Chapter 20

With eight cellular bodies, I was starting to see a rising problem. It was difficult to manage each of them. If I wasn't directly commanding them, they more or less went on autopilot, just replicating what I was doing. If I wanted them to work independently of each other, I had to personally control them, but it was like trying to control several RV cars at once. There was no artificial intelligence or complex algorithm I could give them so that they could use some kind of attack pattern.

As a result of this, I ended up losing more bodies than I cared to admit. I usually gained enough scraps from a kill that I could replace what I lost, but it was still frightening, especially when every death was a sudden massive hit to my HP. How did my guys die despite having so much HP? Well, when I didn't attend to them, anything could happen. I liked to call the events a catastrophic failure. These were events where a cell was eaten, or crushed completely.

I had already reasoned that size matters, and no matter how high your HP got, there was a qualitative difference between higher-order creatures and lower-order creatures. Some events, I realized were catastrophic things. For example, if you were consumed whole, there was little hope of escape. The pressure and internal environment of the creatures were enough for an almost instant death. Another example, although not one I was likely to experience soon, was jumping into a volcano. No matter how high your HP, you would likely die. That was, unless, you had some evolutionary advantage that allowed you to survive such an event.

Congratulations! You have reached level 4.

You have unlocked the skill, Apoptosis.

How long had it been since I last leveled? It was a bit hard to tell since I entered the dark zone. I didn't need to sleep. There were periods when I was digesting nutrients and preparing chemicals and then there were periods when I was killing. It all began to blend. How many creatures had I killed? I couldn't even recall which creatures were from this level and which creatures were from my previous level.

The only thing that differentiated now from before was that I had sixteen bodies now. This was more than I had any hope of controlling. Worst of all, I found that the distance. I had been so excited when I discovered that my bodies weren't the same as clones, but I was quickly realizing just how useless those extra bodies were.

I couldn't create two groups and hunt separately. As soon as they reach a certain distance, I would lose contact. They all had to be under my control and within my senses. I attempted to have two battles once, jumping back and forth between the groups, but it almost wiped us all out. The best I could do was send six to fight and have two stay back. Pincer attacks, blocking retreats, or any other more complex ideas were impossible without me manually directing them, and eight had already resulted in me losing some. An additional eight wouldn't do me any favors.

That Apoptosis skill also left me confused. It was very similar to Autophagy, but it didn't have any of the benefits that I could see. If Autophagy was self-eating, then Apoptosis was just plain suicide. It was known as programmed cell death, and I couldn't understand why such a skill would exist. Stranger still, it was labeled as a defense skill. How could destroying yourself be considered a defense?

I understood a small amount about the mechanism. It was designed to force cells in a multicellular organism to kill themselves. Why would a cell kill itself? If it wasn't working correctly and put the organism at risk, it should die. It could be hijacked by a virus, or perhaps it was cancerous and replicating out of control. Any one of these situations might cause the cell to kill itself for the betterment of the organism. I wasn't sure how such a thing would play out in my case, where I was somewhere between a multicellular and single-cellular organism. I decided to try it on one of my bodies.

-31,000 HP

-20,000 HP

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-16,000 HP

-16,000 HP

-10,000 HP

-10,000 HP

-10,000 HP

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-5,000 HP

-5,000 HP

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-5,000 HP

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-5,000 HP

Holy shit! The cell didn't just die, but it exploded. It swelled up and erupted, party flying everywhere. The closest cells were struck the hardest, causing a powerful amount of damage. Meanwhile, the farther the cell was from the explosion, the less damage it did. I had never expected programmed suicide to be a kamikaze attack. At least, when it came to biology, I was pretty sure the cells didn't explode violently.

Perhaps, its destructive properties had to do with how it died. Programmed cell death requires a ton of signals and the emptying of calcium. It took a certain amount of time. My cell death had been instant, and it seemed like the instant variety was very violent.

"This, I can use this," I muttered internally.

Since I couldn't use these cells of mine in a strategic battle, wouldn't it be better to bombard my enemies? I decided to try my new strategy. Once my cells had mostly healed, I began to play around with Apoptosis. My cell bodies would fly at the organism and once I got close enough I'd trigger Apoptosis. From a distance, I could just watch them explode like a missile. Most of the organisms were heavily damaged in a single strike but would manage to flee.

It turned out I needed to set up about three cells and blow them up in a cascade. This was enough to wipe out an organism and keep it from fleeing. Of course, that depended on the size of the organism. It should be noted that such an explosion would decimate eukaryotes and leave no biomatter to harvest. It was only effective on multicellular organisms that had these complex bodies. The area near the strike was instant death, but then I could harvest the rest of the body and find more than enough to replenish the damage of losing three cells.

I tried a few different methods. For example, I used one cell that was already damaged to see if the explosion was weakened. It wasn't, which made this a good skill to use as a last resort before a cell was destroyed. I also tried to get a cell body eaten, and then explode just as it entered the body. The timing had to be perfect, but the damage was catastrophic. Very few of these organisms survived just one cell body once it had already entered their inner lumen.

Although time was difficult to track, I felt like using Apoptosis still brought down my opponents faster than the previous method. It also felt fairly safe as long as I could handle the damage. Every time I blew up a cell, I felt a strange pang. It wasn't pain, but it felt like a mental stress. After blowing up a hundred or so, the mental strain became enough that I put it away for a while. It turned out the stress of Apoptosis had side effects that I didn't entirely understand yet. Thankfully, it wasn't long until I leveled once again.

Congratulations! You have reached level 5.

You have unlocked the skill, Decoupling.

Decoupling was a Buff skill. At first, I didn't understand what it was. Then, I used it.

Heat?

I felt my body become warmer. I then began to do some experimentation, and I finally figured out what Decoupling meant. Heat is a type of energy, but this energy can be transferred to other things. This is how power plants work. They heat water, and the movement of the water as it turns into vapor which then creates mechanical energy which then is released as electrical energy which travels to your house and then becomes energy for your toaster.

This method of energy production is the same regardless of type. Coal, Oil, Wood, Nuclear… they all work the same way. Heat water, make vapor, push turbines, and release energy. Coal, Oil, and Gas are all called fossil fuels because they came from once-living things. There was a living thing, it died, and as it decayed it became coal, oil, and gas.

In other words, living things make and store energy their entire lives. They take energy, turn it into chemical energy, and that energy is stored until either they need it, or they die and it gets burned and released as fire. So, if you burn chemical energy, you can either do stuff like move things or handle your metabolism… or you can generate heat.

This is the principle behind decoupling. Under normal circumstances, your body takes sugar and your mitochondria turn it into ATP, or cellular chemical energy. If you decoupled or broke the part in mitochondria that makes the energy, it still needs to be released somewhere, so you get heat instead. In other words, when I used Decoupled, my stamina would drop in exchange for heat.

This wasn't at the level of being warm-blooded or cold-blooded, but this was the start of managing heat. I had previously had issues traveling into deeper waters. It had been one of my biggest restrictions. My body couldn't handle the icy waters. Now, with Decoupling, I could generate my heat, and go much deeper.

At first, I was excited, but as I saw the even larger creatures deeper down in the abyss, I couldn't help but gulp. However, when it came to evolution, you could only march forward. There was no going back. I started to lower myself deeper than I had ever gone before.