Chapter 28: Splintering

  I now had a good start for the species.

  After a few hours of thought and running some simple simulations, I took a step back and did a little more work before finalizing anything. In the past, I might have gone ahead and just dropped it in, then tried to fix it later if a problem came up… but I was taking things much more slowly now.

  The thought that Orpheus’s absence was somehow making me more cautious was a little troubling. She’d said she had taken her appearance – something of a glorified sex bomb – from my own soul’s expectations.

  I couldn’t remember my old self, and now that I was dealing with flattened emotions and a lack of hormones, my detached personality wondered what that sort of choice said about who I used to be.

  But was that really my fault?

  Orpheus hadn’t seemed particularly surprised at how quickly I was moving when she’d been here. And while she had rebuffed me whenever I’d – apparently out of habit – flirted with her, she hadn’t seemed shocked that it happened.

  Was that because it was something she didn’t comprehend?

  Or something she expected?

  I’d rushed ahead with her here, maybe because some part of me wanted to show off to the boss. And then she’d sideswiped me with the sudden revelation of my debt and the tithe. Sure, she’d provided some information when I asked… but she hadn’t exactly been helpful.

  She claimed to be my ally, but did she really want me to succeed?

  That thought was unsettling, given that we were dealing with literal universes, not to mention my own continued existence.

  And for that matter, shouldn’t I be more angry with her?

  Reflecting on our interactions, I realized I’d never really felt anger toward her. Annoyance, yes… but not the depth of frustration I probably should have, given all the surprises and her lack of assistance.

  Maybe I should’ve been less welcoming of the little fairy.

  I pushed that thought aside to focus back on my work.

  I could worry about Orpheus – and the whole reason I was here – after I had a net positive income and didn’t have to worry about driving my debt even higher.

  For now, I had an idea… an interesting way to make the elves more populous.

  The problem with the original species I’d designed was that they were too reliant on high-mana areas. I needed to address that somehow, but overall, I was happy with the species as they were.

  Mostly.

  Now that I had an idea, I needed to tweak things to make them a little more interesting. I still couldn’t decide whether my job was to be super-efficient or to make a setting that was interesting for stories.

  There were certainly ways to make it interesting that I wasn’t going to follow… but for now, I set the baseline pack instincts of the species to be a little lower than average, and their tendency toward violence even lower than that. They weren’t the type to run away at the first sign of trouble, but they would still avoid violence when possible.

  Considering I was about to introduce splinter races, I hoped that would avoid the usual problem of racism. If they still had it after the tweaks I’d made… well, that was on them.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Now I was ready to make some splinter species.

  The first one I made was more rugged.

  The original elves were somewhat frail, but this new variant was stronger, firmer, and a little broader in the shoulders – though still slimmer overall compared to a human from my world.

  Their eyes no longer glowed, and their mana conduits were more efficient, if not more powerful. Everything about them was about squeezing every last drop of utility from what mana they could get. They didn’t have a particularly lower potential, but their downside (since I was the one assigning downsides) was a shorter lifespan.

  They still had the same frozen-aging stage, but it lasted from maturity up to about age one-hundred-twenty, and their average lifespan was around one-hundred-fifty.

  Unlike the base species, though, they could not use the memory-sharing technique. A death among them meant the permanent loss of whatever knowledge they had yet to pass on.

  They still carried the biological urge to attempt the sharing, but it had no effect on memory. Instead, it acted as a bit of a throwback to the original species, giving those they shared with a few simple benefits… no new abilities, but something else entirely.

  I called them Perks: small, passive advantages that could be purchased as part of Class advancement, or through this bonding process. They didn’t literally “buy” these perks, but purchase was the best shorthand for what happened in the interface.

  Unlike the others, their pack instincts and tendency toward violence were brought back up to neutral… at least, neutral for this world. I hadn’t dared look at the baseline data for humanity; for all I knew, humans from Earth were ultraviolent compared to the cosmic average.

  And honestly, I didn’t want to know. Even if it might have been the smarter idea.

  I increased their fertility a little, too. It still wasn’t great, but they would spread farther than the original species. Most importantly, their hardier nature made them much better suited to low-mana environments.

  I then went ahead and, since they were originally from the same species, made them inter-fertile with one another.

  Their adaptations were mostly for the amount of mana in the environment, so the child species – the result of any coupling between two elves of any type –would be determined not by the species of the parents, but by the mana concentration the mother had spent most of her pregnancy in.

  If the mother had lived largely in high-mana environments, the original species would be born.

  If low-mana areas were the most common, it would result in the second species.

  And if the mana concentration had fluctuated too much during pregnancy, the result would be the third.

  This last species was probably the most adaptable of the three.

  They still lacked the full memory-sharing ability of the first species… at least, in the same form. Instead, I gave them a rarely occurring ability that could appear as a level-up option and be upgraded. It would let them briefly tap into faint, fragmented memories of their predecessors, but never at will… and certainly not enough to interfere with their own identities.

  These elves were smaller, yet more durable than the others… though that wasn’t what I’d been going for. They were also physically weaker than the second species, with shorter lifespans more in line with humans… around a hundred years on average. However, they remained fit well into their fifties, thanks to a vestigial form of anti-aging similar to what the other two species possessed.

  Their mana conduits were less efficient, and their mana-cores tended to be smaller, but they had one very interesting advantage: during their bonding attempts, they could sometimes share actual abilities rather than simple perks. That made them, in some ways, a throwback to the original pre-sapient species.

  But I liked their advantages… the sense of balance and adaptability they brought.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how all of this would play out on the world, but I wanted some diversity in place before I moved on to any other intelligent species.

  A curious part of me wondered whether their societies would evolve into some kind of caste system, or whether the different subtypes would blend together… or stay isolated from one another. I couldn’t really dictate that behavior – not without knowing more about how biological tendencies translated into social ones – but it did worry me a little.

  I might not have my memories or a full range of emotions anymore, but that didn’t stop me from feeling nervous about the fact that I was playing with the destinies of entire species.

  I wanted to be a good and benevolent creator.

  Yet that was the problem, wasn’t it?

  The universe didn’t want peace.

  It needed conflict to survive.

  The People of Stone

  fascinating, too. Especially when compared to the other platforms(Patreon and ScribbleHub). This is one of the few things I feel comfortable letting my audience decide, even if it may affect things waaay down the line. I have the next arc largely worked out and we’ll start seeing some of the overarching plot hints coming in, soon, so enjoy!

  (POST-DROP EDIT: I originally said that the empathy was lowered in an... attempt to curb racism? I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote that. I’ve changed it to ‘pack instincts’ for now, and if I figure out what I was thinking when I wrote that I will clarify it later. I’m kinda baffled.)