Exploration

The Rhizome system spread into the few caves they had discovered. Since Huo Gu was going to explore caves anyway, he figured he might as well explore the others too.

These caves were deep and winding, steeped in mystery. Strange, colorful, glowing crystals grew along the walls.

Of course, that was only how they looked to ordinary humans, with their mortal eyes.

Huo Gu was no longer human.

"Oh, I see. This must be a channel where lava once flowed. The intense heat refined the silicon, which then mixed with trace radioactive elements in the surrounding strata."

"The strongest evidence is that the rock walls are made of pyroxene rich in metallic elements..."

Huo Gu suddenly froze as he worked through the analysis. It took him a long moment to react. Then he stared at the crystals on the cave wall in utter horror, as if they were demons crawling out of hell.

"Holy shit! This place is radioactive?!"

"Rhizome system, thicken the root skin inside the cave."

Huo Gu issued the command and searched the areas covered by the Rhizome system for elements like lead that could absorb radiation, adding them to the root skin inside the cave.

After a frantic scramble, the exploration resumed, with the mass of roots gradually pushing deeper into the cave.

"Huh? The passage is getting wider?"

"Never mind that for now. Keep going."

The roots continued their advance. The situation was now the exact opposite of what they had encountered at first. When they had entered, the passage had grown narrower and narrower. Now it was getting bigger and bigger.

It seemed they had reached the end of the passage. Through the roots, Huo Gu could clearly feel air currents brushing against their surfaces. That meant this place was either open to the outside world or part of an interior space large enough to generate air currents.

Since Huo Gu was exploring downward, it was clearly the latter.

"No way... Could there really be an underground world?!"

The roots spread beyond the passage, and Huo Gu's view followed them, revealing the scenery at the end.

It was vast—beyond description. He couldn't see the far end, either to the left or the right, and he couldn't see the ceiling above. It was like a strange realm from the underworld. Compared to this place, the underground cavern Huo Gu had fallen into from the sea was no more than a tiny room.

"H-how did this even form?"

Huo Gu suspected he was hallucinating. What he was seeing once again exceeded the limits of his knowledge. In theory, an environment like this should be extremely difficult to form, and even if the conditions were right, the immense weight above would eventually cause it to collapse.

But this underground cavern had clearly not formed recently!

By now, the other caves had also been explored to their ends. Each one led to an underground cavern, but compared to this one, they were like ants beside an elephant.

Huo Gu now had two choices: keep going or stop here.

"Hmm... There's no water in these underground caverns. If I keep extending the roots, transporting water will become more and more difficult."

Unlike human-made rubber pipes, every section of these cellular pipelines needed water for "maintenance." In other words, the farther the water had to travel, the less of it would make the journey.

"The other underground caverns haven't been explored yet. I might as well pause the exploration of this gigantic underground space for now and set up a nonliving pipeline to carry water first. That'll also give me a chance to see what's in the other caverns."

"Right. That's what I'll do."

With a plan in mind, Huo Gu shifted his view to the other underground caverns.

After the shock of that enormous cavern, these others—which were two or three times larger than the first underground cavern he had fallen into—could no longer stir much of a reaction in Huo Gu.

Compared to the outside, the caverns were extremely "barren." Without liquid water or lava to provide nutrients, they could support very few bacteria, while the Rhizome system's exploration was incredibly costly.

Huo Gu soon discovered an awkward truth: he had run out of organic material.

The underground caverns were enormous, and there was very little material to collect. In fact, his organic material should have run out long ago. He had managed to last this long only because root fragments occasionally fell from above, or Gourd and Titanium Snail got swept into the whirlpool. Huo Gu had recycled their organic material to keep going.

"What should I do? Even if the Rhizome system can grow fast enough, the exploration will still slow down."

Huo Gu turned his attention to the opening that was constantly gushing seawater. It connected to the ocean above and was the only passage he knew of.

"Go out?"

"No, no, absolutely not!"

The moment the thought arose, he rejected it in sheer terror. The indescribable being outside had left such a deep psychological scar that, by area, it could probably cover the entire surface of the planet.

Until he had enough power to stand against it, Huo Gu wouldn't even consider entering that thing's field of vision.

"If... it were some other creature, would that thing attack it too?"

Huo Gu had this thought because he was currently short on organic raw materials—microorganisms—and that had given him an idea.

From the very beginning, that unidentified thing seemed to have kept its eyes fixed on Huo Gu, while ignoring the microorganisms in the ocean.

That meant it could distinguish Huo Gu from other life forms. It was precisely because it could tell them apart that it targeted Huo Gu so relentlessly while ignoring the other creatures.

Thinking about it in reverse, the solution was simple enough: Huo Gu could take advantage of this and create organisms capable of acting independently. They could gather organic material in the ocean and then deliver it into the whirlpool.

At the thought, Huo Gu hesitated. This would mean creating genuine life, not biological tools like Gourd and Titanium Snail. They would have a concept of "self."

This raised many concerns for Huo Gu. It was also why he would rather have delays in his commands than design true, complex organisms with their own intelligence.

"If I design creatures like that, will I still be able to control their cells the way I do now?"

"Will they still follow my orders? Could they turn around and attack me?"

"Restricting them is impossible. Life always finds a way. If one day creatures like that became intelligent and learned of my existence, how would they see me?"

"...Knowing human nature, they'd probably chop God to pieces in the street."

It sounded like a distant possibility, but Huo Gu was immortal. A few hundred million years would pass in the blink of an eye for him. What seemed far off was, in truth, right around the corner.

If that's hard to understand, think of it another way: summer vacation seems long, with two whole months ahead of you. But before you know it, it's the last day of the holiday, and you haven't done a single bit of homework.