Seraphine reviewed the information and found numerous ambiguities.
For one, how does one store something as intangible as Spirituality within the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is essentially information? These are two fundamentally different things; it's not a simple case of forcing one into the other through sheer power.
Then there was the issue of guidance and positioning.
How could they ensure that in the next Cosmic Era, the Spirituality and information would be reconstructed perfectly without error?
Was the mechanism for guidance and decoding hidden within the encrypted sequence itself?
Could it really be self-compiling and self-decoding?
Furthermore, after transmitting such a massive amount of information into the CMB, what kind of encryption stability and error-correction protocols were used?
How could they guarantee that throughout billions of years of cosmic evolution, the information wouldn't suffer from information corruption?
Any deviation would mean the new era's humanity would fail to resurrect properly, or at the very least, lose significant portions of their memory.
"Loss of memory..." Seraphine mused.
"Based on these fragmented God of Hunger memories, they seem to have very little understanding of their own 'past lives.'
They remember external events clearly, but their own names and origins are mostly forgotten.
This is likely the result of information corruption."
Strictly speaking, these issues weren't mission-critical, just unfortunate.
The lack of specific technical information meant Seraphine couldn't possibly research or replicate the Grace of Death.
It was truly mind-boggling that an underdeveloped civilization, not yet even a space-faring one, could possess the technical precision and engineering capability to build a device capable of helping an entire species survive the death of the universe and reach a new era.
Even with blueprints, the whole thing was absurd.
Given the Earth Alliance's level of technology, if they had received blueprints for a warp drive, they normally wouldn't have been able to build it, they probably wouldn't even have understood the concepts.
The gap in foundational technology and knowledge is a trench that prevents low-level civilizations from glimpsing the heights of advanced ones. A few blueprints cannot bridge a divide that spans an entire scientific evolution.
Furthermore, why was the Annihilation Traveler so certain that the CMB radiation wouldn't be destroyed during the cycle of cosmic rebirth?
Had he witnessed it many times before?
Or does the cycle simply not affect the background radiation?
It remained unknown.
Perhaps only a future encounter with the Annihilation Traveler would yield answers.
Seraphine's thoughts flickered before she dove back into the vast sea of God of Hunger memories. She found that the subsequent information was oddly fragmented and blurred. She had to piece the historical narrative together through deduction.
Based on these shattered fragments, the Earth Alliance of the previous era spent over a century, roughly four or five generations, barely completing the construction of the Grace of Death.
Upon its completion, the massive structure dwarfed mountains and cities, casting them into shadow. Standing twenty-eight kilometers tall, it was over 1,400 meters higher than three Mount Everests stacked together.
Building this behemoth nearly bankrupt the Earth Alliance, even with their burgeoning resources. Material and energy shortages, along with constant protests and rebellions, plagued the project.
Finally, after a hundred years of torment by extreme weather, diseases, and various catastrophes, the remaining three billion people on Earth committed a monumental "collective suicide" over the span of three months.
Elderly, children, men, women, people of every kind gathered in herds, marching along predetermined paths into the mountain-like device to lie in extraction chambers made of alloys and polymers.
Then, amidst bursts of harsh noise, they abandoned their physical bodies. Their souls and Spirituality were extracted, converted into pure information, and funneled into the data center.
The vacated bodies were pushed out by intelligent robots stationed by the chambers and loaded into colossal corpse-carriers. Once full, these fleets transported the remains to incineration plants for mass disposal.
For three months, these incinerators never stopped.
Thick black smoke and the nauseating stench of burning flesh choked the entire Earth.
During this time, resistance forces launched numerous attacks on the Grace of Death, but they were ruthlessly crushed by legions of robotic guards. This back-and-forth conflict lasted the entire ninety days.
At the end of three months, three billion humans had successfully "committed suicide," their existences converted into an encoded sequence.
Then, silence fell over Earth. Aside from the handful of resistance fighters hiding in the world's corners, the mortal realm was devoid of people.
The Grace of Death roared to life.
All laser emitters converged through layers of crystal filters, firing a high-energy beam containing the encoded sequence of humanity into the cosmos, embedding it into the CMB radiation.
With that, human civilization was extinct.
Across the vast Earth, multi-layered automated farms shut down, thousands of large-scale fusion power stations stopped, and hundreds of dilapidated yet highly intelligent cities were abandoned. Only a few tens of thousands of resistance fighters remained, roaring in fury and despair at the sky.
After this point, the memories became a chaotic blur.
Through these memories, thick with boundless agony, Seraphine was shocked to find that after the previous era's humanity was encoded into the CMB radiation, they remained semi-conscious rather than falling into a deep sleep.
The Grace of Death, through some sinister method and for an unknown, malicious purpose, intentionally kept the consciousness of all humanity awake.
They were forced to vaguely perceive the changes in the physical universe and clearly feel the relentless flow of eons, yet they were tragically powerless to act.
They could not communicate, could not sleep, and could not die. They were trapped in an endless cycle of thought and eternal loneliness.
Billions of human minds became like invisible ghosts within the CMB radiation. Filled with regret, despair, and confusion, they drifted at the speed of light toward the farthest reaches of space.
They drifted for decades, centuries, millennia.
They watched as the expanded Sun ruthlessly devoured the desolate Earth. They saw the icy comets of the Kuiper Belt streak past. The searing flares of Proxima Centauri roared before their eyes, and high-energy jets from massive black holes spewed into the void. They witnessed the wars of thousands of starships.
They saw everything and understood everything.
But none of it mattered. No civilization noticed them; no living being ever discovered them.
By this point, even the most foolish among them realized that their wretched state was the work of the six-dimensional Annihilation Traveler.
He had deceived them.
But it was too late.
All their rage, cries, and tears were reduced to meaningless electromagnetic noise within the CMB.
One hundred thousand years.
Two hundred thousand years.
Five hundred thousand years.
During the first ten thousand years, most could still struggle to maintain their souls against the despair. But five hundred thousand years of endless time was more than almost any human consciousness could endure.
"Let me die!!" This single thought echoed through every human consciousness for countless moments.
But a mere thought was useless.
They couldn't even manage to die.
They could only drift, isolated from existence.
The loneliness was maddening; the boredom led to mental collapse.
Five hundred thousand years. Eight hundred thousand years. One million years.
In this stage, 99.9999999% of human consciousnesses finally broke.
They shattered within the microwave background radiation, exploding into countless fragments of thought and memory, leaving behind only a sliver of clean, transparent Spirituality.
An infinitesimal few showed unimaginable resilience.
By observing the infinite vistas of the universe, they endured a million years of solitude and despair. Their Spirituality began to grow visibly.
But a million years was only the beginning.
Tens of millions of years rushed past.
Unsurprisingly, every single human consciousness eventually exploded and perished. Within the CMB radiation covering the universe, there were now only fragments of human memory, thought, and perception, alongside three billion strands of pure, untainted Spirituality.
At this moment, humanity was truly, utterly extinct.
The historical records following this point are a void, so empty that even Seraphine's Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation could not reconstruct them.
Unknown eons passed, perhaps hundreds of millions or even billions of years.
Within the CMB, amidst the "informational trash heaps" of human memory and perception, new consciousnesses miraculously emerged.
These information-state beings, birthed from the "remains" of human souls and based on residual Spirituality, immediately absorbed the surrounding information to construct independent, complete wills.
Yet, even then, they were ignorant.
They wondered who they were, where they came from, and where they were going.
Driven by these fundamental questions common to all intelligent beings, they began a long process of information collection lasting countless eons.
Through constant gathering, patching, and organizing of data, these myriad information-state beings scattered throughout the cosmic background radiation all arrived at the same self-perception: "I am human."
Naturally, they discovered their origins in the extinguished human consciousnesses of eons past. They learned the ancient stories of Earth and understood the sheer despair of the future they faced.
Perhaps because these "Second Generation" human consciousnesses were born from fragmentation and reconstruction, their willpower and emotional resilience far surpassed the first generation. Remarkably, they didn't fall into despair. Instead, they drifted through the cosmos, fascinated by its myriad wonders.
This fascination lasted for countless ages before inevitably shattering.
Like their predecessors, the second generation could not withstand the boundless solitude and emptiness of eons. One by one, they shrieked and exploded into the informational mists of the background radiation.
After hundreds of millions of years, a new batch of information-state beings emerged from the "remains" of the second generation. Their fate was much the same: the same ignorance, the same gathering of ancestral data, and the same identification as human.
They were even stronger than their predecessors, able to endure for even longer periods.
But it was meaningless.
Under the crushing weight of time, the third generation lasted only a few billion years before they, too, perished in agony, becoming the "umbilical cord" for the next generation.
In a sense, humanity had become an eternal species, a strange being perpetually caught in a cycle of fragmentation and reconstruction across endless time. Generation after generation, each "human" born was more resilient and possessed stronger willpower and Spirituality than the last.
But each generation would eventually collapse, dissolving into aimless flows of information drifting within the CMB, venting their bitterness and confusion as electromagnetic noise into the silent void.
After eons had passed, the universe reached a point where no new stars could form. Even the dimmest, coldest red dwarfs had exhausted their fuel and reached the end of their lifespans.
Every star in the universe, regardless of its original size, had become a Black Dwarf, a stellar-mass object with a temperature equal only to the cosmic background radiation, incapable of further nuclear fusion.
Reviewing these fragmented historical glimpses, Seraphine arrived at a sudden conclusion: "This is... one hundred trillion years in the future."
When every star has guttered out, leaving only billions of neutron stars, black holes, and Black Dwarfs drifting in the cold, infinite cosmos, it means the universe has aged by a full hundred trillion years.
At this point, the universe is shrouded in eternal darkness.
Light only appears briefly when massive, cold celestial bodies are torn apart by a black hole's gravity, their remains flaring up in a hot accretion disk.
For a fleeting moment, a shattered body erupts in a flash of radiation and intense material jets before vanishing into the event horizon, plunging the void back into shadow. Under the weight of time, countless Black Dwarfs would eventually merge and collapse in violent explosions to form new black holes.
In the even more distant future, these would be devoured by even larger black holes until all matter was ruthlessly consumed. The entire universe would become a graveyard of lonely, drifting black holes.
The human consciousnesses of this era had reached their twelfth generation of fragmentation and reconstruction. After a full hundred trillion years, this generation was still repeating the tragic fate of the eleven that came before.
They were born in ignorance, instinctively absorbing the "legacy" of their predecessors to build a mental framework. They considered themselves human, yet remained unable to communicate with their kin, enduring infinite loneliness while sorting through the records of humanity's past.
Nothing had changed. Except their Spirituality was now visibly more vibrant and powerful than that of the first generation from a hundred trillion years ago.
"I see..." Seraphine mused. "I think I know why so many members of the God of Hunger race possess semi-materialized Spirituality.
Though they are still a way off from full materialization, by the standards of the Cosmic Dawn Decree, the twelfth generation's Spirituality has already reached the depths of the third realm. One more step, and they would enter the fourth.
Impressive, Annihilation Traveler.
You actually devised a way to use eons of suffering to sublimate Spirituality and mass-produce high-Spirituality beings.
But why? To research the path of Spiritual Ascension? Or for some even more mysterious purpose?"
Her questions remained unanswered.
Within the fragmented records, the twelfth-generation humans, born as the stars guttered out, suffered for tens of billions of years in the ensuing darkness. Ultimately, they could not withstand the crushing weight of time, and the majority dissolved into nothingness.
But just as 99% of the "human" consciousnesses had shattered, leaving only a few flickering individuals, a sudden event occurred.
In this universe that had expanded for over a hundred trillion years, its space-time scale unimaginable, yet its density extremely thin, the dark energy that had remained constant finally defeated the four fundamental forces.
It seized absolute dominance.
In a split second... the Big Rip began.
BOOM!!!
Every Black Dwarf, every neutron star, every molecule, atom, nucleus, proton, and neutron... all of them disintegrated instantly. Only countless black holes, electromagnetic radiation, and elementary particles remained, drifting farther and farther apart in the vast, expanding space.
Everything else was gone.
The universe had begun its final descent into death.
Tragedy had evolved into an infinitely expanding, colossal, yet meaningless nothingness of space-time.
Perhaps the Big Rip was so cataclysmic that even the boundless three-dimensional space-time suffered severe damage. The frameworks and structures of existence fell into a state of chaotic fragmentation.
Far became near, short became long, large became small, cold became hot, front became back, fast became slow, curved became straight, round became square, concave became convex... everything became utterly indescribable.
The remnants of the twelfth generation, witnessing this annihilation, were violently impacted by the universe's death. In this chaotic, lawless space-time, they shattered alongside the crumbling cosmic background radiation.
But before they vanished, the Spirituality of an infinitesimal few flickered with a faint light, a power capable of interfering with and warping part of reality. Witnessing the death of the universe had caused their Spirituality to suddenly touch the semi-materialized realm, transcending the limits of countless living beings.
Following the extinction of the twelfth-generation "humans," Seraphine encountered a period of historical void. This void was far longer than all previous gaps combined.
"Since the Big Rip occurred and the old universe died, it means a new one is about to be born. But this transition period... how can it be this long? Has another hundred trillion years passed? A quadrillion? A quintillion?"
As Seraphine puzzled over the gap, the heavy, stagnant silence of the void slowly passed. And from the past memories of the God of Hunger race, a reconstructed historical narrative began to glimmer once more.
This signaled the birth of the thirteenth generation of human consciousnesses, born after eons within the chaotic, lawless space-time of the old universe.
But because the background radiation was too fragmented and space-time was so unstable, these newborn consciousnesses couldn't drift properly or cover enough space to absorb sufficient information.
They struggled to even form a basic self-identity or mental framework. They existed in a state of total emptiness, unaware of their surroundings or the passage of time.
They remained in this primitive, dazed state for an eternity.
Until, at a specific moment eons later, the fragile, shattered background radiation that carried them suddenly underwent a violent tremor. This intense vibration jolted these vacant consciousnesses awake. Instinctively, they reached out toward the chaotic, empty void.
And then, these consciousnesses witnessed the birth of the universe: the Big Bang.
Common theory suggests the universe erupted from a single, infinitely small singularity of infinite mass, energy, and density. But through the blurred memories of the thirteenth generation, Seraphine discovered the reality was different.
These dazed consciousnesses from 13.8 billion years ago might not have understood what was happening in the boundless, chaotic old space-time.
But Seraphine could clearly see it.
The vast, turbulent space-time, filled with constant, tiny quantum fluctuations and spanning an unknown number of light-years, suddenly warped to an extreme degree.
In that brief, immeasurable fragment of time, countless light-years of chaotic space-time warped into an "infinitely steep" slope.
Then, this infinite space-time slope, one perhaps far vaster than the entire observable universe, began to undergo an extreme collapse.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! ——
Confronted with this Big Crunch, a cataclysmic event that obliterated the chaotic three-dimensional space-time structure, even Einstein's equations failed. Perhaps only the most extreme, wildest theories of quantum gravity could offer even a glimpse of understanding.
Indeed, even as Seraphine observed this historical record with solemn focus, she could only grasp a fraction of the mysterious transformations occurring within space-time.
"Looking at this historical record, three-dimensional space-time cannot smoothly or stably unfold from a single point.
Therefore... the so-called [ Initial Singularity ], described as possessing infinite mass, energy, and density, likely does not exist.
The true [ Initial Singularity ] or [ Initial Singularity-like ] entity should instead be a point-like pure space-time, or a cluster of them, devoid of energy, matter, density, or information, existing in a state of infinite steepness."
Seraphine focused her gaze on that ancient, terrifying collapse, whispering her theory: "When this cluster of space-time collapses to the absolute limit where the three-dimensional structure completely fails, and there is no further room to shrink... the universe will then explode outward from within."
Her hypothesis was correct.
Once this boundless space-time collapsed to its ultimate limit... a sudden inflation occurred.
In a flash, those point-like collapsed space-times, impossible to define by size, or by macro or micro scales, birthed from countless light-years of infinitely curved space-time, erupted.
BUZZ ——
In a span of time too short to describe or imagine, that cluster of point-like collapsed space-time expanded exponentially by countless squared factors.
It blanketed, engulfed, and fundamentally rewrote every structure, framework, layout, and layer, from the microscopic to the cosmic, of the ancient universe's residual space-time across the vast firmament.
In a heartbeat, chaos and confusion transformed into law and order.
The infinite, microscopic quantum fluctuations within the ancient space-time were instantly magnified by the sweeping Cosmic inflation across micro, macro, and cosmic scales. They manifested into countless primal structures of varying sizes, some possessing clear mass, some refined energy, and others profound information.
From this blurred tableau of history, Seraphine found it impossible to judge how long this inflation lasted.
However, based on the observed reality of 13.8 billion years of three-dimensional space-time and various cosmological theories, she deduced that this stunningly efficient inflation... likely lasted only 10^-35 seconds.
As for those infinite primal structures of every shape and nature, Seraphine theorized they were the original "seeds" that would eventually form all things and phenomena in the future universe.
"So the universe... truly came from nothing. It truly relied on quantum mechanisms... to emerge entirely from the vacuum."
The divine light within Seraphine's Eye of Transcendence flickered incessantly, reflecting sparks of inspiration regarding space-time, the universe, and inflation.
"One could build a model based on the premise that the 'total energy of the universe is zero.' Because gravity manifests space-time, it allows for local stability while being globally unstable; yet, on average, the vacuum remains relatively stable.
Simultaneously, on a universal scale, the positive energy of matter is canceled out by the negative potential energy of gravity, returning to zero.
Therefore, the universe is fully capable of self-creation from nothing. It needs no so-called Singularity, and certainly no so-called Creator."
"Hahaha... infinite steepness... extreme collapse... creation from nothing... spontaneous emergence..."
Having conceptualized this slightly rudimentary cosmological model, Seraphine suddenly let out a soft laugh. "I feel... as if... I know how to create a universe."
Back within the historical tableau.
Due to this inflation, the residual background radiation of the old universe, once fragmented and chaotic due to warped space-time, was reconstructed and restored to its formerly complete state.
But perhaps because this inflation was too violent, or because the background radiation had been fragmented for too long, the information from the countless eons of the old era suffered massive loss and corruption.
As a result, while the countless consciousnesses drifting within it rapidly absorbed data and formed stable thoughts, their grasp of the Earth Civilization's history and the experiences of the twelfth-generation predecessors became extremely blurred and incomplete.
The level of that fragmentation was exactly what Seraphine saw reflected in this long, displayed history of the God of Hunger race.
"I see, no wonder..."
Seraphine had a sudden realization. "No wonder some segments are crystal clear and logical, while others have a complete framework but lack clarity. Then there are those that are hazy, bizarre, and full of holes, and some that are just pure chaos or completely blank."
Right at that moment, under the influence of some mysterious mechanism, several human consciousnesses broke away from the background radiation... and suddenly descended into the newly born universe.