After spending the rest of the day with Milo and father, Alice felt refreshed. After a good night’s sleep, she felt ready to think again. Her thoughts, which had started to feel muddled and choked, felt clear again.

Ethan had one of the servants give her an update on the letters and information he had received from nearby towns. Through letters and reports gathered using his faster [Messengers], he had confirmed that the monsters near other towns also showed signs of becoming much stronger and more intelligent than before. Two other towns had also been attacked by intelligent, organized monster swarms. One of the two had successfully driven off the newly upgraded monsters. The other town was still fighting them off. Things were looking good for the humans in that town overall, but the fact that a newly assembled monster swarm was able to force a town to spend hours fighting it off sent alarm bells ringing inside of Alice’s brain.

The second thing that one of the messengers had reported was far more unusual, though.

Alice had been expecting monsters to gain all sorts of problematic abilities after they started using some sort of knockoff version of the System. Monsters gaining intelligence, forming alliances, and getting new Perks seemed entirely reasonable now. Alice wouldn’t have even been surprised if a monster kingdom appeared overnight, or something equally ridiculous. However, what had happened in a nearby town was of a very different nature than that.

One of the [Scouts] from a nearby town had noticed a small horde of monsters in the woods staring at the tree, as if they were studying it.

The [Scout] had felt that the behavior of the monsters was unusual, so he had sat around to watch.

However, as the monsters watched the tree… the tree slowly started to decay and warp. Not as if it were dying, or as if it were being influenced by magic somehow. Instead, according to the [Scout] report, it was more like the tree had been shrinking or fizzling out of existence. The [Scout] hadn’t been able to detect the monsters using any sort of magic on the trees, despite having a Perk specialized in detecting creatures using magic nearby.

Afterwards, with a fizzling sound, the tree had sort of… popped. Almost like it had turned into a grenade, but without any of the intentional construction that went into a grenade.

This tree explosion had sent wood shrapnel flying into the nearby monsters, injuring a few of them and startling the horde away. The horde had then started avoiding other nearby trees. These other nearby trees had also started popping and exploding shortly afterwards.

This just left Alice scratching her head.

Was a monster misusing a Perk somehow, and accidentally causing the trees to explode like giant wooden grenades? Or perhaps the trees had some sort of potential as enchanting materials, and the monsters had somehow caused the trees to blow up?

If monsters were trying to make enchantments, that would be truly dire news. Monsters were dangerous enough without being walking armories – that was usually a strategy humans employed. However, Alice wasn’t sure if that was actually what had happened. After all, enchanting materials exploding sounded a lot like a consumable enchantment – but the [Scout]’s report didn’t mention any source of energy for a consumable enchantment at all. So Alice just wasn’t sure what to make of the report, other than to conclude that things were getting weirder.

Ethan also firmly told her to leave military matters to him, and to only think about what research and information Alice could obtain from those events. Alice was a researcher – she wasn’t supposed to be managing troop allotment and logistics. Which was a statement Alice found oddly comforting. She didn’t need to figure out how to be a [General] or maintain the defenses for Illvaria’s towns and cities. She just needed to research, and let other people figure out the rest.

Alice did have two major things that she wanted to focus on, now that there were even more ripple effects of the collapse of the System.

First, she still needed to develop enchantments to prevent humans from getting sick. This was a very important job that couldn’t be delayed – it was already looking like plenty of people would have their personalities overwritten by mana, and every single hour the enchantments to fix that problem were delayed was another hour more people would get sick.

She decided to hand part of that job to the Mages she and Cecilia were training. The entire point of training them was to make Alice’s job easier, and it was high time she let them start contributing to the current crisis. All five of the Mages had been selected because they were good at enchanting, and right now, Alice’s biggest problem was designing the enchantment she needed. After all, the harvesting operations for the necessary enchanting materials hadn’t really gotten underway yet.

The mages she and Cecilia were enchanting might not be able to actually use Filtration mana yet… but they could do some of the legwork for designing enchantments to use it, even if they couldn’t actually make the product yet.

Thus, the first thing Alice did that morning was find Cecilia let her know what she needed. Cecilia promised she would get her Mages on it.

After that, Alice got to work on her own, new task.

She needed to figure out what made these monsters tick.

Ethan had said that Alice didn’t need to worry about anything regarding troop movements, logistics, or military organization. This made sense, because Alice really didn’t understand anything about organizing or moving an army around.

But, Alice did want to know how and why the monsters in Illvaria had changed. And while she couldn’t simulate System mana yet, Alice had a few ideas for ways to test how monsters reacted to System mana, even if she couldn’t reproduce it herself yet. She didn’t know if her ideas would work, and there was a good chance that her experiments would just fail to create any result at all. But even if Alice wasn’t sure if her experiments would even generate useful observations, she felt that figuring out how monsters changed could provide critical information for Ethan to plan around.

And if Alice could figure out a way to turn the monsters back to normal quickly and efficiently, that would obviously make the ‘monsters evolving’ problem moot again. Alice doubted there was an easy and fast-acting ‘off switch’ for the changes monsters were now experiencing, but it never hurt to check.

So Alice found Illa, and requested a few monstrous test subjects. A few hours later, Alice was sitting in a room with eight caged spidercrabs, none of which showed any signs of being unusual in any way.

Alice quickly dragged them into a room which Illa had prepared for her. By her side, her [Hidden Bodyguard] and a few regular [Guards] were ready in case the monsters went out of control. She also had a bowl of System-enchantments next to her, most of which were clothes that had very mild enchantments on them, such as +1 strength or +1 Dexterity. Alice also had a few pieces of clothing that had regular Perks attached to them. Even though most people didn’t consider these ‘System enchantments,’ since they didn’t actually provide the wearer with any buffs, Alice wasn’t sure if her test subjects would respond to clothes that had Perks inside of them. Even if a Perk that made cloth slightly tougher and more stain-resistant wasn’t very impressive, it might still allow monsters to warp and change, after all.

Then, Alice turned towards her eight test subjects, and started thinking.

There were two things Alice wanted to test.

First, she wanted to see what happened when monsters were exposed to System mana. She just hoped that her substitute forms of ‘System Mana’ would still provide her with useful observations, or Alice would simply have to give up on that part of the experiment.

Second, the report about the mysterious exploding trees had gotten Alice thinking. She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of the incident, but her first guess was that monsters could try to enchant objects now. She could be wildly incorrect in that assumption, but if Alice managed to create more intelligent monsters, she wanted to see if they would try to enchant objects. Thus, Alice had also gotten a big pile of cheap enchanting materials ready, just in case the monsters tried to enchant them.

If monsters had enchantments, that seemed like the kind of information Illvaria needed to know as soon as possible.

After Alice finished running over her plans, she dragged one of the spidercrabs out of its cage using kinetic magic. The spidercrab wildly thrashed and squirmed, trying to escape its chains and eat Alice and the guards. However, the monster was utterly unable to escape, and Alice easily reattached its chains to some of the pegs on the wall.

Alice studied the creature thoughtfully.

This spidercrab didn’t seem any different from the spidercrabs Alice had seen up until now. For all intents and purposes, it just looked like ordinary spidercrab.

So whatever had happened to the monsters of the world, it had either ignored Spidercrabs, or hadn’t hit every single monster in the wild. Alice hoped it was the latter. If only some monster swarms had been changed, it would be a more manageable problem than every single monster breed above a certain power level changing.

After that, Alice started scanning through her memories, looking for the simplest System mana constructs she had ever seen. She wanted to try exposing the spidercrabs to a variety of different system-adjacent mana constructs, to see if it reacted to any of them.

The first one that Alice thought of was the mana filtration fractal that Alice had used to help construct magic seeds. Before Alice started lobbing enchanted items at the spidercrab, it seemed reasonable to do her best approximation of System mana, to get as much data as possible.

Then, Alice started doing her best to rebuild a very, very weak version of the same fractal in front of the spidercrab. Instead of the working model of a mana filtration fractal that Alice had used when creating magic seeds, she tried her best to recreate the proper System version of the fractal.

Of course, Alice failed miserably. She was missing so many different kinds of mana that replicating the System was impossible. But Alice wasn’t trying to create a good rendition of the System’s fractals. She just wanted to see how the spidercrab reacted.

The spidercrab did nothing. It didn’t even seem to see the mana in front of it.

Alice frowned.

She tried creating her own, working version of the System’s mana fractal. This time, the spidercrab reacted by lunging towards Alice’s mana fractal. Alice didn’t fight the spidercrab, and let it consume the mana fractal.

The spidercrab greedily devoured the mana… before it started to swell up like a balloon. The mana inside of the creature’s stomach started to change, and for a brief moment, it faintly resembled the mana fractal Alice had created. However, there were also a huge number of differences.

Meanwhile, the creature’s stomach continued to expand.

The monster started futilely kicking the floor, scrabbling with its spidery legs as the top half of its body grew larger and more distorted… before it stopped.

Instead of a normal spidercrab, the creature in front of Alice now resembled the world’s most messed up balloon.

Alice blinked in surprise.

No matter what she had been expecting, this result was not one that she had been thinking would appear. Alice had no idea how in the world this had happened.

She observed the creature for a few minutes, but didn’t observe any further changes. The creature kept awkwardly thrashing about, and if it weren’t for the violence and hunger in the creature’s eyes Alice might have felt sorry for it.

Eventually, Alice hesitantly put the creature out of its misery, before going to inspect its corpse.

What she found was other unusual.

All monsters had monster cores – it seemed to be the organ they used to interact with and store mana, and was basically required for a monster to keep living. However, the spidercrab’s monster core was… swollen.

Alice frowned.

Maybe… the spidercrab had copied some part of the mana filtration fractal, which changed how the creature absorbed mana… and caused its monster core to be swollen?

Alice wasn’t sure if that was correct or not. The problem was that there was just too much uncertainty in the experiment.

Alice dragged over another spidercrab and repeated the experiment. Thankfully, unlike the time when Alice had experimented with dimensional mana, her results remained fairly consistent this time. The second spidercrab ignored the mishmash of chaotic ‘fake’ System energy Alice created, ate her mana purification system fractal, and then the upper half of its body ballooned as its monster core started to swell.

Alice shrugged, and dragged over another test subject. This time, Alice tried feeding the monster a Perk that made a skirt waterproof and hard to stain.

Then, she tried dumping colored water on the test spidercrab and a normal spidercrab, to see if the test spidercrab became more resilient against being dyed.

She noticed that the test spidercrab seemed somewhat less covered in dye afterwards, although it was subtle.

As Alice was dumping buckets of dye on monsters, Immortal Ethan entered the room. He glanced at her test subjects, which were now both rather unfortunate shades of orange, and tried not to laugh.

“One of the [Guards] said you were testing things on monsters,” said Ethan. “You should have informed me before you started testing, instead of simply requesting testing materials from Illa. Monsters are unpredictable right now, so it’s dangerous to experiment on them unsupervised.”

Alice blinked, and started to feel a little bad. It was true that the monsters were very unpredictable right now. Ethan made a reasonable point.

“My apologies. I was just thinking about how to help,” said Alice.

Ethan nodded, acknowledging Alice’s good intentions, as well as her apology. Then, he turned towards the spidercrabs. “What have you learned so far?”

“I… THINK that monsters now adopt characteristics from whatever mana they come in contact with,” said Alice. “I can’t think about why that would be the case, but it seems to be true.”

“Is that so?” said Ethan. “I don’t recall monsters ever displaying this kind of adaptability before.”

Alice nodded. “Neither do I. It could just be spidercrabs, or a fluke, or… something. Ideally, I would test it on a few different monster species, and I would also test it with a lot of different Perks, System abilities, and actual System mana to see what changes and narrow things down a bit. But I’m rather short on real System mana these days, and testing supplies and subjects,” said Alice with a sigh. For a moment, she was reminded of her early days in this world, where she was forced to put together every component of her experiments on her own, and substitute more expensive pieces of equipment with Perks.

“What do you have left to test with the spidercrabs?”

“Just system enchantments,” she said.

Ethan eyed the small pile of minor rings Alice had assembled in the corner of the room, before he nodded.

Alice threw a ring of +1 strength at another spidercrab.

The spidercrab didn’t react to the enchanted ring at first. It was as if it couldn’t see the System mana at all. It simply continued to thrash and try to escape.

Very curious.

Alice recalled that, during the fight where Illa and Allira had led a large group of people to fight against the vinebears all those months ago, after the expedition, the vinebears had, at one point, tried to eat Allira’s illusion of a town. However, in day to day life, monsters acted as if they didn’t see the System at all. After the attack on Cyra two days ago, Alice had assumed that monsters were now able to see the System’s mana 24/7. The previous spidercrab test subject had eaten the water and stainproof skirt easily enough. However, the spidercrab was now acting as if it couldn’t see the System mana in the ring front of it.

Alice didn’t understand why monster behavior seemed so inconsistent right now. There must be some kind of rule that Alice wasn’t understanding, but she wasn’t sure what it was yet.

She shook her head, and focused on watching the spidercrab. It continued to ignore the system enchanted ring in front of it.

Alice frowned. Then, she picked up the ring using kinetic magic, and rammed it down the spidercrab’s throat.

The creature shrieked in agony as Alice accidentally shoved the ring a bit too hard into its throat, and ripped a few muscles. Luckily, she didn’t accidentally kill the creature. The spidercrab tried to screech at her, but with its throat messed up, the spidercrab sounded more like it was gargling than screeching.

Alice didn’t give up, and continued trying to shove the ring down the creature’s throat.

After a few minutes of wrangling with the spidercrab, Alice finally managed to get the ring into the creature’s digestive tract.

The monster continued lunging towards Alice for a few moments, before it stopped. Then, it sat down, almost as if it needed to think for a while.

Inside of the creature’s body, Alice could see mana start to squirm and change. The mana inside of the monster’s body started to warp, almost as if it were trying to replicate the mana of the ring Alice had just stuffed inside of its body.

Alice brightened up, expecting that she would soon see a monster with slightly higher physical strength than normal.

However, the mana inside of the creature’s body seemed slightly off. It started twitching and squirming, and the joints and muscles in its spidery limbs started to swell. The creature started thrashing and screeching at Alice for several more moments, before it collapsed to the floor.

Alice watched the spidercrab with great curiosity. The creature didn’t seem to be ‘improving’ quite as directly as Alice had assumed it would. After seeing the monster swarm that had attacked Cyra, Alice had somewhat expected the monster to just… improve instantly, without any sort of problems or consequences. As much as Alice found that idea strange, since she knew just have intricate and precise the upgrades the System gave to humans needed to be, it was also abundantly clear that monsters were playing off of a different set of rules than before.

However, even though monsters were clearly changing based on what types of mana they countered, it didn’t seem quite as direct as ‘instantly upgrade based on new mana types,’ which was something of a relief.

However, Alice while Alice was glad to see that the spidercrab’s ‘limb upgrade’ didn’t go smoothly, she was also very confused.

What had caused this change in monsters?

Why did some monster upgrades seem to work while some failed? The spidercrab that had eaten a stain resistant skirt was now resistant to being dyed different colors. Why did the spidercrab Alice fed a strength ring instead have its limbs swollen and contorted by her experiment?

While on the walls of Cyra, Alice had originally assumed that perhaps the System had mistakenly let monsters start using the same interface as humans did, but that obviously wasn’t the case. If it were true, Alice would have instead expected some of the monsters to slowly upgrade themselves as she used them as test subjects. However, the only time monsters had changed during her experiments was when she fed them strange mana constructs.

However, two days ago monsters did not have any known ability to upgrade themselves by eating strange mana constructs.

Alice sighed, and rubbed her temples. She tried tossing the pile of enchanted materials at the spidercrabs, to see if they did anything with them, and a few of her surviving test subjects walked over to them and started trying to gnaw at them. However, after a few seconds of trying and failing to eat metal bars that remembered thermal mana instructions, the spidercrabs lost interest and went back to trying to eat her. Nothing else happened.

Alice sighed.

She felt like she had learned something, at least, but she was also left even more confused about what had changed with monsters, and why.