The twitching, shivering mass of stone looked at them, and Alice shivered as a strange sense of disquiet settled in the pit of her stomach. It was like no living thing she had ever seen before. The bits of chaotic rainbow mana it emanated were unsettling. It looked like someone had tried and failed to create some sort of… half-baked System mana. However, dozens of parts were missing, and the structure was completely wrong. If Alice compared it to a painting, it was as if someone had heard about the Mona Lisa, and then, without ever seeing the painting, had tried to replicate it using a completely different color palette. Then, halfway through the painting process, they had accidentally dumped several buckets of paint onto the canvas, decided it looked better that way, and called it a day. The strange statue was both familiar and unfamiliar in a deeply unsettling way. However, there was a strange beauty to it, hiding underneath the nightmarish, twisted surface of the strange System mana. Alice was reminded of her own first attempts at creating System mana. Her current attempts to replicate the System were also bizarre, twisted mockeries of the original System - even after all this time, she hadn’t figured out how to perfectly replicate the System, even if she was able to ‘replace’ most of it with semi-effective solutions. Alice saw a pair of rainbow chunks of mana snap around their group, isolating the [Mercenaries] from the rest of the group. Then, Allira and Ethan glared at the statue, as if it owed them money and refused to return it. “What the hell is this?” asked Allira, finally breaking Alice out of her stupor. “This… I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Allira’s eyes were locked on the twitching, writhing mass of stone. Even though Allira couldn’t see mana as far as Alice knew, the woman still seemed disturbed by the bizarre image. “It looks like a cult,” said Ethan, softly. “They’re very rare, since the church of the System is dominant on the southern continent and most of the central continent. Even those that spurn the Church of the System usually turn to the Church of Mana instead. However, occasionally, a few people stop worshipping either the System or mana, and worship something… else. Usually an exceptionally powerful monster. I’ve heard it’s particularly common in societies that get isolated for long periods of time but manage to survive - though there are only a few cases that I know of. Most ‘cults’ appeared before the colonization of the southern continent, and disappeared on their own. Not much future in worshipping a monster, after all.” Ethan grimaced. “I have no idea why a ‘cult’ would appear in the Society, though. As far as I know, they don’t worship anything. They just want power and don’t care how they get it.” “What are the people here even worshipping?” asked Jonathan, as he also gazed at the twisted, messy chunks of mana and stone, as well as the half-dead worshippers. “It looks almost like they offered their own bodies to their ‘god’ as sustenance or something. Are you sure this stone thing isn’t a monster? Or a manaborn or something?” Alice shook her head. “The stone looks like it was carved,” said Alice. “I think this is sort of like a manaborn, but not quite the same. It seems like it was artificially made.” Alice took a single, hesitant step forward, and squinted at the statue. “I think the Society was trying to recreate the System, but in a completely different way from what I’ve been trying.” At first, her voice was unsteady. However, the more she spoke, the more confident Alice became. “That’s…” Cecilia’s eyes widened, as she looked at the space in front of them. “Did they try what I think they tried? That’s… insane. But also kind of brilliant.” Alice suddenly understood why this room smelled so much like human waste. These people couldn’t even walk to the bathroom on their own anymore. At the same time, she resisted the urge to throw up. What had been done to this woman was… revolting. It must have hurt the woman a lot when it was happening - Alice doubted the Society would have bothered with something like Anesthesia. Now, the woman was essentially locked out of controlling her own body. The idea of being even semi-conscious while her body moved around without her consent, or failed to move when she wanted it to, was horrifying for Alice. The most horrible modification was the woman’s jaws and throat. Various parts of her throat, tongue, and jawbone had been modified as if they were mechanical hinges. Without any sort of input on the woman’s part, her voice would keep repeating the same ‘prayer’ over and over again. Alice shuddered. No wonder everyone’s ‘prayers’ sounded like mumbled, delirious nonsense. The people here didn’t have any control over what they were saying - so the words came out slurred and incomprehensible. Combined with their half-delirious state, Alice suspected that these people were drugged. She wasn’t entirely sure whether this would actually create beliefs that warped reality - after all, her understanding of how reality and beliefs interacted with each other still had some missing spots. However, she could see what the Society had been trying to do here - and it was disgusting. It also explained why so many worshipers were dead. Alice was honestly shocked that so many people were even alive, since their mouth and tongue were entirely out of their control. How did these people eat, or sleep? Did the Society help them stay alive, or did these people just get tossed in here, to contribute their ‘worship’ until they died? Alice took a closer look at the woman’s brain, to see if she could identify any obvious signs of being drugged - and then recoiled. This woman’s brain was also messed up. Alice didn’t understand exactly how the human brain worked - sadly, back on Earth, there were still a lot of smaller details regarding the human brain that had yet to be explored in full detail. However, she could tell that the woman’s brain was somehow altered. It was also clear that the Society had no damn clue how the human brain worked. Their understanding was about as good as the humans back on Earth - nowhere near enough to properly modify someone’s brain safely. The Society hadn’t cared. They had taken a trial and error approach to the whole thing, by using magic to rip out chunks of the woman’s brain and then tried to keep her alive using organic magic. Then, they had used some kind of psychedelic drug to keep the woman in a state of near-complete delirium. Alice wasn’t even sure how much there was left to save here. After seeing the wreckage of the woman’s formerly perfectly functional body, Alice felt hot bile rise up in her throat. Finally, Alice leaned over and heaved, until there was nothing left in her stomach. A moment later, Ethan gently nudged Alice aside, and took his own look at the woman’s body. Meanwhile, Cecilia gently rubbed Alice’s back as she tried to stop the roiling in her stomach. A moment later, Ethan’s face darkened. “Even for me, this is pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do here. We’ll still try, but…” he shook his head. Alice nodded, while Allira started humming. A few shadows started gently picking up all of the other people, before they started to transport them out of the room. Meanwhile, Alice finally got her stomach back under control, and glared at the vile room. Based on her understanding of how beliefs and mana interacted with each other, this shouldn’t have been enough to animate the statue in the center of the room. The Society would have still somehow needed to establish a firm idea that the statue in the center of the room was both alive, and the System. Currently, she didn’t see any way for them to have accomplished that. There didn’t seem to be any direct link between the people’s beliefs and the statue. What was the missing link here? Alice stepped closer to the giant statue. “Ethan?” she asked. “If I try to investigate that statue, can you protect me if something goes wrong and it tries to kill me?” Ethan squinted at the statue. “Hmm… I have to admit, I’m not sure,” he said. “I’d like to say yes, but I’ve never seen anything quite before. I could probably keep you safe if something went wrong - but I’m not going to risk your safety on a ‘probably’ unless we have no other choice. That thing is weird, and I don’t know what it can do.” Alice winced. That was… reasonable. She was asking Ethan if he could keep her safe from something he had never seen before, with totally unknown abilities. The situation was as unpredictable as it could possibly get. She hesitated. The statue might be able to give her more information - but she also didn’t want to get killed by it. Ethan, seeing her hesitate, sighed. “I’ll go up to it,” said Ethan. “I’m mostly confident that I’ll be fine if I try to interact with the statue - I’m just not sure if I could pull you out if it moved fast enough and it targeted you. You’re much less resilient against assassination attempts or sudden, dangerous attacks than the rest of us. If I can get a better handle on its abilities and decide it’s not dangerous, you can take a look then. I know you won’t get anywhere near as much information as if you used your own Perks to investigate it while it’s still alive - but if you die, we won’t get any data at all.” Alice sighed, but nodded. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was probably the best one she would get. Without the protection of an Immortal, she really didn’t want to mess with the statue too much. It hadn’t reacted to their attempts to save people so far - but it was impossible to say what would set it off.