The Producer
The life form that must be created first when constructing an ecosystem is obvious.
It is the producer. A creature that generates its own energy. On Earth, the history of producers began when organisms known as cyanobacteria first started photosynthesis.
Flash!
The first life form probably wasn’t created in such a sacred burst of light. In fact, the very first life form on Earth wasn’t even a producer at all, surprisingly.
Regardless, I created the organism at the very bottom of the food pyramid—the foundation of the entire ecosystem. A soft, squishy little creature.
You have created a new life form! What will you name it?
“Nectar Jelly.”
[Nectar Jelly] has been created.
You may freely assign any trait you wish to your first life form.
“Vigorous Metabolism.”
Vigorous Metabolism: The life form’s biological activity accelerates. Energy consumption will rise.
Vigorous metabolism. With the Nectar Well providing an endless supply of energy, this was the perfect choice.
“Um… what exactly are you doing right now…? You have the first-creation bonus. Shouldn’t you be creating the first intelligent being, or at least start with plants?”
No. There was no need to create plants. What I needed was a producer.
In short, at the bottom of the deep sea live creatures called tube worms. They produce energy through chemosynthesis, using the heat and sulfur compounds from hydrothermal vents.
They are animals, yet they function as producers, and they don’t even rely on photosynthesis.
In that case, there was no reason for me to rely on the plant mechanism of turning water, carbon dioxide, and light into glucose and oxygen.
The protection period has begun. During this time, you will not come into contact with any other players’ worlds. After the protection period ends, your world will collide with others.
I would perfect my ecosystem within the protection period. The strategy was already set. If it succeeded, great. If it failed, only one human would disappear. No great loss.
Just sit back and watch. I’ll make your eyes pop.
While I was conversing with the angel, the Nectar Jelly I had created was already exploding in population at an insane rate from the Nectar Well.
It would have been stranger if it hadn’t. This barren desert overflowed with light, heat, minerals, and nectar.
By consuming all of it, the jelly produced the ecosystem’s most lacking resource—water—and the mana required for the Nectar Well’s growth.
Since nectar itself was the most efficient resource in the game and the desert’s sunlight was off the charts, the Nectar Jelly quickly filled the well to capacity.
Once their numbers grew visible to the naked eye, the Nectar Jelly continued pumping out water and mana. The well, which had started at only fifty meters wide and five meters deep, gradually diluted and began to overflow.
I burned divinity—the only resource a player could actively wield and an omnipotent one at that—to accelerate both reproduction and growth speed. The game-like interface made it simple.
Nectar Well has leveled up.
After repeating the process, the level 0 well reached level 1.
The upgraded Nectar Well became an oasis roughly one hundred meters in diameter and seven meters deep. Of course most of it was now water, heavily diluting the nectar, but even so the amount of usable nectar had skyrocketed.
Level 1 seemed to be the current limit. Nectar Jelly consumed nectar and produced water and mana, but my ecosystem still had no organisms that actually consumed water.
The Nectar Jellies, which required light and heat to reproduce, clung densely to the sunlit surface of the lake. Having absorbed both, the surface of the Nectar Oasis became completely covered in jelly, resembling a shimmering jelly lake.
With greater depth, diluted nectar, and even scarcer minerals, reproduction slowed and the environment finally reached equilibrium.
The angel understood. Exactly. This was build-up.
In strategy simulations, what fool would pump out combat units right away? You gathered resources, built multiple bases to increase income, then assembled a larger army. Build first, fight later. It was common sense.
“Now that you have more water, are you finally going to create plants and begin building a civilization?”
No. The protection period still had plenty of time left. If I was going to build up, I would push it to the absolute limit.
Nectar Jelly ate nectar and spat out water and mana.
Given a few billion years it would naturally evolve into a magnificent ecosystem, but since I was a god, why wait?
I artificially accelerated their evolution through divinity and birthed a new creature.
[Nectar Jelly] has evolved into [Rock Jelly].
Rock Jelly was far larger than Nectar Jelly. Unlike the bacteria-like Nectar Jelly, these formed crude jellyfish-like bodies using water and nectar.
They secreted an acidic solution only slightly weaker than human gastric juice, allowing them to directly dissolve and consume the abundant rocks of this ecosystem.
The rocks stripped of their mineral components crumbled into stones.
As they broke down the surrounding bedrock, the Nectar Oasis expanded. Because Rock Jelly consumed enormous amounts of water while growing, the water level of the oasis dropped.
The lake widened by carving away its own shores without any real change in depth, allowing even more Nectar Jelly to proliferate on the surface, which in turn produced more water.
Then the number of Rock Jelly increased again. Since their base was still Nectar Jelly, they produced mana through rocks and sunlight—actually more efficiently than Nectar Jelly itself—so the Nectar Well received a constant, sufficient supply of mana.
This cycle repeated endlessly until the ecosystem reached equilibrium once more.
Nectar Well has leveled up.
The Nectar Well had expanded dramatically, becoming a colossal oasis ten meters deep with a diameter approaching three hundred meters.
I knew that. But right now, something more important than the well’s growth had occurred.
The world’s Life score has surpassed 100 points and risen to Level 1.
You may now select a new Life trait.
Because life in my ecosystem was flourishing wildly, a new trait had been unlocked. My creatures would now become even stronger.
Unlike the initial traits where I could choose freely, this selection was random. However, the system would offer traits that seemed most suitable for my existing life forms.
The angel conjured three glowing cards with magic and floated them before me.
(Selection) Accelerated Evolution: Natural mutations will occur more frequently.
(Selection) Increased Energy Efficiency: Life forms will perform similar activity while consuming far less.
(Divine Ability) Artificial Evolution: When directly evolving creatures, divinity efficiency becomes 150%.
“Artificial Evolution.”
It was the perfect trait. I could keep building up just by tinkering with these jellies without creating anything new.
No. Since the environment was already prepared, I would take it all the way.
“Pardon?”
Rock Jelly excelled at breaking large rocks and consuming minerals, but even Minecraft didn’t treat all minerals as identical.
Naturally, there were mineral remnants and rock debris the Rock Jelly could not consume. I evolved new organisms from the Rock Jelly line that could devour those leftovers.
[Rock Jelly] has evolved into [Gravel Jelly].
[Gravel Jelly] has evolved into [Soil Jelly].
The same Rock Jelly also differentiated into variants—black rock jelly, gray rock jelly, and so on—each specialized in consuming different minerals.
My wretched desert ecosystem had no jewels, precious metals, or even common metals no matter how deeply you dug. It was nothing but rock. Yet the variety of stone types was impressive. Rocks became gravel, gravel became soil, and ultimately everything turned into sand.
Nectar Well has leveled up.
The Nectar Well had now reached level 3. The Nectar Lake stretched nearly eight hundred meters across. Diluted nectar flowed through the fractured bedrock to form rivers, seeped into the softened earth, and created swamps.
When Nectar Jelly produced water, Rock Jelly grew. When Rock Jelly left behind gravel after eating rocks, Gravel Jelly broke that gravel into pieces and turned it into soil. Soil Jelly consumed the soil and finally spat out sand.
What had once been nothing but a nectar well and bare rock had transformed into a landscape featuring a giant oasis, sand, soil, gravel, and rocky bedrock the jellies had not yet reached. That rocky terrain would only become accessible once the Nectar Oasis grew even larger.
A genuinely moving ecosystem had been completed. A few more steps were needed for perfection, but this alone was a tremendous success.
The world’s Life score has surpassed 210 points and risen to Level 2.
You may now select a new trait.
Even more movingly, another new trait. It was only natural—having poured every ounce of growth into life production while abandoning everything else, traits were bound to pour out.
The in-game system emphasized balanced development, but when you hyper-focused on one thing, the results spoke for themselves.
The angel once again offered three recommended traits.
(Divine Ability) Evolution Mastery: When directly evolving a creature, its body will change to better suit its purpose.
(Selection) Increased Energy Efficiency: Life forms will perform similar activity while consuming far less.
(Selection) Nectar Dependence: Energy gained from nectar doubles. The organism can consume nothing else.
“Evolution Mastery.”
I would continue evolving them steadily. This much was necessary.
She kept repeating “civilization, civilization” like a parrot. Sorry, but I had no intention of building one.
“Pardon?”
Civilization is garbage. More precisely, the biological survival strategy of increasing intelligence is garbage.
Stupid dinosaurs thrived for hundreds of millions of years before being wiped out by a meteor, yet the smartest creature of all—Homo sapiens—built a civilization and wrecked their own planet in a mere ten thousand years.
If you truly want to become a god who reigns forever, you must not raise intelligent beings.
No. To me, this game had always been about constructing fantasy ecosystems.
I hadn’t completely avoided civilization-building playstyles in the past, but now I was far more comfortable with a different approach.
So let the others start from the Stone Age and play their little fantasy games. I would build the most ideal ecosystem I could imagine.
The ultimate wilderness where no civilization, no species, no matter how intelligent, could possibly survive. A perfect ecosystem that surpassed any civilization—only possible because this was a fantasy world.
Oh. I like the sound of that.
If the other players were gods, then I was the Demon King. The life forms I created would exist for the sole purpose of completely destroying their civilizations.