In 2760, this group of non-returners set out from the planet at the edge of the Barnard Galaxy, and by 2950 they had advanced to the distant deep space nearly 160 light years away from the solar system.

They discovered a lonely asteroid floating in the universe, not orbiting any star.

After landing, the detector began to continuously receive electromagnetic wave signals with obvious regularity.

After several years of research, the non-returners discovered that the asteroid was actually an ancient rock life.

This rock life has a lifespan of at least 2 billion years.

The consciousness of the rock life was born alone in the rock structure that was fused with some metals, and existed in a way that was completely inconsistent with the cognitive logic of earthlings and the definition of life on Earth.

Its main consciousness is not the complete logic constructed in the brain of carbon-based life. There are no neurons and nerves in its body.

But the amazing thing is that the protons, neutrons, and even the huge structure of atoms and molecules that make up this asteroid form a wonderful whole.

Electrons and ions float in between, transmitting information at a slow speed and forming a closed loop, forming a huge slow wisdom that is similar to carbon-based life, but completely different.

Carbon-based life, especially humans, relies on the flow of charged ions to transmit information, and relies on changing the quantum changes of phosphorus atoms in the microtubule structure of neuronal cells to produce consciousness and store memory.

Rock life relies on slow chemical reactions that are larger in scale but slower in reaction speed to transmit information, and also relies on quantum collapse changes in the various complex compounds inside it to produce knowledge and memory.

The prerequisite for everything is that in the chance with an infinite denominator, the quantum changes in this asteroid form a law and combine into a whole.

The process of its birth was too accidental.

It has no peers.

Even if there are other rock life in the universe, they are not of the same species as it.

Usually, its thinking speed is very slow, and a human life may be just a brief memory for it.

It is not smart, has no inventions or creations, and does not even have a civilization level.

But it is still truly "alive".

It can continuously remember and repeat some simple information.

After it memorizes the information, it will be forgotten at a slow speed as it "ages".

When all memories are forgotten, it means that it has "died".

At that time, the twenty-something who had only ten years left to live did not have the opportunity to read all its messages.

But the silver lining is that when humans come into contact with it, it will also be at the end of its life.

The gravitational effect in its body begins to take effect, and the quantum collapse that was originally never-ending is gradually stagnating due to particle sedimentation.

When everything falls silent, it will become a real cosmic rock, and may be captured by a star or planet countless years later.

As a lonely life that has witnessed two billion years, it may eventually feel a little unwilling.

At the same time, because the quantum state gradually tends to settle, the frequency of small-scale collapse in its body has accelerated countless times.

Its thinking has become faster, and it can begin to release a video signal of about half an hour in a year.

The electromagnetic wave signal is the last image it wants to convey to humans.

Before the Unreturners gradually aged and died, they finally deciphered this information. It was an extremely grand three-dimensional projection of the universe.

It told humans a story.

The content of the story is a war that took place millions of years ago.

The war lasted for thousands of years, and the warring parties disappeared and reappeared from time to time.

Of course, the rock life has seen more than just the scenes in this video in its life, but it has long forgotten things that happened more distantly.

Moreover, in its consciousness, all it had experienced in the long 1.9 billion years of its "first half of life" was endless loneliness and absolute boredom. It was not until the last one million years of its life that everything before its eyes underwent such a dramatic change.

This experience that lasted for thousands of years was its most precious wealth in its heart.

Even if it was about to die, it hoped that its wealth could be passed on.

Rock life compressed thousands of years into a video of only half an hour, making the decryption work extremely difficult.

But the one who did not return finally succeeded.

The two warring parties were the Mi Clan and the Compound Eyes.

At that time, the battleships of the Compound Eyes were not the prismatic structures of today, but small spheres one after another, with a number of exactly one million.

The Compound Eyes Civilization had the upper hand from the beginning.

As the war progressed, the shape of the Compound Eyes Civilization's warships gradually changed, and their performance continued to improve.

This means that the technology of the Mi people is being digested and absorbed.

In the end, the war stopped.

There has never been another confrontation of the same intensity in the memory of rock life.

At this time, the millions of warships of the Compound Eyes Civilization have all been transformed into prismatic structures.

The number of one million is very subtle.

Because Chen Feng saw from the battlefield intelligence that the exact number of prismatic battleships placed in front of him at this time was 999,996.

The four missing ones should be the operators of the spherical battleships, each responsible for patrolling a 90-degree fan-shaped area of ​​the galaxy.

This is both weird and terrifying. This

means that the actual number of compound eye invaders has never decreased or increased over the past millions of years.

This is terrifying, indicating that the compound eye invaders have found a possible way to achieve immortality.

Chen Feng can roughly guess what the method is.

Clone and copy and paste consciousness, and then continue to raise snakes to screen new personality subjects.

At present, humans cannot transfer consciousness because the quantum thinking storm in the human brain is too complicated, but it does not mean that compound eyes cannot do it.

Maybe the thinking of compound eyes is relatively simple?

In addition, the reason why Chen Feng said "possible immortality" is not definite immortality.

That is because there may be a limit to the number of times that consciousness can be cloned and copied and pasted.

When it exceeds a certain number of times, even if the body is still alive, the thinking may collapse and gradually distort into another personality.

Or the consciousness collapses directly, and it goes to a state of being alive physically but completely dead psychologically.

For example, are the one million compound eyes now and the one million compound eyes a million years ago the same person?

Chen Feng doesn't know, and the compound eyes themselves may not know either.

That is the ethics of the universe, and unless humans can master perfect mind transfer, they cannot experience it.

In addition, another important information obtained by Chen Feng, the positioning of the patrol ship of the spherical battleship in the compound eye civilization, also comes from the difference between the number of one million and 999996.

This is the definite answer.

After the compound eyes occupied the Milky Way, they should have gathered in a star system near the center of the Milky Way, and then divided the Milky Way into four fan-shaped areas, and patrolled by four patrol ships at a frequency of one one-way trip every thousand years and one round trip every two thousand years.

Every time the patrol ship returns, a new group of people will be replaced.

Human beings have both good and bad luck. When the solar barrier arrived, the spherical battleships responsible for patrolling this area needed to fly 500 years away from the solar system, which at least gave humans 500 years to develop.

Of course, these 500 years may have been deliberately left for humans by the compound eyes.

Since the compound eyes can absorb the technology of the Mi people, they can certainly absorb human technology.

In a sense, the solar barrier is also an important means for the compound eyes to allow low-level civilizations to develop in the cage absolutely safely, and then completely destroy them and erase all traces at the right time.

As for why the two major colonies failed to find the remains of advanced civilizations in the Orion Arm, and all they encountered were low-level civilizations?

It may be that they were unlucky and didn't find it, or it may be that the compound eyes were too clean.

Assuming that there is still a good order in the universe, then the compound eyes need to clean up the battlefield very carefully when destroying advanced civilizations, but it doesn't matter when destroying low-level civilizations.

It's like a gangster needs to destroy the body and the traces after killing someone. If he steps on a grasshopper to death on the road, he will naturally leave its body alone.

In this timeline, in addition to the spherical battleships, the new enemy prismatic fleet sets out from the galaxy near the center of the Milky Way and rushes towards the earth.

The prismatic battleship travels slightly faster than the spherical ship, and perhaps has a longer distance, but it arrives in the solar system less than 20 hours later.

Why are the spherical battleships used for patrols larger than the war machine prismatic battleships?

From a human perspective, you can think of it this way.

How would a person with eternal life feel if he were to carry out a mission that would take two thousand years to go back and forth?

Even if there was a superluminal quantum network that could keep in touch with his own species, he still couldn't avoid the feeling of emptiness, loneliness and coldness.

When technology is advanced enough and energy is almost inexhaustible, should this "brave man" who is on patrol missions be given the highest material treatment?

Of course they should.

Building a huge patrol ship, increasing its activity space, creating the best entertainment and living conditions for it, and increasing its fun when carrying out missions have become one of the basic guarantees.

In addition, it must be guaranteed a means to continue its life, that is, cloning.

The "patrolman" who died at the hands of Chen Feng must have particularly loved the number 55.

The above conjectures and conclusive evidence are the standard answers obtained by Chen Feng and other scholars in the solar system after integrating the knowledge of the two colonies.

Chen Feng believes that his conjecture is basically close to the truth, and it is also consistent with every speculation and every intelligence detail in the past.

The situation has not actually improved, and this defeat is doomed, but Chen Feng is not sad, but rather a little proud.

Compared with other civilizations that have been wiped out in the Orion Arm, and even compared with the once powerful civilization Mi, he has done well enough.

Since the Compound Eyes civilization invaded the Milky Way, God knows how many wars they have fought, big and small, but there has never been a single individual death.

According to the analysis of the Mi escape ship by scientists from neighboring stars, the technological level of the exterminated Mi at that time should be similar to that of the current solar system, and even slightly superior in materials science.

But the result is that the Mi not only lost completely, but was even completely absorbed by the opponent in the process of war.

Today, humans are facing a stronger enemy that has taken root in the Milky Way for millions of years, absorbed and transformed all the technology of the Mi, and more or less sucked a lot of blood from more low-level civilizations.

But humans, who rose from the bottom of the world, have gone from a once humble and insignificant 0.7 civilization to today after only seven extinctions and seven thousand years of technological acceleration, and successfully killed a compound eye.

Chen Feng didn't feel so proud before, but now he is a little relieved.

In addition, he has a new understanding of the hierarchy of civilization.

When the technological level is not high, the Kardashev civilization classification has a better adaptability.

But when the technological level exceeds a certain limit, the hierarchical gap between civilizations cannot be simply measured by the amount of energy used.

For example, human beings, assuming that human beings fall into an eternal technological bottleneck after inventing the Dyson membrane and no longer have any achievements, but as long as the earthlings are given time, they can still spread their footprints all over the Milky Way and use every star in the Milky Way. It is not impossible for them to covet the Milky Way and slowly climb up the ladder of the third-level civilization.

But at this time, the Earthlings still cannot leave the Milky Way and go to the outer galaxies. When facing the invading compound eyes, they still have to be defeated.

Even if the opponent only sends a million warships, and the total energy they have is less than one ten-billionth of the entire Milky Way, they can still win.

The gap in energy utilization that can be smoothed out by time is worthless.

The value of technology will be more reflected in quality rather than quantity.

For another example, suppose that humans now suddenly master a high-speed mobile technology that is independent of folding and gravitational curvature flight, which can support a group of people to run far away from the Milky Way to the other side of the Lania Kaia Supercluster, then the fate of human extinction will be reversed in an instant.

Chen Feng thought of his next direction of struggle.

Continue to seek deeper technological explosions and obtain new power that is enough to overwhelm the Compound Eyes in some aspects. At that time, humans will either gain super mobility to escape, or gain super combat capabilities to directly destroy the Compound Eyes' million-edge fleet.

Either way, it can completely change the future.

Now he understood the reason, but as the war deepened, his mood did not change much.

First, he found that no matter how much wisdom he used to imagine and speculate, he could not find a stable idea to stimulate the explosion of deep technology. He

also informed Ou Qinglan and others of his ideas, hoping that more scientists would work together with him, but the result was still very unsatisfactory.

Secondly, no matter when, seeing his peers die in groups in the confrontation with aliens is ultimately painful.

The death rate of the three human fleets is still very fast.

After the compound eyes quickly figured out the route of the neighboring star fleet and the Barnard fleet, the rate of casualties was even faster.

Unknowingly, another half an hour had passed, and Chen Feng gradually felt physically and mentally exhausted.

He couldn't come up with any ideas, and so many smart people and such a huge artificial intelligence couldn't come up with any ideas either. The direction of the war was so clear that he was confused and distressed.

He didn't know how long he would have to go on this road, which made him extremely troubled.

He vaguely forgot one thing.

Until now, the player in the solar system has been playing "Morning Breeze" at the highest power without stopping.

The vast majority of people no longer enjoy the emotional blessing of "Morning Breeze". Instead, under the influence of "Song of the World", their thinking has changed logically, and they are no longer emotional even when they die heroically.

Although people with an awakening degree of more than 35% can resist, their state of mind is also affected to some extent. However, only Chen Feng is completely immune to "Song of the World".

But he was also affected by "Morning Breeze", and his emotions were quietly becoming more active.

It was just a little emotional ups and downs, but after being magnified beyond a certain limit, it would cause a drastic change in his state of mind.

Another half an hour passed, and when Tang Tianxin's command ship was attacked and torn apart by eight blade mantises, Chen Feng's perfect judgment had a loophole.

This time, the mother of the child did not have the opportunity to leave him a will, and in an instant she turned into cosmic dust in a violent explosion.

At the same time, the continuous bombardment of the human fleet finally opened a gap in the grid hole.

The overlapping bombardment of energy weapons and missiles and shells seemed to have finally exhausted the dark mass and physical toxins in front of the empty space ahead, and also consumed a lot of the white plasma in the grid.

The first missile passed through the grid perfectly.

The patrolling blade mantises also showed a flaw, leaving a large passage.

The next moment, Chen Feng made a decision and rushed over at the speed of light following the path of the missile.

He was tired of the feeling of being trapped in a deaf box, only being able to fight with other people's swords and spears, but unable to move a hair on other people's heads.

But when he just passed through the grid and entered the area between the grid and the prism array, he saw the energy changes behind him and also saw the battlefield intelligence.

The energy connecting the grid did not weaken, and the missiles and energy cannons behind still could not be fired.

On the prismatic battleship right in front of him, countless long tendrils were spreading out.

He had seen these long tendrils.

They were the means used by the spherical battleships before to freeze the space. In

just this instant, it was like a touch of cold water poured over his head, and Chen Feng woke up with horror. He

fell into a trap.

The compound eyes wanted to capture him alive.

No wonder he always seemed thrilling under the siege of hundreds of blade mantises, but in fact he was able to handle it with ease.

It's not that he is extremely strong, but that the blade mantises are deliberately letting him go!

Chen Feng was not sure whether his ability to travel through time was discovered, but the compound eyes must have discovered his peculiarity!

It's over.

He suddenly only had one choice left, to die early.