Famu swam slowly back to his den.
His thick body silently pushed a path through the tangled eelgrass and watermilfoil, startling several crabs burrowing in the silt.
This was Famu's refuge.
It was filled with aquatic plants, silt, and a few scattered rocks.
Two massive blocks of amphibolite, collapsed with age, leaned against each other, opening a crevice in the dim lakebed. Behind the crevice was an underwater entrance, with enough room inside the rock for Famu to coil up.
Even judged by the exacting standards of a human, it was an excellent hiding place. Famu had sheltered here as a juvenile, claiming the swamp as his own bit by bit.
Famu swam inside. The passage through the rock first descended for a dozen meters or so, then turned upward, finally leading to a spacious Stalagmite Hall, a small karst cave formed by geological shifts and slowly eroded by rainwater.
Most of the floor inside was covered in yellow silt. The water in the den was level with the swamp, and the cave was not completely sealed off, with air vents connecting it to the outside. Judging by the distance he had swum, Famu estimated that the Stalagmite Hall lay inside the small island at the center of the swamp, and that he had risen farther than he had descended.
His scales scraped against the silt as Famu coiled up. He was about to enjoy a sleep on a full stomach, but the flesh beneath his scales itched unbearably.
He didn't have to guess. It was those damned parasites.
Famu sighed inwardly, then wrapped himself around a stalactite and rubbed his scales against it to relieve the itch.
What snake didn't have parasites like these? Most were a very common kind of snake parasite. Famu knew these little things he loathed were trying to find the thinnest part of the keratin layer between his scales, then burrow in and feast on his flesh and blood.
Parasites were a normal part of life for a wild python, but for Famu they were sheer torment.
Fortunately, the itch passed as quickly as it came. After rubbing against the stalactite for a while, Famu felt much better and coiled up again. His slightly bulging belly had already flattened; the half-ton Long-snouted Tapir had been partially digested by the Typhon's stomach acid.
This was the metabolic miracle that set Typhons above the order Squamata.
After consuming such an enormous mass of fat and bone, an ordinary reticulated python or anaconda would undergo compensatory enlargement of its internal organs and enter a low-energy dormant period lasting weeks or even months, surviving by digesting its meal with enzymes at an extremely slow rate.
But Typhons were different.
A Typhon's stomach was like a furnace of boiling, powerful acid. Even flint or quartz, with their high concentrations of silicon dioxide, would be reduced to nothing but residue inside it. Of course, rocks had little nutritional value, as Famu had found when he tried eating them. Plants, on the other hand, provided a little nourishment, so he could gnaw on turf if he was truly starving.
That digestive ability was downright monstrous.
So what did this ability to dissolve inorganic matter bring with it?
Hunger, and the enormous quantities of food needed to survive.
Ever since Famu had begun swimming through this swamp, he had worried about food.
At first he ate small fish, then small rodents. A month later, he moved on to the swamp's large fish and the young of land-dwelling ungulates. By the half-year mark, Famu had begun to dominate the swamp. He hunted down the giant toothed fish that had once been its reigning animals one by one, turning them into meals. He no longer limited himself to young land animals either; as long as he could drag one into the swamp, there was always a way to eat it.
Hunger drove Famu to hunt ceaselessly, and his territory gradually expanded as he hunted, from one corner of the swamp to the entire wetland. Creatures in the water and even on land all feared him.
Under normal circumstances, no matter how brief a creature's juvenile stage was, it shouldn't have reached this point in just one year, even if Famu was a Typhon.
Were Typhons supposed to grow this fast?
Famu knew very little about the Typhon species. These great snakes still held many secrets.
Perhaps, once his territory expanded far enough, Famu would meet another Typhon, and many of his questions could then be answered by comparison.
But not now.
Right now, he had something else to deal with.
Something left behind by humanity.
The great black snake coiled up, his pale eyes losing focus as he sank into deep dormancy.
As his consciousness sank into darkness, points of light appeared within it, branching like twigs at their edges until they formed a giant tree with a spiraling trunk.
A spiral tree diagram.
The icon of the Life Scepter System, the pinnacle of the former human civilization.
Before the Scepter System was born, humanity had believed it had conquered the world.
Humans had deciphered the vast majority of the genetic code, created self-repairing biomaterials, and used artificial cell factories to produce organs, consigning once-incurable diseases to history. They had made photosynthesis more efficient in plants and turned microorganisms into tools for producing energy and materials. Breakthroughs in gravity control and high-density materials had allowed city-sized space stations to stand in low Earth orbit like stars. Even interstellar voyages across the Solar System were no longer a mirage.
Back then, humanity had believed.
Earth was already too small; the sea of stars was the future.
That was until an anomalous signal came from deep within the Antarctic ice sheet.
After drilling through more than five thousand meters of ice, the Helios Geological Research Station in Antarctica detected an unknown stream of high-energy particles. At first, researchers thought it was merely an ordinary geothermal anomaly released from within the Earth, until three months later, when geological stations across the world detected the same phenomenon simultaneously.
Earth was releasing an entirely new form of energy.
It came from deep within the strata, and humanity named this force "Earth Vein Energy."
The initial experiments posed no danger, but by the time the second batch of test subjects was brought in, the first batch of laboratory animals exposed to the samples all began to show abnormalities. Their cell proliferation rates spiraled out of control, their gene expression underwent numerous unknown changes, and some life-forms gained unprecedented adaptive abilities.
The others... simply collapsed.
The individuals whose genes collapsed completely included humans.
People soon realized that Earth was changing, and that humanity was the species least able to adapt to change on the planet.
Predictive models showed that Earth Vein Energy would cover the global biosphere in twenty years.
When that happened, humanity would no longer be able to survive on Earth.
For continuity, for survival.
The Scepter System was born.
As far as Famu knew, there were nine Scepters in the Scepter System, covering every field human civilization needed.
But he knew the functions of only two.
The first was the "Atmosphere Scepter," which monitored and intervened in global weather around the clock, even forcibly slowing the spread of Earth Vein Energy by artificially constructing a particle barrier in the stratosphere. Famu knew about it because weather forecasts sometimes reported which climate effects came from the Atmosphere Scepter System.
The second was the "Staff of Life." It preserved the gene bank and verified the adaptability of human modifications, compressing the evolution of radiation resistance and high-energy adaptability, which would have taken tens of millions of years in nature, into the brief span of an individual human life. Famu had once been a student of the person in charge of that research institution, and he knew how incredible the data processed by the Staff of Life was.
It was nothing like something humans could master.
These supercomputers were described as the power of gods. At a moment when humanity faced life or death, it had entered domains that only the gods of myth would venture into.
They created life out of nothing, rewrote genetic sequences, controlled evolution, and monitored and altered weather on a global scale. That was why they were called the "Scepter System," meaning "the scepters of gods."
These supercomputers ran day and night for a single purpose: to find a way for humanity to adapt to the new Earth and preserve civilization.
One look at this savage rainforest was enough to tell what the final result had been.
Famu stared at the tree. This diagram had been with him ever since he opened his eyes in this wild rainforest.
Beneath the spiral pattern was a tangle of roots.
Golden points of light drifted over their surface, like tiny golden waves breaking against stubborn black stone.
At first, there had been no points of light at all. When Famu caught his first prey, the first glimmer appeared on the roots. Then Famu grew bigger and bigger and came to rule the entire swamp. Fish, rodents, mammals, ungulates—he had filled his belly with everything there was to eat, including some crustaceans he would never have put on his menu.
The life of the entire swamp had been swallowed into his belly, becoming part of this tree.
The golden lights struck against the darkness.
They covered only a tenth of it now.
The Long-snouted Tapir had been rich in nutrients, and the lights had visibly grown a little. Famu was pleased.
The tree was growing alongside him. If he was humanity's continuation, then the tree was proof of its civilization.