"What?!" The three of them exclaimed almost at once.
Everyone essentially believed that the Snow Tribe's speed of thought could rival a human computer's, and they had already seen it for themselves. But the Snow Tribe also claimed to know everything humanity had done on Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri, which was nearly impossible. Snow Star really was just a planet with a Planetary-Level Civilization. There were no warships here, and even its orbit was completely empty, without a single artificial machine. If not for the scattered buildings on Snow Star that marked the presence of civilization, everyone would have thought it was merely a primitive life-bearing planet.
The Snow Tribe's extraordinary speed of thought and their knowledge of events hundreds of light-years away were two entirely unrelated things. Even if the Snow Tribe had reached the stage of a Small Star Sector Civilization, they could not have known what happened hundreds of light-years away without sending warships or satellites there to gather data. As for whether a Great Star Region Civilization could do it, Hu Yu was not sure.
The old rabbit saw the puzzled looks on their faces and stopped speaking. A member of his tribe handed him a plant container, which appeared to hold water or some similar liquid. The old rabbit was so old that he was unsteady even when drinking, and some of the water spilled onto him. His fellow tribesman immediately wiped him clean.
"Chief, according to the Milky Way's classification of civilizations, you should still be at the Planet-Level stage. Please don't take offense, but Planet-Level is the lowest grade of civilization. How did you learn of our actions on Tau Ceti and Alpha Centauri? Could it be that you aren't a Planet-Level Civilization, and have hidden your strength?" Academician Zeng asked.
"Alas, it's a long story. We are indeed at the stage of a Planetary-Level Civilization. Our people on this planet still use primitive physical carriers to send messages over long distances. But we aren't a Planetary-Level Civilization either. Our level has already surpassed that of a Great Star Region Civilization by a great margin. If you guests aren't in a hurry, I can tell you the story at my own pace." The old rabbit chief sighed and began his account.
Snow Star was actually a very ancient planet, not much younger than the universe itself. By now, it was over ten billion years old. The Snow Tribe came into existence roughly five hundred million years after Snow Star formed. As one of the first civilizations in the universe, the Snow Tribe developed rapidly thanks to the advantage of their speed of thought, dominating the Milky Way in less than fifty thousand years. The Milky Way at that time was completely different from what it was now, and there were no very clear boundaries between it and the neighboring galaxies.
The universe had only recently been born, and the Milky Way's central black hole was still competing with the central black holes of neighboring galaxies for all kinds of celestial bodies. The entire universe was like a pot of boiling water, and the orbits of celestial bodies were extremely chaotic, or rather, they had no fixed orbits at all. Every moment, stars collided and caused tremendous explosions, while new celestial bodies gathered enough matter to ignite their cores and become stars. At the point of greatest density, the distance between most stars was less than one light-day. Planets formed even faster. It was in this environment of extreme chaos and violent exchanges of matter that civilizations sprang up on planets like bamboo shoots after rain. Unfortunately, more than ninety-nine percent of them vanished before they could reach a stage where they could withstand the frequent stellar explosions in their galaxies.
"Snow Star was lucky. It constantly threaded its way through countless stars without colliding with any of them. The Snow Tribe was lucky too. Our brains' high-speed thinking allowed us to reach the stage of a Star System-Level Civilization in an extremely short time. At that level, we could be said to have gained the ability to protect ourselves and survive the storms caused by exploding stars. In the time that followed, we developed at tremendous speed, leaving other civilizations far behind.
"About fifty thousand years after the Snow Tribe came into existence, the Milky Way had more or less taken shape. The galactic disk was only about ten thousand light-years across, and the central black hole had seized several hundred billion stars and an equal number of planets. As space expanded, the boundaries between the Milky Way and the neighboring galaxies also began to faintly emerge. The density of stars in the boundary regions was roughly equivalent to the Milky Way's current stellar density, which was already considered very sparse in the universe more than ten billion years ago.
"It was at this time that the Snow Tribe's first chief led us to victory over several million advanced civilizations in the Milky Way, unifying it in one stroke. Every colonizable planet became Snow Tribe territory. The number of Snow Tribe members could no longer be counted, and our warships were spread throughout the Milky Way. We could have continued to dominate the Milky Way, but the first chief made a mistaken decision.
"One victory after another went to the first chief's head. Although we were at a disadvantage in every metric, the Snow Tribe assembled a vast fleet and launched an attack on the neighboring Andromeda Galaxy. Only after the fleet entered Andromeda did we learn that the Milky Way was merely an insignificant little galaxy, and that its civilizations were far less advanced than those of the Andromeda Civilization.
"In that battle, we suffered a crushing defeat. Tens of quadrillions of warships were wiped out under attack from the civilizations of the Andromeda Galaxy, and we lost more than ninety percent of our military strength. When the news reached the Milky Way, the native civilizations we had long suppressed joined forces and launched a counterattack against us. Having lost our main fleet, we were no match for the alliance of millions of civilizations. Our first chief was also to blame for suppressing these native civilizations too harshly. They began a frenzied purge of our people, and civilizations from other galaxies had a hand in it too. They also wanted to plunder our technology amid the chaos.
"On every planet, our people were bleeding. The Snow Tribe did not excel at physical close combat, and ordinary residents on many planets died under attacks from beings of lower-level native civilizations. Some even became food for other species. You can't imagine how horrific the scene was. Countless members of our tribe were killed, then openly sold at marked prices to be eaten by species from other civilizations. Those were the lucky ones. Some of our people were eaten alive by beings from other civilizations.
"The first chief watched all this happen but was powerless to save them. In the end, he piloted a spaceship straight into a star, ending his own life. At that time, several million of our people remained on a planet near the edge of the Milky Way. Our second chief stepped forward. After calmly analyzing the situation with our people, he concluded that there was absolutely no place for us in the Milky Way. The Milky Way was more than ten thousand light-years across and contained millions of advanced civilizations, with countless lesser civilizations besides. Blinded by rage and desire, those civilizations would surely turn the entire Milky Way upside down to hunt us down.
"In the end, the second chief led the few million surviving members of our tribe to Sextans. At the time, Sextans was about 400,000 light-years from the Milky Way, only a tenth of its current distance, and was a star system even smaller than the Milky Way. The chances of an advanced civilization emerging in a small galaxy like that were far lower than in a large one. Unless they belonged to a species with special abilities like ours, ordinary civilizations generally needed contact with other civilizations, whether through war or peace, to reach a high level. The time a single civilization would need to develop to a high level on its own was unimaginable. So the greater the number of civilizations in a galaxy, the greater the chance of a high-level civilization emerging."