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
At some point, I stopped understanding how much time had actually passed. Perhaps days had gone by. Or perhaps years.
All my attention, all my will, and all my existence were focused on only one thing-the transformation of that originally empty world, on breathing complexity, beauty, and endless bioluminescent life into it. I thought of nothing else. During that period, for me there was only this space and the endless process of its birth.
Using the power of this world itself, I filled it ever more deeply and carefully with life. I created tens of thousands of species of flowers, and each one was unique in its own way. Some had thin, almost transparent petals glowing from within with soft blue light. Others shimmered in violet, gold, and emerald hues, as though living energy flowed slowly inside them. Some flowers opened only in darkness, responding to the coming of night with bright flashes of bioluminescence, while others glowed softly in daylight, as though absorbing the light of the heavens and returning it to the earth.
I grew countless species of algae that covered the ocean floor in soft underwater carpets. They stretched in whole fields, swaying in the currents like living meadows beneath the sea. In some places they were long and thin, almost like silk, while elsewhere they were broad and dense, resembling the leaves of giant marine plants. Some emitted a calm green glow, others blue or pearly light, and some flashed in entire patterns whenever currents of salt water passed through them.
The water was incredibly clear-so clear that even without activating the First Heaven, I was sure that even an ordinary human would have been able to see kilometers down, thanks to the light emitted by all that bioluminescent variety. And I still intended to add living creatures that would also possess bioluminescence.
I shaped coral reefs of incredible colors and forms-reefs that could have become home to an endless number of marine creatures. But I did not stop there. I continued filling the world with more and more details: grasses, shrubs, underwater plants, rare mushrooms on islands and continents, coastal thickets, glowing mosses, creeping vines, tree ferns, soft ground-covering plants like living carpets. The world began to breathe. It was gaining depth, structure, the atmosphere I wanted it to have.
Having created the marine zone and filled it with life, I decided to do something that did not even exist in Avatar. I wanted to add something truly unique to this world-a chain of floating continents with a total area of about ten million square kilometers.
These were not merely floating islands scattered chaotically across the sky, but an immense, interconnected system of lands, cliffs, forests, bodies of water, and aerial pathways. This chain of continents was meant to drift slowly across the world, never coming to a halt, circling every continent and every mighty mountain massif.
On those floating continents, I added a huge variety of suspended and drifting elements. In some places, entire masses of stone wrapped in vines and soft-glowing plants drifted slowly between cliffs. In others, lakes of water hung in the air, as if torn free from the ordinary laws of the world and held in place by rules I had not yet fully defined in the Gray Heaven.
I created streams of water in the air, flowing between the cliffs like celestial rivers born amid wind and height. At times, these currents would settle gently upon the floating islands and continents, nourishing them with moisture; at others, finding no barrier in their path, they would plunge downward and spill into the void as endless waterfalls. Between the separate stretches of floating land ran natural bridges made of roots, stone, and intertwined branches, so wide that at times ten people could walk across them hand in hand.
There I also began creating special vegetation unlike anything that already existed below. Trees on those continents grew differently: their roots did not always reach downward-some spread sideways, gripping floating rocks and the aerial veins of the world. Their crowns were light and broad, adapted to catch light. I also added unusual bodies of water held within stone basins and natural hollows, though there was no ordinary soil around them. Water there could hang downward in transparent ribbons without ever fully falling, or gather into slowly revolving spheres suspended between branches and stone.
Later, in the future, these lands would become home to special animals-flying, gliding, drifting creatures capable of living without belonging entirely to either land or sky. But for now, I was merely preparing the foundation for them. I was creating a place that already looked like a miracle in itself. A place where a forest could grow on a floating cliff, where water was not obliged to fall downward, where shadows crawled slowly over the oceans, and the continents themselves wandered forever.
When everything was finished, and I had covered 1.2 billion square kilometers with land, leaving around 600 million for oceans and seas, I froze, gazing at my own world. Only then did I realize that it had been moving the entire time, like a turtle in slow motion
In an ordinary world, those proportions would never have worked, but here I was the law, and so this world would still develop at its own gentle pace even under such conditions, because I had spared neither effort nor design nor resources for it. I poured into it an enormous amount of plants, trees, mosses, algae, fungi, flowers, and grasses. I filled it with colossal volumes of minerals, strata, ores, veins, and rare stones. I created countless networks of roots, living wooden structures, and systems of support linking different parts of the world together. And the number of Clan Homes was truly enormous-those places I had strengthened in a special way, so that they could stand for a million years, though I did still allow minor damage so that those who settled there could make them into true homes.
Thinking of that, I finally lifted my gaze to the completely black sky. With an act of will, I activated the White Heaven and the Dark Heaven, thereby creating day and night. In the same instant, the sun appeared in the sky, and in accordance with the rules I had established, it slowly rose in the east as in a real world. After a moment's thought, I activated the Gray Heaven as well, making one day twenty-seven hours long, and I also made fully dark nights very rare.
After standing for a while on the white sands of a flawless beach, I looked up at the sky and made it so that, in the evenings and at night, several planets would appear overhead, changing with each passing day. At the same time, I added the ever-shifting nebula of the universe as a canvas for the night sky.
And finally, I reached out mentally, activated the Green Heaven, and through the Gray Heaven linked the Clan Homes to it, marking those sacred places. Sending several drops of concentrated aether essence into the Gray Heaven, I caused it to suddenly come alive, and it distributed that aether slightly between the main world and the Green Heaven.
Then an enormous mass of information crashed into my consciousness as the world began functioning as a unified whole, and I started receiving every fragment of it. Shaking my head slightly, I quickly directed another hundred drops of aether essence into the Gray Heaven and began rapidly creating the system that would govern this world.
Quickly naming it the Voice of the World, I gave the Gray Heaven a series of commands, and at last most of the information disappeared from my mind-or rather, most of the unnecessary information was transferred to the Voice of the World, which was governed by the Gray Heaven.
Dissolving into the world, I felt my consciousness dissolve into every part of that vast realm. I became something like the will and eyes of this world. Dedicating another thousand units of aether essence to it, I began creating different animals right before my eyes. Slinger or rather, lanay'ka; Medusoid or Rimo'a; Hammerhead Titanothere or angtsìk; Prolemuris or syaksyuk; Sturmbeast or talioang-the beasts appeared one after another, their large bright forms seeming to be ripped directly from my mind, which, in essence, was exactly what was happening.
Each differed from the others, but many shared common traits: coloration, bioluminescence on the skin, six legs, four eyes, and a respiratory system utterly unlike the familiar one. These animals had no nostrils in the ordinary earthly sense-rather, they possessed special breathing openings in the chest area called operculum. This gave oxygen the shortest possible path to the lungs.
I also strengthened them somewhat, making them roughly five times stronger. Originally their level of strength would have been similar to earthly standards, but I said no and enhanced them. Because of the general warmth of this world, I arranged things so that they had smooth skin devoid of any outer protection except armor. And finally, on their heads they bore two cartilaginous appendages called kuru, beginning at the temples and ending in small nerve-rich protrusions; these contained nerve fibers and allowed the animals to connect to one another.
Having created from memory and imagination more than one hundred thousand living creatures, from which hundreds of times more could later arise, I finally calmed down and transferred the information about them into the Gray Heaven along with more than three thousand units of concentrated aether essence. Immediately, a gray wave passed through the whole world, and right before my eyes several rather large, by my human standards, though still tiny by the standards of this world, fish glowing with bioluminescence appeared.
Right after them, insects emerged into the air, but thanks to the rules of the Gray Heaven, they simply flew away without showing any interest in me whatsoever. The Gray Heaven did not allow insects to attack humans-or at least humanoid beings.
I had spent three thousand units of aether essence on ten million diverse animals.
My gaze shifted farther-to the thousands of floating islands scattered across the central continent and far beyond it. Some were tiny, barely capable of holding a grove of trees or a patch of stone. Others resembled entire floating archipelagos, able to carry forests and lakes upon them, with water cascading from them in waterfalls. And that was when I noticed those who had already taken up residence there.
Thousands of ikran.
They occupied only a few floating islands, because I had deliberately made the initial number of all living beings fairly low-I did not want to spend too much energy on it; in time they would reproduce on their own under the control of the Voice of the World.
They sat in dense groups on several floating islands, covering their surfaces with a living carpet of color. Their enormous bodies-blue, green, scarlet, gold, violet, striped and spotted-made the already vivid world even more beautiful. Some rested with their wings folded, lazily watching the world around them, while others flew from island to island, trying to understand how they had ended up here at all.
Since I had enhanced them rather seriously, the ikran could no longer be compared to their original versions. They had become incredibly fast. By my estimates, their ordinary flying speed should already have reached around four hundred kilometers per hour, with their maximum approaching five hundred.
Finally, I started creating the Na'vi, but instead of the original model, I chose the Avatar-I simply wanted them to have more massive bodies, five fingers, and eyebrows. Overall, the Na'vi possessed humanoid anatomy, though they still retained feline traits such as pointed ears that could move independently and long prehensile tails used for balance and grip. I also kept bioluminescence across their bodies-thin glowing patterns and dots scattered across their skin, giving them an almost fairy-tale, otherworldly appearance, especially at dusk or in the soft light of local nights.
(I based them on Miles Quaritch and Kiri.)
But I still altered the noses slightly, making them closer in appearance to the Avatars, and it was important to me that they keep five fingers instead of four, as well as eyebrows. Naturally, I also preserved the kuru-the special appendage extending from the back of the head, the very living organ of connection shared with all the other creatures of this world.
In creating the Na'vi, I did not limit myself to one single universal form. I immediately set several variations for different conditions of life: for jungles, highlands, coastal zones, floating islands, dense forests with limited light, open plains, and wet territories. In some places their bodies were lighter and more flexible, in others stronger and more enduring; in some they were better suited to humidity, altitude changes, lack of solid footing, or prolonged movement across vertical surfaces.
All of that data, together with more than thirty thousand units of aether essence, I immediately uploaded into the Gray Heaven.
And I made a couple more changes to the Gray Heaven-in other words, I directly placed certain pieces of knowledge and prohibitions into the minds of living beings. I forbade any living being from damaging the kuru.
The second restriction I imposed on intelligent species-first and foremost the Na'vi, who also possessed immense intelligence and might one day turn into full civilizations with their own traditions, disputes, pride, and therefore wars. I forbade them from fighting one another over resources. I did not eliminate conflict entirely, did not erase differences of opinion, and did not strip them of free will-that would have been too crude an interference. But wars over land, water, or the accumulation of wealth, I cut off. I had no need for another world in which intelligent beings began slaughtering one another simply because they could not agree on who owned a forest or a river.
Everything in this world belonged to me, and therefore they were to follow those rules rather than kill one another over things that were not theirs.
Another change concerned language.
I immediately implanted two languages into the consciousness of the Na'vi - their own tongue, the one that existed in the original story, and the language of the world of TBATE. How do I know the Na'vi language? Oh, that is simple. By the time I received the World Seed, I had already imagined that moment hundreds of times. So, possessing a rank 10 intellect, I simply reconstructed and recreated the language from memory.
They would not need to pass through thousands of years of primitive grunting, hissing, random sounds, and the slow, painful birth of real speech. They would be able to speak almost immediately, and therefore transmit knowledge faster, build culture faster, form society faster, and understand one another faster.
What mattered especially was that I gave them not one language, but two at once. Each of them would shape thought in its own way, influence how the world was perceived, and shape the ways thoughts and feelings were expressed. And because both languages would exist side by side from the very beginning, they would not remain static. They would inevitably begin to interact, enrich one another, and improve one another.
I did not want to wait through unnecessary ages just to see even some kind of result.
In addition, I set their physical strength at around seven times greater than that of a human. The world still remained wild. Predators, height, difficult terrain, dense forests, sharp environmental changes-without a serious advantage in strength, the Na'vi would spend too long merely surviving before they could even begin to live.
At first, I also set their lifespan at one hundred years-for the sake of faster development. A hundred years was more than enough to live, love, build, learn, pass on knowledge, and raise a new generation, while at the same time being short enough that the history of the world would not become bogged down in endless stagnation, as with the asuras. Later, after one and a half thousand years, I intended to raise that limit to two hundred. By then culture ought to have formed, and a longer lifespan could help rather than harm it.
Separately, I removed infant mortality.
Completely.
No illnesses in infancy, no randomly weak bodies, no senseless loss of whole generations before they had even learned to walk and speak. More than that, I arranged things so that the bodies of the Na'vi would not fall ill even in deep old age. Aging could come, but without pitiful decrepitude, without the slow rotting of the body, without life turning into some drawn-out agony.
And after that, I allowed myself a few less rational decisions.
To be honest-purely for my own eye. I raised the general threshold of beauty in this world somewhat. Not to absurdity, not to the point where all beings would look equally perfect, but still higher than it probably ought to have been. And once again, for the sake of my own gaze, I allowed only heterosexual relationships.
When everything was finished, I reached out to the Gray Heaven and activated it. At that same moment, a wave of light passed throughout the world. Light rolled across forests, islands, waters, cliffs, valleys, and trees, across the most distant corners of the world, touching everything I had just embedded within it as law, structure, and foundation.
And then, almost immediately, the first Na'vi appeared in different regions of the light.
Several tens of thousands.
That was not much, if one considered the colossal size of this world.
But it was entirely sufficient, given that at this moment there were still comparatively few large predators in the world and not so many living creatures overall. They would have enough space and more than enough resources. Enough time to adapt, build the first settlements, find the Clan Homes, establish connections, and learn to live in what had just become their home.
I also created special safe zones around the Clan Homes in advance-territories to which no predator could come too close.
Not because I wanted to remove all danger from this people or raise them into weak beings unable to stand for themselves. Quite the opposite. A world without threats quickly makes intelligent creatures soft, self-satisfied, and foolish.
But every people should have a place where they can not merely survive, but live: raise children, pass on knowledge, build traditions, develop, without expecting every night that something from the darkness will come to tear them apart. They would be perfectly capable of dealing with everything else on their own. Especially with enhanced bodies and a natural connection to the world, they would manage just fine with whatever awaited them beyond those sacred zones.
When the creation of living beings was finished, I exhaled slowly and finally lifted my gaze from the surface of the world to the heavens.
More precisely, to two of them: the Gray Heaven and the Violet Heaven.
The Gray Heaven remained what it had been from the beginning-a mechanism, an intermediary between my will and the structure of the world. Through it, I set laws, restrictions, biology, instincts, cycles, rhythms of life, growth, and even the very direction of development. It was not merely a shell above the world, but something like a vast governing system, devoid of personality yet perfectly obedient to my thoughts.
More precisely, through it I could create a system that would guide this world more smoothly, because the Gray Heaven itself was too rigid and inflexible. I could state that a day should last forty hours, and it would become so. Through it I could also create living beings, but I could not make it so that without me those beings would receive things like skills, luck, or development. And so through the Gray Heaven I created the Voice of the World. The Na'vi would be able to make contact with the Voice of the World, though very rarely and in a limited way. As I will explain later.
By its very nature, the Gray Heaven was nothing more than a mindless mechanism - a vast, impersonal factory incapable of stepping beyond the rules once imposed upon it. It did not think, doubt, or choose; it merely carried out, without end, that for which it had been created. But the Voice of the World was different. Adaptive in its very essence, it constantly observed the world, caught even the slightest changes, and, guided by my intentions, gradually altered and directed everything within it, bending reality itself to the course of events I desired.
The Violet Heaven, however, was entirely different.
It still contained an unbelievably vast amount of concentrated aether-not merely a lot, but a monstrous amount. The moment I spent any of that concentrated aether, the black flame in my soul had already begun restoring it at a rapid pace.
I looked upon that boundless sea of concentrated aether and could not help catching myself wondering whether I ought to add magic to the world. The temptation was great, but I decided to wait.
Instead, through the Gray Heaven I established yet another rule. A new law. A new mechanism that was meant to become part of the very fabric of the world. I called it the Binding Oath and tied it to what already existed at the foundation of the world-to the Voice of the World.
In essence, they were contracts.
Not written agreements, not empty words, not oaths that were easy to break and forget, but real obligations inscribed into reality itself through the Gray Heaven and the Voice of the World. A Na'vi could enter into such an oath either with themselves, or with another Na'vi. And in deeper cases-directly with the Voice of the World itself.
The principle was simple: fulfilling the conditions and restrictions laid down in the oath granted power, accelerated development, helped one achieve a goal, or allowed one to obtain something inaccessible by ordinary means. But breaking an oath would bring truly horrifying consequences.
There were only three kinds of such oaths.
An oath to oneself. An oath to another. An oath to the Voice of the World.
But for all their differences, all of them ultimately passed through the Voice of the World. It was intermediary, court, witness, and executioner all at once.
For example, a Na'vi could swear to the Voice of the World that until the end of his life he would protect children-always, under any circumstances, even at the cost of his own life in moments of danger, until his heart stopped beating in his chest.
In return, he might gain immense physical strength, incredible agility, endurance, nearly impenetrable bodily defense, or a heightened sense of danger. But power always had to be paid for. In ordinary times, while the oath required no intervention, he might possess only the most basic level of Na'vi strength, remaining the most ordinary member of his people. In other words, the oath did not merely grant power-it restructured the entire balance of his life in accordance with its condition.
Or, for example, two tribes could enter into a pact of non-aggression, exchange of resources, shared access to sacred territories, or mutual protection during a catastrophic hunt or natural disasters. And neither would any longer be able to deceive the other, because an oath concluded through the Voice of the World could not be broken without consequences. In that sense, the world itself became the guarantor of one's word.
What was a catastrophic hunt? I arranged things so that once every twenty-five years, all manner of beasts would attack the already inhabited sacred lands for the span of a week, trying to destroy them. Though in truth it was more a serious inconvenience than a true catastrophe. I set the difficulty so that even if losses did occur, they would remain minimal.
One Na'vi in a thousand would die-a fairly small number, right? For an event that would occur only once every quarter century, it truly could not be called a horrifying price. And even then, a significant part of such deaths would most likely come not from the irresistible strength of the beasts, but from carelessness, excessive confidence, errors in combat, or a poor assessment of danger. In addition, I designed another principle: the larger the village became, the more Na'vi lived on its territory, the more numerous and ferocious the attacking waves of creatures would become.
But I had almost no doubt that in time they would adapt. More than that, I was certain that sooner or later the Na'vi would stop viewing this catastrophe as something solely terrifying and begin to see it differently-as a rare, sacred, and exceptionally profitable hunting season. Because the beasts created by the Voice of the World would differ dramatically from the ordinary fauna of this world. They would not be mere predators or monsters, but special beings temporarily formed by the Voice of the World for the sake of trial and reward. Their value would be colossal.
The blood of some monsters would possess pronounced healing properties, capable of accelerating bodily recovery, halting severe illnesses, or helping the wounded get back on their feet faster. The flesh of others would strengthen the body, making muscles denser, bones stronger, and endurance greater. The hides of certain creatures would contain extraordinarily rare minerals almost impossible to obtain by any other means-a precious resource for weapons, armor, ritual objects, and perhaps even for the future flowering of entire tribes' craftsmanship.
There was something else I had conceived as well. But, just as with the catastrophic hunt, it still lay far too far in the future, and I could abandon the idea at any moment. Even so, as a possible option, I considered adding an essence of monsters - something akin to Gu for this world.
It would take on a crystalline form, and the appearance of such a crystal would depend both on the creature from which the essence had been extracted and on the abilities it had possessed in life. In other words, it was a condensed fragment of a particular attribute, sealed within a material shell.
However, such monsters would not appear immediately, nor certainly everywhere. I restricted their emergence with a strict condition: creatures capable of leaving behind essence would begin to appear only once a village's population exceeded twenty thousand inhabitants. Until that point, the catastrophic hunt would remain a harsh, yet still comparatively straightforward trial. But the moment that threshold was crossed, the world would open a new source of the rarest gifts - the very kind worth truly fighting for.
Still, as I have already said, even if all of this were ever to begin, it would not happen for a very long time. I would have more than enough time to reconsider it a hundred times over and perhaps abandon the idea altogether.
By absorbing a monster's essence, a Na'vi could gain part of its nature. Sometimes that would express itself in strengthening the body: increased strength, greater speed, enhanced resilience, impenetrable or nearly impenetrable skin. In other cases-in sharpened senses: keener smell, sharper eyesight, the ability to see at night almost as clearly as by day. Some essences would grant truly unusual abilities: the power to breathe underwater, navigate dense forests more easily, or sense living organisms nearby more effectively. If the essence came from a wolf-like monster, its owner might gain dominion over a wolf pack-or at least the ability to direct and subjugate similar beasts. And if it came from a monstrous bee, it might grant the ability to produce honey-not perhaps in enormous quantities, but still enough that such a power would be considered rare and useful for a clan.
There were far too many possibilities and variations. These monster essences could also be freely transferred and sold to others, and after the death of those in whom they were contained, the monster essences would simply fly out of the body and come to rest upon the chest.
And yet one persistent thought would not leave me alone: perhaps I should abandon the system of monster essences altogether and choose a far more elegant path - simply granting this world magic. Not one of the systems I already knew, but a new one, built from two different foundations: the world of TBATE and the world of Frieren. I could merge their principles, allowing everyone born into this world to possess a mana core from the very beginning, while making magic itself function by a different rule: pure mana, supported by knowledge and guided by imagination, would become magic.
And, to be honest, that option seemed even more tempting to me.
After that, I added several more rules-more grounded, but no less important.
Through the Gray Heaven, I arranged things so that the Na'vi would, whenever possible, tend toward having five children. Not as crude coercion, but as a natural inclination of the species, an inner norm built into their biology and psychology. The world was still young. It required rapid settlement, population growth, territorial expansion, the formation of villages, clans, bonds, and generational memory. One or two children per family would have meant development that was too slow.
I also made the Na'vi devoted to one partner for life, and after the ritual in which they joined their kuru, their souls would become slightly intertwined, allowing them to sense where their partner was so long as they did not move more than ten kilometers apart.
At the same time, I made the entire process of pregnancy and childbirth completely painless from beginning to end.
And finally, I added one more fundamental law through the Gray Heaven: the resources of the world were to constantly regenerate in different places. Fruits, vegetables, berries, and mushrooms-all of it was to grow year-round. Fast enough that harvest could take place about once every two months.
"I think that will be enough for a start," I said aloud, and transferred one thousand units of concentrated aether into the Gray Heaven, creating two new rules.
First: For the span of one year, time in Blessed Land would flow at the ratio of one year to one day outside the core, after which time would flow at the ratio of ten days to one day.
Second: The Gray Heaven could endlessly draw concentrated aether from the Violet Heaven and pass it to the Voice of the World in order to maintain the balance of resources and living beings within the world.
Why did those rules spend so little aether essence? Because time inside this world and outside the core was already drastically different-this was one of the world's basic abilities. Naturally, it would not cost much, since it already existed and was simply being applied at its maximum.