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.