Published at 27th of July 2026 12:10 pm

Chapter 4346: An Exotic World

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As they descended from the stealth surveyor ship, they plunged towards the world at increasingly high speeds, pulled by the immense gravity of the planet. Their spacesuits began deploying their stealth features, making them harder to discern. In outer space, the background was, of course, the canvas of the cosmos, causing their suits to change color and grow dark as they plunged towards the planet weightlessly.

Siliscia’s body was covered in leaves that ordinarily were a dark green but quickly absorbed light while mimicking the specks of light of stars. Sternon, Misha, and Runark also applied their stealth solutions, ensuring that they completely blended in.

Ultimately, no matter what point they invaded a planet from, they would enter from the sky and would have to ensure that they weren’t detectable. Thankfully, because they weren’t dealing with a very sophisticated civilization, stealth would be a much greater problem.

As they fell towards the planet, they could feel just how massive the planet was. Even though it wasn’t as large as Gaia Prime, which was an utter titan among planets. Navigating and traveling through the planet would not be easy, but unfortunately, they couldn’t afford things like portable transport. They needed to minimize their energy signature and presence in the world.

Ria didn’t truly know how long it would take for the mission to finish, which was the hard part of the kind of infected world operations that they had decided to undertake, but at the same time. She would just need to hope that they could complete it at the pace that would make the most of human civilization’s capacity to mine esoteric matter from it.

She closed her eyes, simply enjoying the feeling of space-diving towards a planet head-first. It was one of her favorite hobbies. The sense of weightlessness and liberation that came with simply falling towards a planet was very intoxicating.

But it felt a little different from all the previous times she had tried. In the past, Ria enjoyed the liberation simply because it was a feeling that she had never enjoyed in other parts of her life, for most of her life, after she realized her identity as a princess.

But this time, the liberation felt a little redundant.

Perhaps it was because she was taking her own steps in life, not just running away from an environment that she disdained, but also moving towards a goal that she had set for herself, one that she was highly motivated for.

For the first time in her life, she grew impatient about the time it took to reach the planet, wishing that they would reach the planet sooner.

WHOOSH

They felt the first hint of drag resistance as they crossed past the exosphere of the mighty planet. The wind fluttered against their respective suits, growing stronger and stronger. The color of their suits also changed as their suits naturally shifted to be able to blend into the background from every direction.

WHOOSH!

The heavy air resistance drastically slowed them down even as they cut through the atmosphere as smoothly as they could, entering the environment of the planet.

What they saw stunned them.

It was one thing seeing holograms of footage taken from outer space through an atmosphere that was highly non-conducive towards allowing light to travel back to outer space unscrambled.

It was another thing seeing the world for itself.

They immediately detected a fleet of macrobes floating across the shocking blue sky of the world, as if gravity didn’t even exist. The macrobes were shaped like donuts, with protruding spikes that resembled the receptors of bacteria. Their bodies were pink in color, causing them to stick out in the sky compared to the more stealthily garbed pathwalkers.

"How are they floating?" Sternon asked with a marveling tone.

"They’re filled with hydrogen and helium," Misha clarified with a highly interested expression. "Somehow, the medium of exchange of their metabolism isn’t liquid; it’s gaseous. I would love to study them. I’m sure I can discover some interesting ways to create more forms of gaseous blood. For now, however, I think we should steer clear of the fleet of macrobes."

WHOOSH

They carefully moved away from the distinct group of macrobes, only to find themselves running more and more of them as they got deeper and deeper into the planet.

It wasn’t just a few groups here and there; they floated about the world at random and as individuals up to several kilometers above the surface, making it more and more difficult for the five of them to avoid crashing into them. It forced them to slow down as they skywalked, reducing the rate of defense.

WHOOSH...

By the time they reached the ground, they felt like they were in an alternate reality.

The ground was, of course, highly red owing to the high presence of iron. The sky was a startling blue that contrasted with the red land. While the atmosphere was thick and dense, both physically and optically, making their perception of the world much more obstructed.

However, what made the world feel truly exotic was the fact that it faintly resembled a depiction of the world of microbes on many levels.

There were numerous macrobes floating across the air and in the sky, while the strange protruding structures made from highly refined iron resembled the receptors that single-celled organisms normally had.

Because of how dense and high-pressure the atmosphere was, any single-celled creature that could achieve that density with gaseous internal bodies could simply ignore gravity as if it didn’t exist, making for a truly bizarre world.

The gravity of the world was twice as high as that of Gaia, making their bodies feel much more sluggish. They were much slower and less nimble than they would be otherwise.

"I hate this," Runark muttered. "Next time. We’re going for a smaller world."

"Smaller world means less esoteric matter," Ria replied, pulling out her exo-planet navigation device from her belt and strapping it to her wrist like a watch.

The device blinked as the screen featured a world map of the planet and a dot that marked their position, along with several other indicators that marked the positions of the quantum anomalies.

It also featured territorial and topographical maps of the planet, while additionally featuring the path that they had planned to the closest entropy anomaly.

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