By the end of the fall, there was a break in the theoretical lessons with Maximilian. Rachel, his older sister, was on the verge of being fifteen years old and had to leave the manor for her coming-of-age ceremony in the capital. Her family had left with her, so the lessons were postponed.
Traveling to the capital took about two and a half days, while the ceremony and the first magic practice took a day each, so the Vallmonts ultimately returned after a week.
The day after their return, as Alice arrived at the manor by carriage, Rachel was waiting at the reception area for once. She had a smug look on her face, so Alice knew she was content with her magic type.
[https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/563044399261417475/1080379222280896512/Rachel_de_Vallmont.png]
“Good morning, Rachel. Congratulations on becoming an adult. You seem especially pleased today. What kind of magic did you awaken?”
“Hehehe. We match now!”
(Eh? Do we? Don’t tell me she figured out what my magic is!-)
“I got strengthening magic!!”
“Huh? As I told you many times, my element is not exactly strengthening…”
“I know that but, thanks to you, I got interested in biology as I looked it up! I don’t really know what your magic type is, but we produce the same results, so we match!”
(We don’t, though…)
“Well, I am happy for you, Rachel. Strengthening magic is rare and powerful, so it does suit you.”
“Thanks! We will train every time you come here, so be prepared!”
Alice sighed as she heard this. Serena already asked her all the time to train her magic, so the idea of having another person do the same thing was going to be especially tiring for her mana. Well, all things considered, it might not be a bad thing. Thanks to her mana armor, Alice would be protected from being hit and might even be able to recover some mana with the photon style. Also, training magic with Rachel meant that she would not train her sword skills, so it would actually be even less tiring than usual.
“As a friend, I accept the task of brawling with you!”
Another advantage of this was that she would have the chance to fight against the magic that resembled her own the most. In other words, she could train against her nemesis. She would be able to see how effective her mana armor truly was at reducing kinetic energy by taking hits from powered-up muscles, so she was sure to get valuable data that she could then use to strengthen her magic. She might even be able to mimic Rachel’s magic.
“Thank you, Alice, but give me a week to get used to it. I’ll start my lessons with my instructor today."
"Um... Will you train in this outfit? It seems a bit unpractical."
"I'll change, of course. I wanted to show you the dress I wore for my coming-of-age ceremony! Cute, right?"
"C-cute? Yes, you could say it is cute indeed..."
(The dress does look nice, but it's strange to see Rachel in cute clothes...)
"By the way, my instructor said that he hoped to see you.”
“D-do not tell me this instructor of yours is-”
“Yep! It’s Viktor!”
(Dammit. Now he has the time to train someone who lives so far from the capital? I hope I don’t see him too much, since he apparently has some secret plan to make use of me in the future…)
“He should arrive at any time now. Do you want to wait with me?”
“Um… My theoretical lesson will start soon, so I should be going now… See you!”
Alice power walked to the manor and arrived in the classroom. Part of it was because she didn't want to see that old man, but she was also excited about today's lesson. After all, an interesting subject was supposed to be brought up: the difference between the different humanoid species.
Basically, it would be a lesson about evolution. Alice was very happy since she had wanted to learn more about this for months, but Maximilian looked incredibly bored. Frankly, she could understand why. In the first place, what was even the point for a child to know about this before their awakening?
(Too bad for him, but I'm dying to know who the Darwin of this world is!)
As it happened, all the humanoid species had their evolutionary lines split a few hundred thousand years in the past and were about as close to each other as a lion was to a tiger or a grizzly to a polar bear. Or maybe a little closer than those examples.
It went essentially like this: different groups of a common ancestor species lived in slightly different environments with slightly different needs and thus evolved slightly differently generation after generation.
An example of this was a group of skilled warriors that isolated themselves in nature and eliminated most of their predators. After thousands of centuries, by slowing down their metabolism and their development, they managed to optimize both their lifespan and the quality of their mana veins. They aged significantly slower than humans and gave their mana veins all the time needed to develop naturally. As such, this species did not have anything resembling the artificial magical awakenings found in almost all human kingdoms.
This group was known as the elves.
A few centuries ago, they had left their forests and lived nowadays almost like humans. Most of the individuals apparently still avoided the other species, however. It made sense for Alice since, according to what Serena had said before, the elves considered the others to be miscreants because they didn't believe in spirits.
On the contrary, in a harsh and violent environment, another group favored short-term achievements for their survival. Their lifespans were quite short since they matured faster than humans. Their mana veins didn’t have the time to fully develop and their mana pools were mediocre as a result, even compared to human commoners. Instead, they kept the great physical capabilities owned by the common ancestor of all humanoid species, such as strength and speed. If we added their lack of a proper educational system, their magic was truly unreliable. This group was called the beastfolks, or beast men.
Still, their great physical features made beast men only slightly weaker than a human strengthening mage. Also, the sexual dimorphism of this species did not include any difference in these great physical abilities: females were hardly weaker than males.
Incidentally, this common ancestor, called fenrith, did not seem to be a primate like on Earth as this family did not even seem to exist in this world. Well, maybe humans and elves could be called primate-like since they had flat nails, but their ancestors did not look a bit like monkeys or apes.
The reason why fenriths and the other humanoid species that evolved from them looked like Earth’s humans was probably because of convergent evolution. Indeed, even on Earth, unrelated species could develop similar features and aspects. For example, insects, birds, and bats separately got wings through evolution, because of the huge advantage of being able to fly. Another weird example of that was carcinization: several families of species were gradually converging into the shape of a crab even though they were mostly unrelated. Strangely enough, Alice was terrified by that example. Would every species evolve into crabs in several millions of years?
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Anyway, Alice thought it kind of made sense that some intelligent bipedal species manipulating tools would evolve to look more or less human-like in this world. This explained why most aliens in movies and comics looked exactly like humans even though they came from another galaxy. This totally had nothing to do with movie directors, scenarists, and artists being too lazy to come up with convincing designs for extraterrestrial species. Definitely, absolutely nothing to do with it.
In any case, fenriths looked like a wilder version of today’s beast men, with even more animal-looking ears and tails. Moreover, the position of their ears seemed to be halfway between that of humans and beastfolks. Based on most of the specimens that were discovered buried deep in the soil, they also seemed to have one big horn on their forehead, like a unicorn.
(Fenriths are so intimidating... It's a good thing that they went extinct. I would be terrified if I was in front of one.)
Just like beastfolks, fenriths had mediocre mana pools but were very powerful. Through the generations and with the use of tools, beast men obtained a more refined appearance while still sharing a lot of aspects with this ancestor. Elves and humans both lost their tails and most of the original species’ strength, while their ears changed in different ways through these hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Surprisingly enough, even though they were pointy, elves’ ears were not that much longer than humans’.
Also living in a harsh environment, another species branched off: the ogres. They had more beast-like features than humans and elves did but still evolved in a different manner than beastfolks. They had human-like ears, a tail, and were great mages like elves. For the last one, though, the process was different: instead of maturing their mana veins slowly over a long period, they developed those very quickly and yet still managed to have mana pools greater than a human noble’s on average. In return, they relied a lot more on their magic than on their physical strength which had declined with the generations. Also, they kept the fenrith’s horn.
Nobody was certain about where to place the ogres in a phylogenetic tree. Elves were saying that they had to have branched off from humans since they had similar ears. Humans said that they probably branched off from beastfolks since they matured way more quickly than humans and still had a tail. Beastmen said that the fact that they still had a horn meant that they branched off from the common ancestor from the start just like the other species. Basically, they were passing the buck to each other because no one wanted to acknowledge them as a subgroup of their own species. They were usually treated like the demons in most stories Alice knew from her dreams.
Overall, each of these species excelled in their specific environment. Though humans looked quite plain in comparison: they were weaker than beastfolks, rarely lived half the lifespan of the elves, and had smaller mana pools than both ogres and elves.
Still, their different strengths were well balanced, which made them prosper in various places of the world. Some individuals, especially nobles, had a lot more mana than others and could even compete with ogres and elves while still being physically stronger than them. Some humans preferred to rely solely on their strength and refined swordsmanship to complete more elaborate tasks than beastfolks while still living significantly longer. This adaptability explained why humans occupied most of this world’s territories.
Unsurprisingly, a lot of humans and elves considered the beastfolks to be no better than beasts who had barely evolved from the fenrith in a few thousand centuries. The two species didn’t really agree about the origin of ogres but, according to humans, they were even worse than the beastfolks since they looked like chimeras trying to resemble every species.
In truth, even though beastfolks looked like their common ancestor more than humans did, it didn’t mean beast-men evolved any less. Even on Earth, chimpanzees had evolved just as much as humans despite resembling more of their common ancestor than humans did. In fact, they were so close to humans that they shared about 99% of their DNA and were actually closer to humans than gorillas.
(Beastfolks do seem to resemble fenriths more than we humans do, but they have clearly changed. At least physically. That common ancestor seems scary, but now, beastfolks are... cute.)
With their current ears and tail, Alice thought the kids were adorable. Although she was apparently the only one to think so in the room. Unfortunately, she thought, they were not catgirls and catboys. From the ears alone, they looked more like wolves or maybe foxes.
(So… if beastfolks and fenriths are canid-like, is that the case for us humans who descended from fenriths as well? Weird… That doesn’t make me a furry, right? I mean, I don’t have more hair than humans from Earth…)
To everyone in this world, there was nothing particularly wrong or unusual about the fact that they descended from such a group. They had found all the bones and skulls they needed to explain how the humanoid species looked the way they currently did. Although people were still searching for missing links reattaching the ogres to other species.
In the end, since they did not know that a similar-looking species had emerged from a completely different family in another world, everything seemed natural to them. To Alice, however, it was truly bizarre. In this world, dog-like creatures would pretty much be cousins with a common ancestor who might have lived millions of years before fenriths, the common ancestor shared by all humanoid species.
All in all, even though Alice had already heard about the elves thanks to Serena, she still learned a lot about how they came to be like this and about the other humanoid species, which were fewer than she thought. She had expected dwarves to exist, though, so she was a little disappointed.
She was also surprised by how soon the theory of evolution had emerged in this world, although it made sense since the different humanoid species had been sharing most of their discoveries of fossils and the like for millennia. At this point, evolutionism was mostly accepted. In this world, there had been no Darwin. Since several intelligent species were living on this planet, it only made sense for them that they shared a common origin.
Like on Earth, however, there were some creationists who rejected evolution by saying that the gods had created the humans as they were, independently of all the other humanoid species that had come from animals or monsters and were a pale imitation of humans.
Still, while Alice thought these idiots should just be ignored, she was not sure if creationism should be completely ruled out. Even though she might have had more scientific knowledge than anybody in this world.
Her former self did not believe in any god, but Alice kind of did. To begin with, even before awakening memories from her past life, she had been taught all her life that there were several gods in this world. Moreover, if she had those foreign memories, it most likely meant that souls existed somehow. This was a strong hint of the existence of at least one god.
To back up creationism, there was also the strong resemblance between the humans of this world and those from Earth despite not being primates. Convergent evolution was a good explanation, but Alice wasn’t sure it was enough. Besides a handful of differences, like the existence of mana veins and the fact that humans seemed stronger in this world, they were pretty much the exact same. Even the position of their internal organs and their role were identical. If one added into the equation beastfolks, elves, as well as nobility and politics, it was awfully similar to Earth and its culture. It was as if resembling a human was some kind of evolutionary finality, which didn’t quite sound scientifically accurate.
Alice would not be surprised if some god had helped or rather influenced the evolution process over a long time. Like, for instance, they might have gotten rid of many individuals in order to deliberately and artificially select precise physical features so that they would end up with the fenriths after millions of years and then with those four specializations that looked way too much like a certain species on Earth after a few other hundreds of thousands of years. It was not too far-fetched when one looked at wolves being turned into chihuahuas in less than 40,000 years by mere humans through some selective breeding.
(If the gods did select specific traits by erasing those who didn’t match their vision, can they truly be called benevolent?)
This thought was a little scary to Alice. However, if they really did this, that is, deliberately choosing certain features, there was an even more frightening implication. She looked once again at the drawings of those beastfolks with their cute puppy ears and tails as she gulped.
(Are the gods furry enthusiasts?)