Star Empire

That's a lot of sky.

A sky that hangs "above" everything, but is lower than everything.

It is blood red, with various strange and subtle lights and shadows constantly rising and falling within it.

The sense of crisis is coming more and more, and all the factors that once directly affected weapons and defense facilities...the weight they occupy seems to have decreased, and they seem to be placed in the rear.

The powerful firepower is still obliterating the stars that are beginning to become active in the sky, and as time goes by, the various "prominences" and jets that the blood-red star can release are becoming stronger and stronger, and their forms are becoming more and more intense. Diverse.

The "blank space" of black space created by various information annihilation missiles has never disappeared, and the outer shield surrounding the star cluster is constantly creating crazy ripples from these powerful attacks. Those star clusters seemed to be resisting the invasion from themselves. Their shields were deflected and twisted, forming a bright canopy of distortion, but at least before, those attacks could still be isolated.

However, compared to these direct attacks that are powerful but still "seem" tangible and detectable, the sky that clearly covers the zenith but appears to be lower than the earth reveals something more ethereal in nature. , some fundamental factors that are more difficult to stop...

"What the hell is it doing? What does it symbolize?!"

Faced with an unprecedented sense of crisis and an unprecedented operating model, under the illumination of purple light, some nodes even started some more basic and detailed advanced thinking.

They no longer rely on the "so-called instincts" accumulated over tens of billions of years for vague matching. They began to use the technologies and theories they had accumulated to think about what was happening now and what they should do...

This seems to be what intelligent life does.

However, these thoughts themselves seem to be starting to become a little blurry and distorted.

Originally, painting on a static sandbox produced stable sand paintings. But now, those sand paintings are becoming blurry and abnormal as the sandbox and sand vibrate!

Everything in the void is made of sand. The most basic and weakest information elements and information clusters are combined with each other to outline a magnificent sand painting called the order of reality. But now... in the entire sand painting, there is It seems like every grain of sand is vibrating crazily, as if the sand is trying to swallow the sand painting and itself!

Attacks are sent from every angle that can be considered, from countless void coordinates. They desperately endure and resist the contradiction and separation between themselves and themselves, forcing their way towards the continent itself that can block the effect of the will of attack. The protective layer is close to...

However, this may not have much effect. Too many attacks have evaporated and dissipated in the process of approaching the target. The Spear of Nothingness failed to have an effect on the intended target after crossing the cross-border gate. , their double yoke connection was dismantled and broken, they tore weak cracks in the void and quickly dissipated.

The star clusters close to the mainland have become relatively stable. They breathe slowly, forcibly gathering the direct will of countless puppets and warships in the entire fleet and integrating them into the artillery fire. These artillery fire can barely break through the two outer attack mapping separation barriers and bring about influence, but they cannot cross the middle protective layer that can reach the highest intensity at this moment.

All the torrent of information seemed to have lost its edge. Most of them just hit the invisible barrier that was almost in front of the muzzle of the cannon, and turned into more and more scattered ripples, and then disappeared.

Powerful questioning may sting the truth for a short time, but the truth itself may be questioned, but in the end it cannot be easily refuted. Even mutually exclusive truths do not necessarily negate each other.

In the void, everything is possible. The fixed trend formed by the powerful existence area may make some events and probabilities that follow the fixed trend be raised to an almost inevitable level, while many patterns and patterns that are not recognized by the real order may be eliminated. It was a huge suppression, but in the end, there was no absolutely certain result.

There will always be a more basic criterion to determine whether it is right or wrong, but if the void itself has no attributes and can contain everything, how can it directly give the absolute meaning of right or wrong for certain events in the direction of order?

In the center of the continent, the second ring began to be sharply compressed and activated. It turned into little streams of light, quickly climbing "upward" along the smooth and solid body of the tower, leaving the earth in the direction defined by its self-order, and rushing towards the zenith.

The stream of light passed over the overlapping dark lights and shadows and the cluster of information annihilation missiles that left only a series of afterimages. It quietly bypassed the chaotic information star and the ring floating on the top of the tower, and bypassed the black and red fleet that was completely arranged. The blood-like emblem bypassed the hexagonal pattern matrix and the first layer of sky that had begun to calm down, and suddenly opened at a relatively "higher" place.

A second sky appears, higher than the first but lower than the earth.

The endless dark red mist, which has the same thickness and is equally vast, is filled with countless tiny light points, silk threads vibrating at high speed like strings, constantly interacting with each other, films that contact, overlap and phase-resonate with each other, and More subtle structures, such as certain dim shimmers, nameless fog and chaos, etc. Endless and diverse.

They seem to be able to form an endless world, from one side here to the other side where the law is almost impossible to allow.

New alarms began to scream - many of the worlds in the same quadrant as this continent were not themselves man-made from the beginning, they were essentially natural. Although... they have undergone large-scale transformation, the essential traces are still there.

Most of the time, they are just providing a relatively stable order space for the empire itself and the empire's basic industries, which have become increasingly chaotic and increasingly cancer-like. Although their own order structures have been destroyed by various Paranormal information and world circuits have been reorganized countless times through calculations, but their original basic structures remain.

However... they seem to be coming to life now, they are resisting the control of the imperial facilities, they are resisting themselves!

".What the hell is that? What could that be?"

Some vague guesses began to emerge from the countless evolutionary matrices of the fleet ahead. These guesses emerged and slowly integrated together with each other's will and trends. They formed a vague prototype of an illusory entity, and this prototype pointed to An uneasiness, or a desperate fact that makes it unnecessary to maintain "unease"

This continent may even be shaking the laws of the quadrant itself. At this moment, everything about it is extremely strange: the long, blood-red sky is obviously infinitely far away from the earth, and is endlessly close to the infinitely high and vast void, but this sky is also far lower than the Quadrant Continent, and it is below the earth—— Why is it lower than the continent itself? Where exactly is it "low"?

Existence attributes, the most essential existence attributes - it is precisely their weak symbolic attributes that are so low that they are about to completely break away from order and fall into the void. The reverse representation of the weak symbolic attributes is too strong, which leads to " The sky will appear to be much lower than the earth itself.

While thinking, the third layer of sky spread, and countless natural phenomena emerged in the blood-red sky:

The stars light up and dim, the collision of rapids subsides, the fire burns and extinguishes, and all things grow and die. These natural phenomena do not seem to correspond to any entity, they are just constructed abruptly, and they just show out of thin air the natural phenomena that may have occurred in thousands of worlds throughout the ages. Or artificial phenomena, just countless meaningless phantoms.

If it is just a phantom, perhaps this is not surprising. After all, these are just light and shadows simulated by means. They do not correspond to reality, but there is a huge problem - almost all of these phenomena can find corresponding essences and similarities in countless worlds. Actual rules. In other words, phenomena correspond to essences.

Suddenly, many tiny particles quickly left in the second layer of sky beneath the earth. They directly crossed the huge gap and "ascended upward" to a higher level. At the same time, the three paths had been extremely compressed to the point of distortion. The ring of white heat is almost abrupt away from the base of the tower.

They leap upward and unfold in the invisible attribute range of existence. They are very similar to each other. They are just groups of mist that merge and disperse with each other, strips of light and shadow that pull each other, and particles that collide with each other. Countless They spread out, interacted with each other, and merged with each other to form a new sky.

Ancient fragments seem to be forcibly extracted from history and memory, and some of their details and phenomena are attracted by the current great changes.

According to the division from the management perspective, the world has four levels: underlying protocol, mapping management, structural system and practical application. They can just correspond to the basic operational basis of the world and the basis formed by the kink and aggregation of the operational basis. On this basis, the stability of the foundation is maintained. The operating rules and the rules themselves can create a strange and colorful world.

They all began to move, as if they began to have actual minds and souls of their own.

There seems to be something familiar about it, they are coming out in large numbers, making what was once a stable part seem to be washed away.

The dark red space with extremely high reality is very similar to an extremely thin and cold red environment - that is red reality, a diluted and dismembered coldness, a self-destruction of the soul and consciousness, but the body is not The strange phenomenon of lesions.

But now it seems that the total strength of the body makes it difficult to die. When individuals have to face long-term loneliness and helplessness, they will indeed try to make their souls self-obliterate. But the red reality itself may have some more obscure but more direct sources - this event must have happened more than once, and the empire must have even experienced it more than once.

In the long and vast depths of time, several cluster-like outbreaks have occurred in the fault zones in the void. Many pollution phenomena may trigger transcendental resonance, so that even worlds far away from the source of the disaster will be affected.

It is even said that during the empire's countless expeditions, many problems occurred within the country itself, but they may have been classified as the suppression and attack of ΣDark Dome, or ignored due to other reasons and speculations.

The empire does not yet have an extremely vast territory in every quadrant. The empire has developed twenty-six quadrants, but the development of other quadrants has also stagnated after the concept of the empire itself was further blurred.

Before that, major territorial expansion had always been concentrated in a few quadrants that seemed "easier to be accepted." Even if the World Branch Zenith and the National Ignition Device are used to directly bombard the core of creation probability, directly bombard the core of the probability lightning chain to create world branches, and create a brilliant world network, this original "major trend" seems to be gradually increasing over time. highlighted.

It may also be that the Void Quadrant is too big and far away, and when those weird and magnificent events happened, they were too weak to be transmitted to the empire, or perhaps the parts that were once able to be done were destroyed countless times as the death wave disaster swept through the void, and Σ itself The "outbreak" ejected too many parts and became weak, making it impossible to return to its previous state. The empire could not focus its attention on this.

But no matter what, no matter what the imperial fleet does, no matter how the trembling stars struggle, all of this is probably unstoppable.

The seventh layer of sky opened. In the sky, dark red light groups connected and combined with each other to form countless solid networks. These networks extend infinitely, and they can include countless nodes, but the nodes themselves seem to have other independent properties.

Each network seems to correspond to a corresponding independent part among countless nodes - countless networks are superimposed together to pave the way to a majestic and vast endless reality. Within and outside the reality paved with countless worlds, some shadowy and weird beings move quietly between the worlds.

The figures of these strange beings passed through one world after another in full view, just like shadows sweeping over boulders. Some of them will be parasitic in a certain point of light, some will pass through every world, and many of them will be cut off by the world itself - they are very strange, and from the direct appearance, they are not related to order. The information composition of the world is exactly the same, and it is not completely covariant.

They are like shadows or living corpses forcibly constructed using some phenomena, muddle-headedly passing through the darkness before the creation of each world. One by one, they fell into the white area of ​​​​order and were eventually annihilated by the void. But before that...either they will be stuck by the rules and foundation of the world itself, or they may be stuck in the world.

They are metaphysically separated existences. Their own constituent elements cannot correspond to a series of covariant knowledge or operating methods in the system that are currently recognized by intelligent life. Their own information operations are either missing or redundant. From here on, they can be unified. Separation will no longer be absolute.

The ordered reality corresponding to the tensile network woven in different ways by countless light points is the general concept and strong law of countless worlds in the void. They are so abstract in themselves, but their concrete, trivial and unique projections can be found in every world.

Each world is self-consistent when healthy, and each world is different from the other. But after reaching a certain height, the ever-changing rules of the world can abstract some unchanging backbone from the concrete. And this process is also true in reverse.

Maybe so...

At this level, do we still need to think about the nature of the origin?

If there can be a truly independent third-party "observer" who can objectively observe all this without causing any disturbance, then they may be able to determine that all this exists objectively, and there is no problem.

However, only wisdom and consciousness can and are necessary to classify the chaotic and complex laws of the world accordingly. If knowledge and application are discarded, these rules will continue to exist unaffected. But by then, I'm afraid all of this will always be a bunch of noise that is superimposed forever...

The void itself is zero, but there is such a colorful world in the void - one of the important reasons why such a colorful real order can be born in the void is the self-ascension of the order body, that is, the continuous shaping of emergence... emergence The emergence of science and technology can always create more life phenomena, more complex and changeable structures... more miracles.

So... what will be their extreme products, will the void itself have such properties, and what will be the wisdom that emerges from the void itself, what may they create, and what impact will they have...?

Life may be born in the void, but the void itself has rules and no rules. It is meaningless to define this. The void will never be restricted by any rules. Laws exist in order, but order is only the product of the decay of the void, a part of the bright color of the void, but it is far from the whole of the void.

The new canopy has been opened. It is very high, very high, appearing far away on the edge of endless darkness, shrouding the earth, and the dark red blood light is solid and bright.

"Already..." The command system has become more stable, but compared to the previous activities, what can still be called "everyone" is just subconsciously organizing various counterattacks. In the chaotic whirlpool of consciousness, they no longer had any hope.

Clouds of nothingness emerged from the darkness.

The tightly restrained ring was released from its restraints. It rose higher and higher, and the halo created by it shattering itself swept across the darkness and chaos.

How can there be truth in the void? Does all this story have a real starting point and a real end? No one can be outside the story, no one can escape all this. They write the story, they weave the story, they participate in the story, and they are also in the story, performing the role called themselves.

What are these skies? What do they contain? What roles and possibilities do they play in different stories, different perspectives, and different viewpoints?

How to define truth and how to apply emptiness?

The void is supreme and infinite, infinite and supreme - will it be equalized or surpassed as it develops? Is it constraining or restricting the development of civilization and order?

The sky is so high, so dark, so ethereal and quiet.

All this is not limited to anyone, nor is it limited to which side - perhaps, the flickers and changes in the past have been seen and recorded, but what happened next? When the eighth and ninth levels of the sky are opened, the countless secrets contained in ancient civilizations, the countless possibilities, ideas and powers that have never been explained to any other wisdom, they are now completely , fully displayed, apart from destruction and destruction, what role can they play?

If all of this is made public in such a grand manner, will it be possible for them to be understood clearly by these madmen who have besieged the mainland?

…

Everything becomes quieter, the alarm lessens, the distortion less.

All tremors, disturbances, and distortions are contained—they are invisible, they are imperceptible.

The depths of the nine layers of sky that connected everything became peaceful, and deep in the dark and profound core, clusters of regular ripples spread out invisibly.

The sound of the bell is long and ethereal, and the lingering echo makes the heart feel so stable and quiet. When night is about to fall, ring this invisible bell to bid farewell to the sunshine and farewell to existence.

...The bell was slowly heard.

Countless battleships and puppet lives completely disappeared the moment they heard these long echoes, and they probably wouldn't even leave their names behind. For nine days, the bells played an ethereal elegy for all beings willing to enter dusk, including the golden fleet outside the sky, and everything about themselves. In the endless echoing sound, many trembling figures turned into shadows one after another— —They might just still have their shields intact and their power strong.

A desolate echo swept through the earth's veins where the torrent of information surged. The life pipe network surging with vitality and hope became dim for an instant. Although the pipe network all over the continent soon lit up again, this could not cover up what had just happened. everything that happened.

Invisible ripples echoed across the nine heavens, and stars lost their light up and down the empty sky.

The smooth and solid black armor became a little dull, and there seemed to be many strange flocculations inside them. The flocs seemed to be just afterimages at first, but they soon began to glow dimly. They began to float, squeezed out from the constraints of the self-consistent law armor, they broke free of the self-consistent law armor and floated into the air.

Then they all disappeared.

The armor lost its sturdiness, lost its health, and its blood-red lines and emblems were covered in ash. Invisible erosion is pervasive. The continent itself and the fleets on the continent begin to decay. The armor begins to shrink and energy begins to drain. These Σ creations are twisting and decaying.

As for why they decay and age so quickly? Why can bells also be used on the sound source itself?

……no one knows.

…

For an instant, it could be a short period of time, it could be eternity, and deathly silence descended quietly.

Between the silence of heaven and earth, the footsteps of decay and disappearance are silent. They strode, but only the sound of the bells echoed.

For whom does this death knell toll?