Chapter 4
Designing an Intelligent Race
After a long search, Xu Zhi found that the species with the most outstanding performance was a beetle-shaped organism.
“It’s armored and dexterous. Most importantly, this organism also has a piece of armor on top of its head, which means, it has no hair… You’re the one! Lucky you! You will be the balding overlord of the homo sapiens for the next era, or even for the next few eras.”
Xu Zhi picked up this ant-sized beetle with a pair of metal tongs then placed it in a clear test tube.
Then he went on another search to look for food to feed this organism. He found himself arriving in front of a new experimental field that was only one square meter in size, and this was where he released the beetle.
Cellular division speed: Ten thousand times!
After a short period of time, the number of this species multiplied madly. It was death, then rebirth, and the size of population immediately shot up to over a hundred thousand.
Xu Zhi picked up a large number of transparent test tubes and placed them on the ground as he said, “Come on, be good and come to the tube yourself. Line up to enter, three hundred of you to one test tube.”
Under the influence of the hatchery, these “ants” consciously lined up to enter the test tubes.
Then, Xu Zhi labelled every test tube with an experimental batch number.
He diluted the gorilla’s blood and dripped droplets of it into every test tube. Then he manipulated the hatchery into making the beetles pierce themselves, causing their body fluids to mix and fuse with the gorilla’s blood. The intense hemolytic transfusion reaction that followed led to an instant wipe-out.
He was no expert biologist. Besides, what he had to do was so simple, though brutal, that even a child would know how to do it:
The weakest goes to the wall. It is the survival of the fittest.
When the different bloods mixed, those that could not survive the hemolytic transfusion reaction would die!
After two days of experimenting with countless batches of test tubes, tens of millions of huge beetles had died.
Eventually, three test tubes samples, #1042, #2041 and #2415, had beetles that mutated, where their blood began to fuse with the gorilla’s blood. This allowed them to endure the reaction due to genetic rejection and thus, survivors had emerged.
But survival was not necessarily a perfect acceptance of the new genes. It could also be just a one-off species aberration.
From the three test tubes, he selected the most successful specimen, it was an organism from test tube #2041.
It was a tiny, delicate species that was a little smaller than the average ant. It was very hairy and looked like an anthropoid ape with black armor. Thus, he named it the Bugape. But unfortunately, it was not as bald as Xu Zhi had imagined it would be. Its entire body was covered with fur so naturally it had a luxurious head of hair.
This anthropoid ape, now in a transparent test tube, was knocking on the glass wall and bellowing strange and incoherent sounds.
“Ball-dy!”
“Balding!”
“Balding!”
…
The voice gradually transformed into a familiar word.
“????”
Xu Zhi was instantly confused.
“I wanted you to become bald, but you appeared with a head full of thick, black hair. And not only that, you are instead crazily mocking me as someone going bald?”
“Dude, you’re getting out of line!”
“Going bald is obviously a short-term side-effect of chemotherapy. After I stop going for chemotherapy and take a good month’s rest, my hair will grow back.”
At one glance, he could tell this was a kind of obedient species.
Xu Zhi took a deep breath and felt like he should crush it as he said, “I may be the only creator in the world to be mocked by own creation as a baldy.”
Having just been born, it dared to mock at the great creator who gave it life?
How very treacherous this was!
The character of this species was bound to be brutal, vicious, insane, and belligerent; it was undoubtedly a scourge to all and had to be disposed of!
“But come to think of it, better not. After all, too many species were ousted during the survival of the fittest before the birth of a mutant species emerged through the process of natural selection. I cannot kill it now. I will just put up with his little act of mockery for the moment and keep a record in a small notebook. Then I will kill it later.”
And this poor creature was completely unaware that the snarling syllabus that it had instinctively voiced upon birth had made a certain extremely vengeful and narrow-minded creator harbor a grudge. In the future era, this would bring great calamity to its race.
“Little brother, I will settle this grudge with you another day…”
Xu Zhi took a deep breath and put the bugape back into the experimental field to let it reproduce.
Accelerated cellular division speed: Ten thousand times!
This strange bugape died a rapid death, ending its sinful life full of bellows of “balding.” In a short time, it quickly multiplied into a race of several tens of thousands of members. As they walked on the ground, they looked like a dense nest of black ants.
“Balding!”
“Balding!”
“Balding!”
The delicate, tiny little bugapes mindlessly wandered around in the sandbox. They ran around with a cheerful and lively vibe. And they collectively shrieked at the giant in the sky.
“You’re poisonous, aren’t you?” Xu Zhi was speechless. After putting in the gorilla’s genes, he now planned to put in another gene again. These were the genes of the white ants.
But this time, he failed.
He had repeated the same experiment more than seventy times and had destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of bugapes who spent their lifetime hollering the word “balding”. But never once had he succeeded in integrating the genes of the white ants.
“Could be that the level of this species is too low, thus it is unable to accommodate too many genes at once.”
Helplessly, he could only put aside the genes of the white ants. He began to accelerate the division of this species by ten thousand times and allow it to reproduce in large quantities as he waited for them to produce their own intelligence and civilization.
But no matter how many new generations the bugapes reproduced, they still looked like they had no intelligence at all. They were still roaring away, “Balding, balding.”
Xu Zhi thought about it and suddenly, realization dawned on him.
“I’m so foolish. If a person’s life is only a dozen seconds, then by speeding up the rate of cellular division by ten thousand times, how can there be time for them to think? To create civilization? Language? Text?”
“Should I set the speed of evolution of cellular division back to normal? But it’s going to be much too long just waiting for them to reproduce at normal rate. It took humans thousands of years to give birth to a civilization!” He began to search through the information in the hatchery, thinking that there was definitely a solution to the situation at hand.
And sure enough, there was.
According to the Insecta’s system of counting units, a doubled rate equated to a year.
Accelerating cellular division speed by ten thousand times was the equivalent of passing ten thousand years away within a day.
This rate of acceleration, with only a few seconds for birth, mating, and death, would leave the organisms no time to think. Their brains were simply unable to withstand such a terrifying rate of division and could only depend on the sheer number of their base population. Instinctively, it was the survival of the fittest, a contest on who was the fastest to evolve and adapt to the environment.
However, when the rate of cellular division was adjusted to just a hundred times, a different kind of change would occur.
At this time, the organisms’ brains would begin to be able to withstand a hundredfold rate of division. When their brains were subjected to cellular division at a rate of hundred times, the brain cells and neurons would also speed up their thought processes by a hundred times.
“Their bodily processes will accelerate by a hundred times; their thought processes will also be a hundred times faster. This is the same as accelerating their time flow by a hundred times…” Xu Zhi thought about it and gave an order to the hatchery.
“For this area, cellular division speed: One hundred times.”
After the speed of cellular division had been adjusted, the thought processes of these ant-sized bugapes were a hundred times faster, and their speed of movement actually kept up with the rate at which their brains were processing thoughts.
Every cell in their bodies was crazily dividing at a hundred times and releasing energy from burning life away. This allowed them to move extremely fast, like they had opened all Eight Gates in their body.
At this point in time, it was as if the entire sandbox had turned into a world of accelerated time, and everything was madly becoming afterimages.
He immediately became curious and asked the Nest mind of the hatchery.
“Can I perform this hundredfold cellular division speed to myself?”
The hatchery replied him a in mechanical tone.
“No, you can’t. This is the unique racial ability of the bugapes. You will only be able to carry out cellular division at a hundredfold acceleration after transplanting the cells of bugapes into your body… At that time, your brain cells will be in a state of a hundred times accelerated division, and you will feel as if the world around you has slowed down by a hundred times. And everywhere in your body, cellular division will be happening at a hundredfold accelerated rate. Your body will release a powerful force, and your movements will also keep up pace with your accelerated thought processes.”
The synchronization of movement and thought was equivalent to speeding up a person’s entire lifetime by a hundred times?
Was this truly a state of rampage caused by “burning life”?
Xu Zhi thought about it and shook his head.
“Given my current condition, undergoing a hundredfold acceleration will also cause my cancer cells to undergo division by a hundred times faster. I will reach the final stage of cancer and die instantly, won’t I?
At this point, Xu Zhi had spent two days experimenting with the bugapes. The two days that had passed were the equivalent of another twenty thousand years in the large sandbox on the other side, that was maintained at an acceleration of ten thousand times. And some powerful species had started to appear.
Towering trees soared high into the clouds.
The appearance of large numbers of giant species had ushered in an Age of Terror which was akin to the Jurassic Age.
The largest of them was a species of wild beasts. These were crusted walking beasts with black disks on their heads. They had reached the maximum size limit set by Xu Zhi: the size of a cat.
This size, when applied on the body of a bugape that was only the size of an ant, was like a human running into a giant ancient Tyrannosaurus Rex nearly 100 meters tall.
“I wonder how they will survive?”
Xu Zhi thought about it. After all, he had to synchronize the cellular division speed in the big sandbox with that of the bugapes. He began to directly slow down the ten-thousand-times cellular division speed in the big sandbox and adjusted it to a hundred times so that the speed of thinking was bearable.
“The experiment is complete. I should now find a place in the sandbox to drop off these ancient bugapes.”
Xu Zhi put on the blue shoe covers that he used in the laboratory. Holding the transparent test tube with the three hundred bugapes, he walked across the orchard ground, passing patches of miniature, delicate valleys that were green and verdant, and stepping over patches of exquisitely small and lush forest.
Trees were starting to collapse, the ground shook, and countless species that were in the deep woods fled frantically.
“It shall be here.”
Xu Zhi dropped the experimental bugapes into a large canyon surrounded by green trees that was south of the sandbox.