“Are you sure?” I asked, frowning at the monster.

“Has Master not noticed?” Carmine gestured around. “The mana here is exceptionally thick.”

“I did, but I just figured that’s because it’s another world. Wait…”

I hadn’t noticed it before. It’d be like noticing the oxygen you were breathing, so who would? This world contained mana, but it didn’t feel foreign at all. Miasma was just mana from another world. In theory, there could be as many different types of miasma as there were worlds. Curses corrupted mana and turned into miasma, but it was more like the invasion of another world.

If that was right, then in this place, we should have been the invaders. In that case, the world should have been like a dungeon to us, and the native mana should have been attacking our bodies. However, there was no incompatibility. It was the same on Earth, but considering I was born there, I hadn’t even considered it. As for the others, they hadn’t mentioned any discomfort either, so I just hadn’t thought about this. Was I wrong about mana, or was there something else at play here?

“It’s very thick here,” Carmine repeated. “As thick as miasma in a dungeon.”

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My eyebrows raised as I watched her looking down at the monster once again. “You’re not saying…”

“I believe this is a native monster of this world. A mana monster.”

Monsters came from dungeons. That was just common knowledge. They were created by the dungeon itself, formed from the condensation of miasma. When they escaped the dungeon, as they did from time to time, they would either weaken and die, or if they were strong and lucky enough, slowly convert to a mana-like body, and then become surface monsters. The conversion weakened them significantly, so surface monsters were actually quite weak.

However, the monster that just attacked us, despite Bernice dispatching it quite easily, was actually pretty powerful. Had it attacked a small village of normal people, it might have had the ability to wipe them out. Just because we were pretty strong didn’t mean that this monster wasn’t an abnormality by itself. However, given the thickness of the mana here, was it possible that this entire place acted just like a dungeon, spontaneously condensing monsters?

If that was the case, it would explain why everyone in the city looked to be cut from a stronger cloth. The standard soldiers seemed to be at the level of elites, and their citizens were at the level of stronger soldiers. Since they were constantly being threatened by the spontaneous creation of monsters, they had to fight to remain alive.

As I was thinking this, there was another howl, and then more howls besides that. It sounded like our gunfire had attracted something. It wasn’t soldiers from the city, but it might be friends of this monster we just killed.

“Come,” I ordered everyone. “We need to find a spot to protect ourselves. I need some time to test out a few theories and think.”