Immortality and degeneration

I have long blabbered of strange creatures in my past records but out of these beasts, none is more influential to the abyss than the Testificate.  Though completely passive and devoid of interactive skills, it has irreversibly affected the underworld and its inhabitants. To the unaware eye, the Testificate can pass a repulsive, translucid, silvery blob of goo of varying proportions. It generally spreads over the ceilings or walls of chambers and feasts upon any unfortunate microorganism it encounters. Finally, the Testificate’s cells are among the largest multicellular organisms and can be distinguished easily by the naked eye.
But one should not be deceived by its ill-favored appearance for it is a truly outstanding being in many ways. Its locomotion, for example, is unique in that it continually grows in a certain direction while letting its posterior body die. While being atrociously slow on a human scale, over eons, the Testificate can easily travel throughout the underground world. Its reproduction is quite interesting too as it proliferates by self-cloning. Asexual reproduction is of course not unheard of among organisms on the surface but to the scale of the Testificate it truly questions the notion of mortality and individuality. For the Testificate is a conscious being, to a further extent maybe than humans, and it has been living since the beginning of life as we understand it. Research by the ancients has demonstrated that it is fully aware of its environment through an extremely complex nervous system close to that of octopuses. But most remarkably the Testificate is the only known immortal organism to have an entirely genetic memory, and this, is the very key to the ancient’s intense obsession with this quirk of life. You see, for an asexually reproducing organism to have genetic memory means it becomes a living archive of events so far through the ages that our bounded minds could not even conceive. A living testimony of our world’s birth and the chronicles of its first steps.
Sadly this very fascination lead to the ancient’s slow decline. They believed they could access the Testificate’s knowledge by injecting their young with its substance. While having the intended result, a majority of cases resulted in lethal insanity. The rare surviving candidates, though having retained a fraction of the information, were the source of the ancient’s immense literacy and were called the Archivists. Yet, despite the scientific glory of those glimpses deep into the past the Archivists unknowingly introduced mutated genes to the rest of the population that uncontrollably brought the community down in a spiral of shorter lifespans and vacuousness. From there on their trace in history gets lost marking the end of a visionary civilization. It is unknown to me whether any ancient is alive to this day.
Still, the Testificate can be found all over the world, passively witnessing the passing of time and, occasionally, the otherworldly events of the depths.
I can only fantasize about the deep memories retained in this organism, from its own origin uncountable eons ago to our recent encounter in the sandy crevasses of the Groïvern. Sometimes I lose myself looking deep into the fleshy mirror of its surface, whispering to myself in words I barely can decipher. Could this ancestral blob be the stepping stone to a new, even deeper world?