Chapter 8

I hadn't checked my status in a while. I was a bit surprised that Lysis was a crafting skill, just like Cohesion. At the time, I had just been happy that the curse I had accidentally imbued on myself had been resolved. Since I knew what it did, I didn't bother looking at my status. After all, every other number seemed to increase like clockwork. I had reached level ten. Soon, I'd be evolving, and then my numbers would increase by a hundred instead.

Phagocytosis made perfect sense as a new absorption skill. As for my new skill, Cellular Growth, I activated it immediately. I felt my body growing in size, but that's when a warning flashed.

Dangerously low energy supply!

I looked in my inventory and gasped. It had consumed almost all of my sugar in an instant. I growled internally and began consuming more prokaryotes. Very few put up even the slightest resistance. I soon restored my glucose sugars, but no sooner did I activate Cellular Growth than it happened again.

Dangerously low energy supply!

It wasn't my imagination; Cellular Growth demanded far too much energy! I didn't have enough storage of sugar to be able to do it. Glycolysis worked very efficiently compared to Chemosynthesis. I could consume sugar for as much stamina as I needed, but the sugar supply was the problem. Did I need to evolve before I could resolve this problem?

Despite all the skills I had now, was there nothing that could help me? I looked through the status a few times, trying to come up with something I was missing. That's when I fell on Lysis again. Lysis was a crafting skill. Its job was to break down everything into the simplest parts. It would destroy a cell, and ultimately process its parts. This was usually done with a specialized part of the cell called a lysosome. I noticed that after eating a cell, I'd continued to gain glucose for some time afterward, and after using up some glucose, it would sometimes restore itself even though I hadn't eaten anything else.

That led me to realize that Lysis also broke down other chemicals into glucose. It didn't break down everything, but I could extract glucose from various chemicals, and I had started keeping some of them in my inventory as well. The inventory had a weird way of working where I couldn't just store sugar. There was a limit to the amount of sugar I could hold, but that same limit didn't exist for other forms of chemicals.

This was the basis of diffusion. Every chemical had a concentration of particulates that could be absorbed. Having a lot of one chemical didn't always interrupt the storage of another. Instead of being like I had one storage that everything got put in, it was like I had a thousand stores, each one unique to a specific chemical, and every chemical overlapped the previous.

That's when an idea struck me. If Lysis could break down materials into glucose, then wasn't Cohesion the opposite? I took two glucose molecules and then merged them. Suddenly, a new molecule existed. Did I just make sucrose? That's two molecules in a plant. I could have made lactose for all I knew. No, that would involve combining two different sugars, galactose and glucose. I couldn't make such a product. That was the limit of this skill. Cohesion could bind two of the same molecule, but it couldn't combine two different molecules.

I started creating sucrose, and, after eating another few prokaryotes, I had all but tripled my sugar supply. That still didn't feel like it would be enough though. I tried to combine the sucrose molecules too, and was relieved to find it created some kind of poly-sugar, like glycogen. That was the complex form of sugar stored in liver cells. I started to build it up in my own body. Only when I had maxed every form of sugar I could construct with Cohesion did I decide to begin Cellular Growth again.

I discovered a few things. First off, there was a limit to my growth. I had to keep it very slow and deliberate. Glucose was my most readily available sugar. The two sugar disaccharides took more effort because I had to break them down into glucose before Glycolysis could take care of them. The polysaccharides composed of many sugars took even longer than that. This meant some limits would only be resolved by me eventually getting greater storage.

Interestingly, growing my size naturally increased my inventory. Thus, I continued to do so, eating and growing. Soon, I was leaving most of the prokaryotes in the dust. They were tiny creatures compared to me. Even the eukaryotes no longer looked as intimidating. They were perhaps about ten times my size. I'd struggle to use Phagocytosis, but I wasn't scared of them hunting me anymore. Of course, one of them eventually attacked me, and I fought back.

I struck it with my Pilli and shot Water Jets at it. It tried to mount an offense.

HP -10

It managed to do some damage by tossing out some kind of strange chemical at me. It burned my body. I didn't have pain receptors though, and my healing was able to resolve it quickly. The eukaryote fell, and I absorbed all of its nutrients. I had to. It wasn't an accident that I had attracted and attacked a eukaryote. I was no longer able to eat prokaryotes fast enough to maintain my body. It was worse than that, too.

I was feeling strains all over my body. I realized I had reached the limit of what I could be as a heterotrophic prokaryote. I couldn't grow any larger, even if I wanted to. Although my body volume increased, allowing my inventory to grow, that growth was not proportional to the demand. In other words, Glycolysis, which had easily maintained my energy before, was now struggling to do so. I had more sugar than Glycolysis could manage. This bloated body I had created might be powerful, but it was an energy drag.

That single battle against the eukaryote had used up 3/4 of my available energy. Although there were a lot of resources to absorb, it also took me nearly that much time just to regenerate the energy I expended. Without another evolution, I had reached a dead end. Prokaryotes had limits to their growth, as did all cells. The only way to get past them was to come up with a new method of growth.

Once I recovered, I moved on and attacked the next eukaryote. Each time, I'd require a fair amount of rest after. Some eukaryotes were difficult. Others didn't fight back. A few were even faster than usual. I hated them the most. As soon as they found themselves losing, they'd turn and flee. They'd dart away at speeds my bloated body couldn't match. At that point, I was left having wasted all that energy yet had gained nothing.

I almost died after encountering two fleers back-to-back. Thankfully, I encountered a less combative one next and improved my capacity to select eukaryotes worth the energy to fight and consume. Time continued to pass, and that's when I received the familiar text I had been waiting for.

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

I was a bit confused. I was certain my next step would be a eukaryote. At least I was officially going to be bacteria, but the 'colony' part confused me. How was I going to be a colony? There was only one way to find out! I clicked yes.

My body began to shimmer and glow, or perhaps that was all in my head. It wasn't like I could see light. After a little bit, I felt like the evolutionary process was over. I brought up my menu.

Congratulations! You have evolved into a Bacterial Colony. 

You have unlocked the skill Binary Fission.

Name: ???

Evolutionary Form: 3

Evolution Level: 1

Species: Bacterial Colony

HP: 100/100

Stamina: 100/100

Attack: 102

Mana: 0

Defense: 103 (197)

Agility: 102

Skills:

Absorption Skills: Active Diffusion, Phagocytosis, Pinocytosis,

Attack Skills: Pilli, Water Jet

Body Modification Skill: Cellular Growth

Crafting Skills: Cohesion, Lysis

Defense Skills: Encapsulation, Cellular Wall

Endurance Skills: Chemosynthesis, Glycolysis

Health Skills: Photosynthesis, Binary Fission

Movement Skill: Cilia

Perception Skill: Chemotaxis

Storage Skill: Selective Permeability

Binary Fission is a Health Skill?

I knew from my classes what Binary Fission meant. I also understood now what evolution meant by a bacterial colony. I thought my evolutionary path would take me to eukaryote, but it turned out I was missing a step. When you reached the limits of a single-celled organism, your only choice would be to go multi-cellular. Yet, saying I was multi-cellular now didn't quite make sense either. Each part was its self-existing organism, but it also functioned on a communal level.

I decided to activate Binary Fission. At that moment, I felt my body being torn apart and let out a cry, believing I was taking damage. A few moments later, I could sense a body next to mine. I looked over and nearly did a double-take. Is that really what I looked like? Well, once again, I couldn't see, but I could sense the chemicals in the second body.

I couldn't help but look at my status again, and that's when I noticed the HP and stamina were halved. The rest of my status was still the same, although half of my inventory was missing. Wait, if my brain was here, had I become two of me? I moved around the duplicate, and it moved around me in the opposite direction. After testing it, I was certain of it; just as I was thinking, it was thinking too.

There were now two of me!