Chapter 1661 Contact

It was not difficult to find a path leading to the Mother's brain core—in fact, the brain core was definitely near the earth's core, as long as one found the right direction and dug all the way down. Then, by scanning the intricate network of nerve lines deep underground, the brain core could be easily located.

However, even though this matter was theoretically simple, Hao Ren still had to execute the entire operation cautiously.

The Mother of this planet had fallen into a state of brain death, but that did not mean it was no longer a threat. Those tentacles that had the function of protecting the main body and eliminating foreign intrusions could still act autonomously even without the control of the brain core. They would automatically destroy threatening targets within their range and block the passage to the depths of the earth's core. If it were not for this, the war for the Seedlings to reclaim their homeworld would not have been so fierce and difficult.

Those intricate defensive tentacles were only one of the difficulties. The group also had to face the increasingly bizarre environment as they went deeper into the planet.

A planet parasitized by a Mother was different from ordinary planets. The mere existence of this unprecedentedly enormous mythical creature within the planet was enough to cause the entire planet's interior to mutate. From the earth's crust downwards, the deeper one went, the more bizarre and strange the environment within the celestial body would become. The laws of physics would often be distorted, and even large-scale supernatural areas would appear. Where the tentacles of the Mother intertwined, chaotic force fields were everywhere, and energy surges replaced the magma surges deep underground. Sometimes, even the nightmare would erode reality—this phenomenon was most common near the nerve nodes of the Mother.

After all, what was growing deep within this planet was not some juvenile, but a truly mature Mother, and its "brain" was out of control. Brain death greatly weakened the Mother's external aggressiveness, but it made the inside of its body even more dangerous.

Hao Ren had come into contact with more than one Mother, so he naturally knew something about the various characteristics of this mythical creature. Based on experience, he first needed to determine the distribution pattern of the Mother's main tentacles from the shallow stratigraphic scanning data and find a suitable point of entry.

This part of the data was not difficult to obtain. In the days when Nolan was camped on the surface, she had roughly scanned the earth's crust data of the entire planet by releasing probes. She also grasped the approximate situation of each tentacle of the Mother exposed on the surface. After compiling the data, Hao Ren discovered several particularly conspicuous "fissures" on the planet's crust.

Those fissures almost ran through several major continents and oceans. Although they had "healed" on the surface and were covered by thick rocks, soil, seawater, and vegetation, their interiors were still in a fractured state. In the holographic image, these shadows representing fault zones were as glaring as the planet's "dark wounds."

This unnatural situation could not possibly be caused by normal geological changes.

Hao Ren thought of something that N-4 mentioned—the meteor shower that changed everything. Before the meteor shower that caused the Mother's brain death, the Mother had once opened up the earth's crust. Now it seemed that the damage suffered by the Mother during that meteor bombardment was more serious than expected, so much so that it had not been able to completely close these "openings" that had cracked on the planet.

Everyone unanimously decided to look for suitable breakthroughs in these fissures: no matter how powerful a creature was, its unhealed wounds were bound to be the weakest point that could be broken through.

The Petrified Turtle Rock was silently traveling within the planet's atmosphere. She was flying over a fissure, using her shipboard radar system to detect the rock structure deep in the earth. Hao Ren stood on the bridge, watching the scenery from the external monitor while paying attention to the crust scanning images that Nolan was transmitting in real time.

A shadow suddenly appearing in the clouds caught his attention.

"What's that?" Lily had also been curiously watching the scenery, so she discovered the abnormality behind the clouds at the same time as Hao Ren and immediately shouted.

"A falling object from outer space, no threat, and not in our flight path." Nolan said casually. She was now fully shielded, with brand-new armor, and a falling object from outer space would not attract her attention at all.

But the others all focused their attention on the behemoth that was gradually breaking through the clouds and falling to the earth.

It was a huge, round, pancake-shaped object with a thick outer edge and an internal support structure built of steel. Around it, twelve solemn black cubes guarded the entire structure like silent sentinels—it was actually the fortress that should have been on the surface of the moon.

The thick clouds were torn apart from the middle, falling around the fortress in wisps and quickly evaporating in the high heat. The fortress obviously did not decelerate effectively when entering the atmosphere—its entire body was wrapped in a layer of hot red light. The high-speed friction and violent vibration when breaking through the atmosphere damaged its ring wall and main beams. This ancient building (or spaceship) gradually began to disintegrate as it approached the earth. The first to fall off were the external armors on the ring wall. Then its main servers began to catch fire and burn one after another, exploding into conspicuous giant fireballs in the air. Metal debris rained down on the earth…

Lily exclaimed when she saw this scene, "Isn't that the fortress! What does the mainframe want to do?"

"The mainframe has already shut down. Now it's the automatic program he left behind that's controlling this fortress," the data terminal said quickly. "It turns out that the vibration we experienced when leaving the fortress was not a self-destruct program… it was preparing to take off!"

The fortress was bound to be slower than Nolan, so it was only now that the fortress had finally flown here after Hao Ren and his party had been active on the homeworld.

Under everyone's shocked gaze, the fortress, as huge as a city, slowly fell towards the end of the horizon, falling apart in the process. Of course, the Mother's tentacles on the planet's surface would not turn a blind eye to this. It regarded the "slow-moving" falling object in the sky as another close-range bombardment. Jagged "ridges" rapidly rose on the surface, and thick, ink-green tentacles broke out of the earth. Immediately afterwards, invisible force fields and visible high-energy beams burst out from the surface of the tentacles, smashing head-on at the fortress in the sky.

Hao Ren had vaguely guessed the fortress's intentions. He gently tapped the console panel, "Cover it—let the drones come down to help too."

The high-energy beams emitted by the Mother bombarded the surface of the fortress, instantly making this fortress, which had already been severely damaged during the process of breaking through the atmosphere, even more riddled with holes. The fortress's remaining repulsive shields only flashed a few times before declaring extinguished. Its ring wall even split directly into three pieces, and several server arrays fell off the main body, falling towards the homeworld's lush green earth.

The fortress's spoke-like main beams also gradually began to break, but it still made a final counterattack. Countless turrets installed on the inner wall of the fortress roared at the same time. Under the control of the predetermined program, these weapons, which had been patiently prepared for thousands of years, bombarded all their energy and ammunition on the planet-devourer's tentacles, causing a grand explosion that even shook half of the continent.

Such a counterattack seemed to "anger" the tentacles on the surface. More branching tentacles surged out of the cracks in the earth, and the fortress was instantly exposed to several times the anti-aircraft firepower.

But at this time, the firepower cover from the Petrified Turtle Rock and the drone swarm finally arrived in time.

The powerful superior firepower instantly suppressed the Mother's counterattack, while the fortress continued to fall along the predetermined trajectory. About one-tenth of the Mother's anti-aircraft firepower broke through the drone swarm's blockade and still firmly carried out interception attacks on the fortress—the latter had no means of counterattack or defense at this moment, so it could only use its structure to withstand these merciless artillery fires.

Countless wreckage fragments fell off its surface, and thick armor and buffer structures were firmly protecting the core of the Palace of Ending.

Finally, its last piece of structure also collapsed—at this moment, the fortress could no longer be called a fortress, it was only a twisted wreck burning with flames and dragging thick black smoke, as well as metal fragments scattered all over the sky.

But in that wreckage smoking with black smoke, a light flashed by. The twisted metal compartment—which was originally a circular hall—exploded from the middle. Hao Ren clearly saw that a transparent glass container was thrown out of the wreckage.

The huge container, like a test tube, miraculously remained intact until it exploded only a few hundred meters above the ground, and large masses of flesh and blood tissue scattered to the earth like falling flowers.

At this height, the Mother had no time to intercept it no matter what, so the exiled ones, who had been away from their homeland for nearly ten thousand years, finally fulfilled the long-cherished wish of countless generations—they were home.

In the end, the mainframe finally completed its mission.

Hao Ren stood quietly on the bridge, watching a stubborn and ancient artificial intelligence complete his farewell battle in this way. The drone swarm had withdrawn from the battle according to the order. After the last piece of the fortress was smashed into pieces by the tentacles in mid-air, the world finally became quiet again.

Only the scorched earth and the dried-up sky could prove what had happened here.

"Terminal, record this. Dream Plane civilization, I'll let you draft the number. On the 312th day of the New Empire Calendar 10090, the main body replacement was completed. The original humans in this area are extinct. This civilization is inherited by the descendants of humans—the Seedlings. Mark the state of this civilization as extant."

"Recorded."

"Boss, found the best entry point," Nolan's voice came from all directions. "We have flown over a large fissure. The battle just now caused the Mother's tentacles to move violently, which happened to tear this place apart again. In addition, a large number of tentacles were damaged in the battle, and this has become the Mother's weakest point of defense."

The topographic scanning data of the surrounding area appeared on the holographic projection in the center of the bridge. A huge rift valley was conspicuously marked, not far from the crash site of the last batch of fortress wreckage.

Hao Ren nodded, "Let the drone swarm lead the way. We'll go down from this place."