Time began to flow again.
I spoke at once.
“Give me the reward for winning the World Collision first.”
“For reference, for players who chose to advance instead of exiting during the exit interval, their Points are doubled immediately afterward. Fun, isn’t it?”
The Angel showed me three Trait cards.
All three were exactly the kinds of cards my world needed.
『Superior Species: ordinary creations can choose a <superior>-grade Trait at Level 5 instead of Level 6.』
『《Nectar Spring》 Enhancement: 《Nectar Spring》 grows dramatically.』
『Combat Mastery: creations gain additional experience in the <Combat> field.』
“I’ll take Superior Species.”
The others were incredibly tempting too, but in my ecosystem, nothing was better than raising basic specs across the board.
Pulling superior Traits forward by even one level could completely change the competition within an ecosystem.
I quickly began reorganizing the desert environment. The newly acquired desert could wait. What mattered right now was tuning the life in the existing Dessert Desert—especially the Meat-Eating Puddings.
“What are you doing?”
“Preparing to apply the game theory I mentioned earlier. Originally I was planning to set this up slowly after one or two more collisions, but if this is the environment, then I need to prepare right now.”
Game theory is not a theory about how to be good at games.
It is the total body of logic applicable to any environment—mathematics, science, sociology, biology, political science, economics—where interdependent, rational decision-making can produce gains and losses.
Put simply: in a given environment, when I have a certain set of choices available, which choice benefits me the most?
That is what game theory explains. Since every environment differs in its conditions, rules, and balance of gain and loss, the theory you build has to change depending on the environment you are given.
Until now, I had assumed this was just one-on-one survival.
But that only happened because I accepted things too quickly and acted without knowing the conditions.
Now I knew them.
Every player except me had understood the true nature of this game from the beginning, and they would make rational decisions accordingly.
From here on out, I would become the most vicious, most relentless predator of all—one that ruthlessly exploits those rational decisions.
“And how are you going to do that?”
First, let’s consider what a “predator” actually is.
Take my Dessert Desert.
At the very beginning, there were no predators at all. It was nothing but a paradise for jellies that ate sunlight, minerals, and nectar.
In that kind of environment, the optimal strategy is simple: eat a lot, grow fast, reproduce a lot.
And that was exactly what the jellies did in the predator-free environment. They flourished like mad and leveled up 《Nectar Spring》.
Then they began consuming minerals no one else would eat, filling an empty ecological niche, and even then the optimal strategy was still the same: eat a lot, grow fast, reproduce a lot.
That is, until I introduced the puddings.
Puddings are predators that eat jellies. The strategy of eating a lot, growing fast, and reproducing a lot remained effective—but now it also meant getting eaten more often, so the jellies had no choice but to develop other strategies. Growing larger, fleeing, burrowing, shells, poison, and so on...
A predator, in other words, is something that counters the other side’s strategy, extracts one-sided benefit, and forces the emergence of “different strategies.”
An ecosystem is the endless repetition of those strategic clashes. When one side gets faster, the predator gets faster too. When one side gets harder, the predator grows stronger. When one side develops poison, the predator evolves tougher innards.
Given enough time, a predator becomes specialized for hunting a specific prey, and the prey becomes specialized for defending against a specific predator. Then some other predator appears and counters that in turn. Then yet another strategy becomes necessary.
If a species fails to respond, it goes extinct. If it succeeds, it prospers.
“So?”
But there is one enormous difference between an ecosystem and a game situation.
In an ecosystem, even the organisms themselves do not know what mutation they will develop or what strategy they will end up creating. In a game situation, by contrast, players know perfectly—or at least partially—what kind of situation their choices will produce.
And in this game, almost everyone except me had probably known those conditions from the start.
From there, the inference follows naturally.
In a game where there is only one winner, and the overwhelming majority are eliminated along the way, what is the optimal strategy?
“As I said before, a ‘good defeat.’”
“Correct. Then what is a good defeat?”
My third opponent had been a textbook example of someone aiming for exactly that.
The overwhelming majority of players in this game were probably similar to those third players. First cooperate with each other, then either betray one another later, or keep cooperating until they reach a satisfying point and exit midway.
And if the opponent turns out too hard-line, then surrender or negotiate your way into becoming a subordinate.
That is the optimal strategy in this game.
“Oh...”
In that respect, my first and second opponents were, in a sense, a little irregular.
They were both players who had prepared strategies specifically meant to counter opponents aiming for a “good defeat.” Looking back now, both of them had somewhat high <Military>. Compared with those third players—whose military strength was weaker than I’d even expected—that makes them stand out as genuinely strange.
Why?
Because if you want to achieve a “good defeat,” you need to make yourself attractive to the other side.
And how do you make yourself attractive? By not building up too much military power. A player with high military strength looks too dangerous.
If both sides have high military strength, they fight and destroy each other. Only when both sides stay militarily weak can they cooperate peacefully.
So the ideal strategy is to raise your military only enough to stop the other side from rolling over you, then focus on internal development and raise your <Culture>, <Industry>, and <Technology> scores instead.
That way, neither side has enough power to completely wipe out the other, so cooperation arises naturally.
“That does sound plausible.”
And yet the first player—whatever-his-name-was, Oswald—aimed straight for that gap and deliberately built military power from the start. If he’d run into someone clumsily focused on internal development, they’d have been smashed to pieces.
Teimong was a little different. She had probably prepared a strategy similar to Oswald’s.
But then what happened? Her first opponent had happened to do the exact same thing. So the two of them fought, she barely won, and then she had to face my Dessert Legion in a half-dead state.
That was why I’d been a little confused too. I thought that strategy was normal. After all, directly or indirectly, I’d encountered players staking everything on one-on-one victory three times in a row...
But in truth, cooperative strategy is usually superior in this game. A strategy built around ruining the other side and squeezing them dry is a bit dubious. If both sides go military, they just mutually annihilate each other.
“That’s a famous bit of game theory on Earth, isn’t it?”
Right. The most famous one.
If both sides cooperate, each gets 3 points.
If one cooperates and one betrays, only the betrayer gets 5 points.
If both betray, both get -1 point.
In an environment like that, played repeatedly over hundreds of rounds, the ideal strategy is Tit-for-Tat.
Cooperate first. Then, forever after, simply repeat whatever action the other side took on the previous turn.
If both sides cooperate endlessly, they score endlessly. If the other side strikes, you retaliate. If they extend a hand for reconciliation, you can reconcile again.
In that sense, I came in carrying a strategy more like, “I get 5 points whether the other side betrays or cooperates.”
In other words, I had become an apex predator that devours predator and prey alike.
If the other side tried some half-baked internal-development strategy, my Dessert Legion would have reduced its farmland to wasteland. If the relationship had stayed tepid and mutually nonaggressive, then the other side wouldn’t have been able to attack me either, so the result would be much the same.
And if the other side launched an active attack, it would only dry out and die.
“You didn’t intend it, but in this environment, you really did bring in the most ideal strategy.”
That’s right. And in truth, I had intended to use that foundation to play more slowly and more safely.
Because I thought this was one-on-one survival.
But now I knew the environment was one where the losers were treated with extraordinary leniency—in other words, a nonaggressive environment where players did not assume elimination at all, and in fact hesitated to act too harshly because if they lost, they were afraid their souls might be erased in retaliation...
I would exploit that.
“Specifically?”
To do that, I first needed a firm grasp on my ecosystem as it currently existed.
Because among the many strategies coming to mind, I had to determine which ones were actually feasible.
At present, my ecosystem was divided into three parts.
The first was Nectar Oasis.
Freshwater and nectar were separated into layers there, and it was both the origin of all life and the very source of my ecosystem’s power.
Thanks to the proliferation of life, its surface and depths alike gleamed and reflected with a beautiful glassy shimmer—but regrettably, since there were no intelligent species, my <Culture> score still didn’t rise.
“Haah.”
The life-forms living inside Nectar Oasis included Nectar Jellies and Toppings. And based on those, aquatic plants and coral reefs. Fish. Along with all kinds of benthic and aquatic jellies that had evolved into underwater forms.
Some had been weeded out. Some had advanced. The Anomalocari-Pudding, which had once dominated the oasis, had, oddly enough, seen the very eyes that had brought about its success degenerate away.
“Huh? Why would the eyes degenerate?”
“Simple. Because the Toppings underwater are producing far too much light.”
“Ah!”
Primitive eyes can do nothing but distinguish light from darkness.
Though, well, even that is astonishingly useful. Just having an eye that can distinguish light from dark is already a major advantage. It makes prey easier to find.
Even that degree of vision existed on Earth’s starfish. Those primitive eyespots that distinguish light from dark are important enough that they sit at the tips of the five branches humans think of as starfish legs.
But inside the lake, because of the Toppings that consume water and mana and emit light and heat, it is simply always bright...
And if that is the case, what meaning is there in a function that only distinguishes brightness and darkness? So instead of those weak eyes developing further, they simply degenerated. An unexpected outcome.
On the other hand, some life-forms had developed eyes for the opposite reason.
“Is that a jellyfish?”
It was a self-evolved life-form with no assigned name, but jellyfish was probably the best word for it. It was a filter-feeding gelatinous life-form, after all.
It could swim, after a fashion, and unlike an actual jellyfish, it had a mouth. Instead of an anus, it had multiple holes in its body. It would open its mouth wide and then close it, squeeze the mouth shut, expel water through the holes in the back, breathe, filter-feed on organic matter, and at the same time swim by jetting water.
This thing had started using the light-emitting Toppings as food, and so it began chasing light. As a result, it developed eyes capable of distinguishing brightness and darkness.
The Sun Toppings were eaten by these jellyfish-like creatures and glowed naturally inside them, so the jellyfish all ended up glowing.
Nectar Oasis was now both highly dynamic and highly stable.
Dynamic, in the sense that survival competition was raging endlessly. Stable, in the sense that no insane strategy had emerged that overturned the entire ecosystem at once.
Abhojuth was managing this place well enough, so that was fine. Next, the freshwater zone.
The freshwater zone resembled an ordinary Earth wetland.
The wetland between Teimong River and Oswald Oasis was gradually being eaten away by the jellies. At this rate, if movement accelerated at some point, the river and the lake looked as though they might eventually merge into one. That too was strange.
Considering how many wetland creatures lived in the space between them, it looked capable of triggering a wave of extinctions by submergence...
Then suddenly another question occurred to me.
That Teimong River...
How exactly is it flowing? If the lake and river merge completely, does the “flow” still remain? In that case, it would be moving on its own in defiance of physical law.
“If you investigate it, you’ll have your answer immediately.”
So I investigated it.
「《River LV.2:》 A terrain feature that generates a <flow> of the <Water> resource across the 《surface》. It grows naturally as the world expands, and can also shrink if too much is drawn off.」
?
I examined it more closely.
「《River LV.2:》 A terrain feature that generates a <flow> of the <Water> resource across the 《surface》. It grows naturally as the world expands, and can also shrink if too much is drawn off.
Detailed Description: A terrain feature that generates a flow of the <Water> resource across the 《surface》. It is a fragment of a being once called a god, and even now, though that body has been torn apart, it continues the flow of bodily fluids.」
...!
I looked again at the 《Aquifer》 I had examined before.
「《Aquifer LV.3:》 A terrain feature that stores the <Water> resource in the 《underground》. It stores rain falling across the world, or water-aspect mana. It grows naturally as the world expands, and can also shrink if too much is drawn off.
Detailed Description: A terrain feature that stores the <Water> resource in the 《underground》. It stores rain falling across the world, or water-aspect mana. It is a fragment of a being once called a god, and even now, though that body has been torn apart, it continues to store moisture.」
What is this?
“What do you mean, what is it? It’s what those one billion worlds actually are. Every one of them is part of the body of something once called a god. Earth has myths like that too, doesn’t it? About giant gods making the world?”
“Then the reason opponents with certain terrain types get matched together is...”
“You can think of it as pieces of the original god’s body sticking to one another. Don’t worry. Even if the final winner combines all the worlds, nothing like that god resurrecting will happen.”
...
“No, no, don’t make that face like I tricked you. The reason fairies can reside not just in 《Nectar Spring》 but in rivers or lakes too is all because of that. Put simply, everything in this world is made from fragments of a god—or from a god’s power.”
Well. All right...
When you think about it, this is a fantasy world. It’s not that strange. What matters is what comes next.
How could I apply that fact to my ecosystem?