World Seed

Author’s Corner: Hey everyone! Glad to see people liked the last chapter so much! This one is going to be a bit of a montage again, because there’s not a lot for them to do before leaving. Enjoy!

After walking around town for a bit more, we decided to stop at a restaurant and get ourselves a bite to eat. By the time we got back, Celeste was still wholly absorbed in watching rapidly flashing screens of information. However, it was a bit strange. Rather than her Deus Ex body absorbing the information, she was letting the AI mind transmit it to the companion bracelets. That way, she didn’t have to slow down and let her aura adapt first.

Since we had some time, Sharon asked me to go ahead and study her aura, though she was a bit shy about it. After all, this was pretty much the most intimate you could be with someone and still have clothes on. It’s just, it was the same kind of intimacy you’d have with a doctor. Still, I studied her aura for a while and added it to my collection.

Next, I summoned Yo out from my grove, who latched onto me happily. Sharon simply giggled when she saw that, and let me study Yo’s aura as well. Since Yo does not have an acidic property like the plant slimes I had originally studied, I wasn’t as concerned about whether or not I would burn myself by doing this.

Naturally, after I got Yo’s aura, I turned myself into a slime person, which was a very strange experience. Slimes don’t really have eyes, so I could see everything around me at the same time. It was fairly disorienting to try to choose a direction to ‘face’ like this. Also, they ‘hear’ with their entire body as well, so sounds were slightly distorted from what I was used to. However, it was still a fairly fun form, and I was able to alter my body fairly easy by concentrating on the form I wanted to take.

Strangely, when Yo embraced me in my slime form, her own body felt much more solid than usual. Likely there was some sort of membrane on the edge of our skins to prevent ourselves from accidentally falling into each other. When I was done with that, I transformed into a wood elf and sent Yo back into my grove.

Since Celeste was likely going to be doing this for quite a while, I pulled Yang out of my grove and asked her to stay with the Deus Ex while I logged out. As long as there was still one bracelet that was connected to Celeste in NeoLife, she should be able to continue her work. After logging out, I again checked on the world news again, hoping that there would be something by now. It was now March 3rd in the real world, and it had been just over a day and a half since the Lunar Titan emerged.

Currently, there were two major opinions in regards to how to proceed. Information regarding NeoLife being the future has already been publicized, and people have been studying anything they can within the game’s history to help make their decisions. The first opinion was naturally to leave Earth, and seek refuge on another world. With the FTL drives becoming available, and druids able to slowly terraform a planet, there was no reason why we couldn’t establish a new homeworld.

The second major opinion regarding how we should act was to train a generation of powerful fighters, and defend our home from the monsters spawning on it. The people with this opinion would often say that we should take as much technology as we could from the future, and use it to destroy anything that unnaturally spawns on Earth. Most likely, these camps would end up each doing their respective activities either way, and only the people in the former would take the chance to leave Earth. As for the rest… I could only guess what would happen to them.

In other news, there had been many more monsters spawning all over the world. Famous landmarks would be twisted and made to come alive. Mount Rushmore turned into five giant golems that walked around, destroying anything in their path. The statue of liberty actually walked all the way to Paris, and picked up the Eiffel Tower to use as a giant lance, which I personally found to be quite hilarious.

Thankfully, there had yet to be a large monster rushing into town yet, though that was not likely to last very long. Shadows had been sighted under the water just off the coast, so we were probably due for something bad to happen soon as well. Sea monsters were not my cup of tea…

Once I was done looking stuff up, I took a walk around town to check up on some people. First, and most importantly, was Tessa and her mom. I knew I couldn’t take them with me when I left, because honestly Earth was probably still safer for a while than flying out into space. Though I wasn’t sure how long that would last, I could only hope that they managed to get on a ship and leave before it did.

While I was there, and walking around town, I spread out my Mana Sense to study the auras of all of the humans that walked by me. Normally, I’d need at least ten minutes of focused study to get an aura down, but that only applied to when I was studying a single person. Now, I was studying the auras of dozens of people, albeit more passively. By the time I had left Tessa’s house and made my way back home, I had managed to obtain the auras of both standard humans and psychic humans. Surprisingly, there was only one small part of the aura that made the difference between the two, and when I mimicked that one change on my own aura, I got this message.