Disaster

The cell clusters, growing exponentially, soon reached a fairly considerable number—more than four hundred individual units.

Because their appearance had changed, the cell clusters that joined the sensory area had gone from long-necked porcelain bottles to gourd shapes, so Huo Gu simply called them "gourds."

"Gourd Number Ten, keep your position as steady as possible."

"Gourd Number One Hundred Thirty-One, you've gone off course. Adjust your angle of elevation, shift nine meters diagonally upward to the right, and return to the position you're supposed to occupy as quickly as possible."

"Gourd Number Three Hundred Sixty-Eight, reduce speed immediately and maintain formation."

Huo Gu tirelessly emphasized his orders again and again. As the distance over which those orders were transmitted increased, a certain problem that had not been obvious before also came to the fore.

Although he could use relays to transmit orders to farther places, commands sent this way came with a delay. The individuals farthest away always had to wait quite a while before receiving the instructions he had issued.

Because of this, every so often, Huo Gu had to correct the position of some gourd in order to maintain the overall formation. In this complex and ever-changing environment, delay was an extremely troublesome problem.

For the moment, Huo Gu had no particularly good way to solve it. After all, he still had not figured out exactly what the core secret was that had brought him to his current state, so naturally there was no question of using it more efficiently.

"The numbers still aren't enough..."

"Am I being a little too rash?"

Huo Gu, squeezing out a bit of thinking capacity from the complicated work of issuing orders, thought this. Although there was temporarily no good solution to the delay problem, as long as their numbers were large enough and the area they covered broad enough, the overall formation's fault tolerance would increase, and the problems caused by command delays could be hidden.

Huo Gu began considering whether he should first slow down the pace of exploring the alkaline waters ahead and expand the gourd swarm's coverage area.

Just then, hundreds of pairs of eyes that were constantly alert to changes in the environment keenly caught a subtle abnormality in the nearby waters.

At a glance, a "white line" appeared at the farthest edge of the gourd swarm's vision, something like a horizon.

Huo Gu immediately used the gourd in the formation closest to that "white line" to observe it.

After the visual system received Huo Gu's instruction, the vitreous body immediately adjusted its curvature, and the eye turned, locking tightly onto the distant "white line."

Magnified by the vitreous body, the "white line" became a "fence," as if it were built from cotton, a hedge that existed only in fairy tales, swaying in the gentle breeze along a country path.

Immediately afterward, Huo Gu also noticed the abnormal state of the entire gourd swarm. The cell membranes, cytoplasm, organelles, and even the cell walls were all trembling faintly.

"Don't tell me it's..."

An intensely ominous premonition came crashing down over his mind like sudden enlightenment. A certain extremely terrible conjecture surfaced in Huo Gu's thoughts, making him feel a chill.

"Clusters Number Eight to Number Five, attention! A rapid current is coming! Flow direction: rear left. Adjust heading, spread all fins, prepare to buffer!"

Not long after the order was given, the entire gourd swarm made the corresponding changes according to the command.

Perhaps they sensed Huo Gu's own anxiety, or perhaps they sensed the coming crisis through Huo Gu himself; aided by their will to survive, the gourd swarm's emergency adjustment was finally completed before that foreseeable disaster arrived.

However, this was not anything worth celebrating. It was merely a tiny bit of psychological comfort after a stretch of rotten luck.

Not much time passed. A short while after the gourd swarm completed its emergency adjustment, the danger that made Huo Gu's blood run cold had already crossed the end of their vision and arrived nearby.

At this moment, it was no longer a "fence," but a "wall."

At that instant, time seemed as if someone had pressed the slow-motion button. When Huo Gu had still been human, he had heard people say that when death drew near, the mind would speed up, and relatively speaking, one's subjective sense of time would slow down. At least, that was how it was for humans.

Staring at the wall not far away, one could deeply grasp the meaning of the word "insignificant." Upward, it reached straight to the sea surface. Looking left, it stretched all the way to the end of the field of view allowed by the vitreous body's limit of curvature, and still no end to the wall could be seen. Looking right, it was the same.

It was as if he stood at the end of the world, face-to-face with a barrier towering at the world's edge—this was Huo Gu's most direct impression of what he saw at that moment.

Through the surging white spray on the white wall, and taking into account the ocean's liquid environment, it was easy to determine the true nature of this magnificent giant wall—a colossal tsunami.

Somewhere in this sea area, an eruption point whose nature was temporarily unclear had released an extremely vast amount of kinetic energy in one breath, radiating through the liquid environment of the ocean in the form of "waves." That was the colossal tsunami the gourd swarm now faced.

The sweeping white wall arrived in the blink of an eye, directly engulfing the entire ant-like gourd swarm and continuing to surge toward the distance.

"Hold steady! You have to hold steady!"

Huo Gu knew this was a futile shout. Before such mighty force, a cluster like theirs was nothing more than an insignificant joke. The fins' flow diversion had its limits after all.

But there were some things one had to do even knowing they were futile. At a time like this, even the slightest miracle was far, far better than no miracle happening at all.

After they were swept into the tsunami, the surrounding scenery turned into fleeting flashes of light and shadow. This was mainly because the gourds carrying the eyes were constantly being tossed and rolled by the turbulent currents within the tsunami.

At present, the only ability that could still be maintained well was probably the internal view inside the gourds. After being swept up by the tumbling surge, the number of gourds had once again fallen from four hundred back to two digits. They were not dead, but had been flung an extremely long distance away and lost contact.

And this was still not the end. When it rained, it poured; sometimes, when bad luck struck, even drinking cold water could get something stuck between your teeth.

Some object swept past one of the remaining gourds at extreme speed, carving open a gash equal to one-third of the gourd's own length.

"What the hell?!"

Huo Gu was shocked and terrified. He wanted to know what it was, but he was powerless. His means of detecting the outside world—vision—was now no different from decorative furnishing.

Once again, he felt that deep sense of powerlessness.

The same situation continued. The first gourd that had been slashed open with a gash one-third its length was, on the contrary, the least damaged gourd in the entire cluster.

What the gourd swarm suffered more of was piercing damage. No fewer than several dozen gourds were riddled like sieves by those objects, and the gourd Huo Gu resided in was the same.

The wall cells' line of defense collapsed, and vast numbers of attack-type microorganisms launched a massive assault on the predator at the top of this current stretch of water.

The situation deteriorated further.