In truth, at this moment, the two virtual lives and Zhao Cheng had not formed a sufficiently stable causal bridge at all. Indeed, through the chess game, they had interacted and formed causality—but victory and defeat were not the same.
Victory represented suppression. It represented plunder.
Even an utterly insignificant victory could, under the manipulation of the two virtual lives, be turned into a pivotal point.
The rough process was this: because of a nail, a horse fell; because of a horse, a knight died; because of a knight, a war was lost; because of a war, a Kingdom fell...
Defeat, meanwhile, meant that they were suppressed in turn. True, Zhao Cheng did not possess their precise technical methods, capable of using a negligible victory to plunder everything from the other side. But as beings from a higher civilization, even if they had no human rights in their own civilization and were merely cannon fodder—
When facing insects from a lower civilization, they were proud.
To be jumped and beaten by an insect was something they simply could not tolerate.
Of course, since they were virtual lives in essence, such emotional responses were themselves part of their algorithms. The Empire was too powerful. The pride of the weak was merely arrogance, but the pride of the strong was majesty!
In a sense, what kind of spiritual state Imperial civilization had reached today was already revealed in the algorithms of these two virtual lives.
The interests of the great ones stood above the interests of the Empire; arrogance and contempt toward lower civilizations...
Still, that was only normal. What was powerful was the technology, not necessarily each individual within the civilization.
In the multiverse, civilizations of the same level—if one could be united as one—would possess a collective might surpassing that