Chapter 612 A Wizard Did It

Chapter 612 A Wizard Did It

Over the next few weeks, the researchers of Task Force Proxima conducted hundreds of different tests and learned a few things about the “root”. As it turned out, it was just one of an entire network of roots that covered the bottom of the entire ocean that they had jokingly named the New Australian Sea. After all, everything they knew lived in it had demonstrated that it was out to kill them, so the name seemed quite appropriate.

The root network was incredibly dense, with nearly a hundred percent coverage of the ocean floor, and each root itself was equally dense. The water pressure in the deepest part of the ocean—which was a full twenty kilometers deep—applied over ten million PSI of water pressure. But even at that depth, they’d learned (at the cost of a few submersible drones loaded with mana batteries) that the roots could still move with the same blinding, predatorial speed as they had near the surface when one had attacked the crewed lander.

Another incidental discovery was that their tide hypothesis had been disproven. Proxima Centauri had little to no effect on the tides of the New Australian Sea. Instead, it now seemed as though the tides were driven by the roots as they twisted, turned, and writhed, seemingly inhaling and exhaling on a slow, but regular schedule.

That said, the star did play at least a minor role in the rise and fall of the tides. It just wasn’t the only factor that drove the rise and fall of the ocean.

After all, the plants on the continent were different from the roots on the ocean floor. Though they, too, had roots, they were of a much more normal sort than the beings that populated the seabed. Much smaller and weaker—and, more importantly, immobile—they served the same purpose as roots did for plant life on Earth. The trees and shrubs had taproots and whiskers, digging into the soil deeply enough to keep them stable, though they seemed to avoid the beaches and ocean.

It was almost like the ocean roots were predators that preyed on the roots of the plants on the land.

There was another curiosity that drove the scientists up a wall with frustration as well: the only multicellular life on the planet was plant life. Other than single-celled organisms, there was no fauna to match the flora.

The current leading theory on that thorny problem was that, much like on Earth, animal life had first evolved in the ocean. But given the demonstrated hostility of the New Australian Ocean’s seabed root network, it was likely that the roots had simply wiped out all the other creatures in a bid to ensure that the resources of the ocean—primarily its oddly rich mana density—belonged solely to them.

Still, given that the land flora showed no signs of either sentience or sapience, much less any hostility, it was decided that the land mass would soon be open to human exploration, so long as they avoided going anywhere near the ocean. So the exploration team decided to get a jump on the mission planning for their return to the surface in preparation for when the top brass authorized the trip.