At the very beginning of the story, there was an utterly ordinary world, an utterly ordinary planet, and an utterly ordinary beginning.
It was a tiny dot in the endless starry sky, a speck of dust in the universe. Like every planet where life had arisen, fortune favored this solid world of rock, metal, and sulfur-rich minerals. After a solar storm swept across its land, charged particles and powerful magnetic fields penetrated the surface strata, and the first silicon-sulfur macromolecule capable of self-replication was assembled by chance in a hot spring near the planet's surface. This silicon-sulfur macromolecule became the most complex compound the planet had ever known, and the beginning of the entire story—it luckily survived the changes in the hot spring's composition, luckily and precisely completed its first replication, and luckily remained stable through shifts in the spring's temperature. Through slow "reproduction" driven entirely by chance, it took tens of millions of years to blanket the rocky floor of the hot spring before gradually spreading outward. It slowly aggregated, mutated, and fused with other surrounding substances or other mutated macromolecules. Symbiosis, conflict, compromise—the seeds of life took root and sprouted. After hundreds of millions of years of simple replication, the first organism that could be called a "cell" finally evolved from that endlessly replicating silicon-sulfur soup.
The primitive biosphere of the home planet began underground.
Several hundred million years later, these cells, encased in polymeric sulfides, slowly "learned" how to join with other cells, forming more complex organisms better suited to survival and migration. For the first time, they roamed freely through the dark geothermal soup.
The original underground hot springs had nearly vanished with the passage of time, but the home planet's underground "water" system formed a web. Having learned to move freely, the ancient organisms swam