Guided by Lily's keen nose, Hao Ren found the first piece of the crashed aircraft.
It was a large, twisted metal plate and an ellipsoidal equipment compartment whose purpose was impossible to identify. They were tangled together with many scorched cables and tubes, giving off a pungent burnt smell. Although the high temperature on the wreckage had faded after a day and a night of cooling, it had clearly endured a violent explosion and fire. Its outer shell had nearly melted.
The fragment, a good five or six meters long, had fallen between two enormous broadleaf trees. Its impact had created a crater roughly ten meters in radius. The two trees at the crater's edge were in completely different states. One had been killed by the heat and shock wave; its trunk had snapped in half, and its crown had been burned down to a few charred branches. The other, however, was lush and vibrant, still standing straight at the crater's edge. Even its branches and green leaves were full of life, as though they had only just grown.
There was no doubt that the second tree had grown from a thin offshoot of the Firstborn's tentacle after it emerged from beneath the surface. It was a neural point the enormous, terrifying creature inside the planet used to sense the outside world. Standing at the edge of the crater, Hao Ren knew he had already landed in the Firstborn's eye.
But as Zorm had said, once a Firstborn matured—usually defined as being able to extend its tentacles from the planetary core to any point on the surface—its perception changed somewhat. The "microscopic organisms" around its tentacles no longer attracted its attention unless they produced an energy reaction powerful enough to damage the main tentacle or emitted some special, stimulating, or