Villain. A pretty convenient word used by everyone too lazy to admit that those who they were facing against, had their own reasons for doing things. From the light novels that I read in my previous life, through the experiences I had during my life as a reincarnator, all the way to the very moment when I departed from my second world… Through all those times, I never had any doubts about what did the word itself meant.
But right now, when I actually wanted to properly make use of this concept to let the worlds under my care grow even brighter, I faced a problem.
How do I make a villain that would be logical enough to fit the rules of the society and the world at large, without making him die off in the early years of his life? When the concept of being a villain mostly focused on amassing the negative traits of character to make the satisfaction from defeating such a person even greater, it just didn't make any sense for such a person to grow up in the first place.
Maybe in a world of luxury and abundance like earth. Maybe a stupid and unrealistic villain like that could appear. But not in the world where strong feasted on the weak. Not in a world where evolution reigned supreme.
Only after shedding all my misconceptions about the necessary character of villains did my actions start to bring some fruit. Comforting to the reality, rather than pushing for the appearance of someone devious to the bone, I ended up creating… a hero.
Once again, this word was pretty overused. But this time, I made sure to stick as close to all those silly concepts that made this word up. From the generous serving of charisma, through immense personal power all the way to a huge dosage of empathy. That kind of traits should be the perfect recipe for an upstanding individual that would lead his people, or whatever other races would choose to name themselves.
The one thing that made it so hard to discern whether those beings were heroical or villainous, was the fact that their tribes weren't united. Leading a single group into a victory and glory brewed hate from those that they conquered. From this hate, another upstanding, charismatic and powerful being would soon appear, only to turn the victims into oppressors in a never-ending circle.
This kind of strength-based development couldn't do any good to society. That is, that's what I thought before I took a critical look at how humanity developed on earth.
As insane as other civilisations were, due to an enormous number of geopolitical, geographical and societal preconditions, Europe was the one continent on earth that ended up spreading its influence all over the planet. But it would be wrong to say that they were some kind of superior people. In fact, Europeans were just blessed and cursed at the same time with all the traits of the lands they were living in.
From the abundance of domesticable animals that allowed for the early societies to develop quickly and over the course of several dreadful diseases, curb the population out of those who were weak against sickness. Through the insanely competitive game of sword and conquest warranted by the lack of fertile land for the number of people settling it. All the way to the insane competition when it came to fertile and resourceful lands.
One could argue that the reason behind European dominance over the entire world during the colonial age was just a result of how hard they had it in the first place. Their superior weapons came from the fact that everyone during most of history was scrambling every bit of technology to gain even the slightest edge over its opponents. Their drive to explore was warranted with the supply of spices that didn't grow domestically, being cut. Faced with a problem, humans, as a highly competitive species, found a way around it, setting the foundation for the entire colonisation process.
And by creating the circle of those broken heroes within my world, I aimed to replicate these processes that took place on earth. By introducing conflict and competition between the tribes of intelligent species, I finally managed to remove this one evolutionary trait that made a peaceful, intelligent life a failure.
Curbing out of the weak.
As genocidal and murderous as it could be, once one looked at the topic from the perspective of millennials, millennials that passed in just a few seconds of my perceived time, there was hardly any way to speak about it with such high morals on the agenda.
Just like a certain dictator once said, killing a single person is a tragedy, but killing millions is just a statistic. The same kind of rule applied to my situation. By increasing the competitiveness of each of the local tribes on the planets I was grooming, I forced them into a state of nearly constant conflict.
In this situation, those who were on the weaker end, had lesser chances to reproduce, leaving less and less offspring than the others. On the other hand, those who were strong, witty and merciless, would not only get more chances to fornicate, but their offspring would also be more likely to survive long enough to reach maturity.
Looking at the topic from the perspective of ages, one could say that I forced the species under my oversight into a process of refinement, turning the budding light in the universe into the ultimate predator. And soon, the results started showing up.
In less than just a single millennium, a certain race managed to find a solution to the problem that made expanding a civilisation beyond a single stellar system previously impossible. Even though it followed the footsteps of its ancestors and fell apart just two centuries later, the concept they came with to solve the problem of a single kind evolving into different races during the planetary colonisation made its way safely to my hive, only to spread in form or random, dreamed out ideas in the heads of the inventors of other races that approached similar level.
But the main problem, the problem of using magic to open rifts between worlds and modifying its properties still remained. Even though my interventions managed to push the limit of what life could achieve from stellar civilisations to multistellar ones, all the life was doomed to repeat the circle of growing up, reaching this new peak and falling apart, only for its ruins to serve as the breeding ground of new civilisations.
Somewhere during my work in one of the remote worlds, a strange accident happened. With the given world using quite a lot of magical energy as the basis of its technology, a huge crackdown of the energetical system of that world interfered with the structure of magic within my clone, leading to a fissure in space.
A fissure through which an entire damned city fell!
While it took me nearly a century to finally find out where did that city ended up, rather than despairing over the loss of several hundreds of thousands of lives… I finally found a reason to rejoice.
Analyzing the rules behind that spatial fissure took me barely a moment, a moment that was as long as an entire month on earth. But with this event perfectly registered in my hive's memory, I now became capable of bringing my meddling to another level.
It was time to start sending living beings from one place, to mess things up in another world!