The group woke up to a nice breakfast at the inn. Alice wasn’t entirely sure how the [Innkeeper] had done it, but he had made an omelet out of eggs that tasted faintly spicy, and had nice, crispy meat on the inside that tasted somewhat similar to bacon. It wasn’t as good as some of the meals she had eaten from Ethan’s personal chef, but it reminded her of meals she used to eat on Earth, and that made her happy. Even if it wasn’t the ‘best meal she’d ever had,’ sometimes, the taste of home was superior to high-quality cuisine. “Do you like it?” asked the [Innkeeper], with the help of Ethan’s translations. “It was quite an odd mix of ingredients, but {Taste of Home} insisted it was the right meal for you. I’ve never tried cooking meat this way before.” “It was lovely,” said Alice, giving the [Innkeeper] a thankful grin. The rest of breakfast passed quickly, and the group prepared to depart from the area. When they stepped out of the inn, they were greeted by a pair of elderly villagers. One of them was an older man who looked to be in his sixties, and had a gnarled back and hands. His body resembled the trunk of an old tree that had weathered many storms, but had never broken under their weight. The other was an elderly woman, who had a straight back and bright, clear eyes. Alice faintly remembered healing both of them yesterday, but hadn’t paid very much attention to them. There had just been too many people to treat yesterday. Alice stared at the two elderly people awkwardly. They hadn’t spoken yet, but Alice was still confused. Finally, after examining her, the elderly man smiled. He pushed a basket covered with a lovely red cloth into her hands. It was warm. Alice gently unwrapped the basket, and found a few loaves of freshly baked bread. “Thank you for help with village, Immortal apprentice,” said the man in broken Illvarian. “Helped lots people. Good person. I make tasty bread. Try it!” Ethan raised a hand first, and then his eyes flashed rainbow as he looked at the bread. He nodded, and lowered his hand. “It’s safe. You can eat it if you want,” he said. Alice pulled out one of the loaves of bread, and took a hesitant bite, before she nodded in approval. It wasn’t as good as Immortal Jonathan’s bread, but it still tasted nice. The insides were warm and soft, and the outside was crusty and tasted faintly of butter and some sort of herb. Alice had never had it before, but it tasted decent. “Thank you, elder,” said Alice. The man clearly struggled with Illvarian, but Alice hoped he at least understood her words. The first thing she tried was simply placing the monsters into an artificial no-mana zone. Alice wasn’t entirely sure what she expected to happen, but she was genuinely curious. She knew that messing with the ‘strings’ connecting these monsters to the swamp would make them vulnerable to death… but normal monsters would just flat-out suffocate to death if they were cut off from mana entirely. What happened if these manaborn monsters were placed in similar conditions? As it turned out, the answer was… interesting. At first, the monster didn’t react at all, leading Alice to start feeling rather disappointed. She had expected some sort of reaction, and she had not gotten one. She supposed it wasn’t that shocking – during the fight, the monsters hadn’t instantly died when she cut them off from the surrounding mana. But the monsters just seemed to be doing the same things they had done before, even after a solid five minutes. It wasn’t until nearly ten minutes that Alice started to notice the monsters changing. Their movements started to become… jerky, like a set of rusty gears. The monster was still reacting normally – snarling at her, trying to escape from its cage, and otherwise letting out menacing hisses and shrieks from time to time. However, its movements were less fluid and animated than before. It was like a video game that was lagging horribly – it would take an action, then slow down for several seconds before jerking back into motion. Nothing it did seemed coordinated anymore. Finally, after twenty minutes, the monster simply flopped over and stopped responding to its surroundings at all. It was like a puppet with no puppeteer. Alice hesitantly started poking it with a long stick, to see if the monster was trying to fake its unresponsiveness as some kind of trick. It was not. The manaborn monster remained as motionless as a corpse. Alice waited for ten more minutes, to see if anything changed, but the monster remained as stiff as a log. Finally, Alice tried releasing the anti-mana barrier. The monster didn’t return to regular function immediately. Instead, it started jerking around, almost like a doll rusty from disuse. For a few minutes, the monster almost seemed to be… confused. About five minutes later, the monster started to jerk around again. It snarled at her, hissed at her, and tried to escape the cage. However, Alice noticed that the monster’s movements hadn’t recovered, even though the area was full of mana again. Its limbs dragged in awkward and unexpected ways when it tried to move. It was like a broken wind up doll. Alice surmised that the time it had spent in a near-comatose state probably had left some kind of permanent damage behind. Perhaps its nerves weren’t working perfectly anymore, or perhaps the monster core had stopped pumping mana around its body as needed. Either way, the monster had minor, seemingly permanent problems now. Equally interesting was the fact that the monster was still alive, despite spending nearly half an hour in a manaless zone. Alice knew for a fact that monsters typically died if they were cut off from mana for long enough, and half an hour was enough to wipe out almost every monster on the planet. It was almost the same as suffocation for a human – monsters needed mana to live. But for some reason, even though they were born from mana, manaborn creatures were actually less reliant on mana to survive. This struck Alice as incredibly unusual, although she wasn’t quite sure what that meant yet, if it meant anything at all. After that, Alice had a lovely idea, for a much more interesting test. Instead of creating a zone with no mana at all, Alice tried doing something a bit more complicated. The first thing she did was to create a thin layer of anti-mana shielding around an area where she and a monster were located. This meant that within the room, there was a small, bubble-shaped area that was perfectly clear of mana. Then, Alice almost immediately began filling up that bubble with ‘pure mana’ from her own magic seed, while maintaining a thin layer of separation between the inside and outside of the bubble. Alice wasn’t quite sure if this would work at all… but she was very curious to know what happened if she isolated the monster from the rest of the world’s mana, but didn’t cut off its supply of mana entirely. The results were… interesting. The monster started to adopt similar problems to before. Its limbs grew clumsy and unresponsive, and it eventually collapsed… but its collapse wasn’t total. The monster was unconscious, but not completely so. It kept reaching out some of its limbs towards Alice, in a hopeless attempt to bite or tear at her flesh. However, its movements were almost wholly uncoordinated. At the same time, Alice started to get an even better idea of how the ‘strings’ of belief connected her and the monster worked. The strings of belief seemed to almost use mana as a sort of medium to exist… but what Alice considered ‘threads’ were more like a web than anything else. They connected the monster to the rest of the world, and simultaneously, connected the monster to the swamp. The swamp, in turn, was connected to people’s beliefs about the swamp. Since the swamp acted as a sort of coordinator for the monster’s actions, without it, the manaborn monster didn’t have the information necessary to fulfill its role. Then, Alice started to wonder something. Was the monster only moving the same way it had in the swamps because of her beliefs about how it moved and acted? Alice’s threads of ‘belief’ were clearly tied to the monster somehow, so it was obviously interacting with her beliefs in some way, shape, or form. What would happen if Alice left the bubble, and then someone with a completely different set of beliefs about how the monsters would act stepped into the bubble instead? Would that change the way the monster worked? And if it worked, how far could she take those beliefs? What if she believed that the monster would grand anyone who ate its flesh total immortality and godhood? What if she believed that the monster was capable of destroying the world in seconds? Alice kind of doubted that either of those beliefs would actually work. There was probably some sort of mana requirement for what kinds of beliefs could be manifested, and how they interacted with reality. But Alice also found the possibilities both fascinating and horrifying. She had no idea how some beliefs would interact with reality, but she suspected there were dozens of ways to end the world if she tried to ‘cleverly’ manipulate the interaction between beliefs and reality. At the same time, Alice needed to a better idea how the interaction worked in the first place, so that she knew what to guard against and how to fix everything. Alice got an idea. She left the room, and walked around until she found Cecilia. “Cecilia!” She yelled. “I want to show you an interesting experiment! I managed to reprogram the manaborn monster a bit!” “Reprogram?” asked Ceclia, blinking in surprise. “What does that mean? I don’t know that word.”