NOVEL NEXT Book 2: Chapter 38 “Goodnight”
Last chapter recap: Lin wants to take over the seabed with its greening plan.
“The Greening Seabed” plan was immediately started after Lin made the decision. It covered a large expanse of the underwater floor. Many grey sand paths or rocky areas were covered in a layer of green.
Lin called this layer of green a “green carpet.” It covered all the areas in the base that the light reached. In reality, Lin did not have several bases any longer. They had merged together into an enormous base.
Lin would be able to obtain endless energy soon, but this plan affected the surrounding environment.
The green carpet frequently would not cover some stationary organisms such as corals. Lin would avoid them. But other organisms, especially those organisms which liked to cover themselves in sand, were completely covered over.
However, they did not disappear. They changed their way of living– moving directly on top of Lin’s green carpet. They created some small cracks to hide in the outer transparent layer of the green carpet or they built nests for themselves on top of the carpet.
Some other leaf worms would stick to the green carpet with their holdfast. Other organisms that burrowed into the sand, such as the cutter shell, moved further away from the area covered in the green carpet.
At the start, Lin would use its cells to drive or kill the organisms living on the carpet. But after a while, Lin stopped doing this. As long as they did not obstruct the light, Lin would ignore them. Lin would have the green carpet cover the organisms that liked to build nests but not block off the entrances. Under Lin’s “benevolence” and the great amount of oxygen released by the green carpet, more organisms gathered on the surface of the carpet.
Lin would unhesitatingly kill those organisms that tried to burrow into the green carpet and eat the photosynthetic cells.
This felt very good. These organisms would be a source of food for Lin.
The green carpet slowly expanded. Lin did not travel during this process. How many years had passed since it started?
Lin did not try to remember these things. In this time, it had been considering all kinds of problems in its mind, and performed some studies.
Lin obtained new terms, including how to describe size. Once, Lin used its cells to compare size, but now it had an accurate unit to describe objects.
These terms mostly revolved around the unit of “meter” and the other measurement units would be ten times that of the previous unit. When it reached one thousand, meter would become “kilometer”. The kilometer felt very troublesome, and not suitable to use.
For example, ten thousand cells could make a sphere described as “millimeter.” However, based on the size of the cells and the density, things made out of similar numbers of cells could vary greatly in side.
But the millimeter unit was already larger than all single celled organisms. Even the largest shapeshifter was only about 70% of a millimeter.
The Leviathan was around one meter in diameter. Among the commonly seen organisms, it could be considered very large. Of the organisms Lin had seen previously, only the ice crystal monster and the giant trap worm were larger.
As for Lin’s green carpet, it may be the biggest organism as it covered several dozen kilometers. Lin did not try to calculate it.
However, Lin did not have any accurate terms to describe an area. “Diameter” did not seem appropriate as it should be used to describe circular objects.
However, Lin would not care so much about minor problems like this … …
Lin did not plan to expand the green carpet far. Lin planned to have the Leviathan travel again and see which direction was suitable for expansion. Maybe it would put down a new base seed and start a new green carpet.
But the recent experiments caused Lin to change its lands. Lin made a great discovery regarding ultraviolet light.
The land above the water surface belonged to the domain of air. Most of the air was not oxygen but some other rare and strange gases, including a gas which could be used for photosynthesis. These gases mostly would not obstruct the ultraviolet light.
However, when the oxygen released by the green carpet and the other photosynthetic organisms interacted with the light for a long time, they would become another strange gas which was able to block the ultraviolet light, though not completely. The ultraviolet light would be weakened and was unable to kill as quickly.
However, other gases would quickly blow away the new oxygen. So Lin had an idea. What if the amount of oxygen was so great it mixed onto all of the other gases? What would happen then?
It seemed an absurd idea as the space outside was so large. But Lin knew that the oxygen released would not escape but continue to mix in other gases. So if Lin had enough time, it was possible … …
Due to this, Lin planned to wait. Maybe it would sleep for a while, just like back in the time when oxygen had threatened it. But its motive was different this time. Last time, Lin was waiting for oxygen to disappear. Now, it was waiting for oxygen to fill the world.
But Lin’s primary goal was still evolution. Most of its evolution methods were copied from other organisms. Right now, Lin had seen many kinds of organisms, and could not find any chances of improving itself. Of course, Lin could travel to other areas. However, Lin wanted to remain here and observe the changes in the organisms.
Other organisms would evolve. Lin had moved the eyeball into the interior of the flat fishes to study it. It discovered that their internal cells would create new structures in different conditions, or their original structures would develop new functions. However, the responses were slow, and could not compare to Lin quickly creating new cells with different abilities … …
However, evolution was a natural response from the organism”s cells, regardless of whether the organisms had brains or not. They could think about their surrounding environment, and then change in response. While slow, their response was effective. They could frequently think of a perfect response, but their ability to deal with rapid change was weak.
Lin”s cells also had this ability, but Lin liked to immediately transform or copy other organisms.
The brains of other organisms seemed to be able to have the organism react quickly to the environment, but not control their own evolution. Due to this, their evolution was still slow.
This kind of slow change would cause the organisms to become different. When some organisms “combined together”, two different flat fishes combining the cells they released together, this cell would grow into a new flat fish. Some of the flat fish would inherit the best traits of the previous two flat fishes, other times even develop and great abilities.
This seemed to be called “sexual reproduction.” It seemed very interesting. Other organisms, such as jellyfish, used a kind of method similar to splitting apart. Due to this, the new organism would only have the traits of one individual, and not two like the flat fish.
However, Lin thought its evolution was better because it did not need to exchange information between cells.
For example, when Lin’s cells in one area evolved, it could immediately use thought to have all the cells evolve correspondingly without any contact, no matter how far away.
Lin’s thoughts seemed able to affect the evolution of cells, but the effect was not complete. The baseline was to obtain information. Lin had to understand the evolution. This had great benefits to the evolution of its own cells. Lin first learned the photosynthesis method, so its cells could rapidly create substances that could absorb light. If the cells had to evolve on their own, they would most likely only complete this change after millions of years.
In conclusion, there were many complicated mysteries left
So Lin did not plan on just sleeping for a time to have the land fill with oxygen. It wanted to observe the evolution of other organisms, and understand the secrets of evolution … …
How many years would this take?
Maybe a long time … …
In order to not get bored, Lin would enter a state similar to sleep. But its cells and eyeballs would continue to work, recording the surrounding changes. When it found great changes, Lin would wake up.
If something else happened in the surroundings such as tsunamis, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions, Lin would also wake up. But Lin thought that, with the large area it possessed, these matters would not affect it greatly.
Lin had completely surrounded its land base with armor. The base itself would continue to test the air around it until the ultraviolet light was not so strong. Then it would notify Lin.
The existence of the green carpet meant Lin would never have to worry about food unless the world lost daylight.
Now, it was time to wait for the world to change … …
When it woke up again, what would it see?
Because the green carpet had covered large ranges of sand and rock, many organisms lost the sand they could hide in. When they found they were exposed to danger, they needed to speed up and grow stronger. This stimulated them to evolve.
Now, most organisms fed on the unicellular organisms floating in the water. But slowly, they started to grow larger. They gradually became dissatisfied with consuming unicellular organisms so they switched their targets on other multicellular organisms.
The organisms being hunted also grew harder shells and larger bodies. This kind of relationship caused them to grow through mutual competition. Adding on the changing environmental factors such as the cold and heat, the future organisms would be greatly different.
In the end, what kinds of transformations would there be?
Lin would only know when it woke up … …
Translator Ramblings: Now we have an ozone layer on this world … and Lin is going to sleep.