As I read the book-- no, journal before me, my metaphorically gaping mouth grew so wide that I could've fit a baby slime in it.

‘Corrupted royalty? Manipulating atoms? Mana core? This guy is Ellie’s father? My… grandfather?’

Upon closer observation, the paper beneath the crimson letters of, ‘Ellie… I love you’, were crinkled as if the man had been crying while he was writing those words. Or maybe....

I couldn’t help but wonder if they were my mom’s tears.

Too many possibilities were whirling around in my head, but one thing was clear. My grandfather was originally not from this world. It was even possible that he came from my world, but the only evidence for this was his knowledge of English. Were there other worlds that used English? Did this world use English? There were so many unanswered questions.

I glanced back at Ellie, who had fallen asleep on Jean’s shoulder, and was snoring with a peaceful expression on her face. A bit of blue hair draped over her mouth, floating up and down with every breath.

What had happened to my grandfather, to have to have left his own daughter in such a hurry? A part of me hoped that he was alive, but there was an unsettling feeling in my stomach that was unconvinced. My mom hadn't mentioned anyone else in our family, and I never really thought to ask. What about Jean's parents?

'Sigh.'

Taking a deep breath, I forced myself to calm my thoughts. For the time being, I would pretend not to have read this journal, nor bring up any mention of my grandparents, lest I bring up painful memories of the past.

‘Mom will tell me when she’s ready.’

I quietly returned the book and shuffled myself back to the rug next to the fire, reflecting on what I had read until sleep overtook me in all of its calming bliss.

“Bell, wake up honey.”

‘Mmmfph, 10 more minutes.’

I blobbed into the rug and nuzzled my face against the softness of the wool.

“Bell, it’s 10 already. Andrea is here with her daughter.”

‘...Who?’

I sleepily glanced up to see a green lady standing next to Ellie, beaming with dazzlingly white teeth. Ah, I remembered.

Andrea was Ellie’s best friend, and our neighbour. Apparently they were rivals back at the academy. If I had to sum up her appearance in one word, it would be ‘supermodel’. Tall and sexy with all the right curves in all the right places, she was my ideal type. It didn’t help that she was kind to a fault and brimming with intelligence, nor that she was unmarried. Ultimately, she had the perfect characteristics of a hot, single mom.

Her daughter, Lily, shyly peered at me from behind her mom’s leg. The same age as me, Lily was an adorable, green slime who wore a little leaf on her head. She didn’t talk much, but that just made me want to cuddle her all the more. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t a carnal desire; after all, she was only three. Nah, it was just my moe spirit burning. Maybe if she was older....

I shook my head to rid myself of these thoughts.

‘Hi Lily. How’ve you been?’

‘H-hi Bell. I’m g-good. Mommy says that we’re all going to the pond today.’

I almost grimaced, thinking that I would rather review everything that I learned yesterday, but quickly changed it to a look of sleepy excitement, befitting of a three-year-old slime. It would be the first time that I actually got to play in the pond, after all.

‘Uhn!’

I lifted two pseudopods in the air and wiggled them a little to show my enthusiasm.

“Awwwweh~ aren’t you the sweetest thing.”

Andrea picked me up and squished me between her giant melons, a crushing experience that could be considered a perfect cocktail of heaven and hell. I found it excruciatingly difficult to focus my thoughts enough to object, but Ellie saved me by stealing me away and placing me on her head.

“Let’s go sleepyhead. You can eat breakfast on the way.”

Ellie tossed me a couple Yaksha berries before marching out the front door. Andrea looked surprised.

“Bell can already eat his own food? Lily can't even do that yet. Did you teach him, El?”

“Nope, I think my son is a genius. He learned all by himself.”

Pushing out her chest, Ellie glanced up at me with a proud smile on her face.

‘Show-off.’

Lily shot at me with a mental image of her tongue sticking out, but I ignored her and basked in my mom's compliment.

The pond water was particularly refreshing. Although there was no sun down in the dungeon, the planet’s mantle moved closer or further from the ground depending on the planet’s alignment with the stars; or that’s what I was told. Consequently, there were four ‘seasons’ every year, going from hot to cold to hot again. Our current season was this world 'summer', and today was the hottest day this year. As such, the pond was packed more than usual.

The younger slimes, including Lily and I, tended to play on the shallow end, under adult supervision, and with little chance of drowning. Even as slimes, we needed oxygen to survive, and not everyone knew how to swim. As for me, I was unfazed. This was the perfect opportunity for me to practice body transformations.

I focused on creating four flat, flipper-like pseudopods to resemble webbed hands and feet. The front appendages were built to move concentrically, travelling up along the narrow edge and stroking down with the broad side. At the same time, the back appendages would kick up and down to propel me forward. The resulting motion was a weird breaststroke that allowed me to surface every so often.

Of course, such a crude transformation was not very effective, and was too slow for my tastes. To boost my speed, I absorbed water through my skin by manipulating the slime within my body to create an inner current, and then released the excess water through my ass during the power stroke. This allowed me to hop a short distance out of the water.

I felt like a torpedoing platypus soaring through the air.

‘Hmm… I can probably move faster and further underwater because I’m essentially diving every time I surface. What about…’

Getting rid of the four flippers, I created two larger ones at the front of my body, and stretched myself out a bit while flattening the sides to improve hydrodynamic performance, ultimately becoming a flippered eel. I wiggled my butt to move around underwater, and dodged the other children playing in the pool. To surface, I would do a massive stroke with my two flippers, and shaped my body into an actual torpedo that burst out of the water.

Once I could shapeshift comfortably underwater, I dived to the bottom of the pond where I flattened myself against the ground. From there, I collected as much water as I could from my surroundings, swelling up like a giant balloon.

PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT.

I launched myself upwards using my ass-propulsion cannon, condensing my body as much as possible. I exploded out of the water like a bullet, and once I reached the peak of my climb, spread myself out thin and wide like a parachute, slowly floating back towards the pond.

“Uh… El, that is your kid, right?”

Andrea’s face paled as she watched Ellie's child transform from a parachute into a cannonball that crashed into the water, splashing kids and parents alike. 25 meters away.

“Yep. Bell’s been doing stuff like this ever since he first learned how to move.”

Ellie appeared a little pale as well, but she took it a little better than Andrea, recalling when her child had formed freakishly long stick legs to try and walk onto the roof of their house. She shuddered.

“Wow. It must be difficult. I thought I had it bad. Lily’s been trouble ever since she started learning how to open the fridge. She thinks it’s funny to throw berries at strangers who pass by our house. I can’t even begin to imagine what Bell would do with that crazy imagination of his.”

“He’s usually quite tame. Really.”

Ellie added, noting Andrea’s doubtful expression.

“He really cares about Jean and I, you know? Even though he’s so young, he helps around the house and even does chores willingly. What sort of kid does that?”

While she was proud of her little slime, there was a hint of sadness in her voice.

“I think… he still blames himself for that day.”

Andrea nodded understandingly. It was the day when Bell accidentally knocked over a hot blade in Jean’s workshop. Jean had protected him by grabbing it in mid-air, but received third degree burns in the process, requiring extensive medical attention at the Faeris hospital.

"What do I do, Ann? He obviously didn't know what he was doing. I know he's smart, but that was more than two years ago. I thought he’d get over it with time, but if he hasn’t... isn't that too much stress for a child?"

Ellie brought her knees up to her chest and hugged them.

"I just want Bell to always be having fun like this. But yesterday, he told Jean and I that he wanted to be strong. I had the feeling that he wants to take on the burden of the entire family on his tiny shoulders, alone."

"Am I a bad mom for not realizing sooner?" She whispered, barely audible.

'No', was what Andrea wanted to say, but the words caught at her throat. It wasn't that she agreed, but rather that merely saying 'no' wouldn't be enough to help her friend. She was at a loss for what to say.

Burying her face into her knees, Ellie remembered the firm expression on Bell's face the other day. It wasn't something that anyone should have to see on three-year-old child. Ellie could only imagine what her father would say to her if he found out that his grandchild wore such a scary face. She chuckled. He'd probably squeeze Bell's cheeks until he laughed or cried.

Ellie gazed at the clouds that drifted overhead, glowing brightly due to the mana crystals embedded in their fluffiness. Memories of her and her father played themselves in her mind.... Holding a huge celebration when she awoke to her mana; choosing a uniform on her first day of school; hugging her on the day of her graduation with a huge, silly grin; proudly holding her hand as she walked up the aisle during her wedding in her white dress....

Wiping her wet eyes with her sleeve, Ellie apologized for being so sentimental.

“No, no, don’t be. El, I'm sorry that I can't be of more help. Just know that your family will always be my family.”

Andrea gave Ellie's shoulder a light squeeze before turning to watch Bell again. He was now doing flying somersaults over the other children, using a jet of water to hover a meter above the surface of the pond.

‘We might actually be family, someday.’

Her daughter was at the edge of the pond watching the spectacle with a twinkle in her eye.

‘I’ll have to teach her well, if she’s to match his talent.’

'Phew!'

I collapsed from exhaustion after Ellie and I returned home for a late lunch. Jean welcomed us back, and left with Ellie to grab some berries from the nearby market, leaving me to get some rest. It had been a productive morning of training. Towards the end of the day, I had figured out to ‘store’ things in my body, without actually integrating it or digesting it.

After an hour of fiddling around with absorbing and releasing water, a thought hit me. Couldn’t I ‘swallow’ the water without actually mixing it with my slime? Such a feat would allow me to exercise a greater degree of control over it. I spent a full hour and a half swallowing water and trying to separate it like a cell would a vesicle. Forming an internal membrane was difficult, but it was nothing compared to learning how to digest a berry.

Practicing this skill on Lily by chasing after and dumping bucketloads of water on her, I eventually learned how to split the ‘vesicles’ inside me, and began to fire little water balls at her. Needless to say, Lily wasn’t very happy with me after that. Ellie gave me a firm lecture all the way home.

Instead of taking a nap, like I probably should’ve done, I was practicing making vesicles containing air. It seemed like an impossible task, because the air would just diffuse through the walls of the membrane, and would leak out completely within seconds.

“We’re home~!”

I put the task beside me and greeted my parents. Today’s meal was white, sweet Yaksha berries, the specialty product of our village, and green, bitter Yaksha berries, which were imported from the cloud cities above. I didn’t really understand plant biology in this world, but I assumed that it had something to do with the environment that they grew up in. In any case, apparently different colored berries provided different nutrients, all of which were essential to a slime’s healthy growth. This was the only reason I ate the bitter flavoured berries. Again, this taste was a little different from that of a human tongue. In this case, ‘bitter’ was more of an unsatisfying and unpleasant tingle that I got in my nucleus.

As I regretfully digested one of the green ones, I recalled my grandfather’s journal. Didn’t he mention that there was something else other than nutrients in these berries? A sudden realization dawned on me, like a spark created from the smack of two flints.

These berries were packed full of mana.

Grandfather’s journal theorized that a mana core could be forcefully matured, but that the limiting factor was a slime’s innate ability to ‘sense’ it. Of course, perhaps I wouldn’t be able to learn how to sense it or be taught how to sense it, but what if I overloaded myself with so much mana that I couldn’t help but at least understand what it felt like?

Back when I attended school in my past life, I learned about something called signal amplification in neurons, the information conducing cell of the body. A central neuron would receive inputs from thousands of different sensory neurons from something like a touch to the body, and only once ample integration was achieved would the central neuron allow an individual to ‘perceive’ a sense. That’s why people don’t always taste a difference between two red wines, unless the tastes of the two were completely different, like one being sweet and the other being bitter.

I also recalled that signal integration was key to improving one’s ability to sense certain signals. For example, an experienced wine taster would be able to perceive the difference in tastes between two red wines, because their neurons are more sensitive, denser, and better integrated at the tongue, to be able to amplify even the smallest difference in sweetness and bring that sensation to their consciousness.

I couldn’t help but think that mana would be the same way. Perhaps this was why slimes varied in the time they took to mature as well, because they were always absorbing mana from the environment, but in such miniscule amounts that they couldn’t feel it. Those with bodies that were able to create these ‘neurons’ faster, denser, and with better interconnectedness would be able to sense mana more adeptly.

Maybe the mana core worked on a similar principle. Only after a certain duration and magnitude of exposure would the nucleus, having much too small a level of mana capacity, gain sufficient storage capacity, which would lead… to… an awakened state? I actually had no clue.

I spent the next few minutes absorbed in my thoughts, not even paying attention to the bitter taste of the green berries nor the sweetness of the white berries anymore. All that mattered was my greediness of potentially becoming a magic user from a young age. Even so, I couldn’t crack the code of how a slime actually ‘awoke’ to their mana. I needed more information.

BUT, I was sure that at least the first part of my analysis was reasonable, and I slowly devised a strategy to test out my theory.

The first thing that I would need, was money.