Chapter 20: Don't Worry, I Have A System

  These small mistakes were getting annoying. I really wanted to take a break and let the universe run by itself for a while. But first, I had to make sure it would run without everything collapsing.

  I took a heavy breath and let out a sigh before turning and collapsing into the recliner. Propping my feet up, I laid my head back and slowed the time dilation to ten times slower than my own subjective time. If the world's ecosystem hadn’t collapsed yet, I doubted that me fiddling around would make things much worse… but there was no point in taking risks.

  I knew the problem had something to do with the mana conduits, and maybe the monster cores as well. It was a little hard to figure that out just by looking at numbers, but fortunately, I could pull up a current analysis of each creature. This gave me an idea of how they’d evolved, and what they were doing that was messing everything up.

  I phrased that in a way that made it sound simple, but once I started delving in, it actually took several hours before I could even identify the problem.

  “It looks like their attempts to use their mana conduits and other abilities are tearing them apart before they can figure out how to do it properly,” I muttered. “This is a little too technical to be simple genetics. Instincts just aren’t quite refined enough to figure this out before it ends up killing them.”

  Orpheus, who was still sitting atop my head, chimed in. “That’s a common problem when Administrators try to give something special powers. That’s why you really should pre?define the powers and attach them to the creature in a more static fashion.”

  I grunted and looked over the whole situation. Orpheus was right, of course. While the mana conduit and monster core system itself was good for a source of power, they couldn’t really do much with it unless I found ways to focus it, like I had with the ice serpent.

  Even my little pet ice serpent wasn’t quite doing as well as I’d thought. I noticed it had taken to breeding and laying its eggs on islands so that the young would soak up the necessary Cruxis Mana. That was a solution I probably should have thought of, but it was nice to see evolution working to patch those little oversights… just like I’d planned.

  That still left me trying to figure out how to fix the broader problem. The simplest way would be to go through and define how each animal could use its powers. I knew I could probably have them evolve powers past that – there were options for doing that sort of thing in the interface – but boy did that seem like a lengthy, mind?numbing exercise. Even my new sleepless existence, with the ability to zone out for hours at a time, would probably make it unbearable.

  It just seemed like there had to be a more efficient way of doing this.

  And that’s when I realized there was.

  “I think I can solve this,” I said aloud. “It’ll still take a few hours, and I’m not sure if it’ll work… but if it does, I think this will be an interesting addition.”

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  I felt Orpheus shift atop my head, but she didn’t say anything. Small fingers grasped my hair to hold on a little more securely as she settled in. I wondered how she would interpret what I was about to do in her own interface.

  I once again looked into the scripting interface. This was going to be a little tricky… but if I pulled it off, I thought it would be really useful later on.

  After examining the scripting interface, I went back to the various properties of mana conduits and monster cores. Then I installed what were basically limiters. These limiters could be forced through with enough effort, but the basic idea was that it wouldn’t be easy to push mana through at dangerous levels.

  These conduits were already meant to work like a muscle, and I’d already figured out that most of the problems came from various creatures trying to use too much mana to do something… or trying to shove the mana into doing something it really couldn’t. They were basically tearing themselves apart.

  That obviously wasn’t at all what I wanted. I briefly thought it was kind of cool—but then I caught myself, and reminded myself that these were living creatures. Dying. And probably very painfully.

  So I worked on a solution.

  The limiters were just the first part, but they needed a way to push through the limit when they had to. For this, I made it so that the monster core would basically be aware of how much the mana conduits had been built up. That wasn’t enough, though, because they also needed a way to safely use mana if they were going to build their conduits into anything useful.

  And this is where the script came in.

  When a creature managed to force enough mana through its conduits to actually have an effect, this script would pick up on it and identify the result. If it resembled a pre?existing effect, the script would classify it under that same ability.

  If it was entirely new, it would create a new classification. It would then attach that classification’s identifier to the monster core. From that point on, the creature would be able to utilize it freely.

  If enough creatures of the same species managed to create abilities of very similar classes, the script would write those abilities permanently into the monster core’s genetic legacy, allowing the species to access them once the cores and mana conduits had expanded enough to support them.

  The monster cores weren’t sophisticated enough to keep track of an unlimited number of abilities, but as they grew stronger, they could handle more. I’d actually been hoping for this side effect, so I didn’t bother to change it. Instead, I let any attempt to gain a new ability fail if the monster core was already at capacity for what it could learn.

  I didn’t want to leave this just at special abilities, though. I knew mana conduits could also act like enhancement fibers in plants. This was more of a passive effect, but it required a steady, fairly constant flow of the creature’s mana to work.

  A small tweak to the concept of the monster cores, along with some more scripting, let me link this regulated flow into an automated system that could be directed based on what had been most useful. As the monster core’s capacity expanded, it would automatically channel more enhancement.

  This basically meant that as the monsters used their powers more – and refined them – they would grow stronger faster, and so on.

  I’d actually toyed with something like this earlier in my ideas, but discarded it at the time as silly. Now, though, I saw it for the opportunity it was.

  I’m not sure how long it took me to do all this. Probably hours, maybe days, lying there fiddling with the menu. I was so absorbed in the work that when I finally felt more satisfied, Orpheus actually broke me out of my fugue by speaking first instead of waiting to be addressed.

  “I don’t really understand what you just did,” she said. “It looks very complicated, and I’m having trouble reading it. It seems like you made them able to steadily control their growth instead of just relying on mutations.”

  “Something like that,” I replied. “Don’t worry. There’s a method to what I’m doing. You could say I have a system.”

  I checked and rechecked my changes one last time, then applied them and turned the time dilation up one more notch.

  “If this works,” I told Orpheus, “I think you’ll be very surprised once we hit the Fourth Epoch.”