"Quiet."
"Too quiet."
Mao Zhengzhi stared at the fantastical, painting-like scene in the holographic projection and forced a few words through clenched teeth.
Lü Yongchang nodded, his expression equally grave.
Just as Academician Mao Zhengzhi had said, this forest was far too quiet!
Apart from the wind rustling the broad leaves, there was almost no other sound!
Often, silence was the greatest anomaly of all!
"Could there be no animals on this planet..."
Lü Yongchang murmured in bewilderment.
While everyone puzzled over this, Zero continued the sampling mission in an orderly fashion.
After collecting leaf samples came trunk samples, soil samples, and samples of associated fungi.
Soil sampling was simple.
Under Zero's control, the robots soon completed the task.
The hardest part was sampling the trees.
The reason... was naturally that these trunks were far harder than Lü Yongchang and the others had imagined!
But that was understandable.
Judging by their appearance, these hundred-meter-tall trees belonged to the same species as the twelve-thousand-meter giant.
The strength of trunks capable of supporting such enormous structures under 1.5 g of gravity was easy to imagine.
But all that resistance came to nothing once the robots switched to drill bits made from the same material as the starship's hull.
Under the assault of a star gold-carbyne composite drill bit, a cylindrical sample spanning the tree's cross section was extracted.
"Professor, the probes have detected slight anomalous tremors in the ground."
As the electronic synthesized voice sounded, all the robots set down their research equipment and revealed the small laser guns mounted on their mechanical arms.
Powered by fusion batteries, the muzzles glimmered with pale violet light. The surrounding temperature rapidly rose, and the still air began to distort slightly.
The tremors stopped.
But the robots held their positions, vigilantly scanning their surroundings.
Ten