The Planet of Saluscula

A civilization of wise and studious aliens discovered a prosperous planet with lush vegetation and lots of valuable resources in a parallel universe, like Avatar's Pandora, but without the intelligent blue hominids. They called this planet Saluscula. The first explorers arrived on this planet, and as a group of highly intellectual aliens, they started to study all the properties of the vegetation. They studied the chemical compounds present in the environment, the life cycle of the plants, the animals and mapped out the territories of the planet. Then, as intelligent aliens, they engineered the best structures to survive in this different environment and created a plan to bring the resources to build an establishment on this planet to start harnessing the value present there.
However, in this parallel universe, they also discovered another compound with very strange and peculiar properties. First, they discovered that every object, like rocks, rivers and atmosphere, contained some of this element; then they also discovered that also animals and all living entities had some of this. This was a new element they did not know about, so it needed to be studied carefully. One alien scientist tried to remove the compound from the objects, and this was successfully done, but nothing happened to the objects immediately, and they noticed that the compound, as soon as it was removed, changed into ordinary elements. The alien scientists were thus puzzled. How important was this element? And why was it there? As these aliens were very meticulous, they studied the planet for some long period. They created a small zone without the compound. They discovered that in that period all the objects in Saluscula changed a lot; they seemed to be producing more with less. Grass grew faster, more dense, more nutritious; animals consumed more, became more numerous, and more efficient, and their internal structures reorganized themselves. Even the planet size grew, producing more fertile land to host more vegetation and more animals. This was a strange planet and a strange universe. However, they discovered that in the zone without the strange compound, the soil remained the same without any change, animals stayed the same, and they also observed that if they left these animals out in the new environment, they would just get outcompeted by the better animals and would starve to death. While the soil would just get replaced by the better, more efficient soil. It seems that the magical compound drove the change of the whole planet. They called this compound auxesin, as it helps the planet to grow. This change, driven by this auxesin, was also highly unpredictable. Sometimes a new mountain develops, and hosts different mountain animals and plants. Sometimes, it changes the structure of present environments to produce grass more efficiently. Sometimes it completely reorganizes the animal's internal organ structure to make space for the change.
The technology that auxesin was inducing was incredible, it seemed to be the main cause of the continuous better usage of planet's resources. But soon the aliens started to worry: what if, after they started resource extraction, this compound would develop ways to prevent them to do so, and protect the planet? This became their main existential worry, and as an intellectual species, their main interest was now to study how auxesin drove this change and understand its inner workings.
They tried to develop notions to explain the chemical nature of the compounds, but this was too complex for them to understand how the parts interacted within the system. They started to gather data to monitor how the environment changed. They started to create artificial systems that were similar to the original wild environment to benchmark the behaviour of the compound within those systems. They started to create formal mathematical theories to understand the properties of safety that would be necessary to safeguard themselves from such existential risk, perhaps they could contain such danger if they could understand how exactly is their risk. However, as soon as they finished the benchmark experiment and got some results, the outside environment had already changed, and now they needed to adapt all the monitors and the benchmarks to be valid in this new environment. At the same time, the formal theories that were developed already didn't work anymore. The assumptions of the past environment are not true in the current one, and theories needed to be rebuilt to take into account the more realistic assumptions. The territory changed, and the maps needed to be updated. The community then split; one part decided it did not make sense to understand the auxesin given the impossibility and started extractions even with this partial understanding, and another community decided to study more of its property for safety, with the hope that at some point the compound will be legible to its scientists. The former started extraction. But tragedy struck, and the former community was indeed killed by an unforeseen and unforeseeable change in the soil beneath them. Their existence needed to be optimized out from the planet. So, the surviving ones continued the study. And this continued from generation to generation with the lesson of the extractive group. With time, hoards of books were developed documenting the change that auxesin was developing: entirely new spaces, new living beings, and continuous wonders. Generation after generation, they continued to study its changes, but every time, completely new things were developed that surprised the alien scientists. The planet continued to grow in the meantime, and the study of auxesin itself and its manifestations became the main reason to live on the planet. The aliens forgot why they were on the planet from the start.

However, at one point, they thought they finally reached the Truth over the mechanism of auxesin and understood the change Itself, and confident of this discovery, they wrote it down to pass the information along.
They then started to make use of this discovery, and were able to direct part of the changes themselves. They carefully started to extract resources, themselves growing and multiplying even faster than the planet itself, with the knowledge of the compound. They were able to create new land of exactly the kind they needed for their buildings. To grow the trees with the material properties that were optimal for their constructions, to farm the land of the nutrients that were perfectly optimal for the plant, and the plant for their own taste and nutrition. This sustained for a while, but then the theory, as many other theories before that, was again broken. The aliens noticed that their innovation brought a change. The compound changed how it changed. This caused the original growth to be unsustainable, and many died of hunger, and the population was resized. And the study continued and continued. Every time they discovered the truth on the world that was not known before, the world found a way to change with the knowledge of the truth, and Truth was no more.