Chapter 169: A Super Ecosystem Far Exceeding Earth's
The transport plane entered Emerald Star's dense atmosphere, continuously descending.
In the final stage, the deceleration engines sprayed downwards, and the aircraft body smoothly landed on the bedrock by the lake, as the players began to unload various camping supplies.
The large lake directly in front of the transport plane was boundless; previous aerial telemetry showed it to be 10,000 meters deep.
However, this was likely just the limit of the equipment.
“Is this a karst landform?” Ma Lou, who enjoyed hiking, found this terrain somewhat familiar. “It looks a lot like a giant sinkhole filled with water.”
“Groundwater can’t erode such deep pits,” Jubian told him while fiddling with communication equipment.
“Then is it a water-filled meteorite crater, or a volcano?”
“Doesn’t look like it either. The underwater part of the lake is very steep, over 60 degrees. I don’t understand geology, but there doesn’t seem to be similar terrain on Earth. I don’t know how it was formed.”
Chang Kong circled the transport ship. The phased array radar mounted on his shoulder armor showed no abnormalities in the surroundings.
However, standing by the lake, Ye Xing and Lu Yuan, who had the highest perception attributes, both felt a bit uncomfortable and uneasy.
Evidently, Emerald Star had a very flourishing ecosystem, and there should have been animals running and flying everywhere, but looking around now, apart from the lake water and towering giant trees, it was simply too quiet.
At this moment, Jubian made a discovery.
“Executive Officer, our communication system has received a signal. We can only determine the direction now, not the distance, but from the waveform, it shouldn’t be too far!”
Black Smoke: “Only received it now? Why didn’t we find it when we were in the sky before?”
Jubian: “I don’t know either—”
“Then let’s take off.” Lu Yuan turned and ordered, “Chang Kong, fly towards the signal.”
Chang Kong: “Now? Shouldn’t we establish an outpost here first?”
“Just listen to the boss! This place has an inexplicable weirdness!”
Ye Xing started running back.
Although there were some doubts in their hearts, everyone obediently gathered their gear. The material boxes that had just been unloaded from the cargo hold were dragged back into the cargo hold before they even had a chance to be opened.
The landing engines reignited. Just as the transport plane slowly ascended from the ground, the onboard remote sensing equipment suddenly emitted a sharp alarm.
Underwater, something had just detached from the rock wall!
“Large unidentified object detected in the water, moving! Ascending very quickly, it’s about to—” Jubian hadn’t finished his sentence when, accompanied by a loud bang, a huge unidentified object burst out of the water.
“Oh my god!”
It was the head of some kind of giant creature. It opened its four-lobed giant mouth, revealing dense, sharp teeth inside, attempting to bite the transport plane in one gulp.
Fortunately, Chang Kong’s reaction was fast enough. While Jubian was still shouting the first half of his sentence, he had already increased the takeoff throttle.
“Go!”
Bang!
The giant mouth closed precariously about ten meters below the fuselage, biting nothing. The strong airflow it created actually lifted the transport plane, which had already activated its Zero Element Furnace and reduced its relative mass to 6 tons, by several meters.
The momentum was astonishing!
The energy contained in that bite probably exceeded a broadside from a real-life battleship’s main guns.
Chang Kong dared not stop, climbing in one breath to an altitude of over 2000 meters.
“What kind of monster is this? How can it be so big!”
Viewed from the air, the monster in the water only revealed two-thirds of its head, and just this two-thirds of its head was already nearly 100 meters long, with a shadow of at least 400 meters of its body still underwater!
Nan Guo de Xue was particularly shocked.
As the only person present who had taken a biology elective in college, she knew that the upper limit of animal size in nature is determined by the density of food in the ecosystem and cannot grow indefinitely.
Taking Earth as an example, the largest animal sizes that the ecosystem can support are basically the blue whale in the sea and the long-extinct Argentinosaurus on land.
The former, a large individual, reached 33 meters in length and 200 tons in weight; the latter was over 40 meters long and nearly 100 tons in weight.
Any larger, even if they consumed nutrients with all their might every day, it would not meet the normal physiological metabolic consumption.
According to this theory, even if Emerald Star's food density reached 20 or 30 times that of Earth, it would at most produce animals tens of times the size of a blue whale, about 120 meters in length.
Four or five hundred meters, incomprehensible, inexplicable—
“What exactly is that? A Mosasaur?”
Ye Xing couldn’t help but recall the famous scene from the movie Jurassic Park.
“What Mosasaur? This thing is three times bigger than Godzilla—”
Black Smoke wiped the cold sweat from his forehead.
“This kind of super creature should spend most of its time in hibernation,” Nan Guo de Xue offered her conjecture, “We probably just woke it up and it mistook us for food.”
“But we didn’t do anything—and besides, how many pounds of meat are we all combined?” Guo Li Cheng questioned, “It’s not even enough to replenish the energy it just expended, is it?”
Nan Guo de Xue gently shook her head.
She truly couldn't answer that question.
Lu Yuan frowned deeply.
Using hibernation to reduce daily consumption only allows for maintaining a super large body size; it doesn't explain how it grew so large.
That giant beast would eventually wake up to hunt, like just now, so the consumption during foraging would still exceed the total energy obtained from food.
Could it be that it has a biological nuclear reactor inside?
Is it really Godzilla's relative?
Whatever the truth, one thing was certain.
They definitely couldn't stay by the water anymore, especially not by such a bottomless lake!
No one could guarantee that the monster just now couldn't come ashore.
“Fly near the signal source we just detected, and then airdrop us. We’ll search for the signal source on foot.”
Lu Yuan said to Chang Kong.
“Understood!”
The squad members went to the cargo hold and began installing power armor accessories.
For this operation, various weapons and equipment were quite complete. The corner of the cargo hold was practically a dazzling small armory, piled with various long guns and short cannons, and ample ammunition.
Considering the complex terrain in the jungle and the high possibility of biological hazards, two sets of all detection equipment needed to be brought as backup, especially thermal imaging.
Chang Kong switched to a semi-sniper, semi-assault loadout, carrying a single-person electromagnetic railgun and a boltgun.
Guo Li Cheng still had her unchanging pure melee equipment, but this time she was very amenable to advice, changing her dark red paint job to the same jungle camouflage as the others.
Ye Xing, Ma Lou, and Lu Yuan himself chose a semi-assault, semi-melee loadout. Among them, Lu Yuan also took the captured plasma weapon. Two of these weapons were seized from Apollo, one of which was left on Li Star for scientific research.
Now, it was renamed the “Dragon’s Breath” plasma shotgun. Although its effective range was only 200 meters, within that range, the armor penetration and damage attributes brought by the ultra-high temperature were maxed out.
It had a kind of numerical beauty.
The “Dragon’s Breath” had adjustable power. When connected to an external large power source, its maximum single-shot energy was 100 megajoules; under power armor supply, the power decreased, with 0.5 to 10 megajoules per shot being a more reasonable range, corresponding to a charging time of 0.25 to 5 seconds.
After preparation, Chang Kong piloted the transport plane down to an altitude of 700 meters, and the side air-drop hatch opened.
The elite five-person team jumped down, using their flight packs to decelerate. Emerald Star's atmosphere was much denser than Li Star's, making the descent very smooth.
Rustle, rustle...
The giant tree leaves constantly brushed against Lu Yuan’s power armor visor. Upon closer observation, these leaves were quite thick, with a faint metallic sheen on their surface.
He adjusted his descent path, stepping on a thick branch midway to scan the leaves.
The genetic material of the plant cells was an organic long chain similar to DNA, but the molecular structure was distinctly different, and the genetic codons were also incompatible with Earth species.
It could be basically confirmed that they were native, naturally evolved alien species.
The cuticles of the giant tree leaves contained lead and boron, which could effectively shield against stellar radiation, protecting cell structures from strong ultraviolet damage, which was very ingenious.
One minute later, the team landed.
“The ground here is a standard karst landform. Ultrasonic radar shows pits and fissures everywhere, but they are all filled with thick humus and are not visible at first glance. Everyone, try to avoid them.”
Ye Xing, acting as scout, reminded everyone.
“Got it~”
Under the heavy canopy, the entire world seemed to be shrouded in a green filter.
The light intensity here was less than ten percent of that at the treetops, but because the star itself was very bright, it still had the illuminance of an overcast day on Earth.
After being “filtered” by layer upon layer of leaves, the harmful radiation content in the sunlight was greatly reduced, basically becoming harmless visible light.
At the same time, precisely because of the Masking of these leaves, communication radio waves in the jungle were difficult to dissipate into the air and be intercepted by the transport plane.
“Everyone, be careful.” Lu Yuan opened the team channel. “The understory environment here is very suitable for animal habitation. I estimate there will be…”
Halfway through his sentence, the heart rate detector interface suddenly showed a large number of red dots, indicating they were within a few meters of them, motionless.
“What’s going on? Is the instrument broken?”
The others also saw these red dots.
“No—? The targets are underground, climbing vertically upwards! Everyone, jump! Then hover in the air!”
Just then, from the knee-deep fallen leaves and humus beneath Guo Li Cheng’s feet, many slender, withered, black-iron-colored arms suddenly stretched out.
These arms all bent downwards, like an inverted cage, tightly grasping Guo Li Cheng’s arms and body, and abruptly dragging her down.
In just an instant, Guo Li Cheng disappeared beneath the thick fallen leaves and humus, as if nothing had happened.