Mt. Dragonends Chapter 6: The Fourth Human, Harpy The reason why tornadoes and tsunamis kept occurring one after the other after the global freeze was because there was an updraft.
When the Earth"s ice started to melt due to the acc.u.mulation of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, the atmospheric temperature reached 50°C. When the sea"s surface appeared, the ocean water warmed up, generating an intense updraft. This occurred all over the world, and as a result, it turned into a historically rare state on Earth where supercells appeared frequently all around.
*T/N: Supercell = a type of thunderstorm (wiki) The raging storms that reached the global scale invoked the next huge storm, and caused tsunamis that were capable of completely submerging mid-sized mountains completely. Giant tsunamis on an absurdly large scale rushed through the continent from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e, submerging it.
Only a portion of high mountains, with me at the very top of the list, were able to avoid being damaged by the tsunamis, and even those mountains had their surfaces whittled away by the raging storms.
It was a dreadfully harsh era, different from the scorching hot world when meteorites collided with the Earth, and the frozen world of the global freeze.
As the dwarves lived inside the mountain, they were able to avoid any damage, while the mermaids actually rode on the tsunamis skillfully, utilizing them to travel long distances. However, the ones who were troubled were the werewolves, headed by Lycan. The ice that served as both their dwellings and food source had completely disappeared due to the violent global warming, in addition to the raging storms and the giant tsunamis.
At this point, there were no places on Earth for the werewolves to live———
———as such, I coped with the situation by having them evacuate to the moon.
The moon is fundamentally a desolate and barren land, but the polar regions have a thick ice sheet. It has a world of ice where the werewolves could live.
Even though it was a world without air, as the werewolves did not breathe, it posed no problem at all. The Earth"s stormy era wouldn"t last that long (comparatively speaking). Once the environment calmed down and until ice once again appeared, the moon was the most suitable place as a refuge.
Sahela was in charge of their evacuation to the moon. She carried the werewolves on her shoulder and jumped to the moon, diligently transporting them all.
Everything with regards to the werewolves was settled with that. When they return from the moon, I"ll probably have them tell me the tales of their travels on the moon.
Now then.
While the werewolves were taking refuge, I created yet another new species.
I wanted a living being that could defy the raging storms, and fly through the skies even as thunderstorms blew.
The world seen from the ground"s surface and the world seen while looking down from the skies were surely different.
A living being that can fly through the sky will need wings. A balloon could also soar up into the air, but just going upwards without being able to control one"s direction couldn"t be called "flying".
I used a humanoid base and added wings to it. A sky child that lived by eating wind and lightning. Its hair was gold like a flash of light, and it was born and would live in the sky.
In other words, the fourth human made after the werewolves was a harpy.
Like with the previous species, I created a single immortal harpy. She was a female harpy, Haru. Haru would lead the entire species to create stories about the heavens to tell me.
Since the harpies exceeded the stratosphere to fly in the cloudless thermosphere (around 80 km from the Earth"s surface), they were able to see a far more vivid night sky compared that seen on the surface of the Earth, which was locked in by the wind and rain. Thanks to the harpies, the records and stories about celestial bodies increased remarkably.
The age of storms settled unexpectedly quickly, in a mere thousand years.
And then, once the ocean calmed and grew quiet once more, it became not blue, but green instead.
The algae that utilized photosynthesis multiplied in an explosive manner.
Creatures that utilized photosynthesis had been around since the ice age, but this was the first time that they had ever propagated to this extent.
What caused them to multiply was the storm and carbon dioxide.
During the ice age, a vast amount of nutrients were locked in on the ocean floor by the ice and had acc.u.mulated without being consumed at all.
The volcanic activity that led to the end of the ice age released a large amount of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, and amongst these gases, everyone knows that carbon dioxide is the raw material for photosynthesis.
The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mixed into the ocean, and the nutrients acc.u.mulated on the ocean floor were stirred up and brought to the ocean surface by the tsunamis that reached 1000 metres high, as well as the supercells.
The unending supply of carbon dioxide that would not dry up even if it was used by the algae for photosynthesis drove their propagation forward exponentially, causing the entire ocean"s surface all over Earth to be dyed green.
The carbon dioxide was converted into oxygen, causing the concentration of oxygen on Earth to practically reach that of the 21st century"s.
Through a chemical reaction with the sunlight, the oxygen was transformed into ozone, forming a thick ozone layer, which obstructed the ultraviolet rays that were harmful to living things.
The creatures that, up until now, had only been able to live in the water where the UV rays couldn"t reach them, now had an environment set up so that they could survive on land.
I learned about all of that in great detail from the harpies who had a communication relay in the skies, and was able to understand what was happening through the knowledge brought with me from my previous life.
It feels like a historian would do anything to be able to be in my position. Well, my existence itself was a part of history as well.
Around the time that the ocean"s surface was dyed green, the atmospheric temperature dropped, and ice started to form in the polar regions.
I called the werewolves, who had been taking refuge on the moon, back home. After coaxing Sahela, who didn"t want to be away from me, I had her once again perform the transport operation between the moon and Earth.
However, a portion of the werewolves did not want to return to Earth.
Since the lifespan of the werewolves was 500 years, once 1000 years pa.s.sed, there was a turnover of about two to three generations.
To the other werewolves other than Lycan, Earth wasn"t their birthplace, but a strange land that they had only heard of in stories.
I didn"t particularly have any intention of forcing them to return to Earth. The werewolves were free to live wherever they wanted.
Lycan was worried about the werewolves that stayed behind on the moon and said that he would stay there as well. Then, the werewolves that adored Lycan also wanted to follow his decision and as a result, the werewolves became split 50-50 between the moon and Earth.
It wasn"t rabbits that lived on the moon, but wolfmen……
Well, it was only really j.a.pan and China that thought there were rabbits on the moon anyhow. Depending on the country, they"ll say that there"s a crab or a lion, so if there"s wolfmen on it, it"ll probably still be fine for the world line.
The werewolves that returned to Earth settled at the North and South poles, as well as on the summit of my mountain.
While I had been shaved down for a period of time by the dragons, and then had considerable destruction done by the raging storms, I was currently at an elevation of about 9000 metres above sea level. Everest was around 8800 metres, so I was Earth"s historically highest mountain. The summit was covered in a white cap all year round, so there was enough ice and snow for the werewolves to live there.
The air warmed by the ocean struck against my mountainside, then rose and was cooled, forming rainclouds, leading to a blessed downpour of water. It flowed down the Earth"s surface, and the abundance of water created a lake at the mountain"s base, which connected to the ocean by river. Thanks to that the mermaids occasionally———with Lorelei coming relatively frequently———came to visit by swimming up the river.
The harpies made me into a rest point. It seems that there were always strong winds blowing near me, so it was a perfect place to rest. It seems that even for a species that chased after storms and could sleep in the middle of a hurricane, sometimes they wanted to take it easy in a moderate breeze.
And then the dwarves naturally lived in the underground tunnels inside of me.
One way or another, the four races enjoyed living life around me.
It was not only them, but other species that I was not involved with started to evolve repeatedly as they started to show signs of prospering.
The algae that turned the ocean green and converted most of the carbon dioxide into oxygen started to decrease in number with the declining temperature, and instead, it started to advance onto the land. On the coast and riversides, as well as along the lakeside, vegetation that resembled moss and ferns started to disembark onto land, and the land that hadn"t shown signs of life for 4 billion years started to bud with it.
The life that had become independent from its Ocean Mother stood upon the earth, raising the curtain of a new era.