My surroundings were gone in an instant, and my physical and mental existence had been erased by the explosion. I sensed a brightly shining light far away, I'd predict hundreds of kilometers, and somehow instinctively knew that if I didn't reach it, I would be trapped in darkness forever. There didn't seem to be gravity or air in this space, so I wasn't moving towards or away from the light. I sensed a star, shining close to me, about the size of a human, that was quickly accelerating towards the light. I had another instinctive piece of knowledge, telling me that if it got to the light first, I wouldn't be able to reach it.
I ejected 1.5 tons of unrefined iron ore, and ended up in the way of the star. The star slowed down dramatically, but then sped up again and began bringing me towards the light very quickly. After what I estimated to be 34 seconds, I was 3 kilometers away from the light, and I ejected 4 tons of unrefined material, boosting me into the light as it closed off, trapping the flying star in the void forever.
The entirety of my surroundings consisted of white light, and it turned to black as my electromagnetic sensors dissapeared. I didn't remember having them installed in the first place. My systems came back online as I was transported back to reality. Under me was packed dirt and some stone. I did a quick underground scan and found that I was positioned in an unregistered type of biome. the ground was covered in dirt, with rocks jutting out 2 feet into the air every 2 meters in every direction.
The grass nearby had a low moisture level and appeared to be of an unknown species. It was sparse and appeared to feed off of the high blood content in the dirt. For the grass to specifically evolve this way, means blood must constantly be spilled in this area. Due to the high content of blood in the earth, there was a high content of iron in the rock, suggesting that the blood had been being spilled for hundreds of thousands of years.
Further into the stone, there appeared to be valuable nuclear resources. They were too far down to identify, but they were definitely emitting nuclear radiation. This amount of nuclear materials meant that this was a very valuable site for mining, but there were likely to be external biological influences, so first I decided to fabricate scouting and building bots to keep my area safe. They were powered by electricity and came in 3 variants.
The first were scouts, which acted as a defense system and allowed me to further examine territory. Scouts were by far the cheapest in terms of time and resources, and required the least amount of energy to run. The second type of bots were constructors. Constructors were 30 to 50 times as expensive as scouts in terms of resources, 3 to 5 times as expensive in terms of time, and 40 to 70 times as expensive in terms of energy, and required a constant flow of resources. Constructors were used to create structures and alter existing ones. The last type of bot was a power plant, which created energy in the most effective way possible, including solar energy, fossil fuels, or extracting energy out of certain ores. Power plants were the most time and resource consuming to produce and allowed for the running of other bots.
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I began creating 40,000 scouts and 1,000 constructors, using up 30% of my avaliable resources. After 23 hours, I had completed 8,357 scouts and 230 constructors. I made the constructors add several electromagnetic wave sensors onto me, which I then wired up. I saw a group of foreign humanoid lifeforms look up at me. Their bodies were defined by red, cracked skin and long, silvery horns protruding from their heads. Each of them were 15 feet tall and had sharp, jagged, grey teeth. They didn't appear to be any kind of native creature to Earth, but seemed to have human characteristics. They were also close to biblical depictions of demons, suggesting that they were genetically engineered, but there was no evidence of this.
I sent out 12 scouts to monitor them and began preparing the rest in a defensive formation around me. The defensive formation was not for them, but to protect from future threats. The lifeforms looked towards me in confusion. They were positioned one kilometer away from me, and it took my scouts 30 to 40 seconds to cross that distance. The lifeforms looked slightly afraid and began talking among each other in an indecipherable language. It sounded to be similar to that of Japanese before the language was influenced by China, but not close enough to help.
After a few seconds, they seemed to come to an agreement, and one of them walked up to one of my scouts, and punched it. His punch was travelling much faster than expected, unnaturally so, and would damage my scout if it connected, so my scout dodged to the right and ejected a tendril into his forehead. The tendril then came back into the scout's body, taking a large portion of a brain out of the lifeform's skull. At that point, one of the lifeforms screamed and told the others something. The others seemed to launch a coordinated attack, with 12 staying behind and 12 attacking each of my scouts. My scouts easily dealt with them in seconds via decapitation, slitting their bellies and peircing their hearts.
The lifeforms actually had eight hearts, so I peirced their brains instead. The lifeforms who had stayed behind had begun chanting strange words with their arms outstretched. The space around their arms began to bubble and heat up, and they all simultaneously yelled a word, and hot balls of burning air flew towards my scouts. 9 dodged, and 3 were lightly damaged. The scouts immediately shot out tendrils at the speed of bullets and grappled from lifeform to lifeform until they were all dead.
I decided to call the newly discovered species demons, as that was what they were most similar to. Next it was time to investigate what they had done to create those fireballs.
I started the production of 5 power plants, costing me 9% of my resources. I also diversified the scouts into several different types to allow for the more effective subjugation, infiltration, information gathering, and communication.