Sweet Tooth occupied almost the same ecological niche as birds or bats. Though, to be fair, birds and bats had similar ecological niches to begin with, since both were creatures capable of flight.
When you considered how prosperous birds and bats were as life-forms, their potential was extremely exceptional. In this world alone, there already seemed to be at least twenty-two species of them… No. Twenty-two families.
Twenty-two families of Sweet Tooth, completely independent in food source, size, habits, intelligence, form, and so on. There was still room for further divergence at the genus and species level.
Since they differed at the family level, their shapes only looked vaguely similar. They did not even feel like life-forms with similar ecology.
Of course they did not. Being different at the family level meant they were as different as dogs, bears, and weasels. All three belong to the Caniformia suborder and are different life-forms at the family level.
I did not know why my last opponent had caused only these things to prosper so much. Maybe a few created life-forms had simply won ecological competition overwhelmingly. Or maybe existing life-forms had been evolved in similar directions. Or perhaps, instead of evolving new species through ecological competition, the player had replaced that process by creating Sweet Tooth that already occupied each ecological niche.
Right now, only the species that ate puddings, the ones that ate the grain the puddings had failed to gnaw down, or the ones that ate tree fruit would survive. The other ten or so species seemed likely to go extinct. I decided to save them too.
「[Unnamed Membranebird] evolves into [Waterweed Jelly-Eating Sweet Tooth].」
「[Unnamed Membranebird] evolves into [Pudding-Eating Sweet Tooth]…」
Membranebird? Was that the name the original player gave them? It was barely any different from bat-bird.
In any case, I used Divinity on a massive scale. I evolved individuals from every species simultaneously.
Some became able to eat not just fruit, but Waterweed Jelly as well. I made them able to eat and hunt puddings, jellies, and the rest of the various Dessert Legion.
I also made them able to eat cactus. Come to think of it, it seemed about time I turned the cacti and camels into part of the Dessert Legion as well.
They were life-forms with such high completeness that it would probably take an absurd amount of divine power, but it was worth doing.
I poured divine power without restraint into my ecosystem, which I had not been able to remodel because I had been looking after Sesaisa’s ecosystem, and into each life-form, making them part of the Dessert Legion.
But the most important thing was Sweet Tooth. And for the ecosystem’s diversity, Sweet Tooth that directly hunted jellies were more important than Sweet Tooth that ate plants, corpses, or grain heads.
Let us return to the ecology of jellies. What jellies needed in their ecology was as follows.
Nectar.
Water.
Rock.
Sunlight.
Those four. How much each element was needed depended on the species. As seen earlier, some species were mobile, but I had also explained that there were slow, hard species that had instead rooted themselves and become like plants.
These jelly trees that performed nectar synthesis were called jellies, but their outer surface was made of insanely hard mineral matter, and their interior was also made of a shell close to mineral matter, allowing them to suck up all inorganic and organic matter from the soil while absorbing great amounts of sunlight from above through leaf-like lenses. In other words, they were jellies that occupied the ecological niche of “plants.”
But about those “leaves.”
They were pure jelly matter.
Naturally. If they had wrapped themselves in vitreous, mineral shells, they would not absorb heat and light well.
That had still been fine. After all, among puddings, species that climbed tree jellies were extremely rare. Most rolled around on the ground or submerged underwater. So the strategy of creating “height” could be called one of the tree jellies’ most successful strategies.
But then flying predators appeared.
They simply flew high, perched on branches, and began mercilessly devouring the jellies spread out so conveniently atop tall trees.
Slow jellies crawling along the ground were also helpless before Sweet Tooth that cracked open their shells with long or sturdy beaks. Puddings were an especially serious problem. The rolling and running method of movement used by puddings could not deal with Sweet Tooth that dove from above and pecked them apart at all.
The life-forms of the Dessert Legion were extremely flustered. Figuratively speaking, of course.
They needed a new survival strategy.
I continued exercising divine power and adjusted their ecosystem.
The first strategy was counterattack. The jelly trees began producing thorns, poison, and so on.
But naturally, Sweet Tooth that adapted to them appeared as well. Some ignored the thorns and ate them anyway. Others digested the poison. There were even Sweet Tooth that broke through counterattacking jellies by sheer physical specs despite the jellies using magic.
The second strategy was increased weight class. They just had to grow larger and higher. To deal with the enlarged jellies, the Sweet Tooth grew larger too.
The third strategy was increased durability. They made their shells large and complex, and coated their jellies hard even if it lowered the efficiency of nectar synthesis. But, of course, powerful Sweet Tooth appeared.
I kept accelerating time while sowing the seeds of various strategies with divine power, repeating the process infinitely and raising them so they could develop consciously.
If the Sweet Tooth had one weakness, it was that their growth speed was measured in years.
In contrast, the longest-lived jellies lived five years.
In the current system, where eating a lot, growing quickly, and reproducing heavily were advantageous, their lifespans had shortened, but their evolutionary speed and reproductive capacity had increased tremendously.
As a result, all I had to adjust was the Sweet Tooth’s evolutionary speed. The Sweet Tooth, divided into twenty-two families, still remained twenty-two families, but their number of species had increased to 560.
“Wow. You really are amazing in this field.”
Now, even if I simply left them alone, the Sweet Tooth would be able to eat jellies and grow on their own. But there was something more important.
“What is it?”
Give me a Trait.
「The world’s <Life> score has exceeded 18,016 points, raising its level to 8. You may now select a new Trait.」
“Level 8. Level 8?! No, seriously, how in the world does a world that’s only been through four collisions have a stat over eighteen thousand?! Everyone else is struggling because they haven’t even broken one thousand yet!”
Because predators appeared.
After playing this game, I found that an environment with an enormous number of predators had a higher Life Score than an ecosystem with no predators at all.
Probably because an ecosystem’s diversity and stability increase the more interacting individuals there are.
The Angel showed me <superior> Trait cards.
『(Selection) Accelerated Evolution: The evolution of life-forms belonging to the selected category is greatly accelerated. Evolution speed is inversely proportional to the number of species designated as targets.』
『Plant Growth: The energy efficiency and growth of life-forms belonging to <Plants> increase.』
『(Pudding) Hunter: The hunting success rate of species belonging to [Pudding] increases.』
“Accelerated Evolution. The classification is every ‘Sweet Tooth.’”
The Sweet Tooth’s evolution sped up even further. They dealt with trees, jellies, puddings, large and gigantic jellies, small and fast jellies, and all sorts of things.
Meanwhile, opportunists appeared as well. Some began going directly to the Nectar Spring to drink Nectar. Honestly, that was probably normal. Rather than pointlessly hunting, it would be normal to eat Nectar, which was pure life energy.
But that place was hell.
【Iyaaaiyaaaaaaaaaaa!】
Abhojuth made the tentacles stretching toward the sky sticky, caught the Sweet Tooth that had gathered in swarms, and digested them alive like a sundew.
Abhojuth, too, was in charge of managing the Nectar Spring, Nectar Jellies, and Coral Guppies, so it could not quietly let Sweet Tooth gather and suck up the Nectar. Yogur-tosoth drinking from it was already hard enough, so of course not.
Some Sweet Tooth dodged Abhojuth’s dull senses and sipped Nectar little by little. Some hunted Nectar Jellies on the water’s surface. Others dove underwater and ate jellyfish and other things inside. Sweet Tooth that had evolved into fully aquatic forms appeared too. Kind of like penguins. I accelerated that growth outright.
“But won’t it be a problem if the Sweet Tooth get this strong?”
“Not really. Because the desserts evolve along with them.”
The evolution of the people-killing Candy I had evolved to extremes was especially dramatic.
To hunt the flying, fast, lightweight Sweet Tooth, they increased their stability so they could leap multiple times, became longer and sleeker, compressed their spikes and horns into a single structure, and so on.
The Camel-Eating Candy and people-killing Candy I had first created were soon culled by the extreme ecology. Instead, more stable and diverse Candies appeared and replaced their ecological niches.
There were still Candies that aimed for camels, which had plenty to eat, and refined only the final charge of their lives to the utmost limit. But the mainstream became Candies that jumped high, ran fast, tired quickly, and were thoroughly carnivorous, devouring everything down to marrow and bone fragments in order to hunt agile predators like Sweet Tooth.
For reference, these Candies had no “eyes.” Instead, they had developed touch, vibration sense, and smell, so they roughly leaped toward Sweet Tooth taking flight, then spread their bodies wide right before colliding with the enemy, seized them, and tore them apart to eat them.
Still, I felt like they would develop eyes soon enough.
As that process repeated, a clear change occurred across the entire ecosystem.
In short, some of the Sweet Tooth became migratory birds. They raised their young near the “safe” freshwater lake, while hunting jellies near the Nectar Oasis to secure food.
And the closer Sweet Tooth or camels approached the Nectar Spring, the more insanely powerful life-forms emerged because of the Nectar Spring’s productivity. So the Nectar Spring became the strongest and most dangerous region. The Teimong River encircling it—now no longer connected to the Nectar Spring, but connected to the mountain river, looping slightly around the world before entering the freshwater lake—had a little Nectar flowing into it, making it a middle-tier region.
And in the safe freshwater lake region across the river, migratory birds, wetland reptiles, frogs, and fish that had fled after failing to win the competition near the Nectar Spring kept spreading across the entire world through overflowing rivers or the water Yogur-tosoth sucked in and released, making the whole world richer.
For the Cactus Forest, I think the expression “dense” now applied. It was the camel zone. Only vicious plants and camels remained there, eating cacti that occupied the status of “trees,” frantically devouring flowers and grasses that grew like mad whenever rain fell, growing quickly, and fleeing from insane camel-hunting Candy.
The camels, too, grew into monsters, undergoing speciation. Their weight class became absurdly large, and instead of ill-fitting shells, they covered their skin in mineral bristles.
Honestly, these things also wanted to come near the Nectar Spring and eat Nectar, but if they did, the Camel-Eating Candy that could only live between the Teimong River and the Nectar Spring would tear them apart.
Even so, they could not endure the urge to eat Nectar at all. Not because it was addictive, but because it was too excellent as an energy source. So the camels also grew larger, became faster, or began armoring themselves in carapaces.
And at last, they appeared.
Not the enormous, mighty jellies of the Nectar Oasis, but creatures that had grown to rip apart the tentacles of Abhojuth, the master of the Nectar Oasis, and suck its bodily fluids.
The strongest Sweet Tooth, able to seize Nectar, the substance of pure life, by physical power alone. Scale-like carapace plates clung like lamellar armor across the membranes of their entire bodies. Their wingspan reached a full fifteen meters, their body length approached four meters, and their legs bore powerful claws, while their beaks were serrated.
They were the strongest and most vicious predators in my ecosystem, creatures that could simply eat something the size of a cow, and even Yogur-tosoth would need to use magic to deal with them.
These honey-sucking Sweet Tooth could beat even Abhojuth, the mighty guardian of the lake, cut off its tentacles, and greedily consume every nutrient by devouring the gushing blood and Nectar—or the Nectar from the spring, along with the jellies.
I should give them an entirely new name.
「[Colossal Sweet Tooth] is named [Bisyakheet].」
“The etymology is hard to understand.”
“It’s fine as long as the people who know, know.”
I wanted to work more on these mighty flying biscuits, but I had spent too much time.
Even if I could accelerate time through divine power during the Protection Period, this was probably the timing when most worlds had entered the “dimensional rift” phase, and the Community would be active now.
「<Life>: 29,131」
Hm. So I could not hit thirty thousand.
“You have no conscience.”
And <Military> was close to 12,000 too, so I could choose one more Trait. For this one, I picked 『Aerial Combat』.
Now then, should I post an advertisement on the Community?
Ecosystem consulting business.
Let us see how well this goes.
[Nonhuman: Sesaisa lol, if I post an ad, could you promote how good my consulting is for me ><]
[Sesaisa: I would appreciate it if you did the same for me. I am also planning to start a Mysticism consulting business for meat.]
While writing the advertisement, a thought suddenly occurred to me.
“Can I maybe post something like a recommendation anonymously?”
“No. No, but why are you already thinking about stealth advertising? If you advertise properly, it seems guaranteed to take off.”
“Listen carefully. I came here to succeed. If it raises my chance of success by even one percent, I can do anything. Rather than lose and then have the thought, ‘Ah, fuck, I should have done stealth advertising,’ flash through my head afterward, it’s better to maximize exposure even if there’s a risk of getting caught stealth advertising.”
“Your conscience really has exploded…”
The path of a Demon King was that ugly and difficult.
“Anyway, anonymity is not allowed. The Community is entirely public. Compete fair and square.”
Fair and square. It was a fair and square match between whether I got caught stealth advertising and was cursed out, or whether I succeeded in advertising without getting caught.
“I think I’m starting to agree a little with the proposition that humans are trash. Anyway, your post already has a comment. Would you like to see it?”
Let’s see.
「Comment 1: Is this crazy bastard serious?」
High praise.
This was a good sign.
Author’s Note
Thank you to Minimib for the sponsorship!