The smoke of battle had not yet fully dissipated when Viola, carrying the eight unconscious eighth-level Octopusmen, flew toward the direction of the flagship wreckage. She didn't even turn her head, merely raising a hand to wave casually at Jie Ming. The meaning was clear: interrogation was hers, the rest was his.
Jie Ming naturally had no objection to that. Interrogating prisoners was indeed most suitable for a wizard who primarily cultivated the Law of Agony.
He turned around and began to arrange the cleanup of this plane.
Under the command of the Black Giant Priests, the Black Giants methodically took charge of the Octopusmen prisoners. The fleet of the Tentacle Tree Civilization, which had been waiting outside the plane, quickly dispersed at his order. Thousands of small squadrons spread out like a net across the plane.
The fleet began systematically taking over native strongholds, remaining Octopusmen facilities, and the resource nodes scattered across the surface that had yet to be processed.
As for Jie Ming himself, he slowly descended from high altitude, finally landing in a hilly region that had been utterly ravaged by the aftermath of battle. The scene on the ground was already completely different from just a few days ago.
The sweeping trajectory of the Trigram Fire Annihilation Divine Light had carved dozens of bottomless canyons into the earth. The rock layers along the canyon edges had been melted into a crimson red by the high temperatures, and scorching lava gushed out through the fissures, forming bubbling lava lakes in the depressions.
Where the Nest's enormous body had crushed the ground, the terrain had been flattened directly, leaving a smooth, mirror-like blue crystalline surface that glowed coldly under the sky.
As for the highly compressed energy attacks volleyed by the Octopusmen fleet, although most had been withstood by Jie Ming, those beams that went wide, missed, or were swept to the surface by shockwaves were each enough to vaporize vast mountain ranges. The hills once covered in lush vegetation had now become a charred wasteland.
The air was thick with the smell of burning and a strong ozone odor, mixed together, stinging the nose.
Clearly, under such terrifying shockwaves, few of the plant people harvesting life energy in the depressions could have survived. Although both sides had intended to pull the battlefield as high as possible before the battle, with tens of thousands of sixth-level warships and hundreds of seventh-level creatures unleashing firepower simultaneously, even the shockwaves alone were enough to inflict devastating damage on the surface.
Most of the plant people's villages in this area were located in hilly depressions, directly beneath the battlefield. The casualties were extremely severe.
Jie Ming silently walked over to a patch of charred soil and crouched down.
In the soil, a broken vine-like arm was half-buried in the rubble, its fingertips still curled as if in a subconscious attempt to grasp something in its final moments.
"Huh?"
Jie Ming suddenly sensed something. He looked down at the severed limb, slowly opened the vertical eye on his forehead, and activated both the All-Purpose Eye and the True Illusion Void-Breaking Eye.
"It's not a plant."
That was his first conclusion after scanning the first corpse remains. The biomass composition of these plant people appeared highly similar to plants: cellulose cell walls, chloroplasts, xylem vessels, all present. But inside their cell nuclei was a complete animal neural signal transmission system. Beneath the bark-like surface lay an extremely delicate and complex neural network. The complexity far exceeded that of ordinary plants, and even surpassed that of many lower animals.
Rather than saying plants had gained the ability to move, it was more like an animal that could perfectly mimic a plant.
Jie Ming continued scanning deeper. Soon, he discovered another even more astonishing fact.
Inside each plant people corpse, a large number of extremely tiny independent nerve tissue remained. These nerve tissue were not part of the plant people's own central nervous system. They belonged to another, smaller life unit. He increased the scanning resolution and found extremely fine synaptic connections between these nerve tissue. Then, he pieced together a complete structure.
"Interesting... What a peculiar life structure."
Each individual plant person was actually a collective community composed of tens of thousands of tiny organisms, interconnected through neural synapses. These tiny organisms had differentiated into different functions: some were responsible for sensing light, some for conducting nutrients, some for coordinating movement, and some for recording information. The entire community operated the plant person's body through a neural signal mechanism resembling democratic voting.
The reason Jie Ming could confirm that these tiny organisms were individuals rather than some special type of cell was that, based on his computation of their neural systems, each tiny organism should also have cognitive ability. The thinking of these tiny individuals was more transparent compared to humans, and to some extent, they could even engage in collaborative thinking. Therefore, the intelligence of plant people did not come from a single brain but from the collective intelligence of the entire community.
The larger the community and the tighter the connections, the higher the intelligence of the plant person.
A hint of surprise flickered in Jie Ming's eyes.
"Truly a special life form. So these plant people are not so much individuals as they are a collection of communities." Hence, their humanoid appearance was by no means the result of natural evolution.
The body structure of these plant people was plastic; their form depended on the external neural signal templates they encountered. When these plant people were enslaved by the Octopusmen, they also learned the Octopusmen's "template" without realizing it. Thus, unconsciously, they mimicked the humanoid contours of the Octopusmen.
Jie Ming even found a neural structure similar to that of Octopusmen inside one of the remains. This indicated that they were not just imitating the Octopusmen's appearance but were using their own methods to "become" Octopusmen. It was an unconscious convergent mutation.
Further on, Jie Ming turned his attention to the "talent" that the Octopusmen valued most in plant people.
The ability to extract life energy, which the Octopusmen regarded as a gift from heaven, was actually not the innate talent of the plant people race at all. Inside a relatively well-preserved corpse, Jie Ming found an exquisitely stunning Micro Biochemical Reaction Chamber. It was a micro-factory composed of specialized nerve tissue within the community.
It could synthesize free energy from the air and trace elements from the soil into high-concentration life energy. And this life energy was merely the basic nutrient needed to maintain the community's activity. This was equivalent to the basic metabolism carried out by all living organisms. The reason the Octopusmen treated it as a treasure was simply because the basal metabolic output of the plant people community far exceeded that of ordinary organisms. Needing to maintain the life activity of tens of thousands of community members, their metabolic output was naturally on a different order of magnitude.
Collecting this metabolic output became what the Octopusmen called a "supernatural ability." The Octopusmen thought they were mining a natural mineral deposit. In reality, they had been using a ridiculously primitive harvesting method, trying to scoop out byproducts from a precision factory.
Jie Ming marveled.
The level of biological civilization in this plane was unexpectedly high. Their exquisite control over biological bodies themselves approached an unimaginable degree. They had evolved collective intelligence, could autonomously develop into any form, and could even construct micro biochemical reaction chambers within their bodies. If such a biological civilization were allowed to develop normally in the Endless Chaotic Void, its potential would be unfathomable.
Unfortunately, the Octopusmen had brutally interrupted their evolutionary process in the simplest, most unreasonable way.
Jie Ming stopped in front of a relatively intact plant people corpse, took out a set of sampling tubes from his Inner World, and gently and steadily extracted some viable nerve tissue samples. As long as these samples were preserved in a suitable nutrient solution, they could continue to maintain community activity in vitro.
The Infernal Sulfur Plane now had plenty of open space. Moreover, after merging with the Tentacle Tree Plane, there were many undeveloped planets. He could easily designate a few suitable planets for the plant people to reproduce and rebuild their communities.
This biological civilization had extremely high research value. Whether as a supplementary source of faith for the Incense Faith Path or as a gene bank for bio-modification technology, it was worth investing resources to cultivate.
Just then, a teleportation array's light shone behind him.
A Black Giant Priest quickly stepped out. The vertical opening in his chest opened and closed slightly, and a low, respectful vibrational voice sounded: "Master, the Tentacle Tree Civilization scouts have sent a message."
Jie Ming turned around curiously: "Have they found something?"
"Yes, they discovered an Octopusmen factory that appears to be their core facility on this plane."