The success rate of civilization ascension had always been low. Based on what Gao Gong knew from the Civilization Council, the success rate of first-level civilization ascension—that was, ascending from a level-three civilization to a level-four civilization—was only 10%.
Of course, that applied to registered households. The failure rate for unregistered households would only be higher.
After an ascension failed, aside from leaving the civilization itself severely weakened, it would produce ascension karmic force with 100% certainty. This karmic force was the product of a species' failed attempt to evolve upward.
Generally speaking, a level-three civilization had anywhere from hundreds of billions to tens of trillions of members.
The genetic fragments or negative energy bred from the failures of so many members, combined with their scale and complexity, constituted standard "nondecomposable waste"—on a universal scale.
Every year, the Civilization Council had to deal with vast quantities of this kind of "waste." The methods were either dumping it into parallel spacetime or incinerating it in galaxy-level or even supergalaxy-level energy reactors.
It wasn't that there were no means of secondary utilization, but they were extremely rare. Every failed civilization ascension produced different karmic force, so it was basically impossible to find a unified technology for putting it to secondary use.
In Gao Gong's eyes, the String Controller's "modified carbon-based fruits" were precisely a secondary use of karmic force.
After realizing this, Gao Gong also abandoned the idea of eating fruits of this kind.
There was no need to think about it. These fruits were 100% toxic and harmful, and were guaranteed to have countless side effects. They belonged to the category of civilization-level technological monstrosities.
These distracting thoughts flashed through Gao Gong's mind one after another. Then, before the other monsters awakened, he entered the tunnel's next stage.
"Huh, is