The Totem had solved this problem the same way a prisoner with a life sentence and too much free time would. It stopped doing things with its own body and started making other things do them instead.
At first the proxies were simple. Bacteria-level organisms that the Totem could grow from its own root network and send to the surface to collect data. But over millions of years the proxies got more complex. Insects, then larger creatures, then things that could breed and evolve on their own while the Totem steered them from below like a kid playing a real-time strategy game except the game board was an entire continent and each round lasted a hundred thousand years.
It built its own ecosystem from scratch while stuck underground.
Eren was starting to understand why no other life had developed independently on Aradne for so long. Nothing could compete with a brain that had been designing organisms since before multicellular life was even a concept anywhere else on the planet.
