Alwin stared wide-eyed at Lapis. She was spying on him! What sort of psychopath listens in on kids using a bathroom? This was absurd! This was madness! This was a violation of his privacy! This paragraph had a lot of exclamation marks!

"Why are you watching me use the toilet?"

"I wasn't. When I built this cafe, I envisioned it as the paradigm of cleanliness and hygiene. The most common cause of an unsanitary kitchen is employees not washing their hands, so I put in little sensors on the tap thingies to track whether they washed their hands. The second most common cause of an unsanitary kitchen is having employees. So I fired them all and replaced them with a bunch of mini-me! Or drones for short. Also, if you find out where I'm going with this let me know because I lost my train of thought."

"We were talking about why you were spying on me!" Alwin shouted. Who knew he could get so upset over something like this? Well, it was a serious issue that warranted such a reaction. Let's hear Lapis' responses.

"Oh right, yeah. It's a prank, little grand student slime boy. I just wanted to say that to freak you out. The sensors are in all the taps and since you got no hands to wash they always go off. I trigger it all the time. Now back to the matter at hand." Lapis turned around and started hovering back and forth, a pair of Spirit Hands—where did those come from—materialized across her back as she paced back and forth. "What were we talking about? I don't remember."

Looks like Alwin had competition for the most oblivious monster. Was that even a contest he wanted to win? Shoving that thought aside, of course, he remembered! Partially! Alwin only remembered the part where she asked him whether he could use that Devolution skill of his, that was the whole reason he went to the bathroom in the first place.

"I—"

"It's okay. Drones, remind me what I was talking about."

A drone flew up to Lapis' side. It was presumably whispering, but all Alwin saw was a tiny floating crystal next to a large floating crystal, with the large floating crystal punctuating the silence with a staccato of, "Yes, uh huh, and go on."

"Alright," said Lapis, "Just for the record, I'm not stupid. I just have a lot of things on my mind. To recap, I need to conduct more experiments using you. I found a way to refine the Refinement technique, and I asked you about that Core Skill of yours. You know, this whole conversation has been really inefficient. So many words, but so little done. Maybe I've been hanging around those Council members way too much."

"Maybe you just talk too much."

"You think so too," Lapis sighed. "I can't help it, it's just me. Truth was I didn't fire my employees, they just got so annoyed about my blabbering that they just left. It sucks. It was tough to run a cafe all by myself and even tougher not having anyone to talk to. At least something good came out of it." Lapis turned to face the drone that was in charge of the Spirit Hands still whisking away at the thick creamy substance—why didn't she just buy a mixer?

If Lapis had a face there would be no doubt that a huge frown was etched onto it. Alwin didn't know what to say, but he did know what to feel. If it wasn't obvious, Alwin felt bad. Really, really, really bad.

"I didn't mean it badly. It's not bad that you talk too much, I was just pointing out the facts. I like the fact that you talk so much. I really enjoy it. It makes me smile listening to you ramble on about... stuff." Alwin put on his widest smile showing off his half black and half white teeth.

"You're a good grand student, slime boy." A Spirit Hand materialized in front of him to pat him on his head before it disappeared into a shimmer of magical particles—Alwin had figured out where those hands were coming from, she was simply Silent Casting.

"I love your talking, but what if whenever you start going on a tangent I say something and you get back on track." That smile of his was so wide, the sides of his lips were starting to crack. Or maybe that was because he just had really dry lips.

"I like it. You're a really nice little grand student of mine. Now let's get back to talking because I think I wasted a lot of time! So... can you devolve yet?"

Alwin gave her a wink before activating his Core Skill, another flash of light consumed the dark and dust-filled lab. When the light subsided, gone was Alwin the Yin-Yang Slime, and in his place was Alwin the Dark Slime. Some might even say he was half the slime he used to be.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

"Awesome! Seems useless for fighting but you'll be the perfect lil guinea pig for my evolution experiments. Here I thought I was going to have to find random first-year recruits, teach them the Refinement technique, evolve them, then go find even more first-year recruits then rinse and repeat. Do you know how much time that'll take? Lucky for me, I have you. Did you know that—"

"Tangent."

"Right, right. Anyway, can you show me your status?"

Name: Alwin

Species: Dark Slime (Tier 1)

Core Skill: Devolution (F)

Species Skills: Dark Tackle (A), Yin-Yang Blast (A)

Skills: Spirit Hands (B), Spirit Barrier (F), Spirit Blast (A), Spirit Scatter Blast (A), Spirit Burst Blast (A), Spirit Feet (F), Refinement (F)

Evolution: 3/100

This was the first time that Alwin had seen his new-old status or was it his old-new status? Either way, this was the first time he had seen it and boy did it look sad. A two-and-a-half-month-old monster that was still at Tier 1? What a loser. Yeah, maybe Alwin had some issues.

"Interesting, even your status regressed. I'm assuming that you've been practicing your skills a whole bunch recently. Let me just"—a drone flew down the stairs and shot an array of lasers at Alwin while circling around him before zipping back up the stairs to whence it came—"two Dark Essence and one Light Essence. Talk about a wrench in the plans."

"Wrench?"

"Did I go into a tangent again? Doesn't seem like it. Anyway, the whole plan was to see what happens when a monster evolves being fueled solely by one element. You, my grand student, are tainted. Oh well. Can you evolve back and show me your status again?"

Another flash of light consumed the room and Alwin the Yin-Yang Slime was back. And of course, Lapis only cared about the changes in his status.

Species: Yin-Yang Slime (Tier 2)

Evolution: 3/5000

Devolution: 0/100

"Interesting. Any chance you could move the 3 from Evolution down to Devolution?" asked Lapis.

"You can do that?"

"I don't know. That's why I asked if there was 'any chance'. So, is there?"

"Guess I'll try to do that."

Alwin stared at the number three on his status. Move down. Move to Devolution. Shift down. Shift down to Devolution. Hello? Paging for Mr. Three, you are currently obstructing the way, could you please move down to Devolution lane? Now either Mr. Three was being a rude butthead who thought it was below him to follow Alwin's request, or that wasn't the proper procedure to do things.

"So, did it work?" asked Lapis.

"Nope. Got any ideas?"

"Did you try asking nicely?"

"That was the very first thing I did!"

"Hmmm. This is a tough cookie to crack. A tough cookie normally means it was left baking in the oven for too long and—"

"Tangent," Alwin interrupted.

"Right, my bad. Have you tried begging?"

Alwin simply stared at Lapis, not even choosing to blink, giving her the blankest stare he could possibly muster. A stare so blank it was as if the lords of this world had erased his face leaving behind nothing but a plain canvas. Now, if only Lapis had a face, he could actually look at instead of the reflective crystalline surface that showed a distorted image of his surroundings and his own face.

Choosing to crack the silence, Alwin said, "No. Give me a second."

Last thing he wanted was to waste any more time on this. Imagine if begging was the solution, but he straight up refused to try it until he was desperate enough for it to even come across his mind in a last-ditch flash of inspiration.

Please Mr. Three standing in the Evolution meter or lane thingy. Please, please, please. Pretty, pretty please. Could you kindly vacate the area and make your way to the Devolution area? I'll do anything for you just please kindly move over.

Nothing happened... again.

"No dice." Alwin shook his head.

"Well of course there's no dice. What am I a board game? Did you try doing this?"

Lapis' Spirit Hands pressed down on the number three that taunted Alwin. A second later the number was jiggling as if it was panicking about the giant finger pressing down on it—if numbers could sweat Alwin's whole status screen would be flooded by now. The finger then dragged the squirming number three down, the number being forced down without a say until finally, the Spirit Hand released it at the Devolution slot. The number three was slingshot back to the Evolution Counter.

Access Denied. Invalid User.

"Now you try," said Lapis.

Alwin summoned his Spirit Hands in his usual fashion—shouting out the name of the skill after shaping it within his core using mana-like clay. Initiating the same actions as Lapis, one of them pressed down number three before it started fidgeting in fear, followed by dragging the poor frightened thing down to Devolution and finally releasing it from Alwin's clutches. The number three and number zero switched places respectively, leaving Alwin with this.

Evolution: 0/5000

Devolution: 3/100

"That worked?" exclaimed Lapis.

"Apparently. I thought you knew it would work when you started touching my things."

"I didn't. I just kept doing stuff until something happened. So now we know what to do."

"Great, so now what?"

"Now, I teach you how to refine specific elemental mana." Her Spirit Hands gave a thumbs up.