So, my first species was ready… or rather, my first species that used my new system. The dragons didn’t really count. They weren’t there to provide energy; that had just been a happy coincidence born from them sorting through the mess of abilities. My new class-naming situation would also give me a little more time in this high-generation period… but I couldn’t rely on it.
I placed one large population of each elven species in the most suitable environment I could find, then scattered a few smaller groups of each kind in other regions.
Then I reached for the time dilation control—only to pause.
I hadn’t actually looked at how the dragons had been placed when I’d started the Draconic Age, and now I was curious. I couldn’t inspect things as closely as I’d have liked visually, even if I could pull up individual stats, but I could zoom in enough to see whether these beings simply popped into existence or not. They obviously couldn’t start as babies; they’d need to grow before they could do anything.
What I saw was a mix – many children, quite a few adolescents, and even a few adults – and all of them were asleep.
That clarified things, and honestly, it was a relief. I would’ve felt weird just dropping people into the world, watching them blink into existence while others materialized beside them.
But then I wondered: why did the interface choose to do it this way? Was it responding to some subconscious concern of mine? Or was this just standard operating procedure?
And what about species that didn’t sleep—if such existed in other universes? Would they just appear awake?
The more I thought about it, the less sense some parts of this made. But the important thing was… it worked. Maybe I was still too caught up in thinking like a human, trying to explain everything through Earth logic.
Maybe I just needed to go along with the flow.
I didn’t really understand the full mechanics of how all this worked, despite the interface trying its best to explain it to me in terms I could comprehend.
I knew roughly what I wanted to do next, so I turned the time dilation up until time was passing fairly quickly inside my universe.
I planned to finish my next project in a few hours and wanted to see if I could time it so that a few hundred years would pass while I worked. I kept the interface open while I gathered my notes, watching for any warnings or notifications and checking how my elves were doing.
In all honesty, I’d expected some kind of serious problem to crop up… but I was pleasantly surprised to see that, for the most part, the elves were simply spreading. They occasionally ran into one another, and while I couldn’t say every meeting was peaceful, it didn’t look like anyone was launching genocidal campaigns.
I resisted the urge to jump in and adjust anything. There appeared to be genuine, reasonable friction, and I really shouldn’t micromanage an entire civilization. I’d created them, sure, but the whole point was free will.
Maybe they’d surprise me.
Satisfied, I turned back to my “workshop” and began focusing on the dwarves. My elves had turned out pretty nonstandard, and my dwarves were likely to be just as strange. I’d given this a lot of thought.
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Being short, stocky humans who lived underground wasn’t what I wanted.
So yes, I made them short, and yes, I made them stocky… and I gave them an enhanced bias toward creation at the biological level.
But this would also be a major experiment, because in this case, the term “biologically” was going to be a pretty loose definition.
Unlike the elves, who I had simply set loose to wander Upside’s various continents, I had a very specific starting location in mind for the dwarves.
But first, I needed to finish designing them.
Much like the elves, I gave them the ability to choose classes and advance through the system. However, I heavily restricted their mana conduits and gave them only a very small mana-core.
The dwarves would rely largely on their innate abilities, not on creating mages—though I made sure to include some variation. Roughly the ninety-fifth percentile of dwarves would have very little mana, but a rare few would possess real potential. At the upper end, they could actually become quite powerful if they chose to pursue that path.
I wondered if, culturally, they might develop some sort of dislike for magic. If so, that would be a waste of potential… but maybe they wouldn’t. I hadn’t built any aversion to magic into their biology, and in fact, their natural abilities were already supernatural.
I supposes that made them… supernatural abilities, huh?
They were heavily Cruxis-based, drawing strongly on that essence.
They also weren’t created in the typical way.
All of them had beards – and they would regrow if cut – but even though they were flesh and blood, that flesh and blood didn’t come from any normal process. Even for this world.
For one thing, I made them all male.
Or, more accurately, ungendered.
I kept thinking of them as male because of the beards, but in truth, they simply didn’t have a sex at all. Dwarves would reproduce only when they found a suitable partner. Two of them could blend their essences to empower a stone and make a third.
The purity of the stone would determine how successful the transition was… and the exact details of the child’s appearance and abilities would be influenced not only by the two contributing parents but also by the type of stone they were made from.
I wanted my dwarves to be the People of the Stone, and I was going to make that literal.
When I started, I wasn’t even sure if this would count as an intelligent species… but apparently, my interface had no problem with it. That made me wonder if I really needed to make flesh-and-blood creatures at all. That, in turn, gave me an idea for another species, one I probably needed to make, but that could wait.
For now, I had to finish the dwarves.
I gave them a good lifespan – about 250 years. But they wouldn’t die immediately. Instead, they would slowly begin to calcify, returning to the stone they had once been. Once that process began, they would have another ten to twenty years at most before they fully solidified, becoming inert statues.
I made one final adjustment to ensure that these calcified dwarves could not be used as the basis for new dwarves. Technically, it would have been a new soul, and thus a new person, but the thought of it made something deep inside me recoil. Some part of me – some lingering fragment of my humanity – found the idea wrong.
I held onto that feeling. I wasn’t sure if being human was a good thing, but some part of me wanted to preserve it, even in small pieces like this.
I spent a negligible amount of Reality Points digging out tunnels in the barrier mountains between Upside and Downside, angling the openings toward Upside. It was plausible that, eventually, the dwarves could dig deep enough to break through to Downside… but hopefully, by then, other means of crossing between the two halves of the world would exist.
If not, well… maybe the dwarves would be my explorers. That really wasn’t my business, was it?
I placed a starting population in several caverns to get things going, and they immediately began working – industrious as expected, shaping their new home from the stone itself.
I’d left the time dilation on, of course, and by now several centuries had passed. I turned my attention back to the elves, just to make sure nothing strange had happened during that time. I caught a glimpse of small villages forming, the beginnings of early civilization – when a notification popped up.
And it was one that changed everything.
Upside Down