The lights were bright, halos crept into his eyes and Professor Quanli took in the scenery, it was much better. After fiddling with his eyes for a moment, he stood there adjusting his vision. "Kim Li, this is much better, what did you do?" There was still no response.
"I don't see any people, lets have a look. Ugh.., this is so boring! This place needs people.." It was like it happened in an instant. People showed up, none of them moved and most of them were stacked on top of each other. "What's this?" Looking at them up close and with confusion Professor Quanli's expression quickly turned green.
A tutorial message showed up, he had been given autonomy over something called Creation drive.
"I thought that was a compression algorithm? What exactly is going on here?" Suddenly and without any warning a text started scrolling in front of his eyes, text flowed and floated, moving with his gaze, inescapable.
Giant red letters appeared, they dimmed into a golden ripple as they vanished.
-{You have died. Due to Karma, the Gods have given you your own Realm. Do with it as you will.}
The tutorial Ended and vanished like a lie.
"That was it? What the FUCK! A sticky post.. that's an explanation?" Yelling in frustration didn't help Jigui either. "How am I suppose to make these things work?" and suddenly everything did..
The world began to move, people started talking, he couldn't hear anything they said, and he couldn't directly interact with them. This foreign world was his, and he had no idea what to do.
The Sun rose and fell, Days turned to nights, but that was it.. no stars, no nightlight.. no streetlight, the only light at night was the Carnival he had woken into. In fact, the Carnival was the only place where things were happening.
"What is going on with me? Why did this happen? This is too depressing.. I'm out." He walked to a tall building and tried to enter but was blocked by his own imagination, no doors led to the roof.
"I NEED A DOOR!" Slamming his fist against the wall, a door appeared, he rushed to the toof, threw himself from the building and nothing happened. When he opened his eyes.. he was standing firm outside the building staring at the entry door like he had never gone in.
He wasn't dead, but he was dead, he wasn't alive, but he wasn't dead.. he had nothing to do.
So, Jigui reviewed his Gaming Animation days and started one inch at a time.
Losing track of time, he became grievously annoyed. After a long time he created stars to remind him of his past, from what he could remember and even added a few constellations to make up for missing spots.
Finally, he had a Night Sky but it left him feeling a sense of lackluster.
"But this is a Construct? Why does it have to be the same as reality?" He thought one day while working on the grass he had been complaining to himself about and then he deleted everything he had done and started from scratch.
Everything vanished.
One would know they were in a simulation simply by looking at the screen, pixelation and electronic movements. Jigui's situation was different, there was no screen. He had a way to interact and very soon he had made a way for him to create better and faster. He had a city then he had small islands, then he looked up at the sky and decided, "This is too.. too familiar!"
He changed it again, this time he added four planets in the vicinity with their own complexions and moons, he created a system of gravity and planetary movement. Two Suns sat parallel to each other and rose and set within three hours of each other. The best part about his progress was that he could start work on his surroundings once more.
Deliberately wiping the surroundings clear of obstacles, he started anew on this round ball within the construct, he had an endless palette to fill. He started with simple Islands, then Continents, changing the rocks and adding minerals of different colors and atomic weight, giving them what he remembered from games, even adding a few from fantasy novels.
Jigui added water, then realized that all the water he had on the planet was fresh water.. so he made it salt. It killed the little grass he had remaining. "Seems I'll have to care about chemical reactions here as well but I don't know what everything does, no one does! This is crazy!"
"If I ever get out of here, I'm giving Xuan Kim Li his degree. Fuck, this is too awesome." As if dumbstruck, an epiphany hit the Professor, "Xuan Kim Li."
A hazy figure of Xuan Kim Li Appeared, his face was fuzzy and somewhat hard to make out.
Professor Quanli felt a little ashamed, he couldn't recall the boys face. He did remember what a few friends looked like while he was growing up and decided to use one of those images, suddenly the figure in front of him came to life.
"I.....iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii" His voice like a stuttering computer, the word 'I' was repeated endlessly. Even though the entity in front of him had a face, it had no personality, no techniques or knowledge. Jigui was brilliant, but so absent minded. He laughed and thought, "Okay, well.. this is stupid!" and then he said "Shut up!" and he did.
He was left speechless by what happened next.
The entity stood there unblinking, quiet and obedient.
Some time later, he had finished building the vicinity. He had spent countless hours, days, years, decades even to make everything as accurate as possible, from rocks to trees. He was somewhat pleased with his work, at least nothing sounded like am incoming Fax Machine.
"This little castle of mine, what should I do? Mmmm....I saw a crappy kids movie that had a great idea!" The Professor waved his hands around and tried his best to envision what he wanted.
'Fly!' He thought and the walls lifted into the air, leaving the soil below with dust falling about. Jigui felt like he was underestimating this world, placing the building back down upon the ground he noticed that it went right back to where it was, even the dust settled in its original place.
"This must be part of the design elements in the creation drive, otherwise.. why would things reset?" Jigui had lots of questions but there was no one to answer. "I have some basic plants but no animals."
"I wonder" Suddenly a Cockroach appeared freestanding in the world. Although it was a little scary for the Professor, he didn't expect the Cockroach to be so large. It stood three meters tall and Jigui barely came up to its mandibles which looked like they could take his head off.
"At least there aren't more of them," Suddenly a hundred appeared in front of him like magic, stunned Jigui waved his hand and sent them far away. Watching them flying away he noticed they didn't flap their wings and fly off.
Then, they did.
"This world is too strange, everything seems to go along with my thoughts but not in a linear fashion." Jigui held his head and tried to hold back his thoughts. "I can't just let my mind run away, what if Godzilla Shows up, this Neo-Tokyo would be done for sure." The exact opposite happened... Godzilla, or at least a red knockoff version of it magically showed up and sank into the sea. It seemed like it was moving but Jigui gulped and continued trying to make sense of his new world.
After some time, Jigui finally made a Dog.
The Dog was a little misshapen but no one was around to care or voice an opinion. Things persisted like that for a while.. Jigui made a few packs of different size Dogs and Cats, before he realized he had not made any sort of food supply for Predators.
Finally somewhat interested in making living creatures, Jigui made rats, bats, mice, fish, algae and crabs. Turtles were harder since he never watched them much. Instead of flippers the Turtles all had hoof feet and Dragon heads. That was the strangest thing he had made up until then, well.. since RedZilla. He didn't want to make a bunch of those so he dared not think about them too much.
When he finally thought he had anatomy down, he started making a lot more animals of all sorts of shapes, sizes and mixes were introduced. He made most of the traditional animals come in variant sizes so that they could be ridden like mounts. Saddles looked funny on the beasts, so he opted not to make them attached to the animals in nature.
"If life rides these things, they will surely find a way." While thinking about animals he could recall or come up with to fill up the everlasting plains he called a planet, Jigui thought about what was normally only possible in games. He started to think about Magic.
Not just Magic in general but Creation, Destruction, Darkness and Light, Water and Fire.. soon, many Magics he had never even considered before started flooding his brain. The Professor had never imagined so much about Magic before and now he was helping build the intricacies behind such functions.
It started to really catch his interest, he enjoyed games when he had the time for them. Now it was at his liberty, just like the games he would play. The Professor dove in to the subject and for a long time, he was not satisfied. To test the new magic power he wielded, he thought about a fireball. Before him, a blazing Mini-sun appeared scorching his face and melting the ground beneath him into a pool of hot liquid.
Amazed, he lost his train of thought and slipped into what people would refer to in his past as a state of Enlightenment. Suddenly every magic he had considered while he was in the construct came into his mind, clearer, and clearer till he had them perfected and could intermingle their usefulness effortlessly.
It was amazing beyond worlds for the Professor, the feeling of Liquid Darkness that could tumble through his fingertips or hover. The feeling of weightlessness with the ability to crush anything before you into twenty million times its density with the force of gravity and space. Then he thought about the Wars of Men and how life would be lost, and suddenly Magic felt sacred something that should not be used for murder.
Worry didn't really cross his mind, but there had to be limitations to power. After Magic had made its mark on Jigui, he no longer felt like the Professor.
So much time had passed, he didn't quite know if time even existed for him. Jigui only knew that he could create, he felt like god and created so many things. He was methodical in his approach, trying to make it feel like an entertaining existence, giving life to life and commands to make those lifeforms function the way he thought they should.
Bored out of his mind after what seemed like an eernity, his wild world had still no people, except his stuttering re-creation. Jigui could not bring himself end his existence and could not cry.
He was pretty satisfied with the results overall and eventually he made it so that 'Boy' was able to cry after being punched and that was fine until the boy stopped crying and started fighting back.
Jigui quickly reduced the boy to atoms and began again.
He went through so many 'Boys' after that.
If he was not stuck in the construct, he surely would have pawned that effort off on someone else. It was all a bit much and he was unable to change his situation. He had tried.
Without any consideration to his imagination, a Girl appeared. She was quite cute, looking like something he had seen in a smut magazine when he was a teenager, he quickly gave her clothes as to not feel like a lecher.
"Am I really going to be like that?" Sighing at his own hesitation, he still couldn't leave the girl naked, she was quickly wrapped in a dress that cleaned itself.