CHAPTER 702: 404 ENDING—HEADING TOWARDS THE UNKNOWN

What is the largest number you can normally think of?

Ten thousand?

A billion?

Googol?

Googolplex?

The googolplex factorial raised to the googolplex to the power of googolplex squared times Graham’s number to the power squared?

No.

None of these are large enough.

In fact, Chen Yun’s understanding of this issue was still not deep enough before.

Until Wang En’s Era one hundred and fifty years.

As he evolved, he diligently closed himself off to study methods to break free from this finite universe, and suddenly he had an epiphany!

No matter how numbers are stacked.

No matter how much stronger he becomes than the previous second, it’s actually meaningless.

Even though he had reached an unimaginable number in his one hundred and fifty years of evolution, it was still not enough.

He lacked qualitative change.

No matter how big the doubled numbers are.

It remains finite.

Terms indicating quantity are called cardinal numbers, and no matter how large a cardinal number you think of, you can always add 1 to it to get a new cardinal number.

Becoming stronger in finite scales has no end, and of course, it has no future.

Finite is always finite.

At that moment, Chen Yun suddenly understood that, to break through the constraints of this hyper-closed universe, he perhaps needed to become infinite!

Breakthrough from the process of dramatically increasing within finite bounds but never leaving this circle.

Thus.

In Wang En’s Era one hundred and sixty years.

Chen Yun sought infinity within.

And... he truly succeeded.

The major credit goes to the Evolution Ability, which perhaps realized that the constant climb from the bottom could only improve within finite limits, never reaching true infinity.

Thus.

It led him to begin a leap.

The process is complex and not comprehensible to ordinary people.

In short.

He reached the first truly infinite, and it was the smallest infinite.

Yes.

There are differences among infinities.

Infinity is not a number but a class of numbers.

The infinity Chen Yun reached in Wang En’s Era one hundred and sixty years is aleph zero.

It is defined as the set of all natural numbers.

This is the smallest and the first infinity.

It is both the count of natural numbers, odd numbers, even numbers, and fractions.

This seems counterintuitive since fractions appear far more numerous than integers on the number line.

But that’s the truth.

There is a method to list all possible fractions, and you’ll find that it indeed shares the same cardinality as natural numbers.

In short.

The key point is that aleph zero is a very large cardinal, reaching true infinity in a sense, larger than any finite cardinal.

In Wang En’s Era one hundred and sixty years.

Chen Yun stood on this level.

But when he reached this level and still couldn’t break the barrier of the hyper-closed universe.

He was bewildered.

Aleph zero, although the smallest infinity.

It’s still infinite.

Even with all the cosmic material energy combined, it does not reach the essence he holds now.

But even at this level.

There still is no way.

In most novels, he would now be considered a terrifying background level existence.

Yet even so, it remains useless.

Should he become stronger?

But the road ahead is no longer simply a matter of piling strength; it perhaps requires deeper understanding in philosophy, mathematics, and world rules.

Indeed.

The word Chen Yun used is perhaps.

After first standing on the true infinite level of [aleph zero], he actually did not know how to proceed with the road ahead.

He feels that it’s already impossible to advance any further.

Trying to progress beyond aleph zero seems pointless, as simply adding 1 like a finite cardinal does not work here.

The calculation rules in finite levels do not apply to infinite levels.

Aleph zero plus 1 remains aleph zero.

Aleph zero plus 2 is still aleph zero.

Even adding aleph zero to aleph zero remains aleph zero.

This perplexity.

Troubled Chen Yun until Wang En’s Era one hundred and seventy-five years.

In that year.

He made a new breakthrough.

As everyone knows in the domain of infinity, there is an extremely important and special situation.

The distinction between ordinal labeling and counting total numbers is significant or even completely different in the realm of infinite calculation.

In the finite domain, the total number and the last number labeled in order are the same.

In the infinite domain, this is not the case.

Aleph zero plus 1 does not affect the total count of infinite cardinal numbers, but it poses a great problem for ordinal labeling.

Aleph zero plus 1, how should it be expressed in order?

Thus, after aleph zero representing all natural numbers, a new label is needed, a number that transcends the infinite set of natural numbers, to express the ordinal meaning of aleph zero plus 1.

This is the transfinite ordinal.

It can be tentatively called

It’s a new definition necessary after using up an infinite number of natural numbers to express the ordinal meaning of [aleph zero plus 1].

If a person ranks at position ω in a race.

It means that before that person, an infinite number of people finished before he did.

This sounds incredible.

But this is the counterintuitive sense of the domain of infinity.

This has been expressed in the most comprehensible way for ordinary people, though in fact, there would be much more that Chen Yun considered for a breakthrough.