I pulled up the interface that showed me the world and zoomed out as much as I could.
It thankfully allowed for options like cutaway views and region overlays, and I could mentally flip it up or down, zoom in on various regions, and isolate elements one at a time.
I set the Time Dilation to one year per hour, so I could hopefully see if my idea for seasons had worked. I wasn't expecting any big surprises, but it wouldn't have been a shock if things didn't go exactly as planned.
I might need to adjust the output of the sun by season as well, I thought.
I obviously hadn’t covered the entire world in vegetation. I’d laid down large patches and tried to keep some variety, but it turned out that life was expensive.
Even just placing patches – and even considering that about sixty to seventy percent of my new world was water – just that cost me nearly 300 Reality Points.
Despite more complex plants like trees being significantly more expensive, the bulk of that cost had come from the massive amounts of algae and mold I’d needed to lay down across the oceans.
I tried to be liberal with the application while also keeping some level of frugality. I was hoping I’d get to see it spread all over… and then, eventually, see the autumn colors on the trees change.
Unfortunately, reality had other ideas.
Some greenery was spreading, I could tell, but it looked a little off.
The landscape just wasn’t as colorful as I’d expected.
I brushed aside a few notifications of species extinctions. That didn’t surprise me… I wasn’t entirely sure how the wind currents and weather would work in some areas, so I knew a few things would quickly die off. I’d probably placed them in a stupid location.
I was hoping nature would balance that for me, especially with the mutation rate helping… but after about half an hour, I could tell something was wrong.
More and more notifications kept popping up. Rather than spreading, the grass and trees seemed to be shrinking. Many patches of grass had started turning brown and dying—starting to dry out, and quickly.
As I watched the year play out, the extinction notifications just kept coming.
The algae and mold, on the other hand, seemed to be spreading. Everything else seemed to be withering.
In fact, the mold seemed to be growing over a lot of the earth that I hadn’t really intended it to reach.
Was it getting too aggressive?
By this point, the extinction notifications had started to pile up. I was getting nervous.
As I watched, the mold crawled across more and more of the land, consuming my beautiful green diorama with what was now a purplish brown mass. It steadily encroached upon the land, while other plants died… trees now looking like skeletal fingers clawing at the sky, as if in desperation.
Quickly, I lowered the Time Dilation back down, then slid it all the way to as slow as I could go.
I hit a 1:10 ratio before a message popped up.
While the warning was interesting, I was far more concerned about why my entire ecosystem was dying off.
A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
With time slowed down, I had plenty of opportunity to pan over most of the land and see what was happening. Aside from the algae being a little too aggressive in the sea—which still seemed fine… it was the land that was being weird. Mold was covering everything.
I fumbled with the interface for a while before I could get an analysis tool to pop up. While I was fiddling with that, I glanced over at Orpheus.
“Did you know this would happen? And if you did, why didn’t you warn me? Or can you not warn me?”
The golden?clad fairy floated over to my shoulder and perched there again, moving from the end table I’d set up.
“Even if I had known, this is not considered a failure state. Mass extinctions are common in early worlds. I've seen entire biomes vanish in minutes. As crises go, this is relatively tame.”
She tilted her head, and her heels lightly drummed on the top of my chest. Even though she didn’t have any weight, I could feel a very gentle tapping.
“But in this case,” she admitted, “I did not see it coming.”
“Well…” she continued, “I can see many of your choices and delve into your interface and world values. But doing a thorough review would be a waste of effort unless you explicitly called down some kind of audit. Calling an audit this early would be both expensive and probably crippling to your creativity.
“I have no idea why your plants are dying like this.”
So much for getting any help there.
I laid back in my recliner and propped my feet up. Even if I couldn’t get tired, the change in position helped me focus a little… a new perspective, you might say.
The interface hovered directly in front of me now, so I was looking up at it while tapping through the options.
Eventually, I managed to figure out a compact way to display an information box about whatever I was inspecting. I swept it over the ground and the trees.
“That’s odd,” I muttered, more to myself than to Orpheus.
“It’s saying a lot of the larger plants aren’t getting enough nutrients… but I’m sure I put healthy ground down.”
I kept browsing through the data. That’s when I noticed something else: a lot of the dead vegetation was withered and dried… but not rotting.
It was about then that I realized I’d taken far too much for granted in just how complex Earth’s ecosystem really was.
I clapped my hand to my forehead with a groan.
“Ugh. I forgot decomposers.”
I thought I’d tweaked everything so that bacteria weren’t entirely necessary… but they’re used for so much.
And without any insects, a lot of the pollinators weren’t working. Trees weren’t spreading their seeds.
There’s probably some reason for earthworms too.
I looked through more of the results and examined what was going on with the mold. Inside that, I saw my stupidity as well.
And of course – of course – there weren’t any animals eating the mold. So of course it was going to outcompete grass. Grass that evolved with symbiotic relationships… with microbes and everything else.
I let my thoughts trail off and sighed heavily, closing my eyes and dismissing the interface for now.
I needed some time to think.
I should’ve expected this.
I’d been so proud of myself… for the clever design of the world, the way I’d managed to save energy with its construction, the cool new features I’d put in. Not to mention all the plans I had for later.
But I’d forgotten all the basics.
I’d been overconfident.
This was a whole new world, and being clever with the structure and shape of things wasn’t enough. I needed to carefully consider everything I was doing.
As much like a video game as this interface looked… it really wasn’t. No video game would have this many parameters to worry about.
In a way, I was lucky. If an oversight like this had happened further along, I might’ve lost a lot more Reality Points… maybe even lost a civilization.
Then again, I guessed there was still time for me to screw that up.
I laid there for a while.
I’m not sure how long it was. Without fatigue, without a change in lighting, without anything like that, it was hard to tell how long I just sat there. Even if I opened the interface and checked how much time had passed in my world, I wasn’t sure how much of that had been me just staring into the back of my eyelids.
Still, I eventually realized I had to do something.
The clock was ticking.
And I couldn’t pause the universe now.
The question was: how do I fix this?