Blue-Green Algae

Blue-Green Algae

Zhang Heng and Bai Qing had originally assumed there would be a lot of information in that burst of radio radiation.

In the end, however, they had only gotten a single word. Lin Sisi had probably edited it down, extracting only the part that represented the final answer.

—blue-green algae.

"This is... blue-green algae?" Bai Qing searched through the vocabulary in her head before finding the answer.

"I know why those three children arranged to meet by the river at night." Zhang Heng sighed. "They were collecting blue-green algae from the riverbank."

Blue-green algae were common in everyday life. You could find those green patches on practically any body of water. Some varieties could cause eutrophication-driven red tides in seawater and algal blooms in lakes after contamination by elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus, severely harming fisheries and aquaculture. Yet few people knew that blue-green algae had existed for 3.5 billion years and were the oldest organisms on Earth.

"Didn't you say that thing beneath Warehouse No. 3 couldn't be dealt with even using a rocket launcher? What use could blue-green algae possibly have?"

"I don't know," Zhang Heng said. After thinking for a moment, he added, "My preliminary guess is that it has something to do with that thing's replication ability. We now know that the thing beneath Warehouse No. 3 produces two different kinds of cicada pupae. The smaller ones produce the shadows in the Fourth Brain, while the larger ones produce replacement targets. But those targets probably can't be cultivated at will. It needs to collect samples first, perhaps hair or blood. It could replicate dinosaurs during the Cretaceous Period and humans in modern times... but what about ancient and unusual prokaryotes like blue-green algae? Unfortunately, we don't have time to verify this guess.

Let's