The first few monsters were near the edge of the village. Alice took a moment to look at the village itself, and saw the same signs of hasty departure they had come across in other villages they had found. The houses were all abandoned, as if the inhabitants had left in a hurry, and most of the valuables had been taken away. The fields of crops were left untended, despite the fact that spring was approaching and most [Farmers] with decent levels should have been clearing the fields and preparing for planting by now. Alice looked at the few monsters in front of her, and fell into thought. If she wanted to get a few levels in [Explorer of Magic], she needed to use magic creatively, and to learn more about magic through her experiments. She felt that exterminating the glimmerspren with raw kinetic magic would be very easy – after all, their primary form of attack was to spray enemies with metallic feathers. Kinetic magic would be able to easily manage any form of attack that relied on physical projectiles. The only other advantage glimmerspren had over normal birds was the fact that they were hard to spot. Alice was able to confirm the locations of the creatures with ease. The mana contained inside of the monsters was nowhere near as hard to spot as their physical bodies, so any decent mana-sight Perk could nullify this advantage. But how could she use magic to creatively kill monsters? Alice didn’t just want a few levels in [Kinetic Manabinder] out of this fight, even if [Kinetic Manabinder] was a useful class to train. Alice thought for several seconds, but she wasn’t quite sure what to do. Therefore, Alice started pushing her thoughts in a different direction. She had always wondered how exactly the System actually built Class seeds in people. Since she had no idea where to even start, Alice had constantly pushed it away. But the fact remained that Alice did need to figure it out eventually. Leaving it as a problem for ‘Future Alice’ wasn’t a good long term solution. Creating new Classes was the only way that children would be safe from the personality-bending effects of mana. Alice would have never originally thought that monsters were a good test subject for this. After all, the System never gave monsters any sort of abilities. But nowadays, monsters were both more intelligent, and also sometimes had access to distorted Perks. That probably meant that monsters could, in theory, have class magic seeds, just like humans. biggest differences between magic seeds and class seeds had been the fact that class seeds could devour mana from their surroundings, and then use that mana to grow and improve. … And as it just so happened, monster cores… seemed to do the exact same thing. In the first place, it was a well known fact that monsters that ate enough mana would eventually undergo a massive change in size and power, becoming a monster alpha. It would then lead its lesser brethren on a rampage until it was put down… Kind of like how a class seed absorbed mana from the user’s body and turned it into levels. And how class seeds gave the user a Perk every five levels. Had she been looking at things the wrong way? What if class seeds weren’t based on magic seeds, the way she assumed they were? What if they were some kind of combined monster core/magic seed instead? Or what if class seeds were explicitly based on monster cores? Alice had spent a very long time working under the assumption that class seeds were based on magic seeds. She had assumed that one was derived from the other. Since the System was almost certainly artificial, and Mages had existed even when the System didn’t exist, Alice had just assumed that the creator(s) of the System had taken inspiration from magic seeds. But what if she had gotten the origin completely wrong? Suddenly caught by this new idea, Alice decided that she needed to observe a monster as it evolved into an alpha monster. If she was right… it might end up being rather analogous to the way perk acquisition worked. And that would let Alice confirm her newest idea. She turned back towards the others, who were watching as Alice messed with the monsters, and signaled towards Ethan. “Are you done already? You should have much more left in you than this, even if you want to play it safe…” said Ethan. Alice shook her head. “I have an idea,” she said. “I want to observe a monster as it becomes a monster alpha. I just had a thought. Monsters and people who are levelling up share a lot of characteristics with each other. What if monster cores are the basis for how class seeds work? If that’s the case, by observing a monster core in more detail, I might be able to get a better idea how class seeds themselves work. And if I know how they work…” “You might be able to reverse engineer them and figure out how to make them. And by doing so, solve one of the biggest remaining problems?” said Ethan. He nodded thoughtfully. “All right, I can see what you’re going for. What do you want me to do?” “You must have a completely absurd amount of mana available to you, right? Can you force-feed this monster a lot of mana?” Ethan grinned. “As an Immortal who specializes in magic… I absolutely have a ridiculous amount of mana. It’s not unlimited, but the quantity is quite absurd.” Ethan chuckled. “I’m a bit of an exception to the usual stats of Immortals my age. Most magic-focused Immortals who are around 4 centuries old have much less mana. But that’s a story for another time. You just want me to shove raw mana into the monster’s body, right?” Ethan grabbed the monster Alice had been experimenting on, and then started cramming mana into the creature. Alice saw hundreds of Mariums pour into the creature, helping its monster core grow richer and more dense each second. But hundreds of Mariums weren’t enough to prompt the creature to evolve. Alice’s eyes widened as the number of Mariums Ethan shoved into the creature exceeded one thousand. Then two thousand. At about three thousand Mariums, Alice started to wonder how high Ethan’s magic stat was. Three thousand Mariums was a number that Alice had a hard time wrapping her head around. It just seemed so utterly ridiculous that it was hard to think about. Finally, at four thousand Mariums, Alice saw something start to change. “Stop,” she said, and Ethan snapped off the flow of mana. A few moments later, Alice saw the monster’s core start to glow, like a shining beacon of energy. It also started to expand. It started out around the size of a peanut, and over the course of the next five minutes, it gradually increased in size until it resembled a golf ball. As the minutes passed by, mana started to pour out of the core and into the rest of the monster’s body. Alice also noticed that the type of mana was also changing. Originally, there had been two kinds of magic seed present in the monster’s core. One type of mana had looked pretty similar to kinetic magic, and although it hadn’t been entirely the same. Alice suspected it was the mana that glimmerspren used to launch feathers at people. The other type of mana had been some sort of… optical camouflage based mana type. Alice wasn’t exactly sure how that mana type worked, but it seemed to be based on optical illusions. Now, there was a third type of mana present. It looked kind of like a mixture of organic mana and pure mana, but with another ideas mixed in that Alice just didn’t understand. It wasn’t quite organic mana, but it also wasn’t… not organic mana. It just looked wrong to her. This mixture of mana constantly flooded the monster’s body, swirling around it as it started to interact with the monster’s muscles, bones, and every single organ and piece of flesh it encountered. As more minutes slowly ticked by, Alice noticed that the monster’s body was getting bigger. The monster’s muscles and bones were becoming more defined. Its monster core was growing brighter and brighter. Alice blinked in surprise. Usually, when people got new Perks, their class fractal just got a little bit brighter and more defined. It definitely didn’t look like this. This looked more like a mana baptism than a class fractal… A few moments later, Alice saw something else start to appear in her surroundings. Something that was even more unexpected. It almost seemed like a paired enchantment was forming between the monster Ethan had forced into an evolution and the single nearby glimmerspren. Alice was now completely baffled. It almost seemed like the monster was creating a constant, endless set of links between it and the other glimmerspren in its surroundings. A few moments later, Alice realized what was happening. Monster alphas were known to be able to command their ordinary brethren. Obviously, they needed to have some method of communicating and controlling their kin. That must be what Alice was seeing right now.