Just as the Alliance Institute of Biological Research had originally guessed, the forest of Baiyue Province was the child born of Gaia and Earth.
And by forest, it didn't mean merely the trees.
It encompassed the flowers and grass, the insects and birds, the beasts of the land, and even the humans who had once lived here.
The broodmother that had descended upon this land opened its gene pool, granting every living creature here the ability to exchange genetic material with one another.
Of course, this exchange was by no means an unruly, random drift.
Operating within the framework of natural selection unique to Earth, it allowed the finest gene fragments—along with their permutations and combinations—to emerge through evolution, flourishing amid the fiercest survival of the fittest and relentless trial and error.
In just two centuries, they had traversed a path that would normally have taken Earth's ecosystem two million or even twenty million years—a path it might never have reached at all.
Leaves rustled in the breeze, punctuated by the chirping of insects.
Hearing this staggering conclusion, Fang Chang froze for a long time. His Adam's apple bobbed slightly as he swallowed hard.
"...This is the fusion?"
Chen Yutong nodded.
Standing nearby, Lao Bai couldn't resist pressing further.
"What about the people here? Did they go through that fusion too... fusing with mutant DNA?"
Chen Yutong nodded once more.
"Barring any surprises, yes. There weren't as many survivors in this area as in Qingquan City, but people certainly stayed behind."
Lao Bai stared blankly at her.
"But... aren't the survivors in the Southern Sea doing just fine? We didn't feel like they were any different from us."
As if anticipating his question, Chen Yutong explained patiently.
"Individual evolution and population evolution operate on entirely different dimensions. Faced with an extremely degraded natural environment, some chose to leave while others chose to stay. The survivors in the Southern Sea are simply the ones who left. After that, they no longer participated in the evolution unfolding in this rainforest."
Frowning slightly, Lao Bai asked, "And what about the ones who stayed?"
"They 'vanished' in the course of evolution. Or rather, they were fused, transforming into other forms of existence..."
As she spoke, Chen Yutong crouched down, plucked a blade of king grass by the roadside, stood up, and handed it to him.
Taking the blade of grass, Lao Bai looked at her in confusion.
"What's this?"
"A blade of king grass," Chen Yutong said, gazing at the leaf in his hand. "In the mitochondria of sliced cellular samples from a king grass specimen, we discovered fragments of human mitochondrial DNA."
Human mitochondria?!
Both Lao Bai and Fang Chang wore stunned expressions.
How the hell was that even possible?!
"...For now, we still can't trace exactly how this DNA fragment, originally belonging to humans, migrated into the king grass. Perhaps it moved up the food chain, or perhaps it bridged through some intermediary microorganism—or both. In subsequent investigations, we soon discovered similar phenomena in mutant spiders, lizards, and even snails... They contain human components as well as components from other species."
Looking at the dumbfounded pair, Chen Yutong said softly, "This is Gaia."
"She handed Earth a key, unlocking the lock on our evolution."
"The lock on the evolution of all things."
Fang Chang stared at her with wide eyes. He felt as though he understood nothing at all, yet at the same time grasped a sliver of it.
It reminded him of a game he used to play called Stellaris.
There was an Ascension Perk in it that he rarely picked called Xeno-Compatibility—the final step of Genetic Ascension.
Not that this path was weak; in fact, it was the most broken ascension route in the entire game.
Once Xeno-Compatibility was unlocked, a player could execute a series of war-crime-level maneuvers, repeatedly placing two species with different traits on the same planet and forcing them to crossbreed. The newly spawned hybrids would inherit positive traits from their parents, unconstrained by the usual trait point caps, allowing endless stacking.
With a bit of patient repetition, a player could ultimately engineer a super-species packing every single positive trait in the game!
Basically a living bundle of buffs!
On the flip side, the side effect turned the species menu into an absolute mess of a color palette.
Hybrids produced between any two species would breed with yet other hybrids, resulting in bizarre portraits and names.
Whether the computer's CPU would blow up was up for debate, but a human's brain would definitely fry.
What was the point?
Even without stacking buffs to the heavens, the braindead AI in the game were no match for a human player anyway.
Consequently, most players stopped short, refusing to take that final step of Genetic Ascension in order to preserve species purity and their own immersion.
A few players would achieve their ultimate goal—crafting that super-creature loaded with myriad buffs—and then herd all the intermediate hybrid products onto a single planet, release a vassal, declare war, and fire up a Colossus to blast them all to dust in one seamless sweep.
The situation exhibited by Planet Gaia was rather like a civilization that had picked Xeno-Compatibility.
For some reason, they had achieved not only cross-species communion, but through unobstructed genetic exchange, they had fused the entire planet's organisms into a single whole.
To outsiders, they appeared to be a unified collective consciousness.
Yet dissecting it layer by layer revealed that it was not a hive mind in the ordinary sense, but rather countless hives unified into one!
She was all, and all was Her.
That civilization, which had long since dissolved into formlessness, was perhaps far more advanced than humanity could imagine.
As for why their footprints had not traversed the stars, or why they had lost their original form, it simply came down to differing pursuits.
The stars in the sky were never just of one color to begin with, and not all civilizations were keen on territorial expansion.
Perhaps some civilizations were born merely to build a wonder, or to compose a poem.
And their poem had already been completed in ages past—that existence the human colonists called Gaia.
The colonists had sent the broodmother carrying that poem back to Earth, and the broodmothers scattered across Baiyue Province were merely an excerpt of that verse.
Fang Chang had a faint premonition that he was closing in on the truth behind the Three-Year War—the overarching storyline buried in Wasteland OL since its launch.
Looking at Chen Yutong, Lao Bai still wore a baffled expression.
"B-but... how did it actually do that?"
The prevailing consensus in biology held that horizontal gene transfer was unique to microorganisms and rarely occurred between eukaryotes.
That was also why, after passing the early microbial stage, the evolution of life on Earth had unfolded in a classic branching tree.
If a river separated a population of mice—mountains on one side, forest on the other—and the river dried up a million years later, the two groups would experience reproductive isolation upon meeting again, effectively evolving into distinct species. One could even say that isolation was a prerequisite for speciation.
Most biology textbooks and popular science materials cited this simple model when explaining geographic and reproductive isolation.
Yet here she was, claiming that the barrier between species had been shattered?!
Though he wasn't well-versed in biology, he had at least completed his nine years of compulsory education.
In fact, one didn't even need nine years of schooling to get the gist.
He could believe a horse and a donkey could mate, but ants and trees? Spiders and cockroaches? How on earth could such bizarre combinations get together?!
Seeing the utter bewilderment on his face, Chen Yutong raised an index finger and pressed her temple, speaking with a touch of helplessness.
"...I can roughly guess what you're thinking. Reproductive isolation between species, right?"
Lao Bai nodded. "Yeah."
Chen Yutong patiently continued.
"Generally speaking, that's true, but reproduction isn't the only pathway for genetic transmission... Take Earth as an example. Smelt and herring are two unrelated cold-water fish, yet the antifreeze protein gene from herring appears in the smelt's gene sequence. We call this horizontal gene transfer."
"According to literature from the Era of Prosperity, similar cases existed not just in fish, but in reptiles, birds, and mammals. Thus, up until the pre-war era, the consensus in academia was that the evolution of life was not a classic tree; thin, adhesive threads had always connected certain branches."
"What Gaia did was turn these threads, which originally played only a minor role in biological evolution, into bridges spanning species, transforming Earth's tree-like evolutionary graph into a 'web' akin to Gaia's."
This time, it was Lao Bai's turn to massage his temples with a headache.
"So... we've joined the glorious evolution now?"
Chen Yutong nodded and looked toward the impenetrable rainforest in the distance.
"Yes. The genes we carry will also enter this forest in some form. Ubiquitous microorganisms will decompose our waste, hair, and even our remains—all of which serve as avenues of entry. But that's integration on a macro level. On a micro level, as long as we aren't eaten by the mutants here and turned into feces, we won't disappear in this rainforest."
Fang Chang, who had been lost in thought for a long while, suddenly spoke up.
"What if someone leaves this forest?"
Chen Yutong looked at him and said, "Nothing will happen. Just like the survivors who fled this rainforest to the islands, the genes they took with them no longer participate in the evolution here."
"In fact, over the past two centuries, mutants have constantly left this forest while new mutants joined. Some populations flourished and expanded within this rainforest, while others vanished without a trace after contributing their DNA."
"Abstractly speaking, this forest is equivalent to a 'Gaia' in its embryonic stage, overlaid with Earth's natural laws. Every organism in the entire rainforest is a fruiting body, and their sum constitutes an abstract 'broodmother'... As for the most primitive, concrete broodmother, we are still looking for it."
"...How on earth was something like that achieved?" Lao Bai scratched his head, still hopelessly wrestling with the problem.
Seeing him stubbornly fixated on the dilemma, Chen Yutong felt a little helpless, but she remained patient.
"That's also what we're currently researching, including why this forest is confined strictly to this province and hasn't spread elsewhere... Don't rush it."
Pausing, she turned to the contemplative Fang Chang.
"Besides, the 'self-healing' property you observed earlier actually exists on the basis of the principles I just mentioned."
"With unobstructed genetic exchange across species and natural selection constantly filtering for stronger organisms, the life-forms here—whether plant or animal, producer or consumer in the food chain—possess extraordinarily vigorous vitality and nutrient accumulation capabilities... Because if they didn't, they would swiftly become cannon fodder, vanishing after contributing a few lines of code."
"In an environment of such extreme internal competition, any physical vacuum that opens up is instantly overtaken by other species."
Nursing a headache, Fang Chang asked, "Is there a solution?"
"It's actually quite simple," Chen Yutong replied. "You just need to maintain occupancy over the area. Take the ground beneath your feet, for instance. Because people walk here constantly, lush vegetation can't take root. Paving it with concrete will also hold out for a long time, though the relative maintenance costs might be higher than elsewhere."
Fang Chang promptly pressed, "And what about areas that aren't regularly active?"
"Then... there's nothing that can be done," Chen Yutong said with a helpless shrug. "Never mind your settlement; even the former Shilong City couldn't withstand the erosion of this extraordinary force of nature. The organisms here tolerate not the slightest waste. You'd best figure out ways to put any reclaimed land to active use."
Fang Chang let out a bitter laugh. "And shoulder exorbitant maintenance costs, right?"
Port French Fries' infrastructure expenses were footed entirely by the Baiyue Strait Development Co., Ltd. The Alliance treasury would never foot the bill for road construction in Port French Fries, so he had to carefully weigh the balance sheet.
Moreover, it wasn't just a matter of money.
From a macroeconomic perspective, currency was merely a tool to balance logistical profits and losses and regulate market supply and demand. The damage caused by a liability wasn't just a deficit on a financial report; it was a massive waste of manpower and material resources on meaningless upkeep.
Chen Yutong looked at him helplessly. "Trying to preserve the original ecological landscape might be a fine idea. There's really no need to build every settlement the same way, right? Why not explore a development model suited specifically to Baiyue Province? That's the only advice I can offer."
At this point, she suddenly remembered something.
"Oh, right. Weren't you looking into utilizing slime mold in the construction sector recently? You could try using those biological self-repairing materials; they might be tailored perfectly to the unique conditions here. As for land with low utilization, you might as well leave the forest in its natural state—"
Just then, Lao Bai, who had been brooding quietly, suddenly spoke up.
"There might be another way."
Both of them turned to him in unison, and Fang Chang immediately asked, "What way?"
"For areas we can't develop right now, how about occupying the land by planting tropical cash crops first? Like rubber, cotton, or something... I recall the shelter produced high-yield cotton seeds a long time ago, didn't it?"
Lao Bai glanced toward the Moon Clan in the eastern camp and continued.
"Just like back in Qingquan City, we clear the land and contract it out to them to farm. As long as something is actively growing on the soil, it should keep the wild growth at bay, right?"
The maintenance cost of a cotton field was far lower than pouring concrete, and the resulting cash crops could turn a profit.
On top of that, this land carried a buff to growth speed, and the soil fertility seemed absurdly high—they might even pull off three or four harvests a year.
He had given up on understanding the game's mechanics through pure science. Approaching it through game logic had cracked his thinking wide open instead.
Chen Yutong's eyes lit up as well, and she said excitedly, "Right... That's a great idea. It aligns with what I was thinking anyway: just swap out the wild flora for cash crops."
Fang Chang frowned slightly.
"Won't doing that introduce outside genes here and make the situation even more complicated—"
Seeing his hesitant expression, Lao Bai shrugged helplessly.
"...We've been here this long already. Do you really think one or two extra chromosomes are going to make a difference?"
Fang Chang froze, suddenly realizing he had asked a foolish question, completely overlooking the orders of magnitude between a minor variable and the overall population.
Never mind metabolic waste; they had dumped far more than a couple of corpses into this forest already. What difference would a few cotton seeds make?
Besides, this rainforest hadn't turned into this overnight. What novel thing hadn't it seen before?
Rubbing his forehead, he said between tears and laughter, "Fair point..."
Chapter 680