I let time continue at an accelerated pace for a while. It wasn’t as fast as before – only weeks going by per hour of my time – but compared to how quickly I’d been running things earlier, that was practically a crawl. I didn’t want to slow things down too much in case something interesting popped up and fixed the problem on its own.
In the meantime, I shrank the interface down to a quarter of my vision and collapsed back into my faithful, comfortable recliner. Propping my feet up, I leaned back and laced my fingers together, staring up at the featureless white ceiling.
What was going wrong?
I could clearly see that the cultures were developing. I’d only checked the three largest settlements, and I was sure the smaller ones were doing things differently, but the lack of energy production was strange.
I’d been certain I’d built in enough struggle to keep them motivated. Had I made my elves too powerful?
I glanced at the readout again, then shook my head. I was generating energy, despite the small population. I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but given that I was still basically at the dawn of civilization, the fact that I was already getting positive income was probably good.
Maybe I just had higher expectations than were reasonable.
Except… I’d seen their levels. They were pretty bad. A few individuals had reached higher levels, but most of them hadn’t been progressing at all.
I could sort through everything and debug it manually, but that would be a long, monotonous process. That was a last resort. I needed to look at the big picture—to see the pattern.
What they were doing seemed perfectly reasonable for a world without a system. But I had built a system… one specifically designed to push them to act, to create, to grow.
Did they not have the same ambition humans did? To see their numbers and accomplishments increase?
It was puzzling, and it bothered me, but I knew that I couldn’t just sit here and stare at the problem to solve it.
I gave my mind a short break by pulling up the soul interface to see how it worked a little more clearly. It was extremely complicated, but it boiled down to a fairly simple system.
This was why maintenance costs kept going up… because as a species grew, it needed to manufacture more souls. Now it made sense why the reincarnation system was there. Reincarnating a soul was much, much cheaper than generating a new one.
Of course, even generating a new one was a tiny individual cost in Reality Points, but when a species started growing exponentially into the millions and billions, it could easily add up. Maybe that was part of why my old universe was said to be negative… or maybe something else had been going on. I couldn’t know without looking, and even then, I might not understand it.
I was once again reminded how little I really knew about how the system worked. That creeping feeling that I’d been set up to fail came back. I didn’t want to believe it.
While Orpheus hadn’t been particularly useful, she had occasionally tried to warn me, or even made suggestions when coaxed into it. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t been set up. It didn’t make sense why they would want to do that, though.
But now that I was alone, my thoughts started drifting toward it. In fact, I realized right then that my thoughts were drifting too much. While this was important, it wasn’t the immediate problem.
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Was it rapid expansion, maybe? Manufacturing lots and lots of new souls? But no, that didn’t make sense either, because it still didn’t explain the low level problem. For some reason, they just didn’t want to increase their levels.
Did it have something to do with their stunted growth in other areas? I was pretty sure that fire would be an early discovery. The knowledge I’d kept from my old world didn’t include much about ancient humanity, but I was reasonably certain that fire was one of the earliest discoveries… certainly before the wheel.
If they didn’t discover fire, how would they handle metals?
I took a brief moment to check on the dwarves, because that reminded me of them. From the look of things, they didn’t have fire either, but they were still chiseling away at their stone domain. The elves had a serious head start on my dwarves, so it made sense that the underground kingdom was still getting settled.
I chided myself for getting distracted again and shook my head. I’d been so sure this system idea would work that I’d put a lot of effort into it, and now – even with my emotions dulled – I was probably getting too invested in the whole system idea.
I still thought it had potential, but maybe it wasn’t the incredibly intelligent design I’d imagined. Maybe it wouldn’t boost my production as much as I’d intended. It was too integrated into the world to yank out now, but I didn’t think it was hurting anything either.
So maybe I’d just have to figure out how to do this the so-called “normal” way.
It was then that I realized I was second-guessing myself… and that I just hadn’t given anyone enough time. That thought occurred to me just as I noticed the notification that popped up.
I paused as I considered the notification. I hadn’t forgotten about writing when I designed the system. Despite the idea of it operating much like my interface now – presenting letters and numbers to represent things – I knew that some people would simply be illiterate.
The system would attempt to convey meaning without letters, although the nuanced descriptions that my dragons had developed wouldn’t be available until writing existed. I had thought that would be enough, but maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe someone who could read needed to explain the information others were getting.
It was too early to tell, of course. I wouldn’t actually get an update on the amount of energy people were generating until the next cycle looped over, and at my current rate that would take several hours. I could have just sped up the time dilation, but instead, I slowed it down to something closer to one-to-one, then used the interface to find who was starting to use symbols.
That surprised me, because I had expected the memory-inheriting elves – the Aravel – to be the ones who developed technology quickly. Yet it was a Calen elf village that had invented this.
I sped time up again, just enough to watch them move through their day, and realized that the hunters were using marks to warn of dangerous areas or regions they had already hunted out.
In hindsight, it made perfect sense. If you inherited all memories, you wouldn’t need to write things down as much. Writing would still be useful for the Aravel elves for things like this – marks to warn others of danger and so on – but the Calen elves had found an immediate, practical use for it.
I sped up time just a little so the weeks flew by again. I kept a close eye on the small village that had developed writing, and I was pleased to see that the practice was spreading.
I was even more pleased to see that it first spread to a Sylen settlement nearby. I hadn’t really been able to tell if the various elf types were interacting peacefully with one another, but it looked like they at least weren’t at war. They didn’t seem to want to intermingle much, but from what I could tell, they definitely had a live-and-let-live philosophy… and perhaps were even trading.
I couldn’t tell from my high-up Administrator view whether the symbols had spread intentionally, as a way to help the Sylen tribe, or if it had been incidental. But the important thing was that there were now two semi-nomadic groups spreading the knowledge.
Bumping up the time dilation again so that a couple of years passed, I dialed it back down to see that the concept was spreading rapidly. I was also pretty sure this would give me a nice energy boost once the cycle came around.
I still had to consider what to do about the whole belief system. Did I even want actual gods running things? I’d already delegated a lot to the dragons, so maybe I was being hypocritical about the idea of delegation.
Just as I slowed down time again to look at more details, I got a notification I hadn’t realized I’d been waiting for.
Well. That was interesting.
Min/Max