SSD 5.13 - Plants and Predators

Chapter, delivered today as promised. I had fully intended to delve fully into exploring Caden's skill, but then, as so often happens with writing, I was diverted by an area that needed to be better explored. Even still, I feel like I could have delved much further into the complexities of the vast ecosystems that had been formed. Still, I decided to leave most of the that exploration for when such things are actually placed into the traversable portions of the dungeon.

And countless were the works of their hands, for Yamash loved all life, and lavished upon it their attention and care. And the world was full, effulgent with the life lavish upon it, left for mankind to cherish. Man, unsatisfied, choked away the life from the face of the world, clawed that they might have every bit, heedless that their grasp should destroy what they sought. And tears fell upon the world, as Yamash grieved, and fire shone upon the deep of the heavens, and all was light, and the world burned, as Yamash turned away, until, once more, balance was restored, and tears returned to run as rivers through the ash.

And, from the ashes, seeds sprung anew, and from the buried dens, animals returned. And Yamash planted a new seed, a dungeon, to bring forth life when it was lost. And great would be the cost thereof, should mankind forget its stewardship.

And Yamash split the light from the dark, birthing his children, and set them to watch over the world, breaking the paradise he had made. Man would be driven forth by ice and fire, and find no rest, save they find the balance between.

-From The Book of Gods, after the second cataclysm, all copies long since turned to dust.

==Caden==

I had been excited to try out my new skill, since I received it. It had been sitting as a motivator to get everything else out of the way, so that I could actually test it out.

Clearing out all of my past projects, grown rampant, had been enough to occupy more than a few of my minds, and I was finally finishing.

Wouldn’t take more than a couple seconds to dissolve everything.

However, while that would have granted any patterns I was missing, it wouldn’t have taught me how everything interacted together. Yes, I had a skill which told me how to make a functional environment, but these were not natural environments, and there were lots of ways to make an environment.

This one isn’t stable, which is why its interesting.

The way the explosive growth had lead many plant species, and a few animal species, to start tunneling through the bedrock itself, was testament to that. If I hadn’t set up the dungeon to reinforce the stone, and create a framework of density enhanced steel, it was likely that sections of the dungeon would have collapsed under the influence of the massively expanding growth.

And certainly there were odd plants that had cropped up, as well.

Okay, with the plants of this world, it might normally be hard to pick out some truly standout examples. Plenty of plants seemed to have some kind of elemental affinity, and I had seen far more of that among the ridiculous number of patterns I had recently acquired. Some plants had grown literally on top of some ore deposits, and had pulled that metal in. Under the influence of my dungeon’s rapid evolution the plants had learned to make use of the metal in various ways.

Perhaps the most mundane of those efforts had simply been incorporating structural lines of metal into the trunk of a plant vaguely like a palm tree. The plant was now more flexible and handled more weight without issue.

From there, the evolutions varied wildly. Some plants had leaves that were sharp like knives, grew metal thorns, or concentrated heavy metal traces into their tissues to make them poisonous, and some of the thorny ones had incorporated that same type of poison. Perhaps my favorite of the metallic one, a plant had grown up over a deposit of silver and gold, incorporating small bits of that into its leaves, making them look like they were outlined with filigree, and its flower, a deep midnight blue, was limned in silver, with stamen of gold. Its pollen filled the air in a faint shining glimmer when the plant was disturbed.

Considering that I’d seen some animals run out of that glittering dust with their eyes red and teary…

Probably some kind of defense. If nothing else, with enough of that pollen in the air, it is literally hard to see.

Cataloging how all the systems were interacting with each other, that was what had really been taking all of the time. It hadn’t helped that so much of the space had been truly overwhelmed by plants, forming not just a single layer of interaction, but rather a jungle equivalent. And just like a jungle, the canopy had a wildly different biome than the layers beneath it. Unlike a normal jungle, however, the accelerated evolution had forced things into far more than just a few layers. Anywhere that an individual resource made things different, or where a particularly unique plant had managed to wrest an area into its control, an entirely new ecosystem had sprung up.

It probably didn’t help that the light sources in the ceiling had been swarmed by the plants that managed to reach them, casting areas below into true darkness, rather than the heavily occluded shade they had been dealing with. Each area still had some lights that hadn’t been touched, the plants below them too busy sabotaging each other to reach them, though creepers of growth along the ceiling showed that those lights too would have shortly be overcome. The only area where the lights were mostly left to their own devices was one of the desert areas, and that seemed to be because one of the plants there had manifested an affinity with fire, while another, next to some metal deposits, had created metallic mirrors. Other plants had started creeping back in, but the remnants of ashes where burnt plants littered the ground showed that their predecessors had not survived their initial competition. Even now, where enough of either of the two dominant plants grew, no other species, including the other dominant type, could survive.

In truth, it might be best that I hadn’t been here, since my natural impulse would almost certainly have been to clear the plants away from the lights. Instead, I had gained this:

A jungle of a dozen different climates, where plants deprived of light had created their own solutions. A bioluminescent fungus grew within the trunk of a plant here, a symbiosis where the plant shared some of its nutrients in exchange for the light, there a plant’s xylem had begun to glow with actinic white lines, from a distance transforming the leaves and main stem into a brilliant fractal surrounded by the green glow of reflected light. In other places the plants had darkened to the purest matte black, deepening the gloom of the shadows into a true absence of light, as the plants looked like a void had been cut into the world, absorbing even the tiniest fragment of light.

Even stranger, and more magical, adaptations had come forth, as well. One plant was surrounded by a nimbus of sourceless light, a gentle glow suffusing the air itself, pretty sure its not using teleportation to get that effect, like I do, while another had lines of light shimmering about it in a private aurora. High energy interactions with the air, or just a similar light effect? Some things were even stranger.

A few plants had gentle flames that burned upon their leaves, the flames almost invisible save for the light, only flickering into reality in half real glimpses, while others, like those from one of the deserts, had flames that were decidedly less friendly. If they had also managed to burn away their neighbors in the past, however, no signs remained, any ashes long since having fueled the growth of new plants. Now the surrounding plants were simply immune to the heat, though still crowding in to take advantage of the heat, or they had developed their own opposing elemental influences, like water, ice, or earth, and even one strange plant that burned with a fire that was cold. A few of the metallic plants had constant humming sparks of electricity, casting off tiny arcs of brilliant light, lighting up the world around them in a constant barrage of flickering light.

Perhaps the strangest of all, were several plant varieties that had shadow magic. Darkness clung to them like dew, beading up on the leaves, or formed a mist in the air, or wavered in the air as a dark inversion to the aurora I had seen before. These plants thrived in the darkest places, adapted to the dark, and actively dimmed the light that grew near them.

Pretty sure darkness isn’t supposed to work like that.

I was, in fact, absolutely certain that darkness was supposed to be nothing more than an absence of light. If I wasn’t already dealing with magic this might have been enough to make me rant, but as it was, it got no more than a shrug.

Sure, darkness as a force of its own, why not? Not any stranger than the cold fire.

Not any stranger than a lot of my life, lately.

Still for all that I rolled my eyes, and was a little exasperated by the world lately, all of the shards were one whole, as so I was also buoyed up, not just by the vast array of wonders I had access to, but the primal satisfaction that came as several shards were engaged with the slogi and social interaction.

I was not jealous of that shard, because I was that shard. Everything it felt, I felt also. And my wonder was reflected into it, as well, even if that was not its focus.

Most of the plants had been cataloged, between all the shards that had worked together. Our focus had switched to the equally strange animals.

Well… they’re not all that strange.

Some of the insects and tiny plate-mice were practically untouched. A few adaptations to make them poisonous, or grant them defenses against dangerous plants and animals, and there wasn’t much to change beyond that. Not that some of them hadn’t made that leap, as well, but there was a niche for the small scavenging or plant eating insects, and so that niche remained filled.

The plate-mice that had grown to almost human size in one of the swampy areas were interesting, but almost mundane against so many of the other adaptations, looking like something that would only have been out of place due to its size. If it didn’t have the exoskeleton, now thickened with added flexible sections, it could have just been another large mammal species. As it was, due to the size it looked like a cross between an insect, an armored reptile, and a mammal.

Just needs some feathers and we can add in the bird category, or some gills to make it amphibious.

Actually, considering its in a swamp… wouldn’t be surprised.

As it was, the lungs had already expanded and grown more efficient, allowing it to hold its breath for a long time under the water.

Would have fit right in, in the ancient past. What was it, the cretaceous, the mesozoic, when there was a lot more oxygen and the insects were massive? Eh, probably, got the era wrong, not that it matters. Not like anyone here is going to correct me, either way, even if I did mention it.

Regardless, I had figured out why plate-mice, and rats, had some version of chitin instead of the fur I was used to.

It had taken a little time, but the tiny normal versions wandered all over the various biospheres. In tracking some of them, I had watched the same ones wander into both the desert and into the icy jungle wastes. Neither one appeared to bother them. They still were careful of the extreme temperatures of plants covered in fire or ice, but even then they sometimes darted in close for a moment to gather a bit of food. All of which meant their chitin was extremely thermally insulating.

Probably, that kind of adaptation simply hadn’t been mutated into, or wasn’t work whatever else it cost to maintain, on Earth. Here, given that a massive surge of heat was rapidly melting away a winter that always the longest season, it was more than merely a useful adaptation. It was likely there were few places that the adaptation wasn’t a necessity.

Still, those were far from the most interesting creatures around.

I hadn’t planted any of… whatever the juvenile Adar were called, leery of growing plants that could become people.

Sure it’s probably normal for them, growing up in a kill or be killed environment…

Regardless of what they felt about it, it still made me uncomfortable. Sadly, I suspected that they needed an adversarial upbringing to go through their various stages and become fully people. If nothing else, their fully ambulatory carnivorous plant phase needed to prey on something.

Of course, some of the plants I had planted had managed the same type of adaptations. Some were just slightly mobile, acting as more active Venus fly trap equivalents, while others were still rooted, but otherwise fully capable of reaching out to entangle, strangle, cut, pierce, or otherwise be a terrible inconvenience for anything that got too close. Still others, had managed to become fully mobile. Regardless, I had saved categorizing all of these types for when I looked at the animals, since they interacted with the biosphere more like animals.

Mostly, the ambulatory plants had become some version of predators, but some had simply evolved to deal with the challenges of the light conditions. One particular type, which evolved from a plant that grew in the crooks of the larger trees, feasting on the accumulated leaves, had responded to the change by going to find light and food itself. It wandered around the forest, gathering dirt, leaves, and other detritus, and then held them in specialized roots at the core of the plant, the decay fueling the nutrient needs of the plants. Periodically it would pause near the brightest light it could find, its leaves unfurling from where they had been pressed against the vines, extending outward until the plant resembled a peacock, the vines forming a fan that curved toward the light, to get as much as possible. Confronted with an herbivore, it would fold up its leaves, cracking its vines like whips. None of the herbivores here were exactly harmless, but I’d only seen one that still tried to eat it, but that particular herbivore species seemed particularly ornery anyway, and the plant had swung up into the trees to get away. The other herbivores had decided that there was plenty of sessile food that didn’t fight back.

Guess when you are a plant, the herbivores are the big scary predators. Well… cats like to chew grass and such at times, but that is not their primary focus.

From a plant’s point of view, the carnivores keep them safe from the scary creatures that like to eat them. They even tend to leave bones, and other bits, that fertilize the soil.

Regardless of what the plants might think of them, and some of the plants here might actually be thinking, which is odd, there were far more herbivores than their were predators. Whatever The System did to push evolution forward here, while it did seem to drive the production and proliferation of reproduction, and therefore food, it didn’t change the fundamental way that the food web was structured. The energy might be supplemented by mana in places, but ultimately the most efficient biomass production or reapplication came from things like plants and fungus. Then they in turn supported herbivores and a multitude of scavengers, which then supported predators. The actual web was far more complicated, and something that was a predator on the small scale, feasting on insects, many of which were also predators, might have a larger predator, and that larger predator might have its own.

Still, the nature of things meant that there were far more herbivores than predators. Still, as the kangaroos, bison, and hippos of Earth had been demonstrating for countless millennia, just being an herbivore did not mean harmless. The strong muscles that allowed them to search out food efficiently, and grow so large, also turned them into fiercesome opponents when provoked.

The tangled nature of the jungle meant that larger herbivores tended to fall into one of a few types. Either they were hyper mobile, like monkeys, were narrow in profile like ferrets or snakes, or just bulky and pushed things out of their way, like cattle.

The body types had, in fact, allowed me to see an herbivore that closely resembled a snake. Like a snake, it mostly ate food whole, swallowing an entire small branch, then using an incredibly sharp set of teeth at the front to come together like axes and severe it, allowing its strong muscles to compact everything, then using its long digestive tract to gradually break the food down. They spend most of their time sleeping, allowed the slow digestion to proceed, curled around trees like vines. Unless something tried to eat them, they mostly ignored the multitude of animals that climbed, crawled, or otherwise moved across them, gathering bits of dust and leaf fragments, just another vine in a world of them.

If I couldn’t see their mana and internal structure, I doubt I would’ve ever noticed the ones resting.

At the top of the food chain were an array of predators, using a multitude of various strategies. They, at least, were mostly quick to categorize. While they often had excellent stealth, they tended to be large and become highly noticeable when they took down prey. Though most were larger, a few of the apex species were smaller pack hunters. There was even an insect species that acted as a swarm to rapidly burrow into an animal to kill it. If that insect wasn’t also eaten by opportunistic predators feasting on the larval form left behind in carcasses, as well eaten by a few brave animals that snatched individuals from the swarm, they could have become like a horde of locusts, rampaging across all the animal populations.

As it was, these, and more, had all been categorized, and it was time to finally try out my skill.