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Neophyte World Builder: Chapter 21
🕑 Added 2025-10-06 16:12:01 +0000 UTCChapter 21: The Diversity of Life
I was almost ready.
Now that the new changes had been installed, I knew I had a lot more work ahead of me later⊠but for now, I could leave things be.
I didnât turn the time dilation back to running the universe fast just yet, though. I still had one more important thing to handle.
Sweeping through the interface, I searched across my little world until I finally found what I was looking for: a large area with a landmass I could cut off and isolate relatively easily. I carved the landmass into three massive islands â and by large, I mean very large. Each one was about the size of Australia.
I had plans for this.
Jumping back into the interface, I returned to Earth creatures, made a few tweaks, and dropped them onto those three islands. I sorted them into the broad eras they were meant to represent: Jurassic, Triassic, and Cretaceous.
Thatâs right. I finally got my dinosaur islandâor in this case, dinosaur islands plural.
I turned their mutation rate way down. I didnât want them evolving away during the next phase. I double-checked that the climate could support them, made a few tweaks so that it actually would, and spent a few Reality Points adjusting the region. This had the pleasant side effect of making it a very stormy area around the trio of islands, hopefully keeping them even more isolated.
I was only a little disappointed that most of the dinosaurs didnât actually look like what Iâd been taught. My memory had some contradicting information about them anyway. When I thought about dinosaurs, I had big scaly lizards juxtaposed with feathered creatures, but the reality was somewhere in between. And they were a lot more colorful than Iâd expected.
I didnât put all of them there, of course. Those eras covered a massive span of time. But I tried to get some good representation: Ankylosaurus, Velociraptor mongoliensis, Plesiosaur, Iguanodon, and of course, Tyrannosaurus rex.
And now I could finally cross that off the list.
I wasnât sure how useful it would be, and the whole process had actually cost me 23 Reality Points⊠which was relatively expensive.
But for some reason, I felt smug and satisfied.
SCRATCH PAD - TODO LISTFurther define magical systems Introduce decomposition, disease, and infection Dinosaur Island Create spellcasting magical system Automate world expansion
Now that I had that taken care of and no longer hanging over my head, I accelerated time so I could watch a few decades pass over the next couple of hours. I rested my head back again and just watched, panning through the world every now and then to make sure the plants and animals were spreading and migrating⊠and that the climate wasnât undergoing some weird collapse.
I did have to spend a few points to bump up the oxygen levels, since Iâd originally intended to have the plants do that for me. Otherwise, things went pretty smoothly⊠at least, as smoothly as prehistoric cutthroat evolution could go.
The monsters seemed to be surviving a little better, adapting somewhat, and becoming pretty powerful. My idea of making it harder for them to survive outside of highâmana areas seemed to be working for now. A few of them would get powerful enough to roam outside, but a single powerful monster could only do so much damage. The animals treated it like a natural disaster and quickly learned to flee. Even the powerful ones needed so much food that they eventually migrated back to the highâmana areas.
That seemed to be working out.
I decided it was time for the real experiment.
âAll right, Orpheus. Iâm going to take a nap. You did say that I could sleep if I wanted to, didnât you? I seem to remember something about that.â
Orpheus flew up and landed on the table, nodding her head. âYes. You can sleep if you wish to⊠but be careful. It isnât the same as organic sleep, and you really should be careful not to leave your universe unattended in these early stages.â
She had a good point. But I kind of needed to if this was going to work.
I nodded to her. âDonât worry. Iâll set some notifications up, just in case.â
And I did just that.
I turned off most notifications so they wouldnât wake me up, but specified a few important ones: if the Magicite shellâs integrity was threatened, if the expansion wasnât working correctly, if too many mass extinctions occurred, and so on.
I didnât want to wake up to a complete mess that would cost me even more Reality Points to fix. So even though I say I set a few notifications, I was very thorough. It took me another hour or two just to go through the ones Iâd marked as necessary, and to make new notifications using the scripting system.
At last, I set one last script to wake me up in eight hours of my time. Then I cranked the time dilation up so that several hundred thousand years would pass. With the compounding effect of the increased mutation rate of most things, that should give me several million yearsâ worth of evolution in that timeframe.
Then I laid back, closed my eyes, and tried to fall asleep.
I awoke with a start when the loud beep came, and opened my eyes to see the notification that eight hours had passed. I waved it away and sat up immediately, kicking the reclinerâs shape back into that of a normal chair. Then I paused.
I wasnât confused or disoriented. That threw me off more than anything. Sleep had basically been just closing my eyes and then opening them again. There had been no fading away, no halfâsleep, and â most importantly â no dreams.
I didnât get physically fatigued anymore, so I didnât feel tired or refreshed in any physical sense. Still, I took stock of my thoughts by taking a deep breath and focusing inward.
Although I didnât feel any different physically, I definitely felt more focused. Iâd been up for what must have been several days â maybe even weeks â working on this without any kind of sleep. While I could focus for very long stretches, over time I had simply collected various tangential thoughts and lingering worries that the âsleepâ had swept away.
âWell⊠that was weird,â I muttered. âI guess I wonât be dreaming ever again. I bet even the animals dream.â
I rummaged through my knowledge, but everything I remembered did seem to confirm that animals â at least cats and dogs â did dream.
Orpheus had been still when I woke up, but she suddenly came to life.
âWelcome back,â she said. âIt appears your universe has not collapsed, new Administrator. Congratulations.â
She paused, then added, âDreaming was an unusual effect of your particular planetâs biology in your particular universe. The animals in your world do not dream. One of the previous Administrators we pulled from your world complained about this as well.â
âI see,â I said, filing that little nugget of info away. âI guess I may have to fix that. But right now⊠letâs see how my world is doing.â
I loaded up the interface and slowed time down to a oneâtoâone ratio so I could properly watch what was going on. The results were even better than I'd hoped. It would have taken me far more time to get this sort of thing done, but I also winced when I saw that doing this stunt had drained over a thousand Reality Points.
That made sense. No input from the world, so it was maintenance only.
The universe and the world had both expanded several times during the period of accelerated time. I checked the endâcaps quickly to make sure that this expansion hadnât caused any problems, but it appeared to have gone largely smoothly. In fact, I saw some things there that were fascinating⊠but werenât related to the expansion itself.
But Iâm getting ahead of myself.
My dinosaur islands were largely intact. All three of them, really. So I felt that same satisfaction again. There were some minor differences, of course. I hadnât completely disabled their mutation, so over millions of years there were bound to be changes. A few species had sadly gone extinct, but I wasnât surprised by that. Thankfully, Iâd thought to put proper vegetation and mammals on the islands as well, so the ecosystem was still relatively balanced.
I moved on to the other species and first checked what had become of my beloved ice serpent.
Surprisingly, they still existed,although theyâd developed fins and were slightly smaller. And by slightly, I mean about twenty percent.
That was fine. Whatever worked.
Theyâd ended up with an ecology that was pretty interesting from what I could see, but I didnât spend a ton of time watching them.
Numerous other monsters had also developed, branching off from the ones Iâd created with simple monster cores. I saw a lot of development in this⊠and, surprisingly, a large number of herbivorous monsters that simply had strange manaâfueled powers.
On a whim, I pulled up the log of my script and saw a bewildering array of new classifications of abilities, even though they were sharing them across species for similar abilities. It was a surprising variety: hundreds and hundreds of different abilities.
I didnât relish going through and naming all of them or tagging them with better descriptions, and I wondered if there was some way to automate that. The interface seemed to be pretty complex and capable of using my subconscious and even conscious thoughts, but I wasnât sure if that extended to automatically naming things and basically operating like a fullâfledged artificial intelligence.
I decided not to risk it for now. Itâs not like anyone could actually see these but me, and the animals couldnât really understand them either.
Now I decided to see if there were any interesting developments in the monsters⊠or in the normal animals.
This was what I had really been worrying about, but I had decided to let the dice fall where they may. With some trepidation, I pulled up the interfaceâs tool for scanning and started looking over the various creatures that had filled my new world.
And I can happily say⊠I was pleasantly surprised.
