Escape

The wind swept everything away. After raging for a while, the thunderstorm gradually died down, as if it had never appeared at all, and the sky returned to its usual orange-red hue.

During that time, perhaps out of timidity, or caution, or some emotion even Huo Gu himself did not understand, he did not actively respond to that message. Throughout the entire process, he maintained absolute silence, like a stone.

In that brief span from encountering the tornado swarm to the thunderstorm, the amount of information Huo Gu received was so enormous that he could not digest it all at once.

When Huo Gu snapped out of his daze, his thoughts were filled with shock, while he was also drowned by immense fear.

The reason people stood in awe of the dark was that darkness represented the unknown. Fear of abnormal phenomena beyond common sense came from the same cause.

During the Hadean Eon, the birth of "intelligence" should have been impossible. At this time, the planet's environment had not formed the conditions necessary for "intelligence" to arise. Life was still in its most primitive stage. Microbacteria that had developed double-stranded DNA as genetic material could already count as top-tier life-forms in this era.

Huo Gu himself could not serve as an example, because he had transmigrated. The origin of his own birth was not this stage of the Hadean Eon. For life on Earth to nurture "intelligence," evolving from the earliest microorganisms to humans, it had taken nearly 4.6 billion years!

Things that exceeded convention could very easily give rise to thoughts and logic that exceeded convention.

Aliens? Atmospheric life? The same kind of cluster mind? Transmigrator?...

"No, now isn't the time to think about this. There's too little information right now, so it's impossible to make an accurate judgment."

Huo Gu, who had instantly calmed down, swept away those wild, unrestrained thoughts in his mind. The other party's existence was beyond doubt. The problem Huo Gu now faced was how he should handle this situation.

After the thunderstorm dispersed, Huo Gu did not receive any similar information again. The other party seemed to have decided that Huo Gu did not possess the ability to communicate and had chosen to leave.

Of course, it was also possible that it was hiding in the dark and observing. Compared with the former, this possibility was extremely high. Those wildlife biologists on Earth often did exactly this sort of thing.

No matter what, Huo Gu could not continue staying here. Although this "home" had been built with all his effort, this "home" was now being watched by a super-terrifying fellow of unknown nature, unknown true form, uncertain good or evil, and capable of casually controlling wind and lightning.

In Huo Gu's impression, white mice in laboratories on Earth had never come to any good end, even though they had never offended anyone.

"I have to leave. I can't hesitate. Any wishful thinking is a stumbling block!"

After warning himself, Huo Gu issued an order to the Titanium Snail, telling it to carefully pulse its water-storage cavity and gradually drift from inside the harbor to outside it.

Because of the Titanium Snail's own mass, this process was extremely slow. Fortunately, though, this method of movement, like drifting deadwood, consumed so little biological energy that it was negligible. Even without nutrient replenishment, it could still maintain the life activities of its cells as a whole through this method.

After great difficulty, it finally rounded the harbor reef that blocked the impact of the waves. At the same time, Huo Gu deeply regretted having built such a long harbor reef in the first place.

The next process was much faster. Riding the surging waves and borrowing this force, it would soon be able to leave this sea area.

Outside the harbor, the view was not completely open. The gourd groups that had previously still been carrying out the work of collecting organic materials were now like robots that had lost signal and were crashing, motionless, half floating and half sinking in the water.

The existence of these gourds could provide cover for the Titanium Snail's departure. During this period, it only needed to disguise itself as an equally disconnected "robot."

The waves were chaotic. Something like ocean currents only revealed their directionality on a planetary scale.

As time passed, the individual gourds drifting alongside the Titanium Snail gradually decreased. Under the pull of the currents, they broke away from the main drifting group and headed toward unknown sea areas.

Huo Gu had no intention of correcting their course, because he was worried that doing so would expose his own existence.

After drifting muddleheadedly for who knew how long, Huo Gu had also separated from the main drifting group under the influence of the current. By now, he was already quite far from that volcanic island. No matter how Huo Gu adjusted the viewing distance of the vitreous body, he could no longer capture that island.

Huo Gu arrived in a new sea area and began using the Titanium Snail's visual system to observe the surrounding environment.

Volcanoes still existed, but they were slightly different from the conical volcanoes of the past. What provided material flow to this sea area was a stretch of fissure-type volcanoes.

Their shapes were different, and the smoke plumes they erupted were also unlike anything he had seen before. The smoke plumes rising from the submarine volcanoes were stretched out, like sheet after sheet of curtains hanging vertically from the sea surface down to the seabed.

Huo Gu felt a burst of joy. Wasn't this kind of environment exactly suitable for him to hide in?

He vigilantly observed the surroundings with the visual system. After confirming there was nothing unusual, the Titanium Snail's long-unused water-storage cavity began to pulse, and in the blink of an eye it plunged into this seabed maze constructed from volcanic smoke plumes.

After entering, Huo Gu carefully moved the fins on both sides, cautiously avoiding the curtains and trying his best not to come into contact with them. These seabed curtains contained large amounts of bubbles. Within the range covered by the curtains, the buoyancy water could generate was almost the same as in air. If Huo Gu carelessly entered one, he would drop into the crater in the blink of an eye and become a charcoal-grilled snail.

While moving cautiously, Huo Gu began analyzing the lava fluidity of this volcanic cluster. If it was poorly flowing lava, eruptions would be more likely to occur, and the powerful currents produced could very possibly push him into the curtains. So he needed to investigate first.

In this maze-like region, Huo Gu found a towering undersea rock. Judging by its shape, it should have formed from lava rapidly piling up during an eruption.

With the help of the fins on both sides, the Titanium Snail slowly descended onto this towering rock, and Huo Gu's nerves loosened as well. During this period, he had kept his nerves wound tight the entire time.

"Speaking of which, what exactly was that thing?"

"Was it an it, or were they a them?"

"And just what form of life would be able to wield natural disasters in the environment so freely?"

"Reality, do you dare be a little more reasonable? Even if you like playing jokes, there should still be a limit, right?"

Huo Gu grumbled complaints that only he could hear. He needed a way to vent the pressure in his heart.

"Wait. In the other party's question, it referred to 'I,' not 'we.' In other words, from the very beginning, it knew of my existence, rather than treating the cell-cluster individuals as single intelligent lives..."

"Then here comes the question. How did the other party obtain this information?"

"Or could it be that my transmigration happened because the other party was pulling strings?"

Huo Gu remembered what he had once said on a television station—if transmigration really happened one day, I would be more inclined to believe it was a man-made event, an event triggered by the subjective actions of some unknown civilization in the universe.