Chapter 31: Guardians of the End

  It was time to move to the other half of my world, and finally deal with intelligence there.

  I gnced at my Reality Points and frowned.

  REALITY POINTS3973.53Gross Generation+8.355/cycleUniverse Maintenance-0.177/cycleCluster Tithe-4.089/cycleDebt Garnish-2.453/cycleNet Income+1.636/cycleThose numbers were… not nearly what I’d expected. I wasn’t too worried yet; it was still early, and I was technically in the positive. But just in case, I slowed the time dition down a fair bit. Time in my new universe still moved faster than here, but now only a few years would pass while I handled things on Downside.

  I was tempted to check what was going on, to diagnose the problem, but I knew that if I dove into fixing it now, it would take even longer before I could focus on the other half of the world. It wasn’t critical, but I really wanted another culture to start developing right away… one that could grow in isotion from the first.

  I still had a good buffer of Reality Points. In fact, I didn’t think my performance had been that exempry, so the surplus confused me a little. I should have noticed it earlier… it didn’t make sense that so many Administrators failed when there was such a seemingly generous cushion.

  Maybe most of them made some fatal mistake right out of the gate. Or failed to get started correctly. Or just spent too much in the early stages. There were a lot of tempting options for expansion and universe tweaks, and those could add up fast. According to Orpheus, my universe had a retively low maintenance cost. So skipping ahead a few million years could easily drain the entire bank account of someone running a less efficient setup.

  Still… I bet a lot of those failures were due to that sudden debt. I couldn’t worry about that right now, though. The whole reason I was working on this was to fix that exact problem.

  To do that, I needed more intelligent species.

  The elves and dwarves were a good start, but they didn’t have the capability to reach this section… at least, not yet. Maybe they could scale the mountains someday, especially if the dwarves tunneled deep enough. But the nd near the barrier mountains on Downside was far more hostile than its reflection on Upside.

  It was a votile mana region, for one thing. Unstable, intense, constantly shifting. Extreme conditions, frequent volcanic activity, too many conflicting nodes of power tangled together. The monsters in the region were tough and violent, too. They had to be, with the cutthroat competition.

  I turned my attention away from the barrier mountains since it looked like they wouldn’t be a serious problem for cross-contamination anytime soon. In fact, I skipped over most of Downside entirely and went straight to the endcap – the pce where the sun finally sank into the Magicite shell.

  The cap, of course, had plenty of mountains and pins of its own… grassnds and stony fields that stretched right up to the edge of the atmosphere. The transition from breathable air to vacuum was far more abrupt than it ever was on Earth, leaving the portion exposed to vacuum as mostly barren rock.

  Beneath it y the solid Magicite shell… the literal foundation of the world.

  I didn’t need to worry about anyone digging too far down and breaching it. The earth yer was kilometers thick, and even if someone somehow managed to dig that deep using magic or some other means, the raw Pure mana radiating from the Magicite would kill any living thing that approached. Even artificial constructs would likely break down long before reaching that depth.

  So, no… breaches weren’t something I’d need to worry about until civilization was well advanced.

  Where it was now? No chance.

  Speaking of civilization, though…

  It was time to stop procrastinating and build the minor race of Downside.

  I called it a “minor” race because I didn’t expect it to dominate the region like the others I had pnned. I just wanted to get it out of the way before tackling my final intelligent species of this session… because that one was going to be a little complicated.

  I could create a new species directly from scratch, but I felt it was best to modify something that already existed. That’s what I’d done with the elves, and while the dwarves had been made from scratch, I’d had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted with them, and they were obviously magical creatures.

  Here, I already had something to work with anyway.

  The way the endcap met the side walls of the world led to a bit of weirdness at the edges. Since I’d set the gravity vector to be parallel to the main mass, what this meant was that gravity pulled down toward the endcap but also pulled down toward the wall… making the edge where the two met have a blended gravity vector effect which, to put it simply, made it rounded like a bowl.

  The point where these two gravity vectors converged led to some strange effects on anything that grew there, and some of the local creatures had learned to exploit that, using the gravity line itself as a sort of built-in trap to confuse wandering prey.

  Life had evolved in slightly different directions from Earth, even though I’d based much of it on Earth species. That was much more evident here in Downside, where a number of insect species – actually, multiple species – had grown far rger than they ever could on Earth.

  The square-cube w that prevented such massive sizes back on Earth was still in effect here, but various mana-based adaptations could sidestep and bend that rule, even if they couldn’t eliminate it completely.

  In short, the upper size limit of insects capable of using mana was far greater than those of Earth, though still capped.

  The curious thing was how these various species of insect had learned to cooperate with one another, after a fashion. They had queens of one species that produced drones of a simir species, sort of like ants. Rather than having specialized soldiers and workers from the same species bred for different roles, they’d just entered into a symbiotic retionship with other insects that could communicate with the queens.

  While I was by now certain that my original self back on Earth had not been a biologist or insect lover, I still found the whole thing fascinating. It was also quite useful, as I could uplift all of them… give them more maniputors and increased intelligence.

  I was surprised to see that even the drones had some level of individuality after that, without me even trying to design it in. They listened to the queen, but they actually had their own free will, if somewhat stunted. That wasn’t what I had expected… but I already had one sort of hive mind in my new world, so I set my expectations aside and welcomed the unexpected development.

  Of course, when doing this, I gave them the typical set I made for intelligent species in my world… mana control, mana cores, and so on.

  The divergent species were pretty interesting. One was vaguely ant-like. Another was some sort of winged creature – sort of like a wasp, but filled with less hate. A third was a bit like a centipede, and the final one was basically a giant worm.

  I actually ended up not uplifting that st one, because there wasn’t much to work with. I could have done it, but when I started pnning it out, I realized it would take so much effort that it might be better to just leave them as they were… something the others didn’t have to argue with to get their jobs done.

  There were several other species that also worked within this strange communal environment, but they were smaller. If I uplifted them to rger, more human-like forms, they would just end up being too simir to one of the others, and not as good at their specialized roles. This whole hive system thrived on specialization, so I probably shouldn’t interfere with that too much.

  All these changes meant they would also have csses, of course, but I wasn’t too worried about Upside learning about them early. The whole reason I’d made the moon core divided in half was so that the dragons of Upside and Downside didn’t communicate. The dragons of Downside – kind of furry lizards, for ck of a better description – had their own setup for handling system abilities and csses. If an ability originated in Downside, it was handled by the Downside dragons.

  It had taken some effort to set that up. By default, the system wanted to make identical abilities share the same reference data, but I’d managed to implement something like aliases, so that an ability could exist globally but have separate names and descriptions depending on which side it was found on.

  At least… I think I got all that right.

  I realized I was drifting a bit… mostly because I was already finished.

  That had gone easier than I expected, despite the strangeness of the civilization I’d just jumpstarted. I rechecked everything one more time but didn’t see any obvious problems. Then I spent another thirty or so Reality Points, painting in the new species. They’d be a good barrier to people trying to reach ‘the end of the world’ or something.

  Now it was time for my magnum opus.