Chapter twenty four: failure?
He had barely finished creating the humans and already, the weight of the willpower drain hit him like a truck.
Caelum felt like he was about to pass out. The moment he finished creating the group of humans, his knees almost buckled.
"Shit… I really overdid it."
The massive drain that came from accelerating the time ones—it was just too much. The strain still clung to his body like lead chains
'This is the effects of the world stabilizer needing way more willpower than i thought it would need, to accelerate the time flow.' caelum thought about his dissatisfaction, then in a low voice he looked twords the humans. "And now this…"
He had poured more willpower into shaping twenty full-grown humans from thin air. To him, it felt like his head would drop any second.
"Ugh… I'm gonna pass out standing," he muttered, rubbing his temples.
Below him, the newly born humans stood in the open field, twenty of them, ten men and ten women. All of them staring around, looking at the world they had been dropped into.
They were physically mature but mentally blank slates, like a computer that had the hardware but hadn't been given the software yet.
'Still, they aren't brainless by any means.' caelum was quite satisfied on how his first inteligent creations turned out.
They didn't speak, probably because they didn't even know what words were. But their eyes weren't the eyes of clueless some animals. They were curious, alert, thinking and processing like any modern human could.
Even if they had no memories or experience, they were based on a modern human template. Their brains were wired to think.
Caelum looked down at them and spoke in a low, almost absent-minded voice, "A few hundred years should be enough. Enough for them to reach the primitive stages of human society…"
His voice carried in the wind, and the humans turned toward him. All twenty pairs of eyes locked onto him at once, followed by their reaction: a mix of fear, awe, and pure confusion.
It was like they just realized something insane was standing right in front of them.
Caelum didn't care at all about their confusion or fear of the unknown, He had no energy to explain or babysit.
He gave a tired sigh and floated upward without warning, and that only made things worse.
The moment his body lifted off the ground, The humans stared up with wide eyes, even more shocked now.
One man gasped, a woman beside him flinched backward and quite a few stumbled around like they had just seen a ghost rise into the sky.
'They will probably want me to go away if anything,' Caelum thought, amused despite his exhaustion. 'I don't even blame them… If I saw some floating guy mumbling nonsense after being born, I'd lose it too.'
Caelum wanted to rest, But there was something he had to do first.
'I can barely stay awake… just one last thing,' he thought, gritting his teeth.
He needed to check something, the 'something' that had been sole reason why his mind even came up with this plan.
"After this, im out. I'll sleep for an entire day." he grumbled, and Focused on the humans below, Caelum activated his willpower one more time.
The world changed before his eyes
And just like that, everything about the humans below was revealed.
Their entire internal structure unfolded to him, layer by layer. Skin faded, muscle peeled away, and organs floated in a clean, sterile view only he could see. Their biological systems glowed faintly with quiet life.
It was akin to a hyper-detailed x-ray.
It was like looking through a window into the blueprints of the human body.
And Caelum immediately zeroed in on the chest: The heart.
That's where the illness should've been. That black substance, the parasite that had wrapped around his own heart. The thing that guaranteed his slow and painful death, but no doctor could explain what it was.
But what he saw now was unexpected.
Caelum rubbed his eyes and looked again as his eyes slowly widened in disbelief.
"…What?" Cold crept up his back and his voice broke off.
He scanned another one, then another and soon he scanned all twenty of the humans.
Soon his face dropped as his heart sank deeper.
A bucket of Cold sweat ran down the back of his neck.
"No… it's missing."
He checked again, again, again—
Every heart was perfectly healthy. The black substance was missing, no parasite and no trace of the illness that infected his own body.
Caelum's face went pale.
"Not just one of them…" His voice shook. "None of them have the illness!"
He almost shouted, his body trembling midair. His vision blurred for a second, but he kept himself steady.
"How is that even possible?! I clearly defined them to have everything the same as me!"
His mind raced. He had used himself as the model, They were supposed to be identical copies, down to the very damn illness.
But despite crossing his moral barrier and creating humans, the thing he wanted to study… was missing entirely.
Caelum hovered in stunned silence with his eyes wide, thoughts spiraling.
Below him, the twenty humans stared upward, clueless to the chaos unraveling in his head.
"Hah! I created the perfect models to study my own disease..But none of them have it?" Caelum closed his eyes as he spoke.
"You got to he kidding me, What the hell went wrong?"
---
Caelum's body felt like it was running low on life, His vision kept getting blurred from moment to moment.
Caelum felt like he will crash down after wasting all his willpower, but still meeting with failure, just before he could pass out inside the painting, he willed himself out of that world.
His tired eyes took one last glance at the twenty humans standing below, his so-called of creations before everything faded out.
His will pulled him away from the field, from the world below, from the failed creations that stood below. The twenty, clueless, curious, and ultimately useless humans.
with a flicker of will, his body disappeared from the grasslands and In the blink of an eye, his body appeared back in the white room.
"I'm too tired to think anything now," Caelum's voice was dry and low, barely holding itself together.
But even the white room felt like too much.
His legs gave out, as he forced another jump, with another flicker of will, His body vanished again—and the sterile white around him dissolved into the familiar dull ceiling of his apartment room.
This time, he have returned to his real world room in the apartment.
He landed flat on his bed with a dead thud, with his arms sprawled and eyes half-lidded.
"…Why the hell didn't it work?" His voice sounded more like a dying breath than a question.
He didn't expect an answer to pop up from the ceiling, and turned his face into the pillow and groaned.
"Everything was the same. My DNA, my body, even my organs... everything was exact same. I did defined them exactly like me, so it's not the fault of my defination"
His hand clenched into the blanket still in disbelief. "So why the hell… didn't they have the illness? Infact it was the only thing missing."
'Is it something something that even the quill can't replicate? No the quill can create something as fundemental as laws of the world, then why?' His eyes stayed open as caelum was still trying to process the whole thing.
"…Screw it, I'll just sleep. Maybe my brain will work again after a proper sleep."
Caelum didn't even change clothes. He yanked the blanket over his shoulder and closed his eyes.
The fatigue was too deep this time, the last thing he saw before drifting off was the ceiling light, blurry and flickering a little from a loose wire.
'Do i have to find a new way now?' he thought as he fell asleep.
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The sky was stuffed with dark clouds as heavy rain waz hammering down on the world outside.
The steady and peaceful rhythm of water smacking against windows and rooftops filled the apartment, and Caelum let out a groggy groan of pleasure from under his blanket.
He curled up even tighter, clutching the blanket like it was his last defense against the rainy weather. A string of sleep-saliva clung to the corner of his lips, but he didn't care.
He had no idea how long he'd been sleeping and he had zero plans of finding out but.....
GURR.
His stomach had other plans, as it growled like a dying car engine.
"Let me sleep a bit more~" Caelum muttered, his voice waz muffled and half-slurred, he was trying to reason with his own body.
GURRR!
The stomach growled louder this time without showing any mercy.
"Ahh! come on," he groaned as he sat up with closed eyes, he tossed the blanket aside.
Then Barefoot and half-asleep he went for the door, taking a glance towards the wall clock.
2:12 PM.
"I actually slept past the morning ha?" he muttered with a yawn so wide it looked painful for a human mouth.
Dragging himself to the sink, he washed up quickly, splashing cold water on his face and brushing up in a abnormal speed.
After getting out of the washroom, he quickly went back to his room to get the quill, he had tossed it somewhere in sleep last night.
Bringing the quill down with him to the dining table, he made a quick breakfast manifest on the table.
A slice of toasted sourdough appeared with a plate, topped with mashed avocado mixed with a little salt, pepper, and lemon. Two sunny-side-up eggs sizzled next to it, still steaming, and a small bowl of yogurt with honey and nuts completed the set.
He sat at the table and inhaled it all with zero elegance, "This is what life should be, i should quickly eat up and go back to sleep."
After eating as fast as he could, almost like a chinese influencer, Caelum walked over and washed the dishes.
Rubbing his hands on a towle, he went twords the apartment front door and cracked it up wide.
"This.." Caelum looked at the streets outside, Rain poured down from the sky and turned the streets outside into waterslides.
Everything was drenched in a gray theme. The trees, the road and the air itself, it all looked like a storm was coming.
"Huugh!" Caelum shivered as a gust of wind hit him straight in the bones. He clutched his arms and rubbed his shoulders.
"Nope. I should go back to sleep. Who even stays awake on a day like this?" Slamming the door shut, he trudged back upstairs like a defeated soldier.
Just before crawling back into bed, his eyes flicked toward the painting on the wall.
He stared at it for a moment then.."Nah. I'll just sleep today."
He rolled over and buried himself under the blanket again.
And just like that, he was deep in sleep ones again