Ughh finally!

  I have all the various me’s wipe their eyebrows and similar things to show how exhausted I am.

  I have made a little tiny working ecosystem entirely run by my mind.

  I did have to streamline it to a major extent, but I found a way to build up instincts!

  I started with three species, a plant, and two animals.

  The plant looks is almost like a mushroom, but it doesn’t seem to be exactly one.

  I don’t know what exactly makes a mushroom a mushroom, so I’m not gonna categorize it.

  The mushroom has the ability to stick out barbs that also retract, allowing me to puncture anything that gets close.

  I’m not going to let my selves die obviously, but If I want to give the illusion, I’m gonna have to pull out myself from the bodies.

  That might require more of a mind than these plants have, so I’m gonna need to think of another solution for that.

  Where was I?

  The way I build up instincts? Wait, my description of my mushrooms and animals.

  The mushrooms are orange and a tiny bit shiny, but also can camouflage.

  The camouflage isn’t great, but it would be better if it had something other than dirt to hide as.

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  So yeah, the mushroom have barbs, camouflage, and are controlled by a hive mind.

  Truly scary for anyone if they find these.

  With these two animals, one I made search for mushrooms, and the other search for the other.

  The mushroom forager which I shall henceforth call the coca-cola fox is basically an extremely red fox with coca-cola written on it.

  What? It’s just temporary, no one will ever see this.

  The tracker of the coca-cola fox is basically a slime. Yes a slime, like the ones from fiction.

  Although, it won’t be like every slime from fiction obviously.

  You might think that the slime should forage, and the fox should track, but you would be mistaken.

  And that’s exactly what I want, I want people to not know what they are dealing with.

  Hmmm…

  You know, I’ve been making a lot of stuff with the intention of showing it to other people.

  A whole lot of this planet probably won’t be explored by the time I span the entirety of it.

  Why am I trying to populate all of it?

  Is it really needed?

  I don’t really know, so I guess I’ll just continue with the descriptions and explanations.

  So I have the fox hunt the mushrooms, the slime follow the fox(not hunting them), and for the mushrooms?

  What should I have them do?

  Maybe I’ll have them hunt the slime!

  It’ll be like the cycle of life, only on a small scale and I wont have them die!

  Onto how I built up the instincts.

  Basically, I put a larger portion of me in each one of the beings that I control, and then gradually decreased that amount.

  This worked really well!

  What did I do with the excess?

  Well, I put it in other specimens of myself to continue this process.

  Now, the actions of my selves aren’t super complex yet, but this seems to be more efficient than learning tool use with the collective.

  And when I recombine and sort of shift around the pieces of me, the me’s learning speed increases more!

  This is really fun now!

  Feeling a very quick difference in a few hours is a lot more rewarding than in a few years.

  Although, I don’t know if my sense of time is normal, but that’s a topic for another time.

  Time to add in another species for my ecosystem!

  Pov: Serne

  What the hell has Asterios been up to this time?

  He… kidnapped some people and attempted to make them rescue some other people.

  I would say I’m shocked, but based on how he acts? That’s the type of thing he might do.

  But at the same time, he didn’t really enjoy scaring those people with me.

  Maybe these years have changed him?

  No, he seems the same.

  But honestly, how could he justify a kidnapping?

  I should confront him, but how do I do it?

  Straight up tell him kidnapping is wrong?

  I feel like that should just be a given.

  He might think that I’m insulting him or calling him a terrible person.

  I mean, he kind of is, but he isn’t the worst.

  And he does seem open to some feedback.

  I’ll try to put it delicately when I talk to him.

  For now, I apparently have a new mission.

  To investigate Asterios’s portal and city, along with 4 people including the priestess.