Human Development Plan

Let me start with the conclusion I have arrived at. First of all, I was in a time period where humans hadn't evolved or been created yet. Which implied that currently, I was in the prehistoric era of my world.

This was the world I was born and raised in, the same world in which I met the foreigners and incredibly overpowered people—those classified as "Protagonists" by the collective System. And I, who became one of them recently.

Which also meant.. For the lack of better words.. That I would need to wait centuries, or years, before the first human would even come to be birthed. 

Fortunately, though, my fears were unfounded. 

Mystery, the foundational unit of the world that makes up everything. From why reality exists in the first place, to what makes up the laws of physics. Mystery, literally referred to the origin of everything and the reason for both the mundane and the divine.

In the time I came from, there were three ways to realize and express Mystery. And each conflicted with the other, and it should be noted that choosing one of these locked one out of the others.

Cultivation— The art of using Mystery to circulate through the body and soul, with the idea of becoming immortal.

The System— A divine machine that governs the laws of the world, and functions via an invisible field which allows people to awaken their unique abilities. 

And Magic. The school of thought concerning the study of Mystery.

Long story short, Mystery was the mysterious and supernatural power people possessed in my time. How you'd handle it, determined many things, including job offers. For what reason? I didn't know. Was Mystery going to handle my teaching job? Was Mystery going to awaken the ghosts within my bloodline to program for me? I didn't know.

Getting back on track, my idea was to use Mystery via the methods of the future to prematurely 'accelerate' the creations of humans.

So, from then on, I started to explore for an optimal environment.. From mountains that rose and sank into the earth, meteor strikes that engulfed everything with earthquakes and overturned seas, to studying the aquatic creatures in the sea.

It was as if there was never a dull moment with all I had to do. Even if the Human Development Plan, otherwise referred to as HDP by me because it was annoying to write it fully everytime onto the cave walls, encountered stagnation, I was sure that I wouldn't go mad.

And I did have the power to uphold my life in times of danger, thanks to the stats and Unique Skill that carried over from the future, awoken from the System.

For example, my incredibly s*itty Unique Skill [Sacrificial Lamb] was still with me. And I had no clue as to why, since the System hadn't been created yet.…

...

The moon rose and fell on the horizon, the sun rising and streaking across the sky before disappearing again. Trees grew, animals sprung up from the depths of the aquatic seas. and the seasons changed.

In an instant, hundreds of years flew by like a passing cloud. Memories blurred into the past and the HDP continued to expand forward.

There were problems and positive results in the process, however, never did HDP ever achieve success as much as it did now. 

It was a day where I emerged from outside my laboratory—a cave sealed off via a large boulder at the peak of a mountain. 

I had then proceeded to wander into the big stretch of a forest that was at the foot of the mountain, my destination, the prairie where I conducted ecosystem experiments for the HDP .

The river that flowed from the ocean through here was being drunk by frequently appearing animals on the side. Birds chirped through the woods I came from, as herds of sheep and cattles moved through the prairie, bathed in by the blinding sun under a blue sky dotted with white clouds..

I saw some familiar species, however, most were ones I didn't recognize. There were birds which could slice through boulders with their beaks, fish that baited land animals to become their food, plants that absorbed the blood of dead animals.

These rapid changes in species were the results of my HDP experiments on the ecosystem, by intentionally sabotaging or modifying environmental and physical factors. and over-saturating them with Mystery over time.

—-And then I made eye contact with a turtle, breaking my thought process.

It wasn't just an average turtle of some random subspecies that formed due to the HDP—- At that moment, it seemed to possess an uncanny human intelligence, maintaining eye contact with me before breaking off when our eyes met.

Curiosity piqued, I approached it. It didn't flinch or retreat like most creatures did, standing its ground and bowing its head down to face the ground. I wanted to reach out a hand to touch the turtle, but to my astonishment, the turtle shuddered in a small light. I felt a bit of the Mystery residing in my body being sapped out, before the turtle spoke out one word. 

Or rather, a name.

"D..Deus?"

It was my name.