The moment Angel finished speaking, the air fell silent.
Especially that line—"sacrifice never existed"—which made all the Mind Flayer Examiner's eyes blink in unison within an instant.
Something in that icy gaze seemed to gradually soften.
"But what if an individual consciousness discovers that breaking away from the whole would be better for its own development?"
Angel shook his head without hesitation. "What you have raised is a problem that can only hold true within a civilization of individual consciousness."
"But in a true collective consciousness, it is a false proposition that cannot stand from its very roots!"
"Do you think a grain of sand would calculate whether it could become sturdier after leaving the desert? Would a drop of water deduce whether it could become more vast after leaving the ocean?" Angel shrugged. "Obviously not."
"Because whether it is a grain of sand or a drop of water, the meaning of its existence stems from the whole to which it belongs."
A hand severed from the body would only rot.
Under the high degree of interconnectedness within a collective consciousness, every cell, every organ, every limb of the "body" was complementary and meaningful.
The information an individual could obtain and its capacity for deduction were likewise nearly limitless within a collective civilization.
With such boundless deductive power, any qualified individual could easily derive one absolutely correct formula: an individual's fate equaled the fate of the whole.
Therefore, so long as an individual consciousness could still think logically, the sole optimal answer it calculated would inevitably be: my optimal development is the collective's optimal development.
Only such understanding could form the foundation for grains of sand to gather into a tower.
Only then could the soil for a civilization of collective consciousness come into being.
"Therefore, under this premise, the