However, what he had seen back then was, after all, merely a hole. Even though this hole was considered quite large for a human, compared to the heavens and the earth, it was truly no bigger than the eye of a needle. This was a classic case of viewing the sky through a bamboo tube. Therefore, that glimpse had simply confirmed to Ased that the World of Light truly existed, and that his dream was not mere fantasy. At the same time, he also learned that there really was no rock layer directly above the World of Light, and that light genuinely shone down from up there. That was all he knew; his actual impression of the World of Light had not fundamentally changed.
Just as humans who normally live beneath a blue sky will use their immediate environment and world to build the most beautiful possible imagination of heaven—for instance, ancient humans imagining a heaven as a place with endless fields where whatever you planted yielded an abundant harvest, free from natural disasters or man-made calamities, stretching their imaginations to the absolute limit of hoping that every single meal in heaven might include meat... such imaginations were akin to an emperor picturing every meal consisting of steamed corn buns to one's heart's content. While later generations might find such imaginings laughable, this was indeed the source of humanity's longing for beauty: whatever people lacked in their own lives became the object of their deepest yearning.
The same held true for Ased. The Wor…
Chapter 170