As mentioned earlier, Hai Liwen’s path of Fate was different from Annie’s.

The biggest difference was that Hai Liwen could only foresee the ‘inevitable nodes of Fate,’ while Annie’s prophecies leaned more toward calculating the possibilities of all things.

One was unchangeable and bound to happen.

The other could change, but wasn’t entirely accurate.

The reason for this difference was their differing understandings of Fate. It was also an inevitable result of advances in magical theory.

At its core, the difference came down to the fundamental theories they used to observe the world—much like how Aristotle’s theory of the elements and Einstein’s theory of relativity offered different analyses of the world’s underlying structure, leading to different technological developments.

Neither was right or wrong. There was no absolute right or wrong.

In the era and environment they lived in, both were right in a sense.

Their biggest point of disagreement lay in how they classified the concept of Fate—or, more precisely, in how they understood what Fate was made of.

Hai Liwen understood Fate as a subordinate concept of Order: an absolute rule, absolutely correct, incapable of error or change.

Annie, on the other hand, understood Fate as a composite subordinate concept of Order and Quantum. It possessed both Order’s rule-bound nature and Quantum’s potential for variation.

In other words, when all conditions were fixed, no matter how many times she made a prophecy, the result would never change.

But once a new variable was introduced, the conclusion she foresaw would fundamentally shift toward another ‘parallel world.’

On the Imaginary Tree, that meant taking another branch and growing an entirely different ‘leaf.’

And Annie made herself that variable.

—Jiang Cha’s research

Based on Jiang Cha’s research into the Fate School, there was another, more important and more hidden point of disagreement between Annie and Hai Liwen.

That was the dimension from which they observed.

You could also call it a difference in their methods of prophecy.

Zero dimensions: a coordinate point.

One dimension: points connected by a line.

Two dimensions: lines forming a plane.

Three dimensions: the world as we know it.

Each increase in dimension brought a rise in complexity far beyond even exponential growth.

Hai Liwen’s prophecies operated in four dimensions. Annie went a step further, reaching the fifth.

There’s a vivid metaphor for the fourth dimension: a time worm.

Slice it at the head, and you get a child. Slice it in the middle, and you get an adult. Slice it at the tail, and you get an old person.

Put simply, it adds a line of ‘time’ to a three-dimensional life form. In everyday terms, it’s like adding a ‘progress bar,’ so the life form isn’t limited to the space-time of the present, but can observe any point in time.

This was the kind of observation behind the ‘prophecies’ of Hai Liwen, the first-generation Fate Witch.

She could only observe at one or a few special points in time—whether by choice or not—which was why she couldn’t change her prophecies.

Because everything was already set in a video. No matter how you dragged the progress bar or which future moment you looked ahead to, the video’s contents and outcome would never change.

The fifth dimension is different.

You can think of the fifth dimension as a tree with branches and leaves spreading in every direction.

It adds another level of spatial dimension to the fourth, expanding the time worm’s range of movement into a plane, or even a three-dimensional space. To be precise, it’s a tree standing in the Void, with nothing around it.

The individual named ‘Jiang Cha’ whom Annie observed was like a time worm born at the tip of a branch near the top of the tree’s trunk.

Everything below her was the ‘trunk’—unchangeable, beyond choice, impossible to revise. In everyday terms, we call that history.

The branches and leaves above her were the future.

A time worm can only move forward along a branch, never backward. Every choice it makes, every different fork in the road it takes, changes its path.

In the end, it ‘wiggles’ its way onto a final leaf called the outcome.

As the saying goes, ‘No two leaves in the world are alike.’ And on this tree, there are no ‘two identical outcomes,’ either.

Annie’s prophecy foresaw a different ‘leaf’ chosen by another Jiang Cha—whether you called it a ‘parallel world’ or a ‘branch in time’—as well as the path she took to reach that leaf.

But as mentioned earlier, Annie added a variable called ‘Annie’ to her prophecy. So nothing was the same anymore.

That was why her prophecies were more like calculations than ‘prophecies.’

That was how she could foresee so many scattered details—even something as trivial as whether Jiang Cha would wake up one morning with her clothes on backward.

Perhaps, in the future, the Witch World will give rise to a new generation of Fate Witches, able to foresee the fate of witches from the sixth or seventh dimension—or even higher ones.

But that has nothing to do with our story.