There may also be some inaccuracies, since English is not my native language.
Essentially, TBATE is first translated from English into my native language - and in that process, some details are already altered to make it more understandable for us. Now I'm taking that adapted (and somewhat distorted) version, revising it, rewriting it, and then translating it back into English.
I hope you'll point out any mistakes in the text that I might have missed.
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Lucius Zogratis POV
I could no longer hear their replies, because by that point I had already brought the World Seed to my core. Curved like a crescent moon, it began to glow softly as it drew near, then passed through my chest as though water through soil. And at that same instant, I-or rather, my consciousness, or astral body-found myself in a place completely unlike anything I had ever seen before.
My consciousness floated in an absolutely black, boundless space, where there was no horizon, no direction, not even a single familiar point of reference. And only at the very center of that endless darkness did the World Seed hover gently.
At that moment, I felt something in my soul begin to pound furiously, like an engine. I did not even need to check to understand what was causing it.
The partial knowledge I had received the moment the World Seed sank into my aether core made it clear that the energy of this world would be restored through the energy of my soul and the aether in my core. This ability absorbed aether particles from the core, mixed them with soul energy, and then forced them to collide in a process resembling nuclear fusion. As a result, even more aether essence was born, which then went toward sustaining this world.
But the speed and power of that process were completely different-they were utterly unlike what I had learned from the knowledge of the World Seed. And the answer was obvious.
The black-and-white flame.
It was working like mad, filling this world with an enormous amount of basic energy, though I myself did not feel even a drop of fatigue.
But I did not have long to think about it, because the World Seed interrupted my train of thought. It began to glow again-this time far brighter-and then suddenly unfolded like the bud of a flower.
The crystal shell of the World Seed opened and split into six petals, completely filling my field of vision. Then those six petals began to expand rapidly and arrange themselves one above another.
And with that movement came truly colossal changes. Knowledge poured into me, and with it came an instinctive understanding of what I could do and what I was capable of changing.
And at the same time, I felt energy.
There was an incredible amount of it.
An unimaginable amount-so much that I could not have described it in either words or numbers. It was something primordial, pure, dense, almost viscous to the senses. It felt as though an entire ocean of energy had spread through that black space-pliant, obedient, ready to take whatever form I wished. And in that very instant, when the World Seed unfolded, I felt something else as well.
A connection.
A connection to all the surrounding space.
The sensation was so complete and so natural that for a moment I truly froze in astonishment. I felt that vast sea of emptiness as though it were an extension of my own body. Space responded to the slightest movement of my will as though they were fingers on a hand, though I still did not fully understand how it worked. But understanding came quickly, directly-like knowledge that had always existed inside me and had only remained sealed until now.
The moment I directed my will, I felt not only this place, but also the layers of space above it-the very petals. More precisely, five of them, because the sixth petal was this black space in which my astral body now floated.
From the inside, the structure of this world was perceived with astonishing clarity. The total area of the main space was enormous-roughly 1.8 billion square kilometers. And apparently, I could shape it however I pleased, and doing so did not even require spending the colossal energy this world possessed.
The very foundation of the world already allowed its basic parameters to be set without any cost at all. It reminded me of a starter pack in village, city, or kingdom-building games-when at the very beginning you are given limited resources: a little stone, a little wood, a little food, a few basic buildings, and you have to squeeze the maximum out of them, developing your settlement step by step.
But here the difference was truly monstrous.
If in those games you begin with fifty stones, forty logs, a few dozen apples, and three tents, the World Seed worked in a completely different way. It did not simply hand out a limited starting stock of materials-it provided the very basis for arranging the Zero Space. Not separate resources, but their original source, a complete foundation for the creation of an entire world.
Earth, water, minerals, vegetation-and probably everything else one could possibly imagine-were included in that original set as something self-evident.
But let us return to the petals layered above the world.
To put it simply, above the main space where my consciousness currently resided, there were five more layers of equal size. Like a true manhua reader, I immediately called them the Heavens.
So, the White Heaven governed the sun, light, and the cycle of day. The Dark Heaven governed night and shadows. The Green Heaven governed all living souls that would appear and die within this space. The Fourth Heaven was gray and empty; it governed the laws and rules that I myself would set, and at the same time it was a kind of system that I would configure later. And finally, the Fifth Heaven was violet-it governed the energy of this world. It was there that the monstrous quantity of pure aether I had felt at the very moment the World Seed awakened was contained.
Yes, aether.
It reminded me of one moment from anime-how Aizen's spiritual pressure became so monstrous in both quality and quantity that it effectively passed into another category of existence. To those around him, it was as though it had vanished-not because it was absent, but because they were no longer capable of comprehending it. They simply could not perceive something so far beyond the limits of their understanding.
The same thing had happened to me. I had failed to realize it was aether only because the level of its purity and density so vastly surpassed everything I had encountered before.
Before, I would never have been able to understand it. I would not have been able to distinguish it, sense it, identify it.
But now, inside this space and perceiving it as a whole, from beginning to end, I recognized it without the slightest doubt. In its essence, this energy truly was aether-perfectly pure and dense, so pure and dense that I simply had not been able to recognize it before. Its quality and density were so overwhelming that my normal methods of perception simply did not work here.
And I instinctively knew that I could draw concentrated aether essence from that sea of aether and use it to alter, create, or destroy anything within this world. More than that, because of the monstrous concentration of aether, even one unit of such essence would be enough to anchor a simple eternal rule. But the more complex the structure became, the higher the price.
To configure the laws of this world and create everything in it except for intelligent lifeforms would require around two and a half thousand units of aether essence. More than half of that amount could be avoided, but I wanted to make this world beautiful and unusual. Animals would require another three to three and a half thousand or so. And creating a complex intelligent species like humans would already require around twenty thousand units.
And I could only create living beings here up to rank 6. Anything above that was simply impossible - the World Seed had a restriction that clearly stated that everything created had to be two ranks lower than the world itself. I would have had to spend more than fifty thousand units of concentrated aether essence to create ten rank 5 beings - the equivalent of silver core stage in the world of TBATE. It would have been far more economical to simply grant this world magic and let them figure things out on their own, although without my help that might have taken tens of thousands of years. But that could be left for later.
The total amount of concentrated aether essence in the Violet Heaven was one hundred thousand units.
And that truly was an enormous amount-nothing at all like what I had expected after receiving the basic knowledge at the very beginning.
Originally, this world was only supposed to possess around five thousand units of concentrated aether essence. That would have been enough to establish the world's rules, create things beyond the world's base resources, and produce some number of animals. And that would have been all. Creating more intelligent species would have required waiting for the aether essence to recover.
But the black-and-white flame had shown its hand once again, increasing the world's base energy reserves twentyfold. In theory, that should have heavily drained my spiritual core, and considering that my soul was rank 12, one might have thought that was only natural. But no - that was not what happened. I could feel a portion of my soul's energy being consumed, only for it to be restored in the very same instant. And once again, it was all thanks to the black-and-white flame.
"What the hell are you?.." I muttered, genuinely bewildered.
I understood that the black-and-white flame was the result of [Half-Otherworldly], whose rank had never been shown, but I still did not understand its true function beyond its strange reaction to any change in my soul and whatever was connected to it.
But back to... perhaps I should give this place a name?
Blessed Land?
Yes, let it be so.
The order of the Heavens also formed into a surprisingly neat structure. First came the Zero World-that is, the world in which all existing things would live. Above it was the White Heaven, above that the Dark Heaven, then the Green Heaven, higher still the Gray Heaven, which embodied the system, and lastly the Violet Heaven, which supplied energy to everything else, especially the Gray Heaven.
All five Heavens were arranged one above the other, forming a kind of vertical structure, while at the very bottom lay the main space-the very place where my consciousness currently resided. Naturally, I immediately checked the boundaries.
Could I go beyond this space?
Yes, but only to a certain extent-up and down. The world was not infinite, and I could not move sideways beyond the seas and oceans that were meant to appear here. In structure, it resembled an ordinary vertical glass: if you went all the way to the very edge of the world, you would run into a wall that could not be passed through. You could move upward or downward, but not sideways beyond its limits.
Incidentally, just as I had expected, this world was flat by nature and extended upward into the heavenly spaces and downward into the thickness of the earth for about thirty thousand kilometers in each direction.
But back to the size of this place... 1.8 billion square kilometers at my disposal.
The number was so enormous that it was difficult to fully grasp at first. To picture it more clearly, it would be like taking 3.7 Earths, cutting each of them in half, and then flattening all those halves into one giant plane.
The total surface area of the Earth was about 500 million square kilometers, but only 150 million square kilometers of that was land; everything else was seas and oceans.
The scale was truly monstrous. A colossal expanse.
As I sorted through the flood of information pouring into me and examined the basic set of materials the World Seed had already provided, I realized that while it might have been convenient for others, for me it was almost useless. If I had possessed only five thousand units of aether essence, then yes, it truly would have been very useful…
With a single act of will, I gave the empty space a floor.
It appeared almost instantly, but not as a perfectly flat, smooth slab that had suddenly emerged from the void. On the contrary, from the very first moments, its surface began to change rapidly, as if the very fabric of the universe were rushing to take shape. The earth was covered with layers of various rocks and minerals: in some places, heavy masses of stone settled; in others, soil gradually accumulated; and in still others, dense sedimentary layers emerged, alternating with softer, looser sections. All of this took shape with astonishing speed, almost in an instant, as if the world itself had been waiting for an invisible signal to finally begin to truly come into being.
The surface became increasingly complex and expressive. Some areas looked harsh and solid, while others seemed more malleable, ready to change under the influence of water and future life. The irregularities of the terrain were not chaotic-on the contrary, all of this was originally created not merely for the sake of form, but for the sake of future movement, development, and interaction.
Following this, small rocks began to rise. Their arrangement formed natural passages, narrow stone corridors, deep depressions, and underwater ridges. These landforms predetermined how currents would flow in the future, where life could take root, and where, conversely, a harsh emptiness would remain. Moreover, they outlined possible paths of movement-both for those who would one day explore this world and for nature itself, which would spread across it slowly but inevitably.
Thinking far ahead, I began to raise the center of the world while simultaneously lowering its edges. There, the depths of the future seas and oceans were to plunge more than thirty kilometers downward, turning the world's edges into an abyss almost beyond the imagination.
This place resembled the dead ecological zone from Subnautica, only brighter and, strangely, alive. The darkness there was broken by the soft glow of bioluminescence emanating from colossal underwater trees, giant corals, and monstrously overgrown mushrooms.
After that, I began filling the lower space with the first signs of beauty and life. Corals appeared-the full spectrum, from tiny branching forms to massive stony colonies. Then came algae of every imaginable color and shade. Green, blue, crimson, violet, amber-they spread across the seabed, each one glowing brightly with bioluminescence and creating a fantastical sight in the darkness.
While doing this, I used the underwater world of Avatar and the games Subnautica and Subnautica 2 as a basis.
When I had filled the lower space, I drew water from the base set. Within mere seconds it flooded everything around, turning the world into one colossal ocean. Currents of water rushed through the entire space, filling depressions, covering cliffs, enveloping corals and algae. Almost immediately, life beneath the water began to play with soft lights-bioluminescence awakened, and the endless darkness beneath the depths bloomed with thousands of shades.
I was moving too quickly, so I had not yet activated the Heavens. That meant the White Heaven, responsible for the sun and light, still lay dormant. There was no daylight in the world, no rays, no familiar source of illumination. But that did not trouble me.
I could see everything perfectly well as it was.
Because in a sense, this world was me. Or perhaps more precisely, it was part of me-we were connected so intimately that light was no longer necessary for perception. I felt every drop of water, every protruding rock, every pebble on the seafloor, and every bend of space as though all of it rested directly in the palms of my hands.
Without hesitation, I moved on to the next stage.
I began creating land.
And right away, I set out to create something truly grand - a supercontinent. First, I formed a gigantic landmass in the far left corner of the world. Its area was only slightly smaller than the entire surface of the Earth. To be precise - 437,937,319 square kilometers. How did I know such an exact number? No idea. I just knew.
This supercontinent turned out truly enormous, but I made it look as though it were something protruding from beyond the walls of the world. Since the world was still only rank 8, I understood that, with further development, this continent would eventually stop looking central unless I planned ahead. So I decided to shape it in such a way that it would seem like only a small part of something colossal, accidentally revealed from behind the world's walls. Later, when I add mountains, I'll make them rise endlessly along the continent's left side, as though it really is part of something immeasurably greater.
In essence, I wanted to divide the world into five parts, but since it will later become several times larger, for now I decided to create only part of the central continent and part of the Eastern Sea.
I planned to shape the Eastern Sea as a place of a million islands, but that could wait for now. Once I advance to rank 11, I'll deal with it then.
Continuing, I began methodically reshaping the terrain of the entire continent all at once. By my will, enormous mountain chains rose, dividing the land into giant regions. Bottomless canyons appeared, some so immense that entire countries could have fit inside them, and I filled them with life in the form of lakes, waterfalls, and trees bearing enormous nutritious fruits. Their width at times reached hundreds of thousands of square kilometers, turning those rifts into not merely geographic formations, but worlds of their own-ideal for life, reproduction, and the isolation of countless species.
Between them stretched endless plains-still empty for now, but already filled with potential that I intended to use to create something like the Upper Plains from the Avatar game.
When the basic terrain had been completed, I turned my attention to water. I sent rivers flowing across the continent-mighty, broad, with countless tributaries, winding through valleys, feeding lakes and underground channels; and after them came the lakes themselves.
Then I began adding vegetation.
First came grass-tall, thick, of all kinds of colors, shapes, and sizes. Then flowers bloomed, and almost immediately after them, as though in a single instant, titanic trees sprang up. They were enormous. Their roots sank into the ground like living ridges, piercing the earth for many kilometers, while their tops rose more than two hundred meters high. Their trunks were colossal and mighty, and their branches stretched for dozens and hundreds of meters, intertwining with one another and forming entire roads above the ground.
But even they seemed small when beside them I created even taller trees. They were incredibly broad-like twenty ordinary trees of this world-and rose more than seven hundred meters high. The crowns of these trees did not stretch upward in sharp peaks, nor droop downward in heavy vaults-they spread wide and level like the giant caps of mushrooms, covering the space beneath with a living green canopy. I made them that way so that those who would one day appear here could walk freely along them, and so that enormous flying creatures could settle upon them.
Vines hung between those arboreal giants. Thick undergrowth spread. Curtains of moss and flowers trailed downward. Shrubs of the strangest shapes multiplied. I kept adding more and more species of plants, changing their size, color, leaf shape, stem structure, and growth patterns. Some were carnivorous, others medicinal, others rare and valuable as ingredients.
The grass glowed beneath one's feet with blue and emerald fire. Flowers pulsed with violet and azure light. The bark of the trees shimmered with thin glowing lines. Moss emitted a deep, soft radiance, and the roots cast a faint light directly into the thickness of the earth. Tiny luminous seeds began to drift through the air.
The whole continent slowly began to gain coherence. When I had outlined the main forest masses, I shifted my attention to another edge of the landmass-broad and open. It was a place of wind, distance, and endless horizons. Vast grassy plains stretched there, cut by harsh cliffs, caves, and giant stone arches hanging over the ground like the fossilized fangs of some ancient world-beast.
I added sparse trees there-ones that did not close off the landscape as in a jungle, but instead emphasized its scale. They grew far apart from one another, and because of that each one looked especially significant, almost sacred. I had already decided that later strong winds would rise here, and then their trunks would begin to bend with graceful solemnity, giving the whole landscape even more character.
Like one in a trance, I continued adding plants, changing the structure of the landscape, layering detail upon detail. Like in a game, I began creating separate locations and biomes. A mushroom biome appeared-a place where giant mushrooms ten meters tall and higher grew, with broad caps, glowing gills, and clouds of spores glittering in the air. A swamp biome arose-humid, heavy, full of rare poisons, dangerous vapors, and extremely valuable ingredients. A stone biome formed-harsh, almost lifeless at first glance, with relatively little food compared to other biomes, though still more than enough, but with immense deposits of metals and the rarest minerals.
Since this world was mine, it obeyed my rules. If I decided that snow must fall year-round in one part of the continent-then so it would. If I wanted one place to live in a perpetual misty autumn, while in another part of the landmass warm thunderstorms never ceased-the world obediently accepted those conditions. That was how I configured the weather and climate in each biome, whose sizes ranged from 150 thousand to 35 million square kilometers.
Sometimes I made the transition soft, sometimes as sharp as a line-on one side snow could be falling, while on the other it was thirty-five degrees Celsius. Some biomes had four seasons; somewhere winter was absent. Somewhere there was barely any difference at all, since it was always thirty degrees and above.
Sometimes I got especially carried away.
Then I created enormous stone spires jutting out of the ground like the fangs of some ancient beast, rising hundreds of meters into the air. Or I created dozens of floating islands, inspired by the Hallelujah Mountains from Avatar.
Ah, the Hallelujah Mountains... I created thousands of such floating islands all across the central continent.
I covered their peaks in thick foliage, turning them into true hanging gardens, and from beneath them, like the roots of aerial ferns, hung thick beards of vines. The slopes of these mountains were sheer walls, and movement between them would take place along vertical chasms. Waterfalls plunged from their summits, ran down rock faces, shattered against ledges, and exploded below in sprays like inverted geysers.
The spectacle that resulted was so unreal that even I, the creator of this world, wanted to pause for a moment and simply look. Where did the water come from? Nowhere. I simply wanted it to exist, and that was enough.
Because in this world, water could flow wherever I decided it would. Clouds could be born from emptiness, rocks could float in the sky, forests could glow in darkness, and snow could fall in the shape of enormous tits instead of ordinary snowflakes in the middle of summer if I happened to like the idea. This world was not obliged to obey anyone else's logic. It obeyed mine.
I also added tens of thousands of Clan Homes, each adapted to the biome in which it grew—except for the swamp biomes, where I would allow no one to live. That place I intended to make fairly dangerous, suitable only for research.
The areas with Clan Homes were immediately noticeable because I made them larger and denser so that they could be easily found, and in addition they contained an enormous number of root fibers filled with neurons for communication. I also decided to connect all the Clan Homes to the Green Heaven-the Heaven responsible for the souls of all living beings fated one day to die within this space.
I wanted those Clan Homes to serve as a way to speak with one's ancestors, with those who had long since left the material world but had not vanished completely. Not like shadows or empty reflections, but like memory that had preserved will, voice, and the trace of life. I wanted every home to contain, deep within it, a bond between generations. I wanted the dead not to disappear entirely, but to remain part of the clan-as advisers or as silent witnesses watching over future generations.
As a finishing touch for this part of the central continent, I decided to create something truly grand: a single World Tree that would become the heart of all the land, its symbol, and the living embodiment of my will. However, even for a world that lived and changed according to my desires, something like that was simply too vast in scale.
The base resources of this world would not have been enough, so I directed around 70 units of aether essence into the creation of the World Tree.
Finding a single suitable place on an area of more than four hundred million square kilometers turned out to be laughably easy. For a brief instant, I mentally divided that enormous continent into four equal parts and marked the center-the point where something greater than everything else should appear. There, at the very heart of that giant landmass, I found a broad, gentle space with several low but incredibly beautiful mountains. Their violet crystalline peaks were calmly swept by the wind, while ridges of violet crystal, catching the light like glass polished to a shine, stretched for many dozens of kilometers.
At the very heart of those mountains, among stone, wind, and height, a young sapling appeared at my thought. Against the surrounding cliffs it looked almost pitiful-a thin, fragile, barely visible sprout-but in the very next second I poured 70 units of aether essence into it.
The effect was instantaneous.
The tiny sapling immediately began to grow at a completely wild, unnatural speed. First it reached ten meters, then fifty, then one hundred. Its trunk thickened rapidly, its branches surged upward, and multicolored leaves were born before my very eyes. But that was only the beginning. Within just a few moments, the tree rose to one hundred sixty meters, then to nine hundred-and even then it showed not the slightest sign of stopping.
The roots of the World Tree began to drive deep into the mountains like living titans trying to sink into the very flesh of the continent. They spread outward and downward, piercing cliffs, splitting layers of stone, plunging deeper and deeper. The mountains trembled beneath its force, but they did not collapse-on the contrary, they fused together with the new giant as one. And yet even that was not enough for the tree. It continued growing without pause, with the same relentless power.
In just a few minutes, the World Tree had grown to a height of over three thousand meters. Its branches spread across the sky like entire continents woven from different colors and bioluminescence, and its crown began to partially block the sunlight for many kilometers around, though I immediately made it so that the light would still faintly filter through its leaves. But even then, its growth did not stop. Its summit surged upward with such force that it soon rose above the clouds. By then, its roots had long since driven into the massive cliffs, spread through the depths of the mountains, and begun to extend far beyond them.
And yet not all of those roots burrowed deep underground. Some of them, obeying my will, burst outward and took on strange, controlled, yet astonishingly natural forms. Enormous and mighty, they rose above the surface, bent, intertwined, and formed living vaults, arches, and rings. Upon those titanic roots, future inhabitants would be able to build safe dwellings for themselves with ease. The roots were so wide that entire houses, halls, passageways, and shelters protected from wind, predators, and any kind of harsh weather could stand upon them.
Following that thought, I mentally bent the roots, lifted them above the ground, and forced them to coil, giving them rounded and oval shapes. Some became like giant rings, others like elongated oval bowls, and still others like hollow vaults. Into those intertwined roots I poured fertile soil, turning them into shelters fit for life. Thus were formed natural platforms, gardens, and entire islands of fertility protected by woody flesh.
Then I went even further and created forests there. They did not look alien or separate-no, they were a direct continuation of the roots themselves, as though the World Tree were giving birth to new life around itself. Trees, shrubs, grasses, and vines rose from soil and roots, weaving themselves into their curves so naturally that it seemed as though everything had grown there for millennia rather than being created by me in real time. Among them, I placed waterfalls, so that water would plunge from the heights of the roots in silvery streams and crash against the rocks below, filling the space with the unbroken sound of living force. Lakes appeared there as well-quiet, deep, hidden in natural hollows and surrounded by greenery and the pale curves of wooden roots.
It continued to rise ever higher-seven thousand meters, ten thousand meters, twelve thousand meters, fourteen thousand meters-and only at the height of eighteen thousand meters did the white tree finally come to a halt. Its shining white trunk dominated the continent, while its multicolored crown, spread at a monstrous height, vanished into the cold blue of the heavens.
I really was trying to justify the name Blessed Land.
(I used the World Tree from HxH and the Divine Tree from Tensura as a basis. You could sort of combine them by taking the height of the World Tree from HxH and the roots and trunk from Tensura. And don't forget to post the picture here.)
Having finished work on the giant supercontinent and its truly incredible natural diversity, I did not stop there. On the contrary, the very idea of creation had seized me, and guided by thought alone, I began creating new lands to its right.
Thus, a little fewer than fifty small continents came into being, arranged along a broad curved line. Each of them covered an area of roughly one million square kilometers. All were washed by seas, and I deliberately shaped their shores to be picturesque, varied, and fit for future life. On each of these smaller continents, I created hundreds of natural bays-broad, deep, and well sheltered from storms.
Right along their coasts, I caused extraordinary trees to grow, resembling mangroves yet surpassing them many times over. They were dozens of times larger than ordinary trees, with gigantic trunks and colossal roots that reached both into the land and into the water, intertwining into vast natural arches and supports. These roots were so immense and sturdy that houses, entire settlements, or even small cities could one day be built upon them. More than that, the trees themselves served as natural coastal defenses: their root systems absorbed the force of heavy waves, softened storms, and made the coastal waters calmer. Because of this, safe and stable places for fishing, living, and seafaring naturally formed nearby.
After that, I repeated the same process again and again, moving from one small continent to the next. But I did not want them to be identical. So each time, I altered the outline of the shores a little, the depth of the bays, the shape of the coastline, the height of the hills, and the placement of the forests. Some continents turned out longer and more stretched, others almost round, while others were made up of several natural regions flowing smoothly into one another. These differences made the world feel alive rather than mechanically copied. I wanted every land to have its own character and its own atmosphere.
Beside these small continents, I created more than a hundred islands ranging in size from 300 square kilometers to 200,000 square kilometers. In the end, there were forty-three small continents, each averaging around one million square kilometers. And since I created roughly two hundred islands near each of them, their total number exceeded nine thousand. Around those islands, I placed another two hundred thousand smaller islets, each noticeably smaller in area.
Altogether, these small continents and islands occupied around seven hundred and forty million square kilometers.
At the far right end of that curved line, amid the vast cluster of small continents and thousands of islands, I created one colossal natural bay with an area of roughly ten million square kilometers. It became the true heart of the entire sea region. I made this place especially unusual: floating cliffs hung above the water-massive stone formations suspended in the air. Some stretched in long arcs and half-rings, like ancient stone ribs embracing the bay and concealing it from the rest of the world. Their shadows drifted slowly across the surface of the water, and because of that, the bay itself seemed sacred-quiet and profound in its very nature. Its waters always remained calm, almost mirrorlike, reflecting the sky, the stone masses hanging in the air, and the soft bioluminescent glow rising from the depths. Even the sound of the waves was different there-muted and gentle. I simply did not allow the peace of that sacred place to be disturbed.
Beneath the water, in the depths of that gigantic bay, I built an enormous Clan Home-a marine equivalent of the Tree of Souls from the jungles of the central continent.
It was not merely a living structure, but the very heart of the bay, its spiritual center. It connected to the entire seabed through a dense network of gigantic roots filled with neural links, and for that reason it became one of the most important nodes in the entire world neural network-a place through which the consciousness of the living could enter the Green Heaven and touch the memory of their ancestors. Around its roots, the water was especially clear and bright, and the soft glow emanating from the sea-tree spread through the entire bay.
It also oxygenated the water, allowing one to remain nearby even at great depth for long periods, though for those who would one day live in this world, this would become more of a sacred convenience than a necessity. This Tree of Spirit was also the largest in all the seas and oceans of my world-so vast that more than ten billion beings could connect to it at once.
But I did not stop there either. I kept working, moving from continent to continent, from island to island, endlessly shaping and filling what had once been empty space. I did not forget the islands I had placed near the smaller continents either-they too received unique nature, distinctive forms, special shores, and internal landscapes. Some were harsh and rocky. Others were covered in dense forests. Still others were fringed by white beaches and calm lagoons.
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Here's a photo showing what Eurasia looks like, covering an area of 54 million km².
Here's a map showing roughly how this blessed land is laid out, though it doesn't capture everything since it's incredibly vast.
Here is a map for my Portuguese-speaking readers
And here are just some photos I found on Pinterest-they don't belong to me in any way, but I think they'll add some color to my world.