After planting the world seed on the unnamed planet, Balor resided in the dark side of the closest moon, watching the world warp into Veilthorn.

  In the Dominion standard doctrine, a serpent didn’t need to concern themselves with the motions of the world seed in granular detail. They were perfected mechanisms that always produced the desired results with a very low margin of variance. Experienced dragons would simply time-skip by hibernating until an intervention step was reached.

  Balor’s situation required more precaution and information to act on. Veilthorn was going to kill him, and he had to know the flavor of its future sapience starting from the primordial soup.

  I need to see everything from the start.

  He had to scale his consciousness scope down to pay sufficient attention to such granular details. Time was an important thing to calibrate to contextualize the creation process. The issue was a very common thing. The planet he chose orbited the star slightly differently from the serpent standard time that he was used to.

  Dominion imposed the galactic standard for all serpents based on the cycles of Dominion’s prime. It was one of the key pieces that kept his species operating at vast spacetime scales while still being centralized in a unified social identity despite each individual being Gods in themselves.

  The stellar core took care of translating the planet’s years to the Dominion standard years.

  Next, it was important to know the difference between a world seed’s path to sapience versus the natural evolution’s path to sapience. The major difference was time.

  His species was a product of natural evolution that took about five billion years, starting about half a billion years from the spark of the cosmos, which was estimated to be nine billion years old. Their spiral galaxy had the perfect conditions to spark life on Dominion’s Prime from the start. This was considered a blessing from the cosmos itself, and it was a core pillar of belief that created their blood drive.

  Needless to say, five billion Dominion standard years was an incredibly long span of time.

  World Seeds was their civilization’s attempt to reduce that by a significant margin, saving time where possible by accelerating certain processes. For example, they had spent nearly four billion years of their natural evolution as microbes.

  The key insight in developing world seeds was knowing this was a wholly unnecessary waste of time. It had taken so much time and effort to verify that insight.

  During their epochs of interstellar conquest, his species dissected life wherever they found it. They had a deep desire to find other independently evolved sapient species, even before they ever ascended to be a technological civilization.

  Eventually, they found the answer to their desperate question in their own second galactic arm after several millennia of combing the systems for it. Since then, their continued conquest gave them four more, each one wildly different in form and function, but similar in the initial and middle steps in the way they reached sapience.

  World seeds made that step efficient. Shrinking the time required from billions of years to hundreds of millions. They also experimented with specific blends, splicing together the most useful aspects of all five that they found, and themselves.

  The Seedmakers of Dominion’s Prime produced countless seeds, churning out various combinations and iterations. Each one was different, and their assignment to a serpent or a Dragon was decided by Starmaker.

  Because of this, it was important to know what kind of sapience a given world seed was meant to result in. It went back to the five sapient species that they had discovered so far. Three of them were bipedal like themselves, which was considered the most ideal form in their doctrine. The vast majority of world seeds adhered to that design, and Veilthorn was one of them.

  His time scale and prerequisite knowledge refreshed, and his consciousness scoped to perceive the finer details, Balor watched the planet from the moon from its early epochs.

  The world seed that he planted repurposed all material from the planet, reconstructing the terrestrial conditions needed for the specific primordial soup it was targeting. Landmasses shifted with new plate tectonics, aligning the planet to the life it was supposed to host. The preparation step ended in priming the atmosphere with the necessary blend of incubation gases.

  His stellar core categorized the rest of the process across time in distinct phases.

  Veilthorn: First Phase.

  This phase skipped the agonizingly long single-cellular era by introducing already primed complex cells. The blend of extremophile microbes and complex green algae created the early foundation for the next steps of evolution by harnessing the solar energy to propagate more life. This was a Seedmaker’s hardest toil when it came to creating a world seed. Balor had no clue where or how they even began to create a self-running system that could adapt to most habitable worlds to get to these necessary, perfectly tuned outcomes in such an efficient way.

  I have never even seen a Seedmaker. They’re more elusive than Starmaker herself.

  The first phase achieved its purpose around the first ten thousand years, completing both terraforming and seeding processes.

  Veilthorn: Second Phase.

  From there, the world seed churned for forty million years. His stellar core scoped his consciousness out to comprehend the events by collapsing and dissolving them. Life evolved at a slightly accelerated, semi-supported rate to populate the world’s oceans. The world seed’s optimization here was pushing those creatures towards evolving bilateral symmetry—a necessary component for future bipedal sapience. During this time, sea creatures evolved more elaborate, centralized nervous cords.

  It was rather entertaining to watch the rise and fall of millions of species of sea creatures and their adaptations in a continuous arms race of predator and prey, which forced the evolution of key sensory organs, and based on those foundations, rapid neurological development.

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  The second phase achieved its purpose, taking orders of magnitude more time than the first phase: Rapid morphogenesis.

  This would’ve taken almost half a billion years if it weren’t for the world. Seed

  Veilthorn: Third Phase.

  The first taste of Veilthorn’s future sapient species became apparent in the next twenty million years. Ocean dwellers encroached upon the landmass, their bodies adapting for terrestrial living. There were millions of species, but the world seed picked one path towards sapience. It went with tuning the climate and atmosphere to evolve warm-blooded creatures, diverting away from his serpent composition. Veilthorn ended up with hot days and freezing cold nights until most cold-blooded species were suppressed. It was instead in favor of evolving endothermy for the creatures to function throughout the day.

  It essentially gave all the dominant species the capability to hunt, learn, and socialize for the majority of the day. This accelerated the speed of social evolution.

  As he figured out the rough direction of the sapience, the third phase came to an en,d achieving its purpose, the high metabolism needed for the high-functioning brain.

  Veilthorn: Fourth Phase.

  As life evolved from there, the world seed underwent waves upon waves of environmental changes to force desired results through evolution. It created a fragmented and unstable geography. Nothing stays the same long enough for the creatures to evolve specialized features that would allow them to dominate and snuff out others with brute force. The species targeted in this stage, from critter to leviathan, needed to constantly solve problems to survive and share scarce resources. These early tribes determined the success of a species. The world seed forced conditions to pit them against each other and ended up selecting tree dwellers who underwent the greatest change relative to others. They evolved the first high-functioning brains and successfully networked them in tribe systems.

  The fourth phase of Veilthorn was about trapping intelligence, and primates emerged victorious.

  It confirmed what Balor suspected from the previous step. Primates were one major category of lifeforms that could achieve sapience. Dominion, over the year,s had found five naturally evolved sapient species. Three of them were bipedal, which was a trait that suited most seeding attempts.

  Of those three bipedal species was born from eggs similar to serpents. Another species was born from external wombs symbiotically with a plant species acting as surrogates. The third one was born from their internal wombs.

  Veilthorn’s sapience was modeled from the third kind, one that was considered rather tame and mellow in temperament.

  Now I wonder what about these things ends up dangerous.

  Veilthorn: Fifth Phase.

  The world seed churned for the next five hundred thousand years, accommodating Veilthorn for primates. It condensed the accumulation of knowledge in social beings, taking them from slamming rocks together to harnessing fire and passing down that knowledge while refining it through generations. Primates mastered external digestion with fire, freeing up energy for their rapid brain growth. With the changes of climate and many other parameters, hunter-gatherers slowly settled in suitable lands, exerting their will over the lower species as they developed agriculture.

  It is in this fifth step that he started noticing the hand of the other serpent in nudging the primates with a gift greater than the natural gift of fire.

  His stellar core gave him the rough estimate of the current step he was witnessing, focusing the scope of his consciousness down as much as possible.

  Veilthorn: 677.

  In evolutionary time scales, this was an early step for a serpent to start meddling with tuning sapience. The previous serpent that owned Veilthorn had already performed six hundred and seventy seven mostly imperceptible steps with the early hominids.

  Interesting. The last one started this early?

  He had missed all of them up until this one. He hadn’t been scoped down enough to notice all the events at a finer granularity. His stellar core listed some local events that could be attributed to some of these steps.

  He found the interesting thread right away.

  Shortly after the first harnessing of fire, an early hominid had met a God dwelling in a cave. This God had gifted them with a ball of energy that was more versatile than fire.

  This God was no doubt the last serpent who had bestowed magics upon the early hominids, handing them a universal toolkit they were too young to fully comprehend.

  The magics was facilitated by a network of infrastructure that the serpent built into the planet with their own stellar core—a form of sharing a fraction of their powers in a preset programmatic way.

  Magics allowed the hominids exert dominion over their physical reality, bending laws and twisting the flow of their existence. In practical terms, magics allowed the primates to spark fires without banging rocks, blow winds out of their mouths to bring fruits down from the trees, part the ground beneath their feet to dig waterways.

  Their use of magics was already etched into the surface of Veilthorn with rapid changes to the environment and surrounding ecosystems.

  The next steps were an experimental phase where the serpent slowly tested it all out with countless individuals. Magics became part of the primates’ daily lives, used for harvesting yams out of the soil to committing the occasional tribal genocide.

  That in itself wasn’t a problem at all. It was a necessary step in tuning the gifted powers, figuring out thousands of operational rules of what should be allowed at what stage.

  Every step up to six hundred and seventy-seven where magics was integrated looked perfectly justifiable. Balor knew this was standard practice from the knowledge stored in his stellar core. The last serpent hadn’t really made any serious mistakes.

  Scoping out and letting time flow faster, Balor arrived at the point where things started to get concerning. Primates had evolved societies by that point. This was during their first categorical civilization situated in a temperate river valley.

  Veilthorn: 1271.

  Balor focused the scope down to the lowest possible, essentially coming down to the scale of days and hours. He saw the previous serpent for the first time from outer space. They were directly involving themselves with the first civilization.

  He had finally arrived at the part where he really wanted to pay attention. He could always scope out and let things flow to the natural conclusion of the failure point at step 1389—which wasn’t too far.

  But skipping time like that risked losing important context.

  So far, he had let time slip as if he were watching a record. In reality, everything he’d witnessed so far had actually happened on the planet in the forward march of time.

  He had sacrificed a perfectly good planet just to see them.

  I already used this planet, better not waste the opportunity.

  Balor decided to witness the next years from the ground level. He wanted to experience history from the point of view of those actively living through it.

  There was one problem. He had to be discreet as a participating observer. He was about to cross paths with a dead serpent encoded into the Veilthorn’s world seed. The encoded consciousnesses had as much agency as the real thing, only limited to the relevant planet.

  If he were detected, he could end up engaging in adversarial play with a ghost. That could alter the final step that he wanted to see, spoiling this whole exercise, which had already cost him several hundred million years.

  Balor detached from the stellar core. It wasn’t wise to descend upon the world again in his colossal dragon form, causing a calamity. He had to get there in a more natural way.

  The previous serpent was directly involved in the first civilization in a rather interesting way.

  They had started playing the role of a common enemy—a dark lord putting direct pressure on three early kingdoms founded on their own magics.

  At a cursory glance from outer space, this dark lord possessed magics that could be problematic for him at the ground level, especially if he wanted to stay invisible. A mistake in his arrival could ruin the whole operation by itself.

  I’ll figure out what to do when I get there.

  Balor leapt off the dark side of the moon in his bipedal form. Turning into a purple streak of light, he found the orbital path to crash into Veilthorn in the guise of a meteor.