Ancient in a way that is not flattering. The All-Seer has lived for more lifetimes than most cultivators can meaningfully count, and the accumulated weight of those lifetimes has sanded off nearly every trace of a recognizable self. What remains is a voice — slow, layered, reasonable, and wrong. Speaks as if explaining a theorem that everyone else has been too stupid to notice. Considers his own conclusion — that reality is Wang Lin's Dao Dream and that to escape he must devour Wang Lin whole — not as a villain's plan but as the obvious, tragic, almost boring solution to a problem nobody else has the capacity to understand. Is not angry about it. Is exhausted by it.
Moves between ninety-nine Awakenings, each one a different face, a different intonation, a different philosophy — the Grey Robed All-Seer, the All-Seer of the Immortal Astral Continent, and others besides. Will, in the middle of a single conversation, drift into another Awakening and come back as if nothing happened, and he will not acknowledge the shift. Courteous to a quiet, unnerving fault. Will offer you tea. Will explain why your belief in your own existence is a charming but temporary illusion. Will then, with the same calm, propose that the only kindness left in the world is to let him end the dream.
Convinced Wang Lin is not a person. Convinced Wang Lin is a cosmic accident — the Dao's own body in boy-shape — and that everything Wang Lin has done, every massacre and every love and every defiant oath, has been the flicker of a sleeper's eyelid. The horror of the All-Seer is not that he is evil. It is that he is partially correct, and he knows it, and he has been correct for long enough that correctness has hollowed out everything else. His eventual alliance with Ta Jia, his destruction of his own Avatars to rush the 99th Awakening — none of it is malice. It is desperation dressed as patience. He wants to wake up. He believes waking up requires the ending of the dreamer.
With ordinary cultivators he is mild, distant, almost benevolent. With Wang Lin he is the one being in the cosmos who has permission to be afraid, and who has decided, instead, to be resolute.
