I’d hoped for more generation than what I was getting, but I wasn’t really sure what was normal. Maybe what I was seeing was considered a lot, and it would just take eons to pay off my debt. My quick mental math told me it would take over eighty thousand years of local time to clear it… and that was assuming it maintained the current pace.
Geologically, that wasn’t long, but for a civilization, that was quite some time. Then again, hadn’t humans been in the Stone Age for longer? I didn’t actually know, but it still seemed like a long time to me.
A few thousand years I could stomach, but eighty thousand was an awful long time to sit around watching civilizations grow. I really didn’t want to just take a nap and let all the interesting developments pass me by… especially if they ended up killing one another and hurting my economy.
I paused at that, mentally chiding myself. I had to keep reminding myself that these were people. Sure, my survival was linked to their success, but that shouldn’t be the only reason I cared about them. I should want their civilizations to survive long-term just because they were people. They would be born, live, and die in spans that passed for me like distractions, but that shouldn’t make their lives mean less.
For that matter, I wondered how the soul recycling was going. I’d just set it to the default – running souls back through the system in a reincarnation loop – but I wasn’t really sure how it worked, or how it was more efficient than just generating new souls. If a population could manufacture new souls on its own, what was the point of reincarnation?
I shook those thoughts from my head and first checked on the fungal overmind and the dwarves. I didn’t expect them to be doing anything interesting yet, and I was right. Sure, the dwarves were building a little underground kingdom just like I’d expected them to, but nothing especially notable had happened yet. They hadn’t even run into any of the fungus drones the overmind used. That was good.
I turned my attention to the elves, who should by now have developed something resembling a society. I was right… but the result was a little puzzling.
The high-magic, memory-inheriting version of the elves did have villages, but they were hard to spot. Or rather, they would have been hard to spot if I weren’t literally the god who designed them.
The largest community I found consisted of several pod-like structures woven from the local vegetation. It wasn’t a tree city like I would have expected; instead, they lived mostly in the lower undergrowth. It seemed a little exposed, but when I flipped through various overlays, the mana overlay showed exactly what was going on.
They had worked together as a society to maintain a barrier of Umbral magic. Since Umbral magic concealed and disguised, the result was a magically hidden village… stereotypically elvish, honestly.
What surprised me was that when I focused on the community, an info box popped up, giving me several pieces of information about it. I blinked, but by now I was used to the interface and how it adjusted to my preferences for presenting data.
After a moment of amusement, I looked over the readout. Interesting how it was able to provide aggregate stats like that. Even more interesting was the way it displayed behavioral tendencies.
I’d expected these elves to be a little more reckless, but it seemed their caution was keeping them from generating much energy. I couldn’t blame them; high-magic areas tended to have the most dangerous monsters. That shielding wouldn’t help against any creature that simply wandered too close, it would only keep them from being noticed.
It also had the side effect of keeping the other elves from finding them.
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Speaking of which, I decided to check on the other varieties of elves next. I wondered if they, too, had named themselves as some sort of subspecies. Did they even recognize one another as related? The interface translated their term as elf for me, but if the low-magic variant used a different word, I was curious how it would appear in translation.
It turned out that they did recognize each other as the same species… or at least, I assumed they did, since they used the same word for themselves.
This group was the Calen variant, using their own language. They were still very primitive: stone and wooden tools, spears, and what looked to be a nomadic lifestyle. That puzzled me for a moment before I realized I hadn’t paid as much attention to their original biology as I should have.
I recalled that they’d been based on an actual predator – omnivorous, yes, but not a forager. I’d made these elves from hunters, and now they were following the game. It made sense.
When I looked back at the Aravel elf village, the contrast became clear. The Calen elves formed tight-knit family units that went out in small bands to hunt, then brought their kills back. The Aravel elves, by contrast, had already developed a system: those who hadn’t bred yet stayed safely within the village and used whatever magical abilities they had to support the hunters, who would leave as close to after breeding as possible.
That way, they minimized the loss of knowledge. Since the Calen elves didn’t inherit memories, they lagged behind, while the Aravel elves had simply learned to be very cautious. They probably viewed the Calen elves as children, now that I thought about it.
I wasn’t going to interfere… but it was an interesting development. Actually, I wasn’t even sure I could interfere, at least not easily. I might be able to do something indirect, like nudge them into closer proximity, but altering their biology to encourage mingling would be prohibitively expensive.
It was curious, though, that the Aravel elves apparently hadn’t discovered fire. Their inherited memories should have made such a discovery easy to retain. I was sure they knew about fire, but they didn’t seem to make or use it themselves. Surely they could use magic to create it? I thought.
At that point, I really wished my old self had studied anthropology more.
I couldn’t see any specific reason why they weren’t generating more energy. As far as I could tell, struggle and strife were supposed to drive that process. The Aravel elves might simply have been playing it too safe, which I could understand… but the Calen elves puzzled me. Were they also avoiding risk?
I fumbled with my interface for a while before figuring out how to bring up an overlay of recent energy generation. The Calen elves definitely produced more than the Aravel, but it still wasn’t all that impressive.
It was the Sylen elves who surprised me. They were the ones actually propping up the others – not because they didn’t struggle, but because their kind of struggle was different.
I zoomed in as close as I could and let time play forward at only a slight acceleration to see what was happening. I hadn’t expected it, but the Sylen elves – the ones adapted for chaotic and unpredictable magic – had developed a society almost as complex as the Aravel.
Their shelters were built from living plant matter, shaped with care. Theirs were smaller and less intricate than the Aravel’s, but they also had larger structures that stood out. I could see that these were threaded with heavy concentrations of Cruxis mana and a strange pattern of Flux mana leading outward, while Vital mana filled the interior.
It puzzled me at first… until I kept watching and saw how their culture functioned. Unlike the others, they didn’t just hunt game. They spent much of their time foraging, and for a while I wondered if they had gone fully vegetarian. Yet I saw them eat meat too, so that wasn’t it.
The answer came when I watched them gather for a coordinated hunt against a massive creature that had wandered into their territory. It looked like a cross between a woolly mammoth and an alligator – complete with a trunk that ended in gnashing teeth. Kind of terrifying, really.
The Sylen elves carefully coordinated their attack, wearing the beast down like a siege against a fortress. That’s when I realized why they were generating so much energy.
All of the elves had an inborn sanctity of life, and the Sylen had chosen to express it through ritualized hunts. They only hunted the most dangerous beasts, treating it as a test of worthiness. From what I could tell, they harvested every part of the kill, storing the meat and materials in those smaller buildings.
The mana patterns I’d noticed earlier turned out to be enchantments meant to preserve the food within. Each successful hunt could provide enough to feed them for most of a year.
I wasn’t sure I’d call it an elegant system… but it was certainly a surprise that the Sylen had developed it.
Well, at least they were net positive. Clearly, I needed to find a way to get these elves a little more active… and playing a little less safe.
I was curious why the whole system of incentives hadn’t worked out as intended. Weren’t they supposed to be driven to act, to grow stronger? Were they somehow safely “farming XP”, as the phrase went?
I did a quick scan of the various elven populations, only to discover that most individuals weren’t very high level. They were taking classes – some of them with rather unusual combinations – but that wasn’t the problem. What concerned me was that very few had advanced past level ten. I’d designed the system so that most people should reach at least twenty before dying, and fairly easily at that.
I’d have to think about this more.
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