Chapter 2 - 2

Chapter 10: Emerald Blanket

First Epoch

You have started the flow of time in a new universe. The First Epoch has begun.

Second Epoch

Your universe has become host to a stable, viable world capable of sustaining life. The Second Epoch has begun.

Rank up - Level 2

Due to your accomplishments, you are now a Rank 2 Administrator. Probationary Status still in effect.

The notifications that flooded my vision were only a mild surprise. I'd expected something when I hit that button.

I was mostly pleased that the auto‑correction the interface did for my intent had kept it from throwing any weird warnings.

With a thought, I summoned up the entirety of the universe and quickly zoomed in by focusing my attention on various parts of the donut. The whole mental interface thing was pretty useful.

Unfortunately, not much was happening.

The sun was just appearing… a slow, glowing emergence from the spire, causing a sort of dawn.

I wondered what it looked like from the surface, but the interface didn't seem capable of actually putting me on the ground from the viewpoint of a living being. That must be what the Avatar function was for.

As soon as I pondered how long I would have to wait, the three‑dimensional window I was looking at manifested a Time Dilation setting. It was currently set at 1:1, which explained everything.

I was literally watching the first few seconds of my new universe's existence.

It was a little overwhelming, and now I thought I understood another reason why my emotions were muted.

If this is how I feel with no real emotions… how would I feel in an actual body, witnessing the birth of creation? I wondered.

I savored the sight of a new world for a little while longer.

I probably went through the first few hours just watching it… seeing the sun travel across the sky. It probably would've been a little more majestic if the world weren't made up of barren rock.

I'd tried to specify dirt, but it was more like gravel.

Only at this point did I realize that dirt had a lot of organic material in it. I wouldn't have actual dirt – or soil – until I had plants.

Well, that wasn't technically true, as it turned out. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After just reveling in my success for a while, I upped the speed to about one year for every five minutes I spent watching. That gave me a nice view of the sun doing its complete course and, finally, the stars coming out.

After a few cycles, I frowned and sped up universe time dilation further to run through the first decade or two.

When I slowed it back down to 1:1, we were about twenty-three years in.

"It appears to be working just fine," Orpheus noted, surprising me by saying something before I addressed her.

I shook my head. "No. I need to make a few tweaks… actually, several. But I think a couple of them can wait until a little later. I might be able to solve them in the Third Epoch."

She looked at me curiously as I pulled up my interface and made a few adjustments.

It was much more expensive to do this sort of thing now that the universe was running live. Even so, my tweaks were so minor that it only took about three points total. I was still paying fractions of a point for some of these changes.

That left me with 9,001 Reality Points, plus less than a tenth of a point in remainders.

Those three points did a lot of work.

All I needed to do was:

Tweak the material the stars were made of so they retained their charge just a little bit longer

Up their absorption rate slightly

Lower the maximum distance at which they started absorbing

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Nudge the Magicite in a few places to add more heat venting, especially along ocean floors

And finally, I tweaked Magicite routing to add a small level of randomization

This last part took over half of the three points for some reason.

"The weather was too predictable," I explained to Orpheus. "Every year was almost exactly the same. And the stars were starting to fade before night was fully over. The first is kind of a big deal, because we don't want a perfectly predictable climate. The second is mostly aesthetic."

Orpheus nodded again. "Aesthetics can actually be very important," she pointed out. "Natural beauty and wonder is one way to inspire sapient life."

"Exactly," I said, and winked.

I turned back to the interface and let it run again, returning to one year per five minutes, and watched another half-dozen years pass.

This looked more satisfactory, even if the weather was a little weird to me.

Clouds tended to be long and stringy. Storms also jetted across the surface in streaks. I didn't see any signs of hurricanes or the like… just intense storms that struck like spears.

It was only then that I realized the weather would be very different without the rotational energy of the Earth causing everything to twist.

I probably could've tweaked some values to imitate that… but after I thought about it, I didn't want to directly copy Earth anyway.

Once more, I attempted to crack my knuckles.

Just like before, nothing happened. I frowned.

I wonder how long it'll take me to break that habit.

I didn't even have joints. Why did I still have the urge to do that?

Why do I still have the habit if I don't have brain chemistry?

I really needed to stop trying to figure out my afterlife. It was distracting.

Instead, I concentrated on my interface.

I slowed the world back to 1:1 and browsed through the tabs.

There was, in fact, a new tab labeled Life—pretty catch-all, but fortunately it was also subdivided in a way that made sense to me, just like the Sanctuary menu.

I was quickly able to divide it up between Flora and Fauna, and I started browsing Vegetation.

To my delight, dirt was actually in there… plenty of types of dirt, too.

I spread it liberally over the places where I thought it made sense, vaguely changing fertility and nutrient values more or less at random.

I was halfway through this before I thought to ask Orpheus about it.

"If I just spread this around with varying degrees, natural processes will move it to where it actually makes sense, right?"

The fairy – who was currently perched on my shoulder and didn't seem to want to move from there — gave a vague nod.

"It will still stabilize over time, so long as you haven't done anything that makes no sense at all. Looking at your world's parameters… you may want to tweak a few settings to increase migration rate and run your vegetation for a few centuries."

I blinked in surprise. That was an actual suggestion. I hadn't expected that from her.

I hesitantly asked, "Is it okay for you to suggest that?"

She nodded again.

"It was a natural extension of the question you were already asking. While it was technically volunteering information, it was the information you were actually looking for, even if it wasn't exactly what you said aloud.

"This terminal does not convey emotions very well," she added, "but you should know that while I am not your companion, I do have a vested interest in your success. And I have no reason to be too literal."

That was a relief… to know she wouldn't be a literal genie or something.

The last thing I needed was an advisor that acted like a monkey's paw.

I paused. That reference wasn't quite right, I thought. I knew that, but my memory was still a little weird about very specific references like that. I couldn't put my finger on it.

For some reason, just thinking that made me chuckle.

I took a breath and went back to work.

I roughly knew what I needed to do.

Before I placed anything, I adjusted the mutation rate globally—so instead of millions of years, we could see a result in a few centuries.

Then I basically smeared algae everywhere and looked through the menu for anything else interesting.

The menu was expansive… way more so than I expected.

The menu had numerous subsections, and they made sense once I started clicking on them. It was still a little hard to navigate.

Algae had been pretty easy to find, and I belatedly realized I needed to seed bacteria as well.

Then I paused.

Did I really need to seed bacteria? That hadn't even been discovered for most of human existence. I could easily make it work without it… or maybe use something else for diseases instead.

I shelved the idea for now and focused on putting plant life in.

The list had so many kinds of trees and bushes, vines, mushrooms… everything. They were organized into ever‑smaller groups, but the groups just kept going.

After browsing for a full twenty minutes, I realized that many of these were probably extinct in my time. This might be organized like I would have done it in my mind, but the data had to be from my world, not my memories. I certainly didn't recognize most of these plants.

With the mutation rate high, I didn't need everything. I selected a few trees I did know, along with some bushes, flowers, mushrooms, vines, molds, and so on. Quite a few of these things I would never have thought of myself, so having them in a menu was nice.

I didn't try to place everything though. I just tried to get a good variety and spread it around.

This was, once again, easy to say… but I was working on a whole world that was much larger than Earth. Even with the thought interface that let me carpet entire islands and even continents with vegetation at once if I wanted to, it took several hours of dedicated work.

I still had more plants I wanted to add, but for now I could rely on the relatively random generation.

At last I sat back in my chair and regarded the massive, virgin expanses of green, yellow, and other colors… mostly green.

I knew enough to put conifers up in cooler areas, but I could only guess what areas would actually be cool in the long run. I'd run the universe long enough for snow to form in some places, so I had a vague idea.

Most importantly, I didn't have to sit through the whole era of nothing but bacteria in the sea, forming algae and molds and then eventually bushes and trees. It was more like a video game again, where I could plant a tree that was obviously a hundred years old if I really wanted to.

Rubbing my hands together, I admired the completely untouched wilderness for a little while longer.

"Lovely," I said.

Then I reached for the Time Dilation.

Chapter 11: Mistakes Were Made

I pulled up the interface that showed me the world and zoomed out as much as I could.

It thankfully allowed for options like cutaway views and region overlays, and I could mentally flip it up or down, zoom in on various regions, and isolate elements one at a time.

I set the Time Dilation to one year per hour, so I could hopefully see if my idea for seasons had worked. I wasn't expecting any big surprises, but it wouldn't have been a shock if things didn't go exactly as planned.

I might need to adjust the output of the sun by season as well, I thought.

I obviously hadn't covered the entire world in vegetation. I'd laid down large patches and tried to keep some variety, but it turned out that life was expensive.

Even just placing patches – and even considering that about sixty to seventy percent of my new world was water – just that cost me nearly 300 Reality Points.

Despite more complex plants like trees being significantly more expensive, the bulk of that cost had come from the massive amounts of algae and mold I'd needed to lay down across the oceans.

I tried to be liberal with the application while also keeping some level of frugality. I was hoping I'd get to see it spread all over… and then, eventually, see the autumn colors on the trees change.

Unfortunately, reality had other ideas.

Some greenery was spreading, I could tell, but it looked a little off.

The landscape just wasn't as colorful as I'd expected.

I brushed aside a few notifications of species extinctions. That didn't surprise me… I wasn't entirely sure how the wind currents and weather would work in some areas, so I knew a few things would quickly die off. I'd probably placed them in a stupid location.

I was hoping nature would balance that for me, especially with the mutation rate helping… but after about half an hour, I could tell something was wrong.

More and more notifications kept popping up. Rather than spreading, the grass and trees seemed to be shrinking. Many patches of grass had started turning brown and dying—starting to dry out, and quickly.

As I watched the year play out, the extinction notifications just kept coming.

The algae and mold, on the other hand, seemed to be spreading. Everything else seemed to be withering.

In fact, the mold seemed to be growing over a lot of the earth that I hadn't really intended it to reach.

Was it getting too aggressive?

By this point, the extinction notifications had started to pile up. I was getting nervous.

As I watched, the mold crawled across more and more of the land, consuming my beautiful green diorama with what was now a purplish brown mass. It steadily encroached upon the land, while other plants died… trees now looking like skeletal fingers clawing at the sky, as if in desperation.

Quickly, I lowered the Time Dilation back down, then slid it all the way to as slow as I could go.

I hit a 1:10 ratio before a message popped up.

Dilation Limit Reached

Ratios below 1:10 require a minimum Rank of 4.

WARNING!

Ratios below 1:10 require constant Reality Point expenditure.

While the warning was interesting, I was far more concerned about why my entire ecosystem was dying off.

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With time slowed down, I had plenty of opportunity to pan over most of the land and see what was happening. Aside from the algae being a little too aggressive in the sea—which still seemed fine… it was the land that was being weird. Mold was covering everything.

I fumbled with the interface for a while before I could get an analysis tool to pop up. While I was fiddling with that, I glanced over at Orpheus.

"Did you know this would happen? And if you did, why didn't you warn me? Or can you not warn me?"

The golden‑clad fairy floated over to my shoulder and perched there again, moving from the end table I'd set up.

"Even if I had known, this is not considered a failure state. Mass extinctions are common in early worlds. I've seen entire biomes vanish in minutes. As crises go, this is relatively tame."

She tilted her head, and her heels lightly drummed on the top of my chest. Even though she didn't have any weight, I could feel a very gentle tapping.

"But in this case," she admitted, "I did not see it coming."

"Well…" she continued, "I can see many of your choices and delve into your interface and world values. But doing a thorough review would be a waste of effort unless you explicitly called down some kind of audit. Calling an audit this early would be both expensive and probably crippling to your creativity.

"I have no idea why your plants are dying like this."

So much for getting any help there.

I laid back in my recliner and propped my feet up. Even if I couldn't get tired, the change in position helped me focus a little… a new perspective, you might say.

The interface hovered directly in front of me now, so I was looking up at it while tapping through the options.

Eventually, I managed to figure out a compact way to display an information box about whatever I was inspecting. I swept it over the ground and the trees.

"That's odd," I muttered, more to myself than to Orpheus.

"It's saying a lot of the larger plants aren't getting enough nutrients… but I'm sure I put healthy ground down."

I kept browsing through the data. That's when I noticed something else: a lot of the dead vegetation was withered and dried… but not rotting.

It was about then that I realized I'd taken far too much for granted in just how complex Earth's ecosystem really was.

I clapped my hand to my forehead with a groan.

"Ugh. I forgot decomposers."

I thought I'd tweaked everything so that bacteria weren't entirely necessary… but they're used for so much.

And without any insects, a lot of the pollinators weren't working. Trees weren't spreading their seeds.

There's probably some reason for earthworms too.

I looked through more of the results and examined what was going on with the mold. Inside that, I saw my stupidity as well.

And of course – of course – there weren't any animals eating the mold. So of course it was going to outcompete grass. Grass that evolved with symbiotic relationships… with microbes and everything else.

I let my thoughts trail off and sighed heavily, closing my eyes and dismissing the interface for now.

I needed some time to think.

I should've expected this.

I'd been so proud of myself… for the clever design of the world, the way I'd managed to save energy with its construction, the cool new features I'd put in. Not to mention all the plans I had for later.

But I'd forgotten all the basics.

I'd been overconfident.

This was a whole new world, and being clever with the structure and shape of things wasn't enough. I needed to carefully consider everything I was doing.

As much like a video game as this interface looked… it really wasn't. No video game would have this many parameters to worry about.

In a way, I was lucky. If an oversight like this had happened further along, I might've lost a lot more Reality Points… maybe even lost a civilization.

Then again, I guessed there was still time for me to screw that up.

I laid there for a while.

I'm not sure how long it was. Without fatigue, without a change in lighting, without anything like that, it was hard to tell how long I just sat there. Even if I opened the interface and checked how much time had passed in my world, I wasn't sure how much of that had been me just staring into the back of my eyelids.

Still, I eventually realized I had to do something.

The clock was ticking.

And I couldn't pause the universe now.

The question was: how do I fix this?

Chapter 12: Cohesion

The 1:10 ratio gave me time.

If I'd been a scientist trying to resolve everything, even with that dilation, the work likely would've taken so long that the rest of the biosphere would have died out before I came close to a solution.

Fortunately, I could alter the rules of reality itself.

The main question was: how do I do that to fix the problem?

"The most straightforward solution would be to add all of the insects and bacteria I need," I said out loud to Orpheus. "But do I really want to just copy Earth? That's an enormously complex system that somebody else designed.

"I like the idea of having Earth‑recognizable plants like oak trees, just for my own sense of aesthetics. But that doesn't mean I need everything Earth had."

This time Orpheus didn't say anything. I didn't expect her to, because this really was entirely in my hands. I knew anything she suggested would influence me.

Still, it was nice to have someone to think out loud toward.

I took a few deep breaths and considered my options.

The important thing was not to panic.

Even if the entire system died out, I'd only be out 300 Reality Points. That would hurt, but it wasn't unrecoverable.

I considered my options.

Adding insects made sense. I didn't want there to be some sort of perfect ecological balance that my civilizations would never have to pay attention to – tension made for good stories – but I wasn't sure I needed bacteria and viruses and all the other things life had evolved from early on.

I was creating everything from scratch. I didn't need to go through the earlier stages, even if the idea of having a lost dinosaur island or something was pretty cool.

I paused when I thought of that and frowned.

"I should get a notebook or something," I muttered, "for the ideas I have for the future."

As soon as I thought of that, a new tab appeared in my interface: Scratch Pad.

I'd never needed it, so it had never appeared. Unlike some of the other tabs, this one wasn't currently locked.

I touched it and saw that it had a familiar interface… files to organize thoughts, folders to put those files in. Convenient.

With this, I started putting down some of the ideas I needed.

I wasn't sure if my non‑biological existence gave me an improved memory or not, so I felt I should write these things down.

I jotted down a few of my ideas for the future – like a dinosaur island and similar concepts – but then I had to get back to the real task: designing the solution to my current problem.

If I didn't use bacteria or viruses, I'd need some other means of revitalizing soil, managing decomposition, handling nutrient cycling, and so on. I wasn't a biologist, as far as I could tell. In fact, I wasn't even sure what my previous job had been.

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I seemed to have a lot of generic knowledge spread across different subjects. Maybe I was just some kind of perpetual student. Or maybe my more specialized knowledge just hadn't come up yet.

I brushed the mental tangent aside and frowned at my current problem.

I must have spent an hour looking through various menus, tweaking values, trying to get things to work… before the solution, which had been staring me in the face the entire time, just sort of reached out… and figuratively slapped me across the cheek.

I didn't want bacteria and viruses. But what did my world have that Earth didn't?

Technically, quite a lot.

But what I immediately thought of was the Mana I'd spent so much trouble infusing into the whole world.

Right now, it was in a steady state but constantly building up. At this rate it would trigger an expansion event relatively soon. I'd intended to tweak the flow once I had a better idea of how often it would happen, because I wanted it to be relatively rare on the scale of civilizations.

But what if it didn't have to build up so fast?

A lot of the processes of living beings were a mystery to me, but I knew some general facts. Most animals took in oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide as a waste product. Plants took in carbon dioxide and produced oxygen as a waste product.

I knew there was a lot more to it than that, but I'd been leaning heavily on the interface to handle those details. I also knew they needed energy to do it. Plants could do this with photosynthesis, but they also needed nutrients in the soil… and who knew what else.

I spent what was probably several hours locally tinkering in the menus again, leaning heavily on the interface to balance things automatically and fill in the gaps in my mental model by picking up on my intent.

It all looked complicated with numbers and ratios and sub‑menus, but generally focusing my will and intent worked a lot better than blindly tweaking values and checking for errors.

I wouldn't say it was easy, but at least I didn't have to be an inhuman calculator.

It did take some tweaking of the Mana energy, which cost more Reality Points than I wanted. Working on such a basic thing after world creation had been initialized was expensive.

Yet it did do what I wanted… or at least, I thought it did.

Now plants could draw Mana deep from the earth and respirate, giving it different forms of a sort.

Animals also respirated Mana, and that helped circulate it, because their bodies would bring Mana from other areas, mixing the energy that had been tinted with their life force.

This was, of course, a very basic explanation. The actual mechanics of it had taken quite a lot to work out.

I didn't want to have another horrifying mistake like what just happened, so I spent a lot more time making this safer.

For one thing, I didn't want plants and animals spontaneously developing the ability to channel and use magic… especially since I hadn't really defined what I wanted magic to do.

It took a lot of work to put limitations on mutations and biology, restricting the use of Mana to strictly biological functions.

I wanted to leave a little leeway for surprises, but I definitely didn't want trees that threw fireballs or something ridiculous like that.

I rubbed my chin and looked over at Orpheus.

"I'm thinking about making some magical plants, though. Do you think I should wait… or do it now?"

She fluttered up from the end table where she'd quietly settled while I was deep in my work. It took her a few moments to respond, and I realized I'd been silent for so long that her attention might have drifted.

That again made me wonder exactly how difficult I was making her actual job by asking all these questions.

"I keep reminding you, I can't advise you on anything," she pointed out. "The most I can do is tell you that I don't see any reason not to make a few prototype magical plants… if you intend to make them later in greater numbers."

That was a good point.

I nodded to her and mulled over my interface.

The question was: how to make some magical plants without giving every plant the ability to do strange things with that energy?

I realized I needed some kind of limiter.

The solutions were getting more and more complicated, and I browsed the interface for another hour before I could even conceive of an answer that satisfied me.

I had to have some way to limit the actual manipulation of Mana beyond basic biological functions… and then have some way of limiting that gateway.

The only trick was keeping things from evolving it into a direction I didn't want.

And that was just going to get more complicated once I put sapients into the mix.

But I guess I was the only one who could do the job, huh?

Chapter 13: High Fiber

After another few hours of browsing menus and prototyping ideas, I finally settled on something for the plants.

Putting restrictions on living things wasn't that difficult. But limiting what they could develop into… that was the hard part.

I stretched my arms and sat up, causing Orpheus to perk up and alight on my shoulder again.

I glanced at her curiously. "Are you getting more interested in what I'm doing?"

The fairy nodded her head.

"Not in the way you might think. I always enjoy watching new Administrators figure out how to solve problems. Call it a type of entertainment. I'm wishing you well, but I'm more hoping that you have a creative solution I haven't seen before."

I grinned at her. "Well, I might not have a solution you haven't seen before yet, but we'll have to see. I think I might have at least a few surprises."

I expanded my interface until it covered my entire vision and went to work.

This time, I narrated some of my logic aloud to Orpheus.

"I think I have a plan for how to have plants use magic… without just letting magical species take over the world. To do this, I'm starting with a prototype."

I stopped speaking, since I knew she could see what I was doing in the interface.

I chose a very fibrous, woody mushroom I didn't recognize as my base. Maybe it had existed in Earth's past, maybe not. I didn't really care. It suited what I wanted well enough.

Into this, I added two kinds of special fibers.

The first kind could draw in Mana and use it for an enhancement effect of some kind. The effect would have to be subtle, but I left it relatively open to interpretation… or at least I was going to. For everything else, yes – but for my prototype, I'd already locked in what it would do.

It needed to reinforce the structure so the mushroom could grow huge over time.

Since it was already long-lived, I made it biologically immortal and capable of regeneration from a stump. It would only spread spores if there was enough Mana in the area to support a new growth.

I also specified that it respirated Mana only. That was unique to this specific growth. Air was toxic to it.

The second kind of fiber was an effect fiber. This would allow it to perform some magical function.

Each fiber was linked to only one function, which could evolve… but the fiber itself could never support more than one function. It also took in energy based on the size of the organism.

That had been the tricky part. I tapped the interface and said aloud:

"This way, no plant can ever really support more than one effect fiber network. Any magical plant will only have one ability… and one ability only."

In this case: a field of light‑absorbing darkness.

Orpheus didn't say anything, but her head tilted in a way that told me she was paying more attention to this than most of my antics.

I named it the Darkness Mushroom, and then locked its mutation rate at zero when I discovered I could do that.

That made my choice much easier. The global mutation rate was still very high, but this thing would never change… unless I went back and changed it myself.

It was a fairly expensive mushroom, but I didn't need many.

I used them to top the mountains that poked out of the atmosphere at the center of the cylinder, right at the midpoint between the two halves, where the sun would pass.

I'd noticed there had been some light leakage from the opening during night. These mushrooms would make the night much darker, forming a barrier that would block the sun once it passed through. The collection of mushrooms would take on a custom life role. Something between atmosphere, flora, and celestial mechanism.

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It was an expensive endeavor, but with its limited placement, it only cost me 12 Reality Points.

Finally, Orpheus had something to say.

"You're using the ecosystem to control the actual day and night cycle. I've seen something like that before… but this specific solution, while a relatively simple one, is interesting."

That gave me a sense of satisfaction.

I'd been pretty happy with this little problem-solving bit, even if I hadn't intended it from the start. It was just a patch for a slight design flaw in my original idea.

I added some of the fibers into variations of other plants – bushes, flowers, trees, vines, even some grasses.

I didn't go crazy with it, but I did want to have a nice spread. I had plenty of world space to work with, after all.

The trick I'd settled on to keep magical plants from overwhelming mundane ones was to tie mutation rate to local *Mana *saturation.

Only in areas where saturation remained high – on average – would the mutation rate rise. The higher the saturation, the more likely a plant was to mutate. That meant these magical variants would only develop in high-Mana areas and generally stay there. To spread beyond those zones, they'd actually have to evolve to use less magic.

I wasn't sure this limitation would work perfectly, but I didn't plan on moving so fast I couldn't course correct.

Just to be safe, I also made magical propagation harder in low-Mana zones. If there were a lot of magic fibers present, the reproduction chance dropped dramatically.

"You're being much more careful this time," Orpheus said, stirring from her perch on my shoulder. "I have to admit, most new Administrators have a much more disastrous mistake drilled into them before they reach this level of caution."

I nodded. "It sounds like most new Administrators are kind of incompetent. I don't consider myself an expert, but most of what I'm doing is just common sense to me."

Orpheus fluttered her tiny wings.

"You're not wrong. That's one of the downsides of random selection. Every once in a while, we get someone with some skill… but most of the time, new Administrators manage to mess things up and get caught in a downward spiral."

I shuddered. "Well, hopefully I won't get stuck in that. I'm still sort of fumbling my way through. I'm just fumbling very slowly this time."

That actually got a chuckle from Orpheus.

I clapped my hands together and switched to the Fauna section.

I'd already selected some basic insects and animals… typical things like deer, wolves, and so on. The interface even had a tool that let me estimate predator‑prey relationships and predation balance.

I also introduced a non‑mutating amphibian and a non‑mutating bird, both designed to feed on that particular moss mutation that had caused problems earlier.

Apparently, it cost Reality Points to eliminate a species entirely, and the moss had taken over so much that it would've cost over 1,000 points to just wipe it out with administrative powers.

Instead, I spent a fraction of a point to turn off its mutation—then created predators that would naturally die off once the moss was fully eaten. It cost me a few more Reality Points to get it all in place, but compared to what I'd lost due to the last problem, this was a cheap fix.

Orpheus spoke up again, and this time, she asked a question about what I was doing:

"These fibers you've made appear to only work for plants. How are you going to handle magical animals? Or is that for later?"

I took her curiosity as a good sign.

Fortunately, I also had an answer.

"Animals can get a sort of material that acts like the enhancement fibers," I said. "I'm working on it right now."

And indeed, I was. I'd just opened up the interface to do exactly that. I was quietly pleased that Orpheus had been so impatient she'd asked before I'd even started the work. She wouldn't have needed to wait long.

I put some similar limitations on the animal version, because I didn't want basic magic‑using creatures to overwhelm the mundane ones. In this case, I tied their reproductive ability to how much magical fiber they possessed.

This could be overridden for certain bloodlines – or at least I planned to eventually – but for now, I just wanted to get a few prototypes out there without risking runaway magical ecosystems.

This would be a real test.

As for the equivalent of effect fibers?

I had a better idea. I had something special planned for the intelligent species I'd eventually be making. Unintelligent animals would use magic differently from them.

"Are you going to limit them to only one ability like you did for the plants?" Orpheus asked.

I shook my head. "No… but multiple abilities should be rare, you're right. I'd love to have some very dangerous creatures with multiple abilities, but they'll probably be stuck in the higher Mana areas."

I paused and added, "I noticed a lot of Mana variation in the landscape when I was scanning to figure out why the plants were dying off. I might as well use that variation, right?"

She fluttered up from my shoulder and did a slow circle around my head.

"Many new Administrators would see an unplanned variation and attempt to correct it. You are instead using it to make your world more interesting. This is not strange for experienced Administrators… just relatively rare for new ones."

I laughed. "Where I'm from, this would basically be called emergent gameplay."

I opened the Organ Creation screen.

"So… would you like to see how animals use magic?"

This time, I designated a specific rule. Even though I didn't have the ability to create intelligent species unlocked yet, I did have the ability to place future-facing limitations related to them.

And in this case, that's exactly what I was doing.

My mental "finger" hovered over a checkbox… one that would prevent the organ I was designing from ever developing inside an intelligent creature.

But then I paused.

That wouldn't be nearly as interesting as the idea I'd just had.

Instead, I reconsidered, my mind already turning over a new design.

Orpheus verbally prodded me. "You were saying something."

I nodded. "Sorry… I just had a great idea. I'll get back to it, though. It won't matter for a little while."

I tapped the Organ Creation screen again and gave the new structure a name:

Monster Core.

Chapter 14: Core Concept

I was very pleased, because the moment I named my new organ, Orpheus was actually curious.

"I have only limited understanding of your old world," she said. "But… isn't a monster a bad thing?"

"It can be," I agreed, as I began refining the parameters of the new organ and what it would do. "But compared to a normal wolf, wouldn't a wolf that can breathe fire and bite through solid rock be considered monstrous? These are for very special creatures."

Despite my casual tone while talking to her, defining the Monster Core was actually taking quite a lot of effort. I had to refine its physical state, determine how it interacted with other organs, set blood flow requirements, and so on.

It was, in brief, something I thought was a cool idea… but, as usual for everything I tried to do, it turned out to be far more complicated than I'd planned.

Living things could have Mana conduits – channels that acted like the enhancement fibers I'd given to plants – but they also served to channel Mana in general. Something could have Mana conduits and no Monster Core. If that were the case, it could only use enhancement functions… much like a magical plant that had enhancement fibers but no effect fibers.

I tapped at my interface before remembering that Orpheus couldn't actually see what I was working on, so I kept narrating.

"Animals are a different thing from plants. They can have Mana conduits without a Monster Core. But, if they do have a Monster Core, it processes, refines, and stores Mana in a highly compressed state, which it then sends through the conduits."

I smiled, proud of my idea.

"This means a monster could have a very dense Monster Core, which gives it a lot of theoretical power and plenty of Mana to burn… but if it has poor quality Mana conduits, it'll have trouble channeling that power. On the upside, it probably won't run out of Mana any time soon."

Orpheus settled back on my shoulder as I rambled on about my new creation.

It wasn't actually that new… it was an idea I'd cribbed from numerous stories that featured similar things.

But that was all part of the plan.

Of course, the problem with monsters in any setting I'd ever read was that, from a logical standpoint, they would rapidly overtake the mundane population.

That in itself could be cool… making a high fantasy world where everything was magical. But I wanted to at least give the mundane animals a chance. In this case, that meant putting similar restrictions on the mutation of Monster Cores.

I also gave them a minimum Mana requirement.

Since I didn't want monsters to be completely unable to leave high‑Mana areas, I let them substitute Mana with increased food intake. I figured: if a very strong monster left a high-Mana area and had to eat an entire herd of deer just to keep going, it would rapidly starve itself out of the region.

Of course, it could also just lead to a rampaging monster that wouldn't stop because it was so hungry…

But I was really just guessing here, and hoping for the best.

I also fiddled with the reproduction rate, making it more difficult for monsters to reproduce outside of high-Mana zones. If anything hosted a Monster Core, its ability to spread would be significantly curbed.

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Mana conduits also got some tweaks so that they'd be more rare, but I was less concerned about them overall. I also made it possible to develop Mana conduits naturally, just very difficult. If wolves eventually evolved into super-wolves… I guessed that was okay. They'd still have a higher calorie intake, so presumably natural balancing would keep them in check.

The interface I was using was actually well tuned for this. It wouldn't warn me about disruptive predators, but I could get a readout of the required predator-to-prey ratios and run analyses on specific areas.

"Are you going to create creatures from your world's myth?"

Orpheus spoke suddenly, breaking the silence.

It startled me… not just because I'd been so focused, but because what she said could have been taken as a suggestion.

I gave her an odd look, squinting at the small fairy‑like being.

"Probably a few," I admitted. "But I'd like to see where the rapid evolution takes things. I'll probably keep things simple at first… but I do have a few ideas for a little later."

I returned to the interface and thought for a while.

Then I decided: designing a few simple creatures would be good, just to get things started.

The first one I created was a variant of the mountain goat.

Goats could already eat just about anything, but I added some Mana conduits to this one. I didn't make it incredibly powerful, but here in the interface I could define all sorts of things about a species.

The more I tweaked, the more complicated things got… a fact that made me very glad for the interface's help. In this case, I let the Mana conduits give it an increased ability to digest materials and refine them.

This goat would also have a vague instinctual desire to nibble on metal-rich ores, which its magical body would then process and use to reinforce its horns and skull… eventually making it an iron-helmeted goat. Or something even more exotic, depending on the metal.

I paused. I already saw some flaws in this design… But then I waved them off. It was fine to make an imperfect creature. I'd be curious to see if it evolved away those flaws, or if it would simply die out.

I'd already selected a number of fish for the oceans, but I noticed that some regions were actually cold.

That surprised me. The whole system should be evenly heated.

But then I discovered it was just a matter of geography. Some areas, when I layered the earth, had ended up farther from the sun's light. And the air currents didn't carry heat effectively to those regions.

That was kind of nice. I'd been worried about having a diverse set of biomes. It was too early to say whether this would be a permanent effect, but it gave me an idea.

Next up: a large sea serpent.

This one did have a Monster Core, giving it the ability to manipulate ice and water—to chill the oceans and even freeze them under the right conditions.

Of course, this took a lot longer to design than the previous creature, because I hadn't really defined what magic could do yet. I initially tried to do it by defining how Mana operated, but I was delighted to see that when I created the Monster Core, another section had opened up.

I could now define, to some degree, what kinds of magic existed.

I played around with it for a little while—just to see how it worked—before realizing this was going to be a much bigger job.

I'd have to work on it while the system evolved.

I didn't stop there.

I made a few simple magical plants—one that pretended to be another plant, another that produced enchanted fruit. Any animal that ate the fruit would feel strong and vigorous for a little while. Simple things like that. I didn't want to define too much, because I still wanted some kind of emergent ecosystem.

As for animals, I created a couple more with fairly basic abilities. Very few had actual Monster Cores—but the ones that did were dangerous.

I had to define magical abilities inside my budding magic system, which clearly needed much more attention before I could use them at full power inside a Monster Core.

So I tried to keep it simple for now.

I already had a plant that used a limited form of illusion magic. So I created an animal that did the same.

I made it a large cat, loosely based on a panther, that could take on the appearance of other animals of similar size. I wasn't sure how useful that would be in practice, but that was part of the so-called fun of the experiment.

Unfortunately, this turned out to be a very expensive experiment.

Between replacing the plants, adding custom plants, refining the magic system, introducing new organs, and then creating all the needed animals and insects to support them… it got very expensive very quickly.

After my earlier failure and the quick patches I'd used to fix it, I'd ended up with 8,673 Reality Points.

By the time I populated my new world with enough breeding populations and spread them across the vast landmass, I took a much more severe hit. My Reality Point counter was looking a lot lower now. 10,000 had seemed like a lot at first.

Now… not so much.

It sat at 6,725 –

– and I still had so much to do.

Chapter 15: The Essence of Elements

I went ahead and placed the new animals and plants.

Now that I'd actually done it, I found myself wondering about some of the assumptions I'd made.

Could I have made a world where there was no real difference between animals and plants?

Where every creature was of the same basic type?

Could I create something else entirely… something in between?

Would it be possible to make something that was living rock… or something even stranger?

I mulled over those thoughts, but didn't spend too much time on them.

Maybe I could use them later, but for now, it was probably best that I kept things at least a little familiar.

Even if I was making some changes, like with the bacteria.

Just musing over those ideas – and the fact that I'd already made a few structural changes – made me realize I needed to start using the Scratch Pad properly.

I pulled it up and made a few entries.

SCRATCH PAD - TODO LIST

Further define magical systems

Introduce decomposition, disease, and infection

Dinosaur Island

I stared forlornly at the Dinosaur Island item.

I really, really wanted it, for some reason, but I knew better than to prioritize it over things like diseases or other systems that would help cull the population aside from predation. The Time Dilation was still set at a 1:10 ratio, so I knew I had some time. Even if I spent a few hours fiddling with this before I got around to decomposition or similar functions, it wouldn't make much difference in my universe.

"Orpheus," I suddenly spoke up, "does it cause a problem to change various rules of reality while time is running? I'm guessing not – because you can't pause it – but are there any potential pitfalls I should look into?"

"It depends on what you are doing," the small fairy replied, "and what Epoch you are in. Currently, things have just gotten started, so it shouldn't cause any serious problems. Once you have a very large population and everyone is actively doing things, changing rules in the middle of creatures using those rules can lead to some strange effects.

She shrugged, "Unless you are outright rewriting massive systems, though, these small instabilities and edge cases are usually smoothed out very quickly."

"I figured as much," I said. "If you can't pause time and the interface lets you make changes, it would be weird if every little adjustment broke everything horribly."

But now I really had a problem.

I'd been in such a rush to get things moving that I'd kicked the can down the road on developing the magic system. A lot of it was still undefined. And now that I had time running, changing it was going to be more expensive.

Another mistake, now clear in hindsight.

But at least the costs of doing those tweaks didn't seem too bad. Maybe that was because nothing was consciously using magic yet.

My first instinct, of course, was to just start building your standard elemental-aligned types of Mana and then link various magic systems to those.

But that felt a little too simplistic.

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I'd already gotten various things to do certain magical abilities even without elemental alignment. If I introduced it now, I'd have to go back and revise the camouflage plants and animals… and that ice serpent, too.

Then again… if I was going to do it, better earlier than later.

I sat up in my chair and drummed my fingers on my knee.

Maybe I should get a desk, I thought.

No. That's procrastination talking.

I really had to face what was going on.

Now that the initial disaster had been dealt with, I was facing a potentially very complicated problem… and my earlier mistake had reminded me just how far in over my head I was.

I'd gotten overconfident.

I couldn't just rush into this, but I also couldn't sit here and do nothing. I had to move forward, without spending all day planning without action.

While I was doing all this thinking, I was also investigating the menus available for defining my Mana energy.

To my surprise, the menus were even more sophisticated than before.

Was the interface adapting? Or was it just letting me do more now that life was active on the planet and interacting with that energy in various ways?

I couldn't be sure, and I didn't bother to ask Orpheus. I didn't want to get distracted.

After a little experimentation, I finally settled on a path forward that looked like it might actually make sense.I was trusting in the interface a lot here, because I wasn't sure how easy it would be to define what I wanted just through numbers and menus.

First, I designated a base type: Pure Mana.

This was the raw, potential-filled stuff – untouched and unshaped.

And just to make things interesting, I made large quantities of it poisonous to most kinds of life.

It could still be filtered through objects and bodies, though… and in doing so, it would "color" the Mana, changing it into something easier to work with.

Now I just had to define some basic types.

I'd already noticed an option that allowed for hybrid types, and I toggled that feature to run through a notification system. That way, if a new hybrid type seemed about to be created, I'd be alerted. I wanted to watch that process carefully.

If I could guide the development of the system instead of brute-forcing everything, maybe I'd have a better chance of making something elegant.

I looked at what I'd already done.

I'd used some illusion magic, some ice magic, and the darkness mushrooms… that could be three different types of magic right there. But none of them covered the general enhancement magic being used by the enhancement fibers. I was very tempted to just use earth, air, fire, water, light, and dark, but that just seemed too trite and limiting.

I sat back in my chair again and rubbed my chin.

I felt a slight tickle at my ear as Orpheus settled on my shoulder. She didn't say anything, but the gesture made me wonder what she was thinking. I didn't have time to really consider it and returned to going over my options for colored Mana.

Instead of "dark" mana for the darkness… how about something specifically for obscuration? That seemed like it would be much more interesting. It would also cover the illusion magic that the plant and that one predator I'd designed used.

I went into their entries and looked them over for commonalities, and then I nodded to myself.

Then I created my first type of colored Mana.

I dubbed it Umbral Mana, though it could also be called Shadow Mana.

It was Mana that specifically interfered with the senses. That way it could cover darkness, illusions, and even mental manipulation if I wanted to add that later.

I left that last part off for now.

This was one of those things that's easy for me to say, but actually doing the work took several hours of defining, tweaking, and running simple simulations in the simulation tool of the interface.

I queued up the changes I had made, but didn't apply them yet. The rest of the Mana needed to be defined so I could properly handle interactions between the types before going "live" with the new system.

The rest were a little trickier—well, most of them.

Luminn Mana was easy. It was basically the counterpart of Umbral, and it was just light magic. It revealed hidden things, provided illumination, enhanced the senses, and so on. Most of what the sun put out was light magic like this. This would make it harder to use illusions in direct sunlight, but I thought that was an interesting way to limit them. I'd have to see how that worked out. Might be making the sun too OP.

After a little more thought, I created two more types of Mana.

Flux Mana handled change and chaos – transformation, mutation. That made it one of the more dangerous kinds of Mana to handle in a pure form, but also incredibly useful.

Countering it was Cruxis Mana—which could also be called Order Mana. This was for stability, defense, stasis, reinforcement, and that sort of thing.

Once I had those down, it got a little easier.

My uncertainty about how to handle the enhancement fibers melted away as I moved down the list and created Vital Mana. This was the Mana of living things… regeneration, growth, healing, and so on.

Countering it was the dangerous Entropic Mana, which would attempt to leech out Mana from both living things and anything else that held another kind of Mana.

I was really getting into this now… but I was still missing a few types.

I added Flame Mana, for consumption, destruction, and of course, fire.

And I countered it with Aqua Mana, for water, fluidity, resilience and calming.

Finally, after all this, I sat up and examined my interface.

Could I use what I just made to do what I wanted… or would I need more types?

Chapter 16: Node Network

Now that I had the various essences of Mana to work with, I had to see if they would properly fit into the conception of the world. Fortunately, I had kept Mana separate from actual matter, so I didn't have to explain why something as prolific as air didn't have a direct essence yet.

Still, I had to come up with ways for everything to work and make sure I didn't have any huge gaps. For example: if something wanted to use magic to fly… what would it use?

I was fine with flight being a little complicated to pull off. And after working with this system and designing it for hours upon hours now… I already knew how flight would work.

I really should take a break soon, I thought.

But I wanted to get everything ready so I could turn up the Time Dilation while I took a rest and let the mutation rate handle things.

But first, I had to finish setting things up.

Now that I had Mana types, I of course had to tweak the various creatures already using magic so they could interact with them properly through Mana conduits.

This part was easy.

Mana conduits could process one type of Mana into another, with varying efficiency depending on a creature's particular affinities. I was going to leave a lot of that up to evolution, but that brought up a question: How, for example, would the sea serpent I'd made use ice magic?

I knew what ice magic would consist of. It was a combination of Aqua and Cruxis.

Aqua was easy… water would naturally color pure Mana into Aqua Mana. But living in the ocean… where would they get Cruxis? It wouldn't be common in an ocean full of water, which had a nature that contradicted what Cruxis stood for.

I thought of a few solutions. Then I decided… I didn't need to solve that. That was something evolution could handle. And I was actually curious to see how it would solve it.

Still, it brought up a larger issue:

Where would the various types of Mana come from?

And I still had a lot of other things to handle with this system.

For now, I concentrated on the first problem… because the second involved some uncomfortable decisions I wanted to put off a little longer.

I spent a few hours going through various materials – like iron, stone, and so on –to tweak what Mana affinities they would have.

When pure Mana bubbled up from the Magicite layer – just as I'd set it to do earlier – it would filter through these various materials. Certain ores would have affinities, aside from the obvious ones like Cruxis of course. I could probably make some magical materials if I wanted to… but that could wait.

This kind of passive filtering technique wasn't very efficient, though. It was especially bad in certain areas that just wouldn't get the Mana they needed to support good biodiversity.

I did have a solution of sorts: If I could create Mana nodes – small local concentrations of colored Mana – then that could serve as a way for magical creatures to get what they needed.

The problem, of course, was that I had no idea what needed what.

I'd designed the system out of creativity. But the fact remained: a certain level of balance and statistical analysis was needed to make it actually work. I knew this. And I even knew enough math to recognize that my previous self had probably had some experience in the sciences.

But just because I had some knowledge didn't mean I'd be able to solve this correctly… or in a reasonable amount of time. If I had subordinates or something to check my math, maybe I'd be willing to try it.

But for now, I had to rely on the interface. And while I'd been relying on it quite a bit, my earlier mistake had taught me that it wasn't a foolproof solution.

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It actually brought me back to something I had been considering for a while but hadn't had the chance to try. I knew I would have to eventually, because the Magicite shell would store up enough energy that I would need to let it out somehow, or else reduce the input into the system. But I didn't want to do the latter.

I mentally reached out toward the interface, but then paused, remembering that Orpheus was still here. While she didn't volunteer information, she had sometimes been able to tell me what was and wasn't possible.

"Orpheus," I said, turning around to look for her.

This brought me almost nose-to-nose with her because I hadn't noticed she was still sitting on my shoulder. Even so, it took her a moment to respond… she blinked as if she had been zoned out.

The moment her eyes focused on me, I continued my question.

"I hate to bother you. You seem a little distracted, but… is it possible to have my interface automate things? Like set up triggers, or make recommendations based upon certain parameters?"

The fairy blinked at me again, but this time the response didn't take very long.

"Such a thing is possible," she confirmed. "The automatic expansion of your original universe was one such thing. The interface is also already set up with some functions that let it analyze and give warnings, which you probably saw during your earlier mishap with the vegetation dying out."

Her heels drummed lightly on my shoulder as she fully woke up from her trance and looked more like an animated little sprite than a simple doll.

"I don't know what your interface looks like," she continued, "but I do know others have set theirs up to do mass analysis before. You should be able to control the interface to do that. But without knowing what your interface is, I don't know what approach you would use for that."

I nodded to her. "Thanks. That's actually all I needed. I didn't want to go hunting for a way to do that if it wasn't possible, or wasn't allowed. I could do this as a Rank Two?"

"You may," Orpheus confirmed. "Your interface will warn you if you are attempting to use a feature beyond your rank. In your case, something particularly complex, or which relies upon an Epoch you have not reached yet, may be barred from you."

That answer gave me everything I needed… but this time, I kept talking instead of letting myself get sucked into my work for hours on end without saying anything.

"Was I boring you?" I asked Orpheus. "I know I've been stuck into the work for several hours."

Orpheus shook her head.

"I don't exactly get bored. But what you were doing was fairly obviously groundwork. I knew I wouldn't see the results of it in a way I could assess for a long while, so I directed my attention elsewhere while you were busy."

Her heels tapped on my shoulder again, like she was fidgeting idly.

"To tell the truth, this is a normal thing that I would do. You've been remarkably fast in building up your world. Most new Administrators struggle with topology far too long. And the ones that don't usually just copy their home universe's topology… and quickly fail."

She turned her head and tilted it, looking at me with a hint of emotion this time, one eyebrow raised.

"You might say you're moving almost as fast as those who rush it," she said, "but you're having much more success. Your original failure with the ecosystem notwithstanding."

"Huh," I muttered. "That's interesting. So I'm a statistical outlier, you're saying."

She nodded. "I've seen this before. But it is relatively rare. It just means that you've had a lot more of my attention for much longer periods than normal."

"It doesn't bother you, does it?" I asked.

She shook her head again.

"No. If anything, it breaks up the monotony. While I do not truly get bored as you understand it, I'm not a completely emotionless entity either. And I can find myself getting interested in something new."

I had a whole truckload of questions about that, but I really didn't want to get into the philosophy of what made a person think and feel without a body… not yet.

Instead, I went back to focusing on my interface. I dug through it, selecting menus and trying to look for what I wanted.

When I found it, I felt really stupid.

This interface had been made just for me, so of course what I wanted would be exactly where I'd expect to find it in a game interface. Namely, further up: a Scripting tab had appeared.

I, of course, knew what programming was. But I didn't need to actually write any code for this, even though it looked like I would. It was more of an abstract concept of scripting, where I could link together concepts visually in my mind, and it would give me the result I wanted, if I was careful enough.

I let Orpheus know that I was going to be zoning out for a couple of hours again. I figured that was just the polite thing to do. Then I spent those hours figuring out how to create an addition to the interface that would overlay what sort of Mana each area would most benefit from.

I didn't want to just give every zone what it needed, because that wouldn't provide any evolutionary pressure. But the overlay did give me a better idea of what kind of interrelations the various lands had, and what kind of node density I might need.

I almost started placing them manually.

Then I got smart.

I directed the interface to use the overlay as a basis for where to put the nodes, and then alter that map of nodes based on random factors.

The world was large – there were literally millions of potential nodes – so I just biased the system's probability toward "no change," and figured the outliers would do the work of seeding chaos.

I set a few of the nodes I knew I'd need in specific places as static, like an Umbral node near where any of the darkness mushrooms grew, so they could feed on it… and then I just let the interface go.

So that is how all the elemental nodes were placed in my world.

Not through divine intervention. Not through natural balance.

But through a glorified dice roll.

Because I thought that would be more interesting.

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A note from ThePudding

I'm trying to intersperse this 'design talk' with more and more hints of overarching plot elements. Is this working for everyone?

As the story progresses and the MC gets more comfortable with his job, he has to confront things like questions of identity and morality, not to mention thoughts about how the entire system he's working within works. I'm hoping that makes the whole 'design segments' more interesting, as a little bit of flavor until we get to the actual civilization stuff which is where the story really takes off, IMO.

We're still several chapters away from civilization, I'm afraid! I'm further ahead in my backlog and I've already made some plans, but you all have a narrow window in which you can actually influence what sort of intelligent creatures he will make. I've made a poll below. If I don't get any cohesive results, I'll just go with what I already have planned.

So if you'd rather be surprised, just don't say anything.

Support "Neophyte World Builder [META LitRPG Building A LitRPG System]"

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What sort of intelligent species should our MC make?

Just humans, only humans. Buck the fantasy trend!

Typical fantasy races like elves, dwarves, and so on, then humans.

Typical fantasy races, but they don't encounter humans until much later.

Typical fantasy races, but also include beast races!

Humans as one, but the others do something different! No elves and dwarves!

No humans or standard fantasy races! Do something totally wild!

Chapter 17: The Second Horseman

A lot of what I had just done wasn't all that expensive, since I wasn't directly manipulating things currently in the world. Sure, there had been several tweaks to what was going on, and I had added a few things, but I didn't really have sticker shock. The total cost was 173 Reality Points. That wasn't cheap, but I thought it was a bargain considering what I had done.

I pulled up my Scratch Pad and crossed off one task from the list—then immediately added two more. I had a feeling this was going to be a common thread: adding more things than I crossed off.

Scratch Pad - TODO LIST

Further define magical systems

Introduce decomposition, disease, and infection

Dinosaur Island

Create spellcasting magical system

Automate world expansion

Closing that and sweeping my interface aside, I spoke up.

"Orpheus, I'm finished with that task. I'm about to do something directly related to what you asked if you wanted to watch. I think this is the last step before I add intelligence."

Orpheus was awake quickly this time. Still perched on my shoulder, the only way I could really tell was in how she suddenly animated and lifted her head. She tilted it to the side for a long moment and then nodded.

"I see what you've done here. While the exact implementation is, of course, unique – as all of them are – this is a fairly logical progression to solve the problem you've had. This is neither bad nor good, but you expressed interest in knowing my thoughts on what you've done."

"Yeah," I said, still browsing through the interface, "pretty much." I was trying to find a way to have decomposition without bacteria when I paused.

"In my world," I continued, "what I did was basically how people used to think the world worked… although with different elements. In hindsight, I may have just tried too hard not to copy the theories they came up with, and make it my own. We'll see if that was worth the effort or not later."

Orpheus patted my ear with a tiny hand.

"I did tell you to be creative. But if the simple and straightforward solution does what you want, you should still consider it. Remember that what is simple and uncreative in your world may still be rather unique in this universe cluster."

"That's a good point," I admitted. "A little too late now, but even if I may have overcomplicated it, I'm pretty happy with how things worked out here. But now…" I sighed heavily as I morosely flipped through the various menus. "Now I need to make things a little harsher. I don't really look forward to dictating ways that people and animals can die."

I glanced at the High Administrator's tiny form.

"I understand why I have to. If I make it perfect there won't be enough energy to run it and then everything dies anyway. But I don't really have to like it, do I?"

Orpheus actually smiled.

"Not all Administrators have empathy. Often it is a liability. But I will point out again that we seek out variety. You understand the need for what you are doing, and that is good enough. If anything, as long as you can force yourself to make it properly dangerous, that means you will not add pointless cruelty to the system."

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I winced at her. "Is that a common problem?"

She shrugged and shook her head.

"I wouldn't say it's a common problem. But neither is it all that rare."

Another heavy sigh left me and I muttered, "I also don't know if you actually care or not. This whole thing where you are masking your real appearance behind this mental image I have of you makes me doubt everything you say. No offense."

"I am an alien intelligence to you," she pointed out. "I would be surprised if you knew all that I was thinking."

She hesitated, and I recognized the pause this time as the look of her delving into my world's standards. Then she continued.

"By your terms I am indeed very detached, and would often appear emotionless. But as I have said, I am not. My emotions simply work differently than yours. But I understand the concept of empathy, and why you would hesitate to hurt others. It may surprise you, but I share them in my own way. I simply take a larger view."

She gestured around the room.

"You are concerned with the innocents of your universe. I am concerned with the overall health of all the universes. This will naturally make me less concerned over individual lives than you. That very fact makes me better suited to be a High Administrator than you… as you are now."

I wasn't really sure I liked that, so I dropped the topic and just nodded. I needed to focus on my next task anyway… namely, I needed to figure out a way for things to decompose.

This actually wasn't that hard. Despite the lack of bacteria, I'd already made Entropic Mana. For this case, I just made anything that had been alive automatically begin to decay its Vital Mana into Entropic Mana.

My universe still had conservation of energy, which seemed to be something like a common law – one that could only be broken with an input of Reality Points – so the conversion took energy.

Basically, when something died, its Mana would flip from one type to the other, and that conversion process would take time and damage the body in the process.

Simple. Easy. Elegant.

Things could even be preserved, if someone applied Mana to clean out the remaining Vital Mana before it had decayed too far.

Unfortunately, now that I had solved decomposition – even if it had taken me an hour or two of tweaking – I now had to confront the big problem.

I had to design disease.

But here I was, adding this horrible thing.

I think part of me had wanted to skip it. But I knew that if I didn't have something besides predation to kill off excess populations, it would lead to overpopulation, and "survival of the fittest" really wouldn't work.

The only good thing about this was that I had discovered an incredibly useful function… one that I would definitely need to use later.

When I was investigating how to do this, I'd largely been working on the conception of animals, plants, mushrooms – whatever – with physical bodies. But this was my universe. And there was nothing really stopping me from creating a presence that was entirely Mana-based.

It wouldn't operate the same way as animals and plants—my universe still had physics that required something to transmit these things—but I could make a mystical presence.

So that's what I did.

First, I replicated infection.

I didn't want it to be as horrible as it could be back on Earth. But I did make it possible for Entropic Mana to try to penetrate a body if there was an opening for it.

Healthy beings would normally circulate Vital Mana to stop this. But if they let something into their body that had other Mana colors in it – like dirt or tainted substances – it would be harder to fight off. It basically mirrored infection fairly closely, but it would probably be easier to treat and harder for anyone or anything to lose limbs from it.

Diseases were more difficult. I really didn't know how to make a disease. I had the library of diseases from Earth to look at, but all of them acquired their transmission vectors through bacteria, viruses, or other carriers. Poison I managed to add fairly easily, as it already existed, but diseases were another thing entirely.

Here was where that "floating aura" trick came in.

I could define specific Mana configurations that had a detrimental effect on people. I could also define how easily they infected others and by what means they did so.

It wasn't exactly like diseases on Earth, but it served the same purpose: a detrimental effect that was contagious, but usually not fatal unless the victim was already weakened or elderly. At least I hadn't had to model old age and all that sort of thing yet.

And just like diseases on Earth, I made it so that something that was too fatal and spread too quickly would basically lose its food source and die off. Mostly, this was interesting to me because I could specify these weird, abstract, non-living yet replicating things to have a mutation rate.

This, depressingly enough, cost about 62 Reality Points to do, for all of it.

So cheap to do something so terrible.

I sighed as I looked at the results of my work.

Orpheus nodded. "That is an interesting way to encourage evolutionary pressure."

I grimaced, but I knew she was right.

Reluctantly, I tapped my interface…

and unleashed the Horseman of Pestilence upon my new world.

Chapter 18: The Grand Experiment

I crossed one more thing off my to‑do list with the creation of disease and infection. I wasn't proud of it, but I knew a life without that sort of pressure would be very different from what I understood. I still had doubts about it, especially about my implementation. I felt it was fairly clever and not as bad as what humanity had to live with in the early days, but I had a feeling this wasn't my specialty.

I still wasn't sure what I had done in life, but all of the unfamiliar words in the interface that I'd been working with were a big hint that I hadn't worked with disease very much.

I did not immediately turn the Time Dilation back up. I left it at its current state, still moving at a crawl; for every minute I spent tweaking things, seconds passed in the world. I took the opportunity to fiddle with the scripting interface again and crossed something else off my to‑do list.

The script read: if I had positive Reality Points and the cost was less than 250, then expand the universe along the circumference of the torus once the Magicite shell had reached 80% saturation; at the same time, expand the shell at the apparent "cap" ends with semi‑randomized terrain that matched up with the current terrain touching the shell. Continue expansion until the shell was drained to 15% of its capacity.

Scratch Pad - TODO LIST

Further define magical systems

Introduce decomposition, disease, and infection

Dinosaur Island

Create spellcasting magical system

Automate world expansion

With the automatic expansion of the world handled, I found myself right back to staring at the interface and the sluggish, slow‑motion progression of my now populated land. I'd been procrastinating, and I knew it. As much as I tried not to think about it, the earlier screw‑up I'd done had been pretty humbling.

I knew I had to progress. But with the mistake before, it had just been some plants that had died… lots and lots of plants, to be sure, and I felt bad about that. But there's a big difference between failing to get your garden to grow properly and watching a dog die, for example.

And I was managing a whole lot of "dogs."

Well, technically, I wasn't managing any dogs at all. I hadn't brought any in... only wolves. I presumed if humanity, or whatever species I would put there, wanted dogs they would domesticate them like my ancestors did. Maybe that was wishful thinking. Maybe I would have to make some dogs after all. I hadn't gotten to the intelligence phase yet.

I brushed away the thought, because here I was procrastinating again.

I'd considered everything I could think of, and it wasn't like I could do anything more unless I sat around and stared into space. Maybe if I had a partner who was willing to debate me I could think of more things. But Orpheus – while she was becoming a lot more talkative now that I was starting to seed animal life – still didn't seem to want to debate me or push back at anything.

I mentally looked at the Time Dilation control and almost pushed it, but then I had another thought. This time, it wasn't procrastination that brought me up short.

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I'd been wondering how fast I should set the time dilation in order to witness the seasons… and then I remembered that my seasons were still a little primitive.

That gave me something to think about.

I pulled up my interface again, in a different section, and looked at the route I'd set for the sun. I could probably do something about this. While the sun didn't put out nearly as much heat as the one in my own world, it was still the major contributor to the climate of wherever it was passing over.

Thinking about climate made me realize I wanted a little more variation there as well.

The path of the sun was currently a straight line. So I lifted my finger and – much like the curve tool in graphic software – I gently started nudging the path to have variation.

I did it in three dimensions, of course, so it ended up being more like a helix… but not as smooth and regular. That was fine. I didn't want it regular.

The variation wasn't much. I didn't want it to come anywhere close to leaving the vacuum in the middle of the cylinder, and I still needed it to "charge" the stars up. Yet even a small variation should have a pretty big effect on the climate.

Small was, after all, rather relative.

That gave me climate. But for seasons, I needed variation throughout the year.

For that, I added a bit of jitter, for lack of a better term. At times, the curve flattened, making the path more direct. I wasn't sure if this would do what I wanted, but it made sense to me. Hopefully, it wouldn't lead to destruction. But it might lead to some extreme environments.

I was okay with that.

I didn't need everything to be like a biome Earth had.

If a part of my little universe looked like Venus or Mars, that was probably okay.

At last, I couldn't really put it off any longer.

Even though I supposedly had my emotions muted in some way, I still felt nervous trepidation at the idea of setting loose all these creatures I'd personally created, or at least given life to, onto the world.

They might die instantly. And even if they didn't, I'd have to watch them murder one another and become something else over time. For my own sanity, I went in to find the notifications for this section.

I was a little bewildered by all the notifications I could have… and many of them didn't make any sense. Some were greyed out already, but fortunately, the interface quickly sorted them when I concentrated on finding the species extinction ones.

I managed to set it to only notify me if a species went extinct and didn't have any descendant species that could be traced back to it. I then quickly designated a few animals I wanted to stick around in similar forms to what they already were – like the aforementioned wolves – and set their mutation rates much lower.

Hopefully, that would help build a recognizable world.

After all that, I set the time dilation fast enough to watch the seasons go by every few minutes… and settled back in my chair to watch.

To my immense relief, things didn't appear to collapse immediately.

My little moss predators started eating things up pretty quickly, and the vegetation I wanted to spread actually began to spread. Various herbivores came out to nibble on the grass and leaves, and a quick adjustment to the interface let me see how the Mana was flowing and colorizing now that I'd put those rules in.

I knew it would take a little while to actually see results and gauge if it had been fully successful… but thus far, it looked to be working.

I knew, of course, that some areas would suffer due to the new climate changes and the adjustment to the seasons, but I couldn't see a way around that.

WARNING

Species reproduction has failed to create viable births for one season.

The notification that did pop up was sudden and unexpected… and then quickly repeated multiple times.

I quickly slowed the time ratio down again, feeling something resembling panic despite my supposedly muted emotional reactions.

Fortunately, while I had made a mistake, it was actually an easily rectified one. The interface let me go to the site of the notification and see what the inviable birth error was caused by fairly quickly. It hadn't meant season in the sense of weather and climate, it meant season in the sense of reproductive cycle.

Okay… so I had made a mistake, but this one wasn't as dramatic as the last.

It was caused by a Monster Core – and some of the other Mana-related features – not being tied to any inheritable traits. That was easy enough to fix.

I quickly made the adjustment… and, strangely, felt better. Once I'd caught an actual mistake, the fear eased a bit.

I turned the time flow back up again and took a deep breath.

Hopefully, that was the only real mistake I'd made this time.