Resurrection Empire

Chapter 1307 - 496: Poisoning, Ant Colony (Part 2)

Even before receiving orders from Fleet Headquarters, they actively initiated this planetary exploration work, providing some technical reserves ahead of the landing for Fleet Headquarters.

Unfortunately, the merchant fleet has always been crazily squeezed for profit and has never experienced technological innovation. As a result, the structure of small exploration spacecraft is fragile, unable to land in advance, and the detection equipment’s performance is low, only able to use remote sensing technology for terrain modeling and basic element analysis.

Among thousands of exploration ships and over a hundred Annulus Merchant Ships, no one noticed that inconspicuous meteorite.

Perhaps some scanning devices briefly captured it, but it was regarded as a secondary target and removed from the reporting list.

Countless micron-sized meteorite dust finally reached the low-temperature focal point, then in the eternal darkness, swept by waterfall-like airflow towards the gigantic glacier below, gently crashing onto the glacier, chiseling small pits into the extremely hard ice.

If there were a microscope at this moment, one could see that these micron-sized meteorite dust particles are not black under the starlight but turn milky white.

Subsequently, cracks rapidly appear on the surface of these milky white particles, seeming like eggshells that are hatching.

A small black dot emerges from the eggshell, first devouring the eggshell at high speed, then turning to gnaw at the nearby ice.

After a few short minutes, this small black dot’s size slightly increases.

If Ren Zhong were nearby, he would exclaim in surprise.

This creature resembles an ant but has a pair of crystalline wings, looking almost identical to Earth’s termites.

A few more minutes pass, the termite with a body length expanding to more than twenty microns suddenly begins to tremble violently, its body splitting open to the sides.

It divides itself into two, completing multiplication through self-destructive means.

The miraculous termite that tore itself into two halves begins to shrink, first curling up its body, then secreting a transparent keratin-like structure from its surface, and finally transforming back into two milky white particles.

A few more minutes later, cracks reappear on the surface of the milky white particles, two termites emerge with identical appearances, seemingly possessing identical genetic information.

Soon after, these two termites proceed to swiftly gnaw and absorb the eggshell, repeating the cycle, continuing to multiply.

Hours pass by, from a single insect egg, a complete colony has proliferated here.

They gnaw the surrounding ice to create a fist-sized void, but their secretion material combined with their body size still cannot fill the hollow generated after the ice disappears, seemingly stealing some space out of thin air.

Subsequently, as the colony grows larger, the appearance of termites begins to diverge.

The strongest of them expands its body first, its abdomen elongating like an inflated balloon.

Some termites start to develop larger fangs.

Others begin to gain faster mobility.

After mere hours, from an original milky white insect egg, the colony has differentiated into more than ten distinct individuals with defined roles, operating like a precise machine, digging into the ice at higher efficiency, continuously moving downward.

This entire process occurred below minus two hundred degrees Celsius.

The same event unfolds in various locations across the vast ice cap of South Nine C.

This planet, originally with only the most basic structure of lower microbiomes, finally welcomes the first wave of non-human complex species.

...

Within Fleet Headquarters, all were silent.

Nearly four billion people had just watched the same documentary titled "The Long Journey" through various media platforms.

They never thought their journey would be recorded in the form of a stereoscopic film.

Some people were "actors" in this documentary, and some people’s parents and friends also had roles.

As Ren Zhong requested, Xiao Xingyue didn’t use any unnecessary art embellishments or exaggeration, only employing the most realistic methods to depict some of the most representative people and events during the journey from an observer’s lens, altering the lighting environment slightly only in necessary segments to facilitate viewing the expressions and other details.