Author’s Corner: Hey everyone! Glad to see people liked the last chapter so much! This one is going to be a bit of a montage again, because there’s not a lot for them to do before leaving. Enjoy!

After walking around town for a bit more, we decided to stop at a restaurant and get ourselves a bite to eat. By the time we got back, Celeste was still wholly absorbed in watching rapidly flashing screens of information. However, it was a bit strange. Rather than her Deus Ex body absorbing the information, she was letting the AI mind transmit it to the companion bracelets. That way, she didn’t have to slow down and let her aura adapt first.

Since we had some time, Sharon asked me to go ahead and study her aura, though she was a bit shy about it. After all, this was pretty much the most intimate you could be with someone and still have clothes on. It’s just, it was the same kind of intimacy you’d have with a doctor. Still, I studied her aura for a while and added it to my collection.

Next, I summoned Yo out from my grove, who latched onto me happily. Sharon simply giggled when she saw that, and let me study Yo’s aura as well. Since Yo does not have an acidic property like the plant slimes I had originally studied, I wasn’t as concerned about whether or not I would burn myself by doing this.

Naturally, after I got Yo’s aura, I turned myself into a slime person, which was a very strange experience. Slimes don’t really have eyes, so I could see everything around me at the same time. It was fairly disorienting to try to choose a direction to ‘face’ like this. Also, they ‘hear’ with their entire body as well, so sounds were slightly distorted from what I was used to. However, it was still a fairly fun form, and I was able to alter my body fairly easy by concentrating on the form I wanted to take.

Strangely, when Yo embraced me in my slime form, her own body felt much more solid than usual. Likely there was some sort of membrane on the edge of our skins to prevent ourselves from accidentally falling into each other. When I was done with that, I transformed into a wood elf and sent Yo back into my grove.

Since Celeste was likely going to be doing this for quite a while, I pulled Yang out of my grove and asked her to stay with the Deus Ex while I logged out. As long as there was still one bracelet that was connected to Celeste in NeoLife, she should be able to continue her work. After logging out, I again checked on the world news again, hoping that there would be something by now. It was now March 3rd in the real world, and it had been just over a day and a half since the Lunar Titan emerged.

Currently, there were two major opinions in regards to how to proceed. Information regarding NeoLife being the future has already been publicized, and people have been studying anything they can within the game’s history to help make their decisions. The first opinion was naturally to leave Earth, and seek refuge on another world. With the FTL drives becoming available, and druids able to slowly terraform a planet, there was no reason why we couldn’t establish a new homeworld.

The second major opinion regarding how we should act was to train a generation of powerful fighters, and defend our home from the monsters spawning on it. The people with this opinion would often say that we should take as much technology as we could from the future, and use it to destroy anything that unnaturally spawns on Earth. Most likely, these camps would end up each doing their respective activities either way, and only the people in the former would take the chance to leave Earth. As for the rest… I could only guess what would happen to them.

In other news, there had been many more monsters spawning all over the world. Famous landmarks would be twisted and made to come alive. Mount Rushmore turned into five giant golems that walked around, destroying anything in their path. The statue of liberty actually walked all the way to Paris, and picked up the Eiffel Tower to use as a giant lance, which I personally found to be quite hilarious.

Thankfully, there had yet to be a large monster rushing into town yet, though that was not likely to last very long. Shadows had been sighted under the water just off the coast, so we were probably due for something bad to happen soon as well. Sea monsters were not my cup of tea…

Once I was done looking stuff up, I took a walk around town to check up on some people. First, and most importantly, was Tessa and her mom. I knew I couldn’t take them with me when I left, because honestly Earth was probably still safer for a while than flying out into space. Though I wasn’t sure how long that would last, I could only hope that they managed to get on a ship and leave before it did.

While I was there, and walking around town, I spread out my Mana Sense to study the auras of all of the humans that walked by me. Normally, I’d need at least ten minutes of focused study to get an aura down, but that only applied to when I was studying a single person. Now, I was studying the auras of dozens of people, albeit more passively. By the time I had left Tessa’s house and made my way back home, I had managed to obtain the auras of both standard humans and psychic humans. Surprisingly, there was only one small part of the aura that made the difference between the two, and when I mimicked that one change on my own aura, I got this message.

New Spell Unlocked!Aspect of the Psychic - Nature Magic - ★★

By studying a psychic race, and copying their aura onto your own, you have unlocked the abilities of your mind. What abilities you manifest initially may be random.

The last part of that message surprised me. I had expected that people chose their psychic abilities when they made their character, or as they level up. And maybe they did, but mine was not a ‘naturally’ gained ability, so maybe I had to play by different rules? I’d have to figure out later what my psychic ability was, but unless it was something bad I would definitely be keeping this part of my aura active whenever I shifted again, like with my bones.

Anyways, I was happy to find out that Tessa was doing okay now, and had not been having any other problems. Her mom even became a druid, thanks to the bracelet I had randomly enchanted for her, though she had only done the very basic training in the game during her spare time. Still, that was enough for her to be able to keep them safe for now.

By the time I got back to NeoLife, a full day had already passed in game, because I had taken my time while walking around. Celeste was…. still absorbing information in front of the TV. Meanwhile, Sharon had taken Yang out to go shopping for clothes, only to later return disappointed for some reason. When I asked her, she just sent me a mild glare and sighed. With a shrug, I sent Yang back into my grove.

The next day, Celeste was still not done, so Sharon and I went to the pet store to check out what they had here. Since we already had more combat pets than we would ever need with Sharon’s grove, we only visited the noncombat store. Once we got inside, Sharon was looking around happily at each and every pet in the store. “Oh my god, they’re so cute~!”

When I asked Sharon her budget, she said she could spend up to one gold on a pet or two, which was over double my own funds. Then again, I had to buy stuff like Celeste’s body and the construction materials. While looking around, her eyes naturally landed on a large kitten with small wings on its back in one of the containers, and she smiled from ear to ear. “Ohh… I want it…”

Looking over, I saw that it was listed as ‘Midnight Tabby’, with a bit of information written below. Apparently, it had low affinities with both dark and light elements, but was only able to use them during the relevant parts of the day. So, it could use some weak light effects during the day, and dark effects at night. As for the effects it could do, it was able to glow, serve as a flashlight, or turn nearly invisible.

Looking at the store owner, I asked rather curiously. “What about when it’s out in space? There aren’t exactly day and night cycles.”

The store owner, a middle aged elf male, simply smiled at me. “Rather than depending on the time of day, it’s more accurate to say that it depends on the relative position of the nearest star, and the distance to it. Out in space, once you exit a system, it will almost always be attuned to darkness.”

I nodded my head at that. It did make sense, after all. Though, Sharon immediately picked up the midnight tabby and bought it for thirty silver. Maybe eventually she would be able to evolve it, but otherwise it’d still be a cute little kitten for her to play with. “I’ll name you… Jasmine~!” After saying such, she hugged the kitten against her chest, causing it to meow pitifully at the sudden treatment.

Shaking my head, I chuckled as I looked through the other pets. There were several interesting ones, like a three headed snake, a blurred figure that led me to believe it was some kind of spider and that Celeste was saving me from destroying public property, and finally a two headed puppy like I had found on Hascion. However, this one was more grey, its fur seeming to shine slightly. Its display listed it as a ‘Lesser Orthrus Variant’. The variant listing seemed to be because, unlike the normal lesser orthrus that was attuned to fire and water, this one was attuned to two secondary elements. These elements were void and metal, and caused the price of the pet to drop to ten silver.

Apparently, creatures that were attuned to secondary elements were naturally weaker than ones attuned to primary elements. Whereas a true lesser orthrus could release breaths of fire and water from its two heads, this one did not have a breath weapon. Instead, it was able to ‘feed’ on magic at a very slow rate, or sense ores.

Thinking that it might prove useful, and seeing that Sharon had started looking over this way with a bit of drool hanging out of her mouth while she looked at the puppy, I decided to hand over the ten silver to pay for it. When I did so, and picked up the puppy, she immediately snatched it out of my arms and held it alongside her midnight tabby. “I’ll name you… Chrome.”

“Uh… shouldn’t I be the one to name him?” I asked as I glanced at her, and the two pets in her arms. At least Chrome and Jasmine seemed to get along, playfully pawing each others’ noses and nuzzling their heads against her.

“Nope. Denied. His name is Chrome.” Sharon shook her head cutely and smiled at me. “Now what?”

Since there wasn’t another midnight tabby or lesser orthrus here, we couldn’t exactly get a breeding pair of them to start our own fluffy farm, so we went ahead and left the pet store. “Now… I don’t know. My plan was pretty reliant on Celeste only needing a day at most to finish getting the information she needed.”

My companion bracelet lit up a few moments later with Celeste’s hologram. “Sorry, this is taking longer than I expected. I want to make sure that we have everything we need, including all of the racial languages and information on how to train the starting classes. Then there’s some future ship blueprints and technology that I want to get, in case we need an upgrade later.”

“And how many fictions are you downloading to keep yourself entertained?”

Celeste froze up at that moment, but looked away slightly. “I am sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. Anyways, I already got all of the star charts for the homeworlds, and completed the calculations to date it back three thousand years.”

“So, where’s our first stop?” I looked down to the AI, and Sharon also seemed interested by this.

“Well, there are two homeworlds within close proximity to Earth. The first is Gerin, the elven homeworld, while the other is the halfling world Raxicoral. They’re both about thirty five parsecs from earth, but in opposite directions.”

I thought about it for a moment, but the decision was pretty easy. “Let’s head to Gerin. First of all, I am not even confident in being able to pronounce the halfling’s world, and second we already have the ability to blend in with elves. Though, the fact that there are two races that close is a bit surprising.”

“Well, by now they have drifted a bit further from Earth, but back then they were pretty close. I’ve already plotted the location of Earth in this time, if you want to take a look at it?”

This time, it was Sharon that answered. “We’d better not… That’d take quite a bit of time, and we’d be risking our only ship, right? Let’s just send the information to people back home, so that they can check it out and use what they find to help make their decision.”

I didn’t doubt that there were people already looking for Earth’s location in NeoLife for that very reason, but many of them don’t have the advantage of a robot that is able to quickly plot it out. It’d likely take them a few weeks before they ran all of the necessary calculations and found it. “Alright. We can send that off with the portable Seeds before we leave. Speaking of, Celeste?”

“Right, I’ve already assigned three of my worker drones to the construction project. I’ve got a basic design planned out, and once it’s complete you can try it out. It’ll take three days for the clone body to be prepared, but after it is you should be able to activate it. The principal behind the technology is the same as your Soul Arts, so that made the job easier.”

I nodded my head, thinking that was pretty good. “So, we’ve got three days after the prototype is complete before they can be tested. How long until the ship is done?”

“I’ve already assembled most of the pieces with a synthesizer in your grove. Now I just have to put them all together. If you go into your grove and move everything into a void area, it’ll make the job go by much faster. However, it’ll still take nearly a week to construct. I’d suggest both of you focus on your cultivation training until then.”

Looking over to Sharon, I gave a slight smile. “Well, at least we have a timetable now.”

Sharon nodded, looking down to the two fluff balls still in her arms. “Let’s make sure we have everything we need to feed these two, and then we can start training.”

“Ah! Falenel!” Celeste suddenly called out from my wrist. “Yang said that it looks like Yo just got her class.”

“Uhm… what did she get..?” Yo hadn’t been trained yet, so it was weird for her to unlock a class by herself.

“The class she got is a unique class only available to those with a slime’s abilities, Morphic Warrior. Give me a moment to look up information about them…” Celeste went quite while the two of us waited. “Alright, a Morphic Warrior is a Fighter advanced class, and its special ability is allowing someone to go relatively unarmed. Instead, they are able to turn their bodies into weapons and armor, much like the slime’s racial trait. However, they also gain a measure of proficiency in the items they turn into, because they absorb the knowledge on how to use them from the item itself.”

“So… this basically does nothing for Yo except make her able to get the proficiencies more easily?”

“Basically, yeah. You’ll need to get a companion swarm for Yo before I can read her actual information.”

“A what now?” Again, it seemed it was Sharon’s turn to raise the question on everyone’s minds.

“A slime’s body rarely stays fully solid for long periods of time, so they can’t wear bracelets like most races. Instead, they get a nanite swarm programmed with the same effect as a companion bracelet injected into them.”

“That… sounds expensive.” I grimaced as I heard the description.

“It is, yeah… one gold coin.”

Yo didn’t really need that, right? I mean, she can just read off her information to Yang or myself, or even Sharon. “Uhm… maybe later. I take it she got this advanced class by…”

“Yeah… she was eating some of Yang’s weapon and armor that she made from the diamondback skeletons.” I gave a low sigh when I heard Celeste say that, and couldn’t help shaking my head.

Author’s Basement: Hey guys! Comment below what kind of psychic power you think John(and Sharon if he gives her the same modification later) should get! Remember, try to keep it within reason, we do not want to OP our MC too much!