Time since the asteroid hit Earth: ~1.6 billion years (subjective to Aryan)
The universe had matured.
Stars now lived and died in cycles. Planets had cooled, water condensed, and chemistry whispered its secrets to the silent void.
On one such fertile world — nestled quietly in a yellow star's embrace — carbon had begun its slow rise.
Aryan Ved watched from within the laws of entropy, his consciousness stretched across probability itself.
> "I have set the conditions," he said. "Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen — all in motion. Bonds forming. Complexity growing."
> "Life should begin... now."
And it did.
Single-celled life emerged.
They swam. They split. They multiplied.
But something was off.
**They stopped evolving.**
Mutation — the engine of evolution — halted after a few successful replications. No new forms. No struggle. No branches in the tree of life. Just endless loops of identical cells.
> "That's... not right," Aryan muttered.
He examined the genetic code.
Perfect. Too perfect.
> "No errors," he realized. "No mutations. No variation. Evolution needs mistakes."
Just then — **POOF!** — a burst of sparkly static.
> "WELL WELL WELL," the Light God sang, floating down in a bathrobe and space slippers. "Someone overcooked the soup again?"
> "They're not mutating," Aryan replied flatly.
> "Isn't that good?" Light God asked, sipping from a glowing mug labeled '#1 Cosmic Being'. "No cancer, no chaos, no embarrassing stages with tails?"
> "It's stagnation. Without mutation, life can't adapt, can't diversify. This planet will be filled with copy-paste organisms until the star burns out."
> "So… turn up the radiation?" Light God wiggled his fingers suggestively. "Maybe toss in a gamma ray tantrum?"
Aryan thought deeply.
> "Too much radiation will kill everything. Too little, nothing mutates."
> "Like seasoning," Light God nodded. "Too much salt, you cry. Too little, you also cry."
> "I'll adjust the solar flares," Aryan decided. "Add random bursts — enough to nudge the code without frying it."
> "And how long will this genius spice-blending take?"
> "A hundred million years of solar variability. I'll appear as magnetic instability — invisible, but guiding."
> "Spicy," Light God grinned. "Let me guess, you're going to call this phase... 'Let There Be Radiation'?"
> "No."
> "Missed opportunity."
Aryan smiled — barely — and shifted his presence into the star. There, he became instability itself. Coronal mass ejections, UV flux, gamma spikes.
Soon, the first mutations appeared.
Cells twisted, adapted, competed.
Some grew tails. Others developed senses.
Life had begun... again.
> "You fixed it," the Light God whispered, reappearing briefly beside him.
> "But tell me... do you think life wants to evolve? Or are you forcing it?"
Aryan didn't answer.
He just watched the cells crawl from the ocean.
Knowing the next step would be harder.
**— End of Chapter 7**