Chapter 22: Finished Prototype

  The first thing I did was look for any creatures that had monster cores. I wanted to see how the monsters were faring, and whether they’d taken over the world or not.

  The results were… a little complicated.

  What I did find was that the various creatures with monster cores had, in fact, diversified quite a bit. This included developments I hadn’t really anticipated.

  When I took a closer look using my scrying tool, for example, I found that the ice serpent had developed a pattern of periodic hibernation. Their nesting grounds were often outside high?mana zones, and this hibernation behavior helped them survive the drop in energy levels. This turned out to be an evolved trait, and one that quite a few of the more powerful creatures had ended up adopting.

  The various adaptations were impressive all around.

  My ice serpents may have fared well… but my stealth hunters and the stealth plants ended up in a very different situation. I had seeded them throughout the entire world, which meant the two halves had developed very differently.

  For now, I decided to arbitrarily name the side of the world where the sun emerged as Upside, and the side where it vanished as Downside.

  Upside had developed a fairly diverse spread of wildlife and plant life. My stealth plants had gone extinct there, but the stealth hunters were thriving. Interestingly, they had become more like pack animals than I’d expected. In their original template, I’d designated them as solitary hunters. Yet in Upside, they had started banding together.

  It took me a moment to figure out why… until I spotted their primary prey. It was an enormous moose?like creature. It also had a monster core, and used Cruxis Mana to reinforce its hide as a defensive measure.

  That was pretty interesting, especially since my stealth hunters couldn’t really use Cruxis Mana themselves. So the entire reason they hunted this thing was a combination of meat… and what they could find once they broke through that reinforced hide.

  What really astounded me, though, was how the normal animals had adapted.

  I’d been worried the magical creatures would overwhelm them. I’d even put in safeguards to help prevent that. But those safeguards hadn’t worked quite the way I’d anticipated.

  Instead, almost the entire animal kingdom had developed rudimentary mana conduits of their own. These were almost identical to the ones I’d designed for monsters, but I had explicitly forbidden non?monsters from developing a monster core. So the appearance of mana conduits in baseline animals was puzzling… until I took a much closer look.

  The advantages of having a monster core were just too great, so the normal animals had created something else – something like a stunted monster core.

  It wasn’t nearly as flexible when it came to creating or learning abilities. Instead, it would gradually develop legacy abilities that every creature of that type could unlock over time. They couldn’t create new abilities on their own, unlike monsters, but this system did give them the ability to limit and incrementally unlock their mana conduits.

  That hadn’t been expected at all. But it only took me a few moments of thought to realize… this was probably better than what I’d originally designed. There was no reason not to keep it.

  What really amused me was that the mundane animals of Downside had developed a similar system.

  The stunted cores of Downside were slightly different in location and operation, so I spent a couple of Reality Points to go in and standardize the whole mess of them. It wouldn’t change the current animals, but all their progeny would now have very similar cores across both halves.

  I didn’t need to do this. After all, divergent evolution was kind of the point of having a bifurcated world. But I figured it was probably a good idea to keep the mundane animals from diverging too much, or I could end up with some real problems later on.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  Downside’s really interesting part was that its divergent evolution had led to a much more wild situation. My stealth plants still existed here, although they’d evolved quite a bit and diversified into an entire class of plant. Stealth hunters were also far more common in Downside.

  I saw a lot of interesting things there that I wanted to keep track of.

  I’d put my dinosaur islands in Downside, which meant my dinosaurs – ironically – were one of the few creature groups in the world that didn’t have some means of processing mana. They’d been created on my whim, though, so I wasn’t in a hurry to make any major changes there.

  The creatures of Downside were also far more violent and predatory. The ecology there had somehow shifted to become more mana-heavy, which made it turbulent in terms of magical energy. Unsurprisingly, monsters were more common and more deeply integrated into the ecosystem.

  I even saw an aerial monster that appeared not to have legs… apparently spending its entire life cycle in flight. I wasn’t sure how viable that would be long-term, but I didn’t have a reason to stop it from running its course.

  I noted several interesting species on both sides.

  Both Upside and Downside had vaguely similar creatures that looked like they had evolved from lizards – though they had some distinct differences – and I put tabs on them for a future step or two.

  But the ones on Downside that really got my attention were what appeared to be a variation of giant insects. On the bottom cap of Downside – where the sun sank into the base – an entire collection of mana-reinforced insects had come to dominate the region, making it hostile to most of the rest of the life.

  On the rest of Downside, the land portion, I found a peculiar species. Or rather, a family of species, to be more technically correct. This sort of creature had spread throughout most of the land on Downside, though I couldn't seem to find an equivalent in the water. Very curious, that.

  They had developed an interesting organ alongside their monster core. It let them take on attributes of what they ate… under certain conditions.

  It was a fascinating evolution. And it gave me some very interesting ideas for what I might do with it.

  Now that I’d taken a look across the flora and fauna of my world, I realized the plants hadn’t evolved quite as much as the animals, but many of them had strange abilities as well.

  One of the stealth plants I’d made now bore what basically amounted to magical fruit. I suspected that any intelligent species that came along would start cultivating it and further enhancing its magical abilities.

  But before I got to intelligent species, I really had to hash something out.

  “Orpheus,” I said suddenly, after hours of silence just looking across the world. “You said that soul energy was largely created by intelligent beings making decisions, right?”

  Orpheus flipped over and stood on my shoulder with one hand, leaning on my head.

  “That’s correct,” she answered. “Important decisions and actions taken by intelligent beings are the main source of soul energy.”

  I frowned and examined my interface again. “So are you saying only intelligent beings have souls? I’m asking because I’m looking at these animals and they seem to have something resembling souls.”

  Orpheus shook her head. “No, I’m not saying that. You are correct that animals – and even plants, to some degree – have what you would term a soul. What they do not have is the self?awareness necessary to make significant decisions."

  She made a small sweeping gesture with one hand. “Animals can make decisions, and those decisions can be important at times, but their general lack of abstract thought and self?awareness makes the energy they generate inferior to that of an intelligent being.”

  She pointed forward – evidently trying to point at my interface. Since she couldn’t actually see the interface, she probably didn’t realize she was pointing at a colon between a label and a number. Still, I got what she meant.

  “Whatever you’re seeing here,” she said – unaware she wasn’t really pointing at anything – “will generate some energy. It’s just usually not significant enough to matter.

  “This generated energy is automatically put back into your system, and the larger cluster of universes does not take any portion of it. We’ve never seen non?intelligent life generate more energy than it takes to keep the system running with them present. From what I can see, yours is no different.”

  I frowned, then nibbled my bottom lip and nodded. “I see,” I eventually answered. “But they do have souls. That’s… sort of important for my next part.”

  Orpheus gave me a curious look and then nodded. “You’ve done some interesting and novel things… and a few that didn’t make sense to me. So far you’ve made a reasonably viable world with a few quirks, which is exactly what we like to see. You aren’t over?performing, but even with the mistakes you’ve made and the numerous corrections you’ve had to make, you’re on track to being able to create a viable universe.”

  I glanced at her. “Do Administrators not normally make corrections?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes. Many just use either an evolutionary approach or simply outright design the world’s inhabitants. You aren’t the first to use a hybrid approach like this, but it’s relatively rare in comparison.”

  I chuckled. “Well, I have a feeling what I’m about to do is going to be a lot more rare.” I clapped my hands together and rubbed them, staring down at my interface.

  “Now you’re going to have to trust me,” I said, “because I can bet you’ve never seen someone make their first intelligent species like this and walk away happy with it.”

  The Children of the Moon