Chapter 626: Its been a while (1/2)
Back when I was a kid, I loved to read novels of almost any kind. But no matter what I would read, one particular activity of mine would repeat all the same. In the middle of tense moments, I would imagine some kind of higher power descending to the world in order to save the heroes from the trouble. After imagining for a bit I would open the book once again and continue with the adventurers in the fictional world according to its author idea, only to rinse and repeat my habit once again a bit later.
In other words, even back when I was still a kid I was already dreaming about possessing god-like powers of influencing anything I would ever want. Yet, just like with everything that people imagine while in their childhood phase, once someone actually obtains what they always dreamed about, it usually turns to be bleak.
The only saving grace of my current situation was the fact that I was most likely the only being from earth ever that managed to actually achieve the goal of becoming a god!
But it didn't change anything in my life at all.
With the constantly accelerating growth of the rate at which my clones multiplied and sprawled all over the endless universe, my perception of time also changed. That is if it was otherwise static in the first place. At some point that I couldn't really pinpoint, I no longer had to merge with the clone to take over its memories. It just… happened.
Maybe the constant procedure of passing the information up the chain that allowed me to merge with only one clone once in a while instead of spending all my time consuming more copies of myself forced the evolution aimed at simplifying this task? Or maybe the combined willpower of all my copies managed to force some changes in the very basic unit of my personality that laid at the core of this collective consciousness that made me capable of replacing the wasteful part of the process with something occurring naturally?
But ultimately, it didn't matter anything at all. I was still stuck in the constantly changing environment of my own universe. Even after finally understanding the idea behind turning magic into a matter that was the perceptive borderline between being still a somewhat human being and a god didn't change my mentality almost at all.
Because in the end, no matter the insane beauty of this universe, I was already getting bored with the life I led. Capable of reliving the memories of each and every respective clone of mine I had no need to personally travel to any place I would find interesting. At first, watching the very first forms of life that my clones managed to find seemed like a good way to kill time. But then I understood the meaning of the 'great filters' that I once watched a video about.
In other words, evolution itself seemed to be against giving birth to any intelligent life. No matter how much time would pass, no matter how many attempts the intelligence would make at surfacing on some world and taking control over it as it happened on earth, the intelligent life simply failed to break through the stage where they could reach the top of the food chain.
Even though it was only my personal thesis, not backed out by any scientist as there was none in this world, the intelligence was a perk that a species often couldn't afford. Even if due to some evolutional quirk a race capable of forming intelligent thought would emerge, the drawbacks it would have in other aspects would quickly make it easy prey for the stronger animals.
Only after watching over a hundred possible civilisations dying out before a single settlement was made, one race finally managed to break through this obstacle. Not because they were the pinnacle of what the nature of their world could create. In fact, they were far weaker than most of the species that my clones took notice off. But they were lucky.
The main reason why any possibly intelligent species would vanish was the huge amounts of energy it would require to maintain a nervous system capable of forming thoughts. Just like in the case with humans, the brain or brain-like organ simply forced them to scavenge and hunt more, putting them at the constant risk of getting killed by stronger predators. But in the case of the planet that I named 'Smiley Face' from how one of its continents resembled the earthy emote, its local race lucked out literally in the apocalypse.
A powerful asteroid was what brought the end to the legendary rein of dinosaurs on Earth, allowing other species to explode in population. But on the smiley face, the asteroid wasn't powerful enough to alter the genome of the entire planet. In fact, outside of creating an immense crater that reached from the foothold of a huge mountain chain all the way to a strange, silverish ocean, its crash didn't affect anything outside of the lethal zone almost at all.
With the obvious exception of the intelligent race.
Enclosed in a small continental enclave, locked between the sea, the mountains and the enormous crater… They quickly killed out all the predators. This was also the very first time when I personally intervened, killing three surviving monsters that those crawling and semi-intelligent creatures would easily fall prey to.
In the dullness of my life, I finally found a chance to watch over a world that gave birth to a life that survived the first great filter. And once they managed to take complete control over the tiny patch of land that they were enclosed with, a miracle happened.
The six-legged race of beings that I could only compare to some kind of repulsive bugs from the earth, managed to discover farming. Not the one that I knew from the earth. In fact, even a god-like me had troubles deciding whether it could be considered farming in the first place.