Finding a passage leading to the Firstborn's core region wasn't difficult—in fact, the core region was certainly near the planet's core. As long as they found the right direction and dug straight down, they could get more or less where they needed to go. Then, by scanning the intricate neural lines deep underground, they could easily pinpoint the core's location.
However, even though this was theoretically simple, Hao Ren still had to carry out the entire operation with caution.
The Firstborn on this planet had fallen into a state of brain death, but that didn't mean it was no longer a threat. The tentacles capable of protecting its body and eliminating invading foreign matter could act autonomously even without the core's control. They would automatically destroy threatening targets within range and block passages leading into the depths of the planet. Otherwise, the battle in which the regents reclaimed their home planet wouldn't have been so brutal and difficult.
Those intricate defensive tentacles were only one of the difficulties. The group also had to face an environment that grew increasingly bizarre the deeper they went into the planet.
A planet parasitized by a Firstborn was different from an ordinary planet. The mere existence of such an immense mythical creature inside a planet was enough to cause mutations throughout its interior. From the crust downward, the deeper they went, the stranger and more bizarre the environment became. Physical laws were often distorted, and large areas of the supernatural could even appear. In places tangled with the Firstborn's tentacles, chaotic force fields were everywhere. Surges of energy replaced the magma flows deep underground, and sometimes nightmares would even erode reality—this phenomenon was most common near the Firstborn's nerve ganglia.
After all, what grew deep within this planet wasn't a juvenile, but a truly