It was not difficult to find a path to the brain of the First Born. In fact, the brain must be near the center of the planet, and as long as they dug in the right direction, they would be able to find it. Then, by scanning the tangled nerves deep underground, they could easily locate the location of the brain.
But even if it was easy in theory, Hao Ren still had to proceed with caution.
The planet's First Born was brain-dead, but that did not mean it was no longer a threat. The tentacles, which had the ability to protect itself and eliminate foreign invasions, could act autonomously even without the control of the brain. They would automatically destroy threatening targets within range and block the passage to the planet's core. If not for that, the Executors' war to recapture their home planet would not have been so brutal and difficult.
Those entangled defensive tentacles were only one of the difficulties. They also had to face the stranger environment the deeper they went into the planet.
A planet that was infested by a First Born was different from an ordinary planet. The existence of such a massive mythical creature was enough to mutate the interior of the planet. From the crust down, the deeper it went, the stranger the environment inside the planet. The laws of physics would often be distorted, and there would even be large-scale supernatural areas. Chaotic energy fields were everywhere where the First Born's tentacles tangled, and energy surges replaced the magma in the depths of the earth. Sometimes, nightmares would even corrode reality. This phenomenon was most common near the First Born's ganglia.
After all, what lived in the depths of the planet was not a juvenile, but a matured First Born, and its' brain 'was out of control. Brain death had greatly weakened the First Born's external aggression, but it had made the inside of its body even more dangerous.
Hao Ren had come into contact with more than one First Born, and he naturally knew the characteristics of this mythical creature. Based on his experience, he first needed to determine the distribution of the main tentacles from the shallow layers of the planet, and then find a suitable invasion point.
This part of the data was not hard to come by. Nolan had roughly scanned the entire planet's crust with the probes she had sent out during her days on the surface. She had also grasped the general situation of each tentacle exposed on the surface. After summarizing the data, Hao Ren found several unusually eye-catching 'cracks' on the planet's crust.
Those fissures had almost penetrated several major continents and oceans. Although they had 'healed' on the surface and were covered by thick rocks, mud, seawater, and vegetation, there was still a fractured state inside. In the holographic image, these shadows that represented the fracture zone were as glaring as the planet's' hidden wounds'.
This unnatural situation was obviously not caused by normal geological changes.
Hao Ren thought of something N-4 mentioned — the meteorite shower that changed everything. Before the meteorite shower that caused the brain death of the First Born, the First Born had once opened the crust. Now it seemed that the damage the First Born suffered during the meteorite bombardment was more serious than expected, so much so that it could not completely close the cracks on the planet.
Everyone unanimously decided to find a suitable breakthrough point in these cracks. No matter how powerful a creature was, its unhealed wounds must be the easiest weakness to break through.
The Petrachelys silently traversed the planet's atmosphere. She was flying over a crack and using her onboard radar system to detect the rock structure deep in the earth. Hao Ren stood on the bridge, watching the real-time crustal scan image sent back by Nolan and the scenery from the external monitor.
A sudden shadow on the clouds caught his attention.
"What is that?" Lily had also been looking at the scenery curiously, so she and Hao Ren noticed the anomaly behind the clouds at the same time.
"A fallen object from outer space, no threat, and not on our flight path," Nolan said casually. Nolan said casually. Her shield was now full, and her armor was brand new. A falling object from outer space would not attract her attention at all.
But everyone else had their eyes on the behemoth that was gradually breaking through the clouds and falling to the earth.
It was a huge disc-shaped object, with a thick outer rim and a steel internal support structure. Around it, twelve solemn black cubes surrounded the entire structure like silent guards. It was the fortress that should have been on the surface of the moon.
The thick clouds were torn apart, and strands of them fell around the fortress and quickly evaporated in the high heat. The fortress did not decelerate as it entered the atmosphere. Its entire body was wrapped in a layer of blazing red light. The high-speed friction and violent vibration as it broke through the atmosphere had destroyed its ring walls and main beams. The ancient building (or rather, the spaceship) gradually began to disintegrate as it approached the ground. The first thing to fall off was the external armor on the ring wall. Then, its main servers began to catch fire one after another, exploding into a huge fireball in the air. Metal wreckage rained down on the ground.
Lily saw this scene and suddenly exclaimed, "Isn't that the fortress! What is the Cortex Prime trying to do? "
"The Cortex Prime has shut down, and now it's the automated program that it left behind to control the fortress," the MDT said quickly. "So the vibration we experienced when we left the fortress was not a self-destruct program … It was preparing to take off!"
The speed of the fortress was certainly not as fast as Nolan, so Hao Ren and his team had been on the home planet for a long time before the fortress finally flew here.
As everyone watched in shock, the city-like fortress slowly fell to the end of the horizon and broke into pieces in the process. The tentacles of the First Born on the surface of the planet, of course, did not ignore it. It saw the 'slow' falling object as another close-range bombing. Hideous' ridges' quickly rose on the surface of the ground, and thick dark green tentacles broke out of the earth. Then, invisible force fields and visible high-energy light beams burst out from the surface of the tentacles and smashed into the fortress in the sky.
Hao Ren had vaguely guessed the intention of the fortress. He gently knocked on the control panel and said, "Cover it. Let the drones come down and help."
The high-energy light beams fired by the First Born bombarded the surface of the fortress, and in an instant, the fortress, which had been severely damaged in the process of breaking through the atmosphere, was riddled with holes. The remaining repulsive shield of the fortress flickered a few times before it was extinguished. Its ring wall even split directly into three pieces, and several server arrays fell from the main body and fell to the green land of the home planet.
The spoke-shaped main beam of the fortress gradually began to break, but it still made a final counterattack: countless cannons installed on the inner wall of the fortress roared at the same time, and under the control of a predetermined program, these weapons, which had been patiently prepared for thousands of years, blasted all their energy and ammunition on the tentacles of the planet devourer, causing a huge explosion that even shook half of the continent.
Such a counterattack seemed to have 'angered' the tentacles on the surface, and more tentacles surged out of the cracks in the earth, and the fortress was instantly exposed to anti-air fire.
But at this moment, the cover fire from the Petrachelys and the drone cluster finally arrived in time.
The powerful superior firepower instantly suppressed the First Born's counterattack, and the fortress continued to fall along the predetermined trajectory. About one-tenth of the First Born's anti-air firepower had broken through the blockade of the drone cluster, and was still resolutely intercepting the fortress. The latter had no means of counterattack and defense, so it could only use its own structure to resist the merciless artillery fire.
Countless debris fell from its surface, and the thick armor and buffer structure unwaveringly protected the core of the Inevitable Palace.
Finally, the last piece of its structure collapsed. At this moment, the fortress could no longer be called a fortress. It was only a burning, twisted wreckage with thick black smoke trailing behind it, and metal fragments flying all over the sky.
But in the wreckage that was billowing black smoke, a light flashed, and the twisted metal cabin, which was originally a circular hall, exploded in the middle, and Hao Ren clearly saw a transparent glass container being thrown out of the wreckage.
The giant test-tube-like container miraculously remained intact until it reached a few hundred meters above the ground before it exploded, and large chunks of flesh and blood rained down to the ground like falling flowers.
At this height, the First Born could not intercept it in time, and so the exiles who had been away from their homes for nearly ten thousand years finally achieved the long-cherished wish of countless generations — they were home.
In the end, the Cortex Prime had completed its mission.
Hao Ren stood quietly on the bridge, watching the stubborn and ancient A.I. use this method to complete its curtain call. The drone cluster had retreated from the battle as ordered, and when the last piece of the fortress was smashed by the tentacles, the world finally quieted down again.
Only the scorched earth and the evaporated sky could prove that something had happened here.
"MDT, record this down. The civilization of the Plane of Dreams, coded by you, completed the replacement of the main body on the New Imperial Calendar, year 10090 312. The original humans are extinct, and the civilization is inherited by the descendants of the humans, the Executors. This civilization is marked as existing."
"It's been recorded."
"Boss, we have found the best infiltration point." Nolan's voice came from all directions. "We have flown above a large rift. The battle just now caused the First Born's tentacles to move violently, and it happened to tear this place again. With a large number of tentacles destroyed in the battle, this has become the First Born's weakest point."
The holographic projection in the center of the bridge showed the terrain scan data of the surrounding area, and a large rift was prominently marked. It was not far from the last crash site of the fortress.
Hao Ren nodded. "Let the drone cluster lead the way, we will go down from here."
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