Chapter twenty three: Humanity
Humans.
The reason Caelum had avoided creating them for so long was simple.
He didn't think a weak and terminally ill human like him had the right to do something so absurd, he was slowly decaying from the inside out, and playing god felt like a cruel joke.
He was just a desperate man.
But. That was story of past now.
After the quill became his second nature, after he spent months of bending the world's common sense with the quill, after drawing creatures from nothing into existence, and finally after shaping time itself a a world he made himself.
That moral barrier holding him back had crumbled. The more he created, the more his moral restrictions shattered.
'Right and wrong are concepts for people who have time left to sit around debating them.' caelum pondered, sitting on the chair with his hands on the long bronze table.
He wanted a cure and that was all.
"Ahhh!" Caelum let out a frustrated groan, dragging his fingers through his hair with enough force to make it sting. "No matter how I look at it, I should just skip the whole 'gorilla' phase and jump straight to humans."
His words echoed faintly before dying out in the white room.
If one were to look according to earth's time flow, Caelum had been hunched over the bronze table over the past two hours, making mental notes and scribbling plans, organizing tests he hadn't begun yet.
But down below, in the world he had drawn, time surged like a river running wild.
He stood, stretching a little. His body didn't feel stiff or anything, as there were no physical changes inside the painting world.
After taking a glance towards the world stabilizer and he let out a low hum.
"By now... a year or two must've passed down there."
It was hard to believe that it had only been a couple of hours according to earth's time, since he'd drawn those animals into the world below.
"Yeah." After grabbing the quill, he spinned it once between his fingers before gripping it tight. "Let's go and check."
In truth, learning about human biology was never the problem.
The real problem was the unique sickness caelum had.
Caelum's body harbored a parasitic black substance, it was vileand incomprehensible. It clung to his heart like it had was parasitizing him.
He'd tried to understand it Using his willpower to examine it, peeling it apart layer by layer. But every time he looked, it remained indescribable.
"I couldn't learn a damn thing about it," Caelum muttered, narrowing his eyes. "And looking into another person won't help either. No one else has it except me."
Afterall, it was a thing that didn't belong in any normal body.
That was what drove him here. That was why he stood at the edge of another absurdly inhuman decision.
What caelum wanted to make was humans like him, each one built from his own blueprint. They would have the same body type, same blood and same sickness.
A few humans who'd have the same illness as him. Maybe then he could understand it, giving him a way to cure it.
Caelum willed himself into the world below.
In a blink, Caelum's form shimmered into existence within the world below. He hovered slightly above the ground, the wind gently brushing against his shirt as grass bent beneath him.
'The world seemes like it had changed quite a bit.' those were caelum'd first thoughts. Time had passed on a much faster pace, just as he predicted.
Trees looked older, and even a few birds could be seen roaming the cloudy sky.
It was way more lively than before.
Caelum looked around, then took a slow breath.
"I'll base all the humans off my own body," he said softly. "That way, every one of them will have this illness… and I'll finally have test subjects that can help me find a way"
His gaze drifted forward, past the hills and rivers, toward the untouched lands.
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The wind was quiet in the open field. Green grass swayed like an ocean of blades, peaceful and endless under the afternoon sky.
Caelum stood still taking in the silence, until a rustle broke the silence.
His head tilted slightly. "...Hm?"
thump!—
From the bush nearby a rabbit burst out, sprinting like hell was on its heels. Its tiny legs blurred across the ground, ears flopping, eyes wide with raw terror.
Caelum had as expressionless. "The hell? Wait-"
His instincts screamed louder than his thought process could.
Without thinking, he shot upward, his body lifting smoothly off the ground. Thanks to the stabilizer's exclusion of his existence from the world's laws, flying here was as easy as breathing. There was no resistance from the gravitational force.
And it was just in time.
CRASH.
A massive lion burst from the same bush, practically erupting into the field as it lunged, jaws snapping. One second later, and the rabbit was done for.
Crunch.
Caelum hovered a little higher, frowning as the lion stood over its kill, blood staining its golden muzzle. The beast didn't even notice him—just tore into its prey with instinctual precision.
"...Huh." Caelum narrowed his eyes. "That's... one of the cubs I created, isn't it?"
Caelum was astonished so much his eyes were wide open.
"It's one of those cubs... and it definitely looks grown enough." Caelum muttered under his breath.
'Well Clearly. Time flows differently here now, maybe even few years had passed for the creatures below while i was scribbling notes in my little white bubble upstairs.' caelum analysed what was going on while hovering in the air.
"Guess this one had plenty to eat," he muttered.
Birds, Rabbits and even reptiles. Everything he'd drawn was now part of the food chain.
Caelum glanced at the lion again, then down at the spot where he'd just been standing.
A slow exhale left his lips.
"If I hadn't flown up… I'd probably be lying there too, torn in half like that rabbit."
There wasn't fear in his voice, just an odd sort of amusement.
Because even now, even after bending the laws of time, of life, of reality itself, he was still just a human.
A squishy bag of blood and bones. His exclusion from the world's rules didn't mean he couldn't get mauled. It just meant gravity wouldn't help hold him down while it happened.
He floated above the lion, watching it devour the rabbit without care.
"It's still beautiful," he spoke to the air dryly. "The circle of life really is beautiful."
After scratching the back of his head. Caelum turned, slowly drifting higher as he scanned the forest edge.
There were more creatures out there. But the lion cubs where the only predators he had created, "After humans, i should add a few more animals from earth."
And somewhere in the distance, where he planned to draw humans, he wondered just how much more dangerous this world would become once they arrived.
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Caelum floated silently above the grasslands, as the he wind rolled gently across the open fields.
His gaze was fixed on the large number of lives below.
A large number of cows filled the area, all sharing the same soft cream coloration they roamed the fields in slow-moving herds. Smaller knots of sheep huddled together here and there in the fields, their wool now thick and somewhat matted from years of unchecked growth.
"…I didn't think so many of them would survive," Caelum looked at them from above with his eyes fixed on the sheeps.
'Maybe the sheeps were not so lucky, their quantity is very less compared to the cows.' trying to assess the sutation he looked twords the forest, where many of the sheeps might have wandered and met their demise.
The distance between this wide grassland and the forest where predators, the lions roamed freely wasn't exactly vast. And somehow, these livestock still flourished.
'Maybe because they outnumber them?' he thought, frowning slightly.
his boots brushed lightly against the grass as he lowered himself toward the field, with a soft tap he landed on the green lands.
'It feels surreal no matter how much i see!'
Caelum suddenly had a gentle expression on his face, seeing a world he had envisoned into existence now pulsing with life.
His eyes slowly turned toward the far-right edge of the field, where a shallow incline rose and plateaued into a flat patch of land. The grass there was short, likely grazed clean by animals before they migrated elsewhere. No trees or rocks were present, just an clean and untouched open stretch.
"That should be the perfect place," Caelum muttered and started toward it, his shirt fluttering lightly as he walked across the field. When he reached the clearing, he paused, rubbing his chin.
'Creating just one man and one woman wouldn't be enough, that would too close to some mythology at best with no fixed chances of survival.' caelum tried to calculate everything before he could make a move.
To him, creating a couple of human felt too slow and fragile. What if one of them caught a disease? Or tripped into a river?
What caelum needed was numbers. A population that could endure, grow and multiply quickly—and most importantly, give him the chance to study the illness.
"Creating just a lcouple of male and female obviously won't work," he murmured aloud. "For them to populate fast enough… at least ten?"
He kept thinking, racking his brain.
"No—twenty," he decided at last, firming his stance. "Ten men, ten women. That way, I can study their way of adjusting with the illness, even their social behaviour and physical differences that would be affected by the illness."
The tip of the quill lifted in his hand, hovering before the empty air like a maestro about to conduct the first note of a grand symphony.
"They'll need to survive, too," he reminded himself. "From the lions… and nature. So I'll need to give them some basic knowledge as well? No... I should probably make them similar to a normal human with no extra benifits," He poured his willpower into the quill in a slow rate, "the only thing they will have similar to me is my biological blueprint, so they can all have my illness."
Coming to a decision caelum made a stroke across the air, and the reality bent.
A low hum filled the clearing, and in the next moment, forms began to take shape from the surrounding energy.
The grass around him fluttered slightly as human bodies began to form from nothing.
It was like fog sculpted into flesh and bone. First only the silhouettes formed, then muscle, skin, and hair. Features sharpened, eyes formed, and slow and study breaths began.
Ten men and ten women stood side by side, barefoot and naked, their eyes slowly blinking open as they looked around with confused but calm expressions. All of them had physical difference, some shorter, some taller, a few more muscular, but nothing too special
They looked around slowly, taking in the wind, the grass, the sky and the life they recieved.
Caelum lowered the quill slowly, exhaling without realizing he had been holding his breath. 'ugh, i do hope they will discover the need of clothes'
Caelum wasn't flustered by the naked humans, afterall they were his own creation.
A group of twenty human standing on the edge of a field, in a world where there was nothing except a few species of animals
Caelum watched them in silence, because they were based off the same general tamplate, his own body
And thus, humans were born.