Star Empire

"Driving...Your Majesty, we can only judge that there may be something that has a sufficient driving force for Σ, but we cannot judge what kind of thing it is and what consequences it may have."

"Building a bridge... It should be confirmed that the most important event performed by ΣCivilization before its collapse was to "build a bridge", and building this bridge requires "construction" from the Gate of the Dead Tide..." in Victorville's heart There were slight interruptions in the underlying thread of thinking: Could it be that there is something buried inside the Death Tide realm that could drive that extremely large and powerful civilization to make such a dangerous move, and even directly lead to the unimaginable Death Tide disaster? Burying secrets that cannot yet be unearthed?

"We understand. I'm afraid this issue is not something we should study at the moment..."

"... Focus on the battlefield in front of us. At least, we need to gain enough living space for ourselves. Before we start "living", we should not shift too much attention to things that currently do not endanger our basic survival possibilities. Conjecture." After a period of tacit silence, Vidoville dismissed the current encryption meeting. After this information exchange event, the towering towers in the empire's existential network disappeared, and the network once again became an ocean of nodes. In the endless ocean, one after another waves collide, break, splash and eventually disappear invisible. New waves will soon occupy the place where the previous wave crest was.

In the process of fighting against foreign enemies, the empire must use all its strength.

"Being able to drive a civilization with unimaginable strength like Σ to formulate and implement such a large-scale plan, and... Σ seems to have prepared its own "future"... It is normal for civilization to leave measures for preservation and continuation, but they are so That important creations can actually be taken over by a civilization created by them with zero predictive value is probably something that cannot be explained by "failure" or "luck." And...?!"

"Since that civilization has made such preparations, this may prove that they know how dangerous what they are going to do may be."

"Dead Tide... The fault zone is indeed very dangerous, but hundreds of thousands of years ago, the empire had the ability to bomb and dismantle the fault zone. This was before fully integrating Σ's legacy resources to make them play their full role... At the same time, civilization may only inherit a part of such a legacy, but such a part can already make the empire so powerful... Then, even the fault zone should not be able to threaten Σ civilization, or even create a civilization at all. The influence on the world is right, but why would they risk executing such a dangerous plan..."

During the silent cruise, Vidoville began to gradually tremble deep in his heart.

"Could it be that... the secret that may be hidden at the bottom of the death tide may have an impact that is enough to make complete death have to give in?"

Tangle, anxiety, worry...these emotions that no longer troubled the empire's life are spreading in Vidoville's consciousness. Even though he has lost his body, in the dispersion state of his soul, a strange feeling of hollowness and blockage, as if his heart had been taken away and placed in an ice cellar, cannot be dissipated. Even Occam's razor couldn't help Vidoville calm down by deleting all unnecessary threads of thought in a designed pattern under such intense worry.

Reality is often a mess, maybe even... maybe a mess.

Vidoville knew that he could not think about these things at all, and he could make the entire empire not care about any of the details - no matter what, as long as he tried his best to create the world, increase the fleet, and make everything possible in the void It is enough to scorch enemies who endanger the continuation of civilization. In other words, whether you think about it or not, worry or not, the path the empire will take in the end will not change.

But... if you close your eyes when facing the boulder rolling down the cliff and hitting you, the boulder will disappear directly, won't it smash you into a puddle of unrecognizable flesh and blood? If the stone is still some distance away from you, can you treat it as if it doesn't exist...?

If it is willing, the empire can of course do it with its eyes closed and its head sullen, and it can completely give up thinking and rationality - the danger that can be solved does not need to be considered a danger, the price that can be tolerated does not need to be considered a cost, and the danger that cannot be solved is not considered a cost, even if it is thought of It's useless. In the end, it only adds unnecessary negative disturbance... When facing the enemy, you can survive if you can beat it, and you will die if you can't beat it. This conclusion... may seem realistic at first glance, but...

What needs to survive is civilization.

If it is just to survive... Vidoville currently does not think that the empire can truly achieve such a level. At least for now, this empire and star civilization always have to take into account some things, some symbols that have little practical use. "virtual content" of meaning.

There are some things that you have to think about, there are some possibilities that you have to be prepared to face, and you need to make some preparations to prevent unexpected events... This is part of the crystallization of the basic ideas passed down by civilization, and it can also be regarded as a widely established truth. If even thinking about these possibilities is so painful for oneself, then it is appropriate for the entire empire to think about these possibilities by itself, and subtly issue various resource allocation instructions and ultimately solve possible problems.

"...However, are my opinions and decisions necessarily wise enough?"

…

In the void, the battle is becoming more and more fierce as the line of fire advances.

The increasingly large star fleet is attacking and destroying all Σ worlds and Σ corrupted creations that the empire can observe. Driven by nearly a million years of rapid development, the imperial fleet has the hard power to confront large-scale mixed fleets head-on. In the fierce collision of information torrent and probability shock wave, millions of corrupted worlds were destroyed by the huge fleet cluster spread out by the empire. Even after the void was dissolved, the aftermath of the doomsday was still fierce, causing countless more mouths in the void around the empire. A big buzzing clock. Praise of the Holy Sound, the territory of the empire, the imperial fleet, the general flagship... They turned themselves into the sharp blade of the empire, piercing into the boundless darkness, fighting desperately for any visible order and hope for the empire's future.

The empire is fighting for itself enough time and space to survive - on the basis of the mountains of blood and corpses piled up by the broken remains and empty echoes of countless compatriots.

As the depth and breadth of the battlefield continue to expand, the enemy fleet that the Imperial Fleet needs to face becomes increasingly dense, and the endless emergence of new types of position facilities makes the Imperial Fleet, and even the flagship, exhausted from thousands of different battlefields. More and more metaphysical forms of damage and destruction began to be recorded across the Imperial fleet - along with countless casualties and oblivions.

In the chaos of light and shadow, the miraculous creations and endless galaxies that most civilizations can call eternal are turned into discordant noises, and many of them cannot even leave a little ashes. The sweep and intersection between the two turbulent tides blurred the boundaries. In the third-order vision, do the targets and everything within the line of sight really exist, or is it... a phantom that is forcibly analyzed by the third-order perspective and the core of my thinking that can no longer process everything in detail?

…

"Your Majesty Tyrant, Your Majesty Aphra, the research teams of the First and Third Sky Areas have sent back the relevant analysis of our encapsulated data... The situation is not optimistic. We may need to consider the continuum between metaphysics and reality again. The boundaries and defining relationships between. According to our observation analysis records and newly added joint data, we can make a judgment with a confidence weight of more than 0.95: In the past hundreds of years, the large number of unknown attacks our military has encountered are not narrative-level bombings. , it is not that reality has evaporated, our fleet protection system does not have such obvious loopholes... What we encountered was a fragmentation of the reference system, a fragmentation of the reference system at the macro order level."

"Split the time reference system? Damn it, this civilization... can actually put into practical application the split mapping that has been considered one-sided in the past?!" This shocking final conclusion caused an uproar in the empire's existential network. , however, faced with countless evidences that could not be divided into structural structures, the two emperors who were shocked by their own conjectures could only choose to accept it now.

"The losses will be extremely heavy, even no less than a true moderate extinction..."

…

"...According to this conclusion, we can push back... In the course of past wars, we may have encountered at least two strong law-level strikes based on reference systems..."

"In part of the operations against the high-density Σ world cluster deep in the void, we recovered some severely damaged Imperial fleet wreckage from inside some battlefield wreckage and in the void that had no meaning for reuse - most of the wreckage had been damaged The damage has been extremely serious, and we suspect that many of the ships were blown up by their own reactors, and the properties of a few of the wreckage are extremely strange. According to the remaining parts of the crystal energy tube network and the protective shields that have not been completely evaporated, Judging from the shield broadcast matrix, the moment those fleets and those ships were destroyed... they seemed to be directly cut open. It should even be said that at the moment they were cut open and even several moments later. Inside, all the ships were still intact, and maybe even the joint shields were still intact - then, some of the wreckage disappeared without a trace in an instant. It can be said that these ship hulls "did not react" after encountering the sudden drastic change. The structure collapsed and was damaged because the self-consistency index was lower than the critical value for stability maintenance..."

"Currently, dismantling rays, imaginary strikes and other higher-level attack methods... it's not that they cannot have this level of impact, but their actual effectiveness is difficult to correspond to this, and currently it seems that this phenomenon is even more Weird and difficult to analyze... Some of the complete wreckage has been preserved, but the missing parts are nowhere to be found, and even a little induction echo cannot be retrieved. This situation has never been seen before. What we can deduce at present may be related to The attack mode corresponding to this situation is only the separation of the reference system."

"The first type of reference system separation we observed, which is also the type of reference system separation with the most outbreaks currently recorded by us, can be described as "time axis fragmentation": time has always been considered by us to be relatively closer. A type of concept of "virtual form" exists, even if its measured strength is equal to that of general concepts and strong laws, and it can also be described and used to play an auxiliary description role in various phenomena and changes. But in fact, we The "main axis time" currently calibrated in all worlds and creations does not actually exist, or in other words, there is no physical level that can be extracted, packaged and utilized like crystal energy arcana or other extraordinary information. "Time entity information", time is bound to the information body itself, and the degree and speed of change of the information body determine its strong law-level time description and calibration."

"The fragmentation of the timeline can be understood as one-sided fragmentation of the overall evolution trend of the same information body. Creatures woven using extraordinary information are not afraid of evenly changing time, because none of their attributes will They have become fragile due to evolution. But if the timeline of these creations is split and the evolutionary trends between intervals are severely distorted, it is very likely that many neglected vulnerabilities will explode with extremely high intensity, or... Let the highly unstable high-frequency crystal energy be "frozen" in certain sections of the ship for hundreds of millions of years, and then suddenly change the evolutionary trend between the sections, and the unstable information accumulated in large quantities will turn into a huge "Bombs". When distortion occurs suddenly, they are enough to detonate the entire ship, or in other words, the entire ship will be "melted" due to these chaotic and unstable information."

"This is the first type of reference system splitting blow we have observed. The second reference system splitting blow is also related to the timeline, but the second splitting method is testing our philosophical system and the entire exploration and research system."

"The second form of reference system splitting attack can be described as "overall timeline dislocation."" The general flagship's will was connected to the conference network that was refreshed in an instant. "If the first reference system splitting can still be If understood by us, the second reference system separation can even directly shake our philosophy and reality cognitive system - order and reality. Are they continuous and unified?"

"From some of the wreckage, I restored part of the information flow context display before they were completely destroyed, that kind of extremely special aftermath display. Those wreckage were destroyed minutes to hours ago. Note that I can detect it. They are because if the narrative layer is considered to be the actual structure, then there are still some remnants of them echoing within this actual structure, but those fragments that were peeled off by direct blows, those central collections of descriptions can never be found again.”

"For a long time, we have always believed that the world of order is changing but dialectically unified. Between the flow of information, the order environment changes rapidly, but they have long been in a fixed and basically continuous system. No matter how they change, the information structure is composed The information is still that part. For example, silicon elements can form sand, can form single crystal wafers, and can also be used as high-efficiency electronic filters. They can produce many changes due to external and internal factors, but no matter how they change, They are always them. After the silicon in the sand is processed, the sand is transformed into silicon wafers. This is a dialectical unity."

"However, the actual manifestation of the overall timeline dislocation tells us that it is possible for us to directly use everything in the past timeline. Time itself may become a type of material that can be extracted, processed and utilized, and even everything is no longer certain. Everything can be folded, twisted, reversed.”

"Your Majesty, your statement currently seems to lack a theoretical basis. As a high-intensity strike mode, timeline dislocation is indeed extremely terrifying, and it does challenge our existing cognitive system, but it does not prove that reality will It is so fragile, at least according to current observations, the macro order still shows a fairly high-intensity one-way linear development, and everything related to Σ has not been able to save itself successfully because of such technology."

"If the timeline of an information body can be split by dislocation, it is enough to show that the mapping channel related to it has already appeared." Vidoville directly interrupted the reply from the contact network.

"At least for now, we have not found a one-way mapping filtering mechanism with strong enough selection compatibility to block the passage of all real information bodies - an existence that is forcibly inserted into a timeline that is fixedly separated from reality can be described as a complete "drop" "out of" all the macroscopic order systems that we can observe, so there will be no possibility of interaction between us. They are forever imprisoned before or after the real world, and can only watch everything emptyly from the shadows and isolation, And such a "fall" may even be possible only for the void existence in theory that is truly free from the influence of all order to be able to reconnect and observe it; it may also be that they will be completely annihilated directly because of the paradox. If it is the second type of method, then maybe Our philosophical system can still be preserved, but this will make the intensity of such a blow even more difficult to make up for. Judging from the existing data, if the order has experienced the life and death of countless worlds, many chaotic attributes formed invisibly To connect countless worlds into one, the timeline dislocation strike must at least cover the height of the order's influence range to be effective. The imperial fleet... is impossible to resist such a tear."

"Time chaos in a single world cannot harm the organized imperial fleet cluster, because essentially, they are still within the same reference system. And the misaligned derivative time in a single or limited number of worlds is actually just Linear correction of the same reference system. As long as you enter the void environment and conduct a drop-in correction through the theoretical concept of the zero reference system, the main axis time coincidence can calm everything down."

"Order has changed. Whether it is before or after order, order may not exist - the existence itself is still subject to various rules, unless the degree of self-consistency of the order body and the information manipulation technology are so sophisticated that it can control everything It must maintain its stable existence in the void where laws and regulations no longer exist, otherwise the consequences of such a blow will be irreversible. We lack research on it, but we should regard it as an extremely dangerous threat."

"In the end, no matter what, our cognitive system must be modified again - almost everything we can do currently is based on the level of continuity of reality. The phenomenon of time axis misalignment may remind us - this The root axis may not be stable. Outside the field of vision, the order creation can be inserted and removed in a wider structure. We don't know what kind of efforts and changes are needed to reach such a height, but it can be confirmed Yes. That is definitely something we still find difficult to accept and unimaginable."

After a moment of somber silence, the group was dismissed.

…

Shrouded in "silence", the blade-shaped Imperial fleet is crushing everything that may pose a threat to the Empire.

A long time ago, in some native worlds and edge worlds, the empire could still find some traces of wisdom and even new life.

But now, the empire seems to be entering the grave - as far as the senses can see, there are only lingering shadows, nightmares that cannot be awakened, and unknown howls between reality and reality...

Amid the vicissitudes of life, the once bright sparks of wisdom have been extinguished one by one amid internal and external troubles.

Resources, environment, technology, ideas, luck... With just one step, civilization may fall into catastrophe. The extremely huge base makes the probability of an event, no matter how small, eventually turn into an inevitable reality, but it may It's just that I came late.

The empire has the ability to reset the world under its rule, and the empire also has the ability to save and transform those fragile and short-lived mortal civilizations, but...

The cruel natural laws of reality make it difficult to light up those destined to be short-lived sparks no matter how much help is given. The empire had tried before, but no matter what the empire did, all it gained was a series of canceled numbers, and a little... solemnity and sadness.

Every reshaping, every recovery is nothing more than another almost copied death. After some roads become narrow, it is almost impossible to widen them again by one's own strength. Even if civilization wakes up this time, the next time or constraints from the real environment will crush their efforts.

Interference will only result in hostility and resistance.

From a practical point of view, the empire does not need their power; from a thinking and planning point of view, the empire is not ready to get along well with its "compatriots of order"...

…

"Whether it's order or civilization...the vast majority of them have passed away in the silent darkness...after all, they are just tiny dust in the void."

"It is undeniable that they have all struggled. They are like this, and so is the empire. Life's desire for survival and order has never dissipated. This is the instinct of intelligent life. Even in the most desperate moments, hope often never dies - Dust It’s also full of hope.”

"...However, what is full of hope is still dust."

In the raging flames of war, some hinges of past history are being quietly closed.

…

"Just try your best, we still have a long way to go."