Star Empire

"Using pollution to stir up dissatisfaction among the empire's beings and then induce them to rebel? Are you sure?"

"Yes! I'm sure! This is why the size of the rebel army can become so huge in such a short time!!"

"The evacuation operation is being coordinated. The world under the rule of the Star Empire's Five Heavenly Constellations and the Observer Council is far away from the war-affected areas. The empire's world management department and the empire's existence coordination department jointly complete relevant tasks..."

"Coordination is ongoing, but there is no clear loss report yet..."

“The scope of the war is expanding—expand the evacuation zone!”

"There is a problem with fleet scheduling, and the growth rate of missing units is abnormal..."

The scope of responsibilities of the Star Empire's Five Heavenly Constellations and the Observer Council have been significantly compressed. They began to evacuate en masse from worlds not explicitly protected by Imperial facilities, lest such worlds become unnoticed springboards for war.

The main navigation channel in the void was blocked, and countless interferences blocked the original normal channel.

However, this still has no obvious effect. The spread of the war is accelerating, and it has a vague momentum of losing control.

The level of alarms throughout the empire is constantly increasing. The main managers in each area have entered combat mode. The soul starship has been activated, and perception has been released to the limit of the safety range.

Vast grids and fiber chains are bent to form a "dragnet" in the world. And entangled and wrapped in a dragnet, the core facilities used to control the world are being repeatedly competed for by powerful external forces.

Countless combat units were shining silently like stars, waiting for orders that no one was willing to face to be issued again and again.

That order was: [Fire on your compatriots. 】

No one is willing to do this - however, even a high-level lockdown alert cannot stop them from attacking, and no communication requests can be responded to.

In the end, the heavy artillery had no choice but to spit out blazing flames and destroy "them" who had become them.

"Why, why is this happening?!" Faced with this unacceptable situation, this question has been raised countless times.

However, under the continuous detection of countless scout fleets, the continuous analysis of countless teams, and the continuous scanning of countless void survey radars, I, and even the "normal" part of the entire empire still... do not know the essential reason why the war was ignited. not much.

"Your Majesty Vidoville, the empire...is a little vague."

"Zhai Cahir?"

"I can't see clearly - I don't know why. This is just my feeling. The empire now... looks like a wet painting."

"……I see."

"Field number one?"

"False information was found to be disturbed, and the identity is unknown. The information intercepted from the rebel fleet is very confusing and is being isolated and analyzed."

…

"Where's the response?!"

"The question - where is it?!"

In Victorville's perception, countless windows are constantly forming and dissipating, and they present themselves with information that has been filtered through layers of filters. These pieces of information intertwine and combine to create a disturbing picture of the current situation.

While retrieving information, he also stared in front and behind him - in front of him, there were overlapping garrison fleets that were like walls built at the boundary of the order field. And behind, is the vast land with countless blazing prominences and coronal jets - that is the Blazing Sun of the Void.

You must guard this theoretical "last line of defense."

In the dark void, the empire's world clusters are as bright as the sea of ​​stars. Behind the vague chaotic light and shadow, there are flashes of light that flicker on and off from time to time - that is the "projection" of the information wave caused by the large-scale doomsday.

Countless pairs of eyes continuously scanned everything in the void, scanning all major events.

"Wood."

"Lil?! What's going on?"

"Now...there are no eyes here."

"There are no eyes... The void survey radar didn't shine here?" Suddenly, Vidoville noticed this "darkness under the light" phenomenon. "So……"

"I need to tell you something, Wood."

"This war... among its meanings is our... 'general ledger'."

"For our...?"

"At least this part of the meaning is in it, and... I suspect there is a driving force behind this, and it may be..."

"...The fifth entity?"

"The information melts...it's enough to understand it. Even we may not remember it now. The content is too ethereal and indescribable in nature...We may soon forget it and even we are not aware of it." , cannot be noticed. But... our coefficients, everything we use, contain too many factors related to 5... Why did we formulate everything like this before... We must know that there must be a reason, There is a source.”

"As for the reason why this war was ignited and the force that drove the traitors to attack the empire... I think it is surprising that such a thing is placed here, but the matter itself is not surprising." At this point, Wei Doville felt a sigh coming from the light behind him.

"In every major disaster in the past..."we" can be said to have used the method of destroying an entire generation of the empire to force the abstract concept of the empire to break free of the so-called "shackles" and face the future..."

Weisrifan said slowly, "From a temporary situation, doing this can indeed quickly reverse the temporary predicament - at least for the "front" part. But for the entire civilization, for the overall story... It is abrupt and incovariant. Those passing existences and entangled causes and effects may disappear, but I am afraid they will not disappear directly..."

"And when there are "inducements", these unstable factors that have not completely disappeared may explode. And the empire has a very high stability threshold, and events that can manifest themselves in this explosive form... The severity will not be less." Vidoville completed what Vesrifan did not say. "...It's not that easy to get around."

"……how do you feel?"

"Well... I can only say, let's face it, after all, the story has come to this point." Vidoville shrugged, and when his human body parts made such movements, the expressions of these movements on the general flagship were: The light pattern flickered several times.

"Well, at this moment...it's nice to be able to think about it like this..."

"Speaking of which, this test must have come from within." Vidoville was silent for a while before whispering. "Essentially, the most fundamental reason for this civil war is that the empire is not prepared to face such a life. We have technology, but we still lack the corresponding ideological foundation. It is precisely because of the lack of corresponding spiritual civilization construction, That’s why everyone is so easily provoked into confrontation.”

"Yes." Wei Ruifan shook his head slightly.

She'd seen the cryptic reports, too. Those reports came from all over the empire, and most of the reports showed that before this, many imperial beings were already experiencing strange opposition to each other.

…

Life Array.

The birthplace of intelligent life in the empire, the "source of creation" of the empire's vitality.

Life arrays are scattered throughout the empire, and they vary greatly from each other - the smaller ones are located on continents, on planets, and exist as additional buildings or planetary structures.

The larger ones among them can stretch for tens of millions of light years, span thousands of dimensions, and are as vast as the Milky Way and the stars in the vast space, or even broader and more brilliant than the stars.

Here, inside these facilities, in the boundless ocean of chaos, probability, disturbance and rules condense imperceptibly, forming a relatively stable and independent whole.

When these wholes are strong enough and independent enough, they can have their own entities, leaving the ethereal nothingness and coming to reality.

However, this choice is not the wishful thinking of either party - the choice is two-way. The life array can create countless souls and encapsulate the souls so that they can exist independently in the order of reality.

In turn, before coming to the order of reality, the soul can also decide on its own whether to accept a series of processes such as condensation and encapsulation and come to reality.

In the chaos, there is a fog that is condensing. In this fog, the precursor of consciousness has been born.

As time goes by, this mist that gradually has its own boundaries is no longer satisfied with the current situation - it shuttles through chaos and treks through nothingness. Its own existence attributes become more complete and independent, which makes it more and more independent. Feeling the coldness and emptiness of the surrounding environment, it began to try to find a more comfortable environment.

"It" senses the general direction.

It starts to move, starts to push itself in a more stable, more practical direction. Gradually, he felt that there seemed to be more and more existences similar to himself around him. They were moving forward together, forming an invisible trend.

The trend is flowing and growing. As this trend develops, the surrounding chaos seems to be fading away more and more.

Originally, everything around was cold and empty, but as the trend grew stronger, light seemed to appear in the chaos, entities appeared, and countless ethereal and spectacular phenomena appeared.

Although we don’t know what those are yet, these changes make the original environment more and more close to our own needs - which makes the intelligent precursors in the trend "joy for joy." But they soon realized that all this was far from the end of the development in the direction they had chosen - neither was the surrounding environment, nor was "themselves".

Gradually, as the trend grows stronger, the surrounding environment seems to become more and more clear and realistic - countless majestic but illusory phenomena gradually solidify and cool down, and structures with more obvious boundaries appear.

And in those structures, more tiny parts begin to become independent from the huge whole. They develop and change. While constantly changing themselves, they are also constantly changing the surrounding environment.

All this has attracted countless precursors of consciousness. In silence, they looked at everything that was constantly changing. In a daze, their own "hearts" also had impulses, and they were eager to try and integrate into the ever-changing environment.

That being the case, why not follow your own wishes and give it a real try?

The precursors of consciousness in the trend began to try to integrate into the new environment that was changing rapidly. They found that if they just joined in like this, they would not be able to touch those clear things.

Therefore, they began to try to change themselves - to make themselves more practical and independent, able to contact and interact with the changing beings in the environment... They were noticed, and the figures in the environment did not exclude themselves, they just silently A part of the space is vacated to accommodate these entities condensed from the chaotic fog.

In these scenes, there are many rules and the ups and downs of things governed by those rules. These things and these rules have never been seen before. For the newborn precursor of consciousness, all of this is so fresh and interesting, and everything is worth trying, worth experiencing, and worth...learning.

In the process of learning and experience, these precursors of souls and consciousness began to master some new contents - they are called knowledge and culture.

These precursors know the existence of another world, or other worlds. Those places have many names-the world of order, the real world, the living environment... They are a series of places that are full of vitality and ever-changing.

That place was very different from here, from the endless cold chaos beyond this small area.

That being the case, why not head over to that side? More and more consciousness precursors began to raise this question invariably. They began to further learn and absorb the knowledge behind the phenomena in this special environment, and began to try to further materialize and become independent themselves. .

"but……"

"The real environment, the ordered world itself, and the life in it are not so perfect."

I don’t know when there were more sounds, more words, and many more weird patterns that had never appeared here before.

Order does not mean simple beauty and positivity. In that huge and intricate system, there are countless logics and elements that do not follow the beauty in the concept and the ideal in the concept. They are fragmented, they are distorted, and they make wisdom I feel puzzled, incredible, and even...surprised and disgusted.

"There, the interests and directions between the individual and the whole are not always consistent. The whole is composed of an unimaginable number of individuals. If there is a conflict between the two, which side will the final choice be? ?”

"The individual only has himself, and the individual is his only one. And the whole...they have countless individuals. The contradictions can be covered up, but their existence is absolute - when the contradiction is really accurate to a certain individual and The whole is in opposition, if that individual is myself, how will we choose?”

“What is this?” It seems that just a moment ago, everything was as beautiful as an idyllic place, and it also seems that the last moment was far before the beginning of time. Amid the drastic changes, these consciousness precursors and souls began to be surprised to find that the world they once expected had turned into a turbulent whirlpool, and everything seemed to be falling into it.

Under the distortion of powerful suction, the broken foam and waves in these vortices collided with the shattered continents, space and stars. Countless "sparks" that seem to be absent are scattered to wisdom and souls - that is a more precise, more complex, and more difficult to understand problem.

"When faced with a scenario where your absolute life and the absolute value you cherish need to be sacrificed for the overall benefit, what would you choose?"

"When the whole you are in is in conflict with other parts of the larger whole, each of your choices is insignificant to the collective. But for itself...each of your choices brings you The consequences will be enough to plunge you into an abyss of eternal destruction... Are you still willing to join in it?"

"The right to identify and explain is not always in your hands. Concealing, tampering... what you struggle to get in return may not be the results you need, or you may be permanently ruined..."

"Your discoveries, your research, and your results may not belong to you. Or, these results may have been proposed millions of times and denied millions of times, and you are just another existence making the same mistakes. If this is indeed the case, are you still willing to persist?"

"The outside world... has many components and many ways of making up... Even they themselves are far from sure whether they need it at the moment. Race, nation, belief, culture... what exactly should they present now? What do they look like? In other words, should they have their own expression in this era, or should they sink into the depths of history with the trend of development?”

"Does the absolute production capacity mean that everything has become absolute? Even if external resources can be regarded as being created out of nothing, intelligent creatures will eventually need to acquire and transform them for their own use. Then... the unlimited upper limit of overall productivity corresponds to Is there no limit to one individual?”

"What does it mean that they have no upper limit? Is it true brilliance, or are certain problems... able to be covered up and avoided all the time?"

"There is no detailed analysis of these... "outside". In other words, these sharp contradictions still exist and have been tried to be hidden - in the face of these situations... your will, your wishes, your efforts... …does it worth?"

…

"what are these?"

The sudden appearance of countless doubts shattered the precursors of consciousness's beautiful yearning for the real world, and at the same time amplified the dissatisfaction and malice deep in their hearts.

In the whirlpool, faced with the turbid current that appeared at an unknown time, the precursors of consciousness and souls fell into confusion, and everything in the past became false dreams and bubbles. They struggled to grab something, but the once glorious continent and sky had been shattered in the whirlpool, turning into countless fragments that collided, dissipated, and passed in the void.

"Then everything... the world we pursue, what we love, and what we expect... is this kind of place? All the beauty is... false?"

Faced with doubts from within themselves, countless consciousnesses and souls chose to dissipate amid struggle and tearing, and chose to return to nothingness. Boundless malice rises from the depths of his heart, presses down from the vast and endless sky, and penetrates everything everywhere, making everything suppressed and unable to breathe.

"Why?!"

In the silent roar and silent questioning, the cold and dull chaos seemed to be lit up.

"The life array encountered an unknown attack! Repeat, the life array encountered an unknown attack——"

"Is this... coming from the world of order?"

Time does not give these ignorant beings much room to think. The explosion struck violently from all directions and from endless angles, and even the void seemed to be shattered and collapsed by it.

Under the dazzling three kinds of strong light, the souls were evaporated one after another.

"no no--"

Before he felt like he was about to be torn apart, "he" seemed to see a weird pink color out of the corner of his eye. Pink light flashed, and the endless huge cantilever quietly passed through the chaos. It seems real and illusory, indescribable.

Then, everything returned to darkness and nothingness in a crazy flash.

"..."

Is this... death, passing away?

But it has not yet entered reality, and has not yet solidified the scope that can be called self... Can a life that has not yet experienced birth be considered to have the concept of "living", or this attribute?

Why ask these questions? Is it necessary to distinguish properties in this way?

Maybe, maybe... not...

In a trance, time seemed to have lost its meaning. There is no point in distinguishing who is watching and who is thinking.

Time passes silently, changes are integrated into everything, and they are constantly flashing along with the flow of the long river.

Is this... reality?