108: Smooth Sailing
Chapter 108: Smooth Sailing
CROWN
I rubbed my chin as I looked over the statistics from the last cycle.
Upside looked really good. Generation was way up, with the elves cautiously interacting with the rooken, and the rooken rapidly advancing through the technological stages. Since the rooken were so mobile, the advances they copied and adapted from the elves spread rapidly to other settlements even far beyond where the elves had reached. The more complex topics and advances were slower to spread, but still very quick in civilization time scales.
It would still be decades or more for some of the more far-flung settlements, but that was fine. The important part is that the rooken were developing fast, just as I’d desired. Their interactions with the elves were bringing in a lot more energy than I’d anticipated, as well. I still couldn’t do a detailed breakdown, but the high-level overview I had available now could tell me that much.
The elves and dwarves had been a lot slower than I’d anticipated. The expected war had just… fizzled out without getting started, but now trade had actually been building up. It would be a few more years before it would stabilize just because of the vast distances involved – past me had been a little overzealous with the world size – but by all accounts that would give an even greater boost. It had been established suspiciously fast, in fact, mostly due to Reyth.
I vaguely remembered the girl. I’d said something to her, and recalled that she’d felt a little different from the other Aravel in the settlement, but I’d dismissed that when I met some of the other explorers sent to meet the dwarves. The fact that the attendant had mustered the courage to go outside of the monastery and forge a path all the way back to the Homelands was pretty impressive, especially without any further prodding from me. I’d already confirmed it gave me some good energy return, so apparently just mentioning something as a Proxy wasn’t enough to penalize.
The dwarves as a whole seemed reluctant to leave their underground domain, but after a little thought, I decided to leave them alone and not pressure them further. I’d pushed a lot of things via tinkering with the various levers at my command, but that had been out of desperation. Leaving one species alone would hopefully give a good baseline to figure out what my return on investment was for interfering.
Of course this wasn’t at all a good scientific experiment. Dwarves and elves and vaskan and so on were wildly different people, so couldn’t be directly compared. It was better than nothing, though. Also, I probably had more pressing matters to attend to. The dwarves may not be bastions of energy production, but neither were they a problem as-is. They indirectly contributed to plenty, and I suspected after some years of trade things would be different for them. Maybe they’d even start venturing outside more.
My addition of the goblin-bugs had caused quite a stir amongst both rooken and elves. That was kind of the point, but with all the things going on – dungeons, new monsters, first contact – I did wonder if they were getting overwhelmed. Not that I could do much about it. We needed them prepared for the dungeons that would pop up when the real incursions started.
I snorted. “When did we start thinking of ‘a few lifetimes’ as short?”
Duck sprawled on her chair and waggled her tail at me. “Maybe it’s just you? But I think it’s because of that energy cycle. It’s 13 years for us, and if that’s because it’s rigged to a standard RP generation timeline, then maybe you should have made your days and years longer and adjusted the lifetimes to match.”
The logic fit, but that just made me wonder about the cycles thing again. Did this mean that when I sped up time, events in other universes were also happening faster? That didn’t make sense. Unless I wasn’t really speeding up time, just my perception of it.
I shook my head free of those thoughts. “The haptix aren’t progressing all that fast, but it has only been a few years. Not even a full generation. I wonder if I need to add some kind of outside pressure for them to develop faster, as well?”
“Maybe.” Duck shrugged, a gesture that looked awkward with how she was laying in the chair. “I think we do have enough time to give them a little while to themselves though. You’ve messed with the rooken a lot already, and they just got started. Also this is only the third time you’ve created truly alien intelligence.”
That made me pause. Third? I mentally reviewed, and realized I had yet to really check on the fungal hive minds or the insects in a while. Those should probably be something I at least look in on.
“I guess the funguses haven’t really been a problem…” I mused thoughtfully. “They aren’t generating much, but also don’t cost me much, and their whole purpose is to guard the darkness mushrooms. Which I… probably don’t actually need any more, do I?”
Duck smirked at me and flicked an ear dismissively. “Don’t ask me. But no, probably not. I’d leave them there anyway. Let some heroic expedition finally make it to the top, magically maintaining their air pressure, only to find massive and mysterious mushrooms darkening everything around them. It’ll be either the great mystery of their time, or a setting for a horror movie.”
I had to chuckle at that. Duck was right, I didn’t need to do anything there. I made a mental note to myself to check out the fungal minds sometime, but it wasn’t a huge priority right now. They were doing their thing, and not being a problem. No reason for divine intervention.
“I guess no problems on Upside for now.” I sighed. “Still feels like that’s going to bite me somehow… but I’ll let it be. I thought I couldn’t get this nervous up here.”
The comment made Duck squint at me. “Boss, you’re getting ready to use your soul to host an interdimensional war. I’d be worried if neither of us weren’t a little worried.”
She had a point. I grunted in response and turned my attention to Downside.
Unlike Upside, Downside’s generation was largely organic. I’d introduced the ‘faeries’ to help motivate the vaskan, but that was still early on and I didn’t expect them to prod the species as a whole into anything wild. It was a little accelerant, not an ignition. The elves had formed different factions, but even those tended to work well together, with only a few conflicts… mostly religious in nature.
The vaskan, on the other hand, fought over most anything. About the only thing they didn’t seem to fight over was religion, which was weird. The rest – territory, pride, resources, whatever – was open season. Though I supposed that the whole system of how they chose their totems was also a kind of religion, so it was possible that counted.
I skipped over them for now and concentrated on the insects, the polyform colonies as we’d been calling them. “These polyforms are expanding a lot farther than I’d planned,” I grumbled.
“Is that a problem, though?” Duck asked aloud. “You made them to hang out at the wall, but they’re bugs. If they want to expand, they will. Might want to see what’s up with that in case it is a problem, but it probably isn’t.”
That made sense, and I would have to think about how to approach it. Without any real idea of how their culture went, I’d need to do an Incarnate Avatar, which meant setting aside a number of years. I didn’t want to use my dream-connection trick on these, as a [Soulkeeper] in a hive society might have some very strange effects.
I did note that while a lot of the hives simply avoided one another, occasionally they would compete for resources or otherwise have conflicts. I’d tended toward thinking of them as homogeneous, but it was clear they had some kind of culture or nations or something going on. Perhaps that was why some of the hives had been drifting outward, away from the wall.
This did mean that they’d encounter the vaskan sooner rather than later, but most of the vaskan out that way were tribalistic or nomadic societies still. I only saw a few settlements that were permanent out that far, so it would be a while before the polyforms ran into any of the more technologically advanced societies.
I turned my attention to the vaskans now. A number of tribes had started breeding true with aquatic traits, so now there were a slow but growing number of underwater habitats. They were still developing their own technology for use under there, but my curious side did wonder how they handled communication and writing down there. Did they mostly use sign language or what? I could think of more exotic methods, but that just made me more interested.
Forcing myself to ignore the trivia, I sighed and looked over at the homeland of the species, with Chall on the edge. It hadn’t changed that much, since it had only been a few years, but that very lack of change made it much easier to identify any anomalies. One of these leapt out at me immediately.
“Is that a magocracy forming around a dungeon?” I pointed it out to Duck and zoomed in further, raising an eyebrow.
She leaned in to confirm, and twitched an ear. “Yeah. Looks like it. Didn’t expect that, did you?”
“It was not on my bingo card,” I confirmed. Vaskan weren’t magically dead or anything, but their potential was much more spotty than that of the elves. I’d made them that way. A cursory scan over the settlement showed that these had standardized on using the cores of highly-magical creatures, but that shouldn’t account for talent in raw magic. Mana cores weren’t linked to monster cores that way.
How very curious.
They’d clearly set up three small settlements around the dungeon. It was a ‘resolved’ dungeon, so no worry of the territory expanding, but that did mean they controlled access to it. Their levels were higher than normal, but not absurdly so… which meant the design was working in that respect. I’d purposefully limited the boost to leveling gained by a dungeon so it had diminishing returns for each individual.
Even more interesting were the roads leading outward. They were still under construction, but with three villages full of mages the progress was quick. I should have anticipated ‘dungeon towns’ forming, but even so this was a remarkably fast turnaround for it to be happening. Maybe the dungeon itself had issued a Quest.
“It’s kind of close to Chall.” Duck’s voice broke into my thoughts, and I saw she was squinting at the map as well. “It says it’s a different country, though. I wonder if Chall will try to take it over?”
I shrugged. “Hard to say. Looking at Chall they’re in the middle of some kind of political upheaval. I’m sure they know about it though… one of those roads is headed for the border.”
Duck nodded. “You should ask your girlfriend about it.” The comment came without a smirk this time… the needling was just her nature, but the suggestion was serious. It wasn’t a bad one, either.
“I think I will.” I rubbed my chin. “But I think I should make a few adjustments, first.”