Ecosystem Maintenance 3
I left the inspection of the other parts of the ecosystem to my other clones and decided to observe this creature I had named **[Tteok]** in detail.
Tteok was a jelly-type lifeform. It descended from Nectar Jelly and shared close relations with jellies, puddings, gummies, candies, yanggaeng, and breads. More specifically, it was a relative of **[Bread]**.
“Calling bread the relative of tteok feels both weirdly off and somehow makes sense.”
“More precisely, it branched off from **[Dough]**.”
There were now far too many species for me to keep track of easily, so I decided to refresh my own memory. First, what exactly was **[Bread]**?
There existed a metallic lifeform called **[Dough]**. It had almost no sense of self and simply rolled around in the mines, digging and eating dirt. It was the laziest and most incompetent creature in my entire ecosystem.
Then there was **[Milk]**. These were pure elemental lifeforms. Lacking intelligence, they fused with the bodies of **[Dough]** using **[Syrup]**, hijacking their forms. They possessed metallic bodies infused with the instincts of elementals. Their leader was none other than **Shuc-rimmurath**.
I had naturally assumed all the Dough would go extinct. After all, the mines had been torn apart to create Shuc-rimmurath, and these creatures were stupid, lacked any defensive capabilities, and were nothing but oversized, useless lumps.
I figured they would all get kneaded together with the Milks and simply turn into bread.
“Turns out that wasn’t the case?”
Dough + Milk + Syrup = Bread. And I’m not talking about cooking—I’m talking about my lifeforms.
So what happened if you removed the Milk and combined just Dough + Syrup? That was **[Tteok]**. Instead of fusing with the elemental lifeform Milk, it was a fusion of Syrup and Dough.
Just like how putting honey inside rice cake dough turns it into honey tteok…!
“Ah. So you’re heading in that direction again.”
Anyway, there were two main types of tteok. The pure ones that only contained syrup. And the more complex ones that had further fused with Syrup + Dough + any jelly-type creature.
There didn’t seem to be any clear superiority between the two. The ones with jelly creatures were stronger, but they consumed far more energy. In nature, that was a pretty serious flaw. Their lifespans also looked quite short.
So what kind of creature were these tteoks? The answer was simple: they were faster, more aggressive, and softer predators than bread.
Bread could use magic because elementals resided in their bodies, but tteoks instead wielded martial arts through the syrup and jellies inside them.
“They’re similar to the Sugar Lumps.”
Exactly. They both started from the same Sugar Lumps, but one side became herbivorous mages while the other became predatory martial artists.
That reminded me of the **[Carnivorous Bread]** I had sent to the enemy world. Six legs, powerful jaws, and metallic carapace. A perfectly ordinary, sturdy predator.
When those grew larger, they became **[Dark Rim]**—the creatures that devoured anything in the enemy world with magic and turned it into Creamland. They were predators, sure, but slow and clumsy.
In contrast, the **[Carnivorous Tteok]** were far more agile and powerful. So much so that they had driven the previously dominant tentacle-hunting carnivorous puddings to extinction and completely taken over their ecological niche.
They ran swiftly on four legs. When an enemy spotted the “loaded” neck folded over their back, the tteok would whip it forward in an instant. The speed was so extreme that even the martial Sugar Lumps couldn’t track it with their eyes.
A direct hit would cause an instant concussion or shatter limbs. The hammer-like head was attached to a flexible neck, but the head itself remained pure metal.
After the strike, they would use the “jaws located beneath the neck” to devour their prey.
Ah. So that wasn’t actually a neck? I had mistaken it because it looked like one, but it was actually the front part of the body that had become elongated and flexible. The mouth was located further down.
“Then we probably shouldn’t call it a neck.”
Hmm. True, but it really does look like a neck, so let’s just keep calling it that. An elephant’s trunk is technically a fusion of its upper lip and nose, yet we still call it a trunk. An octopus’s tentacles are technically its lips, but we still call them tentacles.
“Wait a second… What did you just say?”
What? It’s common knowledge that octopuses and squids have beaks.
“Those creatures have beaks?!”
Yes. Right in the middle of an octopus or squid’s mouth, there’s a beak and a mouth.
Anyway, it seemed some candy genes had accidentally mixed into the tteoks, inserting their “body-ramming” trait into the neck. Otherwise, they couldn’t possibly move at that speed.
They swung their necks once to smash enemies to death. Some even had blades or spikes attached to the tip, allowing them to slash or impale. Their forms seemed to be gradually converging toward maximum efficiency.
I had predicted an evolution where they stored the neck inside the body and then thrust it out like a spear to kill. What I hadn’t expected was that they would store it internally, then shoot it out straight and fast enough to launch fragments of their own carapace like shotgun pellets.
These were creatures capable of true **long-range attacks**. The effective range was only about ten meters, but within that distance, a Homo sapiens would turn into a human beehive. Even at thirty meters, a bad hit would easily tear off limbs.
Whether it was these **[Santan-tteok]**, **[Hammer Tteok]**, or **[Harpoon Tteok]**, after swinging their necks a few times like a candy’s final desperate body ram, the neck would lose its elasticity and flop uselessly. Sometimes it would even detach completely from the body. If they failed to secure a kill within their limited swings, it was over.
Then again, most carnivores die after failing a few hunts anyway because they run out of energy for the next attempt. So maybe this structure wasn’t so bad.
What surprised me, though, was that these creatures had something resembling social behavior. In short, if one individual failed a hunt, nearby others would share some of their food.
The ones that exhausted themselves after a few neck swings lived in groups. The solitary ones had much larger bodies, and their “necks” weren’t consumable—they could be used permanently.
However, solitary individuals also had slower, bulkier bodies, meaning they needed to swing their necks multiple times to kill larger prey. As a result, their necks had evolved to become ridiculously thick and tough.
I was genuinely excited by the evolution of these tteoks. It was fine if they drove the existing puddings to extinction. I immediately tasked **Mihun** with consulting on their martial arts.
“Oho! So there exists a race that wields such wondrous and mysterious techniques!”
“Can you grant them martial arts? I’m in a hurry.”
“Difficult techniques would be hard, but since your Syrup has the property of storing mysteries, it should be possible to create a new guiding technique that combines the **Yo-su-gong-bop**, the mollusk techniques, and martial arts.”
“Guiding technique?”
According to his explanation, if the **Cheonji-gong-bop** grounded the spirit into the material realm and the **Jido-gong-bop** allowed the body to leap into the spiritual flow realm, then the guiding technique aimed for the middle ground between heaven and humanity. In other words, it transformed the entire body into something resembling a “brain”—a midpoint between material and spiritual flow.
I didn’t really understand, so I just thought of it as a magic that walked the middle path.
“Correct. It is a technique that values the path of the golden mean.”
It really didn’t seem all that different.
Anyway, the tteoks learned new techniques. They began to diversify even further.
First, there were the **[Santan-tteok]** specialized in hunting **Gamchi**. These would stealthily approach, scatter their pellets to shred the gamchi’s wings, then move in to devour the corpses.
Then there were the **[Hammer Tteok]** specialized in hunting slow jellies, reptiles, and giant mammals. They would swing their thick necks multiple times to crush their prey’s bodies before eating them.
The **[Blade Tteok]** and **[Harpoon Tteok]**, whose evolutionary directions had not yet been finalized, swung rapidly to slash, pierce, and impale their targets before devouring them.
Beyond that, there were ambush predators, tree-climbing variants, burrowers, simple charging types, ones that used camouflage, and countless more. All kinds of tteoks evolved.
Since what I wanted this time wasn’t a final boss creature like the **Bisyakheet** but simply a wide variety of predators, I accelerated their speciation and evolution without limit.
The clearest result was the decline of the Sugar Lumps.
“Ukkii…”
“That thing’s scary. Don’t get close.”
The tteoks that had learned martial arts could ignore the magic of the magic Sugar Lumps and hunt them anyway. They also overwhelmed the martial Sugar Lumps’ reflexes.
This was the result of enhancing physical ability instead of intelligence. If high intelligence alone let you rule the wild, primates would have conquered the world by now.
“Huh???”
Of course primates had proliferated tremendously, but there were still plenty of predators that ate them. The sudden appearance of tteok as a new predator had ended the golden age of the Sugar Lumps.
The Sugar Lumps could no longer relax and laze about trusting in their magic, nor could they act as leisurely as before. Since the Sugar Lumps lacked carapaces and were smaller in size, the tteoks had begun actively hunting them.
The Sugar Lumps, refusing to simply be eaten, began researching various strategies and evolving in new directions. Many simply used their adaptability to migrate to nearby “islands.” Some moved to wetlands to avoid tteoks that couldn’t swim well.
It was still possible because the tteok species hadn’t yet spread across the entire ecosystem.
“So, are you going to create a fourth Dessert Legion Commander now?”
Well. We’ll see.
“Hmm? It’s not that you can’t think of a name, is it?”
No, I already have a name in mind. It’s an absolutely killer name.
There’s a reason I’m hesitating, though. The Dessert Legion Commanders are powerful and incredibly useful, but their maintenance costs are truly, absurdly, insanely high.
“Well… even **Nyaltartep** is sucking up an enormous amount of flow.”
Right now I was even short on mana and had to beg for magic stones from outside like some beggar.
“‘Beg’? ‘Like some beggar’?”
Stop nitpicking. You were created to match my personality, so why do you keep throwing in these jabs?
Anyway, even if I created a fourth commander right now, it didn’t seem like my ecosystem could handle the burden.
The next opponent… I wasn’t sure, but maybe it would be better to target someone who had conquered the spiritual flow realm? If it was a player who had greatly expanded the spiritual realm, then after I took it over, my magic resource consumption should decrease.
“An excellent idea. The community activity clone will work hard for you.”
As he said, I continued observing the tteok ecosystem in more detail. After all, if the tteoks conquered the world too thoroughly, there wouldn’t be much difference from when the Sugar Lumps had dominated it.
However, that worry turned out to be unfounded. The thick, powerful tteoks like the Hammer Tteok that faced sturdy opponents went extinct almost instantly.
This was partly because jelly and gummi-type creatures possessed incredibly tough carapaces, but more surprisingly, the tteoks—which only had a single weapon—were being hunted by the existing predators, the **[Puddings]**, which had six legs and four or more tentacles.
Although puddings were slower than tteoks, they had the mass to withstand a few hits.
Because tteoks had a reflexive habit of attacking the moment an enemy appeared, they would strike, get counterattacked by the pudding, and be torn apart. This pattern continued.
The result was a strange cyclic structure: the Sugar Lumps used strategy and intelligence to deal with the slow puddings, the Sugar Lumps were eaten by the agile tteoks, and those tteoks were eaten by the puddings.
Of course, since puddings ate both jellies and gummies, Sugar Lumps hunted gamchi and other jellies, and tteoks didn’t only target Sugar Lumps, it wasn’t exactly a perpetual motion machine…
Ecosystems really were mysterious. Even if one species seemed poised to conquer the world, nature adjusted itself naturally.
It would have been nice if humans had been the same. Why do people keep pushing beyond their limits?
As I was thinking that, **Mihun** suddenly came to mind.
That guy who called himself a True Immortal—when you thought about it, he had surpassed human limits too… Judging by the way he spoke, he seemed to have lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Didn’t he ever get tired of living that long?
When I was still human…
“……”
Maybe I should just ask him once.