Myriad Paths

Zhong Minglou's thinking is obviously slow now.

Because the amount of information his thinking organ can process per unit time has exploded.

It's like driving when you are tired.

The information is too large and the processing power is completely overloaded.

Scenery that seems far away will suddenly appear before your eyes in the blink of an eye.

Moreover, the "black screen and freeze" began to appear intermittently in front of him, and his brain began to wander from time to time. It was an unnoticeable moment to him, but in fact several seconds had passed.

Other scenery on the visual interface seemed to be teleporting, and the entire observable universe seemed to be blurred and turned into a bunch of bright patches.

Zhong Minglou no longer has the mental energy to process the redundant image data, and he can't tell what he is doing. Even if a car suddenly appears in front of him, he might not be able to identify it. Whether it is a car or a van, I can only barely tell whether it is a large car or a small car.

All the scenery turned into a blur of pixels, and the field of vision was full of bright spots, mixed with intermittent black screens and freezes. My hearing also began to weaken, and the surrounding sounds became high and low.

He might even have forgotten what the purpose was.

In short, he was close to being mentally ill at this time.

His brain was severely overloaded, as if he were an ordinary person who was forced to control a mecha that was fifty times faster than a normal human and run wildly on the road.

The mecha kept sending him information, and the surrounding information rushed towards him at a speed comparable to that of an F1 car. However, he could only hold on to the steering wheel as much as possible to maintain as much safety as possible in the high-pressure and high-speed environment. , otherwise, his current situation is probably just an accidental moment of distraction.

In just a moment, the car may have rushed hundreds of meters on the road. Other vehicles on the road seem to be teleporting. They will ignore the curve of the highway and rush straight to the railing on the roadside. After suddenly realizing it, they will slowly and violently hit the road. Turn the steering wheel back.

If he didn't call back, the car would be destroyed and people would be killed.

His processing system could not bear the amount of information that exceeded the limit, so he could only simply process the most basic and important information.

All this is because most of his energy has been put outside.

The ‘outside’ of the observable universe.

He seemed to see the threshold of the fourth level from a distance. Although it was out of reach, it was so real.

This forced Zhong Minglou to devote all his efforts.

Li Qi maintained this shrinking observable universe, waiting for Zhong Minglou to find his answer.

He was gambling.

If Zhong Minglou discovered the real crisis, then he would definitely realize the nihility of this war. At that time, his moral dispute with Li Qi would naturally disappear.

While Li Qi and Zhong Minglou were exploring——

——————————

In the void, there is a fourth-grade world floating.

This world is very prosperous, with millions of galaxies, and these galaxies are composed of billions or even hundreds of billions of stars, and each star has many planets.

This is a typical 'material universe'. There is no 'world' inside. They are all planets inside. The entire universe is one world, with only one world barrier, and the inside is boundless void, with a diameter of several billion. A billion light-years across, it houses countless galaxies and planets.

Generally speaking, creatures living in this starry sky-type material world like to call their own universe 'universe' and the 'endless realm' as the multiverse.

They believe that the existence of world barriers is the boundary of the universe, and they live in a sea of ​​universe.

However, this fourth-level world is a bit strange, because it is a world that is about to die, its heaven has begun to decline, and the main color of the entire world has turned red.

Red, among celestial bodies, is the color of ‘death’.

The blue sun is the most energetic and vigorous color. Blue celestial bodies indicate that they are burning vigorously because blue has a short wavelength and high energy.

Correspondingly, red has the longest wavelength, less energy, and the lowest single photon energy, and it will gradually attenuate with the propagation distance and slowly undergo a 'red shift'.

In astronomical observations, it is also generally believed that the redder the color of the galaxy being observed, the farther the galaxy is from the observation point.

But now, red stars can be seen everywhere in this world. They look bright, but then they gradually disappear, quietly, silently, and then fall into a long sleep of suffocation.

What is more terrifying than red is darkness. As the last light begins to fade away, the stars in the sky slowly fade into the deep space. Occasionally, there will be a flash of bright light, which is the unlucky Death Star that has fallen into it. A black hole, or two dwarf stars collide and burn up.

But these are just interludes. Eventually, even the star will collapse into a huge crystal ball made of carbon. At that time, its temperature will be greatly reduced, and you can even touch it with your hands. Imagine what it is like A wonderful situation, touching the corpse of the stars with my own hands.

But that's far from the end.

Stars will continue to exist. Stars, many huge and slender beings, are slowly sliding through the expanding chest of time and space.

It is full of dead stars, and there are also planets everywhere that were pushed away by the final explosion after the stars died, and wandered in the universe.

A large amount of solid matter has also evaporated long ago; burned up by proton decay, it became a puff of neutrino smoke drifting away at the speed of light. Visible and invisible electromagnetic waves spread out in the brown space,

Cosmic rays wander from the very beginning, waiting to be discovered in some return. The tongues of fire engulfed each other, releasing the final song of the explosion of billions of neutron stars. This cry may have started from eternity, or it may have been brewing and accumulated for some coincidence. In the end, the energy waves are smoothed out, and all you can see is a pile of monotonous colors.

This is the beginning and end of the universe.

Civilizations have fallen into slumber or died. For countless generations, engineers from different civilizations and races have worked hard to maintain their civilizations with technology and methods, collecting more materials to replace the decayed parts, and their behavior is noble. , but in vain.

The last building has collapsed. The last black hole also evaporated.

In this universe, countless lives are thinking.

They didn't understand until their death why they couldn't break through the boundaries of the universe. They tried every means and used everything to deduce, trying to find a way to break through the speed of light, but in vain.

They cannot break through the 'observable universe'.

The observable universe is the event horizon.

In the same way, the surface of a black hole is like a barrier. It physically completely isolates the two worlds inside and outside the black hole. We on the outside can never imagine the world inside the black hole, and everything that happens outside the black hole has a profound impact on the world inside the black hole. It is also impossible to know about the world outside the universe, just like we can never know what is outside the universe——

Babar once had this idea: "Could our universe be such an isolated black hole, and are we located in this black hole?"

Babar is a wise man in this world. He is a scientist of an advanced interstellar civilization and is committed to obtaining enough energy from black holes to maintain the development of civilization.

He tried everything he could to prevent the universe from ending, but he failed.

Now, even the last batch of black holes will evaporate, and there will be nothing left in the universe to provide energy.

In the end, he gave up the life-extending surgery and chose death. As the universe declined more and more, he was powerless and unwilling to maintain life anymore.

In other words, his ‘Tao heart collapsed’.

Death made him feel happy, and he felt his breathing slow down, and a growing sense of peace and tranquility washed over him like a tide.

Perhaps, not having to think is also a kind of happiness.

Babar's body was annihilated, and all perceptions began to disappear.

He felt so light that it almost made him dizzy, as if he were spiraling up in the sky.

In a daze, he seemed to see some strange sight.

He saw his own universe, and also saw himself rising out of the universe.

He devoted his life to breaking through the "observable universe". Perhaps this was his last fantasy before his death? Unexpectedly, his dream finally became a dream.

Babar sighed.

Then, he saw that his universe was floating in the larger universe, and there was a 'five-finger'-shaped organ below, which was similar to the limbs of some kind of creature.

coincide?

Impossible, why does the universe float on the limbs of living things? What kind of creature can easily hold up a universe with one appendage?

The world in dreams is really fantastic.

Babar sighed.

However, such an illogical thing happened, indicating that he really had a flashback before his death.

He closed his eyes and waited calmly for death.

But to his surprise, he could still see things when he closed his eyes.

He suddenly realized that he was indeed dead.

The things around me are actually real.

Could it be that... those guys who believe in ‘gods’ are right?

Gods, in his universe, have long been proven not to exist. There is no god in the world who can represent the creation of all things in the universe. If there is, this god cannot have a 'personality'.

They discovered laws, discovered science, exhausted all physical laws, were able to approach light-speed ships, travel throughout the universe in a dormant form, colonize galaxies, and even extract tidal energy from black holes to maintain the existence of civilization.

However, there are still some magicians who maintain the nihilistic existence of 'religion', which makes Babar sneer.

However, now after his death, he was surprised to find...

At this moment, he has a panoramic view of the entire universe.

"If this is not a dream, then it can only be something God saw, right? Will a divine messenger come to pick me up?" Babar thought, subconsciously wanting to stretch out his tentacles.

Babar recalled the history of his civilization and the records about ‘gods’.

This species was originally a worm that lived in stardust, climbed on a comet, and revolved around the star with a cycle of nine thousand years.

Every 8,500 years of cold winter, they will move close to the star and usher in a brief 500-year period of warm thaw. At that time, the worms will wake up from their 8,500-year slumber. , start to reproduce, and then wait for the next round of epoch cycle.

It was in this harsh environment that civilization was born.

In this case, there would have been no civilization at all. They were just bugs living on comets. But next to this star, there was a planet and another intelligent race born in the cradle of the planet. And also launched a space probe towards the sun.

The detection operation failed, but the probe accidentally fell on the comet.

Inside the detector, there is an isotope battery, which can convert it into electrical energy through thermocouples based on the thermoelectric phenomenon. There is a large amount of radioactive material in it, and there is also an entire deep space detector wreckage that can be called the crystallization of civilized technology.

What started as a worm during a five-hundred-year warm period now has an isotope battery capable of continuously releasing heat for hundreds of thousands of years.

They thus gained the qualification to touch civilization.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, the worms broke through their own comet and acquired the ability to travel in deep space.

Of course, they were actually still in the feudal era, but they were already able to sail in deep space.

This depends on two points. First, the gravitational pull of the comet is very weak, almost no gravity. They can let go at a specific position and be directly thrown out by the comet.

Second, they have been living on the ice of deep space comets all year round, far away from the sun, where the temperature is even close to absolute zero. They have evolved extraordinary dormant abilities and can physically cross the universe without any protection. technology.

In this way, in the feudal era, Babar's race, relying on curiosity, directly broke into the void physically, and finally landed on the planet.

The operation was launched for religious reasons.

At that time, they regarded the wreckage of the detector as a miracle and worshiped it as a god. They established a series of religious actions to worship this great thing that could give them warmth in the cold nights for 8,500 years.

Their deep space operation was essentially a 'pilgrimage' and a pursuit of the god they believed in.

They desperately landed on the planet. Compared with the comet's ground, the temperature here was ridiculously hot, but they could adapt well because the comet flew around the sun, and they would pass by the sun during the five-hundred-year window. The temperature at that time can reach hundreds of degrees Celsius, and the temperature on the planet's surface is within their tolerance range.

However, when they came to the surface of the planet...

But I saw a ruins after the extinction of civilization.

The civilization that originally launched the detector has been destroyed hundreds of thousands of years later.

They failed to step out of the cradle of their home planet and died in the civil war. (End of chapter)