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

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

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

After several years of research, the No Returners discovered that the asteroid was actually a long and ancient rock life.

This rock has a lifespan of at least two billion years.

The consciousness of 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 people on earth, and also completely inconsistent with the earth's definition of life.

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

But the wonderful 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 among them, transmitting information at a slow speed and forming a closed cycle, forming a huge slow intelligence 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 quantum changes in phosphorus atoms within the microtubule structure of neuron cells to produce consciousness and store memory.

Rock life relies on larger scale but slower low-speed chemical reactions to transmit information. It also relies on quantum collapse changes in the various compounds within it to produce consciousness and memory.

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

The process of its birth was too accidental.

It has no analogue.

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

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

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

But it is still truly "alive".

It can memorize and repeat simple information continuously.

After the information is memorized by it, it will be forgotten at a slow rate as it "ages".

When all memories are forgotten, it means it is "dead".

At that time, the more than 20 non-returners who only had more than ten years left to live had no chance to read its message.

But fortunately among the misfortunes, when humans come into contact with it, it will soon reach the end of its life.

The gravitational effect within its body begins to take effect, and the quantum collapse that originally never stagnated is gradually stagnating due to particle settling.

When everything falls into silence, it will become a real cosmic rock, which may be captured by a star or planet in countless years.

As a lonely life that has witnessed two billion years of time, it may be a little unwilling after all.

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

Its thinking became faster, and it began to release an image signal that was about half an hour long in a year.

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

Before the non-returners gradually aged and died, they finally deciphered this message, which was an extremely grand three-dimensional projection of the universe.

It tells a story to humans.

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

The war lasted for thousands of years, with the warring parties disappearing and reappearing from time to time.

Of course, the rock life has seen more than just the scenes in this video, but it has long forgotten things from far earlier.

Moreover, in its consciousness, everything it experienced in the long 1.9 billion years of its "first half of life" was only endless loneliness and absolute boredom. It was not until the last million years of its life that everything it experienced before it

experienced such tremendous changes.

This experience that lasted for thousands of years is the most precious treasure in its heart.

Even if it is about to die, it hopes that its wealth can be passed down.

Rock life compresses thousands of years of time into a video of only half an hour, making deciphering extremely difficult.

But the non-returner succeeded in the end.

The two warring parties are the Lost Tribe and the Compound Eyes.

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

The compound-eyed civilization had the upper hand from the beginning.

As the war progressed, the battleship form of the Compound Eye Civilization gradually changed and its performance continued to improve.

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

Eventually, the war stopped.

In the memory of the rock life, there has never been a confrontation of the same intensity.

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

The number one million is very subtle.

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

The four missing ones should be the controllers of the spherical battleships, each responsible for patrolling a ninety-degree sector of the Milky Way.

This is both weird and terrifying.

This means that for millions of years, the real number of compound-eyed invaders has never decreased or increased.

This is scary, and it shows that the compound-eyed people have found a way to possibly live forever.

Chen Feng could roughly guess what the solution was.

Clone and copy and paste the consciousness, and then continue to cultivate the gu to screen new personality subjects.

At present, humans are unable to transfer consciousness because the quantum thought storm in the human brain is too complex, but it does not mean that people with compound eyes cannot do it.

Maybe people with compound eyes have relatively simple thinking?

In addition, the reason why Chen Feng said it was "possible eternal life" rather than confirmed eternal life.

That's because there may be a limit to the number of times you can clone and copy and paste.

After a certain number of times, even if the body is still alive, the mind may collapse and gradually distort into another personality.

Or the consciousness may directly collapse, leading to physical survival and complete psychological death.

For example, are the one million compound-eyed people today and the million compound-eyed people one million years ago still the same person in a one-to-one correspondence?

Chen Feng didn't know, and the compound-eyed man himself might not know either.

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

In addition, another important information Chen Feng obtained, the positioning of spherical battleships as patrol ships in the compound-eye civilization, also came from the difference between the number of one million and 999996.

This is a definite answer.

After the Compound Eyes occupied the Milky Way, they should have gathered in a certain galaxy near the center of the Milky Way, and then divided the Milky Way into four sector-shaped areas, and patrolled them with four patrol ships, with a frequency of one way every thousand years and a round trip every two thousand years.

Approximately every time the patrol ship returns, there will be a different group of people.

Humanity's luck is both good and bad. When the solar barrier arrives, the spherical warship responsible for patrolling this area needs to fly 500 years from the solar system, leaving at least 500 years for mankind to develop.

Of course, these five hundred years may also have been deliberately left to humans by those with compound eyes.

Since the Compound Eyes can absorb the technology of the Lost Clan, of course they can also absorb the technology of humans.

In a sense, the sun barrier is also an important means by which Compound Eye can allow low-level civilization to develop in a cage with absolute safety, and then completely annihilate it and erase its traces at the right time.

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

Maybe it was bad luck and I didn't find it, or maybe the compound-eyed person's hands and feet were too clean.

Assuming that there is still a kind order in the universe, then compound-eyed people need to clean up the battlefield carefully to eliminate high-level civilizations, but it does not matter when they eliminate low-level civilizations.

It's as if a gangster needs to destroy the corpse to eliminate traces of the murderer. If he tramples a grasshopper to death on the road, he will naturally leave his body alone.

In this timeline, in addition to the spherical battleships, the new enemy's prism fleet sets out from the galaxy near the center of the galaxy and pounces on the earth.

The prismatic battleship travels slightly faster than the ball ship, and may be farther away, but it only arrives at the solar system less than twenty hours later.

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

To understand it from a human perspective, you can think of it this way.

How would it feel for a person with eternal life to perform a mission that takes two thousand years to go back and forth?

Even if there is a super-light quantum network that can keep in touch with one's own species, it still cannot avoid feeling empty, lonely and cold.

When technology has developed enough and energy is almost inexhaustible, should this "brave" who performs patrol missions be given the highest material treatment?

Of course it should.

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

In addition, it must be given a means to ensure its continuation of life, which is cloning and replication.

The "patrolman" who died in Chen Feng's hands must have been particularly fond of the number 55.
To be continued...