Those who face the wall, but are in the Nascent Soul stage.

Chapter 465 The Microcosm (5k)

The mothership of the edge world hovered deep in the gap between the spiral arms. Outside the mothership, the star system swept by the two-dimensional foil was turning into flat spots of light, like ink spreading in water, slowly spreading outwards.

The mothership was enjoying the view.

The ever-fading scenery made the mothership feel somewhat melancholic.

In the macrocosm, countless two-dimensional forms are spreading from all directions. Although the macrocosm is expanding at a speed faster than light, it cannot expand forever. Once the macrocosm begins to contract, it will eventually collapse into two dimensions.

A world with only "width" and "length" dimensions—just thinking about it makes me feel suffocated.

Hehe, thankfully I have my little universe.

The mothership's thoughts fluttered happily like butterflies, but this fluttering soon stopped as it received a message.

The cleanup vessel No. 47500 was destroyed.

However, the mothership was not alarmed. In this vast space between the spiral arms, there were millions of cleanup ships within a range of thousands of light-years, so it would not be surprising if one was destroyed occasionally.

As the lowest-level cleanup ships, it's quite common for them to be discovered and even destroyed. After all, these cleanup ships aren't equipped with warp drive engines (because of the time dilation effect, this speed is not conducive to cleanup work), and can only fly at about 99% of the speed of light.

This also means that when faced with a light-speed attack of the same level, even low-level cleanup ships have a hard time escaping. In the past ten million time particles, the cleanup ships between different civilizations were basically destroyed by whoever discovered the other first and launched the attack first.

This struggle between different civilizations to clean up ships is just a small microcosm of this dark forest law universe.

Once the cleanup ship is released by the mothership, it will sever all communication with the mothership and will not carry any information that could expose the mothership. Therefore, even if the cleanup ship is destroyed, it will not have any significant impact.

How do you know who owns this cleanup vessel and where it was built?
Could it be that the atoms that make up the spaceship are engraved with "Made in Borderlands"?
Even the cleanup crews who piloted the cleanup ships had no memory of the mothership, nor did they know where it was. These mass-produced pilots only had the instinct to search, locate, and attack.

Therefore, even if the cleanup ship is destroyed, the edge world behind it is absolutely safe, and the mothership is very confident about this.

This is also the guiding principle that Edgeworld has always adhered to when conducting Dark Forest attacks: [Hide yourself, clean up the mess].

The hostile Singer civilization did the same; hidden genes were essential for every Black Forest civilization.

For example, the singers and their civilizations have done a great deal of "hiding themselves".

The five-dimensional fragment of the Singer civilization, the "Mother World," has been traveling through the universe at the speed of light, occasionally falling into wormholes and jumping to places tens or hundreds of light-years away, thus ensuring that its position changes randomly.

It is precisely because of the Singer civilization's caution that the Edge World has never been able to deliver a decisive blow to the Singer civilization.

However, the Singer civilization's hiding could not escape tens of thousands of time particles. The Edge World's attack on the Singer civilization was all-encompassing and preemptively cut off the Singer civilization's escape route to the middle of the Orion Arm.

The five-dimensional fragment, which was regarded as the 'mother world' by the other party, also dared not break through the three-dimensional universe due to its own technology and other reasons, and escape to thousands or tens of thousands of light-years away. Such a large-scale wormhole crossing would cause the five-dimensional fragment to reorganize internally and strangle all life inside.

The edge world is patiently and steadily suppressing the active star systems of the Singer civilization.

In order to alleviate the offensive of the edge world, the Singer civilization has been forced to use a large number of dimensional weapons and physical law weapons in the war, forming a two-dimensional Great Wall and light-speed slow fog zone that stretches for hundreds of light-years, in an attempt to delay the edge world's attack. This self-inflicted wound means that the Singer civilization will eventually move towards a two-dimensional world.

Become a member of a two-dimensional civilization

This is exactly what the Edge World wants.
It is extremely difficult to completely eliminate a civilization of the same level. The fleets of the Edge World are powerful, but they are hard to resist when the Singer Civilization launches its "Mother World" attack.

The leader of the Singer civilization, "Eternal Song," piloted the "Mother World" and, with a desperate, all-or-nothing attitude, temporarily deterred the invasion of the Edge World.

In the peripheral world, the best approach is to let the other party reduce their own level, rather than slowly grinding things down.

Since the resources of the two-dimensional universe are not interchangeable with those of the three-dimensional universe, the key axiom of the Hessian Law, namely that the resources of the universe are finite, does not hold. Therefore, there is no Dark Forest attack between civilizations of different dimensions.

Faced with two-dimensional foils from all directions, self-degradation is the only way for the Singer's civilization to survive.

—But the edge world doesn't need to do that, because the edge world has already mastered one of the most mysterious technologies in the universe: microcosm technology.

Once the Singer civilization, the dominant civilization at the end of this spiral arm, is defeated, the Edge World can continue to expand unchecked towards the break in the Orion Arm, completely escaping the barren star field between the spiral arms and becoming the master of the spiral arm itself.

At that time, the Edge World will be able to create more microcosms and allow the race to enter them, thereby avoiding attacks from all directions by infinitely spreading weapons such as two-dimensional foils and vacuum decay.

The Edge World's "Savior" believes that microcosm technology is a god-level technology that only gods can master. The Edge World civilization was fortunate to be favored by the universe, which is why it mastered this key technology during a technological explosion.

Scholars in the Edge World also believe that microcosm technology is the ticket for civilization to obtain 'immortality'. However, before using this ticket, the Edge World needs to eliminate all nearby threats and achieve eternal stability. Then, it needs to continuously use the mass-energy of the Orion Arm to steal and create more microcosms to fight against the great catastrophe of the end of the universe.

—The prophecy of the great “Savior of the Edge World” is correct; only the microcosm can escape this calamity.

The more microcosms there are, the less likely the edge world is to be defeated.

Unfortunately, due to the immaturity of the technology, the hundreds of microcosms created in the edge world all suffered a chain reaction of devastating collapses, and a large number of life forms in the edge world were also lost in these unstable microcosms.

Among these destroyed microcosms, only one microcosm with reasonable numerical input survived stably, becoming a stable bubble suspended outside the cosmic membrane.

If the universe is a giant membrane, then the microcosm is a bubble tightly attached to that membrane.

Having obtained a stable microcosm, the 'savior' did not hesitate to move the core of civilization into it.

From this moment on, the edge world can never be destroyed. According to the edge world's calculations, without the microcosm actively opening its door, no macrocosm can find the location of the microcosm—the macrocosm and the microcosm are parallel and do not interfere with each other.

Even if a hostile civilization happens to find the location of the microcosm, no two-dimensional, energy, decay, or light-speed weapon can interfere with it in the slightest.

Even if the universe returns to a singularity, the microcosm will remain perfectly still.

The microcosm is the greatest invention of the rim world, and all of this was bestowed by the "Savior." Thinking of this, the mothership couldn't help but shudder. Looking at the completely invisible microcosm behind it, it emitted a joyful, soft hum.
Ah, what a beautiful microcosm.

The edge of the universe

You are a closed spacetime

Envelop our spark

Without borrowing starlight

Self-built temperature-controlled nest

The marks of civilization
Sealed into an impenetrable barrier

Entropy increase can't keep up with your pace

Darkness cannot spread beyond your borders

We on the margins

In the palm of your hand
Live as an undying coordinate

Ah, what a wonderful little universe.

The mothership couldn't help but recite a poem. The moment the poem was recited, a line of seven-colored poetry suddenly lit up in the distant, gloomy clouds of poetry. The seven-colored poem illuminated the blurry face of Luo Qing's corpse, and a strange spiritual power emanated from Luo Qing's body. If the Thinker were here, it would surely discover a bizarre fact.

—Luo Qing's corpse is getting stronger.

...

After reciting the poem, the mothership belatedly realized something was amiss. Why hadn't the cleanup ship, which should have been destroyed, been destroyed via a one-time quantum communication transmission? Had it fallen into a two-dimensional universe?
The cleanup ship No. 47500 is less than two hundred light-years away from the mothership. If there is a spreading two-dimensional foil two hundred light-years away, then the mothership will have to take it seriously. At the very least, it should establish a containment line to slow down the spread of the two-dimensional foil.

At the same time, a line composed of hydrogen atoms extended from the microcosm to the macrocosm. This was a communication channel established between the microcosm and the macrocosm. This hydrogen atom communication line was sent by the "Savior," who issued an order to the mothership guarding outside:
[Using the input data from this mini-universe, repeat the process and attempt to create a second mini-universe.]

The savior has finally transmitted the data; the mothership has been waiting for a long time.

The mothership immediately abandoned all thoughts about the 47500 cleanup ship. Ripples appeared on the membrane in the center of the bridge, and more vacuum zero points could be drawn in near the mothership. Strings of information representing "local curvature extrema" were embedded in the membrane.

Near the mothership, more and more spatial creases appeared. The three-dimensional space of the macrocosm began to respond, bending inward with the creases as the axis. The distance between the two layers of space was compressed to the Planck length. The rift was born at the critical point of gravitational collapse, and pitch-black space appeared.

This is the prototype of a microcosm, but it still lacks input into various self-consistent and effective mathematical and physical laws.

Next comes input and calibration.

The mothership retrieved the set of physical constants from the original microcosm, fine-tuning data such as Planck's constant and the speed of light constant to make microscopic particles more stable, reduce local spacetime curvature, maintain the speed of light at one-third of the original universe, and slow down entropy increase. Most importantly, it rewrote the gravitational coupling constant, creating a closed-loop gravitational field within the microcosm, preventing it from being affected by the expansion of the original universe.

These operations have been repeated countless times by the mothership, so skillfully performed that there is not a moment's hesitation.

Then comes the "membrane expansion." The mothership releases the "zero-point energy anchor," which is the key to the microcosm's continuous theft of mass and energy from the macrocosm. Rings of pale blue energy ripples spread out, expanding the rift into a spherical space like inflating a balloon.

At this point, the 'volume' of the microcosm was revealed.

The primordial microcosm is isolated from all the physical rules of the original universe—like peeling a drop of water from the ocean and turning it into an oil droplet, retaining the essence of a liquid while escaping the ocean's influence.

Finally, there's the "renovation".

The mothership carved a four-dimensional space channel on the wall of the microcosm. The entrance to the channel appeared as a silver dot the size of a fingernail in the macrocosm. It continuously fed the microcosm with various standard data of the microcosm obtained from another microcosm.

The internal space of the microcosm begins to be molded into specific physical and mathematical rules by these data, and then through these specific rules, a gradually perfected microcosm is formed.

This is the most dangerous step—in the past, every time we reached this step in building our microcosm, it would collapse and shatter at any moment during the input process.

It's like a super-sensitive piece of code, making it impossible to figure out where the bug is.

The entire process took three hours. After the mothership stopped inputting data, the ripples on the membrane gradually subsided. The microcosm had stabilized in the spacetime rift of the original universe. The microcosm it had just created was waiting for its inhabitants to arrive.

"It's done!"

The mothership cheered.

Once the second microcosm is created, it means that "copying and pasting" is feasible in the process of building the microcosm.

But just as the microcosm was about to take shape, the entire space seemed to hear a crisp 'crack' sound.

The mothership's tremors stopped for a moment, and then it saw the completely "copied and pasted" microcosm crack open, then collapse at the speed of light, instantly shattering into the entire macrocosm.

The energy released from the explosion of the entire microcosm caused the mothership to tremble slightly.

"Why not?" the mothership wondered.

Another chain of hydrogen atoms emerged from the core of that small world, providing an explanation.

The Savior: "The macrocosm is not perfectly uniform. The gravitational constant and the distribution of dark energy in every part of space have subtle fluctuations. These subtle fluctuations mean that microcosms must follow different values ​​when they are created. In other words, it is not feasible to build microcosms simply by copying and pasting, even if two microcosms are located next to each other."

Mothership: "That's too difficult. Do we have to conduct countless random tests to create a second microcosm?"

Savior: "Yes—perhaps once we grasp the underlying patterns, we can greatly increase the success rate of building our microcosm... You go ahead and get busy, deal with the Singer civilization as soon as possible, we'll call on you if needed."

Mothership: "Then keep it up... One of the cleanup ships has been destroyed. I'll go check it out first."

The savior of the edge world shut down all external communications and continued to immerse himself in the renovation of his microcosm.

The mothership calmed itself down and then issued an order to one of the edge ships: Go to the area where the cleanup ship 47500 was destroyed and check the situation.

Unlike the cleanup ships, the Edge ships are the main combat ships of the Edge World. Equipped with warp drives, they possess high-powered light-speed weapons and physical law weapons. Made entirely of neutron star materials, they can also project four-dimensional space, forming a four-dimensional domain to defeat the Singer civilization's main combat ships from a higher dimension.

The powerful edge-ship received the order and immediately rushed towards that area at the speed of light.

But almost immediately after the Edge spacecraft took off, the mothership received a message.

The Edge ship was destroyed.

The mothership finally realized something was wrong, and it couldn't help but wonder: "Could it be that the main fleet of the Singer civilization has infiltrated the star system of the outer world?"

"They're practically asking for their own destruction!"

按照母舰的旨意，第149、150、153、186、192、200、213，214等八艘强大的主力边缘飞船，组成四面八方的围攻之势头，以光速飞向第一艘边缘飞船被摧毁的位置。

Just ten seconds after the order was given, the eight edge ships that had entered warp drive mode on the mothership's star map simultaneously went out within a second.

Eight Edgeships were destroyed.

The mothership was stunned.

These eight fringe ships are not together, but are more than ten light-years apart. How could they be destroyed at the same moment? Unless the Singer civilization had eight main ships lying in wait near the ships in the fringe world and attacking them at the same time.

But does the singer Wenming have this ability?
Even the "mother world" of the Singer civilization, that five-dimensional space fragment known as the Silent Garden, couldn't possibly cover such a wide area of ​​attack.

The mothership sounded an alarm for the entire civilization and sent a message into the microcosm:
Don't come out!

Subsequently, a massive edge fleet began to assemble. This powerful edge fleet consisted of ten secondary motherships, 1,800 edge warships, and 108,000 secondary edge ships, all of which were composed of neutron star matter.

This main edge fleet disengaged from the four-dimensional space domain and then appeared neatly in the vast three-dimensional macrocosm, sliding out from the fourth dimension to form a continuous fleet that stretched as far as the eye could see.

This is just one of the eight fleet groups in the edge world, yet it already possesses the power to crush the entire Singer civilization.

Nearly 120,000 edge fleets tore 100,000 silver rifts through the barrier of four-dimensional space. The moment they broke out of the higher-dimensional realm, they simultaneously ignited their warp drives.

The million-kilometer-long light wings unfurled with a roar, and the neutron star ship emitted a dazzling burst of gamma rays.

Even a low-level secondary edge warship, doing nothing but maintaining the gamma-ray burst on the surface of its neutron star hull, would be enough to destroy the entire Trisolaran Second Fleet.

There were as many as 120,000 of these powerful warships.

One hundred and twenty thousand death lines traversing the sea of ​​stars continued to extend, moving slowly toward the target coordinates with the majestic speed of standard vacuum light. Behind them were one hundred and twenty thousand evaporating four-dimensional fragments.

These neutron star warships, with their immense mass and indestructible hardness, etched irreversible expeditionary trajectories into the vast universe through death lines and slow fog.

Even if the "mother world" of the Singer civilization were to come in person, it would have to bow down to such power!
There are eight such powerful fleets in the Edge World!

The mothership focused intently, watching the lone warships on alert disappearing into the distance on the star system radar map, a ruthless glint rising in its mind.

No matter how large the enemy's fleet is, in the face of the Seventh Quadrant Fleet, everyone must recognize who the true cosmic overlord is in this gap between the spiral arms!
In short, it's time to bring about the enemy's destruction.

(End of this chapter)