I Reincarnated Into A Single-Celled Organism! - I Reincarnated into a Single-celled Organism! - Chapter 25

Congratulations! You have reached level 6.

You have unlocked the skill, Antibodies.

My inevitable battle with the kingfish was not going to come any time soon. Even if I collected all sixteen million cell bodies I could create now, my physical size would only equal about one of its eyeballs. Of course, I didn’t need my cell bodies to touch each other to be functional. Most of the time, I was spread out into a vast network, a cloud of destruction. Different cell types were working on different things, but it all contributed to my survivability as a biota.

At this point, I was finding my war to not be against the multicellular organisms, but the unicellular ones. Protista had seemingly grown far more interested in my presence. They liked targeting different groups. They never went against fighting units, but my factory units were under constant attack. My macrophages were functioning as guards, but they were still far from perfect. A sudden outbreak of bacteria could wipe out half of my Photosynthesis cells before I could bring enough macrophages to deal with it.

I knew that I needed to develop a better system, but other than experimenting with creating new macrophages, it seemed like I was in an arms race against all of the unicellular bacteria. Every time I created a stronger macrophage that could defeat the enemy, a new bacteria rose to the challenge.

This was the primary trouble I was having to deal with these days. Leveling had slowed down a bit as I focused on such matters. Thankfully, with this next level, I had found a skill that I could use. Antibodies wasn’t considered a pure defense skill but were given the identification as a Support skill. In my experience, Support skills could be activated along with other skills to increase their effect.

As complex as scientists tried to act, there were only a handful of truly scientific things out there. You could separate things, label things, measure things, and compare things. Every scientific concept, no matter how abstract, was the fundamental basis of one of these four things. When it came to labeling, no method was quite as popular as using antibodies.

If my cells were called cell bodies, then my cell’s antibody would be the inverse of my cell. It’d be the key to my keyhole, the yin to my yang, the dick to my… cough.. um… Jane. The point was, that their purpose was to bind to the bodies of cells, usually by recognizing something on the surface unique to that cell. Once it binds to them, it acts as a giant highlighter, making that particular cell easy to see and easy to track.

Antibodies can be used to create a host of signaling proteins. Anything that I consumed I could label. Once a macrophage ate a cell, I used the parts of that cell to create an antibody. I could then release clouds of antibodies around the cells I wanted to protect. If the invading organism tried to get close, my antibodies would stick to it like a minefield, causing it to stand out.

I could modify these antibodies in a variety of ways. Some ways made them easier to see, like tagging a mark for your bombing plans to make their run, while other ways would slow down the enemy and cause them to stick together, rendering them useless. I was just taking the best actions at the time, but I quickly realized that I was putting together an immune system. My biota was a smoothly functioning machine, and these bacteria were a threat to my function. The only way to resist them was to dedicate a force of cells to fight against them.

Thus, I had a larger force of cells dedicated to battling the big things like fish, but I also had a smaller force dedicated to battling the little things like bacteria. I never expected to have to fight a two-sided war, but I realized after I got started that this was a basic need of all multicellular organisms. Every fish, rat, and dog was constantly battling germs at the microscopic level while also having to hunt for food, fight off predators, and compete against stronger enemies.

I was blessed that I wiped out all of my competition. If I hadn’t destroyed all of the less evolved versions of myself, I could have shared this world with numerous competing biotas. In the end, I would either have to fight them to the death, or we’d reach a standstill that would limit our abilities to gather more resources. In short, I’d become trapped with no path to the future. That was a frightening mistake I had nearly made, but thankfully I had learned that I couldn’t trust anything that wasn’t me.

It wasn’t hard to reach such a conclusion. After all, I had been murdered by my sister. I knew that I would never trust another living being for as long as I lived. By my estimate, that could have already been years if not decades. It was impossible to know my current age, but that didn’t matter. Despite having no one to talk to, I had never felt lonely. Didn’t that mean I didn’t need people? I would settle with becoming ruler of this ocean. I’d become like Poseidon or King Triton.

First off, I needed to get stronger, and before I could focus on leveling, I had to get my immune system functioning. I created various cells to help me run the immune system. I created B cells which used Mutation to make antibodies. Macrophages would first eat bacteria, and then B cells would work on creating the proper antibody. Rather than dedicating my brain power toward making antibodies, I found it better to have the B cells do it themselves.

This also needed the help of another cell type called T cells. T cells were designed to specifically react to antigens. I created them by accident when I was mutating the macrophages. The way I set up the system, the macrophages went around eating everything. They were called big eaters, after all, the literal meaning of the words macro- and -phage. The macrophage then displayed the corpses of its prey on its body, like a macabre predator.

This gave T-cells the chance to look the macrophage over. Once it received the body parts, some piece of the foreign agent that the cell felt could be targeted, it would then split into B cells and a cell I called a killer cell. The B cells produced antibodies. The killer T cell went and killed anything these antibodies were attached to. If the macrophage was a predator, then the killer T cells were terminators.

I didn’t just make up these names either. I more than borrowed the naming based on how the real immune system worked in every multicellular organism. I modeled my system after theirs. The only key difference was that I didn’t have to automate things. If I was willing to use a bit of my Cloud Control, I could use deductive reasoning to speed things up.

The system as it works in organisms is random, just like Mutation. However, I could control Mutation through selective Mitosis. I created a thousand cells, mutated all of them, and then kept the ones whose mutations did what I was looking for. This would be called artificial selection, which was the cousin to natural selection, the process of evolution. It was a tedious process, and one I kept running in the background. I could do something similar when making antibodies. This was also a randomized process, but as long as I was willing to use some manual labor, I could speed up my immune system.

In short, I thought it very unlikely I would be able to get sick unless I allowed myself to be sick. I could similarly extract and remove toxins. It’d be very difficult to poison me. I wondered if all of these things would remain true once I reached the level of a multi-cellular creature. In the meantime, I continued to hunt.

Congratulations! You have reached level 7.

You have unlocked the skill, Gastrulation.

Gastrulation was the name for tissue formation. Specifically, during the germination of a baby, it would split into their tissue layers. In short, I could now interconnect my cells, creating layers of tissue. I finally had a means of exhibiting greater force, enough to battle the whales of the sea. As for the kingfish, he would be my final target.

I knew it, I was moving toward a multicellular organism. With this skill being unlocked, I was 95% confident that I would evolve into a multicellular organism in the next evolution. It was only a matter of time. However, there was something that was starting to worry me. I was finding it harder and harder to find enemies. Since getting a grip on the immune system, most of the local flora and fauna were wiped out wherever I went.

Originally, this wasn’t a problem. I could always move to the next area. When I ran out of areas along the beach, I went into the deep. Yet, I started finding less and less fish. I started marking areas and finding myself returning to areas I had been before. Where was the life? Were they avoiding me?

What if… I had already killed them all?