Effect Before Cause

The final passage made it clear that the writer had almost completely lost their sanity, recording information with intense subjective emotion. Inevitably, the recorded information had been pushed in a mystical direction, and its reference value was open to question.

But after learning what had caused all this, the Collectors could roughly understand why the writer had reached such a conclusion. Even the Collectors themselves might have made the same judgment under those circumstances.

Causality had been reversed; the effect had occurred before the cause. How fantastical.

It had been a great catastrophe, a disaster unique to the Radiance civilization—a disaster targeting the Radiance species, the Spirit Domain, and even the Radiance civilization's technological tree.

Information disasters were a broad category defined by the Radiance civilization. They referred to infectious phenomena spread through information: transmissible memetic viruses, self-replicating electronic viruses, and zombie-like biological viruses all fell into this category.

Among them, the most lethal threat to an advanced civilization like the Radiance civilization was undoubtedly transmissible memetic viruses.

Everything had its weakness. Just as people with high blood pressure reacted more sharply, but if a small tear appeared in a blood vessel, a great deal of blood might spray out.

The higher a civilization's level, the more frequent and faster its internal information exchange became. A civilization like the Radiance civilization, which had achieved faster-than-light travel, naturally exchanged information at faster-than-light speeds as well.

Thus, the memetic virus spread at faster-than-light speed and rapidly blanketed the entire Radiance civilization.

As a technologically advanced cosmic civilization, the Radiance civilization naturally knew where its weaknesses lay and had specifically guarded against the memetic viruses that posed the greatest threat to them.

The Radiance civilization had already mastered mature defensive technologies. This was not merely due to their own independent development; more importantly,