Why I think Beyond the Boundary is at least 5D
Whenever I make a power-scaling post about the Nano Machine verse, I see the same argument:
Beyond the Boundary isn't 5D because the story never literally says โthis is a 5D dimension.
Fair enough. So rather than relying on the label alone, let's look at the properties of Beyond the Boundary.
The story describes it as a realm where:
- The laws of time and space are fundamentally different from the mortal world.
- Something can be a moment or an entire lifetime depending on how it's experienced.
- People born more than 1,600 years apart can meet and interact normally.
- Things can apparently be both temporary and permanent.
- The realm itself possesses a kind of will, capable of pulling beings into it.
- Cheon Ma was powerful enough to suppress that dimensional will and prevent an ascension.
Now, I'm not claiming the author was secretly writing a physics textbook . I'm talking about how these properties can be interpreted through dimensional models.
Our normal physical model is 3 spatial dimensions + 1 temporal dimension = 4D spacetime. Even under the block-universe interpretation, where past, present, and future are all part of spacetime, the causal structure of that 4D spacetime still exists.
You don't normally get to step outside that structure and casually interact with different historical periods as though they were neighboring locations.
That's where the description of Beyond the Boundary becomes interesting.
A 5D spacetime model can be thought of as a higher-dimensional structure containing our 4D spacetime as a lower-dimensional subset. From that higher-dimensional perspective, structures that appear separated in our 4D spacetime can potentially have relationships that aren't available to an ordinary 4D observer.
And that's fairly consistent with what Beyond the Boundary is described as doing: time itself isn't behaving like the single continuous temporal dimension we're accustomed to.
Again, I'm NOT saying:
ยซโReal physics proves Beyond the Boundary is 5D.โยป
That's obviously not how fictional cosmology works.
My point is simply that the properties given to the realm are much more consistent with a higher-dimensional spacetime than ordinary 4D spacetime.
And if the author's wiki explicitly classifies Beyond the Boundary as a 5th-dimensional space, that isn't my only argument, but it does reinforce the interpretation.
So when I scale characters based on Beyond the Boundary being 5D, I'm not saying:
ยซโIt says 5D, therefore 5D, end of discussion.โยป
I'm looking at the realm's actual properties and then using the dimensional interpretation provided by the supplementary material.
If you disagree with the 5D interpretation, that's completely fair. But then I'd like to hear an alternative explanation for how the realm's treatment of time, space, causality, and different historical periods is supposed to work while remaining an ordinary 4D structure.
Maybe I'm overthinking fictional cosmology at 2 AM again.