I bit my tongue to avoid snapping back with the first thing that came to my mind. The previous admin had been someone who I could almost call a friend, even though he was more or less a higher power. At the very least, we had a lot of comfortable and enjoyable conversations, though he was often cryptic and regularly dodged my questions about bigger picture stuff.
This admin was not particularly interested in me at all. That much had been apparent from our first meeting, and she only had any tolerance for me because I could possibly help her achieve her goals. I had kind of hoped that once I passed her test she would warm up to me, but that did not seem to be the case.
Immediately, I crossed off half the questions from my mental list of things to ask her. I wasn’t sure how much time she would give me, and I didn’t want to anger her with the wrong questions. There were things I wanted to know about myself, [Metasurvival], and how I fit in to the multiverse as a whole—as well as the metaverse beyond it, and the Engine of Reincarnation—which the previous admin had repeatedly avoided answering, despite my prodding and our so-called friendship. This admin wasn’t one I would get those answers from, either.
I should keep my questions to things about this world, things that she’d be inclined to answer because it would put me in a better position to fulfill the blessing she gave me, I thought as I debated the first thing I would say, now that I had her attention.
“Thank you for speaking with me,” I started, figuring some obsequiousness couldn’t hurt.
The admin rolled her eyes. “Get on with it, I’ve got things to do.”
Can’t you basically freeze time? How can you be busy? I couldn’t ask that, though, unless I wanted to risk being shunned again. Who knew how long it would be before she gave me another chance to ask questions. Instead, I focused on my more immediate concerns. “You want me to bring the Blood Bond back to the Uli, right? Do I just copy the ritual wholesale?”
“More or less. You really only need to join your Blood with another, intentionally, and with a strong enough relationship that you can trust each other with your life. A connection will form, allowing you to share energy.”
“And Uli can do this too? Why haven’t they already?”
“How often do you run around mixing your blood with other people? And that level of trust is in short supply among the Uli. Once they got on their current track, with the ritual killing and leveraging Blood retaliation, it became more or less impossible for them to organically come up with intentional power sharing.”
“Why not just… disable Blood retaliation? Wouldn’t that fix things?”
The admin shook her head. “That’s like asking me why I don’t just disable gravity. I’m just an administrator. I can’t change the nature of the universe. How things function is baked into the fabric of reality itself. In this universe, a soul with the System naturally generates Blood energy, and it retaliates upon death. I can only work with what I’ve got.”
“So you taught the Sheowon to Blood Bond, and gave them a set of ethics, so they wouldn’t farm Blood retaliation,” I mused. “But… you aren’t entirely opposed to killing. The Sheowon have a way to execute murderers without retaliation. And you threatened to have them kill me when I arrived. ”
“Holding a grudge?”
“I’m just… trying to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish,” I said. “The admin of my last world kept the two races, human and demons, in a cyclical, never-ending war. He said it was to push people out of complacency, that the System rewards conflict. But the Sheowon are as close to perfectly peaceful as I’ve ever seen, thanks to the Blood Bond.”
“Conflict is inevitable in a world with finite resources.”
“Then why stoke the conflict between humans and demons?” The last world had mana, which regenerated. Perhaps that allowed the demons to live without conflict, and could have been true of humans, too. “The humans went to war with themselves, anyway, over land and for power.”
“I would guess those human-on-human battles were a lot more mundane than magical.”
Somnial had ended the war prematurely with magic, but… yeah, they would have been regular soldiers, people like Mishel who learned [Swordsmanship] but had no real Will to speak of.
“Yeah,” I said slowly.
“The demons—they were naturally magical?”
“I think so.” They were the source of [Mana Manipulation], at least.
“Then without war with humans, they would probably wind up with abysmal physical stats.”
I mulled that over. So it was all about stats? Why? Then again, if I started asking questions about stats, I had to wonder about the System itself, and that was the kind of bigger-picture question that the previous admin would always dodge. When it came to this world, the important detail was that the admin’s goals seemed to have something to do with stat growth and personal development, like my last world.
Except, the Uli were developing their stats. They had to, to survive hunting mirulu and fend of uqandu.
“The Uli challenge each other to gain a high Blood stat, believing it to be for the good of the tribe. That it was right. But the Sheowon that follow you see life as having value, and that killing is wrong. I thought that was why you wanted me to bring them the Blood Bond.”
“There’s no such thing as right and wrong. That’s purely the domain of sapience. In the absence of thinking lifeforms, they cease to exist. The universe doesn’t care.”
That was certainly a different direction from where my therapy sessions with Yishola had taken me. I had believed myself to be in the moral right to kill to survive my childhood as an Uli, but when I reexamined my justifications with her, I had come to believe that the children I killed were victims, and I began to deal with the guilt of being in the wrong. Now the admin was telling me that none of it mattered? “Then why do you care that the Uli are killing children?”
“Because it’s inefficient,” she said. “There’s a limited number of sapient lives that are born each year for souls to reincarnate into, and killing them prematurely cuts off their growth and reduces the overall output.”
“Huh,” I said. “But then… doesn’t that support the idea that killing is objectively wrong? It always cuts short the growth of the soul.”
“It always cuts short the growth of the individual soul in question, but a life with no conflict also inhibits growth, across the entire population. Additional stressors are needed to drive additional growth. That’s the main problem with the Sheowon, actually.”
The Sheowon had the capacity to train their Blood really high thanks to the Blood Bond, but most didn’t. For most families, it was just a form of marriage and it gave them enough power to live in good health. There were similar issues with their Brawn and Brain stats; like the humans of Redding, most just lived their lives, only earning enough stats to make do, mostly as a course of living their lives.
That came back to what the previous admin had said, about peace and complacency. I was beginning to get a picture of how these System worlds operated, though I was still a bit in the dark as to why it was so important as to administrate the worlds in the first place.
Unfortunately, it seemed like we were hitting this admin’s limit of how much she would tell me about the bigger-picture stuff. She shook her head. “If it was working, I wouldn’t change anything, but the Uli are on a path to extinction. Their culture is too self-destructive, and the Uli have been unintentionally breeding themselves to have weaker social capacity and more aggression. Tribe living may wind up too fractious and result in only self-organizing into single-male troops. The bigger issue is the local mirulu population has been in decline due to over-hunting. That’s going to lead to more tribal conflict, which will force the tribes to ramp up their practices in order to out-compete their neighbors, and eventually the population won’t be sustainable. A small shove at that stage, be it disease or famine or climate shift, and they may die out.”
Being born to the Uli, the thought of them going extinct wasn’t comfortable to think about, but… “Isn’t that just natural selection? The Sheowon could just expand to fill the new niche, replacing them entirely.”
“Well, that could be what would happened, if not for you. The problem is, the Sheowon aren’t likely to leave their island until the next ice age, either crossing the ice or a land bridge after some marine regression. That’s a long way away, and losing the Uli in the short term means a lot less souls born into the world. Colonization isn’t easy here, and the Sheowon would need to survive up to that point and survive the migration. I’d rather diversify.”
“Is that how they got there in the first place?”
“Yup. The last glacial period ended around eighty thousand years ago. That’s roughly when the Sheowon diverged from their common ancestor with the Uli. Still pretty similar, but more than enough time to begin trending away from each other.”
“So if I bring the Blood Bond back to the Uli, you think they can course correct.”
“Maybe. It’s worth trying, at least. Doesn’t solve all the problems, but if you can establish an Uli religion, I can hopefully help to guide them through the rest.”
“Right. I guess it’s better than betting everything on the Sheowon.”
The admin laughed. “Kid, there’s more than just Uli and Sheowon in the world. During the last ice age, I convinced every ancestral tribe I could speak with to wander. I’ve got a bunch of groups on islands or landmasses of various sizes, where I’m trying different things to secure the future.”
“Oh.” The fact that my last world had been human versus demon had primed me to think that this world was only occupied by Uli and Sheowon, but that was foolish of me. “Do the other groups also Blood Bond?”
“Some do, or a variation of it. The Sheowon are probably my greatest success when it comes to pure Bonding.”
“What sort of variations are there? Bonding on top of murder rituals?”
“Sure. There’s also bloodletting and drinking,” the admin said nonchalantly. “That’s a decent way to temporarily increase your Blood without bonding or outright killing the donor. The main problem with it is how often a culture built on blood drinking descends into actual cannibalism, and things rarely improve beyond that point.”
“What,” I muttered. “The fuck.”
“Yeah, there’s at least two islands you really want to avoid when you make the trip home.”
I shook my head, trying to forget about the islands of four-armed vampire-slash-cannibals. “Speaking of, you do realize I have no idea how I got here and have no idea how to get back, right?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll give you a route. There wouldn’t be a point in blessing you just to watch you die at sea. Though the metalworking was a nice bonus.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “I wasn’t sure if you’d be upset about that.”
“Nah. There’s a few Sheowon villages on the other side of the island, where the bogs aren’t as large, that are already precooking dung in a charcoal kiln to make cleaner cooking fuel, and there’s lignite and copper in the ground. Metalworking would have happened sooner or later.”
I had mixed feelings about this world, but I couldn’t help but wonder where it was headed. Competing ways to develop Blood, the development of technology, and a diverging species separated by a nearly impassible ocean—at least, for now. Things could shift drastically in ways I could hardly imagine, especially with the admin’s thumb on the scale.
“Any other questions? Like I said, I’ve got things to do.”
“I guess just… when I should leave, and when I can get that route from you.”
The admin shrugged. “Spend as much or as little time with the Sheowon as you want. Doesn’t matter to me. Just don’t come back to pray again until you’re ready to leave, and I’ll give you the route then.”
The borderlands disappeared, and I opened my eyes back in the village, processing the things the admin had said.
So much for worrying about a mere cultural shift, I thought. My role in this world had just escalated to potentially saving the entire Uli species from ultimate self-destruction. I just had to take another death-defying voyage across the ocean in my rinky-dink sailboat, figure out how to convince enough people to change their entire way of living, and also start a new religion in the process.
How hard could it be?