The exact nature of the virus had always been extrely unfathomable. He had initially arrived at the point of maximum fear, expecting to find the virus itself. Instead, he found the particle accelerator that was used to expand Gaia into a gigantic planet.
Then, it begged the question.
What exactly was the alien virus?
That was exactly what he was trying to find out with Seismic Regression.
He knew sothing was trying to kill him.
It was trying to kill him by converging all the pressures of weight on him from all directions. It was sothing that was powerful enough to cause an entire section of the planet to crush him from all directions.
RUMBLE!!!!!!!
He had applied the Seismic Regression technique to use innurable vibrations that spread across the mantle and the crust, trying to identify the source of the artificial pressure and trajectory.
The full weight of his mind had converged upon the task.
And then, he found it.
"It erges from the microscopic realm."
It erged from the microscopic realm across the entire crust and mantle. Sothing vast and widespread was responsible for the forces that were trying to crush him.
RUMBLE!!!!!!
His eyes blazed with blood-red suns as he shifted his vision to the microscopic realm, beholding the world around him in the scale of nanoters.
What he saw shook him to his very core.
His eyes widened as he found the entirety of the crust and mantle to be infested with microorganisms. They were truly small.
Orders of magnitude smaller than the common bacteria on the surface of Gaia, so small that even Rui had missed them when searching for a more distinctive alien.
Their outer walls were thicker and denser than ordinary bacteria, allowing them to withstand the intense heat and pressure that existed at extraordinary depths of the planet. They were of strange shapes and had strange structures that he wasn't familiar with. Even more shockingly, they weren't of alien origin.
They existed within the Gaian Tree of Life.
RUMBLE!!!!!!
That was why he knew what he was looking at.
"The deep biosphere."
It was a layer of life that a vast majority of people were unaware of. And yet, it was also the largest and heaviest layer of life in the world. It contained more mass than all animals in the animal kingdom, outweighing multicelled life significantly. It was the largest branch of the Tree of Life. The deep biosphere, a layer of life deep within Gaia, was the one that was trying to kill him. At least, the deep biosphere within and under the Panama Continent.
He could sense the microorganisms using their bodies as glue to try and pull rocks in with a trendous amount of force. One or two microorganisms couldn't do much, but trillions, quadrillions, and quintillions of them certainly could generate extraordinary pressure across vast distances.
Just like they were doing now.
The question was why?
Why were they trying to kill him?
There was only one entity trying to kill him at the mont: the alien entity.
But these microorganisms were of Gaian origin. They were evolved right here on Gaia—Earth—and belonged to the Gaian Tree of Life. How could they possibly be the alien virus?
The answer struck him almost as hard as the plasma and lava around him did.
RUMBLE!!!!!!
It shook him.
It shook him to his core as the true nature of his enemy dawned on him.
"The alien virus…" The blood-red suns in his eyes blazed with blinding brightness. "…isn't one thing, or one entity, or even one species."
He had already co to realize that it was 'everywhere', but only now did he truly understand what form that took. "The alien virus is an ergent lifeform."
An ergent lifeform was a lifeform that did not exist by virtue of a single discrete set of chemical compounds interacting within each other within one body, but rather a lifeform that erged as a result of disconnected and separate systems.
Gaia, as he had recently discovered, was one such lifeform. She was an ergent consciousness that erged from the geological, geochemical, and geomagnetic phenona of the planet. Countless systems ca together to create the integrated information that composed her consciousness.
The alien virus was similar.
It was not just the esoteric matter. The esoteric matter by itself was not alive. The alien lifeform erged in the complex interactions and integration between esoteric matter and the innate life of Gaia. It erged in the system of symbiosis between esoteric matter and native deep biospheres.
An erged lifeform embedded in the crust and the mantle underneath the Panama Continent.
It was a much higher form of life than even himself.
It did not have a singular body.
And thus, it could not be destroyed by destroying one thing.
It essentially 'converted' lifeforms into its minions through esoteric chemical integration, as it had the deep biosphere of the Panama Continent. This model would even explain how the they alien got their hands on the existential information of the deceased human beings of Gaia and used them to fight Rui in the chamber of creation.
The information never left Gaia and eventually beca integrated into its body.
This allowed the deep biosphere to scan and integrate that information as he would expect it to, since integrated information was the source of consciousness according to the Psycher.
That was the true nature of the alien virus.
An ergent abstract lifeform that erged from the systems of interaction between native life and alien esoteric matter. It would weaponize native life by seizing control of it.
Just like the eldritch chira had seized control of the Panama Continent once upon a ti. His eyes widened with shock as the full scope of the truth weighed on him, as he fully fleshed out the story of everything that had happened in the past 187,000 years.
RUMBLE!!!!!!
Even as the world shook, trying to crush him with the full weight of the Panama Continent, his mind exploded with revelation!
The blood-red suns in his eyes blazed with blinding brightness, never once ceasing to adaptively evolve in this path-entranced state, and even then, his conscious mind remained fixed as every single piece of the puzzle fell into place.
He had discovered the truth.
The truth of everything that had happened.
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