The Martial Unity

WHOOSH

They fell from the sky as they beheld the new environment around them. What was perhaps the most shocking was just how Gaia-like the planet felt. While the gravity remained higher and the air denser and heavier, the visual aspect of the world within the manifold felt very much like a world that they were quite familiar with.

At least from afar.

As they fell from the sky, drawing closer to the ground, they increasingly began to notice differences. Differences that set the manifold world apart not only from Gaia, but also from the world outside.

Macrobes floated about in the sky, again making them feel like they were microscopic in nature, living in the world of single-celled organisms.

Except the macrobe creatures they came across this time weren’t single-celled. What they saw, as they fell from the sky, was not individual single-celled organisms simply floating about freely, drifting in the wind.

What they saw were groups of single-celled organisms joined together.

In groups of three, five, or even a dozen.

The macrobes were joint at the cell walls together.

They moved together.

But it wasn’t simply coordination, but rather… a fusion that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Ria’s eyes widened as it clicked. ”A higher form of life was in reference to this…!”

Multi-cellular life.

A greater, more advanced form of life with many cells that came together to become part of a new whole of which they were only a constituent.

Life had begun with the most elementary of single-celled, or even quasi-single-celled, organisms, and had eventually evolved to be composed of numerous single-celled organisms simply due to the fact that they could do what couldn’t be done by one cell alone.

They were more powerful, they were the fittest, so they survived and thrived, eventually evolving into more and more complex multi-cellular forms that were increasingly beyond their single-celled origins.

It hadn’t even occurred to her because of how remarkably advanced single-celled macrobe organisms were. They had complexity, consciousness, and even intelligence. And the fact that they could defy the laws of biology meant that the same impetus for them to form multicellular life simply didn’t exist.

But it wasn’t impossible, by any means.

THUD

They eventually hit the ground, looking at the world around them in bewilderment. It was difficult not to completely dissociate from a colloquial understanding of reality from what they saw.

Planet Pinky had single-celled life that was quite ubiquitous.

But the manifold was filled with complex multicellular life that wasn’t merely ubiquitous, but almost universal.

It started with the greener that they had perceived from the sky. While they might have instinctively expected to run into a forest filled with trees that had many leaves, they instead happened upon complex, multicellular vegetative life that was much more technically primitive compared to the plant kingdom from Gaia.

Trees were evolutionarily younger than many might have suspected, but their genetic ancestors came from the first aerobic single-celled lifeforms that produced oxygen in Gaia, then Earth, known as cyanobacteria. The cyanobacteria were the first single-celled lifeforms that used chlorophyll to produce oxygen and had created the Great Oxidation Event that led to oxygen having a permanent place in Earth’s atmosphere.

The presence of oxygen eventually allowed for higher energy production through combustion and oxidation, which released much greater energy than anaerobic energy production that existed prior, allowing for more complex lifeforms to develop. Eventually, those cyanobacteria and their descendants came together to form the first ancestors of modern-day plants in Gaia.

”This life…” Siliscia whispered as she studied the massive green structures around them. ”These are plants. Alien exobotany derived from the unique life conditions of Pinky.”

The multi-cellular plant-like structures around them extended ten meters into the air, composed of dozens of green chlorophyll-containing cells.

”If the elves can master this macrocellular biology, we might be able to create new kinds of nature and plants unlike anything we have ever seen before!” Siliscia muttered with amazement. ”I must take samples with me. Ugh, why do these cells have to be so massive?”

Even a single cell was roughly a meter in diameter, making it quite inconvenient to pack to go with them with how scarce their inventory storage was.

”Don’t bother.”

Ria’s voice caused Siliscia to turn around with knitted eyebrows. ”Why not? Do you have any idea how valuable these lifeforms are? This is a revolution for botanology! We might be able to create titanic super structures made entirely from vegetation that can sustain much greater scale than our current botanical engineering can. We can potentially fix the weaknesses of elves outside of environments with an absence of the Plant Kingdom! The sky is the limit!”

Siliscia didn’t hide just how much this discovery excited her. Although it wasn’t the mission she had been personally deployed for, the reality was that this did seem to have the potential to help the elves as much as acquiring a mature manifold tree would.

Especially when the manifold tree was highly esoteric matter intensive, while this multi-cellular life didn’t require Transcendent-grade esoterics.

But alas, Ria knew that the elves wouldn’t be able to benefit from macrobes to the extent that Siliscia might have liked. She had her suspicions about why single-celled life in Planet Pinky was so radically different from the rest of the universe, but alas, she couldn’t be certain about it.

”Do not lower your guard, for now let’s just adopt a defensive formation and remain alert,” Ria warned, pulling Siliscia back into the group. ”You can grab a sample once we are on the verge of completing this mission.”

Thankfully, the environment around them didn’t seem particularly dangerous at the moment. They were surrounded by primitive-tree-like structures formed from one-meter-wide macro cyanobacteria like cells.

The fixed structures spread as far as the eye could see in any direction.

”We are not in any immediate danger,” Ria concluded, relying on her powerful senses to scan the environment around them. ”These multi-cellular primitive trees are stationary. They cannot move easily or normally.”