Chapter 358: Void Egg
Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Wet, hot, smelly, and dark were the most intuitive sensations in the pit.
Unlike the surrounding corpses, the artificial people miners who had come back from the dead were here to detect the secrets in the pit.
He wanted to know if the underground of this planet was like what the dead foreman had said. It was the egg of some lifeform.
The pit was filled with thick toxic gas. Ordinary lifeforms had to wear heavy protective suits to work here. This was undoubtedly an unnecessary expense for the company. It was no wonder that all the people working in such a place were corpses.
Even so, a corpse exposed to such toxic gas would quickly decay and a large area of muscle tissue would fall off. It wouldn’t be dry for long.
However, this toxic gas did not affect the miner who had become an artificial form lifeform. His skin only looked like skin, but in fact, it was already a super material that should be cla.s.sified as military protection level in terms of both physical and chemical properties.
His life activities were all carried out in his body, and his interaction with the outside world was zero. He did not have to worry about the toxic gas entering his body at all.
In fact, other than his brain, his body was already a mechanical creation. If Li Wenyuan hadn’t been worried that replacing his brain and turning him into a complete mechanical life would cause him to have cognitive impairments, the current miner would have been a synthetic humanoid and not an artificial person.
The toxic gas and darkness had no effect on the miner. With the help of the mechanical eye, the pit was equivalent to daytime. He followed the corpses and probed the interior.
He discovered that the interior wall of the pit was very smooth, probably the result of mechanical cutting. The deeper he went into the pit, the higher the temperature and concentration of toxic gas. After traveling for about ten kilometers, he reached the end.
From here onwards, it was no longer a straight road, but a pitch-black cliff that was almost at a 90-degree angle from the road. Even with his eyesight, he could not see the bottom.
This distance made him a little puzzled. Although this distance was not short, it was still too shallow for the average thickness of the planet’s crust of more than 30 kilometers, not to mention the thousand-kilometer-wide mantle.
However, this seemed to be the end of the corpse’s journey. They were carrying trash that weighed more than ten times their body weight. Then, they threw it down the cliff and mechanically turned around to leave.
During this process, some corpses whose muscles were about to rot would not be able to withstand the tossing motion. As they approached the cliff, their bodies would fall into the bottomless abyss.
This scene disgusted the miner from the bottom of his heart.
He had already realized that this was originally his ending. Moreover, it was not only him. Everyone around him might end up like this.
“Can’t we find peace even if we die? We worked for the company for our entire lives when we were alive, and we have to work for our entire lives after we die. Even the ownership of the corpse doesn’t belong to us. What else do we have?”
When he was living in a daze, he had never thought about these problems. The heavy life made him not have the mood to think at all. He repeated every day to calculate how to live.
In fact, the company would give them a certain level of education, especially the spirit of the contract. The company emphasized that their ancestors owed the company about five million years of debt, and calculated in detail how much time each person would have to work each day and how many generations they would have to work after death to pay off the debt.
And once someone failed to complete the full working hours while alive, they would be considered to have violated the contract and their debt would increase.
As a result, all of them worked hard and paid close attention to the health of each of their companions. When necessary, they even pooled money to extend the lives of those who had not worked for a long time. This was the case for the miners themselves.
Originally, he thought that it was only natural because they owed a debt, so they should pay it. This was a matter of course.
However, after living with the a.s.similation Fighters for a period of time, the miners knew that this was just a way for the companies to squeeze them dry.
All their knowledge was based on business, but after seeing the real world, he realized that what they thought was just what business wanted them to think.
In the end, he returned here. He felt that there must be someone else in this sealed tower who yearned for the stars as much as he.
Hence, looking at the bottomless cliff, he jumped down without hesitation.
The wind whistled in his ears, and the surrounding temperature increased as the distance decreased. The planet’s core seemed to be still heating the rocks, but the miner felt that something was wrong.
It was not because the temperature was too high, but because the temperature had risen too low.
The planet’s interior would produce a large amount of heat energy due to the compression of gravity and the decay of radioactive elements. Some planets’ core temperature was even higher than the surface of a star.
He had descended to this distance. Logically speaking, he should have reached a temperature that was enough to form lava, but the rocks here were still solid, and he was still quite far from their melting point.
“It’s as if something has absorbed all the heat…” He thought of the terrifying lifeform that seemed to be hiding underground that the dead foreman had mentioned. He immediately perked up and focused on testing the various parameters. Soon after, he discovered something abnormal.
That was the poisonous gas that permeated this place. It did not seem to be produced by the planet itself.
The molecular chain of this poisonous gas was extremely complicated, causing it to be difficult to deal with. It was obvious that it was synthesized. As for whether it was synthesized or produced by some lifeform…
The miner felt that he should have found the answer.
The descent was hampered by a rancid sea of bodies and litter that was the focus of the descent from the cliff.
Corpses and trash continued to fall from the sky, mixing with the rotting sea.
At this moment, the miner had already activated the anti-gravity system in his body, allowing him to float above the sea. Waves of poisonous gas flowed out of the sea, looking like the toxic gas evolved from this rotten sea.
However, the scanning equipment in the miner’s body had already detected the reaction of a huge lifeform through the layers of acc.u.mulation.
From where he was, he could only detect a corner of this lifeform. Due to the suspected sh.e.l.l of some kind of cuticle, the detection wave could not go deeper.
However, the miner had confirmed that the other party was a
high-temperature energy source. Not only that, but it also seemed to have violated the laws of thermodynamics and was maintaining a temperature far higher than the surrounding matter to absorb energy from the outside world.
Obviously, the abnormally low temperature in the depths of the mantle was caused by this lifeform. The heat in the core seemed to be being absorbed by it, and the rotten sea floating on its sh.e.l.l was just an addition to it. Or rather, this lifeform only needed some kind of substance in the sea.
What gave it life was the energy of the planet itself.
“Dong—”
Suddenly, the miner seemed to hear a dull heartbeat coming from deep underground, which made his mechanical core involuntarily jump.
The lifeform was still alive, but it was still in a deep sleep. It would take a long time for him to hear the second heartbeat.
Still, it was enough to get him away from here. He’d completed another section of his mission progress, and now he was sure the dead foreman was telling the truth.
The Servant Megacorp was indeed raising some kind of giant lifeform hidden in the planet’s core. He needed to send this news and related information back.
However, before he left, he looked around at the rancid sea again. Corpses and trash rose and fell with the bubbles. There were especially many things with the logo of the post-mortem employment center, which was especially eye-catching.
After thinking about where this place was, the miner activated his anti-gravity system and continued to fly upward, leaving behind the bubbling sea of decay and the heartbeat that only sounded again after a long time.
Not long after, Li Wenyuan, who was still in the Spiral Galaxy Alpha, received a message from the a.s.similation Fighters.
One of their infiltrators confirmed the existence of an anti-thermodynamic lifeform and believed that it was the creature fed by the servant enterprise mentioned in the previous news.
Although it could not be ruled out that there was a mistake with the scanning equipment, the a.s.similation Fighters thought about it and decided to name it an anti-thermodynamic lifeform.
This was because the egg of this life did not naturally obey the second law of thermodynamics with their current observations.
To be precise, this lifeform would not spontaneously transmit energy to the outside world. In the egg state, the surrounding heat would continue to transmit to the higher-temperature egg, but the egg itself would not transmit heat to the colder outside world.
At first, they thought that there was a mistake in the test, but after more field inspections, they finally confirmed that the egg was not actively absorbing heat. It was indeed the surrounding heat that was actively transmitting to the egg-
It was like an object with a reverse property. It was clearly very hot, but it was the low-temperature one in the thermal system, causing heat to pa.s.s to them spontaneously.
In theory, the body temperature of such a life could reach infinity.
Such magical lifeforms naturally attracted Li Wenyuan’s attention. Even the construction of the Pillar of Creation slowed down a little.
While he was thinking about what was going on, the queen of Presolin also found him and made him understand what kind of lifeforms they were.
“…h.e.l.lo, esteemed Administrator… We’re very uneasy… because we sensed the aura of a former Hunter…”
“Hunter?” Li Wenyuan immediately recalled his experience in Presolin. This group of outer s.p.a.ce refugees had been chased here by a civilization they called Hunters.
At the same time, he connected it to what had happened recently.
“Could it be that the Servant Megacorp is loyal to the Hunter? That terrifying civilization refers to the Hunter?”
Therefore, he directly told Presolin about the discovery of the a.s.similation Fighters, making this queen, who had once been plagued by insects, reveal a human-like expression of fear.
“Yes, yes… That’s the Void Egg. A type of Void Beast will be born inside—Void Evil. They are the hounds of the Hunter….”