It is said that when humans face death, their reactions commonly unfold in five stages.
I, too, was following those steps to the letter.
“Ha, haha. Of course this is a dream. It has to be a dream.”
Denial.
“GM, you son of a biiiiitch!”
Anger.
“If I look around carefully, maybe there’s a function to change races? Please, there has to be.”
Bargaining.
“……Haa. I just want to give up on everything now.”
Depression.
And finally, acceptance.
“……What did I do wrong to have to die twice? No, I’m absolutely not dying. I refuse to die!”
In my case, however, the conclusion of acceptance was a little different.
Unlike other terminal patients, my death was not unavoidable.
The odds were extremely slim, but there was a way to survive.
“Whew, whew. Even if the sky falls, there’s a hole to escape through. Remember that.”
I kept repeating the proverb to myself as I steadied my mind.
Once my emotions had calmed a little, I began assessing the situation in earnest.
“First, this system menu. Is it really the same as Log?”
I examined the translucent UI of Log floating in my vision.
No matter how I looked at it, it was perfectly identical to the player menu from Log, which had been an actual game.
However, right now, no matter what I tried to touch, nothing worked.
[Tutorial 2: Choose your divine name.]
“Is it because of this……”
Even in the actual Log, once the tutorial began, all other controls were locked.
Realizing I had no choice but to proceed with the tutorial, I began thinking about my divine name.
“Divine name, huh. It’s probably something like a nickname, right?”
For a moment, the countless nicknames I had used while playing Log in my previous life flashed through my mind.
But I soon concluded that using any of those nicknames would be dangerous.
It was because of the word “everyone,” which kept appearing in the notices sent by none other than the GM.
“That means I’m not the only one in this situation.”
There was a chance, however small, that someone might recognize a nickname I had used.
So I decided to make a completely new divine name.
“If I’m going to make one anyway, should I make it sound a little impressive? It is supposed to be the name of a god, after all.”
And so the divine name I chose was “Huma.”
It was the English word for human with only the last letter removed.
Originally, I had considered using Homo, the Latin word for man, but that sounded too strange, so I just used English.
[Divine Name: Huma
Rank: Tribal God
Race: Human Race
Population: 0/0]
[Resource Status] [Unit Production]
[Tutorial 2: Quest cleared!]
[Chain quest in progress.]
[Tutorial 3: The minimap……]
Like that, I cleared the tutorial quests one by one.
The contents of the quests were not the slightest bit different from those in Log when it had been a game.
However, the way they were realized in reality was interesting.
Flash!
During the quest where I used divine power, an unknown force actually surged up from within my body.
Crack!
Clang!
When I harvested wood or stone, it was immediately reflected in the resource holdings on the system menu.
Throb!
“Ugh, my head.”
When I turned on the minimap, information did not appear in my field of vision; instead, the surrounding environment was directly hammered into my head.
Aside from being able to see the system menu, it truly felt as if I had become a god.
‘No, in this place, I really am the god of humans.’
Once I had cleared all the tutorial quests, a system message rang out again.
Ding!
[You have cleared all chain quests!]
[Basic structures will be given as a reward.]
Then, along with the addition of a [Construction] category to the system menu, blueprints for buildings appeared in my head.
The types of buildings included primitive huts, wooden fences, and temples.
The moment I confirmed them, I hurriedly began moving.
‘If I stay in the middle of a grassland like this, I’ll be discovered right away.’
Fortunately—if it could be called fortunate—there was a forest not far away.
Because of the limited visibility, a forest narrowed the range of the minimap that could be revealed at once, but it was rich in obtainable resources.
It was perfect terrain for hiding a main base in the early stage.
I moved straight into the forest and began building the “shrine,” the main structure.
Each race in Log had a main structure called a temple.
Worker units were produced at this temple, and through divine power, the resource gathered at the temple, the player could personally perform miracles to overturn the state of battle.
And the level 1 temple structure of the human race was this shrine.
“The shrine should go around here, and the hut can go here, I suppose.”
Every time I used divine power, light flashed continuously from my hands.
At the same time, the surrounding trees were cut down, and they assembled themselves in midair on their own.
And so, after only a few dozen minutes, a small shrine and a hut spacious enough for four people were built where I stood.
“Good. Next are the units.”
At present, the only units I could produce right away were worker units.
To produce proper combat units, I needed to build a combat unit production building called a “training ground.”
I pressed the [Unit Production] button on the system menu to produce a worker unit.
But the next moment, I had no choice but to stop my hand.
“What is this?”
It was because options I had never seen in Log appeared before me.
They were [Creation] and [Childbirth].
Judging by the meaning of the words, [Creation] seemed to mean directly shaping a unit with divine power, while [Childbirth] seemed to mean making a unit give birth to a child.
“Huh…… So when Log turns into reality, changes like this happen too.”
For now, I pressed the [Creation] button and produced a worker unit.
Then, a method for using divine power flowed into my head.
Following the method the system taught me, I drew a portion of divine power from my body and began kneading it.
The form was that of an adult woman, and her age was the same as my current appearance—early twenties.
The moment a clear image appeared in my head, I moved my hands.
But as my hands gradually moved, the form that emerged was unexpected.
“Huh, wait?”
Even though I had never done anything like clay craft in my life, an astonishing result was being born from my fingertips.
If she were completed like this, she would gradually reveal herself as a woman anyone would acknowledge as beautiful.
“It’s not system correction…… How is something like this possible?”
After thinking it over, I realized my hands were moving unconsciously.
Come to think of it, even the concept of kneading divine power had come to me instinctively.
“Divine intuition—no, omniscience?”
If so, then the fact that my hands were moving on their own would correspond to omnipotence.
Only then did I truly feel that I had become a god.
From next time on, it seemed I would be able to produce units even without the system’s help.
“Good, it’s done.”
Once the form was complete, the clay doll shaped from divine power gradually began to materialize into flesh.
The sight of color filling the translucent mass of light as it changed into a tangible body was incredibly mystical.
When her body was fully formed, I laid her on the ground, then once again followed what omniscience told me and breathed life into her.
Whew.
Then I felt my breath enter through her nose and fill her lungs.
At that moment.
Thump.
Thump.
Her heart began beating for the first time.
Along with it, color returned to her entire body.
I slowly looked over the miraculous creation I had shaped with my own hands.
“Whew……”
She exhaled and opened her eyes.
Slightly nervous, I extended my hand to her.
Instead of taking my hand and standing, she stared blankly at me and said,
“……God?”
From that one word, I was able to learn many things.
The emotions she was currently feeling, her level of knowledge, and even the subtle physical reactions that she herself did not know.
Omniscience, the sense and instinct of a god, was an even more tremendous sense than I had thought.
Trying to ignore the information that kept barging in, I personally helped her up.
“Yes. I created you. What else do you know?”
“I know that my race is human, that I am the first human, and that you are the god who created me.”
She listed the information I had “input” when I breathed life into her.
Even as she did so, her expressionless face was like that of a porcelain doll.
Ding!
At that moment, the system notification, which I had thought would stay silent after the reward message, rang out again.
[Entering Era 1, the Primitive Era.]
“It’s finally beginning.”
That message was always displayed when a battle in Log began.
In other words, from this point onward, I had officially plunged into the war between gods.
“What has begun?”
She asked me.
Perhaps she had learned expressions from me in that brief time, because she was directly imitating the “tension” that had appeared on my face.
I answered her honestly.
“War has begun.”
“What is war?”
“It means killing and being killed in order to obtain what each side wants, or in order to survive.”
“Is there something you want, God?”
“No. My goal is to survive this war.”
She asked questions endlessly, but I answered them one by one.
She could speak and possessed an adult level of comprehension, but she was still essentially a being who had only just been born into the world.
After we spent some time asking and answering questions like that, she seemed to run out of things to ask and closed her mouth.
I gave her a name.
“From now on, your name is Lucy.”
“Yes, God.”
The name given to the oldest human fossil in the world I had lived in.
I gave that name to my first creation.