As I thought about the conditions for life to form, I turned my gaze toward the rotating sphere of water before me. Its surface rippled faintly, like a great ocean compressed into a single globe. Each shimmer felt alive, waiting for something, waiting for me. I instinctively knew I could manipulate the planet's landscape using my divinity. The knowledge wasn't taught; it was simply there, embedded into my being the moment I woke in this void.
This caused me to think back to my high school biology class, the droning voice of my teacher, the smell of old books, diagrams of cells and evolution scribbled on whiteboards. Those memories felt like a lifetime ago, but the lessons now carried unimaginable weight. Back then, they were just tests and grades. Here, they were the blueprint for creation itself.
To develop life, I needed several things. An atmosphere, luckily, it already seemed to have formed, faint gases swirling invisibly around the little sphere. Multiple chemicals, too: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, and of course, water. Energy. A stable environment. And finally, time. All the steps, the building blocks, the raw matter of existence. On Earth, these things came together slowly, naturally, over incomprehensible stretches of time. But I wasn't bound to Earth's limitations anymore.
I recalled something my teacher once said: "When all the factors line up perfectly, life doesn't just emerge, it becomes inevitable." Those words echoed now as a quiet certainty inside me.
One place where all these factors converged, even back on Earth, was volcanic hot springs. They were nature's laboratories, bubbling, mineral-rich cauldrons with constant energy and all the essential ingredients for life. For billions of years they had brewed the raw soup of creation. Now, standing in front of my planet, I realized I could recreate that exact cradle here.
I began to channel my divinity and reached my hand out toward the globe. Unlike last time, when an invisible force had stopped me, my hand grew closer and closer to the watery exterior. My skin tingled as it neared, the divine power pulsing through my fingers. It felt like touching the surface of a star, immense, fragile, and terrifying all at once.
Carefully, I focused. Beneath the sphere's surface, land shifted and folded under my will. Slowly, a depression formed. Water gathered there, filling the hollow. In moments, a small pond with a diameter of fifty meters appeared on the planet's surface. To the naked eye it would've been nothing more than a fleck of dust in the vast globe, but with my all-seeing eyes it was as clear as day, rippling water, dark stone edges, faint steam curling upward.
Looking at the pond, I felt a flicker of pride but pressed on. This was only the first step. I reached deeper with my senses, sliding past soil and stone into the world's molten heart. Heat roared in my mind's eye, a great red ocean of magma. I reached out again and created a channel, a path for the molten rock to rise.
The crust cracked. Magma spilled through the opening, hardening into jagged black stone as it reached the surface. A volcano erupted slowly to life, its slopes glowing with faint red veins. Steam hissed from vents. Gases vented skyward. Sulfur and other chemicals poured out, seeding the young atmosphere. It was violent, beautiful, an echo of Earth's own infancy.
And with this, all the requirements were met. Water, minerals, heat, energy, chemical diversity. A stable environment, at least by planetary standards. Now, the only thing left was time.
But time was a luxury I didn't want to afford. On Earth, it had taken millions of years for the first flicker of life to appear. Even here, with time flowing faster on the planet than in my void, it would still take hundreds of years. That wasn't acceptable. I wasn't content to wait and watch.
I channelled my divinity once again, pouring it into the chemical makeup of the springs. My power spread through every drop of water, every grain of mineral-rich sediment. Slowly, I began to condense the elements, pushing them closer and closer together, forcing reactions that would otherwise take eons. The water thickened with potential, a living soup of possibilities. My body trembled with the strain as the divinity burned away.
It felt like shaping destiny itself. My power bent natural laws, accelerating processes that had once been glacial. In this dense, enriched spring, the seeds of life would not just form, they would flourish, far sooner than nature intended.
Finally, I stepped back, breathing slowly. The pond shimmered, faintly glowing, a cauldron of possibility. Now, there was nothing left to do but wait, even if only for a fraction of the time Earth had required.
I exhaled and turned my attention back to the blue screen that hovered before my eyes. It appeared at a thought, crisp and clean.
[Status
Chat
Marketplace
Store]
Lines of text unfolded neatly under the first tab:
[Name: Zane Mercer
Age: 20
Talent: System Creator (SS)
Divinity: 6]
My heart sank a little at the last number. Looking at my decreased divinity, I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt me. Six. More than a third gone already. The power felt like a part of me, and each use left me slightly hollow. Still, I knew it was necessary. Without the sacrifice, there would be nothing to show for my efforts, no world, no life, no future.
I let the thought linger only a moment before shifting my gaze to the next tab [Chat]. Reaching out towards the tab caused a large chat room much like those from Earth to appear. Messages were flying by leaving very little time for me to read. Still thanks to my now godly status I could naturally read the texts.
[Magma: please can someone tell me how to create lifeforms. My planets made completely of lava.
Darkness: Person above... Your screwed]
Reading the nonsensical messages in the chat room i found that unlike me most of the other gods were still trying to figure out what was going on.