The midgame crises, represented by the Gray Tempest and the Great Khan, had passed. The outbreak of the War in Heaven marked this universe's entry into the late game.
Signs of the endgame calamity's arrival had already begun to emerge.
Right beneath Xi Yan's feet, beneath this barren world sealed off by heavy military forces, lay the future source of the Contingency: an Artificial Intelligence World filled with Contingency factories, lying dormant.
Xi Yan had to thank himself for that flash of inspiration back then. If he had not come up with the mad idea of turning every planet in the Empire into nanites on a whim, he would never have discovered this hidden Contingency planet.
If he had failed to discover it, the Contingency's machine planet would have emerged when the precursors to the ghost signal began spreading, immediately spawning a massive fleet. This was deep in the Empire's rear, with the Synaptic Lathe only a few jumps away. Just thinking about it was terrifying...
Let us review the Contingency's lore once more.
The Contingency was an AI created by an ancient civilization named [Ren-Milu] to prevent later civilizations from advancing too far and triggering the so-called [level 30 singularity], which would destroy the entire universe.
Unfortunately, the Contingency decided that exterminating the universe's civilizations seemed an efficient way to prevent a level 30 singularity, so it began violently destroying them.
As the number of mechanical beings and machine empires in the Milky Way Galaxy increased, the likelihood of the Contingency activating grew ever greater.
Four Machine Worlds (contingency central processing systems) would be placed in star systems within the Milky Way Galaxy, concealed among its many systems.
The entire system comprised four planets of random types, along with one non-random planet serving as a hidden nest.
(Note: the