Let you be the wall-facer: you turn around and join the Three-Body Problem?

The dependency theory is also the root of everything. This theory applies not only to the universe and civilization, but also to civilization and civilization.

Is it possible for civilizations to unite?

The answer is yes. When a civilization lives completely under the rules set by another civilization, it locks its ability to transcend the rules.

But there are exceptions to everything. The restrictions of rules are a kind of restriction imposed by one civilization on another civilization. It does not simply suppress the development of the other civilization, but creates a one-way blockade on the other civilization that only affects itself.

And when a third party appears, even if it is a civilization restricted by the rules set by the rule restrictors, it will still not be weaker than the original civilization.

It is for this reason that the Dark Forest Law can exist at the same time.

This social relationship between cosmic civilizations can be explained in the simplest sentence:

The vassal of my vassal is not my vassal.

Just as the Dark Forest Law cannot be applied between civilizations in two different dimensions, dependency theory also has certain conditional restrictions.

In other words, it should be called a method that can break the dependency theory - the knowledge sealing principle!

The essence of rules is the restriction of cognition, just like the sophon locked the Earth's technology. In fact, the Trisolarans are not familiar with the complete dependency theory, and coupled with their lack of humanistic emotions, their technological blockade did not lock on the lifeline of mankind.

It’s not that Sophon’s blockade is not strong enough, but that this blockade is too easy to break.

If a third party force were to intervene in the vassal situation between the two parties at this time, the dependency theory would be directly shattered.

This is another taboo in the universe. No advanced civilization may transmit knowledge to lower civilizations, because this will cause the social relations based on the theory that have been established with great difficulty in the universe to collapse.

By then, the only main theme in the universe will be war.

This is a phenomenon that risk removers would never want to see.

The Troubleshooters are the most advanced civilization in the universe. The existence of the Dependence Theory will lock down the development of civilizations throughout the universe one link after another.

The collapse of dependency theory means that every civilization is subject to the possibility of random technological explosion.

This will have a great chance of shaking the Troublemakers' dominant position in the universe.

Therefore, they have to rectify all of this in order to ensure that their position in the universe is secure enough.

Only when rules exist can the universe be orderly.

But over time, another ideological faction emerged among the troubleshooters - the Zeroers.

They attempted to restart the universe by causing it to fall to zero dimension.

The universe once had eleven dimensions.

It was a pastoral universe, and everything was so beautiful.

Although the total amount of matter in the universe remains unchanged at that time, the resources required by civilizations in different dimensions will be completely different.

Therefore, there is no Dark Forest Law between them, and they can even help each other and get what they need.

The eleven dimensions are like eleven highways. When there is a traffic jam on one highway, people will voluntarily change lanes to other branch roads.

For civilizations above level 4, dimensionality increase and dimensionality decrease are as easy as eating and drinking.

As long as the coordination is proper, the Dark Forest will never happen.

Shifting the perspective from the macro to the micro, we can still verify the correctness of this theory. If the Dark Forest Law exists between all individuals, then there will be no life in the universe, because all living things will think of shooting at each other when they see another living thing that is the same as themselves.

Any cooperation will not be possible in the face of the law of the dark forest.

This also means one thing, that in the pastoral period of the universe, the law of the dark forest does not apply to that era.

But then Nullifier showed up and everything changed.

At the beginning, their appearance was just an experiment within the troubleshooter group.

The Troublemakers are also the product of the theory of cosmic dependency, but they are more pathetic than other civilizations. As long as other civilizations do not abide by the rules of knowledge sealing, they may break through the rules set for them by the vassal civilizations.

But the Troublemakers are old servants of the universe, and there simply isn’t a civilization that could break the impasse for them… or to be more precise, the Troublemakers will never allow them to exist.

After all, greed is the nature of living things.

Perhaps for that civilization, even if they knew that cooperation could bring them greater benefits, they would still choose to go to war with the troublemakers without hesitation.

After all, no one knows what the future will be like, so it is better to seize what we can do now and devour the risk removers as quickly as possible.

This is the bad nature of living things. They prefer to plunder others rather than cooperate.

Later, the fact of the Zeroers also proved that the hypothesis of the Risk-Excluder civilization was correct.

When the Zeroers separated from the Risk Eliminators civilization, they quickly expanded to a civilization of the same level as the Risk Eliminators in a short period of time.

But the first thing they did was to reduce the dimension of the universe from eleven dimensions.

At that moment, all civilizations in the eleven-dimensional state were destroyed instantly. Before they had time to transform themselves, they were hit by a dimensionality reduction attack.

Next is ten dimensions, nine dimensions, eight dimensions...

All civilizations realized the coming crisis and began to transform themselves, downgrading their dimensions layer by layer.

In order to avoid the loss of matter after reducing the dimension, and also to have fewer enemies, they began to frantically launch non-stop dimensionality reduction attacks on the surroundings in an attempt to kill everyone else.

The total amount of matter in the universe remains unchanged, but the living space in the universe is decreasing little by little.

Civilization can no longer switch the output ratio of resources by upgrading dimensions. The pastoral era of the universe has ended, and the dark forest era has begun!

Hide yourself and clean up.

This is the consensus among all advanced civilizations.

They have become part of the frantic escape in this battle royale.

The crazy launch of the Dark Forest attack is just to ensure that one's own civilization can survive and live longer.

This is also why no one has ever tried to track down the targets of the Dark Forest attack, because it is meaningless.

Let’s not talk about whether they can be tracked. After all, the initiators of the Dark Forest attack usually do not launch attacks on their own home planet, but use spacecraft to carry out random attacks.

But the most crucial reason is that the prerequisite for launching the Dark Forest attack is that one is not afraid of the Dark Forest attack in this dimension.

And that's exactly what the Zeroers want.

He is an old minister of the universe. For a civilization at their level, a simple dimensionality reduction attack has lost all its meaning.

And when the universe enters the day of zero-dimensional destruction, they may be able to transcend the constraints of this universe on themselves. On the day when the next new universe opens, they will be the only true gods outside the entire universe.

Question: How to win an impossible-to-win poker game.

Answer: Just overturn the table and then use your good cards to start the next round.

This is also the essential difference in philosophy between those who reset to zero and those who troubleshoot. Although their ultimate goals are the same, the ideas of those who reset to zero are too strong.

Rather than making things difficult for yourself, attack others.

Why bother with dependency theory to stabilize the situation in the universe? You should just kill everyone and start over.

For this reason, the two sides have fought many wars.

Just today, a conflict broke out between the two sides again. They could hardly remember how many times the two sides had fought, but it seemed that since the appearance of the Zeroer, the conflict between the two sides has been escalating.

This time, the Nullifier civilization only sent out one warship.

But don't think that these are the only people they have.

As the battleship sailed, time points were projected into the universe behind it one after another.

This is a weapon formed by utilizing the laws of time.

Time punctuation will mark the individual status of a unit at this time, and extract the ship marked at this time point from the scale of the long river of time, and put it on the same timeline as the current one. This is the horror of time weapons.

Although it cannot reverse time and space, it is more than enough to deal with enemies.

Sure enough, after the last time mark was dropped, hundreds of identical warships had already appeared densely in the space, some of them were even still sailing. No need to guess, these were all the same warships, but their time was fast-forwarded, and each node was extracted and merged at the current time point to achieve the current effect.

"Zero, why don't you listen? These weapons are meaningless to you and me."

The troubleshooter was somewhat helpless. He looked at the warships attacking him, raised his hand, and began to write in the universe.

1+1=2.

Then he waved his hand again and drew a line through the last "=" sign.

This makes the problem become, 1+1 is not equal to 2!

In an instant, all the warships that the Zeroer had just extracted from the time point disappeared, leaving only one warship, drifting alone in the boundless space.

This is the weapon of mathematical laws.

The troubleshooters directly modified the definition of mathematical rules of the Zeroizers, making the Peano axioms directly invalid in their civilization.

There are five Peano axioms:

One: 1 is a natural number.

2: Any natural number has a neighbor, which we call the successor of this natural number, which is also a natural number.

1: The successor number of any natural number is not .

4: Pick two natural numbers at random, call one a and the other b. If the successor of a and the successor of b happen to be the same number, then a and b are not two different natural numbers, but the same natural number.

Five: Assume that the natural number 1 has a characteristic. Moreover, if any natural number n has this characteristic, then the successor of n also has this characteristic. From the first two sentences, it can be concluded that all natural numbers have this characteristic.

After knowing these five axioms, we need to understand how to verify that 1+1=2.

The verification method is very simple, just one sentence: if n is a natural number, then n+1=n'.

And assuming n is 1, then 1+1 equals 1'.

1’只要被称之为2，那么就可以得出1+1=2了。

This is the most basic addition axiom.

The weapons of mathematical laws used by troubleshooters directly cause all theories built on mathematical models by zeroers to collapse.

At this moment, in the civilization of the Zeroers, all 1+1 is no longer equal to 2, which means that the superposition of all quantities will become meaningless. Naturally, the things created by the Zeroers using the timeline cannot be superimposed, and thus disappear in the chaos.

This is the attack method used by advanced civilizations.

There was no so-called battleship bombardment, no so-called close combat, just a simple modification of a symbol, and everything was over.

This is the constraint of the rules. As long as the Zeroer cannot transcend the rules of this universe, he and the Troubleshooter will never be able to completely kill each other, or be killed by each other.

"Return to zero, it's meaningless, you've already lost." The troubleshooter's tone was still so calm, as if he was just stating something that could not be more ordinary.

But this made the already suppressed Zeroer even more annoyed.

"Shut up, troubleshooter. You are a bunch of frogs in a well. You can only live in this small space of the universe. You don't even have the courage to look outside. What qualifications do you have to criticize me?"

"We are just more rational than you, because we already know that you will lose!" The troubleshooter remained calm.

In terms of age, they are the elders of the Zero Returners. After all, without them, the Zero Returners would not have been born.

"Don't you understand? If the universe can really be transcended after it is reduced to zero dimension, then how many times has the universe been restarted since its appearance?"

"Time will not go back, it will only move forward as always."

"I believe that before us, there must be more than one civilization that did the same thing as you and restarted the entire universe."

"But have you ever seen a civilization that has transcended the constraints of the universe?"

"no!"

"Since we became the managers of the universe's rules, we have not seen a civilization that survived from the previous universe. Doesn't this mean that you have failed?"

"Shut up, old man. We are just trapped in this universe now. Maybe after we escape, the world outside will be different."

"Then you are so pathetic, kid, please allow me to call you that." said the troubleshooter.

"If there is a bigger world outside of this, then you are just running from a dark forest to another bigger dark forest. Instead of that, it is better to live in our small universe..."

"Do you want to be a prisoner for the rest of your life?" Zero laughed.

"But how do you know that the world outside is definitely free?"

"This is not a problem!"

The Zeroers reset the mathematical model of their own civilization, returning themselves to normal.

Weapons of that level would be almost devastating to other civilizations, but for the Zeroers and Troubleshooters who have already utilized the laws of the universe to near perfection, it is nothing more than a small fight between them.

"Besides, how do you know that there are no products from the previous universe in the world? The zero-reset movement will eventually come, and the restart of the universe is also the general trend, but I guess there will definitely be greedy civilizations that want to leave their own things behind."

"Even if we only stole 5 kilograms of mass from the universe, the restart of the universe would fail, but our universe still appeared. This means that the previous restart of the universe was completed, right?"

"Then can I understand that the universe is a big cake, and even if a part of it is stolen, it can still be restarted smoothly. Then I only need to steal the part that belongs to me during the restart, and can I achieve transcendence?"