They were enormous tentacles that wound across the land like mountain ranges.
Hao Ren had lost count of how many planets in the Dream Plane he had seen those terrifying things on. The first time had been underground on Horleta. Back then, they had only been a few exposed offshoot roots of what could be called a "juvenile" Firstborn, yet they had still given everyone quite a scare. But afterward, more and more of those things were discovered, until they covered nearly every ecological planet in the entire Dream Plane—even former ecological planets that had already died completely. As the drone swarms expanded ceaselessly across the universe, reports of Firstborn traces arrived before Hao Ren every day like snowflakes. These powerful creatures, which lived inside planets and had been designed to maintain their ecosystems, had once been the caretakers and gardeners of every race in the Dream Plane. Now, they had become the nightmare of the universe.
Who would have thought that here, on this unknown and mysterious planet, he would see those heart-stopping tentacles again?
The tentacle grew in an arc around the edge of the forest. Its mountain-sized body formed a natural boundary, and the forest came to an abrupt stop before it, as though cowed by the majesty of that ancient creature. The Data Terminal quickly magnified the details in the image, allowing Hao Ren to see that the tentacle had actually grown out of a canyon before spreading across the surface for several hundred kilometers and plunging back underground. Many branching structures grew from the main tentacle. Quite a few extended deep into the forest and had already grown together with it. Their ends reached toward the sky, taking the shape of trees. They looked no different from the ordinary giant trees in the forest.
A