Chapter 595: Chapter 385: Perfect Logical Deduction and Dying Early_1

In the year 2760, the No Returners set out from a planet on the outer edge of the Barnard’s Star System, and by 2950, they had advanced to a distant deep space area nearly 160 light-years away from the Solar System.

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

After landing, the detectors began to receive a continuous stream of clearly-ordered electromagnetic wave signals.

Through years of research, the No Returners found that the asteroid was actually an ancient Rock Life.

This Rock Life had a lifespan of at least two billion years.

The consciousness of the Rock Life was born within a rock structure fused with some metals, existing in a way that contradicted Earthlings’ understanding of logic and life’s definition altogether.

Its main consciousness was not built on the complete logic typical of carbon-based life’s brains, and it did not have neurons or nerves inside it.

But amazingly, the protons, neutrons, atoms, and molecules that made up this asteroid formed a unique entirety.

Electrons and ions moved between them, slowly transmitting information, and formed closed-loop circuits, composing a vast slow intelligence that was similar to carbon-based life but completely different in nature.

Carbon-based life, especially humans, relied on the flow of charged ions to transmit information and generate consciousness and memory storage by changing the quantum state of phosphorus atoms within the microtubule structures of neuron cells.

Rock Life relied on larger-scale, slower chemical reactions to transmit information and produced consciousness and memory by depending on the quantum collapse of various compounds within its interior.

The prerequisite for all of this was that the quantum changes within the asteroid formed a pattern within the infinitely large odds, combining them into a whole.

Its birth was incredibly accidental.

It had no peers.

Even if there were other Rock Lives in the universe, they would not be of the same species.

Generally, its thought process was slow. To him, a human’s lifetime might only be a brief memory.

It wasn’t intelligent, it didn’t invent or create anything, and it didn’t even have a civilization level.

But it was still truly “alive.”

It could continuously memorize and repeat simple information.

Once the information was recorded, it would slowly be forgotten as it “aged.”

When all memories were forgotten, it meant that it had “died.”

At that point, the twenty-odd remaining No Returners with just over a decade of life left had no opportunity to read its message fully.

But to their great fortune, the Rock Life was also nearing the end of its life when humans contacted it.

The gravitational effects within its body began to take effect, causing the never-ending quantum collapse to slowly stagnate due to particle settlement.

When everything fell silent, it would become a real cosmic rock, possibly being captured by some star or planet after countless years.

As a lonely life that had witnessed two billion years of time, it might be ultimately unwilling to accept its fate.

At the same time, the quantum states within it gradually settled, accelerating the small-scale collapse frequency countless times.

Its thought process sped up, and it began to emit an image signal with a half-hour length in just one year’s time.

Electromagnetic wave signals were the last images it wanted to convey to humans.

By deciphering the information before they aged and died one after another, the No Returners received an extremely vast cosmic space three-dimensional projection.

It told humans a story.

The story was about a war that took place a million years ago.

The war lasted for thousands of years, with both sides disappearing and reappearing from time to time.

Of course, the Rock Life had seen more than just the scenes in this video, but it had long forgotten the distant past.

Moreover, in its consciousness, everything it experienced in the extremely long nineteen billion-plus years of its “first half” of life was nothing but endless loneliness and absolute boredom until the dramatic change of the past million years unfolded before its eyes.

This thousands-year-long experience was its most precious treasure in its heart.

Even on the brink of death, it hoped its wealth could be passed on.

Rock Life condensed thousands of years into a half-hour-long video, which caused immense difficulty for the decryption team.

But the No Returners eventually succeeded.

The warring sides were indeed the Egyptian tribe and Compound-Eyed Observers.

At the time, the battleships of the Compound Eye Civilization were not the current angular structure but smaller spheres, with a total of one million precisely.

The Compound Eye Civilization had the upper hand initially.

As the war progressed, the Compound Eye Civilization’s battleships gradually changed shape and performance, continually improving.

This indicated that the Egyptian tribe’s technology was being assimilated.

In the end, the war ceased.

There was never another confrontation of the same intensity in the Rock Life’s memory.

At this point, all of the Compound Eye Civilization’s million battleships had transformed into angular structures.

The number one million was very subtle.

Because Harrison Clark saw from the battlefield intelligence that the precise number of angular battleships now before him was 999,996.

Those missing four should have been sphere battleship operators, each responsible for patrolling a 90-degree sector of the Milky Way Galaxy.

This was both strange and terrifying.

It meant that for the past million years, the number of real Compound Eye Invaders had never decreased or increased.

This was a terrifying fact, implying that the Compound-Eyed Observer had discovered a potentially immortal method.

Harrison Clark could roughly guess what that method was.