Chapter 12 Doomsday

"The end is coming!"

Although their lives were going smoothly, they discovered a serious situation.

Their 'void' is limited.

This is the reaction of the residents living in the doomsday tunnel when they explore the space around them and discover the edge of space.

Extremely frightened.

They originally thought that the size of the surrounding area was endless, and the various detection instruments they made also said so.

They detected phenomena quite far away, so they felt that this place must have endless things waiting for them to...explore.

But in fact, the edge was explored very quickly.

Lin didn’t know how big the space was at that time. According to today’s terms, this space was actually a long strip.

It is more than 100,000 kilometers thick and over 10 billion kilometers long.

But according to Tunnel of Doom, it wasn't in this shape at the time.

In short, there is definitely no 'infinite size', and after exploring to the edge the residents inside began to panic.

They had all sorts of guesses, like their civilization was some powerful creature kept in a 'tank' for viewing, or that this edge was some horrific natural phenomenon that isolated them from the 'outside world'.

The idea that scares them the most is not that they are captives of some powerful creature, but that their 'void' is really only that big.

Beyond the edge, there is nothing.

This is what they fear the most, so for a long time, they tried to use various methods to "drill" through the edge.

But just as they thought, the edge of space cannot be opened.

Although there is some way to connect this space to other spaces, they do not have any relevant technology.

So they always think that this is their end and they will be trapped here until death.

Then the end really came.

As the "doomsday rumors" spread more and more widely, the residents here gradually began to despair.

Even those residents who feel there is no need to explore and continue to live here are beginning to worry about resource consumption.

These residents became increasingly depressed over a long period of time, and the more they were unable to leave this space, the more severe the feeling of loss spread among them.

Eventually, they discovered that everything they had created began to...rot.

In fact, the maintenance of this place is mainly related to their "hope".

The creatures here are generally full of hope when they first enter space, develop civilization, are on the way to development, and are able to explore the surroundings.

Although there are many conflicts among them, generally speaking they all look forward to the future.

Their hopes may even change the environment around them, such as there will be a steady supply of resources around them, or even make their technological inventions more effective.

This 'hope effect' is not set up by the Tunnel of Doom.

In fact, this is one of the characteristics of this space. As for why it has this characteristic, the Doomsday Tunnel did not explain.

It just told Lin that it had also been observing this characteristic.

But... when he found that he couldn't leave the void, he became desperate.

Contrary to hope, when organisms feel despair they are unable to accomplish anything, and even those things they have assembled begin to fall apart.

This is mainly because all the objects here are related to dream energy.

Even if it is a physical object, the despair of the creature will be transmitted to the dream energy, and then the dream energy will affect the object.

Lesser despair will only cause the object to be unstable, for example, machinery will be easily damaged.

Greater despair will cause the entire object to disintegrate into debris.

Due to the prevailing mood of despair, the entire civilization they had built began to collapse.

Once the collapse begins, they become even more desperate, and in this vicious cycle the entire civilization cannot last long.

Even the entire space began to shake.

Because... this space itself will collapse due to despair.

However, this situation has been observed in the Tunnel of Doom.

It sent troops to rescue some of the residents. Since the space could not be repaired, it took these residents to a safe place, and then created a new space to throw them into.

They began a new development in this place.

The result of this development is similar to the last time, because when the tunnel rescued these creatures, they had almost no idea what was happening. They just suddenly found themselves in a new place, and they could not do anything except start a new development.

Although they remember what happened before, in the process of passing it on to future generations, it is gradually regarded as a legend.

Then, when this civilization developed again, it experienced the same desperate event as before.

Finally, it was the tunnel that rescued the last few remaining creatures.

After discovering that civilization always collapses due to despair, Tunnel of Doom came up with a solution.

It gave these creatures an education.

It teaches them that hope has positive effects and despair has negative effects.

After these creatures understood this, they did not live a hopeful life, but instead tried to cultivate "hopeful people" through technology.

That is to adjust the brain, remove the part that produces despair, and then throw these hopeful people to various places...to keep hope for the entire civilization.

This approach of theirs...seems to be of no use.

Because space's judgment of "despair" seems a little strange.

Because the Hopefuls' brains have been adjusted, they will be very happy even if they see their best companions being killed in front of them, or even if they themselves suffer and are tortured.

But their happiness is regarded as 'despair' by space, and will cause the surrounding objects to collapse.

Later, they had no choice but to turn to the Tunnel of Doom.

Because the Doomsday Tunnel had reminded them before, although it did not appear directly, they had already regarded the Doomsday Tunnel as a god or something.

Therefore, when the space collapsed, these creatures were rescued again.

Over time, the Tunnel of Doom came to be known as... the Tunnel of Doom.

Because it can be considered as formally communicating with these creatures, they also have many ideas about the Doomsday Tunnel, and some of them believe that it was responsible for all this.

Regardless, they have never prevented the end of the world.

Because no matter how this civilization develops, it will eventually fall into despair... and then it will change space.

It doesn’t matter to the Doomsday Tunnel, but every time the space changes at the end of the world, it causes great turmoil to the civilization inside.

They finally found a way, which was to 'collect hope', which allowed them to maintain a space for a considerable period of time.

This is the space that Lin is seeing now.