However, education has become increasingly unsustainable.
The number of young people is increasing, and there are more and more children. The transmission of knowledge and experience is becoming more and more difficult.
During this period, in the fifth five-year plan, a new strategy was put on the agenda.
Led by brain machines, "immersive education" was activated to maximize the efficiency of education and reduce the pressure on knowledge transmission.
This strategy evidently worked, but the side effects were also quite obvious.
Many people experienced mental issues, but since these problems were relatively mild, the decision-makers at the base could only view them as a necessary cost.
Unfortunately, even so, the downward trend was not reversed.
In the thirtieth year of the Imperial Capital Base, the base’s population declined for the first time.
The base, with nearly 6,000 people, lost 500 people within a year.
The situation had become urgent.
So, in the next five years, they activated new equipment.
The birth cycle was compressed to four months, and in a situation that was almost hopeless, they chose the simplest, most direct way to respond to population decline.
This time, the young team member who succeeded Wang He expressed his thoughts to another young communicator for the first time.
"We need to think of another way... The second generation on the wasteland also doesn’t live past 35."
"Just relying on birth is meaningless; maybe there’s something wrong with our genes..."
In fact, his thoughts also represented the thoughts of the vast majority in the base.
So, in 2086, the forty-first year of the Imperial Capital Base’s existence, the people here started a daring experiment.
Using well-preserved gene editing equipment, they "created" the first gene-edited embryo.
Ten months later, this embryo, along with hundreds of other embryos, grew into a new generation of people from the Imperial Capital.
They called these babies "Sparks."
Clearly, these babies carried their greatest hope for the continuation of humanity.
No one knew whether these babies survived, or whether they lived past 35 years.
Because in 2094, a sudden disaster almost completely destroyed the entire base.
Unlike the great calamity, the process of this secondary disaster was largely clear.
The first signs were various meteorological disasters that completely defied basic principles.
Winds that rose suddenly and dissipated quickly, hail from a clear sky, tsunamis sweeping the coast like explosions...
Then came extreme low temperatures.
Many people in the base died.
Some died from visible disasters, but many others, just like in the great calamity, inexplicably died from multiple organ failure.
As if filtered through a sieve, the base, originally with only 4,000 people, was finally left with less than half the population.
Finally, in desperation, the "survivors" of the Imperial Capital Base abandoned this base they had painstakingly maintained.
They left behind three phrases.
"The world is being filtered."
"We took everything we needed."
"For humanity’s future, we must ignite the spark."
And with that, the record ends.
Chen Jian exhaled deeply.
Lei Jie, beside him, looked up at Chen Jian and said:
"At the end of the record, it says they’re heading to Chang’an and, if conditions permit, going to Mountain City to meet with other bases."
"So... did they ever reach Mountain City?"
Chen Jian shook his head and replied:
"If they really did reach Mountain City, there probably wouldn’t be later issues with Mimic Heretics, Blood Skull, and Holy Blood."
"They are the origin of everything."
"This... Holy Father really wasn’t wrong."
"These people are their true creators."
Lei Jie sighed as well.
After a moment of silence, he furrowed his brows and said:
"There’s still too little information about the secondary disaster... But it seems secondary disaster is very similar to the first great calamity?"
"Why do I feel like the Imperial Capital region was swept by some sort of ’Rule Domain’?"
"Clearly, that’s what they think too."
Chen Jian nodded and said:
"Otherwise, they wouldn’t talk about ’filtering’ with such a judgment."
Lei Jie instinctively rubbed his somewhat swollen brow; after a moment, he suddenly asked:
"So do you think they succeeded?"
"I mean... was the problem of reduced lifespan actually solved?"
Chen Jian pursed his lips, didn’t answer directly, and instead asked:
"In this world, have you seen anyone over 40?"
"I’m not sure... but the elders in Yellow Stone City do seem to age in a way that doesn’t match their actual age..."
"That’s because Yellow Stone City has always been isolated. This is not evidence of failure; on the contrary, it’s evidence of success."
Chen Jian took a deep breath and then said:
"Did you forget? The Saint of the Mechanical God Sect lived genuinely to his seventies."
"They not only created the so-called genetic progenitors."
"Theoretically speaking..."
"Everyone in the world is their child."