Time flew, and several months passed in the blink of an eye.
On the vast scale of the universe, time was usually measured in tens of thousands of years.
Yet life was brief and brilliant, and countless cycles of life could unfold within those ten thousand years.
For intelligent beings, even a short span of time was enough to create infinite miracles.
These included, but were not limited to: launching total wars that engulfed the entire galaxy, bombarding everything with the Colossus and the Heaven-Burning Divine Weapon, building the Aetherophasic Engine to blow up the galaxy and the Shroud, choosing cosmogenesis to radically rewrite the laws of the universe, and building the Horizon Needle to pierce a black hole and throw time into chaos...
Uh, none of that looked much like a miracle, no matter how you looked at it.
In any case, that was the power of time. It could bring an empire into gradual decline, or nurture a newborn one.
For Xi Yan, time was something he desperately needed to develop.
The newborn Interstellar Human Military Junta was far too fragile, and it still lacked the ability to deal with the dangers of the universe.
He needed technology, and territory!
Yet he was reluctant to make contact with alien civilizations of a similar type too early.
It was tough...
During this period, Xi Yan also gave careful thought to which ascension path he should choose.
From a standpoint of general rationality, although this world was real, its underlying structure still followed the logic of the game Stellaris. Its event chains and technology tree had not changed significantly either.
So when he reached the point where he would choose ascension paths and traditions in the game, there should be some dedicated way to do so. Xi Yan guessed it