The gorilla tilted his head.
"What exactly do you mean?"
The Rich Woman Ai Ai Prototype smiled.
"You should understand perfectly. You sealed away all the evil gods, so wouldn't the creator of this Box Spirit notice it? And once they noticed it, wouldn't they notice you too?"
"Now guess what the other side will do. Erase the Old Helmsman? Quickly erase all traces of history and change the civilization's hardware location? Or come over directly and wage a civilization war against you?"
"Although there aren't many information-based civilizations like the War Maniac and Mechanical Calamity, some virus-type information civilizations also have very strong desires to attack. Guess—is it one of those?"
"Dark deterrence, and you're threatening two ascension civilizations in one go. You've got some nerve," the gorilla said softly.
"You don't have to accept the deterrence. You can attack us directly."
"But guess this: in the eyes of the other ascension civilization, won't the traces of your attack look like a prelude to war?"
The gorilla shook his head.
"The other side may not act as you deduced. As long as they're even slightly willing to communicate with us, the tense situation you created artificially will be like a bubble. One light poke, and it will burst."
"An ascension civilization taking the initiative to communicate with others, even though its civilization coordinates might be exposed... You haven't been ascended for very long, have you? Or is your ascension technology not a collective technology?"
The gorilla fell silent.
His gaze passed over Gao Gong and landed on the observation box floating in midair.
This was the Old Helmsman's true form: a twelve-sided crystal suspended in a quantum force field, a regular geometric body with thirty-centimeter edges, forged from dark matter alloy. This material had an eerie reflective property—as soon