Chapter 823: Transition

Zhong Minglou's thoughts were clearly sluggish now.

Because his thinking organ, the amount of information it could process per unit of time, had already exploded.

It was like driving while fatigued.

The information was too vast, and his processing capacity was completely overloaded.

Objects that seemed far away would suddenly appear in front of him in the blink of an eye.

Moreover, his vision began to experience intermittent "black screens and freezes"; his brain would occasionally wander off, moments he couldn't perceive himself, but in reality, several seconds had already passed.

Other objects on his visual interface seemed to be teleporting, the entire Observable Universe appeared blurred, completely turning into a mass of bright splotches.

Zhong Minglou's mind no longer had the capacity to process that excess image data; he couldn't even distinguish what he was doing, and if a car suddenly appeared in front of him, he might not even be able to tell if it was a car or a van, only barely able to judge if it was a large vehicle or a small one.

All the scenery turned into a blurry mess of pixel blocks, his vision filled with bright spots, interspersed with intermittent black screens and freezes, and his hearing also began to diminish, the surrounding sounds becoming erratic.

He might have even forgotten his own objective.

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

His brain was severely overloaded, just like an ordinary person forced to control a mech moving at fifty times the speed of a normal human, racing uncontrollably down a road.

The mech continuously transmitted information to him, and the F1 race car-like speed caused information to surge towards him wildly, yet he could only grasp the steering wheel as best he could, maintaining as much safety as possible in the high-pressure, high-speed environment; otherwise, his current state meant that a single moment of inattentiveness, a mere instant, could send him hundreds of meters off the road.

Other vehicles on the road would seem to teleport, ignoring highway curves, heading straight for the roadside barrier, then, upon sudden realization, he'd jerk the steering wheel back with a half-second delay.

If he didn't steer it back, it would naturally result in a crash and death.

His processing System was completely unable to handle the information overload that exceeded its limits, thus he could only simply process the most basic and important information.

All of this was because most of his energy was already focused on the outside.

The 'outside' of the Observable Universe.

He seemed to vaguely glimpse the threshold of the Fourth Grade, though it was beyond reach, it felt so real.

This forced Zhong Minglou to dedicate his full effort.

Li Qi, meanwhile, maintained this shrunken Observable Universe, waiting for Zhong Minglou to find his answer within it.

He was taking a gamble.

If Zhong Minglou discovered the crisis of reality, then he would certainly realize the futility of this war, and at that time, his Dao struggle against Li Qi would naturally dissipate into nothingness.

Just as Li Qi and Zhong Minglou were exploring—

— — — — — — — — — —

In Boundless Outer Domain, a Fourth Grade world floated.

This world was extremely prosperous, containing millions of galaxies, which in turn consisted of billions, even hundreds of billions, of stars, and each star had numerous planets.

This was a typical 'Material Universe'; there were no 'worlds' within it, only individual planets. The entire Universe was one world, with only a single world barrier, and its interior was an endless Void Realm, with a diameter that could reach billions of light-years, containing countless galaxies and planets.

Generally, beings living in this type of stellar material world prefer to call their own Universe 'Universe' and refer to Boundless Outer Domain as the multiverse.

They believe that the existence of the world barrier is the boundary of the Universe, and that they live in a sea of Universes.

However, this Fourth Grade world was somewhat peculiar, as it was a dying world; its Heavenly Dao had already begun to wane, and the main color of the entire world had turned red.

Red, among celestial bodies, is the color of 'death'.

Blue suns are the most vibrant, the most flourishing color; blue celestial bodies indicate vigorous burning, because blue light has a short wavelength and high energy.

Conversely, red has the longest wavelength, less energy, and the lowest single-photon energy, and it gradually attenuates and slowly 'redshifts' with propagation distance.

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

And now, red stars were ubiquitous throughout this world; they appeared brilliant, but then gradually annihilated, quietly, silently, before entering a long, suffocating slumber.

More terrifying than red was darkness; as the last light began to fade, the stars across the sky slowly vanished into deep space, occasionally a flicker of light appearing, perhaps a doomed dead star falling into a black hole, or two dwarf stars colliding and igniting.

But these were merely interludes; eventually, even stars would collapse into giant crystal balls made of carbon, at which point their temperature would drop so much that one could even touch them. Imagine, what a marvelous situation that would be, to personally touch the corpse of a star.

But that was far from the end.

Stars would continue to exist, these numerous massive yet delicate stellar presences, slowly gliding across the expanding chest of spacetime.

Filled with dead stars, and also everywhere, planets that had been pushed away by the final eruption after stellar death, now wandering in cosmic space.

Large amounts of solid matter had long since evaporated; burned out by proton decay, becoming a wisp of neutrino smoke drifting away at the speed of light. Visible and invisible electromagnetic waves scattered in the coffee-colored space,

Cosmic rays wandered from the earliest times, waiting to be discovered in some return. Tongues of fire devoured each other, releasing the dying symphony of billions of neutron star explosions, a lament that might have begun in ancient times, or perhaps was brewing and accumulating, waiting for some coincidence. In the end, the ripples of energy were smoothed out, and as far as the eye could see, there was only a monotonous stack of colors.

This was the beginning and end of the Universe.

Civilizations fell into slumber, or into death. For countless generations, engineers from different civilizations and races strenuously maintained their civilizations with technology and means, collecting more Materials to replace decaying parts, acting nobly, yet in vain.

The last buildings had also collapsed. The last black hole had also evaporated.

In this Universe, countless lives pondered.

Until their dying breath, they couldn't understand why they couldn't Breakthrough the boundaries of the Universe. They tried every method, used everything they had to deduce, wanting to find a way to Breakthrough the speed of light, but all was in vain.

They could not Breakthrough the Observable Universe.

And the Observable Universe is the event horizon.

Similarly, the surface of a black hole is like a barrier; it physically 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 is equally unknowable to the world inside the black hole, just as we can never know what is beyond the Universe—

Baal once had such a thought: "Could our Universe be such an isolated black hole, and are we perhaps located within this black hole?"

Baal was a sage of this world, a scientist from an advanced interstellar civilization, dedicated to extracting enough energy from black holes to sustain the development of his civilization.

He used everything to prevent the Universe from falling into ruin, but he failed.

Now, even the last black holes were about to evaporate, and soon there would be nothing left in the Universe to provide energy.

Finally, he gave up life-extension surgery and chose death. Nothing else mattered; as the Universe increasingly declined, he was powerless, and he no longer wished to maintain his life.

In other words, his Dao Heart had collapsed.

Death made him feel joyful; he felt his breathing slow, and an increasingly strong sense of peace and tranquility swept over him like a tide.

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

Baal's Physical Body annihilated, and all his senses began to fade.

He felt his body incredibly light, almost dizzying him, as if he were soaring upward in the sky.

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

He saw his own Universe, and he also saw himself ascending out of the Universe.

He had dedicated his life to breaking through the 'Observable Universe'. Perhaps this was his final illusion before death? He hadn't expected his dream to truly become a dream in the end.

Baal sighed thus.

Then, he saw his Universe, floating in a larger cosmic space, and below it, there was a 'five-fingered' organ, resembling a biological limb.

Coincidence?

Impossible, why would a Universe float on a biological limb? What kind of creature could effortlessly hold up a Universe with an appendage?

The world in a dream, it truly is fantastic.

Baal exclaimed thus.

However, the appearance of such an illogical thing indicated that he was truly experiencing a final burst of vitality before death.

He closed his eyes, calmly awaiting death.

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

He suddenly realized that he had indeed died.

The things around him were actually real.

Could it be… those who believed in 'gods' were right?

Gods, in his Universe, had long been proven nonexistent; there was no god in this world capable of creating all things in the Universe, and if there were, this god could not possess 'personality'.

They discovered laws, discovered science, exhausted all physical laws, could approach light-speed spacecraft, traverse the entire Universe in a state of hibernation, colonize star Systems, and even extract tidal energy from black holes to sustain the existence of civilization.

However, there were still some charlatans who maintained the 'religion', a non-existent entity, which Baal scoffed at.

Yet, now after death, he was surprised to find…

He could now take the entire Universe into his sight.

"If this isn't a dream, then it must be what a god sees, right? Will a divine messenger come to pick me up?" Baal thought, instinctively wanting to extend his tentacles.

Baal recalled the history of his civilization, the records about 'Gods'.

His species originally lived as worms in stardust, clinging to a comet, orbiting a star with a nine-thousand-year period.

Every eight thousand five hundred years of cruel winter, they would move closer to the star, entering a brief five-hundred-year period of warm thawing. At that time, the worms would awaken from their eight-thousand-five-hundred-year slumber, begin to reproduce, and then await the next cycle of epochs.

It was in this harsh environment that their civilization was born.

Under such circumstances, it would have been absolutely impossible for a civilization to exist; they were merely worms living on a comet. However, next to this star, there was a planet with another intelligent species that had been born in the cradle of that planet, and they had sent a cosmic probe towards the sun.

The probe mission failed, but the probe unexpectedly landed on the comet.

Inside the probe, there was an isotope battery capable of converting heat into electrical energy via thermocouples based on the thermoelectric effect, and it contained a large amount of radioactive Materials, as well as the wreckage of a deep-space probe that was a crystallization of civilization's technology.

Initially, worms only had a five-hundred-year warm period, but now they had an isotope battery that could continuously release heat for hundreds of thousands of years.

They thus gained the qualification to touch civilization.

Hundreds of thousands of years later, the worms broke free from their comet, gaining the ability for deep-space navigation.

Of course, they were still in the feudal era, but they were already capable of deep-space navigation.

This depended on two points: first, the comet's gravity was very weak, almost nonexistent; they could let go at specific positions and be directly flung off the comet.

Second, having lived on the ice of a deep-space comet for extended periods, in places far from the sun where temperatures approached absolute zero, they had evolved extraordinary hibernation abilities, allowing them to traverse the Universe with their Physical Body, without needing any protective technology.

As a result, Baal's species, in the feudal era, driven by pure curiosity, directly entered the Void Realm with their Physical Body and eventually landed on a planet.

The reason for this expedition was religious.

At that time, they regarded the wreckage of the probe as a miracle and revered it as a deity, establishing a series of religious activities to worship this great object that could give them warmth during the eight-thousand-five-hundred-year cold night.

Their deep-space expedition was essentially a 'pilgrimage,' a pursuit of the god they believed in.

They desperately landed on the planet. Compared to the comet's surface, the temperature here was ridiculously hot, but they could adapt well because the comet orbited the sun, and they would pass the sun during a five-hundred-year window, when temperatures could reach several hundred degrees Celsius. The planet's surface temperature was within their tolerance.

However, when they arrived on the planet's surface…

They saw a ruined wasteland after a civilization's extinction.

The civilization that launched the probe had been destroyed hundreds of thousands of years later.

They failed to step out of their home planet's cradle and died in civil war. (End of Chapter)