Both the maids and the set of guards were quiet. Although Xander was just 7 years of age, his voice carried a certain level of oppression. At the same time, just by standing in front of him, one could feel being beneath him, as if one would prostrate in front of him.
Of course, in their minds, there was still a small seed of ridicule towards him, given his age and the words he mentioned didn't match at all! Although the world they were in was a magi-tech type of civilization, such words and actions done by Xander were quite delusional and kind of childish, given the one speaking was a child. Although their rationality dictated that the kid in front of them was already qualified and would enter college, his looks still impacted his presence and oppressive aura.
Of course, Xander has no idea what these people were thinking. If he could read their minds, he would have laughed. He hasn't done anything at all, and was just mimicking the generals he had seen in the movies. He really didn't care about the lives of these guards, as he had no familial or blood connection whatsoever.
After the meeting, Xander and the rest dispersed, beginning to do their respective jobs. Xander decided to head outside and into the garden, where he planned to get some samples for the first experiment he wanted to try: Plant sentience.
Of course, he was no plant magician, nor was he an acknowledge botanist, but he did have one thing that these professionals didn't have: the power of time and space.
He wanted to check if given enough time and unimpeded growth, will biological, non-sentient beings develop sentience? It was a simple question, but it gave rise to possible implications of how special life forms besides humans, elves, and dwarves could exist, such as magical beasts and sprites.
What factors sentience? Is sentience equivalent to higher thinking, or a higher brain development and function? What happens if there is no brain-type system at all, like in plants? How about higher-dimensional beings who exists in weird manifestations, are they considered sentient if they only have a literal eye or even just a mouth as their bodies?
Of course, he had to start from somewhere familiar and safer to understand these things. First and foremost, he selected a simple thorned rose as a test subject. He then dug it up and transferred it into a different patch of land, one that was devoid of other plants.
What he did next was quite daring; he changed the time around the flower and the soil underneath it, increasing it to a ratio of 1 second outside to 100 minutes inside the plot of land, which led to the elemental particles and energies in that area to actually rapidly increase and condense. The situation inside was literally the elements continuously propagating faster than the space outside.
This phenomenon was quite interesting for Xander because he also wanted to understand why having a higher time-flow would result to more elemental particles being propagated. Even with his control over space, he couldn't find any traces of where these were coming from. Maybe it involved higher-ranked elements. With the help of space magic, he isolated the plot of land to avoid dispersing the particles to the rest of the garden, ensuring a one-way space.
He completed the setup 2 hours before lunch. He continued to observe the changes until it was lunchtime. There were no significant changes on the flower, or the soil; they both just seemed glossier and healthier than before. He left the garden and ate his lunch. After roughly an hour he returned to the garden.
What he saw surprised him. In that plot of land, the flower had already bloomed; and inside the flower, there was a tiny person lying down, sleeping on the flower. It looked delicate and feminine, yet it does not have any reproductive organs at all. He could barely see it as it was quite translucent. Xander, however, recognized what it was: a Plant sprite. Xander calculated how long has it been. It has been 2 years for the plant and soil. So how could it produce such a sprite? Could it be the condensing elemental particles led to a speedy development of the flower spirit? Is the sprite a necessary step to manifest sentience in empowered plants? How about the soil? Has it changed drastically as well?
Xander began investigating the soil and saw that there was a mass of earth elemental energies condensing right under the roots of the plant. It seems not every sprite is easily developed; each element would seem to have a different period of time as well as elemental concentration to form a sprite.
He continued to observe that plot of land. As time passed, the color and size of the flower sprite continued to deepen and increase, while the earth sprite of the soil continued to accumulate elemental energies. The formation of sprites were more on the animalistic to humanoid form; could this be an evolution of the material to showcase sentience or life development? The soil giving birth to a sprite was quite surprising for Xander, as it would seem that certain conditions can result inanimate objects forming their own sentience.
6 hours, or 4 years later for the plot of land, dinner was ready. After finishing, he headed back to the garden and continued his observation; nothing much has changed, but the soil was already in a deep brown color, while the plant was turning from radiant green to jade-green, with its thorns seemingly looking like facets of a crystal rose. The petals of the rose turned from rich red to a vibrant gradient of the sunset.
"So there is a qualitative change as the elements nurture the formation and growth of the material… formation of sentience, could it be a response of the material?" Xander pondered, as his eyes glowed with thirst for such knowledge.
He had an intriguing thought: The formation of sprites was a necessity for survival in high-powered locations.
The materials in this place required such formation to focus the continuous input of power from their surroundings, avoiding their self-destruction upon reaching their containing threshold.
So, the factor of adaptation is still present, whether or not it is with life, or non-living. Then that means… evolution, or the element it represents, may be pushing the growth and development of all things?
As Xander pondered, time passed by quickly. Leaving the area, since there wasn't much change in the development of the soil and the plant, he decided to create a space barrier just in case the sprites awaken and escape, and headed to his room to sleep for the night.
The next day.
Xander woke up with a yawn; he headed down and looked for breakfast. The meal was quickly prepared and he began to browse the news today using his tablet.
He didn't see anything noteworthy; there wasn't much that would affect his plans. There was a piece of news that did catch his eyes, which was about the escalating tensions between Eta and Nema, the two superpowers in Eteria Planet. It caught his eye because Callows city was in the Delta province, which was one of the 10 provinces of Eta.
At the same time, with his time ability, he knew that this would result to war in 200 years; a war that lasted 50 years before Eta emerging as the winner. Nema is absorbed by the country of Eta, which in turn, resulted to the formation of the parliament for the remaining 40 countries, uniting to make sure that Eta is kept in check.
1000 years later after this incident, due to multiple situations and escalating violence, both Eta and the Parliament merges, creating the Eteria Empire. The Eteria empire would have a unified universal currency, and the depreciation of the previous different currencies began. Of course, Eta was still a strong currency after 700 years of unification, only depreciating to a hundredth of its original value, while the rest of the currencies were already near obsolete or in the process of dispersion. What was interesting that after the unification, technological and magical development flourished, such as body augmentations, and longer lifespan for those below the Mythic class.
1000 years after the unification, magicians below Demigod realm finally were able to step into space and began their planetary expansion. They were able to, for some reason, reach faster than the speed of light with the help of the magic runic spells found in another ancient ruins 600 years after the unification. It took them 400 years to develop a magic-technological space carrier, allowing tens of thousands of humanoid lifeforms that haven't even reached the Demigod or Divine stage to enter and traverse the wide starry space.
When Xander saw this future once again, what he wanted to do was get the augmentation, as well as get the runic spells that they had found. He thinks that the runic spells were actually the partial fusion of space-time elements, given that they were able to achieve superluminal speed, roughly between 2 to 20 times the speed of light. However, he planned to go there once his comprehension of space-time elements are higher and his time traveling more longer and more stable, as well as his overall power being stronger than now. Who knows if Mythical magicians or higher became a common thing in that future?
After eating his breakfast, he headed to the garden and was quite surprised to see the changes that had happened. it has roughly been 16 years for the plot of land, and a lot has changed since then. The soil wasn't that brown anymore, but contained streaks of silver and jade green color. The plant looked like it was crystallized, forever immortalized, gleaming under the sunlight, with a height of 1 meter.
The sprites' were the largest change he had ever seen. The flower sprite had fully materialized, and it was roughly half the height of the rose plant with a humanoid shape. The sprite had mysterious markings in its arms and limbs, with the symbol of an opening rose right in its chest. The sprite looked like a male elf, but had feminine features.
It looked around at its surroundings with curiosity and immediately sensed the earth sprite below.
The earth sprite, however, had a weird shape and looked like a turtle. It didn't look like a humanoid, and was just munching on one of the roots of the plant, seemingly without care of what's happening in the outside world. The plant sprite, however, was quite furious with the earth sprite and attempted to command the roots to whip the turtle, which were all evaded by the turtle, who returned to munching the roots.
Xander smiled at this. He had seen that every bite of the turtle, earth elemental energy was being transferred from it to the roots. At the same time, the actions of the roots also helped the turtle and allowed it loosen the soil, while also infusing wood elemental energy to it at the same time, turning it more fertile. It was quite fascinating to see the dynamics of these two sprites.
He then headed to the modified plot of land. Upon detecting the presence of Xander, the plant sprite was shocked that it yelped before moving in front of the flower, as if wanting to defend it from Xander. The turtle looked up from beneath the ground, but resumed feeding on the the roots after a while.