I Reincarnated Into A Single-Celled Organism! - I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 174

Although most of the students attending were younger than me, and the talk was aimed at them, I found myself needing a lot of what Erika said to fill in the holes that were missing in my common sense. They believed it was because I spent life as a commoner, or the disciple of some reclusive paragon, but the truth was simply that I had never explored this world until a short few months ago. My entire understanding of the world was the size of the small pond that I lived in. Thankfully, I was joined by the Lou sisters, Ronald, and Penelope as if by including other older students, it wouldn’t be as embarrassing for me to be there.

Erika’s explanation was starting to help me understand my origins in this world. I started as a tiny bacteria, absorbing sunlight and converting it into energy. They seemed to use the word energy. It only became mana once it was manipulated, sort of like magma was molten rock underground and lava was the name once it reached the surface. You collected and stored energy, and mana was what you expelled to affect the world.

Once I evolved and started predating on other creatures, my evolutionary path began to increase. Every time I consumed parts of another lifeform, I would take in a bit more energy. Since I started microscopic, I had a very low activation energy. Thus, I evolved relatively easily compared to humans. If that was so, why aren’t there more evolved bacteria like me? I didn’t need to wait long for that answer.

“What is the second part?” Someone asked. “You said there were two parts to evolution.”

“Yes…” Erika nodded, her voice far steadier now that she got into the rhythm of her explanations. “The second aspect of evolution is experience. Without a proper degree of understanding, one cannot step into the next stage of evolution. As you evolve, you become able to see the world differently. Humans do not see the world the same way paragons do, every level of paragon involves seeing the world differently. Your senses expand and grow, and the way you see the universe changes as well. Without a firm understanding of where you are and a solid direction on where you’re going, you will ultimately fail to evolve.”

“What happens if you don’t have enough understanding of the next stage?” One student asked.

“You will hit a bottleneck. You will stall at that stage and no longer be able to evolve, no matter how much energy you accumulate. If you attempt to evolve without the prerequisite understanding, then you will fail and you can even potentially damage your evolutionary path, making it so you can no longer proceed to a higher stage of evolution. However, if you do not have a bottleneck, you will evolve as soon as you gain enough energy, although there are techniques that can hold it back for a time.”

That was the final piece of information that I was missing. Bacteria could not think, so even if they stored enough energy, they’d never be able to evolve. Evolving meant understanding where you were going. To the creatures who lived in that pond, the pond was their entire universe. It was because I inexplicably had the experiences of my previous life that I was able to evolve back into a human. I already had the experiences, so I never once had a bottleneck.

How hard would it be to evolve into a multicellular organism when you were always only a single-celled organism? How difficult was it to evolve into a fish when you started without sighs? You’d have to understand to concept of seeing before you could do so! How could a creature imagine what it was like to walk on land when their entire existence resided in a pond? The simple answer was that very few ever would. It was because I had already been there that I could return to this state. I already knew where I was going, so the only prerequisite was to absorb enough energy to evolve.

“Yes, you…” Erika pointed to a woman I hadn’t noticed before.

It was the young and dainty beauty I had encountered once before during the fight earlier. I hadn’t seen her slip in, but she was surrounded by women who all looked at her reverently.

“My father said that one can evolve through battling stronger foes. Isn’t this true?”

“Battling can allow someone to gain experience,” Erika spoke carefully. “By battling someone stronger, you may gain inspiration into how their evolution has changed their ability to perceive the world. This experience can be vital for evolution. However, you won’t get any energy from them.”

I blinked. “Wouldn’t you get more energy the larger the enemy you take down?”

“The primary way you can absorb energy from an enemy is to consume it.” Erika grimaced slightly. “Of course, it is considered taboo to eat each other. People are willing to eat animals, but when it comes to sage beasts, not only is it very difficult to defeat one higher level than yourself, but most sage beasts get larger the further along they are along their evolution. Eating a thousand pounds of meat in a reasonable amount of time is tough even for a high-level paragon who no longer needs to eat to live, and all the energy in the bones, skin, and other inedible parts will also be lost, although such items are often used to make weapons or armor. There is also, of course, the ethical implications…”

“What ethics?” The Stride boy snorted. “I heard some monks are vegetarians…”

“Well, it’s not so simple. By the third or fourth evolution, most sage beasts have the intelligence of a human. They can speak, and some even can take on human form. When they die, they return to their beast form, but in the same way, we don’t eat humans, are you comfortable eating a beast that talks? Even if you are, that beast will likely have friends, and those friends would be offended by you eating them. Eating many beasts isn’t much different than going around eating humans.” Her words caused the boy to grow quiet, and even a few of the girls around him shot him an uneasy look, causing him to turn red.

“I-I wasn’t talking about those sage beasts…” he muttered unhappily.

“While it’s easy to find meat to consume for the first three paragon levels, it becomes increasingly harder. This is the concept of the trophic pyramid. If you remember, I mentioned autotrophs make their energy, and heterotrophs consume the energy of others. Well, this creates a pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid is the producer, the autotroph. The heterotroph that consumes the producer is called a primary consumer, and the heterotroph that eats the primary consumer is a secondary consumer. This can create a line of consumers, but the top of the food pyramid is the apex predator.”

“We’re the apex predator, right?” One girl asked nervously.

“We can be… but that depends on the ecosystem we find ourselves in. There are other ecosystems where powerful sage beasts consume humans and other ecosystems where humans consume sage beasts. Within this human province, we believe in the sanctity of all intelligent life, so there are limits to the sage beasts available to hunt, and thus also limits to how quickly we can grow evolutionarily. However, the important point I wanted to make is that at every trophic level, you step up, from producer to consumer to apex predator, there has to be more prey than there are predators. In a lifetime, a predator eats countless prey, so every level must have a tenfold increase in animals over the previous level. There must be tenfold as much grass as there are grass eaters. There must be tenfold as many grass eaters as there are consumers of grass eaters, and so on. Thus, by the very nature of the world, mortals are countless, and each level of paragon higher similarly decreases the number of individuals by roughly tenfold. There are fewer Flawless than there are Evolved and fewer Champions than there are Flawless. This is the nature of energy. It accumulates at the top.”

“Are you saying that we can’t reach the top?” The Stride boy asked with a frown.

“You are limited by the energy found in the ecosystem you live in.” Erika continued. “Now, there are techniques that allow people to absorb the energy from living beings directly, but such techniques are outlawed in this province. I don’t necessarily know everything about evolution, but I can tell you this. In this province, we have Lord Nikola. He sits at the top. You could say he is our Apex predator, but only within this province. Just as you must broaden your view of the world to evolve, you also must expand beyond the confines of this province if you wish to find greater energy sources. This is how lord Nikola became a lord. He left, and when he returned he had already managed to evolve into a Lord to challenge the former regime. If you wish to reach the top, you also must one day leave the safety of this province, but I warn you, few who leave ever return. Yes?”

A girl in the back was raising her hand and Erika stopped to point her out. “Um… you said that the higher levels are fewer… does that mean if we pull out far enough, consider wide enough, there is a true Apex predator, someone who sits at the top?”

“It’s possible…” Erika spoke after considering her question for a moment. “However, if such a being existed… then this province and the people in it would be nothing but an ant mound to him. Should he see fit, he could wipe us out with the wave of a hand.