This was an "ocean" formed from clouds and mist. Dust drifted through this environment of weak gravity, neither falling nor moving far away.
This "sea" of dust and gas was not deep, only several tens of thousands of zhang. But it was simply too vast—vast enough for the entirety of Shenzhou Houtu to roll about upon it. Standing on its surface, an ordinary living being's vision could not even reach the edge of this sea. There was no horizon here either; the end of the "ocean" was the starry sky.
This was Jupiter—the dragons called it the "Heavenly River."
Sunlight slanted across the "sea's" surface, revealing wave-like layers of shadow. This place was originally farther from the sun than Shenzhou was. Moreover, at this distance, the sun's luminous atmosphere was difficult to perceive with the naked eye, so the sun looked more like a shooting star—a shooting star many times brighter than a first-magnitude star.
Yet this thin sunlight could still sustain the activities of living beings.
Within the "Heavenly River," dragons swam.
They were many times larger than their young kin in Shenzhou. After all, here they did not need to worry about crowding out the living space of other species and could devour matter to their hearts' content. Those dragons gladly swallowed cosmic dust, filtering out the useful power within. Some dragons skilled in Shapeshifting Spiritual Power could even obtain the essence of plants [chloroplasts] by consuming vegetation, gaining the ability of plants to directly draw power from sunlight.
That was an extraordinarily remarkable ability.
In Earth's terminology, chloroplasts, like mitochondria, possessed genetic information independent from the parts within a cell nucleus that controlled biological traits—mitochondria and chloroplasts could even be regarded as symbiotic organisms within other higher lifeforms.
Shapeshifting Spiritual Power altered the expression of bloodline spiritual