Chapter 931: Chaos Is Not Chaos |
This was a very simple line of thought. If a mountain on Earth collapsed, people would wonder whether there had been an earthquake, or whether some monster had come out and pushed it over. They would not go looking for an ant and pin the blame on it.
Likewise, if the Central Black Hole had disappeared, Xiao Yu should not be searching for things like some supernova explosion or some little black hole quietly swallowing a star. Instead, he should be looking for a powerful existence with strength on the same level, something capable of rivaling the Central Black Hole.
Then, within a galaxy, what exactly possessed power great enough to rival the Central Black Hole?
In Xiao Yu’s earlier way of thinking, there had been a blind spot. He had always been searching for a single object. But what single stellar body could compare with the Central Black Hole? That was why he had never been able to find it. Now, that blind spot had been broken. When Xiao Yu’s gaze fell upon this vast river of stars, upon these countless stars, he suddenly sensed the carrier of this immense power.
That carrier was the galaxy itself. A single star was weak, but if trillions of stars were joined together, they would become a force even greater than the Central Black Hole. The Central Black Hole plus the mass of its surrounding accretion disk amounted to roughly nearly ten billion solar masses, while the countless stars of the Feiyuan Galaxy possessed no less than one trillion solar masses.
This was the only existence within this galaxy qualified to affect the Central Black Hole.
If the disappearance of the Central Black Hole was not because of the intervention of an advanced civilization, and not because of the power of the Central Black Hole itself, then there was only this one possibility left. The disappearance of the Central Black Hole was the result, and to achieve this result there had to be an execution mechanism. Within that mechanism, the only possible carrier was the Feiyuan Galaxy itself.
“If my deduction is correct, and the disappearance of the Central Black Hole was caused by certain strange motions of this galaxy, then there must inevitably be some traces. Those traces may be tiny when distributed across each single star, so tiny that even I cannot perceive them, but if I analyze them on a grand scale, I will definitely be able to find them.”
Xiao Yu swiftly determined his next course of action. After continuous thought, experimentation, and failure, Xiao Yu had found a new way forward. This path seemed highly likely to lead to the final open road.
This was perhaps the correct path. It was like a social revolution. If one wanted to investigate the cause of such a revolution, one could not find the cause by looking at a single intelligent lifeform. For example, a university student suddenly developed a bit more awareness about ethnicity, a worker suddenly developed a bit more awareness of unfair conditions, a down-and-out web novelist suddenly developed a bit of bitterness toward society… each of these things was trivial by itself. But when hundreds of millions of such thoughts were added together, they would ultimately form a torrent powerful enough to destroy heaven and earth.
Each star was an individual. The event of the Central Black Hole’s disappearance was the enormous social transformation. If each of these countless stars made just a slight change, the power would gather together, and in the end, causing the Central Black Hole to disappear was not impossible.
The immense intelligence network Xiao Yu had deployed in advance finally came into use at this moment. One trillion detectors corresponded to one trillion stars. They were all meticulously measuring every item of data they could detect, then aggregating it and sending it into Xiao Yu’s mind for his final analysis and judgment.
If Xiao Yu had not obtained more advanced computer technology during the war with the virtual life civilization, causing his computing power to rise sharply once again, this enormous torrent of data would have instantly crashed his main computer. Even though Xiao Yu was no longer what he had once been, these data streams still drove his computational usage to what could almost be called a dangerous level.
“The motion of this star seems somewhat strange… its rotation speed has decreased by three millimeters per second over the past five thousand years. The reason is the pulling force of its planet, and the reason the planet generated such a pull is because its orbit changed due to the impact of an asteroid. As for the reason for the asteroid impact… the collisions within the asteroid belt are too chaotic. There is no way to judge that. Fine, this line ends here.”
“This star’s luminosity seems to have increased by 0.2 percent over the past five thousand years. The reason is… the nuclear fusion rate increased? And the reason it increased? Mm, there was a nova explosion nearby…”
“The spatial curvature here is somewhat abnormal… a six-body motion? Multi-body motion is unpredictable, which means any kind of trajectory could occur. After a fixed time interval, the probability of it producing result A or result B is equal. This is an excellent place to complete an arrangement without leaving traces. Even if a Logic Weapon designated that in the future it would produce result A, that would still leave no trace at all, because I have no way of determining whether, under its natural evolution, it was originally supposed to produce result A or result B…”
Under Xiao Yu’s detection and analysis, the immense stream of data rolled onward. Useless data was discarded, while useful data was retained by Xiao Yu for the next level of analysis.
In Xiao Yu’s view, all these matters were trivial details. Each one by itself held no great meaning. But when these many matters were linked together, Xiao Yu discovered a bit of the mystery hidden behind them.
For example… a star’s rotation speed dropped by three millimeters per second, or a star’s luminosity increased by 0.2 percent. Individually, these things meant nothing. But when these stars were linked together, they caused changes in another nearby open cluster. The change in that open cluster then affected another massive globular cluster, ultimately influencing even more stars. And among these more numerous stars, many of them were themselves also undergoing changes. These endless changes interwove with one another, ultimately converging into a terrifying torrent.
Every star was participating in this upheaval, and every star was also being affected by it at the same time. The consequence of such a situation was that the result was almost impossible to predict. But what they faced was Xiao Yu. Relying on his vast computing power, through this nearly heaven-defying capability, Xiao Yu forcibly reconstructed all of it, sorted out every thread of their mutual influences, and restored every role they had played in this upheaval.
This was chaos, yet Xiao Yu’s infinite computing power peeled it apart layer by layer and completely reconstructed it.
It was like a butterfly flapping its wings above the rainforests of South America, ultimately causing a storm over the Atlantic Ocean. This was chaos theory. It was impossible to predict. And what Xiao Yu did was, through these countless detectors, simultaneously grasp every meteorological datum on Earth, including the temperature at every place, the pressure, the humidity, the wind direction, and so on, and then through calculation, forcibly predict the result of the accidental event of the butterfly flapping its wings.
Xiao Yu’s computational power was this terrifying.
During the process of calculation, Xiao Yu also encountered one contradictory point, but he immediately excluded it.
Only five thousand years had passed. Under normal logic, the influences of these countless stars could at most only propagate to places within five thousand light years, because the speed of light was the upper limit of conventional travel. By comparison, the diameter of the entire Feiyuan Galaxy was one million light years. Compared to the scale of the entire Feiyuan Galaxy, these influences should not have been able to reach across the whole galaxy.
But in this event, Xiao Yu discovered another strange phenomenon. The changes in these stars seemed to have caused certain distortions of space, and these influences were being transmitted through that distorted space. In other words, the stars had, through their own power, created a kind of curvature space, and these influences were spreading at faster-than-light speed, not constrained by the speed of light.
Once this contradiction was excluded, the final obstacle before Xiao Yu was removed as well.
Xiao Yu calculated for nearly a hundred years. During those nearly one hundred years, Xiao Yu reconstructed the trajectory of every star he had detected over the past five thousand years, what kinds of changes had occurred, what effects those changes would cause, and what consequences they would produce… Xiao Yu calculated all of it.
From that moment onward, the Feiyuan Galaxy no longer held any secrets before Xiao Yu. It was like a specimen pinned to a wall with thumbtacks, and Xiao Yu could use any instrument at any time to observe it.
Under such circumstances, a clear thread was finally found by Xiao Yu. Yes, through nearly a hundred years of observation and calculation of nearly one trillion stars, Xiao Yu had already found the reason why the Central Black Hole had disappeared while still using gravity to dominate this galaxy, and had also found the mechanism by which this state had come to be…