"That was the most glorious era of the entire civilization."
Zero told Meng Chao, "Using the Genesis Engine, our civilization leaped from one galaxy to another, expanded from one spiral arm to the next. In merely a few million years, we had spread across most of the known universe's starfields and possessed tens of thousands of habitable planets.
"Even planets that had once been cold, dark, and dead—uninhabitable worlds—became vibrant and brimming with hope after meteor impacts, crustal reconstruction, and ecological replication."
However, good times did not last.
As the civilization grew ever larger, the contradictions it accumulated internally and the problems that erupted became ever more numerous.
The greatest of these problems were space and time.
Any lifeform, empire, or even civilization itself, no matter how powerful or advanced, ultimately had its limits.
When planets on the civilization's frontier were separated from the Homeworld, where the civilization had originated, by a vast sea of stars, the cost of maintaining contact kept rising. Once that cost exceeded the benefits, the frontier planets gradually lost their need for, reverence toward, and willingness to submit to the Homeworld.
And when branches of civilization that had developed independently over millions or even tens of millions of years grew increasingly different from one another, it became harder and harder for them to form an "imagined community" that breathed together and shared the same fate.
Within a mere ten thousand years, the once-glorious civilization declined from prosperity into decay.
Countless frontier planets raised the banners of rebellion. They were unwilling both to continue following lifestyles and moral values originating from the Homeworld and to shoulder their innate sacred obligations to the vast empire.
Even in the civilization's core—the refined regions that had developed for tens of millions of years—large numbers of civilized individuals had grown