The evolution of insect swarms from XNUMX million years ago

Chapter 201 The Last Bao

When consciousness awakens in a completely unfamiliar environment, there is no fluctuation in its consciousness.

The linguistic genetic material in the body does not know the thoughts of this body, but faithfully records everything that happens in the outside world, and engraves it into the depths of the sequence - they once bathed in the light of stars on the soft earth, and stretched the branches and leaves in the wind. , like a light pressure sail facing a star.

They remember every drop of water that fell in the scorching summer, and every piece of frost that fell in the trembling winter. As the stars spin overhead, they sway in the breeze.

Ba'ao is the name given to them by the first race that came into contact with them. In the language of this race, it means "the sower".

As their name suggests, as normal plants with synapse networks, they pay attention to the balance of the ecological environment, and often drop the seeds of life to planets with suitable environments but where life has not yet been born, or further modify the environment to make the environment suitable for ordinary people. Carbon-based organisms survive.

Those were also their most glorious years, when billions of their kind worked together and cooperated as one body under the connection of special synaptic structures, just like the branches, leaves and roots of the same tree.

They have sown many colonies in star space in a unique way. Their advanced organic structure technology has allowed them to expand widely across the galaxy and bring the seeds of life to those barren planets.

Until that happened.

The mother planet was the first to bear the brunt - before they realized the danger, the entire planet fell into silence - synapses everywhere were quickly severed in an incomprehensible way, fundamentally disconnecting the connection. Then, the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

One signal after another breaks away from the cluster, and they lose a large number of individuals in this way. From the beginning to the end, most individuals lost their connection with the collective consciousness before they even had time to see the enemy.

Except it. Whether it was luck or misfortune, it, or part of it, was selected by those unknown enemies, uprooted, cut off its branches and leaves, placed in a transparent cage, and barely survived on the nutrients infused by mercury.

Its lifespan is almost eternal, but at this time, eternal life brings a long period of suffering and pain. The connection with the cluster has been disconnected at an unknown time, and its consciousness has fallen into silence since then, leaving only the increasingly decaying body. The body is in this transparent prison.

What greeted it and them was a series of inhumane experiments. In each experiment, their body tissues were decomposed, torn apart, and then injected with liquid of unknown ingredients - this would become the source of all subsequent disasters.

A long time passed, everything was rewritten, the facilities housing it gradually decayed, and it once again accidentally solved the problem and fell into the planet below, but it was unknown to all of this.

But like a miracle, its consciousness did not decay with all this. When consciousness wakes up again, it is already in a strange environment.

The transparent cage and other structures that imprisoned it were shattered at some point. Only its body survived, and it took root again in the cage, multiplying and expanding.

Although it didn't know where the new unknown environment was, a hint of luck in its instinct made it initially plan to try to regain contact with the cluster - until it discovered that it could no longer proliferate other synapses in the normal way. Structural individuals. The individuals multiplied through fission no longer have the synaptic structure connected to the cluster, and can only act instinctively like ordinary plants. This leads to the fact that when that kind of existence appears, the main body is decaying and it is no longer able to do anything.

Those gray-green beings that were somewhat similar to it were extremely aggressive. At first, they drove the puppets controlled by them to try to raze it.

And when it showed some characteristics, those beings suddenly changed their methods - among the gray and green tissues, the gray parts extended, climbed up its trunk, and began to penetrate its roots into its tissues.

Those gray-white structures quickly found the location of the neural structures and began to invade - their method was quite strange, they could decompose the original nervous system and replace it with special structures, seizing control of the body.

Although it tried its best to resist, those gray-white structures still successfully invaded the nervous system and took away part of the body's control. What's terrible is that the complete parts taken by the opponent have complete functions and can fully support the opponent's long-term development.

It doesn't know what hemiplegia is, otherwise it would definitely use this word to describe its current state. The perceptual system allows it to still perceive foreign objects through its organs, but it cannot issue instructions through the nervous system. It can only watch its body being paralyzed by those parasites. Manipulated by others, it proliferates and expands endlessly.

When encountering those strange structures, it had already extended many branches from its body that were connected to the nervous system through its roots. However, the parasites did not destroy it, but controlled it to split outwards to produce independent individuals.

It completely lost control of these individuals. After that, it no longer knew anything about it. It just resisted the other party's continued erosion day after day, allowing its own consciousness to survive.

It uses the remaining synaptic structure in the body to proliferate a brand new brain and supporting nutritional tissue on the body, and almost seals it to resist the erosion of the special structure, randomly giving up the defense of the main brain, and Consciousness is transferred to the paracerebral defense.

It is this expedient strategy that can be called self-destruction of martial arts that prevents its consciousness from being completely eroded by the parasites for the time being. Instead, it maintains a certain degree of control and can interfere with the opponent's control of some structures to an extremely limited extent.

But it can't do anything about the structures on the outside that are completely controlled by the opponent. Can't even know what happened.

Time continued to pass like this, and gradually, it and the parasite reached a certain sense of balance. Both parties were helpless with each other, and even began to develop from unilateral parasitism to symbiosis - as a last resort, it could only accept all this. .

Until the consciousness felt that something had broken through the defense lines of the parasitic sub-bodies on the periphery and entered the core area. This made it feel a little surprised - it knew the aggressiveness of the parasites and could break through its many defense lines. Killing here is obviously not easy.

In its consciousness, the opponent's steps gradually broke through and gradually approached the position of the main body - for a time, hope was rekindled in its heart. Even if the other party is not friendly, it may be possible to end one's own pain and stop being tortured by the parasite day after day.

(End of this chapter)