Chapter 54: The Dust of Life
This is the fifth multicellular organism......
Leviathan was now in the cavern beneath the Isle of Ashes, and Lynn had found that there were many creatures on the surface of the moon, and Leviathan was now looking at the creature in front of him, observing and recording it.
This organism is known as the 'Grey Mushroom', which is a sponge-like, soft, and highly poisonous creature.
The thing was more than a meter tall, cylindrical in shape, towering on the ground like a mushroom, and had no organs in its body, and Lin found that its only food was dust wafting in the air around it, and it had multiple small pores on its body surface, and the cells in the guò moved to absorb moisture and food from the surrounding air, some like primitive filter feeders.
At present, this is the largest multicellular creature that Lynn has seen, except for the 'Gravel Monster' she has seen before, but the structure is very simple, and everything else is very small, living with the fungi in the waterhole.
In fact, the Gravel Monster is not considered 'big', after all, it is a combination of many small gravel creatures.
Although the composition of these creatures is the same, the structure and form are very different from those on the 'pom-pom', and Lynn discovers that they do not use oxygen, because there is very little here, but use another way to replace it.
It may be another gas in the middle of the month, or something else, their internal structure has not yet been fully studied, and their circulatory systems are also very different, they do not have a seemingly basic structure such as 'blood vessels', but use some special cell extrusion to transmit energy.
I don't know if this is the case for all creatures, or if this is the case for the creatures found so far.
Right now, Lynn is mostly looking for some big creatures. And there will definitely be one here. Because......
'Boom......' thought of this. Leviathan heard a rumbling sound outside, and the Isle of Ashes was ready to erupt once more.
'Bang! With the sound, Leviathan suddenly felt a strong suction, and saw a huge amount of dust rushing madly from the mouth of the cave, like a sandstorm sweeping through the entire cavern, and after the dust storm had passed, there was still a large amount of dust left on the ground and in the pool, covering Leviathan's body with a thin layer......
There was more dust pouring into the depths of the cave. There seems to be something there...... in sucking up these dusts.
Dust was originally sprayed from the bottom to the surface of the island, and as a cave in the rock face, it is unlikely that any dust will enter, and at most it will gather at the mouth of the cave......
However, this dust is the main source of life for the creatures here, because it is mixed with a lot of decomposable food, and the fungi and other organisms in the waterhole need to decompose this dust.
And this happened when Lynn was wondering how they were going to get the dust......
As the dust erupts, a powerful attraction is created at the same time, sucking the dust into the cavern. And it will last for a while, so that the dust can reach the depths of the cave.
The dust that spreads is basically broken down by those fungi. Then the bigger creatures eat the fungi, and so on, layer by layer, and then slowly go up, and finally to the very big creatures.
If any.
Now, Leviathan is uncovering what exactly is causing this appeal.
The sound of water droplets can be heard everywhere in the Leviathan Flying Cave, and the roof of the cave often drips down and then gathers into puddles of water on the ground.
This seems to have created the environment in which they live, and the water may come from the sea, but the matter in it is not so mixed, and it is more 'pure'.
Suddenly, Lynn noticed that Leviathan's light had reached something that moved, and it drank water next to the puddle, and even when it was illuminated, it didn't respond at all.
The creature looked like a cylindrical stone more than a meter long, and its body was covered with thick needles, and it was now leaning to the side, and Lynn saw that the needles on the side of its body had opened a small hole at the end, and from it something like a tongue was constantly licking the water in the puddle.
This is what the sixth multicellular organism looks like.
Looks...... It doesn't seem so strange.
Leviathan was trying to get closer when the creature suddenly felt as if it sensed, retracted its 'tongue', and rolled away on the ground at breakneck speed.
It was clearly a creature that was good at tumbling, but Leviathan chased after it at a faster speed and reached out to grab the rolling cylinder on the ground.
The moment it grabbed it, it squirted a large amount of liquid from the needles on its body.
The liquid seemed to be highly toxic to creatures like them, but nothing to the creatures of the pom-poms.
After Leviathan researched the creature's miniature class, Lynn found that it seemed to be a similar species of the previous Gravel Monster, although this was not a polymer, but its shell structure was the same as that of the Gravel Monster's Gravel, and the shape inside it was also like that of the Gravel Monster.
But it's huge, and like all creatures here, it's eyeless.
Wait a minute...... Is this ......
While exploring, Lynn's miniature found a large amount of fat at the end of its body, which appeared to be a storage area, but Lynn found that there was a lot of white material in the stored things.
That's right, this one is...... White paste!
Thinking about it, Lynn immediately let go of the creature, and the Leviathan quickly flew into the depths of the cave.
There are puddles of water everywhere here, and Leviathan investigates each puddle as fast as he can, searching for microorganisms inside, and so far, Leviathan has found dozens of fungal creatures, but none of them are familiar to Lynn.
Suddenly, Leviathan stopped.
Because there was another creature in front of it, this creature was only thirty centimeters tall, and it looked like a plant called a 'turnip', but this 'turnip' was standing upside down and walking on the ground on three slender legs.
Sure enough, the creatures here are all wonderful.
However, Leviathan's main concern was the location of these 'turnips', there was a pool there, and that pool was different from the others, although it was also muddy, but the color inside was mainly white.
Leviathan immediately flew there, and the 'turnip' was immediately scared away, and Leviathan flew to the pool and immediately reached into it and tested the contents.
Really...... There's white paste in it.
The fungi that lived in this puddle were the ones that Lin had ever seen, and could be named 'white paste fungi', the ones that the creators had brought with them, and they seemed to be breaking down the dust and making it into white paste.
However, the white paste produced by these bacteria was different from what Lin had known before, and Lin tried to break it down, and found that there was a toxin in the white paste, which was effective on both the creatures on the moon and the creatures on the pom-poms.
This toxin is basic and can harm the synthesis system of cells, but it has no effect on them themselves.
And for good reason, because the reason they made the white paste seems to be for storage, not for other creatures...... That said, there should be some creatures here that can eat them, like the radish was probably about to eat them, and the cylindrical creature I saw earlier seems to be able to eat white paste as well.
They don't seem to have anything to do with the creators, but are a separate kind of fungus.
However, it is possible that the creators took advantage of their ability to make white paste, and finally let them make a non-poisonous white paste, which was then used to feed the sword fleas in their bodies.
But what is the process like in between?
It's hard to investigate, I don't know what form the creator of the zào used to reach the 'pom-pom', maybe it was more primitive at the beginning, and then slowly evolved into that form......
Now, Leviathan moved on, seemingly approaching the bottom of the cavern.
Under the light of the Leviathan, there were many creatures here, and in addition to the radish before, Lynn saw some stone-like creatures, most of them only a few centimeters, crawling on the ground in an extremely slow wriggling manner......
Not only the ground, but also at the top of the cavern, Lynn saw something wonderful, and the soft-looking silk threads spread all over the top of the cavern, reflecting the sparkling light under the Leviathan.
These creatures are called 'weeping fungi' by Lynn, and the structures that appear to be silk threads are actually collections of fungi that appear to have taken on this shape specifically to obtain dust, as well as direct access to water from the roof of the cave.
The creature with the most here is the radish, because I didn't think of a good name, so I just called it radish.
They run very fast and feed on the plaster in the surrounding puddles, but they don't eat much, and Lynn reckons that they have to wait for their bodies to clear the toxins before they can continue eating.
Lynn saw one of the turnips run onto a puddle of gravel, and the puddle of sand suddenly moved, encasing the whole radish inside......
Sure enough, the Gravel Monster relies on this camouflage to hunt for food, and it seems that it does not eat the contents of the watering holes, but lives entirely on predators.
Leviathan made some observations here, and in addition to the previous ones, Lynn also found some stone-like creatures that were extremely slow to move and lived on fungi in the puddles......
There are a lot of creatures here, and although there are still not many creatures here compared to even the frozen pompoms, Lynn thinks there are many more creatures here, and some of them are quite large.
Leviathan now stopped in one place, which seemed to have reached the end, and in front of the Leviathan was a wall, and on the wall, there were many ...... Crack.
This is where the dust is sucked up. (To be continued......)
PS: Thank you for the tip of EX (9) ~ of ~turning~
Thanks to ~73506~closed for the monthly pass~