Nolan was temporarily unable to take off, and the drone swarm's urban infrastructure work had yet to reach this Barbaric Planet. Hao Ren and the others therefore had no advantage in space, but being unable to take off did not mean they could do nothing. Under the scans of thousands of atmospheric probes and Nolan's own powerful antenna arrays, massive amounts of information were gathered. Hao Ren still obtained a great deal of intelligence about the planet.
The Firstborn's "brain core offline" status was basically an established fact. Whether the deeper cause was a pathological change in his brain core, the dispersal of his consciousness, or some powerful neural suppression factor at work—such as an absurdly powerful lullaby generator poking directly at his neural system—in short, all the Firstborn tissue on this planet had definitively lost unified control. After collecting the behavioral patterns of tentacles across the planet's surface and scanning the neural pulse patterns beneath the crust, Nolan confirmed that the Firstborn now retained only the most basic conditioned reflexes and self-defense abilities. It would counterattack when attacked, activate emergency regeneration when subjected to obvious damage, and alter its physiological structure when the environment changed, but all these changes were completed by the tentacles through their own functions. This completely explained why the survivor resistance army's bombardments had provoked only the Firstborn's "limited counterattacks" rather than any devastating retaliation.
On the other side, the "descendants of the survivors" living on the Moon and in space continued organizing counterattacks against the surface. They had a tightly structured, highly efficient militarized society, relying on the Moon surface base to provide an endless stream of industrial support. Their attacks on the Firstborn tentacles on their home planet were almost never-ending. After Nolan spread her "eyes" across the entire planet, she could observe