Chapter 5

Cilia are little hair-like projections on the surface of a cell. An organism can use them to move their cellular body, but some can also use them to move things around outside near the surface of the cell. I couldn't see them, and, if it wasn't for my education, I would have had no clue they were there. The only thing I would have been able to do is take advantage of what they could do.

No matter how good I got at using Osmosis to suck and propel water, the basic truth was that it lacked any fine motor control. The very act of absorbing water or expelling it ended up disturbing the water around it. The very chemicals I was trying to reach ended up being blown away by my tampering as often as I was brought to them. The practice had caused me to successfully obtain the chemicals I was aiming for, but it was still a tedious process at best.

Cilia was a game-changer. My agility stat had increased to one. I could move my body around rapidly now, snatching pieces of chemicals with ease. A process that might have taken fifteen minutes in the past could take seconds now. Well, time was funky when you were microscopic. I had no clue how much time passed by. I had no grasp on time. Yet time continued to pass, and I continued to do my best to gain experience.

I would have expected my leveling speed to increase, but everything I did to increase the speed of experience gained seemed to be offset by the high levels. I was now level nine. Part of me wondered what a level one hundred prokaryote would be like. Then, I realized it didn't matter. A level one hundred prokaryote would still be nothing. What was even the point of continuing like this? As the inevitability of it all set in, I was starting to lose my drive. Just one more level, and then I'd let history be history. However, I didn't see the next level. What popped up in my vision wasn't what I expected.

[You have reached the maximum level for an Autotrophic Prokaryote. If you wish to proceed, you must evolve. Your level will return to level 1. Do you want to evolve into a Heterotrophic Prokaryote?]

I stared at the words for a while in stunned silence. It took a while for my mind to process them, since they seemed completely foreign to me. However, when it all finally clicked, I nearly screamed out loud.

Hell yeah!

An autotroph was a creature that created its own food. I had considered it before, but once I unlocked Cellular Wall, I was pretty sure I was a plant of some kind. With no attack ability of my own, my only choice was to remain low and hope I wasn't eaten. Once, I had almost been eaten, and since then I had fearfully awaited the next dangerous event. Thankfully, it never came.

I could now evolve into a heterotroph. They were still the simplest of single-celled organisms, so I was still a prokaryote, but I was no longer food waiting to be eaten. Heterotrophs found their food supply. In other words, I became the hunter. I had been nothing but prey before; even once getting Cilia, I was only prey that could run. Now, I could eat other things and take their energy.

Congratulations! You have evolved into a Heterotrophic Prokaryote.

You have unlocked the skill Pilli.

I felt a surge of energy flow through me, and I felt my body growing. I was more than I was before. I knew that for certain. I immediately went to look at my status.

Name: ???

Evolutionary Form: 2

Evolution Level: 1

Species: Heterotrophic Prokaryote

HP: 10/10

Stamina: 10/10

Attack: 10

Mana: 0

Defense: 13 (17)

Agility: 12

Skills:

Absorption Skill: Active Diffusion

Attack Skill: Pilli

Defense Skills: Encapsulation, Cellular Wall

Endurance Skill: Chemosynthesis

Health Skill: Photosynthesis

Movement Skill: Cilia

Perception Skill: Chemotaxis

Storage Skill: Selective Permeability

Support Skill: Osmosis

I let out an internal sigh of relief as I saw my status was still increasing. I had jumped at evolving without really thinking about the point of returning to level one. However, even though my level was one, I still had the HP and stamina I originally had. That got me thinking. Perhaps, all heterotrophic prokaryotes started with 10 HP. If that was true, then I was no stronger than anyone else at my level.

The other thing that caught my notice was that I now had an attack skill. Thanks to Cellular Wall, my defense stat was increasing at every level, and the Encapsulation was also amplifying with it. Now, with Pilli, I could increase my attack as well. I was no longer forced to run whenever I encountered an enemy. I said that, but I had only ever encountered one enemy, and my awareness of it had been vague from the beginning.

I gasped internally when I realized that, after evolving, my Chemotaxis had seemingly undergone an evolution too. My sense of chemicals used to be only a short distance away. My senses now extended a vast distance. It was so vast that I could see clusters of chemicals all wrapped together. I instinctively seemed to realize that these were, in fact, other cells. They varied in all shapes and sizes. Some of them were heterotrophs, like me. I could usually tell because they were moving around quickly and would often be chasing after something else. The rest were autotrophs.

Seeing this vast and busy world, I grew a little anxious. I could have been one of those helpless autotrophs being quickly devoured by some other cell. Although there were way fewer heterotrophs than autotrophs, there seemed to be about a tenfold difference. It wasn't just numbers that had protected me, but pure luck.

Any doubts I had over evolving went away, and I instead looked for a helpless autotroph to consume. Hey, it wasn't like I wanted to eat other things to survive. I realized with my evolution that my metabolism had increased as well. Even though I could still use Chemosynthesis, I quickly found the rate I consumed energy to be slightly higher than the rate I could gather chemicals the old-fashioned way. In other words, my own body required more energy to maintain its current steady state, the state otherwise known as being alive.

There was a reason for this. All of my skills had become amplified. Chemotaxis wasn't the only thing that got an upgrade. My Cellular Wall had increased defense, and Osmosis could absorb more material into my inventory. I had more control of my Cilia and could move much faster and with greater agility. To maintain this evolved body, I had no choice but to consume more, and the big bags of collected energy known as other lifeforms were my best shot at survival.

I picked a smaller lifeform, one that didn't appear to have any movement, as my first target. I activated my Pilli. It was a long appendage that came from my body. I struck the target with it, but nothing happened. I frowned a bit, and then pulled back the Pilli and did it again. I repeated this five times until I felt a pop. The resources that had been bound up started spreading, and I beat my Cilia to quickly use Selectively Permeability to allow in the ingredients that I needed. It would have taken me ten minutes to fill my inventory with resources, but killing this thing and taking its resources took less than a minute. Truly, heterotrophy was the way to go.

I went and found another organism and repeated it. I quickly found that my rate of killing food was far greater than my need to process it. I also didn't have a fridge, and my inventory was limited, so all I could do was let those corpses bleed out, the materials slowly spreading until they became indistinguishable from the rest of the environment. Ah well, there were more where that came from.

I had decided on my new task. I started going from organism to organism. I would wail on it with my Pilli until it exploded, then suck up as many resources as I could. After that, I processed the material to restore my stamina and then repeated it. This pattern continued until I killed my tenth creature, and then I got another level notification.

Congratulations! You have reached level 2.

You have unlocked the skill Pinocytosis.

Wasn't that a bit fast?

Up until that point, I had been leveling very slowly. Even with the increased rate of chemical absorption from killing creatures, I hadn't processed even a hundredth the number of resources it had been taking for me to level. I hadn't even been processing anything when I leveled there. This led me to only one conclusion: stamina and HP regeneration gave only a small amount of experience. Real experience must have been earned by killing enemies.

I couldn't stop myself from bringing up my status once again.

Name: ???

Evolutionary Form: 2

Evolution Level: 2

Species: Heterotrophic Prokaryote

HP: 20/20

Stamina: 20/20

Attack: 22

Mana: 0

Defense: 23 (37)

Agility: 22

Skills:

Absorption Skills: Active Diffusion, Pinocytosis

Attack Skill: Pilli

Defense Skills: Encapsulation, Cellular Wall

Endurance Skill: Chemosynthesis

Health Skill: Photosynthesis

Movement Skill: Cilia

Perception Skill: Chemotaxis

Storage Skill: Selective Permeability

Support Skill: Osmosis

"Holy crap!" I would have shouted that if I had a mouth.

When you reached your next phase of evolution, everything increased exponentially. Instead of increasing 1 HP per level, I'd be increasing 10. The same applied to my attack, agility, and defense. My defense when encapsulated nearly doubled.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel it either. I tried moving with my Cilia, and my movements made my previous ability feel like I was trying to race a cargo boat. Feeling invigorated by my influx of energy, I checked out my new skill. Pinocytosis was an absorptive ability. I immediately activated it and started to suck in material from the outside world quickly. The flow of the material came in like a vacuum, but it flowed specifically through the tip of my Pilli.

That's right. Pinocytosis is to sip.

That word didn't come from my education, but from a video game I had played. You could pierce an enemy and then suck out its insides like a mosquito. I realized that my Pilli wasn't for slapping opponents, but for piercing them. When combined with Pinocytosis, I no longer lost my ingredients with the outside world.

This was good, because along with my upgrade in the status came an increase in energy consumption. Thankfully, this appeared to be a balanced world, and my consumption wasn't outside of a realm I could handle. I had a feeling that my status would continue to rise, and my energy consumption would rise to match it. This also meant that the old way of leveling became obsolete, as I needed ways that allowed me to obtain nutrients to support my faster, stronger body.

I supposed that was the nature of things. Fast, agile beasts needed to eat rich meals full of nutrients. They'd take the energy a herbivore took over its lifetime, slowly consuming plants, and then consume it all for a single meal, only to need another a few days later. I was nowhere near a tiger or a cheetah, but now that I was moving, my consumption demands were bound to increase as well.

Thus, I began to eat. I would find an organism, pierce it with my Pilli, and then suck out its insides with Pinocytosis. With my last level, I now had enough room to contain all of the contents. Yet after consuming ten of them, I didn't level again. I supposed it would make sense that the requirements would increase. I reached twenty, then thirty … fifty … eighty … I finally killed the hundredth enemy, and I was finally starting to understand how the system worked.

Congratulations! You have reached level 3.

You have unlocked the skill Cohesion.