Balor took the horrid world seed of Veilthorn and traversed far and wide through the fourth spiral arm of the Galaxy for another candidate system. It took longer this time because he didn’t want to make a single mistake.

  He found the perfect system that fit all his criteria, a planet almost identical to the last one in terms of size and proximity to the sun. The day-night cycle was more or less the same, and it had four moons with a larger one. This planet was habitable on its own, but it didn’t have anything more than the primordial soup.

  He dashed straight into the first landmass, his stellar core again resembling the dragon fit for terrestrial travel. He separated and walked a few feet over, while still connected by a thread to his stellar core.

  This time, he made sure to change Veilthorn’s steps.

  Veilthorn, 0.

  Then he pushed the seed into the soil and blasted it to the core of the planet. Then he took off with his stellar core as the terraforming cataclysms began. This time, he didn’t go on vacation on the moon. He couldn’t be that relaxed ever again. He had to hammer Veilthorn into the shape that he wanted.

  First, he had to know where the corrupted Seedmaker was. It would be manufacturing itself during the terraform process, deep beneath the planetary crust. Based on the amount of soul matter that it had, it had to be at least as large as the Inner core of the planet, about as large as the moon.

  It should somehow build itself in the magma layer, and through some chemical process, it produced its soul matter into bloodstone, which slowly crept up the crust into veins that could be mined.

  That is too easy for hominids to acquire. They dig the soil all the time.

  Balor needed a solution to change that, but he was a serpent. He couldn’t alter the seed’s behavior like a Seedmaker could. If left to its own processes, the world seed would create a world almost exactly like the last one, and that was a direct path to failure.

  A serpent wasn’t safe in a world where anything that could dig could find a crystal to summon a corrupted dragon to beat them with. Coming into physical contact with the said stone was a cataclysm of epic proportions. The only way to mitigate this was through very drastic action.

  He had to be the outside force that interfered with the world seed’s process. He had to make it do things it didn’t want to do, adapt in ways that could benefit him.

  I have to make mining deep into the crust impossible. If not, delay it for as long as possible until I have something that can counter the bloodstone magics.

  Balor dashed around the system looking for ice asteroids. He found all the water that he needed this way, and he flung hundreds of asteroids at the planet during its first year, flooding it completely. He pushed once habitable land down to the abyssal depths of a new, enormous planet-sized ocean.

  The world seed adapted, changing its steps to match these new conditions. It was imperceptible at first because at phase one, it was just beginning to introduce life. Early life thrived rather well on water, and Balor knew the sea creature phase of this planet would be a sight to witness.

  Except that he couldn’t sit idle and wait for it to happen. He had other plans, much more complicated plans. A planet without land couldn’t evolve hominids, and the world seed couldn’t paint a picture with colors that weren’t there. He had to give this new Veilthorn land.

  There was another problem to deal with at the same time. The land had to be big enough to accommodate a lot of hominids. Billions of them. Tens of billions of them. He couldn’t manipulate a small population to defeat a Seedmaker. A large genetic pool gave him more leeway for mistakes.

  I need a stratified Veilthorn. More land up from the sea, more land on top of land.

  The plan for this step was two-fold. He went to the adjacent planets to harvest crust layers from them. He hurled them all to Veilthorn from all possible angles, giving the planet a crust that was five times thicker, tectonic plates floating in water above each other.

  The world seed adapted to this as well, and it almost broke the experiment. These changes were too drastic, and he had to act fast to shape the new crust properly.

  Balor’s plan for that step was even more dramatic than throwing things at a planet. He used the stellar core to create a lensing array to harness the power from the star.

  Channeling the energy from the star into a finer point, he carved the crust into more manageable shapes with an ocean ideal for early life. He melted the new tectonic plates, creating several strata up from the abyssal depths.

  This shaping of the world took a couple of Dominion standard years, during which time the world seed struggled to do what it was supposed to do. He had to coax it along his wild ride, giving it just enough leeway to keep life alive.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  His next step involved messing with life itself. The strata that he melted into the world weren’t fit for habitation by hominids yet. He wanted to organize them into layers, and that involved digging at the ground level.

  His initial changes finished, Balor landed on the moon and watched as the world seed adapted around his changes, filling every possible gap that it could. With these drastic early changes, Veilthorn wouldn’t really be the same planet as it was before, but it was the foundation for a world that could destroy him a lot slower.

  He reawakened after the world seed evolved sea creatures and then started selecting against the desired traits for sapient life.

  Balor wasn’t interested in sapient life just yet. He was interested in the leviathans roaming the depths. He wanted to use them to carve the crust into a shape that he wanted.

  Veilthorn, 2.

  He descended with his stellar core and started a quick project to evolve these creatures for his purposes. He was no Seedmaker, but he could force the leviathan lifeforms to behave a certain way if he infused them with his soul matter.

  He created a new class of creatures that could carve through the crust over time. He encoded their behaviors and subclasses, delegating them to handle manual terraforming on their own.

  He imbued all the sub-classes with a strata separation function, each type of creature preferring to dig at a certain depth. This cost him about ten percent of soul matter from his stellar core. It was a necessary cost.

  These creatures could shape the world for him over the years, stratifying the levels above the ocean as they slowly evolved to take over the land. Life was robust now, and the World Seed could manipulate its way out of this situation more easily than before.

  A stratified Veilthorn constructed, Balor spent centuries here and there monitoring the rise and fall of ecosystems, keeping a paranoid watch on the sea bed at abyssal depths, although no one could dig deep enough for bloodstone. He had to solve some of his problems with creative solutions.

  Three hundred thousand years after introducing the crust-digging leviathans, they evolved with his soul matter into things that resembled shapes between serpents and dragons. The subjects ran wild all across Veilthorn, and he had to personally wipe them out from the strata that they themselves constructed.

  Of course, he couldn’t work against the world seed, which at this point was far enough along to keep evolving that form of life despite his attempts to cull it. He decided to go with quarantine instead.

  He created various spacetime distortions where the world seed was evolving trouble ecosystems. He had to curb one particular runaway ecosystem at the surface where serpentine creatures roamed a forest with aggressively growing trees. The whole ecosystem there had somehow embodied a different aspect of his soul matter, and seemed to be evolving into an evolutionary war against each other with no end.

  He walled it off with more of his soul matter, containing the forest and its serpents and the rest of the creatures so that it could never spread across the rest of Veilthorn.

  He had to do the same thing down below the lowest terrestrial stratum, the third layer. A runaway leviathan species was digging an underground complex that didn’t serve its purposes. He walled them off into their own underground world.

  He dealt with other pockets of detrimental life the same way, trapping them in spacetime bubbles separated from the wider world.

  These also gave him places to hide in, and he picked the isolated forest of serpents as his preferred ground-level location. It felt like watching his home planet, and he had more plans that involved experimentation there.

  He had to wait for the hominids to evolve, and it was still hundreds of thousands of years away. The world seed was stable now, properly adapting to a stratified planet meant to bury the corrupted Seedmaker.

  While that process was underway, Balor started thinking about the magics that he wanted to implement. He knew the ghost serpent had to implement it by dispersing their stellar core all over the atmosphere.

  That couldn’t really work in this new configuration for Veilthorn. There were four strata above sea level, and his stellar core could be more diluted across the world than it should be. He wanted to foster his hominids to rival a corrupted Dragon sleeping beneath their feet.

  It didn’t bode well for anyone if they struggled for hundreds of thousands of years just to resort to bloodstone because their planetary magics weren’t sufficient. The habitable surface area was large enough to hold tens of billions, and they were certainly going to get ideas as civilizations progress.

  I need them to be powerful enough to kill those who resort to bloodstone. That way, they fight my war and keep me from coming into contact with it.

  Balor picked one hemisphere of Veilthorn. It was naturally formed in a way that left a huge mess of a melted landmass on one side, where all the leviathans still roamed. The area where the leviathans evolved to be smaller and smaller had more defined geography, making that area the focus of the World Seed.

  Hominids couldn’t survive among leviathans, and he was fine if that large continent remained that way. Hominids needed a challenge, and that would be their frontier should they evolve into a global civilization.

  Balor picked an unconventional way to implement magics.

  He took the majority of his stellar core to the moon. Once there, he dug a hole deep into the crust and let his excess soul matter create a layer at the edge of the mantle. He wanted to mimic the same process the corrupted Seedmaker was using.

  Crystallization of power. In the next hundred thousand years, his soul matter would solidify on the moon, integrating itself into a lunar terrestrial cycle. He waited on the moon, overseeing the production of one particularly colossal crystal, one that could absorb and regulate soul matter for the selected hemisphere of Veilthorn.

  Once it was ready, he dug it up and hurled it from space straight into the planet below. The crystal shattered on impact with the surface, collapsing a hole through the planet down to the third stratum. The soul matter that had dispersed over the hemisphere, creating ambient energy concentrated around smaller shards that spread across the crust.

  With it, he laid the foundation for magics, one that was unevenly spread on the world, rife for inequality among individuals and heavy survival competition.

  He descended to Veilthorn, leaving the rest of his soul matter to crystallize on the moon. His hominids could access more power if they figured out how to mine the moon, a million years into the future, as many civilizations as it could take.

  He landed in the forest that he picked. Here, he would slumber until they evolved. Here, he would wait for the next step: directly meddling with their bloodlines.

  He needed his hominids to develop magics faster.

  By any means necessary.