Luo Yu continued to share what he had seen in the broodmother's lingering memories on the forum, while Chu Guang learned about the downtown broodmother from Yu, who lived on Floor B4 of the shelter.
Speaking of which, it was largely thanks to Heya.
By modifying the neural link equipment produced by the black box, she had designed a dedicated neural network data exchange interface for Yu, connecting it to the servers in the Floor B6 server room.
This was effectively like outfitting it with "virtual reality glasses," allowing its consciousness to communicate directly with Xiao Qi.
One had to give Yu credit: the little fellow was remarkably receptive to tools invented by humans.
Yu had already had a field day with the headset Heya had previously fitted onto it, and with this new toy, it was having the time of its life.
With Yu's assistance, Xiao Qi remodeled and reconstructed the memories recovered from the broodmother.
This way, not only Chu Guang, but any player—new or old—could access this ancient memory through neural link devices...
"Incredible... Such a beautiful planet is only five light-years away from us!"
Floating in an endless void, gazing intently at the planet right before her eyes, Heya couldn't help but sigh in admiration.
A brand-new ecosystem!
A massive, living library of DNA samples!
For an expert dedicated to research in this field, was there anything more thrilling?
Chu Guang, standing beside her, felt much the same.
However, his thoughts differed starkly from Heya's. Less technical, he was simply dumbfounded—
This planet was actually alive?
And possessed a consciousness of its own!
From all indications, the evolutionary path of the creatures living on this planet was entirely different from Earth's.
Of course, another possibility couldn't be ruled out: perhaps Earth's ecosystem was a singular anomaly in the universe, or perhaps the evolutionary course on every planet was unique.
After all, before his transmigration, human civilization in his previous world had never truly stepped outside the solar system, and their understanding of the extrasolar universe had been built on countless conjectures and paradoxes.
At this moment, both of them were connected to the shelter's servers through virtual reality equipment.
Yin Fang had actually been here moments ago, but having once been an Academy surveyor, the man had seen a great deal of the world. He had merely popped in for a glance, and seeing nothing that interested him, he had left.
Compared to an abstract memory, he was far more interested in the evolved organisms the players had brought back from downtown.
Those were all living fossils preserved from two centuries ago!
Not to mention the ruins once sealed underground by mutant slime mold!
The significance of this victory to the Alliance was nothing short of an Age of Discovery!
He didn't want to waste a single minute outside the laboratory.
Just as the two were staring entranced at the planet, Xiao Qi's voice drifted over from the side.
"Master, the memory analysis is fully complete!"
Snapping back to reality at the sound of Xiao Qi's voice, Chu Guang immediately asked, "Can we get closer? I want to go down and have a look."
"Getting closer is no problem... but if you're hoping to land on the planet, there isn't really anything to see up close," Xiao Qi said in a slightly hesitant, quiet voice. "That broodmother only had a vague memory of Planet Gaia. It roughly knew the planet's general state, but it never actually lived there... If you want to go down, I could generate some surface textures based on those memory fragments, but the discrepancies from reality would probably be quite large."
Hearing Xiao Qi's response, Chu Guang didn't need to think twice to know that the player named Luo Yu was probably already complaining on the forum about the devs hyping an unfinished map and serving up pie in the sky.
As a player, discovering a new map made it impossible not to go take a look.
Without Xiao Qi's help, Luo Yu probably hadn't even been able to see textures when he moved in close.
However, Chu Guang was already used to this.
Whenever those guys encountered anything unexplainable in the game, they would pin it all on him: either the dog dev hadn't finished making it, or the dog dev was playing 4D chess.
He usually couldn't be bothered to explain, and was even happy for his lovely little players to misunderstand like that; after all, sometimes he needed the forum himself to gather in-game information.
Was there anything unreasonable about a game in closed beta being unfinished?
It couldn't be more reasonable!
"...Besides the planet itself, are there any other details about Gaia in the broodmother's memory fragments?" Chu Guang continued.
Xiao Qi replied immediately, "There are some miscellaneous bits, mainly concerning Gaia and the colonists who landed on Gaia. If you'd like to know, I can organize them for you."
"Please do."
"Hehe, it's no trouble at all! Serving Master is Xiao Qi's honor!" A bashful voice floated over, followed immediately by a light-blue window appearing before Chu Guang.
This information recounted a past event during early contact between human civilization and "Gaia," primarily from the perspective of the mutant slime mold.
Because mutant slime mold did not communicate via sound, the concepts stored in the broodmother's sea of consciousness were recorded entirely in biological data, without any corresponding spoken or written language.
Fortunately, the Alliance had Yu, a translator that had evolved a "voice function."
With its help, Xiao Qi had been able to convert this abstract memory into language that humans could comprehend.
Seeing Chu Guang absorbed in reading, Heya, floating nearby, curiously drifted over.
Just as "Gaia" had shocked the Human Alliance, the omnipotent Gaia had been equally stunned by these extraterrestrial visitors upon discovering humanity's presence.
It had existed on this planet for countless stellar cycles, ruling over it like a god for just as long, yet this was the very first time It had encountered such strange organisms.
They melted soil and rock with fire, paved the ground with refined elements, summoned lightning from temperatures rivaling stars, and drove all things to turn around them.
And most unfathomable of all: these organisms were beyond Its control!
This was something It could not comprehend.
Not only could It not control them, It couldn't even establish communication with them. Meanwhile, they remained completely oblivious to Its existence, repeatedly slaughtering the fruiting bodies It dispatched to make contact.
At first, It mistook these colonists for a virus brought by meteorites or something similar—after all, such occurrences happened from time to time.
And so, through Its own abilities, It evolved "antibodies" to purge these organisms.
In the beginning, Its antibodies did achieve some effect. The extraterrestrial visitors infected by the slime mold soon developed symptoms like weakness, coughing, and lethargy.
Yet Chu Guang didn't even need to guess to know that, given the technological prowess of the Era of Prosperity, a minor cold of this degree hardly posed a threat.
And events unfolded just as he imagined.
Relying on advanced medical technology and analysis of native species, the colonists quickly developed vaccines and even carried out wide-area exterminations targeting "the antibodies It had engineered against humans."
This was likely the first direct clash between Gaia and human civilization. Neither side had any clear idea of what the other truly was before tumbling headlong into an unprepared war.
Realizing that viral and bacterial attacks yielded negligible results, an enraged Gaia escalated the scale of the conflict. It began attempting to trigger global-scale cataclysms and evolving more aggressive fruiting bodies, trying to physically eradicate the expanding colonists.
The Human Alliance was certainly not going to abandon such a hard-won paradise over a minor setback. They channeled ever more resources into developing the colony, systematically countering every move Gaia threw at them.
Interestingly enough, it was precisely during this process that Human Alliance scholars finally discovered the existence of "Gaia"!
The series of disasters occurring on Planet Gaia were not isolated events; everything was orchestrated by a single unified consciousness!
Human Alliance biologists had proposed this hypothesis while comparing the DNA of alien lifeforms, and the subsequent discovery of the psychic interference device confirmed it!
From the mutant slime mold's perspective, that was the first time humanity had truly heard Its voice and established direct communication with It.
"A psychic interference device?!"
When Heya saw this part of the data, shock washed over her face.
After a moment's contemplation, she mumbled to herself, "The higher an organism's cognitive capacity, the more information it receives, and the weaker the interference it suffers... Hiss, so that's how it is!"
Previously, while studying the data from Shelter 117, she had found it odd.
The original stated purpose of the psychic interference device project was to replace the infrasonic fences used in the colony to repel mutants. However, according to the intel they had gathered, the colony's mutants were all fruiting bodies of the slime mold.
Sharing a single hive consciousness, they theoretically could not be repelled by a psychic interference device.
In fact, there was no need to say "theoretically"—Qingquan City had vast hordes of slime mold fruiting bodies, and psychic interference devices were completely useless against them.
After all this time, the colonists hadn't used it to replace infrasonic fences, but to establish diplomatic relations with Gaia?
Chu Guang said nothing. His thoughts drifted to another matter instead.
It was something Dr. Method had mentioned to him back in Shelter 101.
During the Era of Prosperity, a radical school of thought had gained widespread traction in Human Alliance society.
Namely, the definition of a human being.
Radicals believed that humans were social beings, that a social being was inherently a human, and that the Human Alliance ought to advance with the times. Conservatives, on the other hand, held that a human was the unity of both a social being and a biological human; neither could be missing, and ancestral principles could not be altered.
The two factions had deep divisions across a wide range of agendas, including android citizenship, the scope of cloning technology, and socialized child-rearing.
Against this unique historical backdrop, the discovery of "Gaia" had actually dealt a profound shock to Human Alliance society.
In the past, the only gestalt societies humanity could observe in Earth's nature were dull, low-efficiency insects like ants and bees. But now, a nearly perfected, ultimate entity had presented itself before everyone's eyes.
In the eyes of some, Its existence offered an almost flawless resolution to the divide between radicals and conservatives.
Namely, by studying Gaia, they could build a gestalt thought network akin to Gaia's, linking the consciousness of every individual in society into a single unified whole—and thus all disagreements would be resolved effortlessly.
Gaia was proof of this.
Before humans arrived, there had not even been a concept of conflict here, let alone any disagreement.
And the ones who first established contact with Gaia were precisely these people.
Most of them were scholars and researchers who had voluntarily applied to relocate from their homeworld to the colony, and most were thoroughly fed up with endless bickering and the meddling of the Scientific Ethics Committee.
In the broodmother's lingering memories, It viewed these humans who actively embraced Gaia in a positive light.
And in Its perception, It had not slaughtered for slaughter's sake, but had answered the summons of the human "Gaia Faction," coming under Gaia's guidance to liberate the suffering organisms of this planet.
Of course, this had not been a purely altruistic crusade; it was also for Its Mother.
According to the humans who sympathized with them, if they did not solve the problem at its root, the conflict would never end.
Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution, the word "plunder" had been etched into the genes of the vast majority of species on that planet.
"...No wonder that broodmother could accept believers from the Church of the Torch," Chu Guang managed to squeeze out after a long pause.
Those people had visited Shelter 401 and taken the psychic interference device along with related technology, objectively giving them the tools to communicate with the slime mold broodmother.
And their philosophy and tenets happened to coincide with the "Gaia Faction" the mutant slime mold sympathized with—save for being just a bit more extreme toward their own kind.
But what did that matter to the broodmother?
To use an imperfect analogy, the broodmother had probably viewed them much like Chu Guang viewed Yu.
After fighting for so many years, a group of humans had finally appeared who understood its desires. For all anyone knew, the DNA samples in the Church of the Torch's possession had been given to them for free by that downtown broodmother!
"Are there any other memories?" Having reached the end of the memory, Heya looked eagerly toward the direction of Xiao Qi's voice.
"No more. That's all It knew," Xiao Qi replied helplessly.
Hearing Xiao Qi's answer, Heya couldn't help feeling a tinge of lingering disappointment, though she didn't push further.
"Unbelievable... this information completely upends my understanding of mutant slime mold." Heya rubbed the bridge of her nose, then suddenly looked at Chu Guang in excitement. "You know what? I have a ton of new ideas in my head right now... Never mind, I can't explain it all to you. I might need to shut myself away in the lab for a few days."
Seeing Heya's eager expression, Chu Guang figured she had likely gained fresh inspiration for her field of research from this memory.
Such specialized matters were indeed beyond his wheelhouse.
Without pressing for details on what it was, Chu Guang cleared his throat softly and said, "You can stay in seclusion as long as you want, but before that, there's one thing I need to get your opinion on."
Heya raised an eyebrow in curiosity. "What is it?"
Chu Guang attempted to outline his idea. "I want Yu to... improve Qingquan City's urban landscape."
In truth, rather than an idea, it was more of a wild brainstorm.
Just now, while lurking on the forum, he had noticed Professor Yang urging Luo Yu to put his newly acquired millions of cheap offspring onto assembly lines to farm money.
To be honest, that was a cheeky exploit Chu Guang hadn't anticipated, and even Luo Yu himself felt it wasn't very realistic.
After all, if players could really pull that off, it wouldn't just ruin the gameplay experience for other players—it would probably ruin the experience for the NPCs as well.
It was best to keep such an overpowered cheat in the hands of the collective.
"Improve the urban landscape?" Heya froze upon hearing this, looking at Chu Guang in total bewilderment. "How... how could it even improve that?"
Chu Guang explained patiently, "Right now, Qingquan City is a field of ruins. If we could get millions of slime mold fruiting bodies to participate in the reconstruction work, projects that would normally take a century might be cut down to a few years."
His expectations weren't high.
Even if it only brought certain districts of Qingquan City up to a liveable standard or better, it would be of immense benefit to the Alliance.
Moreover, having Yu make visible societal contributions would help ease the reservations of wastelanders who didn't understand it.
Seeing Heya standing dumbstruck without saying anything for a long time, Chu Guang added, "Of course, this is just an unpolished idea..."
"Mmh... it's not a question of whether it's polished or not. The idea actually sounds pretty good, but there's one problem."
Pausing for a moment, Heya continued with a nuanced expression, "According to our research, hive minds aren't as omnipotent as they appear. To a large extent, their control operates on a macro level. Take Thea, for example—her micro-management was somewhat better than her mother's. Yet even for her, once the number of fruiting bodies reached a thousand or ten thousand, it was very difficult to control the precise actions of every single fruiting body."
"That's why she attempted the assimilation model, allowing assimilated fruiting bodies to retain a degree of self-awareness so they could carry out specific tasks based on vague commands. The prevailing consensus at the Institute is that this is an ability the mutant slime mold evolved by observing human society."
After a brief pause, she continued, "As for Yu, its control over the fruiting bodies in Qingquan City is actually weaker than that of the broodmother it devoured. For one thing, it conveys information through sound. While the transmission distance and speed are superior to spores, there's inevitably a loss of information entropy. Having commands relayed through both sound and spores down to each individual fruiting body makes it hard to say whether they can comprehend complex orders."
"In other words, if it tells those gnawers to go bite people, they'll understand without a doubt. But if it wants them to carry something from one place to another, that will probably put Yu's command skills to the test."
Hearing Heya's explanation, Chu Guang felt a touch of regret. "I see..."
Seeing his disappointed look, Heya couldn't help adding, "This is only my hypothesis, and my hypothesis isn't necessarily correct. Besides, you really shouldn't be asking me about this—you should communicate directly with Yu. That fellow is a born biologist; its very existence is an incredible miracle to us, an isolated singularity lying beyond the event horizon of our established understanding."
At this point, she joked, "To make a vivid if imperfect analogy: those of us who study nature's mysteries are like magicians, relying on finely crafted wands and obscure incantations to cast spells."
"It's different."
"It is magic itself!"
...
Shelter Floor B6.
Standing amidst a pale-red sea, Yu let out a soft, lingering sigh.
The pale-red spore coat rolled like ocean waves, rippling outwards in concentric rings until it merged with the pitch-black server racks that stood like reefs inside the server room.
It seemed slime mold had its own troubles as well.
Removing the virtual reality glasses from his head, Chu Guang, sitting by the server room door, placed them atop the wastebasket-shaped robot.
Sensing Yu's melancholy, Chu Guang refrained from bringing up his own agenda right away, asking in an easygoing tone instead, "What are you thinking about?"
Gentle thoughts traveled along pale-red tendrils into the carbon-based semiconductors inside the server racks, translated into human language by Xiao Qi:
"I failed to convince Thea."
The fellow could actually speak.
However, human language had such low information entropy that it preferred expressing itself in its own way, knowing Xiao Qi would translate for it anyway.
Chu Guang pondered for a moment before speaking.
"You don't need to feel sad for her. She chose her own destiny, following her mother to walk her chosen path to the very end. Nothing in this world is flawless; you've already done very well."
"Ee-woo."
Yu murmured softly, its mood seeming to brighten slightly.
As the first human it had seen upon awakening, Chu Guang was like a father and mother figure to it; it had always placed deep trust in his words.
Initially, it hadn't understood this feeling, but after seeing Thea and the broodmother, it had begun to grasp something of that so-called sense of inheritance.
Just as Thea had inherited her mother's will.
Its worldview had largely formed within Alliance society. In its own self-perception, aside from having a different physical form, it was virtually no different from a human.
After all, physical shape was the most trivial matter to an entity possessing countless fruiting bodies yet a singular self.
This was the exact opposite of humans, who were adept at drawing lines between peers based on visual affinity.
After a moment of silence, Yu suddenly asked an odd question:
"Am I human?"
Chu Guang thought for a second and answered honestly, "Objectively speaking, obviously not."
Hearing this, Yu felt a bit dejected, but soon perked back up and continued, "How can I become human?"
Sensing the earnestness and innocence in those words, Chu Guang couldn't help but smile, replying gently, "You don't need to become human. You are you. You should be able to feel that we've never excluded you."
"Ee-woo!"
Seeming very pleased with this answer, Yu's voice took on a note of delight. Excitedly, it extended a tendril from the pale-red sea toward Chu Guang's shoulder, seeking to nuzzle his cheek.
This was one of its ways of expressing affection.
It had learned it from a fellow named Neko.
Xiao Qi, sitting on Chu Guang's shoulder, dodged aside in protest and squeaked discontentedly, "Eww! Don't get that slimy stuff on me! My head will rust!"
The figurine Pai had given Chu Guang was Xiao Qi's favorite among all its avatars.
Although that fellow Ibers had presented a life-sized doll a while ago that was quite to its liking, that doll had its own AI core just like Frost and Eclipse; Xiao Qi didn't really want to use it, feeling it would be weird.
"Ee-woo..."
Yu whimpered aggrievedly, avoiding Xiao Qi and circling around to Chu Guang's other shoulder.
The two little guys actually got along quite well.
After all, Xiao Qi often served as Chu Guang's mouthpiece, and whenever Luo Yu logged off, Xiao Qi was usually the one keeping Yu company.
Looking at Xiao Qi hopping onto the wastebasket robot, Chu Guang chuckled. He didn't mind Yu's affectionate nuzzling at all—it wasn't like he had to wash his own power armor anyway.
When it came to novel things, Chu Guang was fairly open-minded.
After all, from a practical standpoint, if copying the Human Alliance's methods could solve the problems, there wouldn't have been any need for him to clean up this mess.
What's more, looking at it from another angle, if his brainstorm could actually be realized, Yu was practically a planetary-scale terraforming miracle tool!
In the future, if they encountered a planet filled with carbon dioxide or other toxic gases that fell just a little short of the habitable baseline, they could totally drop a Yu down to take a few bites before dropping down a colony!
Interstellar communication couldn't possibly be harder than interstellar travel.
It wouldn't even need to communicate via spores like its ancestor "Gaia"; with the aid of human civilization's technology, all it needed was an open mic.
Cost-wise, this would definitely be far more economical than conventional atmospheric terraforming projects.
And its footsteps would follow the Alliance's fleet and its ambitions of exploring new worlds, treading upon a vaster cosmos its ancestors had never envisioned.
This could very well be a win-win!
Of course, exploring new worlds was still far too distant for today's Alliance, and the old world at hand still had a mountain of troubles waiting for him to deal with.
Looking at Yu, who was in good spirits, Chu Guang smiled and pitched his idea.
"I'd like to ask a favor of you."
"Ee-woo!"
Yu excitedly bobbed its extended tendril, agreeing immediately without even asking.
Chu Guang joked, "Aren't you going to ask what it is?"
The pale-red spore coat filling the server room swayed gently like water weeds, as straightforward and transparent as lake water where one could see straight to the bottom:
"I trust you!"
Chapter 640