Chapter 16
“Just how big is this world?” I asked myself.
Once I returned to the light zone, I found myself in a very unfamiliar environment. Some of the same chemicals were available but in different proportions. Furthermore, the flora and fauna nearby were completely different. I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the composition of the world around me, but after taking a ride on a larger organism, it felt like I had landed on a new planet.
Everything I knew about what was safe and what was dangerous was no longer relevant. I had to start all over again learning which creatures were safe and which were dangerous. I also found that the behaviors of these organisms were quite a bit different too. It was like having to learn the patterns of a new battle or boss. Furthermore, I had to develop new strategies for challenging them.
The worst part of it all was that I didn’t have the blessing of multiple versions of myself anymore. With only my single life, I had to reacclimate to my environment. Between this zone and the other zone, I’d have to say this one was harder. There were far more predators. In the previous zone, food had been ample and despite my struggles, the predators were rather docile. Few attacked when they weren’t provoked, and those that did usually fought independently.
I recognized some of the protists that I encountered. There were stentor, vorticella, parameciums, and microspora. I ran into euglenas and even an amoeba. This all but confirmed for me that I was in fact in some kind of water suspension. It had to be a body of water since there was no current and a smaller one at that from the lack of tides.
As I observed the organisms around my new location, it was more like a warzone. There were very few organisms sitting around passively waiting to be eaten, and infinitely more battling for their little slice of meat. Worst of all, I saw some fighting in groups. When I did it, it was because we all had the mentality of people and could work together. How were other Protista working as groups?
This created some horrific battlefields. Compared to the battlefields I had seen before, these were many times larger and seemed to stretch on passed-by senses. Creatures were either openly in battle, or the fresh graveyard after a battle where scavengers came to clean up. At first, I acted with the scavengers cleaning up after the battle, but once the damage I had taken had been cleared out, I progressed into the battlefield.
That’s when I finally realized that all of my paranoia was for not. Even though the other Protista seemed to be a bit cleverer than the simple eukaryotes I was eating before, they were more varied and had more complex attacks, it seemed like they weren’t able to do much damage to me. Even in the heat of battle, I only lost at most tens of HP at a time. It was then that I realized that this was the advantage of evolution.
Each time I evolved, my numbers jumped tenfold, and I reached a state where creatures at my level no longer posed a threat. Only those with multiple evolutions might be able to hurt me, and bacteria likely had too short a lifespan and lacked any willpower to motivate them to evolve. As a result, my defense and HP were simply too hard. Only when I fought opponents many times my size would I be threatened, but I had already reached the upper limits of cell size. At least, everything I saw that was larger existed in the dark zone and seemed to all be multicellular organisms.
This was another thing I had learned in biology. All of my chemical exchanges were done across my plasma membrane. I didn’t know how I looked, but I probably was just a gelatinous membrane stuffed full of organelles, like the creatures I was eating. Every time a cell got larger, the ratio of the available surface membrane to the total volume of the cell shifted.
For example, if I had two surface membranes for every one volume If I then grew by one and had three surface area and two volumes, I now had less surface area per volume. It was originally 2 to 1, and now it was 3 to 2. This created an upper limit where cells couldn’t support their biological processes simply because they didn’t have enough membrane to uptake or expel chemicals to serve an ever-enlarging volume.
This told me that my next step in evolution had to be moving toward a multicellular route. However, before I could obtain that, I had to grow, and the only way to grow was to hunt. In this environment where battle was everything, I got a great deal of practice. Although I could blow off most attacks as irrelevant due to my high defenses, I chose to treat it like training, becoming better and better at battling as a cell.
My near-death experience had truly opened my eyes to the cruelty of this world, or perhaps it was better to say the cruelty in myself. These cells might be all single-evolution organisms, but the cells I evolved from were not. Out there in the deep were other cells just like me, growing and evolving. I didn’t just have to level like crazy, but I also had to train my mind as well. We started from the same mold, but I was no longer the same as them. I had my own identity, and I had to use every second if I wanted to defeat them.
During this time, I also tested out how far into the light zone I could get. I eventually reached a point where the light was blinding. If I tried to force myself further, I started taking damage. If I ignored the damage, I still reached a point in which I was forced back. It was like there was an invisible barrier separating me from the world beyond. I couldn’t escape the cohesive forces around me. Instead, I concentrated on leveling.
I moved from one battlefield to the next, slaughtering indiscriminately as I practiced avoiding attacks and making strikes while not being hit. In the chaos of the battlefield, it took a lot of skill the avoid getting hit, but thanks to ample amounts of energy, I could afford to practice. Every day, I felt myself growing stronger, as did my levels.
Congratulations! You have reached level 3.
You have unlocked the skill, Acidify.
Congratulations! You have reached level 4.
You have unlocked the skill, Spores.
Congratulations! You have reached level 5.
You have unlocked the skill, Chemiluminescence.
Congratulations! You have reached level 6.
You have unlocked the skill, Shape Manipulation.
Each time I leveled, I unlocked a new skill, which I then added to my repertoire. Spores were a new form of attack. If I had to describe them, they were like dropping bombs. They spread out and exploded on contact. Acidify was a Support skill that allowed me to create deadly acidic attacks by storing it in vesicles and then releasing it using Exocytosis.
However, when I reached level 5 and level 6, things got a bit interesting. Chemiluminescence allowed me to visualize chemicals. It was labeled as a perception skill, and it worked along with Photo sense to allow me to see my environment. For the first time, my eyes were open to the world. This skill also worked in the dark zone, although just as with sight, I could still see farther and better in the light.
Shape Manipulation allowed me to alter my body shape. This was something I applied to combat. I could dodge attacks much more easily. Whether I was close range or far, I could dominate any battlefield I was on. I had become a vessel of death, moving from one area to the next. Yet, the leveling went down after each kill. There was nothing bigger than Protista, so my experience points stagnated once again. I felt a bit of frustration. Each level required more and more kills, and by the time I got to level 6, I had already spent just as long as it took to get to the previous three levels.
“Should I target another multi-cellular organism?” I asked.
I had avoided them so far because the jump from Protista to multicellular seemed too large to overcome. Yet, if I didn’t take the risk and battle something larger, then my prospects of reaching my next evolution seemed almost nonexistent. I looked into the murky abyss below. Down there, I could see the occasional glimmer of light as Chemiluminescence picked up. It only made the sight increasingly eerie, like I was floating above an ocean of leviathans.
“Fuck it, you only live once.”
I began to float down into the dark zone. I moved deeper and deeper. My senses had grown quite a bit after three levels, and along with Chemiluminescence, I was able to visualize the shape, or at least part of the shape, of some of these multicellular creatures. That’s when a large snake-like creature came up from the dark. It opened its mouth and before I could even react, I was swallowed whole!
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