"This week has not been slow," thought Gaia as she sat inside her own private space, wrapped in a blanket with a hot cup of cocoa in her hands. She was watching television, although calling what she was watching television was somewhat misleading. The screen in front of her had been divided into roughly one hundred smaller screens, each showing a different opening of the proving grounds somewhere around the world. Gaia watched them with genuine excitement, because the entire concept was something she was incredibly pleased with herself for having managed to create.
Getting the proving grounds to work had been far more difficult than she had initially expected. The preparations had pushed her right up against the limits of what she could accomplish with her authority, which was not something Gaia was particularly accustomed to experiencing. As the consciousness of planet Earth, she possessed authority over the natural laws that occurred within her planet. If she decided that gravity should reverse itself on an entire continent, then gravity would reverse itself there. That was precisely why one generally did not try to mess around with a planetary consciousness, because doing so was an exceptionally dumb idea.
There were, however, very real limitations to Gaia's authority. She could manipulate the natural laws she possessed authority over, but she could not simply invent a new natural law or improve her own understanding of how those laws worked. That part had to come from humanity. When humans discovered something new about the universe, Gaia gained access to that knowledge as well, allowing her to understand and manipulate that particular aspect of reality more effectively.
That meant Gaia could not simply decide to bend space because it sounded useful. She did not actually understand how to bend space, nor did she know how to properly reverse the gravity of an entire continent. The laws themselves were available to her, but her understanding of those laws was incomplete. It was somewhat like possessing a tool without fully understanding how the tool had been constructed or what every part of it was capable of doing.
That was not entirely true, of course. Humanity had spent thousands of years studying science, and Gaia had absorbed a small portion of the knowledge humanity had accumulated. The problem was that humanity had only been able to access perhaps five percent of all existence before mana appeared. Even that five percent had barely begun to be understood, meaning Gaia's own understanding was similarly limited.
Still, what she did understand had been enough to create the proving grounds. The basic concept was derived from virtual-reality games and illusions, although Gaia's version was considerably more complicated. Instead of forcing people to physically travel somewhere, she used illusions to create an environment where they could fight opponents entirely within their minds. To the people participating, however, those battles felt real enough to train their bodies, minds, and techniques.
She had also managed to make the system work cooperatively. Multiple people could enter the same illusion and fight together if they wanted to, allowing groups to train against enemies without needing to physically gather in the same location. From Gaia's perspective, that was one of the most entertaining aspects of the entire system. Humans could turn the proving grounds into anything from individual training sessions to enormous battles.
The real purpose behind the system, however, went beyond simple entertainment. The participants were fighting and cultivating at the same time, which stimulated them into producing cultural energy. That energy was already connected to the mana of the enemies they defeated. Since Gaia created those enemies entirely out of the mana that the participants wanted to absorb, the cultural energy and mana naturally worked together.
The result was remarkably efficient. The participants could fight enemies, absorb their mana, cultivate themselves, and produce cultural energy at the same time. Their rate of improvement was therefore considerably faster than it would have been through ordinary training. Gaia had essentially created a giant training ground that allowed humanity to improve while simultaneously feeding the world with the energy she needed.
Of course, there were other benefits for Gaia as well. The most obvious one was that humans would not become rusty when it came to fighting. With corrupted creatures still existing throughout the world, allowing humanity's combat skills to deteriorate would have been rather foolish. Keeping people accustomed to combat meant that if something went wrong, they would already have the experience necessary to respond.
The entertainment aspect was almost as important to Gaia, though. She expected the proving grounds to keep her entertained for a very long time. Gaia had only been truly aware for around five years, but that did not mean she lacked memories. Her existence was considerably stranger than that of an ordinary human being.
She remembered humanity's history as though she had personally experienced it. Humanity had existed on Earth for roughly three hundred thousand years, and during that time, human beings had gradually accumulated cultural energy. Gaia's conscious existence might have only begun recently, but those memories still existed within her. As a result, she sometimes felt as though she had lived for at least three hundred thousand years.
That was both a blessing and a curse. Every living thing on the planet possessed some degree of free will, even if that amount was incredibly small. Gaia did not have much personal use for the free will of individual organisms, but the collective expression of free will was important because it contributed to the creation of cultural energy. When countless beings began living together, forming societies, developing traditions, and building civilizations, that collective activity created something Gaia could use.
Cultural energy had become one of the most important resources for Gaia's growth. It was what she could use to develop and expand herself as a planetary consciousness. Unfortunately, the same thing that gave her access to an enormous amount of cultural energy also gave her an enormous number of memories. That meant Gaia had memories of being bored.
She had memories of periods when nothing particularly interesting had happened, even though she had not been consciously awake during those times. The proving grounds were therefore an excellent solution to a very old problem. They gave humanity something entertaining to do while simultaneously giving Gaia something interesting to watch.
Films and television had once served a similar purpose, but humanity had unfortunately stopped producing them for the moment. The problem was that Gaia had an extremely difficult time enjoying a film she had already seen. She could remember the entire filming process, the actors, the production, and every time the finished movie or series had been aired.
Gaia could mute portions of her own memories if she really wanted to, but she disliked doing that. Suppressing her memories simply to enjoy a piece of entertainment felt wrong to her. If humanity started filming something new today, however, that would be completely different. Gaia would happily watch the entire production process from beginning to end because she would not already know what was going to happen.
Sadly, humanity had stopped producing films because they were no longer commercially viable. That was why the proving grounds were so promising. They could provide Gaia with something she had not already experienced, something unpredictable that would continue changing every time humanity entered them.
"This is going to be comedic enough," Gaia thought as she watched another screen. She took another sip of cocoa while observing dozens of different battles unfold simultaneously. Humans were remarkably entertaining when given enough freedom to make their own decisions. More importantly, she had no idea what they were going to do next.
There was another significant benefit to the proving grounds that had nothing to do with entertainment. Gaia could use them to keep an eye on the mana of the world. The various mana circles that acted as filters could occasionally create an imbalance between the different attributes of mana in the atmosphere. If those imbalances became severe enough, they could create dangerous dead zones in places where they were never supposed to exist.
A forest, for example, could potentially lose its fire-attributed mana. That would be a serious problem because fire was not merely destructive; it was also part of the natural cycle that maintained the forest. If there was not enough fire-attributed mana in a region, the world's natural cycle would eventually attempt to introduce it back into that environment.
The problem was that the correction could be extremely violent. If the world had to restore a missing element naturally, it could result in massive forest fires. Such fires were perfectly acceptable when they happened naturally because they were part of the world's ecological cycle. Fires caused by humans, however, were a different matter entirely.
Those were mistakes Gaia expected humanity to deal with themselves. Unfortunately, the world was still not stable enough to comfortably withstand large shocks. The entire cycle of life was still recovering from the enormous expansion of the Earth, and Gaia had to be careful not to allow another major imbalance to develop while everything was still settling.
The place where that instability could be seen most clearly was the coral reefs. Coral reefs had already begun recovering after humanity had spent decades and trillions of dollars attempting to repair the damage it had caused to them. Compared to the influx of resources Gaia could now provide, however, those previous efforts were almost insignificant.
Gaia had burned through an immense amount of cultural energy correcting many of humanity's mistakes. As a result, the coral reefs had recovered to levels comparable to those that existed before the Industrial Revolution. Under normal circumstances, that would have been an extraordinary achievement.
The problem was that Earth was no longer the same size it had been before the Industrial Revolution. The planet had expanded enormously, and its coastlines had become vastly larger. The coral reefs had recovered to their old levels, but those levels were no longer sufficient for the new planet.
They needed to at least double in size to keep up with the expanded world. Gaia had deliberately held back when it came to the deep sea, but that was not where coral reefs thrived anyway. Their recovery therefore served as an uncomfortable reminder that the natural cycle was still badly out of balance.
That imbalance affected Gaia far more than humanity realized. Humans were celebrating the apparent end of global warming and congratulating themselves on the recovery of the planet, but Gaia could see the bigger picture. The world was healing, but healing was not the same thing as being stable.
For Gaia, the proving grounds were therefore much more than a game. They were entertainment, a training system for humanity, a source of cultural energy, and another tool for monitoring the balance of mana across the planet. She could sit comfortably in her private space with her blanket and cocoa while watching humanity fight across a hundred screens. For the first time in a very long time, Gaia had something new to watch, and she intended to enjoy every second of it.