[Nonhuman: Sesaisa. I’m going to fix this ecosystem, so pay me 4 Points for every point I raise here.]
[Sesaisa: Same terms for me. 4 Points per contribution point.]
[Nonhuman: I can tolerate minor losses, but if <Life> drops by more than 300 points, stop immediately ^^]
[Sesaisa: Agreed. And <Mysticism> plus <Technology> must not lose more than 300 points total.]
When you manipulated another player’s ecosystem, you used your own divine power instead of theirs. Since the other side could spend as much as I did, we negotiated an initial amount we were each allowed to use.
This much divine power should do. Then let’s get started on rebuilding this ecosystem.
First of all. The only life here was the elephant-people. The sole species, a life-form with massive brains, tremendous physical strength, and overwhelming Mysticism.
Sesaisa’s elephant species seemed to be a modified version of an originally native life-form, because it really did possess an ecology very similar to an actual elephant’s.
And what was elephant ecology?
In nature, the elephant’s role was to eat trees.
That was why there were so few trees on the African savanna. Elephant herds roamed around smashing and chewing them all down. The only reason forests still formed there at all was that the African savanna was so vast that, by the time the elephants moved on, the trees had time to regrow.
For reference, North America’s dense great forests only existed because humans had wiped out the ground-sloth-like creatures that once occupied the elephant’s ecological niche there.
“Ah. Yes. I see.”
In other words, these things were herbivores. Herbivores that ate trees and digested them slowly in enormous stomachs. Plants were hard to digest, but if you could digest them, you could get that fat just by eating wood.
But Sesaisa had increased the species’ numbers without any plan whatsoever, wrecking the balance of the natural world and literally pulverizing the forest.
So once they ran out of food, Sesaisa—who clearly didn’t know the first damn thing about biology—had arbitrarily evolved these elephant-people so they could eat insects and meat too, by remodeling their insides. Which only made their energy efficiency even worse.
So after they had eaten the whole forest, stripped the shrubs, stripped the grass from the ground, devoured every bug and beast they could find, all they had left was to pray to their god and beg for food.
First, I would fix the environment.
I examined the seeds that remained here and the fragment of a god, restored their genetics, and revived the oaks that had once lived in this forest.
Judging from the remains, they had probably been massive organisms that produced absurd amounts of acorns.
If the elephant-things’ role was to clear overly dense forest, then the bones still left in the woods suggested the rest of the original ecology had included rodents that ate huge quantities of acorns, herbivorous mammals, reptiles—this one didn’t seem to match any species on Earth—and birds. And then medium-to-large carnivores that preyed on them.
The sheer agony I felt, the blood-boiling horror of realizing that someone could have been handed an ecosystem this good and still destroyed it, was indescribable.
But I had work to do.
First, I modified the restored oaks with divine power. I poured in excessive divine power and made them bigger and denser, then covered roughly fifteen square kilometers of the land with nothing but oak.
[Sesaisa: You idiot! Who can’t use divine power to make plants?]
[Nonhuman: God, if I don’t restore the forest first, how is the ecosystem supposed to function? Wait, what are you doing?! The waters in my Nectar Oasis—where the hell did you put them?!]
[Sesaisa: It looked like they were diluting the Nectar, so I dumped them into the nearby Valley. How could it possibly absorb mana with that structure?]
[Nonhuman: You deranged fucking moron!!!]
I rushed back to my own world and hurriedly readjusted the water and jellies that had filled the Valley, while Sesaisa tried to have the elephant-things eat the oak forest I had painstakingly restored, forcing me to frantically stop them.
[Nonhuman: Fine. Then I’ll reduce the elephants’ size first.]
[Sesaisa: Huh? No!!! If you do that, their brains get weaker, their mental force gets weaker, and so does their Mysticism!]
[Nonhuman: Then just increase their numbers.]
[Sesaisa: No! Absolutely not! Their overall size cannot go down!]
Oh, really? So there actually was a reason they had to stay large? Well, fair enough. It did look like Sesaisa had done a lot of modifications involving the brain, nervous system, and some soul-related things I didn’t fully understand.
Then I’d change methods.
We added more restrictions and conditions about what was and wasn’t allowed, and I continued tuning the ecosystem.
For starters, “oak” was just a general name for acorn-bearing trees. Even in another world, there were bound to be organisms that had convergently evolved into that kind of form.
And acorns were tree fruit. Nutritious enough that a creature could survive on them alone. Their only drawback was that they tasted like hell.
By human standards they were barely edible, and even squirrels would pick peanuts over acorns if they had the choice.
But acorns came in truly absurd numbers. Every autumn, millions of them blanketed the ground in an oak forest. Enough to support the entire ecosystem by themselves.
So I modified the elephants’ diet away from pure wood and random omnivory and made them prefer acorns. Their population was still small, so the alterations were easy.
Then I took their short, stubby arms and hands—structures that could hold tools and make the gestures used in magic, but did so with horrible inefficiency—and lengthened them dramatically. I made their legs longer and thicker too, while slimming down the abdomen where the guts were housed. If they were no longer living on a wood-heavy diet, they didn’t need those enormous stomachs.
The skull stayed the same size, and so did brain function, but I softened the proportions slightly. They changed from elephant-people into something closer to elephant-humans.
I modified the trunk too. I reshaped it into something more like a scoop, and built in structures within the nasal cavity that could hold large amounts of material like cheek pouches. That way they could shovel acorns into their mouths with their trunks while gripping tools in their hands and tearing trees apart with raw grip strength.
The acorn-eating elephants flourished like mad.
The annual acorn harvest became their breeding season. They would gorge themselves on acorns, put on fat like maniacs, then produce young. During the rest of the year, they used their long fingers and arms to gather and eat leaves, dead leaves, and branches, or snap them off and chew them.
Most of their time seemed to go into magical research. Or magical training. Or meditation. Something along those lines. Since they could use magic, I put them to work helping expand the forest.
I restored other life-forms too, with squirrels, squirrel-eating birds, and foxes as the highest priorities.
And the oaks’ roots had to be made deeper and broader, and their fruit yield had to become truly monstrous. Enough that the elephants could live off acorns year-round if necessary.
Once that happened, they learned how to store the acorns that ripened only once a year. They began building houses from wood, making tools, and cooking. <Culture>, <Technology>, and <Industry> all shot up enormously, completely beyond anything I had intended.
[Nonhuman: I’ve used up the divine power I budgeted. Pick some Traits. <Life> broke 926, so that’s 2. And <Culture>, <Politics>, and <Industry> all rose by two levels.]
[Sesaisa: What?! Those never went up no matter what I did! Oh, and I raised the Nectar Spring by 1 level too, and Abhojuth by 2 levels.]
What?
They raised the Nectar Spring by another level?
We both looked into each other’s worlds and recoiled in horror.
What the hell had this lunatic done? The Nectar Spring had reached Level 7. And the oasis was the same size. The same size, and yet…
The mana concentration had doubled. Exactly doubled. No resources had been spent except divine power, so what in the world had they actually done?
[Sesaisa: Y-you. What exactly did you do? How did you raise the <Life> Score that much with that amount of divine power?! And what happened with all the other scores?]
[Nonhuman: No, I’m the one who wants to ask how you did it?!?!]
I had only used normal methods. But Sesaisa insisted they had only used normal methods too.
They said the surrounding fragments of a god and spiritual structures were in complete disarray because of the wrecked ecosystem below, so they had restored those flows and made the world’s mana naturally condense into Nectar Oasis according to simple mana principles. There was nothing Yogur-tosoth couldn’t do, they explained.
What did that even mean? How were you supposed to do that?
[Sesaisa: Can you raise the <Life> Score more?]
[Nonhuman: I’ve only done the groundwork so far. If you want, I could triple it. Quadruple it.]
[Sesaisa: I’ve only done the groundwork too, you know? Wait a moment. If I just teach Yogur-tosoth a few pieces of sorcerous knowledge, its combat power is going to double… Just wait.]
Now that my usable resources had doubled, I resumed remodeling the ecosystem.
Not every stretch of land needed to be oak forest. The most important primary terrain suited the acorn-producing oak forest best, but the lakeside nearby, along with the Valley and the hills, could all support other organisms.
I was not some environmentalist idiot who mindlessly preached harmony for its own sake. I only played that way because it best fit my world. Sesaisa’s world, on the other hand, had to become a world for elephants, and elephants alone.
So I reshaped the whole world into a form that served the oak forest and the civilization that would grow from it.
An eco-civilization project.
“Wow… Lord of Mass Extinction actually knows how to play like this, and still chooses anti-intellectualism?”
“As for Sesaisa, ha… don’t even ask. They’re the sort of person who, armed with knowledge of Mysticism, will bulldoze an existing forest without a second thought.”
Whatever the Angels babbled about, Sesaisa and I kept switching back and forth between our worlds, repeatedly checking conditions, making sure the other wasn’t pulling some trick or making a mistake, and on top of that continuously improving each other’s ecosystems and magical environments.
Now the oak forests were managed not by the elephants but by trained squirrels.
The squirrels buried acorns everywhere almost as if they were sowing them, and the birds ate the acorns too, then scattered the seeds even farther through their droppings.
I modified all the oaks so they could adapt to every environment in Sesaisa’s ecosystem, while preserving their biological function of scattering acorns. No matter how much the elephants flourished, wherever they went in the world, there would always be acorns and oaks for them to eat.
And since they seemed to like fruit and grass as delicacies too, I added plants of that sort as well. I massively increased the ecosystem’s diversity, fused monsters with plants, and created magical life-forms that supported every part of their culture, technology, and industry.
The elephant-humans cut down great trees, shared them out, and held festivals. And thanks to the acorns, which I had configured to be sown at different times throughout the year, they could now celebrate acorn festivals every single day simply by making pilgrimages along the world’s designated route.
With their exceptional intelligence, they built villages, developed commerce and tools, cultivated oak groves directly, and produced cuisine and medicines from acorns and all sorts of plants.
There was plenty more I wanted to touch, but this was enough.
[Sesaisa: Praise be. To this great Mysticism.]
Applaud it.
This beautiful ecosystem.
「Nonhuman’s World
Life LV.7: 9,367 (+1,067) 1 new superior-grade Trait
Military LV.6: 6,632 (+2,633)
Industry LV.4: 1,464 (+631) 1 new Trait
Technology LV.5: 2,021 (+1,861) 4 new Traits
Culture LV.0: 0
Politics LV.0: 0
Mysticism LV.6: 4,385 (+2,519) 1 new Trait, 1 new superior-grade Trait
Faith LV.5: 3,098 (+1,327)
Total LV.5: 26,967 (+10,038)」
「Sesaisa’s World
Life LV.5: 2,291 (+2,058) 3 new Traits
Military LV.6: 5,232 (+1,343) 1 new superior-grade Trait
Industry LV.4: 1,526 (+1,447) 4 new Traits
Technology LV.5: 3,913 (+347)
Culture LV.5: 3,236 (+3,003) 3 new Traits
Politics LV.5: 2,676 (+2,499) 4 new Traits
Mysticism LV.6: 5,459 (+456)
Faith LV.5: 3,244 (+333)
Total LV.5: 27,577 (+11,486)」
[Sesaisa: Oh, this beautiful world!!!]
Completely insane.
Sesaisa had strengthened my world in an almost absurdly straightforward way. They raised the Nectar Spring’s level, pushed Abhojuth all the way to Level 7, and dragged Yogur-tosoth up to Level 5 as well.
Then they drove the mana pressure of the entire world through the roof, which Abhojuth then consumed, which the jellies then consumed, and as a result the world’s overall life and combat power were still exploding upward even now.
There was really only one thing I could say.
What the hell did they actually do?
I could not understand it at all.
[Sesaisa: Good heavens. Good heavens. Good heavens. These useless lumps of meat actually have a civilization now! And the flow of meat is functioning perfectly!]
[Nonhuman: Yeeeah. I have no idea how you did any of that either, but the Nectar Spring and the fairy and even the Legendary Creation all went way up in level lololol This is seriously insane T_T]
“I’ll settle the Points on both sides now.”
Right. Only contribution counted. In other words, if a score would have risen on its own even without the other party touching it, you didn’t get paid for that part.
Ah, shit. That was a problem. They’d done so much for me—was I about to get gouged for tens of thousands of Points?
“Sesaisa will need to pay 344 Points to Nonhuman.”
Wow.
I was getting paid instead?
Hadn’t they done more for me?
Though when it was calculated properly, the difference was actually slight.
[Sesaisa: Nonhuman. You truly are the greatest expert on meat.]
[Nonhuman: Yep yep. And Sesaisa is seriously amazing at magic! Absolute master!]
[Sesaisa: Wait, no, that’s not the point. There’s still a lot I can teach you. You’re going to win your next match anyway, so let’s do one thing in advance just in case.]
「Player 'Sesaisa' has proposed a <Non-Aggression Pact>. As long as the pact remains in effect, you will not become World Collision targets except in unavoidable circumstances.」
Not an alliance proposal.
A non-aggression pact.
In other words, they were openly saying we’d settle things in the late game. Until then, they intended to suck every last drop out of the ecosystem knowledge I could teach them.
But I needed their magical knowledge too…
Yes. The magical knowledge I had learned in-game wasn’t enough.
If I was going to become the best out of one billion people, then at the very least I needed to know enough about magic not to be deceived by it. What I needed was the help of a true top expert from a world that actually had magic.
I accepted Sesaisa’s proposal.
The next collision—Sesaisa would probably win.
And I had extremely high odds of winning as well.
「A World Collision will begin shortly. Only surviving players may advance to the next round.」
We could talk after that.
“My condolences to the player unfortunate enough to face Lord of Mass Extinction, and to the player unlucky enough to face the magical elephant legion that now rivals it…”
Well, that was how asteroids worked.
They fell without warning.