Chapter 2712: One Life in the Houyi Clan

He didn't know whether he was still Li Yao, or even whether he was a "he" or an "it". It was as if he lost the logical thinking abilities of an intelligent creature, but gained something impossible to describe.

He was like an egg, but also like an agglomerate of hundreds of thousands of eggs. He could feel the warmth, moisture and movement of an uncountable number of eggs in the surrounding soil. He could even link with the insects on the surface through some sort of telepathy- or pheromone-like method, sharing their vision to see everything.

He saw that this was a planet that was vast and burning hot, covered with constantly erupting volcanos and dark clouds that issued lightning. The star was very close to the planet. Its sunlight was like magma falling on the ground, bringing more destruction than life.

Very little life could adapt to the harsh environment, let alone evolve into a civilisation of intelligent creatures.

But his species fell outside the norm.

He "saw" an immeasurably long black meteorite, or starship, burning in raging fire, dragging a grey-white tail, tearing through through the dark clouds, riding the sunlight, diving into the atmosphere of the planet.

It didn't slow down in its descent, but in midair it gave out a huge roar and exploded into a spiral of uncountable shards.

These shards gave out piercing screams, landed on the ground and immediately rotated at high speed to drill themselves into the earth.

One word appeared in Li Yao's primal consciousness: "Burst". (TN: ?)

He suddenly understood the meaning of this scene, like a blind person first seeing the light, seeing the brilliant colourful world and receiving a bounty of information.

These black meteorite-like starships were not ordinary transportation devices, but were the Houyi Clan themselves.

Hundreds of millions of insects of the Houyi Clan, like hundreds of millions of cells, gathered together and formed into incomparably huge, star-crossing starship life forms, bringing the capability to travel the stars and search for new habitats to this origin planet.

The cold darkness of space constantly eroded at the insect starships, gradually taking the lives of the beetles.

In addition, the high temperatures of re-entry would sever the last strand of life of these living starships.

Thus, after successfully delivering its cargo of eggs (TN: written as seeds, but eggs makes more sense) to within the new habitable planet's atmosphere, the starships' mission were complete. They would use their last strength to blow themselves up, one after another.

Hundreds of millions of old beetles died in a split second, but hundreds of millions of eggs would be scattered by the shockwave to every corner of the entire planet.

Li Yao quietly appreciated the fireworks of death and rebirth brightly blooming above the dark clouds, feeling neither sorrow nor joy.

All beetles are one, uncountable beetles forming the lifeform known as "Houyi". The sacrifice of millions of living starships gave new life and created a chance for the eggs to incubate. This was a perfectly normal metabolic process. There was nothing tragic about it, but there was nothing joyful or moving about it either - and anyway, their environment was still precarious and they could not waste the slightest bit of energy on joyfulness or feeling moved.

He, it, they, were simply following the instructions engraved into their genes, doing their best to absorb the heat of the sun and the nutrients from the soil to reproduce and grow.

Not all the eggs were this fortunate.

Many eggs (TN: written as eggs) were scattered into soil layers too close to the surface and met with the magma-like scorching of the sun. Even the Houyi Clan's black shells were unable to withstand such heat and were burnt into ash.

Many other eggs drilled too deep, down into the overly dark and cold soil layers, and could not absorb enough heat and nutrients to survive.

Not to mention the indigenous animals - even though there weren't any huge high-level animals, there were still fungi in the soil that similarly used sunlight as food. These fungi gave Li Yao's "kin" a lot of trouble. Like lightning, pheromones from afar brought news of the "kin" far away.

It was said that in a certain place, the fungus had grown into enormous fungal nets and fungal blankets and swallowed uncountable Houyi Clan eggs. They were forced to quickly adjust their own genes to evolve resistance to infection by this fungus, which greatly delayed their emergence from the soil and their domination of the planet.

Luckily, Li Yao was not buried too deeply or too shallowly, was not too wet or too dry, received enough sunlight for abundant energy but not so much that it burnt his shell, did not have his growth disturbed by the hateful fungus, and was more than 18 kilometres away from the volcanoes and earthquakes. He could focus on unlocking the secrets in his gene strands and fetching more and more new weapons from the "armoury" to outfit himself.

He experienced a total of seven molts. After every molt, the size of his body grew and the patterns on his newly grown shell were better finetuned towards the radiation of the sun and its spiritual ripples.

These patterns were like adding wings to a tiger, increasing his sunlight absorption efficiency to new levels. Countless mottled glimpsed images flashed across his consciousness, showing him thousands of Houyi Clan "living starships" traversing the ocean of stars and the highly developed Houyi Clan home planet with its row upon row of tall buildings that scraped the sky that were all composed of the tiny beetles, perhaps hundreds of millions of beetles in cohesion, to form something like a "biochemical superbrain".

Li Yao gained a new understanding of what he did not know before. He understood the purpose of this expedition.

They were to reproduce on this new planet, breed millions of his family, and only when the number of beetles crossed the critical threshold could they construct complex structures like battleships, high-rise buildings, biochemical superbrains, and "civilisation". Only then could they transit a message back to the home planet, announcing that this expedition was a "success".

Li Yao emerged from the soil and gathered with the tens of thousands of his kin.

He could not precisely tell whether he was this single tiny beetle, or the agglomeration of the messages constantly being exchanged by the uncountable beetles nearby.

The poisonous atmosphere and the ferocious sunlight no longer made him uncomfortable. When he was buried under the ground growing, his genes had already been adjusted to be suitable to the enrivonment on this planet - the Houyi Clan had conquered many similar planets, and this was not the worst one. In their gene bank, they had many weapons for dealing with tricky situations.

Even so, uncountable tribesmen died upon emerging from the soil.

They died from poison, from sun explosure, from cold, from hunger, from all kinds of strange or normal reasons - death did not need an explanation, because life was the only important thing.

Li Yao did not hesitate. His instinct overrode his thinking ability. He squirmed his round body, clumsily waved his immature feelers, and swallowed the dead bodies of his companions.

This was a critical moment. The whole wilderness had been covered by a black tide, and the water in the tide was making "click click" noises. Uncountable beetles were swallowing the dead bodies, increasing the nutrition in their bodies, painfully resisting the scorching sun, strong winds and heavy rain, struggling to fight for a chance to survive.

In the wind and sunlight, Li Yao experienced a few more molts, making his body even bigger and more beautiful.

He grew a pair of sharp and tough pincers, for the purpose of doing precision work on rock; his shell became even shinier, with colourful patterns that could reflect different wavelengths of light, turning them into profound and complex messages; his abdomen grew several sets of extra legs, and in front of his chest were two rows of parallel holes - these orifices had their own secrets that he had yet to discover.

Suddenly, like lightning across his muddled mind, he and the thousands of tribesmen beside him stirred - the season of cohesion had arrived!

Li Yao's shell released colourful light, sending the patterns on his body scattering to the eight directions, looking for compatible kin.

All of his kin were doing the same, and there were hundreds in the crowd that were looking for him too.

Quickly, two sets of shining patterns met in midair. Li Yao crawled towards a particular member of his kin, and the kinsperson responded to his call.

Li Yao used his extra legs to hold tightly onto his counterpart's ring grooves, and his counterpart stabbed its feelers into the holes in Li Yao's chest. It was a perfect and seamless fit.

In that moment, Li Yao felt a trembling from deep in his genes. He felt that he had become more complete. His consciousness was shared with his counterpart, and the parts of his gene bank that he couldn't open before were opened. Even more messages surged out like a flood.

Unsatisfied, they - he was still not satisfied, still used the patterns on his shell to pull in even more beetles to join him. Eventually there were twelve beetles that received his invitation and become part of him. Some beetles acted as legs for crawling, some for precision work, some for digestion and energy storage. In a moment, he leaped from being a lower animal to a higher animal, turning into a huge and overbearing crab-shaped animal.

He was not even the biggest winner in this festival of cohesion. Many beetles had successfully cohered with hundreds, perhaps even a thousand of their companions, forming into a "large group". They would shape themselves into various bizarre and unrestrained forms, trying out different shapes to see which would survive best on this planet.

The process of this experimentation was cruel.

Uncountable forms that had been successful in the past were demonstrated to be unsuitable to this planet. The ferocious and clawed "large groups" collapsed one by one, killing the great majority of beetles. The remaining beetles brought the lessons learned from the failure and joined Li Yao's "small group".

But there were also a tiny portion of the cohesion forms that were identified as successes, and the "large groups" in these shapes would split up regardless and bring knowledge of their new successful forms to more "small groups".

Even Li Yao died twice.

He wasn't sure if he should use the word "died" to describe his own collapse. In the end, the form he had cohered at great difficulty was found to not be suitable for life on this planet and the project of doing precision work on rock (TN: terraforming?). Ninety percent of the beetles in his body died, but the remaining ten percent brought the most important genetic information, gathered more members, and sought the perfect fusion.

Perhaps, to the individual members of a hive organism, death was a meaningless concept. As long as their civilisation lived, they had achieved immortality.