The three decided to start searching from the nearest crash site.
The first crash site was in the nearby primeval jungle. The Data Terminal could be said to have chosen a pretty good landing site. The three made a rough cleanup of the camp, leaving all the luggage that was difficult to carry beneath the huge boulder. Each of them took only the necessary food and water before entering that alien jungle, which hid who knew what secrets. They did not need to bring tools for clearing a path—the three superhumans had more than enough strength to split mountains and shatter rocks.
The plants on this planet were all far larger and more spectacular than the ones Hao Ren had seen on Earth. Trees, shrubs, and grass were all the same. The most common plants in the jungle were enormous trees of uniform thickness from top to bottom. Their trunks were often at least as thick as what two or three people could encircle together, with no branches from the ground up to a height of ten meters. Above that, they began to split into sturdy branches arranged in distinct, symmetrical layers. Their leaves were broad and dense, and a single giant tree could cover a patch of sky more than ten meters across. Deep-green vines also grew around their dark-brown trunks. Every one of these giant trees had vines wrapped around its trunk, which was truly astonishing. They must have formed some extremely close symbiotic relationship, to the point that individuals incapable of symbiosis had been naturally eliminated.
The air in the jungle seemed to contain more oxygen. The towering trees around them, along with the large bushes they passed, seemed to be producing oxygen at an efficiency far beyond that of Earth's plants. Their physiological structures must have