What is The Creation? It is a paradox.
What is a paradox? It is an event that denies itself; something nonsensical. But is that really true?
One must avoid using a 'rational' perspective when dealing with things like the creation and paradoxes.
Everything people know about 'Logic' is what they learned from observing their environment; who said that everywhere must look like their expectations?
Paradoxes are building blocs of the entire existence; they are far deeper than any 'logic' people use.
Everything is built upon paradoxes; without them, nothing can even exist. The stable universes that people can live on and thrive in are all built on top of paradox after paradox.
To start explaining it, one must start with Time itself.
What is time? Time is a record; its only function is to keep track of particles, their location, energy, state, etc.
There is no tangible thing called time; that's not a thing.
The record, what some may call 'time', always moves forward, as it records things forward, not backward.
However, with enough energy, it's possible to turn back time. To do it, one must have infinite knowledge and energy; in practice, only a rank 15 can truly travel back in time.
To travel back in time, a rank 15, who has infinite knowledge and infinite energy, can recreate the desired time exactly as it was; that is a true travel back in time; as mentioned before, time is a record, so a recreation of the previously recorded state of being is a travel back in time.
Why time slows down in some universes at speeds close to the speed of masslessness or near curvature in space is a local question based on the local universe and world.
For example, In worlds where time slows for beings or things moving close to the speed of masslessness, One can change it by modifying the code.
In that world, time stops at the speed of masslessness simply to prevent bugs in the code; after all, it is logically impossible to move faster than a massless particle, but if the coder doesn't care, they can remove the limit and allow people to move even quicker than the speed of masslessness.
As for the reason time slows in places where there is a curvature in space, that is because, in a lot of worlds, they code the 'recorder' of events, also called 'time', with space and lock and synchronize them together to facilitate the better and more efficient recording of events; it has a downside, though; because they locked time and space together, any disturbance in space would affect time, which is an undesirable outcome, but benefits of efficient recording would outweigh the costs.
Only those in rank 15 can truly travel back or forward in time.
However, one can travel back and forth in local time quite easily. Even a 10s rank can do small-scale time travel. They only need an isolated world and a complete record of the time and state of all particles with absolute detail; once they have it, they can, at any time, provided they have enough energy, recreate the time they are trying to travel to.
Local time travels only affect that isolated world, and as mentioned before, it is not true time travel, but for that isolated world, there is no difference.
Travel in the future is harder, as one must calculate the state of particles in the future, which would consume unimaginable computing power.
At the moment, Rachel is strong enough to travel back and forward in time within her universe; traveling into the far future and far past is harder for her, as she would have to calculate it, as she lacks a record of too far back.
The time travel will fail once there is an error in the calculation.
There is another way of time travel, which is far harder. The creation keeps a record of everything and keeps them in faraway charges of reality. It is practically impossible to reach them, but if someone somehow manages to do it, any change to that record, which the creation relies on, would change reality, the past, and the future.
It gets much more complicated once one considers different charges of reality.
Time in a universe or a world is usually synchronized, but it is not so between charges of reality or in the endless space outside universes.
Rachel is a young rank 14, less than a Googol year old; compared to other rank 14s, she is basically a newborn, not even that, basically still in the womb.
But even though she is young, others are not necessarily older than her.
Time in the endless space outside universes, especially among further charges of reality, is not synchronized; it's extremely chaotic and nonsensical.
To say in a language mortals can understand, your biological mother may actually be your biological daughter; from a logical standpoint, that is impossible, but what logic are we talking about? The normal logic wouldn't apply.
For example, the office; Rachel has taken care of the office in her universe; however, the office was originally not from here; if she finds the correct charge where the creation keeps the record of the office, she can travel to the office's 'past' and seal it or destroy it in the far past, long before it can even get here to this charge of reality.
With no office, the time and history of this charge of reality, including Rachel's, must change; after all, the office killed many previous Rachels incarnations in this universe, so without the office, the present Rachel would probably not come to be, as one of those previous Rachels would most likely have managed to reach rank 14 long before.
In this example, if the office is killed before it can get to this charge of reality, that would mean everything that happened never actually happened; everything that exists currently becomes a dream of the universe that never happened, an illusion.
But as a rank 14, even an illusion of a rank 14 can simply be used by her power to emerge from the illusion. Even rank 13s who are good at illusions can do that; techniques such as killing one in the past may work on weak rank 13s, but they would never work on rank 14s.
It is all a paradox.
One can plant the seed of a tree called A, wait for it to produce fruit, pick the fruit, harvest the seeds, and plant them; then repeat the cycle: plant the seeds and wait for the same tree that produced the seeds, tree A, to grow fruit. That is a paradox, but it can happen, and it is common in rank 15 existence.
A woman marries a rank 14 immortal and gives birth to a boy, who later reaches rank 14. Someone travels back in time and kills the woman to prevent the rank 14 boy from being born. That would directly render the rank 14 boy an illusion; he was never born, never cultivated, never became immortal, and never reached rank 14, an illusion. But that is from the perspective of the local universe; from the perspective of creation, there is indeed someone who was born, and it gave him permission to use its power.
All rank 14s, even in dreams and illusions, fantasies, whatever, are true rank 14s.
The rank 14 boy rendered into an illusion can simply return to reality. His existence in the universe is a paradox; he has no mother, father, or source, yet he exists. But the unchangeable fact is that he exists.
This is why truly killing rank 14s is, in practice, impossible.
The Rank 14 boy then marries a woman; they give birth to a son. The son grows up and reaches rank 14.
The son is himself; he was the father of himself.
That is nonsensical; how can one be his own father? But it is possible; normally, the laws of the universes prevent such convoluted happenings, as they can greatly destabilize codes, but in the endless space where there are no codes and laws, normal logic is meaningless.
He abandons his wife, who is actually his mother, with the son, who is actually himself.
The two would be like incarnations, though it's not obvious who is the main and who is fake. At such levels, there is no fake and real to begin with. Both use the same share of creation energy slot from the creation and are recognized by the creation as the same.
But what happens if the immortal doesn't marry the woman who gave birth to him? The answer is another paradox; he would be again rendered into an illusion, which he can come out of.
Even for rank 14s, it's best not to create too many paradoxes; it's troublesome and annoying to be rendered into illusions. Small paradoxes only send one to slightly different charges of reality; but big paradoxes may send one too far into different charges, where returning would be troublesome.
For this reason, even rank 14s try to solve paradoxes. The rank 14 boy is his own father; he has to marry the woman and give birth to himself; otherwise, the paradox gets bigger and bigger and throws him into different charges of reality, like ping-pong.
As for how it all began, how the rank 14 immortal first appeared, that is called the root paradox; only the creation can know that information.
How to completely kill a rank 14? It's simple: expose their root paradox; of course, only the creation has that knowledge, so to do that, one must steal a piece of the creation, which is next to impossible.
Root paradox is how creation recognizes entities; it's like a password. As long as the two entities' root paradox is the same, they are recognized as the same and use the same creation energy allocation.
As for the biggest mystery of all, the root paradox of the creation.
Creation is also a paradox; it has existed since the beginning; however, the beginning is infinite years in the past, which means there was no beginning to begin with.
The creation was created by itself, just as the man was his own father; it can be said that the entire creation is built on a false premise; everything exists just because they do; there is no source, no beginning, no end; everything revolves around paradoxes.
The first paradox has always been the creation itself; its secret must not be revealed; otherwise, the consequences would be unimaginable.
Rachel's gray realm used to be an incarnation of the creation, but over time, it was separated from it; now, they have different root paradoxes.
The gray realm exists regardless of the creation; it was born from the creation but entirely separated to become an equal entity to the creation. Sure, it's a smaller infinity, but as discussed before, infinity is infinity; they may look different, but their essence is the same.
What is a root paradox? It's the moment of birth of a nonsensical being.
Gray energy's root paradox is the moment of its separation from the creation.
The Creation was invincible, omnipotent, and omniscient; the secret of how a piece of it split off and formed the gray realm is the second most important root paradox in the entire existence.
That knowledge is held only by the gray realm; it stole it from the creation the moment it split off.