Virtual World, tech tree, Cloudtop Research Institute.
"A woody plant, thirty kilometers tall, with roots extending up to five hundred kilometers. Its cellular activity is 135 times that of Earth's plants. It has very few chloroplasts, and its capacity for photosynthesis has almost completely degenerated. Its mitochondria are extremely numerous and show clear mutations, with an extraordinary rate of energy metabolism!
"Some tissue cells inside its body have lost the cell walls characteristic of plant cells. Our preliminary assessment is localized animalization...
"Whoa! Even more incredible is this little sapling designated as the 'core.' According to scans by miniature robots, its roots are exceptionally well developed, spreading through almost the entire tree. They function like the human nervous system, transmitting signals and commands. It's practically the brain of this tree...
"Amazing! Absolutely amazing! This is nothing short of a miracle of natural evolution!"
Zhou Dong stared feverishly at the virtual model of the Long-Lived One before him, streams of scan data flowing across it.
"Enough, Lao Zhou. You've been marveling at it for ages. The boss wants a modification plan as soon as possible. With a tree this big, we've got plenty of work ahead of us!" Elder Yu said as he operated a panel and analyzed the data.
Beside him, more than a dozen scientists were also hard at work.
After receiving Nie Yun's orders, they had put aside all their research projects to tackle the urgent assignment codenamed the "Long-Lived One Modification Project" together.
"Modification? What modification?! A life-form this perfect shouldn't be subjected to human vandalism! Look at what you're planning to install! What even is this, huh?!
"A super Energy Crystal furnace, eight super-sized and sixteen large nuclear fusion reactors-I could let those slide. But three Fortress-Class Force-Field Ray Cannons, twelve Fortress-Class Laser Cannons, thirty-six Heavy