I was almost ready.
Now that the new changes had been installed, I knew I had a lot more work ahead of me later… but for now, I could leave things be.
I didn’t turn the time dilation back to running the universe fast just yet, though. I still had one more important thing to handle.
Sweeping through the interface, I searched across my little world until I finally found what I was looking for: a large area with a landmass I could cut off and isolate relatively easily. I carved the landmass into three massive islands – and by large, I mean very large. Each one was about the size of Australia.
I had plans for this.
Jumping back into the interface, I returned to Earth creatures, made a few tweaks, and dropped them onto those three islands. I sorted them into the broad eras they were meant to represent: Jurassic, Triassic, and Cretaceous.
That’s right. I finally got my dinosaur island—or in this case, dinosaur islands plural.
I turned their mutation rate way down. I didn’t want them evolving away during the next phase. I double-checked that the climate could support them, made a few tweaks so that it actually would, and spent a few Reality Points adjusting the region. This had the pleasant side effect of making it a very stormy area around the trio of islands, hopefully keeping them even more isolated.
I was only a little disappointed that most of the dinosaurs didn’t actually look like what I’d been taught. My memory had some contradicting information about them anyway. When I thought about dinosaurs, I had big scaly lizards juxtaposed with feathered creatures, but the reality was somewhere in between. And they were a lot more colorful than I’d expected.
I didn’t put all of them there, of course. Those eras covered a massive span of time. But I tried to get some good representation: Ankylosaurus, Velociraptor mongoliensis, Plesiosaur, Iguanodon, and of course, Tyrannosaurus rex.
And now I could finally cross that off the list.
I wasn’t sure how useful it would be, and the whole process had actually cost me 23 Reality Points… which was relatively expensive.
But for some reason, I felt smug and satisfied.
Now that I had that taken care of and no longer hanging over my head, I accelerated time so I could watch a few decades pass over the next couple of hours. I rested my head back again and just watched, panning through the world every now and then to make sure the plants and animals were spreading and migrating… and that the climate wasn’t undergoing some weird collapse.
I did have to spend a few points to bump up the oxygen levels, since I’d originally intended to have the plants do that for me. Otherwise, things went pretty smoothly… at least, as smoothly as prehistoric cutthroat evolution could go.
The monsters seemed to be surviving a little better, adapting somewhat, and becoming pretty powerful. My idea of making it harder for them to survive outside of high?mana areas seemed to be working for now. A few of them would get powerful enough to roam outside, but a single powerful monster could only do so much damage. The animals treated it like a natural disaster and quickly learned to flee. Even the powerful ones needed so much food that they eventually migrated back to the high?mana areas.
That seemed to be working out.
I decided it was time for the real experiment.
“All right, Orpheus. I’m going to take a nap. You did say that I could sleep if I wanted to, didn’t you? I seem to remember something about that.”
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Orpheus flew up and landed on the table, nodding her head. “Yes. You can sleep if you wish to… but be careful. It isn’t the same as organic sleep, and you really should be careful not to leave your universe unattended in these early stages.”
She had a good point. But I kind of needed to if this was going to work.
I nodded to her. “Don’t worry. I’ll set some notifications up, just in case.”
And I did just that.
I turned off most notifications so they wouldn’t wake me up, but specified a few important ones: if the Magicite shell’s integrity was threatened, if the expansion wasn’t working correctly, if too many mass extinctions occurred, and so on.
I didn’t want to wake up to a complete mess that would cost me even more Reality Points to fix. So even though I say I set a few notifications, I was very thorough. It took me another hour or two just to go through the ones I’d marked as necessary, and to make new notifications using the scripting system.
At last, I set one last script to wake me up in eight hours of my time. Then I cranked the time dilation up so that several hundred thousand years would pass. With the compounding effect of the increased mutation rate of most things, that should give me several million years’ worth of evolution in that timeframe.
Then I laid back, closed my eyes, and tried to fall asleep.
I awoke with a start when the loud beep came, and opened my eyes to see the notification that eight hours had passed. I waved it away and sat up immediately, kicking the recliner’s shape back into that of a normal chair. Then I paused.
I wasn’t confused or disoriented. That threw me off more than anything. Sleep had basically been just closing my eyes and then opening them again. There had been no fading away, no half?sleep, and – most importantly – no dreams.
I didn’t get physically fatigued anymore, so I didn’t feel tired or refreshed in any physical sense. Still, I took stock of my thoughts by taking a deep breath and focusing inward.
Although I didn’t feel any different physically, I definitely felt more focused. I’d been up for what must have been several days – maybe even weeks – working on this without any kind of sleep. While I could focus for very long stretches, over time I had simply collected various tangential thoughts and lingering worries that the “sleep” had swept away.
“Well… that was weird,” I muttered. “I guess I won’t be dreaming ever again. I bet even the animals dream.”
I rummaged through my knowledge, but everything I remembered did seem to confirm that animals – at least cats and dogs – did dream.
Orpheus had been still when I woke up, but she suddenly came to life.
“Welcome back,” she said. “It appears your universe has not collapsed, new Administrator. Congratulations.”
She paused, then added, “Dreaming was an unusual effect of your particular planet’s biology in your particular universe. The animals in your new world do not dream. One of the previous Administrators we pulled from your world complained about this as well.”
“I see,” I said, filing that little nugget of info away. “I guess I may have to fix that. But right now… let’s see how my world is doing.”
I loaded up the interface and slowed time down to a one?to?one ratio so I could properly watch what was going on. The results were even better than I'd hoped. It would have taken me far more time to get this sort of thing done, but I also winced when I saw that doing this stunt had drained over a thousand Reality Points.
That made sense. No input from the world, so it was maintenance only.
The universe and the world had both expanded several times during the period of accelerated time. I checked the end?caps quickly to make sure that this expansion hadn’t caused any problems, but it appeared to have gone largely smoothly. In fact, I saw some things there that were fascinating… but weren’t related to the expansion itself.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
My dinosaur islands were largely intact. All three of them, really. So I felt that same satisfaction again. There were some minor differences, of course. I hadn’t completely disabled their mutation, so over millions of years there were bound to be changes. A few species had sadly gone extinct, but I wasn’t surprised by that. Thankfully, I’d thought to put proper vegetation and mammals on the islands as well, so the ecosystem was still relatively balanced.
I moved on to the other species and first checked what had become of my beloved ice serpent.
Surprisingly, they still existed,although they’d developed fins and were slightly smaller. And by slightly, I mean about twenty percent.
That was fine. Whatever worked.
They’d ended up with an ecology that was pretty interesting from what I could see, but I didn’t spend a ton of time watching them.
Numerous other monsters had also developed, branching off from the ones I’d created with simple monster cores. I saw a lot of development in this… and, surprisingly, a large number of herbivorous monsters that simply had strange mana?fueled powers.
On a whim, I pulled up the log of my script and saw a bewildering array of new classifications of abilities, even though they were sharing them across species for similar abilities. It was a surprising variety: hundreds and hundreds of different abilities.
I didn’t relish going through and naming all of them or tagging them with better descriptions, and I wondered if there was some way to automate that. The interface seemed to be pretty complex and capable of using my subconscious and even conscious thoughts, but I wasn’t sure if that extended to automatically naming things and basically operating like a full?fledged artificial intelligence.
I decided not to risk it for now. It’s not like anyone could actually see these but me, and the animals couldn’t really understand them either.
Now I decided to see if there were any interesting developments in the monsters… or in the normal animals.
This was what I had really been worrying about, but I had decided to let the dice fall where they may. With some trepidation, I pulled up the interface’s tool for scanning and started looking over the various creatures that had filled my new world.
And I can happily say… I was pleasantly surprised.
Finished Prototype
marketing talk.
Patreon:
I do have one! It currently gives 3 chapters ahead of Royal Road releases, but I’m expanding that to 5 chapters tonight... and maybe more once my backlog (currently 7–9 chapters ahead) grows further.
first 25 sign-ups get a special reduced-cost tier with the same benefits as the regular one... even after the expansion.
Shoutouts:
These are small cross-promotions between authors: I’ll share an ad for another story, and they’ll share mine. It’s a common way to help readers discover similar stories.
only post shoutouts for fictions think are genuinely interesting for some reason. I won’t do them every update, and I won’t do review swaps; reviews should always be genuine.
EDIT: Added ‘new’ to the talk about dreaming since it was ambiguous and unclear that Orpheus was saying animals in the new world couldn’t dream, and it looked like she was saying animals in the original universe(ours) couldn’t dream. AFAIK animals in our universe dream quite a lot! Sorry for the confusion. Just one word makes all the difference...