Grayson worked day after day, designing new species for every environmental niche he could think of. He crafted mammals, reptiles, fish, and bacteria. Plants and fungus and everything in between.
His hands molded the virtual images like clay. He slowly learned that there was a balance to these things. It was hard to quantify, as even Egg had to constantly reconfigure and adjust the details. A bottleneck started to become apparent, as the metabolic needs of each new species was calculated. the balance between size, speed, temperature, efficiency and digestive methods was tricky.
Grayson had some great success with giving plants some animal digestive properties and giving animals supplementary chlorophyll filled tissues. He was, however, coming to a point where these methods weren't enough. 'Perhaps,' He thought, 'I can improve on the energy systems of Earth life so far.'
Looking up the information in his interface, Grayson learned:
[Nearly all eukaryotic life is using mitochondria to break down molecules into useful components and delivering the energy of that process to the cell.]
[Mitochondria are believed to have been once independent organisms that somehow bound themselves permanently into our cells. This happened so long ago that there are almost no known species of multicellular life that don't contain them in their cells. There aren't even more than a handful of single celled organisms without them. Mitochondria could be said to be the single most successful organism ever.]
'So it wouldn't be easy to improve on success that strong. Maybe their integration with all other species has limited their ability to improve?' Grayson pondered.
Grayson finally had an idea. He was going to tweak Mitochondrial DNA and make them super efficient, if possible. This should help him add some much needed metabolic juice to his overpowered designs.
While he was at it, Grayson looked up whether there were any improvements on plant metabolism. He quickly found some research had been done that greatly improved on the efficiency of chlorophyll. The gene sequence for the change was right there in the paper. He could easily apply this gene to his various plant species.
It seemed to be a case of conservation that plants hadn't already evolved this more efficient molecule. It takes a lot of energy upfront to produce and raises the average nutrient needs of the plant, making it less able to compete in a crowded forest in the early stages. That wouldn't be a problem in this era. Once these plants were established, they would easily out-compete any of the old guard species.
Plants with as much energy as these would have, could do things plants just didn't do. They might be able to physically move, even if very slowly. That could be a major survival factor in the long term!
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Next on the agenda was another high energy evolution, larger, more complex brains. Humans were so destructive to the planet because they had no competition. The human line had gone all in on brain development and that turned out to be a major win. It seemed to also be a self-destructive trait if left completely unchecked or unchallenged. Grayson was more than a little hesitant about this. 'It couldn't hurt to just test the ideas and see if it could work, though. I wouldn't have to produce them,' he thought.
Grayson pulled up his interface and got to work. His earlier completions of the quests Egg had pushed on him had earned him a little experience. Actual experience in working with the design interface. Egg had also helpfully quantified that experience with a system based experience tracker.
[Experienced Earned: 10,654]
[Access to cloud computation unlocked. You may request one computational effort from Ring for each 5000 exp earned.]
This was great news for Grayson. He was no microbiologist. His knowledge of mitochondria, ATP, chlorophyll improvements and the rest was superficial and contained zero knowledge of the actual molecules involved. He had hoped that just the graphical interface from Egg would make up for his lack. This news was far better.
Ring was a supercomputer of unimaginable power. It had a land area of more than 12 million square kilometers and nearly all of that had a subsurface layer of computational elements. With light speed signals, a brain that size was only equivalent in speed to a human brain. However, it's parallel processing capacity and number of neural connections was far surpassing several billion human brains.
This perk would be like asking a research genie for a wish. He would need to work extra hard to earn it more often. For now, he did have two projects that were out of his depth. Might as well see what the biggest mind in human history could do with it.
Grayson selected his perk and filled in the details of the research he wanted to be done. He chose to research the chlorophyll upgrade first, since most of his work so far had been on plants. For his second point, Grayson decided to research a simple genetic change that would unlock massive brain development in species with it.
After delegating his research goals to the very capable Ring, Grayson decided to search into his interface a bit more and see if he had some quests available for more exp.
[Quests available: Expand Operations- You will need to scale up your efforts off the islands and onto the mainland somewhere. Be careful. Maybe not everything you've done or will do will be a good idea. Reward: 1,000 xp per successful species introduced. Indefinite.]
[Partial completion: You have already remotely seeded some mainland areas by drone, but this quest will need your base of operations to move to a continental land mass to be rewarded, as experience is based on study of your results.]
[Quest: Pack up and Ship out- Your sprawling operations need to be loaded onto a mobile platform for your expansion onto the mainland. You don't currently have a mobile platform, so you will need to craft one before completing this quest.]
[Quest: Not alone in the Universe- Humanity has yet to find other intelligent life in the universe. This may not be a good thing for the mental health of the species. Develop a new sentient race or several and help them develop cultures of their own to grow alongside humanity.
Reward: 10 exp for every individual born of a new intelligent species. Indefinite]