After seeing those reliefs in the city ruins, Hao Ren knew that the planet's native civilization had carried out a massive self-rescue operation in its final moments. They had launched enormous spaceships to send part of their "kindling" into space. Although the reliefs contained no subsequent records of the operation, they at least offered one possibility: some of the humans on this planet had probably escaped alive.
So his suspicion was not unfounded either: the aircraft they had seen during the day might not have come from the planet's surface.
"I think the Landlord has a point." As an imaginative literary enthusiast, Lily was the first to voice her support. "The planet's surface is the Firstborn's home turf. Staying on the surface and fighting the Firstborn hand-to-hand is basically suicide. So compared to the human resistance forces that stayed behind, I think the 'kindling' launched into space had a clearly higher chance of survival."
"To be honest, even an ark launched into space... might not have survived," Nangong Sanba said with a smack of his lips. "The Firstborn is capable of fighting in space, and spaceships are always more fragile than ground fortresses. Maybe the people launched into the sky back then never escaped at all. The resistance forces that stayed on the surface might instead have found the Firstborn's neural activity patterns and built shelters or something similar."
"Both possibilities exist. We won't be able to draw a conclusion until we've investigated further." Hao Ren shook his head. "In any case, survivors definitely exist, and they're still trying to drive back the tentacles on the surface even today... Nolan, do you have any spare probes?"
"We have plenty of probes in storage. I brought a lot of those little things. But right now, we only have models designed for