I Arrived At Wizard World While Cultivating Immortality Chapter 758: A Special Life Form

The smoke of battle had not yet fully cleared before Viola was already carrying the eight unconscious eighth-level octopus-men off toward the wreckage of the flagship. She did not so much as look back, only raised a hand and waved casually at Jie Ming, her meaning as plain as it could be: the interrogation was hers, the rest was his.

Jie Ming naturally had no objection.

Handing something like the interrogation of prisoners to a wizard whose primary study was the Pain Law really could not be more appropriate.

He turned and began arranging the cleanup of this plane.

Under the direction of the Black Giant priests, the Black Giants took the octopus-man prisoners into custody in orderly fashion.

The fleet of the Tentacle Tree Civilization, which had been waiting outside the plane all this time, dispersed rapidly at his order, several thousand small formations spreading out toward every part of the plane like a net thrown open.

The fleet began systematically taking over the native settlements, the octopus-men’s remaining facilities, and the resource nodes scattered across the surface that no one had yet had time to process.

Jie Ming himself descended slowly from high altitude and came to rest at last on a stretch of hill country beaten past recognition by the backwash of the fighting. The scene on the ground bore no resemblance at all to what it had been a few days earlier.

The strafing tracks of the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light had carved dozens of bottomless canyons into the earth, the rock strata along their edges melted red by the heat, scalding lava welling out of the fissures and pooling in the low ground into lakes that were still bubbling.

Where the Nest’s enormous body had rolled through, the terrain had simply been pressed flat, leaving a whole sheet of blue crystal as smooth as a mirror, glinting coldly under the daylight.

And of the hyper-compressed energy attacks of the octopus-man fleet’s salvos, most had been taken head-on by Jie Ming, but every beam that had gone wide, missed, or been swept toward the surface by the backwash was enough on its own to vaporize a broad stretch of mountain range.

The hills, once covered in dense vegetation, were now a charred black wasteland.

The air was thick with the smell of burning and a heavy reek of ozone, the two mixed together sharply enough to sting the inside of the nose.

Clearly, under a backwash that terrible, very few of the plant-people who gathered life energy in the low ground could have survived.

Even though both sides had deliberately drawn the battlefield as high into the sky as they could before the fighting began, tens of thousands of sixth-level warships and over a hundred seventh-level beings pouring out firepower at once meant that the backwash alone was enough to deal the surface a devastating blow.

The plant-people’s villages in this region were mostly distributed through the hollows among the hills, which put them directly beneath the battlefield.

The casualties were appalling.

Jie Ming walked in silence up to a patch of scorched soil and crouched down.

In the dirt, a broken vine of an arm lay half buried in the rubble, the fingertips still holding the curled posture they had died in, as though in the last moment they had instinctively wanted to seize hold of something.

“Oh?”

Jie Ming suddenly noticed something. He looked down at that severed limb, and the vertical eye between his brows slowly opened as the All-Purpose Eye and the True-False Void-Piercing Pupil began running together.

“Not plants.”

That was the first conclusion he reached after finishing his scan of the first corpse.

The biomass composition of these plant-people looked highly similar to that of plants.

Cellulose cell walls, chloroplasts, xylem vessels, all present and correct.

And yet inside their cell nuclei sat a complete animal nervous signal transmission system.

Beneath that surface layer that looked like bark hid an extremely fine, extremely complex neural network.

Its complexity ran far beyond that of an ordinary plant.

It was even a great deal higher than that of many lower animals.

Rather than a plant that had acquired the ability to move, it was better described as an animal capable of perfectly mimicking a plant.

Jie Ming scanned deeper.

Very soon, he discovered an even more astonishing fact.

Inside every plant-person corpse there remained a great quantity of extremely tiny independent ganglia.

These ganglia were not the plant-person’s own central nervous system.

They belonged to another, smaller unit of life.

He raised the precision of the scan and found extremely fine synaptic connections between those ganglia.

And then, piece by piece, a complete structure assembled itself for him.

“Interesting… what a peculiar construction of life.”

Every individual plant-person was in fact a collective of a species, tens of thousands of tiny organisms linked to one another through neural synapses and jointly constituting the whole.

These tiny organisms had each differentiated into different functions.

Some handled the perception of light, some the conduction of nutrients, some the coordination of movement, some the recording of information.

And the whole population manipulated the plant-person’s body together through a neural signaling mechanism resembling a democratic vote.

The reason Jie Ming could confirm that these tiny organisms were individuals and not some special kind of cell was that, by his own computation of their nervous systems, these tiny individual organisms ought to be capable of thought as well.

The thinking of these tiny individuals was more transparent to one another than a human’s, and they could even manage a degree of cooperative thought. So a plant-person’s intelligence came not from any single brain but from the collective intelligence of the whole population.

The larger the population and the tighter the connections, the higher the plant-person’s intelligence.

A flicker of surprise crossed Jie Ming’s eyes.

“What a special life form. So rather than call these plant-people single individuals, it would be better to call each of them a collective of a species.” Which meant their humanoid outward shape was not the result of natural evolution at all.

The body structure of these plant-people was plastic. Their form depended on the external neural signal templates they came into contact with.

And while these plant-people were being enslaved by the octopus-men, they had also been learning the octopus-men’s “template.”

So without anyone noticing, they had simulated the octopus-men’s humanoid outline.

Jie Ming even found, inside one set of remains, a neural structure resembling that of the octopus-men.

Which showed that they were not merely imitating the octopus-men’s appearance. They were, in their own way, “becoming” octopus-men.

It was a distortion of unconscious convergence.

After that, Jie Ming turned his attention to the “gift” of the plant-people that the octopus-men prized above all else.

That ability to extract life energy, which the octopus-men regarded as a heaven-sent thing, was in fact not an innate gift of the plant-people as a species at all. Inside one relatively well-preserved corpse, Jie Ming found a miniature biochemical reaction chamber of a delicacy that beggared belief. It was a miniature factory constituted out of specialized ganglia drawn from the population.

It could synthesize the free energy in the air and the trace elements in the soil into highly concentrated life energy.

And this life energy was, to the plant-people themselves, nothing more than the basic nutrient that sustained the population’s vitality.

The equivalent of the basic metabolism every living thing carries out.

The only reason the octopus-men treated it as a treasure was that the output of a plant-person population’s basic metabolism ran far beyond that of ordinary organisms. They had to sustain the vital activity of tens of thousands of population members, so of course their metabolic volume was not on the same order of magnitude.

Collect that metabolic volume, and in the octopus-men’s eyes it became an “extraordinary innate gift.”

The octopus-men believed they were mining a natural ore deposit.

In reality, they had all along been using a laughably primitive method of collection to try to ladle a byproduct out of a precision factory.

Jie Ming clicked his tongue in wonder.

The level of this plane’s biological civilization was unexpectedly high, and its exquisite mastery of the organism itself had already approached something scarcely conceivable. It could evolve a collective population intelligence, could develop itself into any form at will, could even build a miniature biochemical reaction chamber inside its own body.

If a biological civilization like this were allowed to develop normally in the Endless Chaotic Void, its ceiling would be beyond estimation.

Unfortunately, the octopus-men had used the crudest, simplest, most unreasoning method there was to break its evolutionary process off by force.

Jie Ming stopped in front of a relatively intact plant-person corpse, took a rack of sampling tubes out of his inner world, and with gentle, steady movements extracted samples of some living ganglia.

As long as these samples were kept in a suitable nutrient solution, they could go on sustaining the population’s vitality outside a body.

The Infernal Sulfur Plane had plenty of empty land now.

And after merging with the Tentacle Tree Plane, there were a great many undeveloped planets besides. It was entirely possible to set aside a few suitable planets for the plant-people and let them breed and rebuild their populations.

The research value of a biological civilization like this was extremely high.

Whether as a supplementary source of faith for the Incense Fire Divine Dao or as a gene bank for biological modification technology, it was worth putting resources into cultivating. Just then, the light of a teleportation array lit up behind him.

A Black Giant priest strode out, the vertical mouth on its chest opening and closing slightly, a low, respectful vibration sounding at once:

“Master, word has come from the Tentacle Tree Civilization’s scouts.”

Jie Ming turned his head, curious. “Have they found something?”

“Yes. They have found an octopus-man factory. It appears to be their core facility on this plane.”