Falling Feather continued sharing his discoveries from the Main Mother Body’s residual memories on the forums, while Chu Guang was busy learning about its condition directly from Little Feather.

He remained comfortably on level B4.

For that, they had Hyrja to thank.

By modifying the neural-link hardware produced from the black boxes, Hyrja had designed a dedicated neural-network data-exchange interface for Little Feather, connecting it directly to the servers in the B6 data center.

It was essentially like giving it a virtual-reality headset, allowing it to communicate directly with Little Seven through consciousness alone.

And one had to admit, Little Feather had taken to human technology remarkably well.

The headset Hyrja made for it earlier had already been turned into a plaything in its hands, and now that it had an even newer gadget, it was completely overjoyed.

With Little Feather’s assistance, Little Seven had reconstructed and re-rendered the memories it had extracted from the Main Mother Body.

Now, not only Chu Guang but any curious player, old or new, could access those ancient memories through a neural-link device.

...

“Unbelievable... such a beautiful planet, and it’s only five light-years away from us!” Floating in the boundless void, Hyrja couldn’t help but voice her awe as she gazed at the planet suspended just ahead.

It was a completely new ecosystem.

A vast, living DNA archive.

For a specialist in her field, what could be more exciting?

Standing beside her, Chu Guang felt the same amazement, though of a different kind, not scientific, but existential.

This planet was alive, and conscious!

From all appearances, the evolutionary path of life there was utterly unlike that of Earth.

Of course, there was another possibility: that Earth’s biosphere was the exception in the universe, or perhaps that each world evolved in its own unique way.

After all, before he had crossed over, humanity in his old one had yet to truly leave the solar system. Everything they knew about exoplanets was based on speculation and paradox.

Now, both he and Hyrja were linked into the shelter’s server via VR neural connections.

Yin Fang had been there a moment ago too, but the man, once an Academy prospector, had seen plenty of strange things already. After a glance that failed to spark his interest, he had gone off again, far more intrigued by the Evolved Types players had brought back from the city center.

Those things were two-century-old living fossils! Not to mention the ruins that had been sealed underground by the Mutant Slime Mold. This victory, for the New Alliance, was nothing short of a great geographical discovery.

Yin Fang wasn’t about to waste a single minute cooped up in his lab.

...

Just as Chu Guang and Hyrja stared, mesmerized, at the glowing planet before them, Little Seven’s voice chimed in. “Master, the memory analysis is complete!”

Snapped out of his thoughts, Chu Guang quickly asked, “Can we move closer? I want to take a look.”

“Getting closer is fine,” Little Seven replied gently, “But if you intend to land on that planet, there won’t be much to see.”

Little Seven’s tone grew slightly awkward as it explained, “The Main Mother Body only retained a vague memory of Planet Gaia. It knew of the planet, but never actually lived on it. I could fabricate surface textures based on fragmented memory data, but they would likely be far from accurate.”

Hearing that, Chu Guang didn’t even need to guess. Falling Feather was probably already on the forums roasting him for releasing an unfinished map.

As any player would, the moment a new area was discovered, they would have to check it out.

Without Little Seven’s help, he probably wouldn’t even have a texture to look at.

Whatever it was, Chu Guang was long used to that sort of thing.

Whenever players ran into something they couldn’t explain, they always dumped the blame on him, either something about the doggy developers not finishing the game, or the damn developers are hiding it because of some grand plan.

He rarely bothered correcting them, sometimes even enjoying their wild theories, after all, the forums were often his best source of in-game intelligence.

And come on, what’s so unreasonable about an unfinished beta?

That’s perfectly reasonable!

...

“Besides the planet itself,” Chu Guang continued, “Were there any other memory fragments about Gaia?”

“Yes,” Little Seven replied instantly. “Scattered bits, mostly about Gaia itself and the colonists who landed there. If you wish, I can compile them for you.”

“Please do.”

“Hehe, of course! Serving Master is Little Seven’s honor!” the figurine on the table said sweetly. Moments later, a pale-blue holographic window unfolded before him.

The record, told from the perspective of the mutant Slime Mold, recounted humanity’s first encounter with Gaia.

Because the Slime Mold didn’t communicate through sound, the memories stored within the Main Mother Body’s consciousness were expressed purely as biological information, not language.

Fortunately, with Little Feather, who had evolved speech capability, it acted as translator. Little Seven was able to convert those abstract data into something humans could understand.

Seeing Chu Guang engrossed, Hyrja floated closer, her curiosity piqued.

Just as humanity had been awestruck by Gaia, the omnipotent Gaia had likewise been astonished when it first noticed the humans.

It had existed for countless stellar cycles, ruling the planet as a godlike will, yet it had never before encountered such bizarre organisms.

They melted soil and rock with fire, paved refined metals across the land, summoned lightning hotter than stars, and bent all things to orbit around them.

And the most astonishing part, those organisms were beyond Its control.

That was what it could not comprehend.

Not only could Gaia not command them, it could not communicate with them. They, in turn, were completely unaware of Its existence, killing every emissary it sent to make contact.

At first, Gaia mistook the colonists for viruses brought by a meteorite impact, a phenomenon not unheard of in Its long history.

In the end, it evolved “antibodies” meant to eradicate the infection.

At first, they worked. The alien visitors fell ill. They experienced weakness, they coughed, and felt mental fatigue.

But Chu Guang could already guess the rest. With the Prosperity Era’s technology, a mild cold was no threat at all.

Sure enough, the colonists quickly developed vaccines and countermeasures through advanced medicine and xenobiology. They even launched large-scale purges targeting the very antibodies Gaia had created to fight them.

That was the first direct conflict between Gaia and humanity, an unintentional war born from total misunderstanding.

When viruses and bacteria failed, the enraged Gaia escalated. It unleashed global cataclysms, evolving aggressive creatures it spawned to physically eradicate the expanding colony.

Of course, the United Human Federation wasn’t about to abandon such a valuable new world over a small setback. They poured more resources into the colony, countering each disaster with their own ingenuity.

And ironically, it was through the struggle that humanity discovered Gaia’s existence.

The catastrophes weren’t random, they were orchestrated by a single, planetary consciousness.

Federation biologists proposed this theory after comparing alien DNA samples, and it was later confirmed with the discovery of the Spirit Interference Device.

From the Slime Mold’s perspective, that was the first time humans had truly heard Gaia’s voice, and established direct communication with it.

...

“Spirit Interference Device?!” Hyrja’s eyes widened at the term.

After a brief pause, she muttered to herself, “The higher the intellect, the richer the data received, and the weaker the interference... so that’s how it worked!”

She had found it odd while studying records from Shelter 117.

The Spirit Interference Device had originally been developed to replace the low-frequency sonic fences used to repel local mutants. But according to the reports, all those mutants were actually Mutant Slime Mold, extensions of a single collective mind.

Theoretically, such creatures shouldn’t be repelled by the device.

Actually, no theory was needed, Clearspring City was crawling with Mutant Slime Mold, and the device didn’t affect them at all.

So it turned out, the colonists weren’t using it against the Slime Mold, but to communicate with Gaia itself.

Chu Guang said nothing, lost in thought, remembering what Dr. Methods had once told him back in Shelter 101.

During the Prosperity Era, a radical ideology had swept through Federation society, one concerning the definition of humanity.

Radicals claimed that humans were social beings, and social beings defined humanity; thus, the Federation should evolve alongside that idea. Conservatives argued that humanity was both a social and a natural being, one could not exist without the other, and the old order must stand.

The two sides clashed endlessly over android citizenship, cloning rights, and socialized child-rearing.

In that ideological backdrop, Gaia’s emergence had a profound impact on the Federation’s collective psyche.

Before, the only gestalt societies humanity had ever observed were ants and bees, primitive, inefficient insects. Now they faced a perfect, unified mind.

To some, Gaia offered a divine solution to the radical-conservative divide. If humanity could replicate Gaia’s gestalt consciousness, linking every mind into one collective thought, then all conflict, all division, would vanish.

Gaia itself was proof.

Before humanity’s arrival, there had been no conflict in that world, no division at all.

And the first to contact Gaia were precisely those people, scholars and researchers who had volunteered for the colony, tired of endless debate and bureaucratic meddling by ethics committees.

In the Main Mother Body’s memory, Gaia regarded those who embraced It favorably.

In its understanding, it had not killed for malice, but had answered the call of humanity’s “Gaia Faction,” descending to liberate the suffering organisms of the planet. 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

Of course, it wasn’t purely altruistic, it was also for Its own mother.

According to the sympathetic humans, if the root cause wasn’t addressed, the conflict would never end.

After billions of years of evolution, predation was written into the DNA of nearly every species on the planet.

...