The Record of Unusual Creature

“Not the same? What’s the difference?” Vivian looked at Hao Ren and asked, “Because this one’s still a ‘baby’?”

“Not just because it’s still a ‘baby’,” Hao Ren looked at the tentacles as well as biological tissue debris around him and said, “the First Born we saw in the Plane of Dreams was closer to some kind of plant and it had precise differentiated functions such as the woods on the surface, the tentacles in the rocks, the ‘heart’ buried in the ground, as well as the various nerve tissues. But, this one looks like it didn’t experience a complete evolution. It’s more like an embryo.”

Nangong Wuyue also added, “And how it came into this world from the Plane of Dreams is also a big problem.”

Hao Ren looked around the hall. This was the hub of the spacecraft, and there were many passages leading of to some location. The tentacles of the First Born spread along these passages, and there was a possibility that some of its organs could be found elsewhere. Hao Ren thought about it and decided that they go for it separately. “Let’s split up. It’ll be more efficient. Let’s contact each other immediately if any one of us finds anything.”

Everybody agreed and divided into groups; Lily and Hao Ren; Y’zaks,his daughter and Lanina; Vivian and Nangong Wuyue. The three groups set out in three directions after a rigorous process of guessing coins and turning sticks.

Lily held up her Flamejoy and walked cheerfully ahead. She wanted to play, so she was not timid. Hao Ren followed the husky girl and cautiously observed his surroundings as he walked forward. Their exploration had taken them a long distance from the hall and they found some empty compartments. However, the compartments were either empty, or contained ordinary tentacles that were of little value.

However, Lily was very excited. Whenever she found something rare in the spaceship, she would pick it up and stuff it into her pocket. Soon, she filled every single pocket on her body. In the end, she could only stuff the rest into Hao Ren’s Dimensional Pocket. Hao Ren looked at the girl, unable to understand why she was doing all of this. “It’s understandable if you’re collecting unique and bizarre stones, but what’s the point of collecting useless debris?”

Lily answered seriously, “It doesn’t matter if they’re useful or not. Just take them back first. This is common sense for werewolves!”

Hao Ren then thought, The kind of werewolves Lily had in mind probably included those pulling sleds in the Arctic Circle as well…

The two of them chatted while they walked forward. Finally, they found an empty room. The door of the room was almost completely blocked by tentacles. Without waiting for Hao Ren’s command, Lily waved her paws and cut them up happily. She soon cleaned up the withered tentacles and Hao Ren held the MDT up to light up the room. “Seems like there’s no… Wait a minute! There’s something there!”

The MDT’s blue light scanned the room, and a reflective thing immediately caught Hao Ren’s attention. He quickly floated in and dug the thing out of a pile of tentacles. He found that he was right; it was a small device and it still looked intact.

They had been having a bad feeling all the way because there was nothing but tentacles along their path. The big ship was so clean that it felt like it came out fresh from the oven. Whatever happened did not feel like a sudden attack, but an orderly evacuation. And now, they finally found something interesting.

The small device was only the size of his palm. It was shaped like an oval pancake with a smooth surface, but there were no buttons on it. Hao Ren asked the MDT, “What is it?”

The MDT floated over, scanned it and answered, “It appears to be my foreign friend…”

“What?”

“Oh, I mean this thing appears to be a data processing device, like a PDA, but I don’t know which civilization made it.”

Hao Ren immediately asked a follow-up question, feeling hopeful. “Can you retrieve its data?”

“The difficulty is high.” The MDT turned around the small device, touched it and asked, “Hey, hey, buddy, still alive?”

There was still no response from it. The MDT sadly shook its body and said, “It’s already dead.”

Hao Ren took out the alloy brick from his Dimensional Pocket to aim it at the MDT and threatened it, “Do you believe that I’ll knock you with this? Want to try?”

The MDT immediately sprang back to the small device and said, “I’m just trying to ease the atmosphere here. Don’t panic. Let me retrieve it…”

The MDT clung to the old device that had been scrapped for tens of thousands of years, releasing a faint blue light as it started to crack any information that may have remained inside. Because it was hard to determine the storage mechanism and the object’s structure, the MDT was slowly fidgeting about while retrieving the data. Lily looked at the scene and touched her chin as though she was thinking of something. Then, she said, “Why do I feel like the MDT is molesting the corpse…”

Hao Ren slapped Lily on the head and scolded her. “Can you not think about such things! You were so pure when you first came. How did you end up becoming so wretched?!”

Lily covered her head. She looked at Hao Ren with feelings of injustice and said, “I am very pure. I haven’t even gone into heat yet, but you can’t stop me from reading everything.”

Hao Ren suddenly realised the cultural difference between the young lady and himself.

The MDT was occupied as he listened to two people of no moral integrity discussing the issue of moral integrity. It really could not stand it any longer, and muttered, “Okay, enough. I’m not interested in this dwarf device with four redundant processors. I long for a bold and unconstrained host, with full processing cores, expansion slots all over the body, coupled with 16 threads. Of course, preferably the one on the battleship…”

Hao Ren was surprised to find that there was also a cultural difference between his PDA and himself!

At this point, the MDT seemed to have finally found something. It suddenly exclaimed in surprise, “Eh, really! There is really a small number of data saved in here!”

“Show it to me, now!” Hao Ren could not wait to see it.

The MDT processed the data. “Wait a minute, I’m translating it and putting aside the useless materials. Don’t tell me you’re interested in alien pornography?”

Hao Ren held up the alloy brick and threatened the MDT, “Want to try it?”

The MDT shuddered and hastened to release the processed documents. “Let’s see, this should be the log of the spaceship’s crew. Probably, information on the First Born eroding the ship were recorded in here.”

The log was translated and the most valuable part of the intelligence was extracted. Hao Ren and Lily hurriedly read it with caution.

“Log one, keywords: navigation record.

“We have arrived in this galaxy for six months. At present, we have found a large number of living star systems and habitable planets. It should be a thriving land of life. These days, we have been busy recording coordinates and collecting data from the planets. It’s quite boring, but we feel happy when we discover a living planet. We noticed the creatures called demons. They are highly intelligent, but they seem grumpy and unable to negotiate. Perhaps, it has something to do with the harsh environment in which they live? Some of those planets are not really good places to live. This is the first time I’ve seen a creature that can move in magma.

“Log two, keywords: unexpected disasters.

“There was an incredible accident and I should be glad that I’m still alive… May the winds of the homeland bless us. We do not know how long this spaceship can persist! A huge… Strange things suddenly appeared in space and something crashed into the spacecraft. It contains an incomprehensible energy. At the moment of contact, it overloaded the ship’s shield system and almost broke the ship. Now, the weird sphere is stuck in the central hangar. It’s unbelievable that a ball, hundreds of metres wide caused a hole more than 10 kilometres wide. This should be related to some kind of space phenomenon. A serious gas leak occurred in the spacecraft, thousands of people are dead or missing. The emergency control device has successfully stopped the gas leak and the spread of the fire, but we may not be able to repair the ship.

“Log three, keywords: growing, bizarre.

“Unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable, unbelievable! I can only express my surprise. I am a biologist, who has spent my life studying the creatures of the universe. But I never thought that the sphere, which crashed into the spaceship’s hangar would be some form of life! It was just a sphere yesterday, but today, its surface has cracked and something strange is growing out of it… I’m sure that’s a sign of life. It has moved across the span of space, surviving in the universe. It possesses a mighty power. Why is there such a thing in the world? Today, the people on the ship had a meeting to discuss what to do with the sphere. Some suggested throwing it back into space, but soon, we found it impossible. The sphere has ‘taken root’ on our ship, and its powerful supernatural forces have prevented some of the more violent tests from being carried out. We can only watch it lie there now and pray that it will not bring harm to us.

“P.S. The navigator also came face to face with a bad situation. For some reason, the space around the spacecraft seems to be closed. We appear to be temporarily trapped in a warped space bubble. The only consolation now is that the technicians look like they are able to repair the hyperspace modules of the escape boats. They seem to be planning on evacuation. I should probably study the thing that is growing out of the sphere before I leave.

“Log four, keywords: a gentle seed.

“I’ve been dealing with the weird creature that has been growing fast in the sphere these past few days. To my surprise, it is gentle. Although we still can’t communicate with each other smoothly, it seems to realize that it is on someone else’s ship, so it has slowed down the speed of its expansion cautiously. If I am not mistaken, it also tried to express its apologies to me. Of course, other people don’t care about my little discoveries. They are busy investigating the changes in space. The ship is trapped in a state more serious than expected.”

Hao Ren was stunned when he read this, and asked, “It says the ‘First Born’ was very gentle?!”

Lily was also stunned by what she had just read. When she recalled the savage tentacles, the fur on Lily’s tail suddenly stood up. She kept shaking her head, and said, “How could it be gentle! I was almost eaten by it!”

At this point, the MDT was still extracting data from the log. Hao Ren temporarily put aside his confusion and continued to read the next record.

“Log five, keywords: mutation of space.

“I really want to keep track of that ‘space sphere’, but I have to record a worse situation today: the spatial structure around us seems to have changed to a detectable range.

“It is now possible to determine that the spacecraft is indeed trapped in a weird situation, like a warped bubble. The surrounding space has been closed off, as if the entire universe has shrunk to a mere 10 million kilometres in diameter. The detector that we released met a closed space wall. After flying in one direction, it would come back from the other side of the space. The technicians calculated the loop path of the detector and finally concluded that the centre of the enclosed space is our ship. What happened? Has the universe collapsed around us? No matter what, the technicians are still looking for the cause of the mutation, but I am not optimistic.

“Log six, keywords: none.

“We know too little about the universe.

“That strange, sphere creature—I can only call it this way, now—seems to be the root of everything. The technicians were analysing the instrumental records of the sphere creature when it suddenly appeared near the spacecraft. They were surprised to find that it was not a spatial leap in the ordinary sense, but rather, a more peculiar phenomenon of teleportation. The records show that when the sphere appeared, the laws of nature around it were distorted as if the sphere ‘dropped’ in from a universe that was different from ours. It may be that this ‘time traveling’ behaviour triggered a spatial pattern of confusion, causing us to be trapped in a closed space bubble. Fortunately, there are indications that the space around us is not completely sealed. Some unstable teleportation points can be opened at a fixed location, and technicians are testing the opening rules.

“Log seven, keyword: bubble, spreading.

“We have finally confirmed the situation outside, whereby the ‘outside’ refers to the situation outside the space bubble.

“Things are more bizarre than we thought. There is a strange atmosphere in the spaceship and everyone is upset. It is clear that there has been a great change outside the space bubble for some time, but we know nothing about it: The outer space structure has been torn apart.

“Technicians have opened several teleportation portals to the outside world. The detectors succeeded in teleporting and turning back. The news they brought back is surprising. The outside is also full of space bubbles—one after the other. They are warping spaces that are connected by the hyper-spatiotemporal channel. They are all respectively closed. None of the detectors found the shadow of the stars. Maybe the whole universe has mutated? No one knows what the real situation is.

“It’s like a pot of calm water being added to a foaming agent, and then wildly stirred. Now, the universe outside of us is completely different from the universe we know. The visible and accessible space has been broken. All this was caused by… a mere seed. A seed that may have come from another parallel universe.

“It’s still growing. Although it has slowed down, it has completely occupied the middle part of the spacecraft, and it’s spreading to the power core. I still believe its nature is gentle, but its natural instinct is gradually disintegrating our ship.

“A group of soldiers tried to destroy its tentacles. They made some gains, but it was meaningless. The soldiers’ mental state became abnormal after they returned. There is probably no new action on getting rid of it. This morning, I found some small bumps at the corner of my cabin. The tentacles are about to spread here too.

“Log eight, keywords: none.

“We finally decided to give up the ship, including the ‘sphere creature’, which has been in fully symbiotic relationship with the spacecraft. Oh, it’s not a sphere now. It’s like a forest, spreading across half of the spacecraft.

“Technicians have roughly predicted a spatial model. They think that the area of change should be limited. The laws of the universe will soothe the intrusion of foreign information. The space bubble phenomenon is probably just a ‘cosmic self-healing method’. We have enough small crafts to evacuate. According to the route speculated by technical staff, as long as we follow a certain law, jumping continuously between the space bubbles, we will be able to leave this strange star area.

“The sphere creature seems to know that we are leaving and expresses some kind of regret. I don’t know how to tell anyone about how I communicate with this weird creature: it’s a spiritual connection. It’s probably because my room is close to one of its nerves. I can hear its voice in my sleep.

“It says that it cannot leave this place. This was a failed sowing and it will continue to grow here, at least to complete its own ‘first generation hatching’ mission. If it has enough power, it intends to evolve into a small, short-term biosphere within its own coverage. I don’t quite understand what it means, but there seems to be more powerful, higher beings that made it carry out a seeding task. Anyway, we know too little about the universe.

“This concludes the log.”

Hao Ren and Lily looked at each other. The journal revealed something so significant that it was far beyond Hao Ren’s initial expectations.

It seemed that a lot of problems were suddenly solved!

Of course, a lot of problems emerged on the spot as well.

Lily stretched out her paws to scratch the wall and muttered, “How old is this ship? So, the space bubble was formed that way?”

“I’ve detected it.” The MDT floated in front of them and said, “This will scare you. After converting the time scale, this ship was abandoned at least 200,000 years ago.”

“Oh, 200,000 years… What?!” Hao Ren was shocked.

“Two hundred thousand years ago. This amount of information is really huge…” The MDT sounded serious.

Just as Hao Ren was about to say something, they suddenly heard Vivian’s voice coming from the communicator. “Landlord! We found something strange here!”