Reflection

Huo Gu did not know how long he had been swept along by that savage surge, because he had no tool or method for keeping time, but by his subjective sense, a very long time had already passed.

During that time, the individuals in the gourd cluster had their wounds widened by the churning currents until they were torn apart whole like shredded paper.

Huo Gu was powerless to do anything about it. He could barely protect himself now. The gourd he had originally been inhabiting had been ripped apart along its wounds and dismembered into twenty-one chunks of flesh of varying sizes.

When the surge gradually returned to calm and Huo Gu came back to his senses, he had once again returned to that original state of utter poverty, stripped bare in every sense.

"That was close... any... worse... and normal... logical... thought... couldn't have... been... guaranteed..."

At this moment, Huo Gu did not feel much fear toward what he had just personally experienced, simply because even maintaining the most normal thoughts was already quite difficult for him now.

Layer upon layer of shackles on his mind made even his reactions sluggish.

The urgent priority was to recover to his previous state as quickly as possible.

"...Must... proliferate... as soon... as possible..."

The internal cells that received the order immediately began collecting amino acid proteins, starting to expand their numbers. The recovery work proceeded in full swing.

Of course, the process was not completely smooth. When the number of internal cells had grown to four times the volume of the original fragment, new uninvited guests arrived.

They were a group of long, spindle-shaped microbes, swaying the flagella at their tails. Through the eyespots inside their cells, they locked onto their target and charged straight at the colony of internal cells that was expanding in number.

The heads of these microbes bore a sharp spike. It was by relying on this weapon that they had swept all before them in this stretch of water and seized the throne at the top of the food chain in one move.

The spikes pierced the cell membranes of the internal cells with extreme ease. The microbes then stirred up the cytoplasm inside themselves and injected protein lytic enzymes into the internal cells through the narrow channels within the spikes.

The internal cells that had been injected immediately withered, lost their biological activity, and dismembered into several large protein structures.

Because he had no eyes, by the time Huo Gu noticed these uninvited guests, the outermost batch of injected internal cells had all died.

And those microbes were still unsatisfied, preparing to attack the nearby internal cells.

"You're asking to die!"

After a long period of studying control over cells, Huo Gu already had a manipulation method that formed its own system. The him of now and the him who had just come into contact with cells back then simply could not be mentioned in the same breath.

While the microbes were busy attacking, Huo Gu gave the internal cells on the other side, which had not been attacked, the order to "proliferate."

The shape of the internal cell colony changed. The attacked area gradually caved inward, while the other unattacked areas bulged under the proliferation order, gradually forming a cavity that wrapped those microbes inside it.

"Release lytic enzymes."

One second after the order was given, the internal cells facing the cavity adjusted their cell membranes one after another and released large amounts of lytic enzymes. Very soon, the enzymes filled the entire space of the cavity.

At this moment, those microbes finally realized something was wrong. They chose to flee.

One nimble microbe after another swayed the flagella at their tails, swimming blindly through the low-enzyme-concentration regions, as if searching for an escape route, and also as if dodging the harm of those enzymes.

But all of this was futile, because this cavity was fully enclosed. As early as the moment this cavity formed, they were already doomed to die.

Buried along with these microbes were the internal cells on the inner wall of the cavity. At the cost of sacrificing a portion of his internal cells, Huo Gu also harvested large amounts of various types of proteins and amino acids.

As time advanced step by step, the biological materials he needed were finally collected in full.

The first thing to recover was the mouth, then the jet-propulsion organ.

With these two components working together, Huo Gu's speed in collecting biological materials rose even further.

However, Huo Gu did not dare advance at full speed, mainly because he had no eyes. It was like driving down a road blindfolded. If Huo Gu had not known he was in the ocean, where there were almost no obstacles, he really would not have dared do such a thing.

After enough materials had been collected, the eyes used to observe the outside were also restored by Huo Gu, followed immediately by the restoration of the sensory cavity.

The whole process did not take much time. Huo Gu was merely walking once more down the road he had already walked before, omitting all those parts where he had racked his brains.

After he had completely recovered to his peak state, while copying the other gourd individuals, Huo Gu also divided his attention to do another thing—summarize and reflect.

Huo Gu had never feared failure. As long as there was still a chance to start over, failure was instead a kind of help. It was precisely this style that had made him someone who could be said to have a voice in the field of archaeology when he was still human.

"First is reflection."

"Too fragile. The defensive ability of the wall cells is truly too fragile..."

"Although they can provide powerful defense against microorganisms, that is only limited to the microscopic scale. At the end of the day, they are merely a thin layer of cells. On the macroscopic level, they are probably even more fragile than soft tofu pudding."

"Then there is the jet-propulsion organ. Its explosive power is acceptable, but its endurance is not. This time, when facing that surge, I did not choose to flee and instead set up an anti-impact formation precisely because its endurance was not up to standard. With my current mobility, I simply couldn't escape."

Huo Gu thought of the surge he had faced before and felt endlessly vexed. If he had been able to calm down and design a more efficient method of propulsion, he would not have ended up putting himself in danger.

"Next is the emotion of 'complacency' that I unconsciously ignored. I clearly knew that on the macroscopic level, I was even more fragile than an infant, yet because I believed that there were no multicellular organisms in the Hadean Eon, I unconsciously ignored threats from this aspect..."

In Huo Gu's thoughts, those gourds pierced through by unknown objects flashed past. At the same time, he once again remembered that terrifying surge. This time, he felt fear.

"This won't do. There absolutely cannot be a next time. I was lucky to survive this time, but next time is uncertain. Even if the same turnaround happens next time, the time after that is just as uncertain."

"Lastly is the summary..."

At this point, Huo Gu paused and sank into deep thought.

"I was misled from the very beginning..."

"I was above those microorganisms to begin with. I am a macroscopic organism. Whether it was me back when I was human, or me now—in fact, it should be said that a thinking me defeating thoughtless microorganisms is only natural in itself. There is nothing worth being proud of."

"Microorganisms were never my greatest threat..."

"My true opponent should be this world, this era..."

"This planet that is still in the Hadean Eon!"