"Void creatures are completely indistinguishable from ordinary creatures before awakening, only showing some subtle anomalies in the decades leading up to their awakening, and after awakening, their characteristics as void creatures begin to revival. ”

"Void creatures have eternal life and strong growth, so the Loya civilization has been very wary of void creatures since the discovery of void creatures. ”

"However, void creatures rarely make full use of their eternal lifespan, nor are they as ambitious as the Loya civilization, we often take the initiative to invest in the soul cycle hundreds of years after awakening, reincarnated as an ordinary creature, and continue to start ordinary for several lifetimes or even dozens or hundreds of lifetimes, until the next awakening, will restore the abilities of the void creatures and some memories from the last awakening, but at this time, these memories are often incomplete and may even be completely lost after many reincarnations. ”

Hearing Abdul-Jabbar say this, Samuel couldn't help but interrupt: "With eternal life and great strength, why don't the void creatures make good use of it, but take the initiative to give up all this and turn back into ordinary creatures?"

"Mortals have a short lifespan and cannot understand that 'eternity' is itself a curse. In fact, mortals don't even realize that the motivation for their survival is actually the affection and bonds for their relatives, friends, country, society, and even this era, which are necessary to maintain 'humanity'. ”

Once the life span is long enough, one's relatives, friends, country, society, and the era with which one was once familiar will eventually disappear, and at that time, the individual will feel a strong sense of illusion: one's outlook on life, values, and worldview all depend on a certain era and the people and things in it, and now that all this has disappeared, the individual will naturally have strong doubts about the meaning of his own existence, and questions similar to "what do you live for" will torment you day and night.

This question has not been encountered by mortals, but all void creatures do, and these ultimate questions are almost impossible to answer well, so whenever they encounter this situation, they will choose to abandon all the memories of this life, devote themselves to the soul cycle, and start a new life. ”

Samuel soon had a new question: why didn't the long-lived creatures in the world have the same eternal lifespan, such as the gods, to have an eternal lifespan?

Abdul-Jabbar replied:

Actually, the gods have the same problem, they just have different solutions. When the gods are plagued by such problems because they have been in existence for too long, the gods tend to strip their sensibilities from their consciousness, retain only pure reason, and then anchor their existence to a pure belief in pure "justice" for the god of justice, "guardianship" for the god of guardianship, and so on. Therefore, since the sensibility has been completely stripped away, the 'humanity' of the gods will gradually disappear, and finally it will be reduced to a purely automated machine, a belief-driven puppet. ”

"Void creatures are by nature to change, and we can't tolerate ourselves becoming eternal puppets of some belief or a machine without humanity, so we choose to end this life on our own initiative rather than a solution from the gods. ”

Samuel felt a chill through this answer, and when he heard Abdul-Jabbar's words, he couldn't help but sketch out a story in his head: the gods who looked down on humanity from above were not perfect beings of goodness and love in the teachings, but an emotionless machine that worked according to a pre-set program for thousands of years.

For hundreds of centuries, human civilization has been imprisoned in a vast cage of hundreds of such machines, spending day after day under the gaze of countless pairs of emotionless eyes.

In the indifferent eyes of the gods, all the beings in the world are probably just a bunch of meaningless numbers, just as an input parameter in the program of this delicate machine. The parameters are input into the machine, and the program calculates the difference between the current state and the "ideal state" that the program considers, and then the gods will intervene in the world under the impetus of the program to eliminate these "differences", and it does not matter to the gods whether these differences correspond to the most heinous sinners or the saints who care about the world.

"In fact, not all gods are puppets of pure belief programs, when the new gods replace the previous gods who have been reduced to puppets, the new gods still retain a strong human nature, and these human natures will take a long time to fade, so among the many gods in a world, there are always some who still retain human nature. ”

"There are also a few gods who can't accept the fate of becoming puppets of the faith program, so they will voluntarily give up their priesthood and take the initiative to end their lives like void creatures and enter the soul cycle. ”

Although there are such cases, it does not change the background of the story, the story of gods and mortals is still very dark, so Samuel does not want to continue to think about it, he turns to review what Abdul-Jabbar said, and see what questions are worth exploring.

He soon discovered a new problem:

"You said that the Void creatures are all awakened from ordinary species, so are the Void creatures disguised as ordinary species in advance and mixed into the main material plane, or can all ordinary species awaken as Void creatures?"

Are Void creatures born different from ordinary species, or are ordinary species just Void creatures that have not yet awakened?

"That's a good question, I don't know," Abdul-Jabbar admitted, "and in fact both explanations have supporters and supporting evidence, but no answer has yet been argued"

Samuel asked, "What's the proof?"

"For example, as far as I can remember, the Void creatures have waged several wars that have affected the entire multiverse, the most recent of which seems to have taken place in ...... More than 700 years ago?"

The number "more than 700 years ago" made Samuel's eyelids jump, there was a period of "silent age" in human history that lasted for more than 600 years, all the gods stopped sending miracles or oracles, and if it weren't for the priests of the gods who were still able to use divine magic, the major churches would have fallen apart long ago. Even so, the power of the Church has weakened greatly over the past 600 years, and the people have gradually abandoned their devout beliefs because they suspect that the gods have abandoned humanity. This "Age of Silence", which had a profound impact on human society, began more than 700 years ago. Now it seems that there is a story behind the long "Silent Age", and it is likely that this story is also related to the Void creatures.

"After several reincarnations, my memory of that time has basically been lost, I only vaguely remember that the war seemed to be against the Loya civilization, but I don't remember the reason for the outbreak of the war, I only remember that we almost completely destroyed the Loya civilization"

"But it doesn't matter, what matters is that for some reason, during that time, the void creatures awakened massively across the entire multiverse, and the number of awakenings even exceeded the sum of the past hundreds of centuries. Most of these Void creatures have no memories of the previous life's awakening at all, which means that there is a high probability that they will awaken for the first time. ”

"The sudden emergence of so many Void creatures that awakened for the first time in a short period of time is difficult to explain by the theory that Void creatures were disguised as ordinary species in advance and mixed into the main matter plane. Therefore, many people use this as a basis to argue that 'void creatures are transformed from ordinary species'"

"Of course, many opponents also point out that the absence of memories of past lives does not prove that the Void Creatures are awakened for the first time, after all, the possibility of completely losing the memories of the past lives after the first awakening is also high, so it is 'Void creatures that have long been disguised as ordinary species have awakened' rather than 'Void creatures have been transformed from ordinary species'. ”

"Of course, there are divisions among even the adherents of the idea that 'Void creatures are transformed from ordinary species', with some arguing that 'any mortal can be transformed into a Void creature' and others arguing that 'only a small number of mortals have the potential to awaken into Void creatures', but that's another topic. ”

Samuel was already speechless with shock, and the academic debate of "whether all mortals can awaken as Void Creatures" was put aside for the sake of it, and he was now more concerned about the war between the Void Creatures and the Loya civilization. He didn't expect that the power of the Void Creatures was so terrifying, and the strength of the Loya Civilization in this world was probably only the tip of the iceberg of its overall strength, but even this had already made the mortals at that time powerless to resist, but this powerful civilization throughout the multiverse was almost wiped out under the blows of the Void Creatures, and the strength of the Void Creatures was far beyond his expectations.

After the shock he felt a trance and emptiness, wealth, military exploits, worldly power...... These achievements that he was proud of were probably really not worth mentioning in the eyes of higher beings, and the "Silent Age" that had a profound impact on human civilization was probably just a microcosm of a grand war that spanned countless worlds and planes, and was only the aftermath of the storm's edge. So what is the civilization of this world in the eyes of the higher beings?

Abdul-Jabbar seemed to see through Samuel's psychology and asked amusedly, "Do you think that your previous achievements are nothing compared to this kind of interdimensional warfare, so you plan to make a career so as not to live up to the identity of the Void Creature?"

Samuel shook his head, looked into Abdul-Jabbar's eyes, and said seriously:

"I just think that in this life, it is estimated that it is impossible to work hard to achieve the achievements of the predecessors of the void creatures, so it is better to use endless life to enjoy the endless fun of retirement life"