When Qi Heng first transmigrated, A0 had only told him some basic information, such as the relationship between him and the Tianjia Civilization, and that the civilization was on the brink of destruction and had brought him here to save it.
Before Qi Heng could fully process any of that, A0 had begun tirelessly attempting to persuade him to agree to save the world.
As an adult, Qi Heng naturally would not accept such a monumental responsibility merely because of A0’s vague and incomplete explanation.
In fact, it had not taken him long to replace the noisy A0 with A1.
Thinking about it now, aside from the information he had gathered himself, he truly knew very little about the Zerg’s current circumstances.
Numerous thoughts passed through his mind, though only an instant elapsed in reality.
[Nearly thirteen thousand years have passed between the last time I logged into the game and the present. Why is the difference so great?]
Qi Heng thought of the Overlord’s age displayed in the game.
Good grief.
After the fusion, he had gone from twenty-seven years old to more than twenty thousand, transforming directly from an older young man into a living fossil.
【Time flows at different rates in the two universes.】
[The Tianjia Civilization was a peak Level 6 civilization. There shouldn’t have been any civilization in the Milky Way, or anywhere else in this galaxy, capable of bringing it down.]
Qi Heng paused slightly when he said “Milky Way.”
What the galaxy had originally been called was no longer important.
After the Zerg conquered it, the name bestowed upon it by the Overlord became known to every interstellar civilization.
From that point onward, it was the Milky Way.
Qi Heng had chosen the name partly because it rolled easily off the tongue and partly because he was genuinely terrible at naming things.
There were many similar examples.
During the development of the Zerg civilization, numerous places and concepts had been connected to Earth’s civilization.
Qi Heng continued:
[How did the Tianjia Civilization fall?]
【It was destroyed by war and by the Tianjia Civilization itself.】
A0’s simple answer contained an enormous amount of information.
It was unexpected, yet also reasonable.
There were only two general causes capable of destroying a civilization: external forces and internal ones.
Had the Tianjia Civilization suffered from both?
[Explain in greater detail.]
Qi Heng wanted to know what kind of war could destroy a peak Level 6 civilization.
How could an advanced civilization that had dominated the Milky Way be destroyed so easily?
Could a Level 7 civilization have appeared after he left?
The instant the possibility entered his mind, Qi Heng dismissed it himself.
There was no special reason.
The likelihood was simply so low that it could be ignored.
Advancing a civilization was extraordinarily difficult, and it became increasingly difficult at higher levels. The technological innovation and accumulation required could consume an immense amount of a civilization’s time.
Earth’s civilization, for example, was only at Level 0.7. It had not even reached the level of a planetary, Level 1 civilization.
A peak Level 6 civilization, by contrast, could freely travel throughout an entire galaxy.
One further step would bring it to Level 7, after which it would begin exploring and developing other galaxies.
The very purpose of a civilization’s existence was to continue developing, climb ever higher, and advance to a greater civilization level.
Within the game, that would have meant opening the path to conquer the next galaxy, then repeating the previous process again and again in an endless cycle.
Qi Heng considered himself a reasonably patient player.
However, after effortlessly steamrolling the entire Milky Way, he had lost interest in gameplay whose conclusion he could already see at a glance.
It had been far too boring.
With that mindset, he had abandoned the game without hesitation.
【The system database was damaged during dimensional transit. Until it is repaired, I cannot provide a complete answer to your question.】
【According to the surviving records…】
While Qi Heng continued thinking, he listened as A0 described the changes that had occurred within the Tianjia Civilization after he “left” the game.
What he had never expected was that the Zerg’s destruction had apparently been caused by him.
【After the disappearance of the Overlord, meaning you, the Tianjia Civilization, with the support of the Imperial Chief Consul and the Grand Marshal, took the initiative to violate the Galactic Peace Accord and launched a war that swept across the entire Milky Way.】
【The Zerg hoped that the flames of war they rekindled throughout the sea of stars would please their departed Overlord and cause the Overlord to descend once more.】
【…This civilization-wide mobilization involved more than eighty-five percent of the empire’s Zerg. With the empire’s support, they expanded into the territories of neighboring civilizations.】
【Not long after the war began, the Milky Way’s lower civilizations formed the Stellar Alliance under the leadership of the Mora Civilization and took the initiative to wage war against the Zerg, who had been designated a “calamity.”】
【During this period, the vassal civilizations rebelled, leaving the Tianjia Empire surrounded by enemies…】
【The war continued for more than a thousand years. Countless star systems and civilizations were destroyed. In the end, after every civilization within the Stellar Alliance paid a devastating price, the Tianjia Civilization was defeated.】
【During the final stage of the war, to prevent the Zerg from recovering and returning, the Stellar Alliance, which had replaced the Stellar Council, issued a Stellar Extermination Order…】
Qi Heng’s mouth twitched continuously as he listened to A0’s unembellished, matter-of-fact account.
What was this supposed to mean?
It sounded as though he had become some disastrous male beauty whose disappearance brought an empire to ruin.
However, Qi Heng still noticed that A0’s account was far too one-sided.
Everything it said sounded superficially reasonable, yet something about it was wrong.
Unless he remembered incorrectly, the Mora Civilization had been second only to the Tianjia Civilization within the Milky Way.
There had only been a handful of Level 6 civilizations, so Qi Heng still remembered it.
With a Level 6 civilization taking the lead, once the Tianjia Civilization had made an enemy of the entire galaxy and begun to weaken, it was only natural that everyone would join in bringing it down.
The rebellion of the vassal civilizations was equally unsurprising.
After all, the Tianjia Civilization had used only one method to force those civilizations into submission:
War.
In the eyes of the vassal civilizations, the Tianjia Civilization represented dictatorship and tyranny. It was a mountain pressing down upon them, one they hated so deeply that they wished for its death.
[So you’re saying the Tianjia Civilization ended up like this because of me.]
【According to the information available in the database, that is correct.】
Qi Heng was speechless.
Was he truly supposed to blame himself for this?
How could he possibly have known that abandoning a game would trigger an interstellar war?
Had he known, he would certainly have left proper final instructions before quitting instead of simply logging off in a hurry.
Qi Heng was not stupid.
After learning that the game had never truly been a game, he had not automatically believed everything A0 told him.
The Tianjia Civilization had been guided into existence by his own hand.
It might once have played the role of a great demon king and possessed the potential to destroy worlds, but it could not possibly have begun annihilating other civilizations and star regions merely to find him.
Even if he was the Zerg Overlord, could he truly have been that important?
Qi Heng wanted to say no, but he could not.
He understood very clearly how the Zerg had come into existence, as well as the importance and irreplaceability of the Overlord to them.
If they had truly gone mad and chosen an extreme path, it was not impossible that they might have started a war in an attempt to make him appear again.
Qi Heng felt a headache coming on.
This had to be karmic backlash from the way he had played the game.
He personally loved peace and rejected war.
Games did not count.
The romance of expanding one’s territory, sweeping across the cosmos, unifying the sea of stars, and accomplishing an achievement unmatched throughout history was something no ordinary person could resist.
Why had he behaved like such an edgelord while playing?
Had he been more serious and behaved himself properly, none of this might have happened.
Then again, who behaved seriously while playing a game?
Letting oneself run wild was the normal way to play.
Qi Heng felt an urge to withdraw from the world entirely.
After calming himself, he asked:
[Under those circumstances, the Zerg should have been exterminated. Why do they still exist here?]
Qi Heng discarded every emotion interfering with his judgment.
Whether considered emotionally or logically, he could not rely solely on A0’s one-sided account.
A0 itself had admitted that its database was damaged and its information incomplete. Everything it said therefore remained open to question.
Moreover, Qi Heng’s instincts told him that there were problems involving the Mora Civilization, the Stellar Alliance that had replaced the Stellar Council, and the vassal civilizations that had rebelled against the Zerg.
【During the later stages of the war… Tianjia-controlled star regions… planet-destroying weapons… star systems detonated… population numbers sharply reduced… designated a slave species by the Stellar Alliance… confined and bred in captivity as atonement…】
A0’s broken, halting speech caused Qi Heng to frown.
Not one of those fragments sounded good.
He interrupted:
[Is the information in this section damaged?]
【Yes.】
[Bring up the records. I’ll read them myself.]
A document appeared on the interface.
Few complete sentences remained. Most of the contents consisted of fragmented, disconnected words and phrases that described the final fate of the Zerg civilization ten thousand years earlier.
Qi Heng’s gaze passed over the file name, Judgment Against the Zerg.
He then continued reading without expression, filtering out the corrupted text and extracting the information hidden within it line by line.
…
Ten thousand years ago, the Stellar Alliance had passed judgment upon the Zerg.
The measures imposed included, but were not limited to, eradicating their civilization’s language, writing system, and technological structure; forbidding the Zerg from cultivating mental power or stellar power; and restricting the regions in which the Zerg were permitted to reproduce.
The Tianjia Civilization, whose reach had once extended throughout the Milky Way, became a thing of the past.
The Zerg were confined to the star region where their species had originated.
Qi Heng had once named that region Tianjia.
It had been a vast and beautiful star region. In addition to the Tianjia Civilization, it had contained several lower civilizations that belonged to Tianjia.
None of that existed anymore.
The final war ten thousand years earlier had taken place within the Tianjia Star Region.
All manner of prohibited, massive stellar weapons had been unleashed there without restraint, tearing the entire region apart.
Not only were the Tianjia Star Region’s habitable star systems destroyed, but even the Zerg home system failed to escape.
Finally, the Stellar Alliance issued cleansing orders against the inhabited worlds that had survived the war.
A single enormous beam would strike a planet and cause its core to explode from the inside outward.
In this way, all life on the planet was directly annihilated.
Only a portion of the Zerg were left alive, confined to abandoned planets whose ecosystems had already been destroyed by the war. Numerous restrictions were then imposed to control their development.
The surviving records ended there.
Nothing further remained.
Even so, it was enough for Qi Heng to understand the Zerg’s current circumstances.
In the darkness, the hand hanging beside Qi Heng’s body unconsciously tightened.
Even he did not realize how cold and severe his open eyes had become.
He could tell that his emotions were becoming unstable, and he knew it was because he had learned of the Zerg’s terrible fate.
The outcome left him in an extremely foul mood because of his connection to the Zerg, but any normal person possessing even a trace of empathy would have felt equally disturbed after reading it.
Abandoned planets and Tianyun Star.
The districts carved out within the slums.
A civilization forced back into conditions resembling the Stone Age.
Identification tags and clothing manufactured using technology from a far more advanced era.
Every one of these things conveyed the same message to him:
There was an extraordinary degree of malice behind it all.
Combined with the contents of the judgment document, the conclusion forming in Qi Heng’s mind made a chill run through him.
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