Star Empire

"...very old? Your Majesty, you..."

"I know what you want to say." The resonance at the soul level conveyed every bit of information without any delay or hindrance. "My ability, or my performance and knowledge... that is just the most superficial aspect. They are You can make up for it by learning and connecting to external resource systems. This is not a problem. My heart and attitude... are no longer enough for me to persist in such an environment."

"Perhaps... I should have ceased to exist long ago, and now I am here. It is just a combination of many coincidences."

"You may be able to recall some differences, and after long-term comparison and measurement, you can also perceive some phenomena that can be called subtle... The current network is not strong, nor is it tough and perfect. In fact, the entire The few souls currently in the empire... they all face everything in this world with a certain attitude toward death..."

"Your Majesty, Your Majesty, you are..."

"The network is not strong, and everything is not perfect or smooth. Billions of years ago, a missing computer could jam everything we have. Our network structure has been accompanied by too many problems for a long time, and we are not There is always a chance to modify everything, and some mistakes may be made up for by luck, but we do not always have luck. In other words... we must have luck, but our luck will be limited. Once we exceed the limit, we will encounter disaster... …”

"Calost!! You-"

Beyond the edge of light and darkness that the two people's vision and perception could reach, some kind of thick condensed cloud flashed past.

"...Ah, maybe I said too much. I should tell you that you don't need to care too much. Most of the time, just do whatever you want to do. You don't need to think too much or have worries..."

"...?!"

After a brief silence, the conversation ended.

But...you know your own feelings best.

"The mind and emotions are fluctuating. There must be some kind of mutation in the mind... some kind of radical change. This kind of inner feeling cannot be self-deceptive, but all the equipment and all the systems have not detected any abnormalities. This is …”

"...Perhaps, there are still many loopholes that cannot be detected by our current equipment. Maybe my ability can bring some new effects... It seems... to die? In this case, the whole operation will be more bright. ?”

"Your Majesty...well...forget it, I'm doing whatever I'm thinking about..."

…

The huge fleet jumped in the void.

Compared to fighting against the standard unit fleets and expanded fleets of common fault zones, such a team is really too large - Calost himself can command tens of millions of threads, and the fleet that follows his total consciousness is smaller than This is much more.

They have now all gathered together and moved towards the central core area of ​​the empire, which is the "trunk" of the world's branches. Compared with the powerful "information radiation" that the entire empire is continuously releasing outwards, this fleet moving in the opposite direction is somewhat conspicuous.

The empire is completing the "pollution cleanup" of the entire world's branches. The entire operation may eventually take about 50,000 years to complete - clearing all the fault zones in the entire world branch structure marks that this huge world structure has been completely and comprehensively controlled by the empire, but in order to complete For all its construction and all subsequent research... tens of millions of years is not too long.

For a very long time, most of the worlds in this branch of the world may only have a set of the most basic heart of the world restraint control facilities and a core broadcast tower of the cosmic benchmark stabilizing anchor - this is a single system that the empire can control. The most basic configuration of the world.

Returning from the contaminated area to the core security territory of the empire requires multiple jumps - the current border of the empire's order zone is almost a mess. As the war continued, more and more small fault zones were eliminated and destroyed, while the fault zones that were not destroyed immediately due to the time difference expanded rapidly during this time.

They devour a variety of environments, constantly repairing themselves using the Genesis-Apocalypse balance of destruction. They accumulate an unimaginable amount of information in the process - it is not difficult to blow up hundreds of worlds, but... if you want to blow up hundreds of dead worlds, the difficulty of execution will skyrocket, because...

In a world where the end of the world has already occurred, it is considered to be almost impossible for the end of the world to happen again, at least with the current level of technology, this is difficult to achieve. To destroy them, we can only use the most primitive and rude means of violence - blowing them up directly with the purest torrent of information.

The rest of the battlefield begins to look harsh and strange.

Countless such chaotic fluctuations affected the diffuse information correlation pulses between worlds, which caused various distortions and twists on the edges of the branches of the world that should have been relatively stable. Under the influence of such an abnormal void correlation environment, the fleet When jumping between those worlds, it is possible to veer off course halfway and be directly sucked into a nearby fault zone or a cluster of world debris. Both the Void Engine route and the World Gate route were severely affected by this...

"The difficulty of trying to cross the border is greater than flying out of the remnants of the fault zone..."

"The World Gate network and the guidance beacon array are currently very unstable. The entire empire has been seeing back and forth between the death tide pollution and the order zone in the border area for tens of thousands of years. Even now, many parts are still like this... …Many of the Empire’s frontier worlds are now equipped with frequency disruptors, which almost jump in a probabilistic dispersion state within a huge interval…”

"The World Gate network is extremely unstable, and their birth and death frequency even exceeds the empire's statistical capabilities..."

"IV, be careful. The emperor represents a person and the various huge matrices behind him jointly responsible for the empire. Pay attention, but don't think too much. Pay attention... huh? IV, on this road... You have been thinking about other things, and the main thread segment of your soul is operating at a low intensity."

"There are some... things that are worthy of my attention. I once felt that we and everything around us have undergone some changes, but I have never been able to find out the source of that change, nor can I filter out any little bit. Abnormal information can be detected from the background environment, but...that feeling, that inner perception and warning...cannot be fake."

"Being able to leave memories... In my opinion, this may be good or bad, it depends on how you use it in the future. Many times, being able to distinguish what is behind extreme illusion and reality, and what exactly everything has gone through, Maybe it’s not something that can be carried by life...?”

"——!!"

"Why are you saying this? The Internet can transmit it, and soul communication and soul interaction will have more effects. You don't have to--Your Majesty, what are you-??!"

An unexplained chill suddenly exploded in the hearts of the two of them. A dark past that seems to have been sealed for billions of years and is unwilling to be faced seems to be ready to move. They break through the shackles between the past and reality, and break through the boundaries between illusion and reality...

"Suffer-"

Some kind of pre-perception that precedes intelligent thinking or even body touch control reaction suddenly creates a sense of crisis. Driven by this fierce and oppressive crisis, Kalost almost forcibly ordered the fleet carrying the pure arcane life IV to swerve in without using any real information instructions or taking actual actions. The direction of the empire's void.

Almost at the next moment, the entire fleet he was in deviated from the void navigation information deviation state, and then fell hard into a strange mass of debris.

"This is -!" Kalost recalled what this scene represented - once, when the Ark fleet continued to sink into the depths of the corroded world fragments... the moment he remembered was almost exactly the same as now...

"Damn, what is this-"

Before giving himself and the evolutionary matrices more time to react, the entire fleet was completely torn apart. All the connections in the entire free matrix were completely torn apart in an instant, and the mapping turned into floating fragments and dust. In fact, countless such fractures have turned into some kind of pipe network that is disobeying the order, guiding the actual billowing black mist in the outer area to engulf and annihilate these glorious bodies.

The size of this fleet is actually very large - almost all the warships that Kalost's command thread can guide are here, and when they are lined up in space... they should be as bright as the stars.

but now……

The surrounding darkness seems to be able to swallow everything, and any seemingly bizarre events can always appear suddenly, and... every time they appear, the order will tremble.

——

"Your Majesty, Your Majesty Caluster, please answer - why, the communication has been blocked to such an extent? Or has your Majesty..."

——

Thoughts and consciousness command all surrounding creations that still have order, and the fleet attempts to resist.

However, outside of his own barrier level, the empire's network seemed to have been completely destroyed, leaving him alone as an isolated "person".

My own perception could originally penetrate the core of countless matrices and connect the characteristic points of countless operators, my own, but now... everything around me that should have been very clear seems to have instantly turned into layers of illusion. , shadows of different shades. The white matter artillery fire and the creation glow that were originally enough to penetrate the sky and the earth... they seemed to be extinguished immediately as soon as they left the protective layer, and all the resistance of the order body seemed to be silently resolved in the black tide.

…

"Highest level alert! A large number of communication channels have been cut off, and the backflow of death tide pollution has been detected and blocked. The evolutionary matrix confirms that the world ring debris does not exist. Correction - the world ring debris structure created by the limited order of the end of the world cannot be detected."

"Only fault zones can cause such an intense impact, but such an intense impact... has never been seen in all types of possible fault zones in the past..."

Perhaps when the joint shield is deployed stronger and more comprehensively, the fleet order may not be torn apart, and the entire fleet matrix can rely on the overall strength to persist for a longer period of time.

but now……

The contact no longer exists. What can be confirmed is that the originally huge and powerful fleet structure has disintegrated. The battleships may be completely corroded and destroyed like ice slag thrown into the star...

The same is true for artillery fire - even the moment the channel is opened, pollution will pour back.

This may be a new type of fault zone structure, and its formation and effectiveness mechanism are different from those in the past.

There is not much time left for me - the black tide is about to erode the small tranquility around me.

The last part of the message should be passed on - which is not easy to do, because here, even the void engine seems to have lost the ability to start. To send information out from inside a black hole of order with infinitely low intensity of order reality and infinitely strong devouring power...

There are ways, but it's just hard to imagine - many times, the concept of unified information represents that everything is composed of information, or in other words, everything can be regarded as information in a way, and based on this view, Basically control everything, with different attitudes and different perspectives...

But this does not mean that all restrictions and rules have been broken.

The timeline slowly unfolded in my mind.

There will always be a target window, the battleship and itself... After such a long battle, the empire has confirmed that before the fleet or soul body is completely wiped out, they will inevitably face some extreme conditions - which may be equivalent to the end of the world. , or fiery conditions even more extreme than the end of the world itself…

At that time, everything will be destroyed, but after everything develops into a closed loop and the end of everything is connected to a point... all information from the past to the future will be closed and broken.

Many details and interactions that may have gone unnoticed may now be detectable—and they will be important.

They and they need to be able to send out these messages, and the Empire needs to be able to receive them.

"The swan song time point is beginning to approach... the ring closure is about to be completed... preparations for the explosion..."

…

"Is it a new fault zone structure..."

"In this environment, dying in such a way...should not be bad."

"At least... I don't know what happened to the Ark fleet when it fell from the pollution zone into the void, and when the pollution spread and disappeared... Wait... those people, are they all unconscious..."

"...I can't remember anymore... Looking at it now, maybe this is the right path, for me..."

"It's not bad, but...it's true..."

"The empire itself will continue to fall into catastrophic changes and reorganization, and the... lives that make up it will not be... immortal..."

"……So fine……"

From this side... the afterimages inside the fault zone seemed to disappear, and darkness swallowed everything.

——

"Your Majesty, you are—retreat, retreat immediately—"

"Be cautious about details... We are currently facing too many unknowns and confusions. For the same thing, we can often only observe its appearance. If we make too many guesses based on this, we may fall into the thinking trap we have woven by ourselves. And the logical cage..."

"From the perspective of frequency scale and attribute characterization, the scale of the new fault zone... does not appear to be huge. It is not like our common fault zones that swallow up countless worlds and connect millions of units of order. But Its internal environment is extreme - all communication between the fleets has disappeared, and the entire fleet is like completely dismantled ice fragments, thrown into the sun..."

“It’s impossible to measure its internal order—”

"Initial suspicion is that its structure may be similar to that of an extreme super star fusion core - Genesis-Doomsday is also true for the elimination balance, but it has "compressed" all Genesis structures and corresponding attributes into the depths of the core..."

"We need ultra-large-scale and powerful weapons - we are currently using concepts, formulating rules, and using various means to destroy the world..."

"But... we can... rely on direct fixed means to purify the starry sky. There is too little tool... even the Holy Music Praise..."

"The starry sky is filled with stars that can be counted in ridges or even valleys... They are spread over tens of millions or even billions of light-years..."

"Your Majesty, have you already thought about doing this... This is just a reason..." Facing the fracture zone far behind, which was torn open again by "Swan Song", this mystery that has been unknown for billions of years Shusheng felt some strange throbbing deep in his heart.

What happened to this network, this empire...?

…

"……is that so……"

"...It makes sense."

"Old friend, from the beginning of the action... alas..."

"That was a man who deserves to be respected and missed...from our personal perspective."

"But this is not good for the empire as a whole..."

"yes……"

"The evolutionary matrix begins to match the wreckage...confirming that the parts we infer that the world should exist but we cannot find the corresponding parts of the wreckage may be swallowed by the second type of fault zone structure."

"Preliminary model deduction of the second type of fault zone structure..."

"Stellar fusion cores have model simulation value, and big collapse-like doomsday has value..."

"This has guiding significance for our future actions..."

"... He died a death well deserved. Hopefully he also thinks he died a death worthy of his death."

"He can still be remembered by us. This is actually a kind of luck..."

"Nothing lasts forever, not us, not our empire, not everything about us - we are dying, at our own pace."

"We are just a corner."

"...In the future, we may still have time, so let's stop here for now."

"Yes." "Understood." "Confirm."

…

This is just a small episode. Compared with the huge branches of the world, souls are already too few.

The evolutionary matrix formed by countless puppet lives began to take over everything in the empire - except that the central command source was still controlled by the spiritual person, everything... was more like a cold, heartless machine.

The discovery of the second type of fault zone explains the reason why some world signals are lost, and its appearance also brings countless new problems - in the void, anything is possible.

This also means that these two types of fault zones... can be combined in any form and at any scale - which may mean that within the huge diffuse type, that is, the first type of fault zone, it is very likely that there will be There are multiple, even more ultra-high-kill cores that are free and hard to find. And those cores... it is almost impossible to judge their scale and complexity from the outside world, and their internal environment...

There must be something that can correspond to them...

"Inside the Dead Tide Gate?"

"Lack of large-scale and widespread destruction tools... The effectiveness of full-scale white matter ship-based bombs is feasible, but the total quantity and possible production methods are questionable."

"The ultimate technical deduction module begins to weave rational solutions..."

…

The Sacred Music Praise Fortress began to be used in large numbers.

The functions of conventional fleets are limited. Even the Star-Rising Fortress III, the Holy Mang Field Killer Ship II, the Amps-class Assault Lance and the Final Samsara-class Closed-Loop Twisted Position Ship, etc., are unable to withstand the extremes of the second type of fault zone. Environment - Protection strength is only a secondary reason, they...

Either it relies too much on laws to fight, or its pure killing range is too limited.

In fact... the Empire still has too few means to destroy the stars in the universe with one pure attack, or to directly attack the multiverse across the void.

Strong law weapons and general concept weapons...the concepts and laws they utilize must be supported before they can be used. However... the interior of the second type of fault zone is almost incompatible with the existence of any order, which is very different from the first type of fault zone.

This may be a stern wake-up call.

If the interior of a universe... at a certain moment, all the stars are infected by the death tide, the space is polluted and corroded, the resonance between the heart of the world and the world itself is completely cut off, and everything in the universe is transformed within a certain period of time became an enemy, and the concepts and laws that maintained all order also completely failed during that time...

Even if the civilizations living there had controlled the universe before, at that moment, what could they rely on to fight against the crazy critical stars in their corrupted homeland?

The countless light points in the vast starry sky do not mean that the light points themselves are stars - they may also be galaxies. Billions of galaxies may account for most of the mass of the universe, or they may be just a visible part of the end products of countless mass evolutions.

And between them, there is vast and vast space.

Emptiness is not nothingness.

Using concepts, utilizing laws, looking down at everything from a higher perspective... does not mean that restrictions are lifted. On the contrary... although the stars represent the practical application layer, they are the main active part of the world of order.

When the rules no longer hold and are no longer recognized...

All equipment controlled based on laws may turn into waste in an instant.

…

One hundred thousand years later, the operation ended.

In order to be as safe as possible, and to ensure that all correction factors derived from new discoveries in the operation were fully implemented, the Empire went further than planned.

The power of the exponential explosion ensures the empire's unlimited troop growth, the huge evolutionary matrix and activities at the core of the empire, and the ubiquitous field life ensures that all mistakes can be locked in the network and annihilated near the origin.

Countless puppets, countless matrices, and countless battleship clusters turned into irrecyclable dust.

No one can remember how many comrades they have and how many they should have.

…

"...We need a little summary. Such a big action is worthy of our thinking and summary, even if it is only the most direct practical and superficial part."

"First of all, we can confirm..."

"Every rule, every system, every word and every sentence is soaked in blood and tears."

"They are piled up by life, soul and will - no exception at any time."

"We want to fight to the death, and we don't want to become a group of ants that are wantonly ravaged. This is something we must consider—even if we are "dead" now."