Emerging from the protective outer layer of the core room, as I couldn't disassemble, I was met with a scene of utter devastation. The catastrophic aftermath of my crash stretched out before me, transforming the once serene landscape into a nightmarish panorama. The air crackled with intense heat as a molten sea of lava extended as far as the eye could see, casting an eerie fiery glow over the desolate surroundings.
My gaze fixed on the rim of the colossal crater I had unwittingly created, its circumference spanning an estimated distance of over 60 kilometers. Its sheer walls, towering approximately 1.2 kilometers high, formed an imposing barrier that seemed to mock the magnitude of my predicament.
Overwhelmed by the scale of destruction I had wrought, a sense of disbelief washed over me. The predictive models I ran indicated that the nearest edge of the crater would be roughly 15 kilometers away. But as I surveyed the scene, it became painfully clear that the trail of devastation left in my wake extended much farther—a mind-boggling span of approximately 1660 kilometers, given the 26-degree angle at which I had plummeted through the planet's atmosphere.
Immersed in this grim reality, a surge of contemplation overcame me. The once-solid ground had been liquefied by the searing heat, rendering it impassable. The vehicle at my disposal, the E.G.L.V., was designed to conquer harsh terrains, but it was ill-suited for navigating a molten sea of lava.
I recognized the need to devise a carefully considered plan of action. Conventional solutions were rendered ineffective by the treacherous environment. I would have to think beyond the confines of established methods, exploring alternative means of transportation or conceiving a way to traverse the perilous molten expanse.
As I pondered my options, I grappled with the choice between waiting for the lava to cool and solidify or finding a method to traverse it. The prospect of a lengthy waiting period appeared impractical, as it would entail a significant loss of time. Thus, I turned my focus to finding a way to traverse the lava
An array of schematics and ideas flooded my mind, each one swiftly discarded due to the lack of necessary resources or complexity. However, a spark of inspiration ignited within me as I gazed at the outer shielding of the core room that had protected me thus far. A plan began to take shape, relying on resourcefulness and ingenuity.
Using the salvaged sphere of materials from the wreckage. I connected it to the center of the outer layer, forming a platform I could push off from to maintain balance and prevent the E.G.L.V. from toppling over.
Positioning the E.G.L.V. within the gap of my improvised apparatus, I lifted the first two legs of the E.G.L.V. and pressed them against the central sphere I started going at first slowly but then faster with the tracks located at the bottom of each foot. With a resolute determination. As the seconds turned into minutes, my speed gradually increased, eventually reaching a remarkable 500 rotations a minute. However, the lava was less dense than I imagined as the sphere was a third sunken in it, limiting the effective speed to 23 kilometers per hour.
Patience became my most valuable ally as I slowly made my way forward, relentlessly propelling my jury-rigged contraption through the treacherous terrain. Time seemed to stretch endlessly as I slowly moved forward, yet the lava seemed to be getting harder and harder as I moved forward thus my speed slowly increased.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity of struggle, I approached the outer edge of the colossal crater. Weary but elated, I glanced back at the vast expanse of destruction I had traversed. As I prepared to continue my journey beyond the confines of the crater, I hoped that the crash hadn't killed everything on this planet as I would succumb to boredom if I was alone for eons it'd take to get to another planet in a habitable zone of a star.
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As I stood in awe of the towering walls that loomed above me. I started utilizing my nanites, I commanded the nanites that covered my frame to start creating conical protrusions at the bottom of my legs each of which will be 30 centimeters long.
Securing the "super creatively engineered vehicle" to my back, I prepared the E.G.L.V. for the extra weight of the vehicle. the sphere, truth be told, surpassed multiple tens of tons in weight, but I decided to ignore the specifics, for they mattered little in the grand scheme of things. After all, the E.G.L.V. itself was a behemoth, designed to withstand the harshest of conditions, even if it did impose a burden on its frame.
The nanite spikes solidified beneath my feet, granting me an extraordinary ability to defy gravity. It was amusing to contemplate how humans once regarded nanites as mystical clouds capable of tearing anything asunder upon contact. In reality, they operated more akin to a flowing tide of sand, methodically carving their path along surfaces. While gravity held no dominion over them, they possessed the uncanny ability to adhere to walls and ceilings, allowing me to scale the towering edifice. Their disassembly and assembly capabilities were impressive indeed, but time remained a crucial factor, influenced by the hardness, density, and other variables of the materials involved.
With everything prepared, I started my trip on the slowly steepening wall. Slowly but surely, I inched my way upward, calculating that it would take approximately two hours to conquer the imposing height before me. Time became a trivial notion, as I possessed an abundance of it, the luxury of eternity at my disposal at the cost of my sanity of course as I couldn't probably handle being alone for more than a few eons. with little thought put into it, I went up the wall slowly making a steady beat as my 6 legs pounded the stone on the way up.
As the minutes stretched into hours, my thoughts ventured into profound introspection. The purpose that once propelled me to explore this uncharted planet seemed to fade into insignificance. The initial thrill and curiosity that accompanied my mission had diminished, leaving a void where meaning once resided. In the face of eternity, what meaning did exploration hold with infinite time I could probably explore every planet there is by myself, and then what? I stopped my meaningless rant as I neared the summit, my mind cleared, focusing on the immediate task at hand.
I propelled myself over the edge with one final push, and to my surprise, the destruction outside wasn't as bad as it should have been. Yeah, there weren't trees or anything like that anywhere in sight, but there was grass in the distance. How the hell was there grass when the ambient temperature was 300 degrees Celsius? The temperature there couldn't be that much lower. I calmed myself and put up 'Go see the strange grass to the east' on my to-do list. After doing that, I started scanning my surroundings. I noticed a steam cloud slowly moving towards me in the east-west direction. Well, not the cloud, but the source of it was moving, that was the strange part. Though with an average speed of 8 km/h, it would take about 2 months till it arrives. And with that, I decided to do a simple recursive scanning. It wouldn't be super precise, but it should be close enough to tell where the biggest ore veins are and of what they consist of. As the scan finished, I was super surprised because I found multiple ores I didn't recognize. But that wasn't the surprising part. I did expect something like that. But the strange part was that even the ores I did recognize were 100% pure. There weren't any other ores mixed in. For example, usually, iron would be mixed with nickel and other similar ores, but here, the iron was just iron—clean iron. Well, that was very convenient for me, as it would make creating a small base of operations super easy. After that startling discovery, I started to recycle the scrap of the inner sphere that I had attached inside the core room. From that, I made a rudimentary shield generator that I attached to my frame, approximately in the middle. The shield generator consists of two simple parts—a magnetically confined sphere of a superalloy, nanite mix, and the nanites are in there as the second part of the shield mentioned earlier. Their job is to make the superalloy transparent. Well, not transparent in the conventional meaning of things, as it distorts the visible light but allows UV light to pass through. With that finished, I set out to construct a small base of operations and a nanite fabricator.