The Record of Unusual Creatures

Panda Novel

L’Harrone, the Planetary Core.

The engineering droids had already completed their scan of the cool planet’s heart from tip to toe. They had erected all sorts of research and engineering units around its outer shell, with towers and connecting tubes linked to the core. That gave Hao Ren the feeling of an ongoing “surgery”.

It was as if the planet’s core was being prepared to go under the knife…

“This is technically similar to surgery.” Nolan laughed after she listened to Hao Ren’s thoughts. “The Heart of God is located deep within the planet’s core, and it is covered by the usual metals and rock layers. You’ll need to cut it apart to take it out anyway. Plus, the Heart of God was originally soaked in the lava, but after the planet was torn in two, the core rapidly cooled down, and the Heart of God was sealed deep within the hardened lava.”

Hao Ren raised his eyebrow. “But its ability to affect the information outside is not impeded.”

Nolan shrugged. “Its operations are based on the laws of the universe. Mere material impact won’t do much to it.”

As she said, she commanded the engineering droids to commence the cutting of the solid rock shell around the core of the planet.

About a dozen engineering droids flew above the cutting point as the connecting tubes and support scaffolding retracted away. A moment later, blinding cutter beams blasted out from the engineering droids, and started slicing a series of bright and melting lines.

The other engineering droids soon followed as they activated their tractor beams, and started pulling the cut shells and melted materials away.

Lily lay on the railings as she stared at the holographic projection, her tail wagging excitedly. “Oh oh oh! This reminds me of the scene when we dug the First Born out of Holletta! But the whole commotion created by the Aerymian engineering vessels is much larger than this!”

“We are doing precision engineering here, how can excavating an ancient tech be compared to digging the thick-skinned First Born out?” Hao Ren gave Lily the eye, as his gaze fell on the latter’s wagging tail, and he tugged the tip of her tail. “Say, did you bump your head earlier after transforming? You had been wagging for almost two hours now, and not feeling tired at all?”

“Wah!” Lily yelped as she almost leaped up before turning and glared at Hao Ren. “Mr. Landlord you scared the heck out of me! I told you many times to tell me first before you grab my tail! I’ll get tail cramps!”

Vivian rolled her eyes too. “You sure love toying with Doggie. Not scared that she’ll bite?”

Hao Ren sniggered before turning away to look at the outer shell of the Heart of God that was being excavated. “Say… is that thing the ‘vaccine’ we are looking for? It doesn’t feel real at this stage…”

“It doesn’t feel real to me too,” The spacing out (in reality, was doing her homework) Rheia suddenly responded too, “The situation of this world is so different from what we had thought it was. The Mad Lord was not weakened by something, rather the local ancestral civilization had forcibly extended the universe’s existence using technology, and while it may have achieved the aim of ‘suppressing the destructive powers of the taint of madness’, but I dare not say that the Heart of God has a vaccination property.”

As she said, the intensity of the cutter beams had lowered before stopping altogether while the traction droids dragged the debris from the excavation away, and a two-kilometer-wide, uneven diamond-shaped entrance had appeared on the planet’s core.

Beneath the gap, there was an argent gloss.

Hao Ren and the rest boarded a small shuttle away from the Petrachelys and soon arrived that the base of the excavation that was still extremely hot.

With advanced cutter beams and continuous gravity traction clearing the way, the excavation site was unusually clean and did not have too much debris that needed to be cleared. After leaving the shuttle that Hao Ren realized that the argent material was actually an alloy shell.

It felt almost like a titanium alloy, but the data from all of the instruments showed that its strength was about the same as the Creation’s Engine.

There were a large number of lines on the surface of the shell as if it was the surface of a circuit board that was filled with circuits, and between the lines, a white glow waxed and waned.

The waxing and waning matched the “heartbeat” that Nolan had heard earlier.

“I can even hear heartbeats.” Nolan’s image appeared on the projection and she was still monitoring all the data coming from the monitoring instruments, “Heartbeat stable, the Heart of God is in a very calm state now.”

Hao Ren casually quipped, “Are you still maintaining contact with it?”

“Yes, our datalink never disconnected,” Nolan replied. “I have transferred over the cipher from the Foundation Stones to my unique language repository, and now I can directly speak to the Heart of God. But it does not have advanced intelligence, and as a device meant to restart the universe, it had dedicated most of its computation ability to the world re-creation module, and its ability to think is rather basic.”

Hao Ren was not all that surprised. “Yeah… it does not really need to process any complicated stuff, and if it was too intelligent… god knows what sort of nonsense will happen after so many cycles of annihilation.”

Vivian looked down at the alloy “surface” that she was stepping on, and while the gravity pull around the core was weak but the moment she touched the surface of the Heart of God she felt the gravity was about the same as Earth’s, and that allowed her to stand stably.

“This surface seems to have a layer over it,” Lily said as she squatted down and used her claws to scratch the surface. She found that her nails did not actually touch the alloy as if a layer of energy shielding had prevented her from doing so, “Seems like a shield?”

“Yes, this is a protective shield.” Hao Ren said as he pulled out the Scepter of Sovereignty out from his dimensional pocket, “The data from the Foundation Stones only contains surface level authorization, and can only open the Heart of God on a data level, but the Heart of God itself is still has a physical protection, and this shield is that thing. I had Nolan open a hole here just because the connecting port to disable this shield is close by.”

He slammed the end of the scepter down onto the surface of the Heart of God.

The moment they two made contact, layers upon layers of glowing lines appeared from the point of contact and the light spread out like ripples upon a lake’s surface. And at the same time, Hao Ren felt a series of shuddering underneath him.

He lifted the scepter and slammed it once again on the surface of the Heart of God, and the rippling rings of light became a continuous halo and the shuddering became more and more pronounced.

“Is this thing supposed to be used this way?” Lily mumbled to Vivian, “Won’t Mr. Landlord wreck it?”

“Not everyone is a clueless brute like you, you know?” Vivian gave the doggie a measured disdain. “You can even wreck the door by just opening it, there’s nothing that won’t get wrecked in your hands.”

And while the two continued to mumble at each other, Hao Ren had already stopped.

Nolan’s voice then rang, “Boss, the barrier is about to go offline!”

“Pull the engineering droids back.” Hao Ren looked at the debris that was falling from the shuddering, and as he lifted the scepter he turned to Vivian and the rest. “Let’s step back for a bit! The Heart of God’s shell is about to crack!”

The engineering droids were already prepared and the moment the Heart of God started shuddering, they quickly pulled back and by the time that Hao Ren and the rest had teleported to a ‘safe zone’ a few kilometers away, the outer shell of the Heart of God fully opened.

The blackish-red shell of the planet’s core cracked open in many places as a small amount of molten lava spewed out from the cracks and threw a huge amount of debris all around and the outer shell rapidly expanded as if it could no longer hold the internal pressure of the core, and a low hum later, the hardened ‘protective shell’ finally shattered.

But the cooled outer shell was not Hao Ren’s concern, they were literally nothing in the eyes of the legendary excavating professional, the Sun King that had previously dug two First Born out of Holletta, and this was pretty much another excavation work that needed more time, but the most important matter was… the shielding that came with the Heart of God had finally deactivated.

It had appeared in whole before everyone and was now controllable.

It was a massive silver orb structure, but it was not as ‘smooth’ as Hao Ren had imagined. He was fooled by the alloy surface, and in fact, that surface he saw was just a platform on the outer shell.

Across the five-kilometer wide sphere, there were countless of hexagonal platforms scattered unevenly across the surface, and some even had odd spiral and tubular-shaped structures. Some of them seemed like an enlarged data port while some looked like a connecting framework to an even bigger structure while countless of crystal-like objects grew around the hexagonal platform and the tubular structures, bizarre and beautiful at the same time.

Lily started mumbling again, “Seems like this thing had been connected to some other thing before…”

“It is, the Heart of God was not created independently, and it was originally installed on all sorts of platforms.” Nolan’s projection appeared above the data terminal. “At first, a planetary starship was its ‘throne’, and the starship was called ‘Mokhra’, but after a few eras Mokhra was destroyed and the Heart of God was installed by the people of the latter eras on different things, a star fort, a massive starship, and even on the planet’s surface. Installing it in the planet’s core was something done a few eras back. By then, L’Harronean civilizations had lost the ability to operate or access the Heart of God and did not even know what it was for. The Heart of God had looked for a ‘safe sanctuary’ by itself, a backup protocol after not receiving any external commands.

Hao Ren kept silent and tightened his grip on the Scepter of Sovereignty as he looked at the glowing ‘mini planet’ surrounded by the shattered fragments of the core.

At this moment, a torrent of data and information were surging into his mind through the scepter.

Vivian finally noticed Hao Ren’s silence and slight stupor and asked concernedly, “Hao Ren? Hao Ren? What’s wrong?”

After a few calls only did Hao Ren broke out of his stupor. He quickly waved his hand, “I’m fine, I’m fine. The Heart of God had sent me an instruction manual through the scepter…”

Everyone was confused. “A manual?”

Hao Ren broke into a smile as he turned towards Rheia. “Weren’t we cracking our heads about the missing high-efficiency core for the Creation’s Engine? We now have one!”