Back when I was a kid, I loved to read novels of almost any kind. But no matter what I would read, one particular activity of mine would repeat all the same. In the middle of tense moments, I would imagine some kind of higher power descending to the world in order to save the heroes from the trouble. After imagining for a bit I would open the book once again and continue with the adventurers in the fictional world according to its author idea, only to rinse and repeat my habit once again a bit later.

In other words, even back when I was still a kid I was already dreaming about possessing god-like powers of influencing anything I would ever want. Yet, just like with everything that people imagine while in their childhood phase, once someone actually obtains what they always dreamed about, it usually turns to be bleak.

The only saving grace of my current situation was the fact that I was most likely the only being from earth ever that managed to actually achieve the goal of becoming a god!

But it didn't change anything in my life at all.

With the constantly accelerating growth of the rate at which my clones multiplied and sprawled all over the endless universe, my perception of time also changed. That is if it was otherwise static in the first place. At some point that I couldn't really pinpoint, I no longer had to merge with the clone to take over its memories. It just… happened.

Maybe the constant procedure of passing the information up the chain that allowed me to merge with only one clone once in a while instead of spending all my time consuming more copies of myself forced the evolution aimed at simplifying this task? Or maybe the combined willpower of all my copies managed to force some changes in the very basic unit of my personality that laid at the core of this collective consciousness that made me capable of replacing the wasteful part of the process with something occurring naturally?

But ultimately, it didn't matter anything at all. I was still stuck in the constantly changing environment of my own universe. Even after finally understanding the idea behind turning magic into a matter that was the perceptive borderline between being still a somewhat human being and a god didn't change my mentality almost at all.

Because in the end, no matter the insane beauty of this universe, I was already getting bored with the life I led. Capable of reliving the memories of each and every respective clone of mine I had no need to personally travel to any place I would find interesting. At first, watching the very first forms of life that my clones managed to find seemed like a good way to kill time. But then I understood the meaning of the 'great filters' that I once watched a video about.

In other words, evolution itself seemed to be against giving birth to any intelligent life. No matter how much time would pass, no matter how many attempts the intelligence would make at surfacing on some world and taking control over it as it happened on earth, the intelligent life simply failed to break through the stage where they could reach the top of the food chain.

Even though it was only my personal thesis, not backed out by any scientist as there was none in this world, the intelligence was a perk that a species often couldn't afford. Even if due to some evolutional quirk a race capable of forming intelligent thought would emerge, the drawbacks it would have in other aspects would quickly make it easy prey for the stronger animals.

Only after watching over a hundred possible civilisations dying out before a single settlement was made, one race finally managed to break through this obstacle. Not because they were the pinnacle of what the nature of their world could create. In fact, they were far weaker than most of the species that my clones took notice off. But they were lucky.

The main reason why any possibly intelligent species would vanish was the huge amounts of energy it would require to maintain a nervous system capable of forming thoughts. Just like in the case with humans, the brain or brain-like organ simply forced them to scavenge and hunt more, putting them at the constant risk of getting killed by stronger predators. But in the case of the planet that I named 'Smiley Face' from how one of its continents resembled the earthy emote, its local race lucked out literally in the apocalypse.

A powerful asteroid was what brought the end to the legendary rein of dinosaurs on Earth, allowing other species to explode in population. But on the smiley face, the asteroid wasn't powerful enough to alter the genome of the entire planet. In fact, outside of creating an immense crater that reached from the foothold of a huge mountain chain all the way to a strange, silverish ocean, its crash didn't affect anything outside of the lethal zone almost at all.

With the obvious exception of the intelligent race.

Enclosed in a small continental enclave, locked between the sea, the mountains and the enormous crater… They quickly killed out all the predators. This was also the very first time when I personally intervened, killing three surviving monsters that those crawling and semi-intelligent creatures would easily fall prey to.

In the dullness of my life, I finally found a chance to watch over a world that gave birth to a life that survived the first great filter. And once they managed to take complete control over the tiny patch of land that they were enclosed with, a miracle happened.

The six-legged race of beings that I could only compare to some kind of repulsive bugs from the earth, managed to discover farming. Not the one that I knew from the earth. In fact, even a god-like me had troubles deciding whether it could be considered farming in the first place.

Apparently, their way of reproduction was strangely similar to the earthy egg. At first, a female specimen would lay its eggs all over a huge patch of 'farmland', then, after the larvae would grow big enough, the male responsible for the area would pick few of the best-looking eggs to fertilize before harvesting all the others.

The larvae itself worked like a plant. Consisting of the soft egg hidden under the blanket of dust that this planet was made off, it would sprout a thick stem from which red petals would then grow. Once it became ripe, its petals would start falling off, nourishing the dust below it for the next round of farming. And by observing the process for a time long enough, I realised that the number of petals a stem would sprout was the sole thing that decided which larvae would become the next generations of 'smiley bugs' and which ones would be put for the adult specimen to feed on.

Thankfully, I didn't need to watch over the growth of the civilisation of those bugs for the enormous vastness of the time necessary for the evolution to do its part. As the numbers of my clones grew, so did the time that I required to process all their memories. While the theory behind it that I crafted involved some pretty deep and interesting theorems, ultimately it could all be traced back to a simple idea.

The passage of the time itself was turning quicker and quicker the more my collateral consciousness grew!

And this was the sole reason why just a single disruption of the rift in the universe that I discovered all the way before even a single star appeared in this world was more than enough for me to miss the collapse of the civilisation of those bugs. Just the time I needed to inspect the changes in that strange space before returning back to overseeing the smiley planet…

Over the private investigation that I conducted to discover just what could have happened to eradicate a somewhat intelligent species from a place where it had no other enemies… I ended up coming to a quite depressing explanation. From the traces of farms in the otherwise dead crater I could tell that they attempted to expand outside of their enclave. And from how the entire land within their banishment zone was now nothing more but dryland, it became obvious that their population grew so big, that they turned to be a bane of their own race.

Even with how the entire detective process of mine seemed to take several times longer than the entire lifespan of this civilisation, for me it felt as if everything happened in just a few moments.

And then, that ripple in space that I was so curious about yet powerless to do anything about shook again.

And then again. And again!

And then, the ripple finally managed to achieve its true form, tearing the fabric of my universe apart and revealing a mass of energy that had a pretty similar aura to all my clones. Yet, there was something foreign to it at the same time.

"Mike… Is that you?"

As unsurprising as it could be, I wasn't the one that this strange being encountered first in this world. It was just another clone of mine. But hearing the word, the language that I didn't expect to hear ever again in my life was a shock big enough to send the entire web of connection between clones in different places in disarray.

With this single sentence, the structure of universal vigilance that I built based on my clones… collapsed. Just because not a single part of my greater, collateral being, was willing to miss the opportunity to experience the old world of ours, even if it were to be the only shadow of it.

"So you have finally made it here."

Appearing right where the anomaly used to be with just a thought, I used galaxy-worth of magic to create a hidden world where this foreign mass of energy could finally take any form it wished.

And as deep as his face was buried in my extensive storage of memory right now, once I saw a human face for the first time ever since I was banished to this emptiness, I had no more doubts about my guess.

"It's been a while, Bonger."