I was sitting in the waiting room of the local scientific laboratory. After having completed a few more quests together with Redax, I’d decided that it was finally time for me to complete the quest I’d gotten from Lophan on my first day here. He had requested that I meet with one of their researchers so that they could gain what info they could about a voidling, and me specifically. I’d debated whether it was a good idea to reveal everything to them, but after they’d treated me like royalty I’d decided to just go for it.

Well, technically I was royalty.

Another reason that helped me decide was the fact that I would be able to meet with a literal expert on monsters. Since I was a monster, I was sure that I could ask them some questions about my build, what mutations would be nice to go for, or any other stuff I wanted to know. After all, it would only be fair that they answered any questions I had in exchange for the details of my existence. I had asked the people from Nimmas team about some specifics of their skills since I was curious, but apparently, it was considered somewhat rude to ask this of somebody. They humored me by sharing some things, but knowing the full status wasn’t something you’d just tell any random stranger who asked.

I had Orbos guide me to this place. Apparently, there were loads of different buildings that researched monsters all over Lophan, but I was required to show up to this specific one. Apparently, this one was working directly under Lophan and had some of the most professional researchers around. I’d gotten here about half an hour ago, but since I hadn’t announced my arrival beforehand the researcher that was supposed to do my analysis was busy and I had to wait for a bit. To that end, they’d brought me to a waiting room that uncomfortably reminded me of waiting in a doctor's office.

There was a lot of white stuff here, uncomfortable chairs, and seemingly random paintings. A few plants were sitting in the corners, bringing at least some color into the room. I wasn’t sure why doctor’s waiting rooms needed to be as uncomfortable as they were, but apparently, it was consistent throughout different dimensions. Or galaxies. I still wasn’t quite sure where I was, in relation to my old hunting grounds, Earth.

I was considering doing what I could do to entertain myself when the door cracked open and an Asphon stepped in to let me know that it was finally time for my appointment. As I followed them through the hallways of the institute, I idly wondered why I’d gotten bored so quickly. Ever since I’d been reborn as a slug, I had become a master of patience, sitting around doing nothing for hours, sometimes days at a time. Yet, half an hour in a waiting room had me giddy to start moving around.

We eventually arrived in a spacious room that had a small, sterile-looking metal table in the center of it. Several lights were pointed at it to provide maximum illumination of the subject, and the walls of the room were lined with various machines, apparatuses, and McGuffins. I was instructed to hop onto the table before my guide left with the words I dreaded to hear the most. “The professor will be with you shortly.”

That was usually code for “You’re gonna sit in here for about an hour.”

Much to my surprise, the professor arrived a mere two minutes later. Armed with my recently gained knowledge on how to differentiate Asphons, I quickly scanned over the professor as they entered. They were slightly taller than most Asphons, the spikes along their spines looked like sharpened disks, their tail was pretty long, and their armor was just about the smoothest one I’d seen yet. If it wasn’t for the spine disks, I’d be hard-pressed to find any sharp angles on this Asphon.

“Hello, I’m Professor Wotan and I’ll be conducting your analysis today,” the professor introduced herself, the voice clearly identifying her as a woman. “You must be Gary. I’ve heard a lot about you already and I’d like to thank you again for agreeing to do this for us. Data on voidlings is hard to come by, and it is truly an incredible opportunity for us.”

“It’s really no problem,” I assured her as she started setting herself up. “I do get a quest completion for this after all. Also, I was hoping that once you’ve gathered all the data you need, we could answer some questions I have that went unanswered for way too long.”

“That can definitely be arranged,” Wotan replied, gathering several doodads on a cart that she’d retrieved next to the door. “In fact, I’d love to discuss my findings with you once I have evaluated all of the data. If you don’t mind coming back at a later date.”

“I guess knowing more about voidlings and myself would be pretty nice,” I replied, unsure if I’d even be able to make sense of whatever scientific babble she’d present me with. “But before we get ahead of ourselves, what should I expect from this “analysis”? All I know is that you’ll take a look and gather data, but looking at all the devices you got in this room, I’m assuming that it’ll be a bit more involved.”

“Right, it’s nothing too scary, don’t worry,” Professor Wotan had seemingly finished gathering the materials she needed and parked the cart next to the table I was resting on and sitting down on a chair without back support. “I could do the entire procedure without any input from you, as most of the time, we conduct our experiments on dead specimens. It is a lot easier to take a detailed look at a monster when it isn’t actively trying to kill you. That being said, since we can talk to each other in a civilized manner, I’m sure we can expedite the whole process. Well, I won’t be looking at your interior workings as I usually do. Cutting you up would be a rather intrusive and illegal procedure.”

“That’s… nice,” I wasn’t entirely certain if the illegality of the matter was the only reason holding her back. “So what will you do, then?”

“Well, if you don’t mind, I would like to take several samples. That includes flesh and mucus, and if I can, I’d love to try and grab a sample of whatever your little crown is made out of,” Wotan explained, pointing to several devices on her cart as she went. “I’d usually perform an autopsy to get a look at all the juicy mutations a monster has and closely analyze the different organs, but in your case, I suppose we’ll just stick to you telling me what is going on in that fascinating body of yours.”

“I’m fine with you taking these samples,” I consented. “Under the assumption that you’ll only grab small samples. I wouldn’t want to be walking out missing a fourth of my body, after all. As for taking a sample of the crown, you might have some difficulty with that. According to its description, it is made from pure void energy, so unless you have a way to take a sample of that you might be out of luck.”

“Oh that shouldn’t be a problem,” Wotan got up from her seat and walked over to one of the bigger machines in the room. It was standing on small wheels, allowing her to roll it over to me without issue. “This baby can analyze just about any form of energy. It won’t be able to take a sample, but it will give me an extensive readout for whatever is going on in that crown of yours.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“Then, aside from these things, we’ll mostly talk about my capabilities, right?” I wondered out loud.

“Mostly, yes,” Wotan nodded. “The system provides us with pretty vague descriptions of our skills and mutations, but we have a rather extensive library of things that will allow us to dive deeper into the functionality of things we already know about. For everything else, we’ll make new entries, which is what I’m looking forward to the most. I’ll also have you demonstrate some of your skills and spells if you don’t mind.”

“That should be fine as well, although I do have to remind you that I’m rather poisonous and that coming in contact with me or my mucus is a genuinely bad idea,” I gave the complimentary warning about my poisonous nature, although I suspected she knew about this already. But, the whole talk about their library reminded me of a skill I had. “Speaking of your library, I do have a passive skill called “Archive of Asphon”. You wouldn’t happen to be able to know about that, right?”

“Oh, you lucky guy!” Wotan seemed to perk up even more. “Yes, yes, I do know about it. It happens pretty rarely, but every once in a while, a traveler with that skill shows up. We know the system hands out the skill on one of the higher layers, so it is rare, but not unusual. I, and many of my contemporaries have the skill as well, although for us, unlocking it requires a lifetime of study and devotion to our craft. It is a game-changer, though, once we unlock it. Helps us massively since we don’t need to constantly rummage through physical books.”

“You make it sound like the skill has more functions than what I know about,” I asked suspiciously. “I only know that it can show me the name, tier, and short description of a monster I’m facing, as well as showing me buff and debuff icons that apply to the monster.”

“Oh, that’s just the start of it!” Wotan was full-on excited now. “You’ll quickly find that EX-tier skills are a lot more extensive than the system leads you to believe. Some skills can have additional uses other than the one obvious thing they do. Sometimes it just takes a bit of imagination to find these additional ways of using them. The higher the tier, the more likely it is that there are some hidden functions, and EX-tier skills are the best examples of that.”

I digested her words, thinking back to that one time I cut off a voidlings arm by closing a void jump portal on it. Now she was telling me that the Archive of Asphon had more hidden functions, and if she was right, my magical singularity skill was also hiding some functionality. Maybe she would know the answer to that question.

“So what other uses does the archive have?” I asked curiously.

“Do you mind if I start gathering the samples while we talk?” Wotan gestured to the devices on the cart, and after I told her that was fine, she grabbed the first of the devices, informing me that she was about to take a bit of flesh. “As the name implies, the skill gives you access to our archive. There is a physical archive here in Lophan, but it is not complete. The version the skill gives you access to is a collection of every archive of every Asphon city. The complete version.

“While on the surface, the skill tells you a bit of information about the monster you’re looking at, you can take it a lot further. If you concentrate on the original prompt and think of querying more specific information, the skill will provide you with it as long as said information is in the archive. For you, the most convenient function would probably be to ask for weak spots or what attack types the monster is weak to. You could of course ask for a lot of other stuff as well, but that’s more for if you are into research. Combat use is pretty limited, and the higher the tier of the monster is, the less likely it is that we have accurate information on it.

“The more a monster evolves, the more likely it is to deviate from what we would consider the standard path. With some monsters it’s even worse, like with you voidlings for example. Almost no two voidlings are the same, so it is difficult to have any kind of accurate data on them.”

“That is incredible,” I said, thinking about how I could’ve queried for weaknesses this entire time. Of course, with my explosive powers I didn’t need to most of the time, but for certain stronger types I might have been able to eke out an advantage. Or in the case of a certain aquatic enemy, learned in advance that it was able to use lightning attacks. “Is there anything else the skill can do?”

“Why yes,” Wotan confirmed, as she put my flesh sample in a tube. I hadn’t even felt any pain from the extraction which was a pleasant surprise. “As I said, the rest of it is more focused on the research part. You can overlay a 3D model of a scanned monster over the one you are currently analyzing to easily spot differences. You can make new entries into the archive, although they’ll be subject to peer review. You can also simply browse the archive at your leisure.”

“That… is a lot more stuff than I thought there would be,” I said, cursing the system for its annoyingly vague descriptions of skills. “I wonder what other skills I have that have hidden functions like this.”

“A few, probably,” Wotan had scraped off some of my mucus and was storing it in a tube. “And while I do know certain things, if you really want to dive into the details, you’d probably be better off to meet with a skill master. I’d still like to discuss what we can, though.”

“There are people completely specialized in skills? There wouldn’t happen to be anybody that is specialized in mutations, right?”

“Of course there are,” Wotan began to pick up some seemingly random devices from the cart and used them to scan me or certain body parts. “If you talk to our receptionist in the lobby, I’m sure she’d be delighted to arrange a meeting for either of them. And I’m sure the experts would love to meet with you as well.”

“I’ll be sure to do that then,” I said happily. Finally I’d have somebody to talk about all the stuff I’d gotten so far, and probably discuss some things I really, really should be getting. So far I’d mostly picked stuff that seemed right to me, but that didn’t mean that I was missing out on some obvious stuff I simply didn’t know about.

“Alright, I’ll try and get a reading on the void crown now,” Wotan stood up from her chair and brought the large device closer to me, fiddling with some dials and levers. “I’ll have to ask you to stay as still as possible for the duration that the device is running.”

I dutifully froze in place, a skill that I was quite proficient in by now. She did some more adjustments, setting a few prongs up so that they all pointed at different bits of my crown before hitting a button that caused the machine to whirr to life. I did my best not to move a single inch while she was busy observing the machine to make sure that nothing went wrong when a loud bang could be heard from inside the machine, immediately followed by the machine stopping.

“Uhhh… was that supposed to happen?” I asked tentatively, still not moving, just in case.

“No, it was not,” I could hear the frown in her voice as she went to open up a compartment at the back of the device. “Looks like the crystal exploded. Probably couldn’t handle whatever is going on in your void crown.”

“I’m sorry?” I knew this wasn’t my fault, but I still felt like apologizing.

“Don’t worry about it, the insides are protected in case something like this happens and the crystal is easy enough to replace,” Wotan explained, scraping the shattered crystal into a bucket she retrieved. “Just goes to show that this crown of yours is truly something special. Mind explaining what it does, exactly?

“Not at all,” I agreed to her request and told her the description of the system, as well as the fact that I currently couldn’t go to the void since the teleport ban was still in effect. From there, we spent the next hour or so going over my status in detail, although this was purely for documentation. After my session with Professor Wotan, I’d make appointments to get to the real meat and bones of my status.