Vincent pulled out a pair of glasses from his lab coat’s breast pocket and put them on. He muttered some unintelligible words and the frames turned hot pink and while anxious, John couldn’t help but admit that it looked pretty funny.

The mad scientist held his hand out toward John and the bejeweled sphere seemed to synchronize with the glasses as it began to glow pink as well. Slowly the sphere began floating to John who was closing his eyes and looked like he was bracing himself for death. Then John felt a warm tingly feeling from his head incrementally move down to his feet. Squinting his eyes open he saw that the crystals attached to the sphere were covering him in a similar pink light.

INITIAL SCANNING. COMPLETE.

The sphere let out a confirmation and for a moment Vincent looked stunned. He scratched his singed beard with a confused expression and then relaxed his shoulders.

“Hmm, it appears to have worked and you seem no worse off than when you walked in here” Vincent pondered.

“What the hell! You look surprised that it didn’t blow up in my face”

“They usually do,” Vincent said with a nonchalant shrug. “Anyways I should be the one asking you what the hell. Your anatomy is VERY strange John.”

He fiddled with his pink glasses for a moment before continuing “It appears you have the physiology of a Spirit Beast, or a monster as some refer to them. Your body is not one that was naturally created like most animals or people, but mana that has formed around your spirit much like a spirit beast”.

He sighed as he realized the two listening had no idea what he was talking about. “I’ll explain clearly. When an animal dies their spirit will occasionally not traverse through the veil between this plane of existence and wherever spirits go after it's vessel, our bodies, perish. When that happens, the spirit enters a dormant state where it is temporarily like a blank slate. During this status, it naturally absorbs ambient energy and is drawn to strong sources of it. It uses the spiritual energy to sort of... grow a body in accordance with the soul's implicit memory of its vessel. That is why in areas of low natural spiritual energy like Aerlorhn forest, spirit beasts are mainly found in dungeons where there's a higher concentration of energy. Areas with high concentration allow for spontaneous manifestation of spirit beast given enough time.

Now this is something that has never been recorded happening to a human or any of the variant humans as our innate ego, the part of our mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious, is too strong to allow the status period to happen and when the spirit gains awareness, higher forces ensure that it is drawn through the veil to who knows where. In other words, the fact that you are standing here in front of me, with a body made of spiritual energy, means something is seriously wrong on either a cosmological or even a theological scale... You John should not exist and the fact that you do, is probably the mistake of the universal concepts or that of a god themselves”

Vincent took in a deep breath, clearly winded from his explanation. The three of them stood there, feeling the weight of the moment that seemed to drag on, until Arther let out a chuckle.

“You mean to say, that I found what you think is a god-level error breaking the fundamentals of this universe in a tree while on a mere low level dungeon raid! What luck, this is going to be so. Much. FUN!” Arthur gleefully claimed a grin spead across his face.

“So tell me Vince, if he's not a human or variant human.... some type of Spirit Man? What exactly can he do” Arthur said, looking at John like a Golden Retriever who just found his new favorite chew toy.

“Well, assuming that it works the same, he would stronger the same way spirit beasts do. Battle. People and living animals simply meditate and absorb the ambient atmospheric spirit energy to consolidate their mystic core and gain power. Spirit beasts however have two options. The easiest is killing other spirit beasts. Their body, even if as solid as you or I, is still just congealed energy. When they kill a separate spirit beast, the energy that was collected by the foe's soul flows into them, albeit at a large reduction of energy. While effective, it still takes an absurd amount of battles to raise a whole level... especially higher up in the ranks where the caps between the stages of Spiritual Power are like Heaven and Earth. This is why it is rare to see extremely powerful spirit beasts outside of areas with highly concentrated ambient spirit energy or dungeon cores.

Also on rare occasions a spirit beast will receive a form of enlightenment in battle. Like I explained before, the ego separates and mediates the conscious thought and unconscious mind. Research has shown that magic is manipulated and controlled by said unconscious mind. After a crazy amount of time spent visualizing, repetition, and meditation, us researchers and you warriors are able to influence our unconscious mind into performing magic. When in a battle frenzy, some spirit beasts have been observed to unconsciously change their physiques or tap into powers their conscious mind previously couldn’t access. This really isn’t my field so I can’t speak much more on the subject. Your red haired party member is more well versed in the topic.” Vincent concluded.

Arthur asked with a grin “So you're telling me, if we feed our weak human shaped monster here a bunch of other weak monsters on the brink of death he’ll get crazy powerful?”

Vincent shook his head “this has been tried before in lab settings. Ways to quickly and artificially produce extremely strong spirit beasts, but it always ends in failure. There are a few theories as to why, but the prevailing theory is that the unconscious mind has some inhibitor in it that doesn’t just willy nilly except the released energy from a spirit beast corpse if not directly responsible for it’s death. Again. This is REALLY not my field of study. I'm a machinist! Not a spirit beast researcher and definitely not the local doctor.”

John looked at Arther, he and his group of adventurers were the closest thing John had to friends in this world, and asked him “What now”.

Arther smiled “Of course we are meeting the party up at the pub then getting wasted”.

“Actually Arther, John should get some proper test done. He should have the ability to perfectly heal by absorbing spirit energy, imaging the amount of good researching that ability could do. John why dont y-"

Arther cut Vincent off and turned to John smiling. “Tonight we will drink, and tomorrow we're gonna get your ass into a dungeon and see what happens.”