The two memories he had seen earlier had clearly belonged to General Reinhardt.
If his guess was correct, Xiao Ai was probably the intelligent navigation AI aboard that escape ship.
With the death of the owner of that memory, everything around him grew illusory along with his fading consciousness, finally dissolving into pale blue motes of light that scattered and vanished like butterflies.
When Lu Zhou came back to his senses, he was already standing within that expanse of white light. The man who called himself the Observer was watching him with a smile.
His Adam's apple bobbed slightly. Lu Zhou felt his throat go dry and spoke uncertainly.
"...So, the Jialan Empire was destroyed?"
"The Empire's destruction was a long process," the Observer said with a nod. "The Oracle led to divisions, and those divisions led to infighting. The civil war intensified the contradictions within the Empire, yet changed nothing. After the owner of this memory died, the conflict shifted from visible battlefields to invisible ones. And the virus spreading through neural networks was far more terrifying than the fleets they had once been so proud of. They spent centuries considering how to eliminate their excess weapons, yet took less than five years to regain them. The fatal problem was that they were utterly unprepared to possess them again."
"The major battles had ended, but minor conflicts continued. To maintain contact with the frontier star systems and meet Ringworld's ever-growing demand for resources, they had no choice but to use warships to escort cargo vessels. Over the following hundred and fifty years, Ringworld gradually lost control over the remote star systems, while internal strife also rendered the worlds within the ring unstable."
"If you are interested in this history, you may continue calculating along this memory's trail. The data