Xiang Wu tapped his own head.
Let's reorganize things.
The Olorun Civilization is a collective consciousness rather than individual life forms. Along the path of industrialization, their cognitive components responsible for production were influenced by assembly line operations, becoming rigid and inflexible. Because the Olorun Civilization is a collective and does not experience death, these negative effects accumulated for a long time before being recognized. By that stage, the situation had reached a point of no return.
In simple terms, they had "screwed themselves silly."
Upon realizing that their civilization's progress had stalled, the Olorun Civilization chose to plant seeds on alien planets, creating life forms with Olorun gene segments.
The way they chose was to have local microbes engulf self-replicating genomes, hoping to utilize naturally occurring genetic drift in microbes to overcome obstacles unimaginable to the Olorun Civilization.
