11 Starting with Something Small

Michael looked at the small insect squirming between his fingers. He had caught it fairly easily enough, and with just a mental note, the tiny creature disassembled into countless colored confetti of equaled size.

They looked a lot like pixels, and those pixels swirled into the air before being absorbed into Michael, who blinked afterwards. He felt nothing when those pixels entered his body, but he did note that there was now a single item – a model – within his assets folder.

It was a fire ant model.

With that, Michael could now populate his world with fire ants. Or so he had believed. When he finally returned back into his world and tried to do exactly just that, an error message appeared.

It only appeared when he tried to spawn a second ant. The first one was fine.

[Species required soul (minor) to spawn.]

Michael frowned at that. While it was easily solved since there were plenty of ants for him to digitalize in the outside world, ants were still ants. He would have to populate the world with bigger things.

Like much, much bigger thing.

He decided to think about that when the times come. For now, he would go and collect more ants. He would also be experimenting a little, checking what constitute as a minor soul.

From his understand of soul, there were several grades of souls. Minor, lesser, greater, grand – just to name a few.

Then there were also type of souls. Mortals. Immortals. Monsters. Divines. And so on. Humans would be considered to have greater mortal souls. Some people would have grand mortal souls or better.

It was rare to meet those people, however. There were only a handful of people in the world who had a grand soul let alone higher.

Of course, Michael had no allusion to go and collect human souls, just so he could spawn humans into his world, but he would need to spawn some humanoid in the future. Sentient lifeforms were said to have greater souls or higher grades.

Monsters, while sentient, were in a class of their own, and Michael wondered where he would be able to collect monster souls, just so his world could have monsters. His world was not going to be like the outside world. Magic and much more were all possible with his world.

Michael went back to the outside world to squash some ants colonies and steal their souls. Apparently, he just needed to kill them to claim their souls. Acquiring their model to spawn into his world was not that simple. He needed to be in physical contact to acquire that.

It did not take a long time for Michael to collect millions upon millions of minor souls. Each ant colony yielded upwards of a million, especially when it was a matured colony. It was pretty evil for him to just go and snuff out their life like that, but countless of ants died every day.

And it wasn't like they were dead forever. They would be reborn into his world with a completely new identity and a new life. Furthermore, his world currently did not have pesky humans or similar to wipe them out accidentally or indirectly.

Michael also collected other sorts of insects, acquiring their model for spawning as well as their minor souls for resources. All insects seemed to yield minor souls. One of them yield a micro soul, which sort of give him the idea of how small a soul could be.

Surely, at microscopic level, there were creatures with even smaller grade of souls. How small, Michael wasn't too sure.

Michael believed that he did not need to go that far to collect souls. Unlike the outside world created by Biblical God, his world did not need to have a complex ecosystem.

Everything could be simulated realistically but he would know that fact. He disliked fakeness, thus that was why he had spent so long to get the environment perfectly, even down to the minor details.

Besides, there were many benefits to having actual souls inhabiting his world. For example, if sentient being worshipped him, he could empower himself. That was how gods were able to become gods and to remain as such.

Gods with a capital G were no exception. Just that they could drawled power from far greater sources, and sometimes, they drawled power from within themselves. How was that possible? Michael wasn't sure. He would find out one day.

Since Michael wanted to be a God, he would have to start a religion of his own. Or at least let sentient beings living within his world knew who he was and their place within the grand scheme of things.

It seemed like a pain. But having more divine power allowed him to do a lot more things, which in turn benefits the inhabitants of his world.

A win-win scenario.

Michael continued to collect more and more models for his world, he realized that the models weren't necessarily needed to be alive. Any dead things would be fine.

Not to mention seemingly extended to inanimate objects as well, and those objects do not need a soul to spawn within his world.

It seemed that anything could be converted to a model for him to use through physical touch. Knowing that gives him a lot of ideas and a lot more options.

There was a nagging problem, however. People would definitely notice things disappearing, especially when things belong to them. Their sport cars for example.

Michael would love to have driven one in his lifetime. Well. Now he could drive a whole bunch. As soon as he steals some.