The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 114 The vicissitudes of life

According to later research, this first great ice age since the earth entered the Phanerozoic Era lasted for nearly a million years.

Taking into account the end of the ice age, another equally drastic environmental change triggered a small-scale extinction event. The entire mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician took more than one million years.

In the long history of evolution, this is just a blink of an eye, but for a single organism, it is a terrifyingly long time. Even the super-individual creature in Lin Yi's current form.

Theoretically, Lin Yi's current form of existence has no lifespan limit at all. Let alone survive the end-Ordovician mass extinction, he can easily survive until the earth explodes if he wants to.

But this long time would be a waste just to wait.

In the final battle, Lin Yi gained a lot. Although the genetic sequences of the "Kraken" and the giant starfish were encrypted, since the Helix Nest Group could reverse engineer a small amount of non-critical genetic sequences, he was confident that he could decipher some of them and use them for his own use.

Thick clouds of toxic substances block the sky, cut off sunlight, and make the climate colder day by day.

Sea levels are falling, and the shallow sea waters on the continental margins suitable for biological survival are gradually receding. Everything is completely consistent with the development speculated by later generations.

The mother nest group in the shallow sea area on the continental edge has been converted into a transport vehicle with belly full of nutrients in advance, but it is not affected at this time. But those native sessile filter-feeding organisms are in dire straits. Unable to move, they can only watch the water level gradually decrease until their bodies are also exposed to the air.

A large number of biological corpses piled up like mountains, accompanied by the coral skeletons exposed on the water and turned pale due to the loss of algae, showing a hellish scene.

But in this sea of ​​​​blood and corpses, there are some creatures that live a particularly nourishing life - the shrimp.

As the only creatures in this era that can land on land, they even expanded their living range for a time, and their population increased instead of decreasing, dealing with the corpses washed ashore.

These straight shrimps are likely to be mixed with the ancestors of later generations of insects and ancestors of myriapods. In the subsequent evolution process, as the terrestrial ecosystem was further improved, they made a decision that went against their ancestors and embarked on an inland journey. path of.

But all this has nothing to do with Lin Yi now. He is still busy with the final preparations.

Most of the troops used in shallow seas have been recovered, including a large number of fearless soldiers - the Straight Spiral Stone Nest Group has been destroyed. Now, Lin Yi no longer needs such a huge standing military force.

Transport workers and other grades have also been recycled. Now, Lin Yi's nest group will be dominated by ordinary workers and soldiers adapted to the deep sea environment, so as to survive the mass extinction smoothly.

The genetic sequences of other grades will be stored by him and will be produced again when the ecosystem recovers.

After completing all the preparations, Lin Yi controlled all level individuals and retreated into the deep sea in various places. He only sent a reconnaissance mother to enter the shallow sea area every once in a while to check the situation.

And his consciousness also stopped commanding most individuals, and only controlled a small number of workers to complete various maintenance tasks. Most of his "computing power" was dedicated to deciphering the genetic sequence of "Kraken".

The analysis of these encrypted genetic sequences is a very long process, but now, Lin Yi has enough time to complete it. In the past one million years, even if we were to exhaustively enumerate them one by one, we could still come up with almost the same number.

Some time later, the first complete structural gene fragment in the "Kraken" gene sequence was successfully deciphered by Lin Yi - but it was not an attack structure, or a structure that could make an individual grow larger, but a "Kraken" "Brain!"

Later cephalopods were known for having the most developed brains among invertebrates. As the crystallization of black technology, "Kraken" naturally also has a developed brain structure. Although it is not known how the primitive brood was able to create a developed brain structure that transcended the times, this does not prevent Lin Yi from making use of it.

The hive mind consciousness network is formed by connecting the brains of all ordinary individuals. Therefore, there is no upper limit on the number of control individuals alone.

But in the process of analyzing the gene sequence, Lin Yi discovered that the brain's "computing power" is currently a little insufficient.

The solution Lin Yi came up with was to simply and crudely mass-produce special-grade individuals with developed brains and shrunken bodies, so that the extra computing power could be used to analyze the genetic sequence.

This is the purpose of prioritizing the analysis of the part of the "Kraken" gene sequence related to the developed brain, so that it will be more convenient to analyze more gene sequences in the future.

The new individual structure is very simple. A gene fragment from the brain of "Kraken" is inserted directly into the genetic blueprint of the mother nest and connected to the cluster consciousness network.

The remaining functions are simplified as much as possible, leaving only the structure that maintains the normal life activities of the brain. According to later generations, this thing is not a brain growing on the living body, but a living thing growing on the brain.

Brand-new grades have begun to be produced in small quantities - at present, the environment in the deep sea is still stable, and food resources have gradually begun to increase, allowing Lin Yi to waste some nutrients and produce these nutrients-consuming grades, which is beneficial to "Kraken" and giant starfish. More gene fragments can be analyzed.

I don’t know how long it took.

The information returned by the reconnaissance mother that floats up to the shallow sea for reconnaissance from time to time shows that the sea level has begun to stabilize, but a large number of shallow continental seas have disappeared and will not be restored for a while.

In the increasingly cold environment, everything as far as the eye can see is depression. The number of living things is not what it used to be.

But through the perception of the filter-feeding structure, Lin Yi discovered that the number of plankton has begun to rebound, indicating that the ecosystem will gradually stabilize. Although it is difficult to return to the level before the mass extinction, at least it will not be completely different. Dead silence.

But Lin Yi knew that everything was temporary. When the climate warmed up and the glaciers melted, there would be a new round of disaster.

It is too early to return to the shallow sea now. It is better to continue to accumulate nutrients in the deep sea. When the heavy metal materials surge upward, it will not be too late to return to the shallow sea.

An unknown amount of time has passed, and the extremely long years have made time meaningless to Lin Yi. Even if his consciousness has been perfectly integrated with the hive mind consciousness, this period of time is still long and torturous.

But no matter what, nearly a million years of silence cannot destroy the tenacious life.

The seeds of life sprout quietly in the dark, just waiting for the first sunlight of the Silurian Period to penetrate the atmosphere shrouded in thick clouds of toxic substances and thrive again.

(End of this chapter)