With her second test subject dead, Alice turned towards the third glimmerspren. The creature constantly flopped around and wriggled, as though it were a zombie. Even with no wings, it still kept trying to wriggle towards Alice, as though it wanted to take a bite out of her.

Alice shuddered. Monsters were downright creepy sometimes. She shook her head and tried to remove the image of the creature inching its way towards her from her mind. Instead, she turned towards Ethan again.

“Do you have enough mana to make this one into an alpha as well?” she asked, hesitantly.

Ethan paused, as if thinking about it.

“I can make one more evolve, but after that, I don’t want to make a third alpha. Even for me, this isn’t a small amount of mana, and I need to keep some ready for an emergency. I’m pretty sure that the [Queen] won’t do anything stupid while we’re here… but the Society or the Sigmusi might still send a wave of [Assassins] after us. It never hurts to be prepared for the worst.”

“Understood,” said Alice. In that case, she had to make this test count. She was desperately hoping that this round of experiments could bring her to level 85. If it didn’t, Alice would need to spend more time working on [Explorer of Magic] before she could investigate the mana gem in her brain more thoroughly.

Ethan stepped towards the final glimmerspren, and started infusing it with mana, just like the previous one. Alice crossed her fingers and hoped that this one wouldn’t also develop a Perk. Alice was wary of randomly getting killed by a monster wielding a Perk, since there was such a massive variety of Perks that existed. Even if she lost the opportunity to conduct more tests, if this monster also developed a Perk Alice would kill it immediately.

Just like before, its body started shimmering with mana. The two kinds of mana present in its monster core flashed and pulsed, and at the same time, a new type of mana started to spread throughout its body and warp it into a new shape.

The monster core in its body started pulsing with rainbow mana, then a few unidentified types of mana, then Ethan’s organic mana. Thankfully, this time, the monster didn’t start developing a perk. She didn’t have to cancel the experiment this time.

Five minutes passed as the monster’s body changed. Then ten minutes. After twenty minutes, Alice started frowning.

Why aren’t there any paired enchantments forming this time? Alice wondered. When the second test subject had started to turn into a monster alpha, it had only taken fifteen minutes for the creature to start forming pseudo-paired enchantments with the other test subjects. Yet this time, twenty minutes had passed, and there was still no sign of the monster forming a connection with other monsters. What was the difference here?

Maybe it’s a range limitation thing? Alice thought. Theoretically, most of the nearby glimmerspren should be in range of the monster alpha she and Ethan had created – but perhaps its range constantly expanded during the process of becoming an alpha. If that was the case, things would make sense to her. The second test subject had only been a few meters away from the third test subject, which would allow it to form a connection between the two almost instantly. By contrast, for this glimmerspren, there were no nearby other glimmerspren. Alice had chosen a group of monsters that was completely out of the way to target first, so the nearest glimmerspren were still a decent distance away.

As Alice thought about the control monster alphas exerted over their kin, she found herself curious. What would happen if she re-introduced the newly created glimmerspren alpha to the monster swarm? The original monster swarm already had an alpha. That was the reason why they were moving as a group, rather than just wandering around as individual monsters. What happened when two different monster alphas appeared right next to each other?

Then, Alice frowned. During the expedition from Cyra to the broken mana zone, Alice remembered that only one monster swarm had come out of the entire mess. It had been a massive vinebear pack. Based on that expedition, it seemed like monster swarms usually just massacred each other until one remained. However, during the most recent trip to Cyra, she and Ethan had seen two monster swarms working together. Which Ethan had noted was rather atypical behavior for monsters. Even if monster alphas normally slaughtered each other, it was hard to say whether that was still true now.

In these circumstances, awakening another monster alpha and letting it loose upon the world probably wasn’t a very good idea. Alice felt a bit regretful, but decided to keep an eye out for an opportunity to observe this process in detail later. Perhaps if the group ran across a few spidercrab packs they could give it a go and see what happened. Even with perks, Alice seriously doubted spidercrabs could threaten them.

But Alice still felt a little itch of curiosity in her heart. She already had an evolving monster alpha right in front of her. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to just bring over a few more glimmerspren and see what happened, right?

She spent a few moments scanning their surroundings, before she turned towards Allira. “Honored Immortal, would it be possible to bring over a few more test subjects? I want to see how the monster alpha’s monster core interacts with a few other glimmerspren. I just need them alive, their condition doesn’t matter.”

Allira looked at the evolving monster alpha for a few moments, before she shrugged. “Sure. Give me a moment,” she said, before hopping into the nearby woods. Less than a minute later, she returned with five more de-winged glimmerspren.

Alice took the half-dead monsters and double checked that they didn’t have any Perks available to them. If they had Perks, they needed to be eliminated before they caused more chaos.

Of the five captured by Allira, only one had a Perk. Alice killed that one, and then quickly started placing the glimmerspren around the clearing. The first glimmerspren was placed right next to the evolving monster alpha. The second one was placed ten meters away. The final two test subjects were placed twenty and forty meters away. After she finished placing the glimmerspren, Alice carefully watched the way that the monsters interacted with the newborn alpha.

The first glimmerspren, which was closest to the alpha, started forming a connection with the half-baked alpha glimmerspren instantly. Alice observed this process as carefully as she could, and noted that the glimmerspren’s monster core started to look almost like the ‘inverse’ of the paired enchantment forming in the alpha’s core. The glimmerspren that was ten meters away started going through a very similar process a few moments later. The glimmerspren that were twenty and forty meters away didn’t seem to have any response to the newly forming alpha at all. It was as though their monster cores didn’t even notice the existence of the new alpha yet – or at the very least, they were out of range right now.

Alice stopped paying attention to them, and payed more attention to the monsters that were connected to the alpha.

After some inspection, Alice realized that the ability for a monster alpha to issue commands to other members of its species wasn’t exactly as one-sided as she had thought. Apparently, the monsters also received something from an alpha while under its command. It looked almost like the nearby alpha was feeding the two affected monsters some sort of enchantment that improved their cores. The two glimmerspren were starting to absorb slightly more mana from their surroundings with each second. It was very minute, and Alice had to use her Marium-measuring Perks to make sure that she wasn’t just seeing things – but the monsters under the command of an alpha were slowly developing to become more like the alpha they served. And Alice also noticed that the monster that was physically closer to the glimmerspren was more affected.

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In other words, monsters don’t just mimic and adapt to new sources of mana that they encounter – they also mimic each other, thought Alice, absently.

With that minor mystery solved, Alice turned back towards the alpha itself… and was astonished. The monster alpha seemed to be nearly finished evolving. The ‘irregular’ types of mana in the monster core had started to disappear, and all that was left was the original two types of mana – whatever the monster used to launch feathers at enemies, and the mana it used to make itself hard to spot.

Most interestingly, though, was that the monster core did, indeed, look a little bit more… magic-seed like. It was still very distinctly a monster core – something that Alice would never mistake, having used them frequently during her enchanting. However, the monster core wasn’t just hungrily absorbing all nearby mana anymore.

Most monsters constantly absorbed nearby mana. This was a fundamental fact, and anytime a monster was cut off from nearby mana, it would essentially suffocate and die moments later. It was one of the most well known facts in the world. The monster alpha’s core was still absorbing nearby mana… but it wasn’t doing so at the exaggerated rate most monster cores operated at. Most monster cores were like miniature black holes, where mana constantly went in and then never went out. The monster alpha’s monster core was more like a little suction tube. It was still absorbing a bit of mana… but not quite much. This was distinctly at odds with what Alice had assumed would happen. She had assumed that monster alphas would need more mana to sustain their enlarged bodies, not less.

“Ethan, has anyone ever verified whether monster alphas suffocate once you cut them off from mana?” asked Alice. She also started searching her own memories for any similar studies that she might have read in the school library. She recalled hearing studies talk about experiments performed on monsters, but she didn’t remember seeing that many performed on monster alphas specifically.

Ethan frowned. “A few? Not many, though. Most studies just assume that monster alphas are bigger and smarter versions of the same monster. They never demonstrate any particularly unique capabilities, at least beyond the ability to command their lesser brethren. This is assumed to be some sort of link established between monster alphas and their lesser kin, and most [Scholars] think it’s pretty similar to a paired enchantment.” Ethan paused in thought. “There are also a few suggestions that some monster species produce wildly different results when they evolve into alphas. Spidercrabs are the most commonly used test subject, since they aren’t really a danger to researchers. But a few studies that were conducted with other species suggest that some monsters have far greater differences between alphas and normal monsters. Spidercrab alphas definitely die of mana deprivation if you cut them off from mana… but that might not be true for every monster species.”

Alice blinked. Apparently, half of the things she had discovered during this experiment weren’t particularly revolutionary. And the fact that there was such a big difference between monster species also surprised her. In hindsight, it actually should have been obvious that different species of monster behaved differently. After all, they were completely different animals with different body shapes and needs. But Alice had just gotten so used to lumping them all together that she was still surprised by this rather obvious fact.

Alice shook her head, and decided to focus on her experiment again. She could mull over the differences between monster species later. Right now, what she wanted to do was examine the monster core/magic seed in more detail.

With some curiosity, Alice confirmed that the monster core seemed to be creating energy from nothing – kind of like a magic seed. However, it wasn’t seemingly producing energy from thin air, the way a human magic seed did. Instead, it looked more like… the monster core was amplifying whatever mana it absorbed. If the monster core absorbed five mariums of mana, after the monster’s core finished absorbing it, it became about fifteen mariums of mana.

It was still created energy from nothing, at least as far as Alice could tell. But it wasn’t doing so effectively infinitely, unlike magic seeds. The monster cores needed a source of mana to keep creating more, while magic seeds didn’t. Alice did wonder whether it was theoretically possible for a monster core to just ‘release’ some of the mana inside of it, before ‘re-integrating’ it and tripling the mana quantity again… but regardless of whether it was possible or not, the monster in front of her wasn’t doing so.

Alice continued watching the captured monster alpha, to see if it did anything else that surprised her. The creature continued flopping around a little bit, and after another ten minutes, it ‘connected’ to another of the captured monsters.

This time, Alice noticed that the other monster didn’t ‘link up’ with the new monster alpha as easily. She also noticed that there seemed to be some sort of subtle clash of mana happening within the monster’s core.

“It must be the other monster alpha,” said Alice, as she watched a nearly-invisible set of paired enchantments fight for dominance inside of the monster’s core. It was very hard to notice… but now that Alice knew what to look for, she quickly found the ‘paired enchantment’ in the final captured monster’s core.

Out of curiosity, Alice grabbed it and started jogging away from the village where the original monster alpha was located. She made sure to avoid the range of the newly awakening monster alpha, because Alice wanted to see what happened when another monster left the range of its alpha.

After it got a certain range away, the ‘paired enchantment’ in the monster’s core naturally fell away on its own, leaving a totally normal monster behind. Alice noticed that whatever influence the original monster alpha had on its core started to gradually disappear. In other words, monsters needed to stay near the monster alpha if they wanted to keep benefitting from its presence.

Alice shrugged, and turned her attention back towards her artificial monster alpha. As it continued to evolve, the monster core started to form strands of mana that connected the monster core with the rest of its body more tightly. Alice was vaguely reminded of the nervous system of a human – the way that various nerves were connected to the spinal cord, and those, in turn, enabled human movement, along with small electrical impulses. It seemed that monster cores had a somewhat similar function, except that electricity was replaced with mana. Nothing else seemed particularly remarkable about the monster’s ascension, much to Alice’s disappointment. She had been hoping for some insight about the way that the System’s Perk creation and class seeds worked behind the scenes, but while she was getting some idea how and why some things worked, there were a lot of components to this experiment that she either wasn’t understanding or just wasn’t finding.

Finally, after about an hour since she had started the experiment, the monster core flashed a couple of times, and then it stopped changing. Alice realized that it had finished ascending. It had ‘finalized’ its new form. This, unlike some of the other parts of the monster’s evolution, caught Alice’s interest again.

She had seen multiple things ‘flash’ with mana during her investigation of the System. When she was observing a mana baptism, a successful mana baptism always resulted in several quick flashes of mana. Now, she had seen a monster alpha’s monster core do the exact same thing once it finished evolving into an alpha.

Alice still had no idea what that little flash of mana signified, or what it meant. Which was unfortunate, because Alice was starting to suspect that the little flash of mana she kept seeing was somehow really important to the whole process. It might be the missing puzzle piece that let her link everything together, and she just couldn’t understand what it was or how it worked. And right now, she had no way to investigate it in detail.

She sighed, and spent several more minutes observing the new monster alpha. Sadly, it seemed to be done doing interesting things. After another twenty minutes of observation, the only thing the monster alpha did was flop around and try to wrangle more subordinates. While Alice was getting a better idea how the connection between monster alphas and their subordinates worked, she wasn’t learning much else.

With a sigh, Alice fired a rock through the monster’s brain, killing it instantly. Then, she purified her mana types and checked her System notifications.

Alice grinned.

The first System notification was the entire reason she had started this whole experiment chain.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic : 83 -> 85

Alice had finally reached level 85 in [Explorer of Magic].

Alice had also gotten some levels in her other Classes as well.

You have leveled up!

Survivor : 66 -> 67, Scholar: 62 -> 66, Scientist 66 -> 68, Kinetic Manabinder 51 -> 52

Alice resisted the urge to rub her hands together in glee.

She had two new Perks to choose.