Finding a wizard in the vast Inferno was like looking for a needle in a haystack. Even with the army of bats that Vivian was so proud of and Hao Ren’s advanced probes, there was no guarantee they would find him. They began to discuss their next search option. Lily recalled the purpose why Baptiste wanted to go to Inferno. “He’s going to the second layer of Inferno. But where’s this second layer?”
Hao Ren looked into the distance. No matter which direction he looked at, he could only see a desolate land. There was no sign of ‘stratification.’ When he first heard about the second layer of Inferno, he thought it was structurally like a tower, but now it seemed that he was wrong.
“Underground,” Vivian gently tapped the ground with her toes. “There is another layer a dozen kilometers beneath our feet. It is a vast space, almost like another world.”
Lily was wide-mouthed for a long while before she said, “Underground again? It seems like we always go underground lately.”
Hessiana looked at Hao Ren suspiciously. “What do you mean underground? What do you usually do with Vivian?” she asked.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to sell her to Shanxi coal miner as a slave,” Hao Ren said, waving his hand. “Not even the Saudi Crown Prince could stand her jinx. And by the way, is the second layer of Inferno a cave?”
“No.” Vivian shook her head. She looked troubled as if she was at a loss. “I just heard some rumors. It is said that the area beneath is as big as the surface world. It is so incredibly big that it is not a cave. No one had ever gone to the deeper part of Inferno. An exploration team had detected the second layer of Inferno using magic telepathy. But I can’t tell what it is like.”
“Baptiste knows it. Otherwise, he will not be so obsessed with it,” Nangong Wuyue said in a snoring sound of water. “Do you know where is the entrance ?”
“I am letting the bats look for it. It is said to be surrounded by a huge hole surrounded by a crater. I think it should be very eye-catching. It would be great if we can find Baptiste when we find the entrance.”
Meanwhile, Nangong Sanba was looking around cautiously. “I heard there are monsters here? Rumour has it that the monsters crawl the land, but I could see nothing here.”
“Is it not good to not seeing a monster?” Vivian arced her mouth. “There are indeed many monsters in Inferno, but not in all places. Occasionally, we will encounter a ‘quiet’ place like this. Now, we are just plain lucky. I hope Baptiste is equally fortunate that he doesn’t die before we get to him.”
Vivian then looked at Hao Ren and said, “Can you increase the range of the probes? It is not that I can come to Inferno every day; I want to get to know more about this place. I was curious about it last time, but unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance.”
Hao Ren nodded. He instructed the MDT to let the probes to conduct a broader search.
Armed with the latest information, he issued a set of new search criteria to the probes. Besides searching for Baptiste, the probes would also look for large voids and crater on the surface. They had enlarged the search area, and the holographic map displayed on the MDT was continually updating. The probes and Vivian’s bats were searching separately to cover more area.
Meanwhile, he ordered some probes to get a bird’s-eye view from above so that he could see how big this world was.
The MDT showed the footage as the probes streaming back the visual. The probes had entered the thick and dense atmosphere at high altitude. Large, dirty clouds were looming low with frequent lightning. This lightning was not natural lightning but a result of a kind of chemical reaction. It oscillated at breakneck speed on the surface and inside the cloud, turning the cloud into a weird illuminant and resonating with the other clouds on the surroundings.
This visual was like a tour into the stomach of a massive monster of clouds whose organs and flesh were shimmering with light.
Hao Ren deliberately let the probes slow down so that he could observe the cloud more clearly in the hope that he might find out the answer to the mystery of the ecological environment of Inferno. The magical visual attracted their eyeballs as they all gathered and watched. Poking her head at the visual, Lily suddenly said, “Are these lights illuminating the entire Inferno?”
“I supposed. But we can’t see the sun from the surface; the thick clouds are blocking out any light from above. So, yeah, the clouds are illuminating the world.” Hao Ren nodded slightly. “And this is dimensional debris; it is hard to say whether there are stars outside.”
Nangong Wuyue asked curiously, “Where does the electric light in the clouds come from?”
Hao Ren poked the MDT who then replied listlessly, “Don’t poke me. I have done the analysis. It’s the microbes.”
“Microorganisms?” Hao Ren looked a little surprised.
“Weird ecosystem,” the MDT said, opening a small set of visuals next to it that showed a simulated planet Inferno. As there were no real scan images of the planet, the simulation was just an assumption. But the simulation did look convincing; there was a diagram showing the cross-section of the upper atmosphere to the surface. “The thick clouds cover the planet, so dense that it was as if bed covered with a quilt. The clouds contained microbes, at least as many as a hundred types of them. They feed on the organic dust brought up from the lower atmosphere. And, they give out heat and light. Strictly speaking, this is no longer a ‘cloud,’ but a massive, living pan-biological tissue. Due to the unique structure of the cloud, I see it as a loose, peculiar multi-cellular organism although the microbes appear to be independent single-cell individuals. The world is a big, big place. Anything can happen.”
Everyone was stunned except Hessiana and her sidekicks who appeared like listening to double Dutch. Lily could not help but look up at the clouds in the sky. “It looks a supermassive soft creature wraps around a planet.”
Hearing what Lily said, Hao Ren glanced at Nangong Wuyue. Nangong Wuyue immediately shook her body and snorted. “Why are you looking at me? I am Mollusca, not a creature… No, I mean I am a creature, not Mollusca. Oh, wait! I am Mollusca, but I’m not that big.”
Hao Ren scratched his head. “Speaking of Mollusca, I can’t help but think of Slime. Can’t you study what you ultimate talent is and form shift into something other than a Slime?”
Nangong Wuyue held her arms and said, “I did. I’m also a mantis shrimp. Three meters long!”
Hao Ren: “…..”
Lily was right. A massive organism wrapped the Planet Inferno inside. The cloud was a spheroidal creature that provided light and heat to the world. However, compared to this incredible phenomenon, Hao Ren was more concerned about one other thing. “What is outside the clouds?” he asked.
The MDT commanded the probes to speed up. Soon the probe had reached an altitude above the clouds. As they could see from the visual, the probe had passed through an incredibly smooth, silk-like milky white plane before it shot into the vast darkness.
The probe slowed down and started to capture images of a sea of white plane, which was as smooth as snow. If not that they already knew, they would have thought that it was a snowfield.
Lily was almost in a stupor. “…so beautiful!”
Vivian shot her a sideways look. “Feeling like putting some collar on the neck and go for a sprint?”
Without thinking, Lily replied, “Yes!”
She had the gene of her ancestors.
The probe turned the lens back in the direction from where it came. It captured a leak spot on the smooth, white ‘purdah,’ where there were fog and white, fiber-like tissue spewed out. But the place was closed a few seconds later.
“Unbelievable… this is biological,” Hao Ren said. His jaw almost dropped to the ground. “How did it evolve into this?”
“It prevents the planet from losing its mass,” the MDT replied. “The probe had just penetrated a solid colloidal structure, which the microbes in the clouds have probably condensed for thousands of years. The outermost layer of the planet is a pure white world. If you walk in the atmosphere, you should feel like walking on marshmallows.”
Nangong Wuyue let out a sigh. “I have never imagined this hellish place could be so beautiful from space.”