Chapter 23
Destroy, consume, multiply… destroy, consume, multiply. This seemed to be the ethos that I followed. Every time I leveled, my network of cells grew larger and more complex.
Congratulations! You have reached level 7.
You have unlocked the skill, Growth Factors.
I had a bit of trouble figuring out what this did, but as a Health skill, I eventually figured it out. It did a lot of little things. First off, it increased the speed of Mitosis. A round usually took a minute, but now could take a few seconds. It also functions as a whole-body regeneration. It’d allow me to simultaneously heal all of my cells as if they were one unit. In the past, I had cells that were divided by my entire HP. When a cell died, all the HP attached to that cell went with it. I only regained those cells once I divided again.
After Growth Factors, I had a lot more flexibility. I could give different cells different amounts of HP, assigning them different values in combat. It was a small change, but it meant that I could reuse Apoptosis. By creating 1 HP suicide unit, their destruction didn’t cause the mental blow to me that a large chunk of my body exploding would. I could also create juggernaut cells that could tank damage. I never imagined I’d start applying party formations to my life as a single-celled organism, but it made sense to have tanks, healers, damage dealers, and so on. My combat efficiency went up again.
Congratulations! You have reached level 8.
You have unlocked the skill, Succession.
Succession was an ability that I didn’t grasp. In a nutshell, succession meant change. It was the subtle adaptations that a species went through. An example of this would be a rocky terrain. Imagine that over time, small bacteria, water, and the went slowly break down those rocks. As the rocks break down a bunch, they allow room for grass and bugs to move in. The grass roots and the bugs help break up the soul, allowing for more grass and even flowers. As the roots break down more, and as bugs die and decay, you end up with more and more fertile topsoil. Eventually, small animals move in, and they further lead to increasing plant life and animal life. Before you knew it, you had a forest. Each step was necessary for the next step to develop a community.
It was a knowledge skill, and I didn’t know how that helped me. I decided to put it aside for now and concentrate instead on the increasing cells. I could now produce over 100,000 cell bodies. These swept across my network from the light zone to the dark zone. I moved constantly to find more prey. I was like a dark cloud of death. With my scope having been increased, I started to become aware of things.
Particularly, I became aware of a day and night cycle. The light zone wasn’t always light. There were periods were the light zone was dark. I hadn’t noticed it before because my Photo Sense was too weak and I had no frame of reference, but since now I could see both the light zone and the dark zone, I understood that these periods had to be a day and night cycle. There must be a sun that set, leaving a darker, but still starlite night.
As for how often they happened, it was quite frequent. My perception of time had been completely lost. I only spoke of seconds and minutes based on my conception of time, but without anything to compare it to, I had no clue how much time had passed. It was only now that I could determine a day and night cycle that I found time passing quite quickly. There was no way to tell how long I had been evolving, but nearly a year passed by until I reached my next level.
I knew that a year had passed because my Thermoception was able to detect the temperature change. It became quite cold, although the water didn’t freeze over. This supported my belief I was in some kind of vast ocean, or at least a great lake since I didn’t find very large amounts of what I perceived to be salt. It was a good thing I had appeared here, or I might have died that first season from freezing to death.
Congratulations! You have reached level 9.
You have unlocked the skill, Metamorphosis.
Metamorphosis was a Body Modification skill. It seemed to exist to allow me to change my cells up. No longer did my cell bodies look like gelatinous blobs. I had the freedom to modify them. Some of them could focus on defense, while others focus on offense. I could make them stringy like webs, or thick like walls. I could turn them into cones, filaments, or even donuts.
Although I didn’t know for sure, the last couple of skills had started to mentally prepare me for my next phase of evolution. I knew without the strength to bring down larger multicellular organisms, it would take me a long time to evolve, but I had nothing but time. Seeing the days and nights pass by only motivated me to continue. I was becoming aware of my external environment, and that honestly made me a tad curious. What was my place in this world?
I continued to wage battle, and the days and nights passed by as I moved over the massive mass of water. I had long started to feel the limits of a symbiotic population. With only a quarter of a million cells at my disposal, I had already reached the max of this current elevation. Still, if the passing of seasons corresponded with years, then it was nearly five years that passed before I saw the familiar question again.
[You have reached the maximum level for a Symbiotic Population. If you wish to proceed, you must evolve. Your level will return to level 1. Do you want to evolve into a Biota?]
“So, it’s as I expected,” I spoke to myself on the inside.
If one considers the order of biology, a single cell is the smallest order that could be called a living thing, or an organism. A group of the same organism is called a population. The step that came after a population was a community. How did a population differ from a community?
“Yes, evolve.”
Congratulations! You have reached level 1.
You have unlocked the skill, Differentiation.
After my body glowed with light, or should I see all of my body’s glowed with light, I saw a new skill. Differentiation, the ability to create different cells. It was what I thought. All of my cell bodies were identical, but recently, I gained abilities that allowed me to change them. They were still identical cells, but after being made I started to change them in different ways to serve different purposes.
Differentiation was a control skill missing from that process, and it appeared in my evolution. With this skill, I could make these unique cells and even multiply them at will using Mitosis. It was the difference between being handed a rock and being asked to chisel it into something and being handed a lump of clay to shape it at my will. In short, I had become my community.
If a population were a number of any single organism, then a community was all of the different organisms working together with each other. Except, I was the community, so I was every organism.
Confused?
This was a necessary ability for a multicellular organism. In many ways, a multicellular organism wasn’t that different from an ecological community. A human is an organism, and every cell of a human is a human cell, yet we differentiate those cells to create muscle cells, skin cells, brain cells, and so on. Just like a rotting log can be an ecosystem where countless bugs, mold, and fungi work together and off each other, humans aren’t that different from a rotting log. At the end of the day, we’re just a bunch of cells working together, and we create locations on our body where other communities thrive too, such as within our digestive tract, or on our skin. Countless organisms live on and in our bodies, each one of them evolved to live in the ecosystem called humanity.
I made sure to check out my stats one more time.
Name: ???
Evolutionary Form: 8
Evolution Level: 1
Species: Coenobium
HP: 19999900/19999900
Stamina: 19999900/19999900
Attack: 19999902
Mana: 0
Defense: 19999903 (29999855)
Agility: 1999999902
Skills:
Absorption Skill: Active Diffusion, Endocytosis, Phagocytosis, Pinocytosis,
Attack Skill: Eutrophication, Phage Tail, Pilli, Water Jet, Spores
Body Modification Skill: Cellular Growth, Chromatophore, Metamorphosis, Shape Modification, Specialization
Buff Skill: Anatomical Separation, Decoupling, Signal Transduction, Toxins
Crafting Skill: Adhesion, Cohesion, Filtration, Glycosylation, Lysis, Transcription
Control Skill: Autobiokinesis, Cloud Control, Differentiation
Defense Skill: Apoptosis, Cellular Wall, Encapsulation, Fibrinolysis
Endurance Skill: Aerobic Respiration, Chemosynthesis, Fermentation, Glycolysis
Experience Skill: Conjugation
Health Skill: Autophagy, Binary Fission, Growth Factors, Homeostasis, Mitosis, Photosynthesis, Regeneration
Knowledge Skill: Nuclear Envelope, Replication, Succession
Language Skill: Translation
Movement Skill: Cilia, Flagellum, Pseudopod
Perception Skill: Chemiluminescence, Chemotaxis, Parallel Processing, Photo Sense, Thermoception
Storage Skill: Endocytosis, Exocytosis, Luminal Storage, Selective Permeability, Vacuole
Stealth Skill: L Form Switching
Support Skill: Acidify, Mutation
Before I could reach the stage of multicellular, it looked like I needed to become a full community. My half-million cells continued to spread out and finally set my sights on the creatures of the deep. With differentiation, I could now amount to a formidable force. The fish might be large, but I was legion.
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