...What is that girl doing? I might not know what's she's saying, but it's been hours. I know I wanted to wait and see which person would be the one I chose, but watching someone talk non-stop is a bit too much.

Well, it doesn't matter too much. The kneeling guy having his ear talked off will be the perfect candidate for me to jump into since he looks pretty much defeated at this point.

But, the first thing I need to do is to trap the two girls so that they don't interfere with the body snatching.

Now then what to use? A simple trap formation maybe? No, they'll still be able to talk while trapped, and their useless chatter might disturb me. Why not a simply sleeping formation then? I might not get the chance to interrogate the women once I've finished the process, but I should have enough time to search the boy's memory and find either the route out of this place or where the boy came from.

Right, now that that's sorted time to initiate the plan.

Immediately the two women's surroundings lit up as the formation's set about their work, and as expected the armoured girl collapsed like a sack of potatoes, however, the Oriental dressed lass actual managed to jump away from it the initial formation. Well, she attempted to at least, but the formation was already locked onto her as soon as it was cast, so she was only delaying the inevitable, and as I had already begun walking towards the boy I caught her body falling out of the sky from the corner of my eye.

Reaching the man, I immediately initiated the process of injecting myself into him by gathering some mana from the surrounding area and using that to open up a way to his soul.

After that's done, I take some of my own mana and begin injecting it into his soul, thus allowing me to model a space for me to occupy once the once the procedure is complete.

However, being so pre-occupied with the mana process, I decided to ignore the suspicious glowing coming from the man since I had more pressing matters to attend to.

It wasn't until the mana that I had already injected into him was dissolved and absorbed by some unknown entity, that I was shaken out of the trance like state my concentration had put me in.

Surprised by this sudden interruption, I immediately scanned the surrounding area for any hostiles, but other than the two sleeping beauties and some slight mana distortion from the man they were no other mana signatures anywhere else. Thus my mind arrived at the natural conclusion of the offender already being inside the guy's body; well time for someone to get evicted.

For such a simple task, one lightning formation was all I used since the offender will show himself once sufficiently threatened. Well, I hope at least since it wouldn't be much of an eviction if the bastard didn't fight back.

Though the plan seemed too effective, because once the small lightning formation formed the energy distortion on the man blew up like an inquisitional bonfire and my surroundings were drowned in a blinding light.

In a fact, I was so focused on the light show that the lightning formation disintegrating in the palm of my hand barely registered with me.

Though using your own mama to set off a temporary dead zone is quite intriguing, this is the first time I've seen someone forcibly expel they mana to agitate the wild mana and create a zone where mana vision is worthless.

It does unfotunatly mean that I won't be able to pursue him unless he sticks around but the chances are unlikely. So with that thought in mind, I was ready to pat myself on the back for a job well done, no casualties and a now vacant body for me to occupy.

But my celebrations were cut short when out of the light emerged some sort of floating grey ball of slime, safe to say I was more stunned at the head sized slime than I was shocked.

But what did shock me was that the slime was using the dissolved lightning formation's mana to feed itself. The worst part was that the slime was beginning to glow brighter and brighter.

Seeing that it was rather docile towards eating, I weighed up my options, and decided that killing the slime then experimenting on it was worth the amount of time I would waste killing such an anomaly.

Though just in case something goes wrong I cast a teleportation formation on the boy; who had apparently fallen unconscious at some point, and moved him a few meters away.

Now then, time to die slime.

With the slime currently distracted by the every decreasing lightning mana, I quickly construct a void portal formation which I then proceeded to fire it at the slime, who neither bothered to dodge or eat the formation.

Slightly bemused by its actions, I drew my conclusions at it being newly born, and since it wasn't putting up a fight, I aimed to knock it out in one blow. For this, I directed the formation to the area where the slime's core should be, activate it, and...

...Nothing. Even though I activated the formation, there was no mana discharge, and my connection was immediately broken as soon as it was activated.

Agitated over my formation failure, I spent the next minute or so flinging void portals at it in various numbers and frequencies.

But none of it worked, what the hell was going on?! The current situation was currently pissing me off. Never in my years has a mana beast been so difficult in killing, even if it's a magically eating slime there are always limits to what they can eat.

Coming up with a solution is easy, so checking the man's distance I conclude that he is far enough away for the feast that I'm about to give the slime. Though I do teleport the two women away as well, wouldn't want to remember them after the slime has begun feeding.

Distractions out the way. I spend about half an hour collecting the surrounding mana and condensing it between my two palms. As the seconds past the condensed mana begun to take on an indigo colour as it's size expanded from a small pebble to the size of a rock, then the size of a boulder and finally so big that my person was blocked from sight.

This process was quite taxing on my body however, as I had to continuously feed the mana ball's outer shell with my own mana so that it wouldn't collapse in on itself as soon as I let it go.

The size was also a problem as well since it was currently too big to push, so I had to also regularly cast formations inside and out to crush the mana further together.

Eventually, after a few more additional hours of work the entire ball of mana been crushed to the size of my head, though it now leaked out an incredibly dangerous aura. That and the mana distortions that it was causing all around me.

With the process over I move the orb to situate directly in front of the slime, the space around being distorted as I moved it. Even then, the most dangerous part was the several lightning tendrils that flickered from it every so often, most likely caused by some residue lightning mana from the slime's snack.

Positioning it a few meters away from the slime I quickly release it, and with the orb's stability out of my hands now, it quickly reached its target while it left a ripple distortion in its path.

However, Instead of being instantly incinerated by the pure mana racing towards it the slime instead took the challenge head on, literally.

The slime and orb met for but a brief second, and it showed that the orb was ineffective. The slime ate or should I say absorbed the orb into itself.

Consuming the orb seemed to cause the slime to gain size rapidly, and for some bizarre reason it even started to glow brighter, taking this as a sign from Sol I decided that it was in my best interests to leave and not bother the atomic-like slime and his man pet anymore.

But like so many of my plans today, the slime that was lighting up like a religious festival suddenly blew up and coated the surrounding area in the plain in a blinding light.

This blinding light was not only blinding to my normal sense, but my over detection skills weren't usable either. Everything I used gave me the same indication of me being stuck in nothing but perpetual whiteness. Even the teleportation formation I had hoped to set up was useless as the mana wouldn't even come out of my body to construct it, the light of mana was that domineering.

While I began to panic slightly, the more scientific side of me thought of something new. This 'slime' that I had just encountered may be some new species, one that had the ability to consume magical power and then use that power to fuel its own growth.

That or I had done a Darwins and created a new miniature sun that fed upon the world's mana.

My bet was on the latter option though, since at least with a new sun being made this whole venture wouldn't have been a complete waste of time.

Though thinking about it more carefully, if the slime was still alive, somehow, then that means that I've lost the chance to have a new body, which is upsetting since I'd rather not become soul giblets.

But after what seemed like an eternity, the dense mana surrounding me begun to dissipate. In this situation, I should have been elated, but I felt a disturbance in the air.

To my dismay, the mana wasn't dissipated into the surroundings as I had hoped. Instead, that fiendish slime was guzzling it all up, and I could sense it had already eaten the mana surrounding it.

Not waiting to see if my new creation would call me father or not. I took the only option that was left to me, use a teleportation formation and flee like a coward.

Even if I'm abandoning the man and his two female companions in the face of death, I would rather live and find a different host, rather than incur more wrath from the magically absorbing slime.

The slime, however, had plans of its own and almost instantaneously squashed that idea, since as soon as I put down the formation, I detected an uncountable number of distortions beginning to surround me and my formation.

Everything was a blur as the distortions revealed themselves to be the slime's tentacles which now resembled the distortions that the orb had left behind.

But instead of flickering randomly, theses tentacles wasted no time as they immediately attacked my formation and completely stripped it of any mana. Seeing this was bringing me to my wit's end, and I started throwing magic formations at it in hopes that I could distract the thing.

Oh, how I wished that plan would have worked at least. Instead, the distorted tentacles seemed to be controlled by an intelligent being as only one or two went after each of the formation I sent out, the rest advanced unmercifully on me.

As they begun to wrap around me, I used the most drastic method I knew and simply bled the mana from my body in a deranged hope of having the slime think I had no mana on me to eat. But I was naive to think that method would work. Instead, the tentacles bound my entire body much more quickly and brought me closer towards its main body.

They have been very few times in my life where the prospect of dying was likely, and this thing was one of the most dangerous situations I've ever found myself in. But even when I was in front of the slime and begun feeling that my life was about to perish, nothing happened.

The slime dangled me in front of its now boulder-sized body and simply stared.

Seeing the slime stare at me this was the first time that I every even considered that it had intelligence and was acting on its thoughts and not on some simply gluttonous desire for mana.

Thinking about that idea for a moment, I realised I would have preferred the unintelligent glutton to of captured me. At least then I could vaguely know what it was about to do.

But while I pondered another unexpected thing happened, the slime brought me towards the unconscious man I had initially aimed for. Slowly coming face to face with him, it was at this point something grey and cylinder caught my attention for the first time.

If one were to take just one glance at it, then one would never notice it. But if you were to look long enough at it then you would see that it was spotted with holes in various places and covered in weird sketched symbols on it's outside. Even taking a glance at the holes could reveal a strange writing that was written in a strange language that was almost impossible to understand, never mind trying to speak or translate the word inside it.

It's quite funny really, the one in front of me looked almost identical to the one I had back home, even the sketches seemed to all be in the same places. Quite the coincidence that I should meet another, maybe they both act as portals to each other's location.

Finding that path of thought funny I take a look at its surroundings and I notice that there's a small stream of mana connecting it to the slime. Was the slime some sort of safety mechanism? No, it can't be, with them, being so similar in design wouldn't something like this happened when I was in trouble.

Running with this line of though I began to create some hypotheses on what the slime is and how it's connected to the cylinders, but it would seem that the slime wouldn't let me debate any of them with myself.

It seems like the slimes finished now, did he only wanted to gloat about keeping the body that I originally wanted to have for myself.

As quick as I had been captured, the slime began to encase me in its mana empowered body.

I've never been encased in a mana body before so I wouldn't know what to expect, but feeling like thousand of needles were pricking my soul wouldn't have been my first option pick; must be the feeling of how slimes dissolve their prey.

At this point, I could only give off a feeble attempt at resistance in the form of squirming.

But as quickly as I was encased and was feeling the prickling sensation, I didn't feel my soul dissolving. A shiver went up to my non-existent shine as I begun to have a foreboding feeling, what was worse was that a small stream of mana began to connect the man and me together.

The slime couldn't be intending for me to be fuel for this man, even if I'm going to die soon I refuse to be someone else refined mana dinner. I have to think of a plan before I'm refined, dammit none of my formations are forming. Don't tell me I'm going to have to shatter my soul.

Best case scenario there is is that in a few thousand years I can reform my soul somewhere in the void. Though I will most likely be extremely damaged and possibly even amnesiatic.

However, against my better expectations of being turned into refined mana fuel, instead, the foreboding feeling I had earlier seemed to indicate something much worse.

Since as soon as the connection between the man and me was stabilised I felt that my soul had become tethered to the man's own soul, this slime had somehow done the impossible and performed a soul anchorage.

As I was dragged inside his body, the slime took this chance to dissipate back inside the cylinder as well; but not before it drew in the remaining doom orb's mana.

It didn't take me long to realise that the slimes plan all along was to have someone more active be the guardian for the man, in short, the slime had unceremoniously thrust upon me the position of babysitter.

How in Sol's name am I supposed to be optimistic in this pessimistic situation?