“Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Watching the team as most of them drifted off to sleep, I was able to focus on other things.

I actually had quite a few projects going on, if nothing else so I wouldn’t go crazy. It was always nice to find creative ways to keep myself busy. I had consumed all the knowledge I could on Earth, and I was applying that here, where I could. Though first I did something I probably should have done immediately. I started to record any knowledge from Earth that might be useful and I thought I would forget.

I wondered if maybe it didn’t even matter. Magic in this world could make irrelevant the thousands of years of science and discovery from Earth. Maybe magic gave everyone on this world everything they could possibly want, but I doubted it. Not just because people were coming to explore the dungeon I had made, which would be dangerous. There were scientists and thrill seekers from my old world that would have been happy to do that.

No, it was the backstabbing of the man in the sewers. And everything else about him. The state of his body was poor, malnutrition had been written into his very bones. His clothes were rough and handmade. They were probably more resilient than something I could have bought in a cheap store, but I was also certain they were much more expensive and time consuming to make.

For most of history mankind had been only barely above subsistence. That added up over time, which is how we spread out to cover the globe; the majority had enough to eat if they were lucky, and not much more. And in years when there was not enough… it wasn’t the wealthy and powerful who starved. I had never seen the past as an idyllic paradise. It might be fun to go to a renaissance fair, but the past was mostly toil, sweat, and disease.

I was the first to admit that science also had issues. Since science was a process of gradual understanding, it often allowed for solutions that were eventually proven shortsighted. And culture and funding determined what research topics were considered acceptable. However, I still expected science to eventually catch up with its faults and have solutions implemented where it had proven inadequate.

I knew people who loved the past. Mostly, though, they weren’t in love with the life of the peasants. They were in love with the power of nobles and rulers. There was a fun fantasy there. And if they really liked the true life of the past they could go deep into the woods or mountains and make a community. There were still deep untamed wild places, even if they were few.

I was assuming that the nature of this world was like my own; it was probably even more wild and untamed than my world used to be. Going for a hike was not the true face of nature.

If someone dropped me at random into a wilderness while I was still human the odds were very good that I would die. Nature was peaceful and beautiful; it was also deadly. Mankind knew nature’s true face when we saw it. The power of a thunderstorm, the deceptive force of a river, and mountains rearing their head into the sky. Nature was as majestic, cold, and implacable as a glacier grinding that mountain down into a valley.

The odds were good that I was dealing with a world where mankind had not won against nature. A world where their future was uncertain.

I had a steel dagger, but I wasn’t sure what that meant about their technology. Metallurgy was not my strong point. And they could have forged it with magic. I knew a few basic alloys. Pewter was a mix of silver and lead, but I didn’t know the exact proportions. I knew that high temperatures were used to smelt in a blast furnace, and that the air was recirculated to keep it hot. Maybe that was new to this world; I supposed I was going to find out.

I knew how to make a basic generator by having a magnet in the center. You turned it while it was surrounded by coils of a conductive metal, usually copper. I honestly wasn’t certain if any other metals worked more efficiently. At least that idea was relatively simple and it entered my wall of things to try later. I had no great use for electricity in the moment, except in traps. If I knew how to make a radio that would be cool, but I honestly had no idea how they were made except that they had some kind of crystal involved in the original ones. The major problem was that I didn’t know any simple applications of electricity, except for one.

I could use electricity for lighting, but I already had better solutions for that. I knew that light bulbs involved either a neutral gas inside, or a vacuum. And I wasn’t certain how to make the filament, either. I was fairly sure I had heard something about them being made of Tungsten, but other than knowing that Tungsten had the letter W as its symbol, I had no idea how to find it. I would experiment with light bulbs and traps later though. It would probably give me some additional environmental control options.

My appraise ability only told me what things were worth, and the names of things that I knew enough about. Gold ore, silver ore, copper ore, etc… had all been identified for me. Still I had been able to put together some of the periodic table.

It was hydrogen, helium, lithium (I think), and then I couldn’t remember the fourth one to save my life. Boron came next, and I remembered that one because it was weird and liked a different amount of electrons than anything else. Then Carbon, which was easy for anyone who did science It usually had a balanced number of protons and neutrons and was considered the building block of life. I had been able to get the pattern for carbon isolated by burning some dried living tissue and absorbing the ashes.

Nitrogen was next, and I had tried to get the pattern for that by just absorbing air. Unfortunately the patterns for air were as insubstantial as the air itself. I could recreate them, but not isolate the components. And air had thousands of chemicals mixed in, they muddled the entire signal. However, I did discover a pleasant surprise when I absorbed air. It acted as a sense of smell. As training I had a shard constantly devouring air in The Garden, and it was trying to separate out the different patterns.

Oxygen was next. It was easy to separate out from water, and I had gotten hydrogen the same way, so that was useful. Pure oxygen was highly flammable and also highly reactive. It had gone on my list of things to think about for traps. After oxygen was fluorine. It was the most chemically unstable element that I could think of. If I ever isolated an element that reacted in fiery death with everything, I would assume that I found it.

After that were the noble gases, and I wasn’t holding out much hope of being able to isolate those. They were nonreactive by nature. Neon was first of those, then xenon, then krypton (which always made me think of a certain alien), and then radon came in last… wait. I was pretty sure argon went in the middle of those somewhere. I knew radon was last, just because it was radioactive. I might actually be able to isolate that someday. Like the others it was colorless, odorless, and tasteless, which was not surprising since they don’t react to anything. However I remembered something about it pooling out of the ground and causing problems in basements. Considering the shear amount of underground space I was using, I might stumble upon pockets of it by accident. Guess I would be absorbing the air in pockets from now on… Actually I might find natural gas that way too…

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Anyway, after neon came another row. It started with sodium, which I isolated easily enough from salt. I knew it exploded on contact with water, lots of trap potential there. I wasn’t sure what came after that, but I knew aluminum came next. I only knew about aluminum since it was the lightest of the elements that were characterized as generic metals. I hadn’t found a way to isolate it yet. Silicon was next and people always got excited about it because, like carbon, it could make four bonds. People thought alien life might use it instead of carbon, for all I knew I was a silicon-based life form. Lots of silicon in glass. I should be able to recognize glass when I saw it, because it wasn’t a crystal.

After that my knowledge grew increasingly spotty, except for the column with fluorine. I had isolated the next chemical down, chlorine, because it was the other half of salt. Chlorine gas was a nasty yellow-green; I knew, I had made it myself. And I was sure it was highly dangerous. Something for one of the more deadly traps. After that was bromine, and then iodine. Sadly I knew that iodine wasn’t a natural part of salt, so I had no way to isolate it. After that… I wasn’t sure. I knew a few elements that should be in the right section of the periodic table: phosphorus, arsenic, sulfur. I had actually isolated sulfur without any issues. There were yellow seams with a strong amount of it in my geothermal areas. There were some other things around there too. Gallium I think… which could melt in a cup of hot water and had been used for a disappearing spoon trick in one of my chemistry classes. I had no idea where it was found though.

The left side had calcium and potassium, though I wasn’t sure exactly where they fit in. I had tried to isolate calcium from bone, but it turned out to be far too complex. I knew copper, silver, and gold were in the same column, and since I had coinage for that it was easy enough to isolate them out. Iron was the twenty-fifth element, and I had its signal from coinage too. Lead was the heaviest stable element, though I found no ore specifically mentioning it. I expected I would find lead eventually though, it was fairly common. Odds are it was already in one of the ores I had around. Mercury was liquid at room temperature, and I would recognize it if I saw it. Its metallic reflectivity was distinctive.

Other than that, there were just so many elements. I couldn’t really figure out where they were or what they did. I knew the names of some, like platinum, which was valuable, and molybdenum, which I only remembered cause it was an interesting word. Iridium was very rare on Earth and mainly showed up in meteorites. It was uniquely refractive, so I might recognize it if I found it. I knew some of the radioactive elements, of course, uranium, plutonium, but other than knowing that uranium was often green, I didn’t know much else.

All of these things had been inscribed on the walls around my core. I created the shapes of various electron orbitals, and described as best I could how they were actually probability fields. Maybe I would eventually be able to manipulate molecules and atoms directly, rather than just replicating their signal and seeing what happened. I knew about fun things like carbon nanotubes, buckyballs, and others. I had no way to make them for now. I could barely tune my resolution far enough down to see the cell wall outline on some larger plant cells.

I had written down every application of science that I would think of. Eventually I started writing subjects into large stone books, binding them with metal. I wrote about airplanes, cars, washing machines, computers, and more. I put what simple things I knew about electricity and its history in one place. When I ran out of ideas I would think of famous people and try to remember what they did, why were they famous, what happened in reaction. In this way I remembered and wrote about the cotton gin, Lincoln, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and then onto the Greeks, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates. I didn’t limit myself to science, I wrote what I knew of philosophy, art, and all the theories of the humanities. I had lived in an incredibly rich world, I tried to capture a fragment of that.

Of course, even as I was doing this, I had been preparing for my guests.

I had no particular fine control, but I had managed something.

My greatest success was isolating a unique plant structure from one plant and placing it into another. I was only capable of doing that because that structure was completely unique to a single plant I had found, and the plant was incredibly simple. It was a kind of moss from a mountain cave. My identify skill called it goblin gold. It had interesting properties with regards to light. And I only noticed that by taking the time to actually look at the garden with my core since it had an interesting name.

It had taken a great deal of trial and error to put it in the right place. I killed the trees I was working on many times. However, even if my approach was brute force, I knew how to do testing, and I had some powerful tools.

First, everything was growing and replicating far faster than normal; the slowest creature I had seen so far only had a reproductive cycle of half a day. Many of the smaller creatures and plants grew much faster. Not too surprising, since they needed to feed the rapidly growing population of larger animals.

Second, the dungeon was selective in its mutation. By everything I knew the mutations ought to be random and the vast majority ought to result in death or defects. The dungeon, however, seemed to know how to avoid these, and it also changed the entire genome of the creature at the same time. The offspring would mostly have the same characteristics, though mutation would happen and start to skew this too. And it was breeding to make things more dangerous.

Third, with the dungeon menu I could cheat outright. I could control behavior to a certain extent. I could set the option on an animal group that they were not allowed to attack members of their own species, or pick another species and make them off limits too. Or I could do the reverse. I could also forbid them from leaving a certain area. These might not seem huge, but if I was trying to get two species to form a symbiotic relationship this was powerful. I could also force a predator to focus on something new it normally didn’t eat. As I had watched, I had seen that if I turned off my selections after a few generations, they were often now part of how the creature acted normally. My changes became permanent.

Fourth, I could turn off the overaggressive dungeon mutation, though then mutation went back to its normal slow speed. This did let me breed up populations, however.

And fifth, once I had an organism the way I liked, I could lock it in. That had varying degrees of functionality. I could just set that as the general template, so future generations would be about the same, or I could make it exact. If I set a tree up that way, it would regrow in the exact same shape every time, even if it had been damaged, chewed on, etc… This was definitely going to be useful in the aesthetics of my dungeon.

I was doing everything I could to guide the evolutions. I wasn’t able to pick the exact path, but I still had plenty of things to do. Every time I had a species become dominant in an area I would introduce it to new habitat with other successful predators. I constantly changed the variables. If I wanted a species to get larger I set them to prey on something about the same size or larger than they were. They would either find a way to kill it as a pack, with some novel method, or grow to accommodate their needs.

Some of my best successes came when I slimmed an environment down to only having two animals, predator and prey, with some plants that were not allowed to change for the prey to eat. The predator got better at eating the prey, but the prey usually developed some powerful defenses of their own. And then I could see how those defenses worked against other predators, and more.

It took some time before I got anything that the system recognized as an actual monster. Not too surprising, since the most dangerous things I started out with were mice-bugs and rat-bugs. I actually had the proper name for those as well. They were called plate mice and plate rats; I was hoping that was because of their keratin plated exterior and not because of a common culinary usage. Though I suppose lobster and shrimp were really just an underwater bugs...

Regardless, unlocking a monster unlocked the corresponding tab on my dungeon menu and I acquired spawning options. I actually didn’t like most of the options for the monsters. The part I liked best was that I could dictate some tactics in how they faced opponents. Nothing too complicated, but I could choose swarms, ambush predators, territorial, etc…

I was able to use those tactics options to help guide the evolution of the monsters, too. I would give them a general tactic, and then they would evolve to get better at that role. It was amazing how quickly I saw results at times. Though my attempts to get water-based organisms onto land by putting them in shallower and shallower water was definitely still a work in progress.

I planned to use some of my territorial creatures to guard treasure and traps. Most traps would get harder if you fell in and were suddenly swarmed by creatures that stung or bit.

I suspected that the methodical way I was approaching this was letting me evolve things fairly quickly, however, even with all my extra brain power, I was quickly overwhelmed. I was having success, but I was just maintaining my progress as best I could. My ultra large environments that blended into each other were checked on periodically and I added in some of my more successful plants and animals. I suspected that unless I gained the ability to control far more, my large environments would eventually be where the majority of the evolution happened. I would only step in when I had time or a specific goal in mind.

For now though, I was focused more on building new dungeon levels and watching my guests as they ever so slowly walked along the walls. At least they had seemed really interested in the new plant I had made. I watched them as they finally got to the entrance to the dungeon, and triggered my puzzle conditions. Soon I would actually get to test some people and see what they could handle.