Chapter 1140 — The Emergence of the Final Threshold
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 5
The vast majority had gone dark.
A single sentence from Enya was like a cold, keen wind: it cooled Gao Yang, who had been on the verge of excitement, from skin to marrow in an instant. His face turned calm and grave, and he savored in fine detail the information hidden behind that word "dark." Only after a long while did he break the silence: "Gone dark... gone dark how? You mean they all went extinct, for one reason or another?"
"Those signals flickered in the distance like lamps in the night. Perhaps limited by their technology, those flickering lamps could carry only the most limited information — sometimes so simple that all they conveyed was the meaning 'I am here.' Then, at some moment, some of those signals would suddenly vanish, and no new word ever came again. The too-vast reaches of cosmic space bury too many secrets and truths; in that expanse of darkness, I can see nothing at all."
Enya spoke slowly, as though picking yellowed pages out of a distant, blurred memory.
"I do not know what they met with specifically. Like the other minds trapped on this planet, I can only guess at the ends of those civilizations by inference from observed phenomena. But some of them... I did manage to decipher the messages they sent. I can be fairly certain that they either perished by natural calamity or died at the hands of gods."
Gao Yang unconsciously repeated the other's last few words: "Died at the hands of gods?"
Enya said softly, "Died at the hands of gods — their own gods. In the very few signals I successfully deciphered, I did hear them cry out their last within the wrath of their gods. Even across the distant stars, that sound was still so shrill and despairing that one could not bear to hear it."
"So it is as we guessed before: if there are other intelligent beings on other planets, and if their worlds also follow the natural laws we understand, then they too will face everything we face..." Gao Yang drew a light breath. "After developing to a certain point, they too triggered the rite of 'Final Defiance,' which led to the gods losing control and the world's destruction..."
Enya did not speak, and after a pause Gao Yang asked again: "Then what of those destroyed by natural calamity? What sort of calamities were they?"
"The signals that managed to cross the stars to reach us are mostly blurred and indistinct, rarely capable of carrying clear and detailed intelligence. Especially after a 'calamity' breaks out, the civilization sending the message usually falls into chaos — a chaos even worse than the descent of a god, leaving them unable to organize anyone to send an orderly 'deathbed cry' into outer space," Enya said quietly, as though dissecting a corpse with a calm tone as she described to Gao Yang the cruel clues she had encountered over the past million-odd years. "So the descriptions of 'calamity' are very disordered and fragmentary. But it is precisely that disordered, fragmentary state that lets me be almost certain: what they met was the Demon Tide."
The Demon Tide.
At this moment, Gao Yang's expression showed not the slightest change, though a powerful ripple had already stirred in his heart — yet that powerful ripple merely confirmed a guess he had formed long ago.
Enya's conclusion was within his expectations — the Demon Tide was not confined to this planet, but was a universal phenomenon in this universe. Fairly and periodically, it would sweep across the whole starry sky, again and again erasing the records civilizations had left among the stars.