Chương 23: A whole new world

Joshua checked his patron level, and it seemed that level ten was a massive boundary. He already had a hefty amount of patron points stored up, yet the system still showed no sign of allowing him to advance. Nevertheless, he rolled up his imaginary sleeves and pushed his mind into his new realm. At first, he decided that he needed to create space and matter. Both attempts cost him a sizeable chunk of patron points, but… nothing happened. He pushed more and more matter in but … nothing.

"Wait… don't I need the rules of reality too?" he hummed. Joshua thought about it for a moment before simply copying the rules of the reality he already knew, only to... BOOOOOOOM! If he had been doing this with his actual eyes instead of observing everything through his divine senses, he probably would have burned his eyeballs out of his head. He had just made the Big Bang happen.

Joshua had kept pushing more and more matter into a realm that had no time, and now all that matter suddenly had time to expand and push outward. Space itself began expanding at an absurd rate, forcing the tiny universe to grow larger and larger as an explosion of energy and matter tore through it.

"Whoa! So much hot gas!" Joshua watched in fascination.

"Err… I should really make sure this isn't all messed up. Or should I just fast-forward time?" After a moment of consideration, he decided on the latter. He pushed the flow of time within his realm to become sixty billion times faster. Joshua watched in fascination as stars began forming, living for millions or billions of years, and eventually collapsing or exploding.

New stars formed from their remains, and entire generations of stellar systems appeared and vanished while, from his perspective, only moments passed.

"That's actually amazing." He carefully guided the formation of several galaxies, making sure the matter was not simply scattered randomly throughout the universe. Eventually, he slowed the flow of time back down.

"Great. I have a couple hundred galaxies." He chuckled like an excited kid "Compared to my reality, this one has so little material, even though I spent almost half my patron points making it. No matter, this world will do." Since he had copied the fundamental rules of reality from his own universe, this little universe was essentially a miniature copy of the one he had come from. There was nothing particularly special about it yet, but that could always change. Then Joshua had an idea, which made sense.

He breathed mana into the universe. The change was subtle at first, but Joshua immediately noticed the difference. Mana began permeating the newly created reality, much like the world where Gaix lived. He nodded to himself before immediately checking on Gaix's world to make sure he had not accidentally done something catastrophically stupid. He compared the magical rules of the two realities several times, adjusting his own realm whenever he noticed something that might interfere with its natural development.

"This is really like playing a sandbox game with creative mode." Joshua grinned as he looked over his tiny universe. Putting mana into the newly created world took almost all of his remaining reserves, but thankfully, Joshua no longer needed to spend anything to maintain it. Everything he had already created was now there and functioning on its own. What the universe lacked were suitable planets. Joshua picked a random galaxy that looked calm and neatly arranged, then found a relatively young and stable star.

He decided to shamelessly take inspiration from the Sol system. It was a pretty good setup, all things considered. He created a dozen planets around the star, placing one of them in the habitable zone. He also gave his chosen world two moons, each enchanted to make tiny corrections to its orbit whenever necessary. That way, they would never accidentally cause catastrophic changes to the planet's climate or tides. The first layer of defense was good, but Joshua wanted to be thorough.

The gas giants were particularly useful for diverting asteroids and other space debris, while the enchanted moons could take care of anything that managed to slip through. Making a world habitable, however, turned out to be far more difficult than simply dropping a ball of rock into the Goldilocks zone. For one thing, the planet was initially nothing more than a massive lump of minerals. Joshua needed to give it a stable rotation, which meant creating the right internal structure.

He built a solid magnetic core surrounded by a seething layer of molten material, then started working on the atmosphere. That was where things became complicated. Joshua suddenly remembered just how little of this he had actually learned in college.

"Okay… I definitely need more books." The next thing he knew, every relevant book he could find in a massive library was being pulled into his realm. Advanced material on planetary formation, atmospheric chemistry, geology, biology, climatology, and countless other subjects suddenly became available to him. Joshua cheated… obviously. There was no other way to describe it.

He absorbed knowledge at a ridiculous rate, using his divine mind to work through information that would have taken a normal scientist decades to fully understand. Thankfully, time inside his created world was still moving vastly faster than time outside it. While Joshua spent what felt like months working on the planet, barely a few seconds passed back on Earth.

"Aaaand… done." He sighed and leaned back. The planet was finally capable of sustaining life. Joshua decided not to leave evolution entirely to chance. Instead, he copied existing plants and animals from both his own world and Gaix's world, filling the planet with familiar flora and fauna. Then he sped up time so years would pass in seconds. Joshua proudly looked over his creation, then he nearly gagged. Animal corpses littered the ground.

Entire patches of vegetation had died, while others were being stripped away faster than they could recover.

"What the hell?" It took Joshua only a few moments to realize his mistake. Microorganisms, bacteria, fungi and insects were all things a planet needed. He had completely forgotten the foundation of an ecosystem. Without the countless tiny organisms responsible for breaking down dead matter, pollinating plants, recycling nutrients, and maintaining the soil, the entire system had begun collapsing. He had essentially built a beautiful castle on top of reeds and expected it to remain standing.

"Nope. Nope, nope, nope." Joshua immediately reversed time. The planet rewound until it was back to the moment before he had introduced life. He then began filling in the missing pieces, before introducing the larger creatures again. The second test failed as expected but it had progress. Without evolution, ecosystems did not build themselves out. Test twenty-three failed because the predators multiplied too quickly. Test forty-one collapsed when a particular fungus spread uncontrollably.

Test sixty-eight ended when Joshua realized he had accidentally created a plant that consumed almost every other form of vegetation. By test seventy-five, however, he finally got it right and the ecosystem stabilized. Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Plants grew, died, and returned their nutrients to the soil. Insects spread pollen and fed countless other creatures.

Herbivores grazed without destroying the vegetation, while predators kept their numbers under control. Microorganisms quietly performed their endless work beneath everything. The planet had finally become self-sustaining. Joshua stared at it for a long moment.

"Yes!" He jumped around like a fool in the sky.

"Finally!" He checked the time outside his tiny realm. It was almost midnight by now even with the time difference. After a quick peek at all three of his warlocks, Joshua nodded to himself. Satisfied, he climbed into his dragon-sized bed and finally allowed himself to sleep. - - - - - - - - - - - Maurapia was the City of Knowledge. People came from all across the lands to trade, study, and enjoy the advancements created by the city lord and his Future-Makers. It was also a land of no faith.

No gods or spirits ruled over the city, and no knowledge was considered sacred. As a result, Maurapia had bloomed into a massive metropolis in less than fifty years. Its main streets were filled with Chakura riders, while Baukk, Servoma, and Humans lived side by side. No other land dared to mix races into one place. Here, however, freedom and riches had made such differences almost meaningless.

Having faith was not outlawed by any means, but anyone wishing to pray or perform a faith-based ritual was expected to leave the city. Practicing such things openly in the streets was punishable, a rule that had been established to keep superstition from interfering with the city's pursuit of knowledge. It was also this freedom of thought that encouraged the city's scholars to attempt things that wiser folk might have considered impossible. Euripa was a Baukk.

Her thick brown fur and saber-like teeth made her stand out even among her own kind, as most Baukk were sand-colored and their primary teeth were nowhere near as pronounced as hers. She was also bulky, with a heavy frame that made her appear slow and clumsy. Most people considered her rather dumb. That last part was not entirely by accident.

Euripa had played the role of a simple-minded cat for so long that, even after entering the world-famous City of Knowledge, she sometimes found herself slipping into the same vacant expression. In reality, her mind was a massive library of ideas. For some strange reason, she could never forget anything she had ever seen. Every book, every face, every street, and every conversation could be recalled with absolute clarity.

Combined with her endless curiosity, this had nearly gotten her burned at the stake more than once. Fortunately, her act had saved her. No one believed that the lumbering female with the vacant stare could actually read the cursed books confiscated from her former master. They certainly never suspected that she had secretly read every single one. Euripa eventually found work hauling boxes and also secured a much nicer position at the local library as a sweeper. It was the perfect job.

Whenever no one was watching, she would quietly slip a book from the shelves, hide somewhere between the stacks, and read until she had memorized every word. Her current boss at the shop was a male Servoma named Aukkoo. The canine had short silver fur, a long tail, and sharp ears that always stood upright like blades.

"Euripa! There's a caravan at the south gate. Get the boxes with the yellow paint as usual." Aukkoo handed her a carved bone plate bearing his sigil.

"Take this too. I don't want to repeat what happened last time when they thought you were a thief."

"Sure, boss." Euripa smiled, her massive teeth showing a little more than most people found comfortable. She happily walked down the main street, carrying the bone plate in one paw while greeting everyone she passed. When she came across a chittering Chakura, she reached down and gently petted its head. The eight-legged creature responded by happily poking her arm with its antennae while producing a high-pitched little sound. The Chakura were the best mounts in the desert.

Fast, durable, intelligent, and surprisingly affectionate once properly trained. Euripa continued toward the southern gate, barely paying attention to the bone tag in her grip, when her eyes saw something that shouldn't be. She stopped, and the tag slipped free, falling into the dirt… completely forgotten. An enormous shadow from the sky… A massive shape so impossibly large that her mind struggled to comprehend what she was seeing. Above the city, a palm the size of an island descended from the heavens.

People cried out while others screamed… some simply fell to their knees, unable to understand what they were witnessing. Euripa stood frozen in the middle of the street, her mind finally abandoning every explanation she had ever learned. The palm came down and then everything went dark. - - - - - - - - - - - Euripa felt time passing, yet somehow also felt it being stopped. Her mind was simply too active, and her unique aura seemed to give her a strange perception of suspension.

It was an odd sensation she could not properly describe. She was being moved, placed down, handed out, dropped, picked up, and handed out again. All of it happened instantly and slowly at the same time, as though every moment was both an eternity and a single heartbeat. When light finally returned, she found herself staring at the same street. People were still panicking, shouting and running through the roads, but the enormous palm that had covered the sky was gone. Euripa doubled over and immediately vomited.

All those sensations she had experienced in the void suddenly caught up with her brain, and her nerves seemed completely unable to process what had happened. Her stomach decided to handle the confusion in the only way it knew how, resulting in her projectile vomiting onto the packed dirt. The sounds of the city slowly returned around her. People were shouting questions at one another, trying to make sense of what they had just witnessed.

Many were already convinced that it had been some elaborate trick played by an idiot magic user. Then a dozen humans and Baukk came running down the main street, their voices cutting through the confusion.

"The Oroitan Desert is gone!"

"It's all gone! There's grassland out there!"

"What?" Euripa straightened, wiping her mouth with a rag before spitting out the rancid taste that remained. She took off down the main road at full speed, her heavy paws hammering against the stone. A speeding Baukk was a sight to behold, and Euripa was fast even among her kind. At this speed, a collision with a human could easily knock them unconscious or even kill them. She barely slowed as she reached the edge of the city, skidding to a halt so violently that several claws scraped across the dirt.

Her eyes widened… beyond Maurapia was no longer the familiar Oroitan Desert. Instead, an enormous stretch of lush grassland extended toward the horizon, broken by clusters of trees and a wide river winding through the landscape. The rich scent of fresh vegetation and moisture filled the air, so unfamiliar to a species accustomed to dry savannas and desert regions that Euripa sneezed almost immediately. She stared from left to right. There was something deeply unnatural about the scene.

The city itself was completely intact, but beyond its borders the landscape changed as though someone had drawn a perfect line across the world. On one side stood Maurapia, exactly as it had always been. On the other was an entirely foreign land. It was almost as if the entire city had been scooped out of its original location and simply plopped down somewhere else. Euripa's eyes followed the river. Then she noticed something even stranger.

The river flowing through Maurapia continued naturally into the new landscape, its waters joining the unfamiliar river beyond the city as though the two had always belonged together.

"How…" She swallowed.

"How much time had passed?" Her voice was rough from the coughing fit and vomiting, but the question lingered unanswered in the cool, humid air. - - - - - - - - - - - It took Joshua some internal convincing before he finally decided to just do it and put the souls given to him into his own world. He started small, if an entire city could be considered small.

There were thirty-seven thousand souls inside it, all belonging to a city whose former god had apparently cared so little about them that he had simply placed the entire population into a stasis card. Joshua examined the city carefully and noticed a river running straight through it. Most of the buildings were made from a material resembling sandstone, giving the entire place a warm, almost desert-like appearance. After some searching, he found what he believed to be the perfect location for it.

The climate was neither too warm nor too cold, with a wide grassland stretching around a sandstone hill. A few dozen miles farther south was a vast savannah, while a nearby sea and a river roughly matching the one flowing through the city would provide the area with a gentle climate. Joshua even went as far as adjusting the river so that it perfectly matched the entrance and exit points of the city's original waterway.

Then he carefully removed a massive chunk of land and fitted the city into it like a puzzle piece being placed into the location it had always been meant to occupy. He looked over his work and everything seemed right.

"Okay…" Joshua hesitated for another moment before restarting time. The first thing he heard from the city was a tremendous amount of screaming about a massive palm appearing in the sky. Apperantly the previous god had no intention on being subtle. Thankfully, the panic soon turned into confusion rather than a full-scale riot. Joshua remained nearby in his dragon form, floating high above the city and keeping watch while fully invisible.

He wanted to make sure there were no unforeseen problems before making his presence known. He also needed to explain what had happened. That thought alone made his stomach twist into a knot.

"How should I do this?" he muttered.

"Maybe send a prophet? Or should I just show myself as I am?" He sighed and looked down over the city. Then something caught his attention... a massive female catfolk came rushing out of the city at full speed before skidding to a halt at the edge of the newly placed landscape. She was enormous compared to the other catfolk around her, with a bulky, powerful build and thick chestnut fur. Two magnificent saber teeth protruded from her muzzle, giving her an almost prehistoric appearance.

"Wow." He slowly lowered himself through the air. He could have simply observed her with his divine senses, but somehow seeing her properly felt more natural.

"She is amazing." Then something happened that made Joshua freeze. The woman turned her head, her eyes locked directly onto him. It was almost as though she had heard his quiet comment from all the way up in the sky.