Designing an Intelligent Race

Xu Zhi searched for quite a while. The most outstanding specimen was a beetle-shaped creature.

"Armored and agile. Most importantly, its head is armored too. No hair—you're the one. Lucky fellow, you will become the bald-headed ruler of future Homo sapiens for one era, perhaps even several eras."

Xu Zhi picked up the ant-sized beetle with metal tweezers and placed it into a transparent test tube.

He then found food to raise the species and brought it before a brand-new Experimental Field only one square meter in size, releasing it inside.

Cell division speed: ten thousand times! In a short time—

Their population bred wildly, died, and was born anew, quickly reaching more than a hundred thousand.

Xu Zhi took out a large batch of transparent test tubes and arranged them on the ground. "Come on, get into the tubes nicely. Line up. Three hundred per test tube."

Influenced by the Mother Nest, the "ants" obediently lined up and entered the test tubes.

Next, Xu Zhi assigned an experimental serial number to every test tube.

He diluted gorilla blood, let droplets fall into each test tube, then controlled the Mother Nest to make them pierce their own skin. Their bodily fluids mixed with the gorilla blood, and the immense blood rejection reaction killed them instantly.

He was no advanced biologist. What he intended to do was simple and crude—something even children understood: survival of the fittest.

After the blood was mixed, any that could not endure the rejection reaction had to die! Over two days of experiments, countless batches of test tubes went through tens of millions of giant beetles.

In the end, beetles in test tube samples 1042, 2041, and 2415 mutated. They began to merge with the gorilla blood, successfully endured the genetic rejection reaction, and survived.

But surviving did not necessarily mean they had perfectly accepted the genes. It could also mean the species had become deformed.

From the three test tubes, he selected the most successful sample: the creature from test tube 2041.

It was a tiny, exquisite species even smaller than an ordinary ant, thickly furred and resembling a black-armored ape. He named it an Insect Ape. Unfortunately, it was not bald as Xu Zhi had imagined. Its entire body was covered in luxuriant hair, and its head was naturally full of it as well.

Inside the transparent test tube, the ape pounded on the glass wall and roared loudly in strange, incomprehensible sounds.

Listening to the syllables, it sounded like, "Xie... ding?"

"Bald!"

"Bald!"

The sound gradually turned into a familiar word.

"????"

Xu Zhi was instantly dumbfounded.

I wanted you to become bald, but you ended up with a thick head of black hair—and now you're wildly mocking me for being bald?

Brother, that's going too far!

Baldness was clearly just a short-term side effect of chemotherapy. After stopping treatment and recovering properly for a month, his hair would grow back.

One look was enough to tell this was no good species.

Xu Zhi took a deep breath and felt like crushing it to death. "Perhaps I am the only Creator in the world to be mocked for baldness by a creature I created."

It had only just been born, yet it dared mock the great Creator who had given it life? What outrageous defiance! This species was surely cruel, vile, mad, warlike, and a scourge upon all living things. It had to be dealt with!

But after thinking it over, he decided against it. After all, only one mutation fit for survival had emerged after so much natural selection. He could not kill it yet. He would endure this insult for now, write it down in his little notebook, and kill it later.

And this pitiful creature had no idea that the instinctive roar it made upon birth had caused a certain petty, grudge-holding Creator to bear a deep resentment, bringing its race an incomparably troubled fate in the ages to come.

"Little brother, we'll settle this score another day."

Xu Zhi took a deep breath and put it back into the Experimental Field, allowing the Insect Ape to reproduce.

Cell division accelerated: ten thousand times! This strange Insect Ape swiftly died, ending its sinful life of roaring "Bald!" Yet in a short time, it rapidly reproduced into a tribe of tens of thousands, walking across the ground like a dense swarm of black ants.

"Bald!"

"Bald!"

"Bald!"

The delicate, tiny Insect Apes wandered unconsciously through the Sand Table. They ran about beneath the giant in the sky, lively and joyful, releasing collective screeches.

"Are you poisonous or something?" Xu Zhi was speechless. After introducing gorilla genes, he now planned to introduce a second gene: the White Ant Gene.

This time, however, he failed.

He repeated the process more than seventy times, ending the "Bald!" lives of over a hundred thousand Insect Apes, yet not once did any successfully merge with the white ant genes.

"The species level must be too low. They can't accommodate too many genes at once."

Helplessly, he set aside the white ant genes and began accelerating the Insect Apes' cell division ten thousandfold, letting them reproduce in vast numbers as he waited for them to develop intelligence and civilization of their own.

But no matter how many generations the Insect Apes reproduced, they still showed no sign of intelligence. They only continued roaring, "Bald! Bald!"

Xu Zhi thought for a moment, then suddenly realized something.

"I'm such an idiot. With cell division accelerated ten thousandfold, if a person's lifespan were only a dozen seconds, how would they have time to think? To create civilization? Language? Writing?"

"Should I return their cell division evolution speed to normal? But waiting for them to reproduce normally would take too long. Humans took thousands of years to develop civilization!" He began searching through the Mother Nest's information, certain there had to be a solution.

Sure enough, there was.

According to the Zerg's unit of measurement, onefold equaled one year.

A cell division speed of ten thousandfold meant that one day was equivalent to ten thousand years passing.

This acceleration caused creatures to be born, mate, and die in seconds, leaving them no time to think. Their brains simply could not withstand such terrifying division speed. They could only rely on vast population numbers, instinctive survival of the fittest, and ultra-fast adaptation to their environment.

However, when cell division was adjusted to one hundredfold, another change occurred.

At that point, a creature's brain could begin to withstand a hundredfold division speed. A brain, brain cells, and neurons dividing one hundred times faster would make its thoughts accelerate a hundredfold.

"Their bodies accelerate a hundredfold, and so do their thoughts. That means the flow of time for them is accelerated a hundredfold." Xu Zhi considered it, then gave the Mother Nest an order:

"For this area, cell division speed: one hundredfold."

After adjusting the cell division speed, these ant-sized Insect Apes began thinking a hundred times faster—and their movements somehow kept up with their minds.

Because every cell in their bodies was dividing madly at a hundredfold speed, rapidly burning their lives to release energy, their movements became incredibly fast, as if they had opened the Eight Gates.

The entire Sand Table now seemed to exist in a time-accelerated world, everything crazily turning into afterimages.

He immediately grew curious and asked the Mother Nest's secondary brain, "Can I undergo a hundredfold cell division acceleration myself?"

The Mother Nest answered mechanically:

"No. This is a racial ability exclusive to the Zerg. Only after transplanting Zerg cells can one undergo a hundredfold cell division acceleration. At that time, brain cells will be dividing a hundred times faster, making the world feel one hundred times slower. Furthermore, the hundredfold cell division throughout the body will release powerful strength, allowing physical movements to keep pace with accelerated thought."

Movement and thought synchronized—wouldn't that mean a person's entire life was accelerated a hundredfold? A true berserk state of "burning life"? Xu Zhi thought about it, then shook his head. "If I accelerated myself a hundredfold now, my Cancer Cells would also divide a hundred times faster. Wouldn't I instantly reach terminal cancer and die?"

While Xu Zhi spent two days experimenting on the Insect Apes, the Great Sandbox on the other side, accelerated ten thousandfold, had experienced another twenty thousand years. Some powerful species had already appeared.

Trees towered into the clouds.

Enormous species emerged in great numbers, entering a terrifying era similar to the Jurassic Era.

The largest were beasts—armored creatures with black disks atop their heads. They had already reached the size limit Xu Zhi had set: about the size of a cat.

To the ant-sized Insect Apes, such a size was like humans encountering an ancient Tyrannosaurus nearly a hundred meters tall.

"I wonder how they'll survive?"

After some thought, Xu Zhi directly slowed the Great Sandbox's ten-thousandfold cell division speed to one hundredfold as well, a speed capable of supporting thought. After all, they needed to be synchronized.

"The experiment is complete. Find a place in the Sand Table and release these ancient Insect Apes."

Wearing blue laboratory shoe covers and carrying three hundred Insect Apes in transparent test tubes, Xu Zhi walked across the orchard floor, over patches of lush green miniature valleys and through delicate, flourishing miniature forests.

Trees began collapsing, the ground shook, and countless species in the deep forest fled in panic.

"Here will do."

Xu Zhi released these experimental Insect Apes into a great canyon surrounded by green trees in the southern part of the Sand Table.