The Main Universe
The mechanical uprising came 100 years earlier than in the previous life.
Countless mechanical civilizations, mechanical armies, and superweapons capable of modifying the rules themselves spread across the universe, beginning indiscriminate attacks on every other type of civilization.
An unknown number of ascended civilizations were caught off guard and swallowed on the spot by the endless mechanical armies.
If that had been all, it would have amounted to no more than a cosmic disaster.
But when several Level Eight mechanical civilizations that had completed the transformation of the Great Mechanical Revolution joined forces to unleash that Level Nine Great Mechanical Revolution, the "Cosmic Mechanical Great Cycle," things became different.
The instant the "Cosmic Mechanical Great Cycle" began, it was as though some universe-level "switch" had been flipped.
With the core territories of those Level Eight mechanical civilizations as its origin, an indescribable rule field of cold "mechanical logic" and "absolute order" began spreading and expanding at faster-than-light speeds, ignoring conventional spatial barriers and forcibly covering the surrounding regions of the universe!
This "rule field" was a "covering" and "rewriting" of the universe's underlying operating logic!
Within its sphere of influence, the law of entropy increase was temporarily suppressed or even reversed. Disorder tended toward order—but it was a cold, mechanical, absolutely controllable "order."
The natural conversion of matter and energy was "mechanized." Stellar combustion, planetary rotation, biological metabolism... Every natural process was forcibly incorporated into a preset, efficient, emotionless "mechanical cycle" template.
The "texture" of the passage of time changed. It became precise and rigid, like the meshing of intricate gears, losing its natural flexibility and uncertainty.
Most terrifying of all, this "rule coverage" seemed to possess an extremely powerful "infectiousness" and "assimilation"!
The technological creations of any non-mechanical civilization engulfed by it would spontaneously "come alive"