Wizard: My career panel has no upper limit

He focused too much on the technical aspects of the ternary symbiotic system, to the point that he overlooked a most basic fact:
The birth of a race is not merely a biological process of "being created".

He needs a reason for these individuals to lower their guard, come closer to each other, and face the world together.

Technology can give them the ability to survive, but it cannot give them the desire to live together.

The former is science, the latter is... Ron couldn't find a precise word to summarize it.

Faith? That's too heavy a burden.

Consensus? That's too rational.

Perhaps the closest description is: a shared experience.

An experience that everyone will remember, celebrate, and revisit in the years to come.

A baptism that can forge "I" into "we".

What are you planning to do?

Dragon Soul had been observing silently, but now he could no longer suppress his curiosity.

Ron stood in front of the observation platform, his gaze fixed on the surface of the miniature planet.

Those scattered clusters of lights are like independent lighthouses on isolated islands, their lights unable to reach each other.

"I'm going to give them a harsh winter, and then see if they'll choose to come closer."

"...Do you know what that sounds like?"

"Like what?"

"Like a bored god experimenting on the ants he created."

Ron was silent for a moment.

“Maybe.” He didn’t deny it: “But at least I know what I’m doing.”

“That’s incredibly arrogant,” Acelia scoffed.

"If Hector heard this, he'd probably tell you another little story."

………………

There is a well-known rule for public servers.

For newly released populations that have been in the environment for less than two years (external time), their creators have a one-time "environmental calibration" privilege.

The original intention of this rule was to protect the early survival rate of new species.

After all, the ecosystem of the arena is far more complex than that of a private cubicle. Newly introduced species are extremely vulnerable during their adaptation period, and the slightest mistake could lead to their complete annihilation.

Most participants will use this opportunity to "improve" the living conditions of their species: increase local temperature, increase rainfall, and repel nearby dangerous creatures...

Ron did two things.

The first measure was to deploy "smoke to dispel confusion" at the boundary of the hilly area.

This is an environmental interference method that can create an invisible odor barrier within a specific area.

The arena is teeming with mutated beasts from the Abyss School.

Those mutated creatures, which are extremely difficult to control, are like wild monsters on a large map, running around everywhere and biting anything they see.

For most of the contestants' mature populations, these mutant beasts were at best an annoying nuisance.

However, for the Bloodline, which has just been deployed and has not yet established any defense system, even an attack by a small group of aberrant beasts could cause devastating damage.

The purpose of dispelling sedatives is to temporarily isolate these uncontrollable dangerous factors.

Ron entered the parameters on the control panel:

"I can put pressure on them, but I can't let them face annihilation unprepared."

The second thing he did was lower the temperature parameters for the hilly areas by forty degrees.

The numbers on the panel plummeted from an average daytime temperature of 23 degrees Celsius to minus 20 degrees Celsius, and the cold wave is expected to last for several months.

This value is almost cruelly precise, falling right on the edge of the physiological limits of bloodline.

It wouldn't freeze them to death immediately, but it would be enough to make each individual deeply feel how difficult it is to survive alone in the bitter cold.

In addition, low temperatures also inhibit the effect of the Echo Tree, something he discovered in his previous experiments.

"you sure?"

Acelia hesitated for a moment:

"Minus twenty degrees Celsius... With their current equipment and organizational level, a single group simply cannot survive the first night."

"That's the key point."

Ron's finger hovered above the confirm button for a brief second before falling down.

"A single community might not survive, but what if multiple communities come together?"

The moment the parameters took effect, the climate around the public server he controlled underwent a dramatic change.

From high above, a layer of leaden gray clouds surges from the northern horizon of the hills, like a giant curtain being suddenly pulled up.

The sunlight was completely blocked within a few hours.

The temperature began to drop.

The temperature dropped from 27 degrees to 15 degrees, and the bloodline members only felt a slight unusual chill, instinctively hugging their arms to their chests.

Then at five degrees, my breath turned into white mist, and my bare feet began to feel the biting cold as I stepped on the soil.

Then it dropped to minus ten degrees Celsius, and a thin layer of ice had formed on the surface of the stream.

Those communities that hadn't had time to store water began to panic, smashing the ice with stones and desperately pouring the icy water into their rough containers.

It was minus twenty degrees Celsius, and night had fallen.

There was no moon, no stars, only endless darkness and cold wind.

The bloodline's amber skin began to fade in the extreme cold, and the warmth of the star fragments was diluted to an almost imperceptible degree.

Without sunlight, their energy cycle is cut off, and their body heat is being lost at an alarming rate.

A dozen or so communities huddled together in their own camps, using whatever they could find—dry grass, tree bark, mud—to try to build a windbreak.

But a few mud walls cannot withstand the extreme cold of minus twenty degrees Celsius.

The wind is like an invisible knife, seeping in through every crack and stripping away every last bit of warmth.

Ron was in the observation room, watching the brightness of those points of light gradually diminish.

Those points of light represent the activity of stellar fragments within the bloodline.

The lower the activity, the dimmer the light spot.

When the light completely goes out, it means that the individual has lost consciousness.

After that, there is death.

His fingers tightened slightly on the armrest.

"You're hesitating."

"No."

Ron took a deep breath: "I'm waiting."

………………

The turning point happened at midnight.

A community on the eastern side of the hills has been enduring the cold wind for six hours.

They huddled together, warming each other with their bodies.

Although stellar debris loses its supply of sunlight, a weak "near-field resonance" effect occurs when multiple individual fragments are closely clustered together.

Several candles that are about to go out can be put together and reignited.

The heat generated by resonance is not much, but it is just enough to maintain the core temperature.

They could barely survive, but they weren't comfortable at all.

The problem is that this community only has 120 individuals.

When the outermost bloodline in the group began to shiver from hypothermia, the community leader made a decision.

He pushed his way out of the crowd, braving the biting cold wind, and headed north.

Three hundred meters to the north was the camp of another group.

That group had nearly two hundred individuals, but their situation was equally dire.

When the tall, blood-blooded man staggered into their camp, everyone stood up alertly.

The two communities had previously been embroiled in a dispute over the ownership of a water source.

Although no blood was shed, the seeds of hostility had been sown.

The tall, bloodline man stopped two steps away, trembling violently.

His lips were frozen bluish-purple, and his words came out in broken sentences, with wisps of steam escaping from between his teeth:

"……cold."

"Together...warmth."

Just those two words.

There was no rhetoric, no negotiation, and no diplomatic skill whatsoever.

It was the most primal plea from a single life on the verge of freezing to another group of lives on the verge of freezing.

The wind howled in the darkness, and the whole world was counting down for them.

Finally, an older female from the opposite group stepped forward.

She didn't speak, but simply reached out and grasped the tall man's frozen fingers.

Then, she turned and made a gesture towards her people.

The crowd slowly parted, making way for one hundred and twenty blood descendants who staggered in.

The two groups of people mingled together, huddled together.

The combined body heat of over three hundred bodies amplified the near-field resonance effect of the stellar debris.

A faint warmth spread outwards from the center of the crowd, gradually pushing back the cold.

This scene played out repeatedly during that long, cold night.

The two communities on the south side merged, and the three communities on the west side merged.

Some communities traveled a long way, trekking through the darkness for two whole hours, before finding their nearest neighbor.

Some communities have never taken that step.

Those who did not choose to approach fell asleep before dawn.

Before losing consciousness, the severely hypothermic brain made one last wrong judgment.

They felt hot all over, so they took off their only animal skins and revealed enigmatic smiles.

Then, she quietly stopped breathing.

Ron watched all of this from the observation room.

The harsh cold was the pressure he exerted, but the choice was between reaching out to each other or enduring the darkness alone.

This choice is one that only they can make.

Creators can design bones and blood, but they cannot design courage.

………………

Dawn has broken.

A crack appeared in the clouds, and the first ray of sunlight pierced through the cold mist, slanting into the earth.

For ordinary creatures, this is just another ordinary sunrise.

But for those of bloodline, this ray of light means the difference between life and death.

The moment the sunlight touched the skin, the stellar fragments within the body, dormant all night, suddenly burst forth with scorching energy pulses.

Those blood descendants who huddled together in the cold night resonated with each other.

The remaining two thousand-plus star fragments all felt the same ray of sunlight at the same moment.

Ron observed from the observation room that the brightness of these points of light successively climbed to their peak values.

Ron looked at the once scattered and isolated points of light, which were now all gathered around the icon of the Echoing Tree.

They were no longer seventeen scattered campfires, but had transformed into a single, unified flame.

However, not all stories have a happy ending.

More than four hundred individuals of the bloodline froze to death in the cold night.

On the spiritual level, the "soul anchor point" at the end of the tree root is performing calculations.

Ron had previously verified the backup and reconstruction mechanism of the Echo Tree in the experimental grid.

But all of that was done under “ideal conditions”—ample energy, a stable environment, and precise tracking of individual experimental subjects.

At this moment, in a real competitive environment, under the extreme condition of hundreds of individuals dying simultaneously, the Echoing Tree exhibited some behavioral patterns that he had never observed in the laboratory.

The first step is screening.

Not all deaths triggered the reconstruction process.

Of the more than 400 bodies, less than a third of the information was completely intercepted by the tree roots.

The reason is simple: the extreme cold severely inhibited the transmission efficiency of the Echoing Tree, causing the backup signal to weaken to the point where it could no longer be completely intercepted.

Those individuals who were too far from the nearest tree root, or whose soul fragments scattered too quickly upon death.

Their information was lost in the noise of the lower levels of the spirit world before it could be captured.

A cup of water is spilled into the ocean, and it becomes impossible to distinguish which water molecules belonged to that cup.

“Permanent death,” Ron noted in his notebook.

This was to be expected; the Echoing Tree was not a foolproof safety net.

If any link in the chain—distance, energy, or environmental conditions—goes wrong, death is truly death.

Then comes the reconstruction itself.

This process is slower and more...rougher than what is observed in the laboratory.

Under the suppression of low temperature, it took the Echoing Tree nearly twenty days (internal time) to complete the reconstruction of its first body, and this was only because its inner spiritual energy reserves were sufficient.

When the new body emerged from the soil near the tree roots, Ron focused his observation on it.

At first glance, this body is almost identical to the original deceased individual.

With the same height, bone structure, facial contours, and even the distribution pattern of stellar fragments under the skin, the original version was also accurately replicated.

If we only look at the physical biological indicators, this is the deceased bloodline.

Ron stared at him for a long time, then finally shook his head.

"Not the same one."

"Hmm?" Acelia was somewhat puzzled:
"Data comparison shows that the physiological structure restoration rate reached 99.7%, and the fidelity of the soul information was also above 98%."

“Accuracy is not an issue.” Ron pulled up two sets of comparison data.

The last neural activity record of the original individual before death, and the first set of neural activity records after the reconstructed individual awakens.

“Look here.”

He pointed to an extremely subtle deviation between two almost perfectly parallel curves.

"In the final moments before death, the brain of an individual produces a unique pattern of neural impulses."

That was the sum of all the sensations he experienced in the last few seconds before his consciousness faded in the extreme cold.

Fear, resentment, a longing for warmth, a fleeting glimpse of a companion's face...

"The Echo Tree faithfully recorded all this information."

“But…” His finger paused on the deviation: “What is recorded is only the information itself.”

"When this information is injected into a brand new body, the new brain will 'read' these memories, just like flipping through someone else's diary."

“He knows what the original individual went through, and can recall those images, emotions, and details, but he has never ‘experienced’ it himself.”

"You mean... reading a book about drowning and actually drowning are two completely different things."

"almost."

Ron leaned back in his chair.

"What the Echo Tree does is essentially a highly accurate 'information replication'."

He can replicate memories, personality traits, and behavioral patterns, but there's one thing he can't replicate.

"Every second that an individual experiences from birth to death constitutes a continuous river of experiences."

Every drop of water in this river is a product of this very moment; the feeling of the previous second shapes the reaction of the next, and the reaction of the next second, in turn, influences the decision of the second after that.

“This sense of continuity of ‘experiencing this moment’ is something that the Tree of Echoes cannot capture or replicate.”

This analysis reminded him of an ancient proposition that had troubled countless philosophers.

The Ship of Theseus.

If every plank of a ship is replaced one by one, is the ship still the same ship after the replacement?

When faced with this problem, most people get bogged down in deciding "which plank is the key".

But the real answer may be even more brutal: the key is not the plank.

A ship is "that ship" not because of the planks it is made of, but simply because it carries a specific voyage.

When the voyage is interrupted, that part of the journey ends.

The Echo Tree can build a new ship using the exact same planks, and can even allow the new ship to set sail again along the old route.

But that was already a new journey.

Ron looked at the newly reconstructed body on the screen.

He was looking around blankly, the halo around him exactly the same as the dead primitive entity.

He stood up, and the first thing he did was walk towards the Bloodline community.

Because his memory told him that those were "one of their own".

But when he reached the edge of the settlement and saw his surviving companions, he stopped.

His companions recognized his face, and one of them tentatively reached out and touched his arm.

The body temperature is warm, and the skin feels real.

"You...you're back?"

The reconstructed body tilted its head.

He remembered the companion who was speaking to him, and he also remembered the two of them picking berries together by the stream.

But he also vaguely sensed that something was wrong.

Those memories are there, clear and tangible, like morning dew clinging to a spiderweb.

But that personal feeling of "I was there at the time" is separated by a thin veil.

You don't need scientific instruments to measure this difference; your body knows it itself.

"……Um."

The reconstructed entity finally nodded and then walked into the community.

He'll adapt.

As time goes by, new experiences will gradually cover that thin veil.

New memories will intertwine with old memories, eventually forming a continuous river of experiences that belongs to him alone.

"This is the essence of the Echoing Tree."

Ron wrote a final summary in his notebook:

“The dead navigator sank to the bottom of the sea, but the nautical charts he left behind will be used by the next navigator to continue the voyage.”

"The charts are old, but the navigators are new. The voyage never stops."

"But then again..."

Acelia suddenly broke the somewhat heavy atmosphere:

"That philosophical analysis you just gave certainly sounded quite profound, but have you considered a more practical question?"

"What's the problem?"

"How will those descendants themselves view this?"

Ron was taken aback.

"For them, a companion died and then 'woke up' again beside the sacred tree."

Do you think...they'll get bogged down in philosophical questions about 'continuity'?

"Or will they just cling tightly to the person who 'came back,' thankful that they haven't completely lost them?"

Ron remained silent for a long time.

"...You're right, after all, not all of them have the perspective of a creator."

Aseria snorted: "It seems that my influence on you over the years has had some effect after all."

"...When have you ever influenced me?"

"Every time you do something stupid."

………………

One month after the initial individuals were released (in external time), the internal equivalent flow was sufficient for the bloodline society to complete the transformation from "gathering" to "initial organization".

A bloodline member stood up; his number was α-0217.

From the first day of awakening, α-0217 showed a stronger desire for language expression than other individuals.

When others communicate using gestures and short words, he will tirelessly try to describe things using longer sentences.

He likes to "talk".

Most of the time, the other bloodlines just looked at him with confusion and then went on with their own business.

But after the cold night, everything changed.

It was on that darkest night that α-0217 staggered toward its northern neighboring community.

It was he who uttered the words "cold," "together," and "warm," which determined the fate of the entire race.

Therefore, once the merger was completed and the settlement was initially formed, α-0217 naturally became the most trusted voice in this new community.

The events of that day fundamentally changed his role once again.

As if drawn by some force, α-0217 placed its palm on the trunk of the Echoing Tree.

Perhaps it is his innate sensitivity that makes him more adept at "interpreting" information flow.

The moment his palm touched the tree trunk, he saw the image.

He saw the scattered groups trembling in the darkness.

He saw himself staggering through the blizzard, then a hand reached out, and another hand grasped his.

He also saw the light of dawn.

The bloodline members sitting around the tree almost simultaneously felt a warm wave rising from the soles of their feet.

In those few seconds, everyone "saw" the same thing.

Darkness, hand, light, tree.

α-0217 said one word.

"Solheim".

Sol is a syllable root related to "light" from the vampire gene library.

Heim – This syllable is not in the vampire language library.

Ron retrieved α-0217's previous speech records and played them back frame by frame.

He had tried using "beside the tree" to express it in the past few days, but felt it wasn't enough.

I tried using "warm place" as a substitute, but I'm still not satisfied.

They even tried a five-syllable phrase that roughly translates to "the tree-lined place where everyone feels safe and secure when they gather together."

It's too long.

Ultimately, he overturned all the expressions he had tried and condensed them into a single syllable.

Heim (home).

When "Sol" and "Heim" are put together, a word is born.

Solheim, the House of Sunshine.

He used this word to refer to the place where the Echoing Tree was located, this sunlit land, the common home of all people.

"The spontaneous creation of language is a historic moment, no less significant than when apes learned to use fire."

“α-0217”.

Ron wrote two notes next to the number.

The first one: leader.

α-0217 never declared itself the "leader".

He simply stepped forward whenever someone needed to speak up, and the others automatically followed suit.

The second annotation—Ron thought for a while and finally wrote down two words: Medium.

Listen to the voice of the Echoing Tree, weave the memories within the tree into a narrative, and then transmit the narrative to everyone through collective resonance.

This is the function of a medium.

α-0217 possesses two talents: a passion for language and a sensitivity to spiritual information.

The former made him the first storyteller of his race, while the latter made him able to "hear" the voices in the trees.

When these two talents converge in a person, a medium is born.

Also born naturally was the first "epic" of the bloodline civilization.

In the days following that collective resonance, α-0217 began to regularly narrate under the Echo Tree.

His narrative style gradually changed with each repetition, acquiring structure, rhythm, and deliberate rhetoric.

Gradually, this narrative acquired a fixed title—"Song of the Night".

"What are you thinking about?" Acelia asked.

“I think… they seem to have interpreted that cold night as a story about ‘unity’ and ‘hope’.”

Ron frowned: "But in reality, that cold night was an environmental stress test that I created."

Acelia remained silent for a few seconds.

"So you think... that story is fake?"

“No.” Ron shook his head:
"The story itself is true. Every scene and every detail actually happened."

His finger lightly tapped the data panel, and the recording paused.

"However, the cause that triggered all of this was something I deliberately created."

I gave them a carefully calculated test question, and they handed in a perfect score.

"They extracted unexpected beauty from the difficulties I created."

"Perhaps this original hymn is more valuable than my experimental report."

Noticing the other person's confusion, Acelia deliberately imitated the tone of the King of Absurdity:
"How about this, I'll tell you a story too."

Ron was somewhat surprised: "Okay, what's the story?"

"Back then I was young... well, before I met that woman Pandora."

“My nest is atop the mountains, and every spring, a flock of migrating blue tits flies over my airspace.”

“They are so small that I could swallow a whole group of them in one go.”

"But one year, I overheard them singing in flight."

"That song is very simple, just a few syllables repeated over and over."

"But that's how they tell their companions during long migrations, 'I'm still here, you're not alone.'"

"I listened to it all spring."

"Then, I gave up the habit of hunting blue tits during the migration season."

Ron chuckled softly.

"So you also have the experience of being a 'bored god'."

"...I take back what I said. You can interpret it however you like."

"It's too late, I've already written it down."

"you--!"

Dragon Soul's voice suddenly rose in pitch, then he forcefully suppressed it again:
"...I just think those birds sing quite nicely, don't overthink it."

"Yeah, I didn't think much of it."

You're clearly smiling!

"I didn't laugh."

You're laughing right now!

"...Okay, I was laughing, but it was an appreciative laugh."

"Humph."

Acelia let out a heavy snort, whether from anger or embarrassment, it was hard to tell. (End of Chapter)