The Truth Behind the Sun's Disappearance

Maslow once said that human needs were hierarchical. The more primitive and basic they were, the closer they were to instinctual needs, and the higher their priority.

When a person could not even satisfy their basic need for food and water to survive, it was difficult for them to consider complex things like dignity, ideals, self-worth, or belonging.

They would instead abandon all dignity and morality for a piece of bread or a cup of water, willing to pay any price for it, even death.

Only after lower-level physiological needs had been met could people pursue higher things such as order, fairness, and a sense of security.

That was also why direct conflicts had almost never erupted between military powers after the world entered the nuclear age.

Although nuclear weapons were far from capable of wiping out humanity, they could severely damage existing productive capacity, making essential supplies such as electricity and water difficult to obtain—or causing them to disappear entirely in some regions.

Worse still, as living standards plummeted and survival crises emerged, law and order would collapse alongside them, followed by the inevitable decline of civilization.

It would not take much—just two or three generations. Once all the elderly people who had mastered advanced knowledge, technology, and ideas died off, the quality of the population would decline to an unbearable degree. Under the darkness and greed of human nature, society might even regress into dictatorship and slavery.

If that situation continued for a while longer, everyone would gradually adapt and come to believe that everything was only natural, that the world had always been this way.

Once degeneration reached that point, trying to develop again and restore past prosperity would become extraordinarily difficult, like turning on Nine Hells difficulty.

After all, social progress could not be achieved simply