Chapter 184
The next day was spent poking at the manaborn monsters more, as Alice tried to figure out what made them tick. Since ‘manaborn’ creatures were so new to this world, Alice still had a lot of head-scratching to do when it came to these odd organisms. After her test with Cecilia, she explained what she had actually been testing, and then enlisted the help of a Jonathan’s children to test out other things.
The next thing she tried to figure out was how much, exactly, one person’s beliefs could change the physical shape and behavior of a manaborn monster. If someone believed that a manaborn monster was supposed to have forty legs, would it sprout extra legs the moment it came into contact with their beliefs? Or was its form fixed the moment it was born?
She quickly confirmed was that the forms of manaborn were not malleable. Even when Alice told Mimi, Jonathan’s youngest daughter, all about the interesting one-eyed manaborn monster she had been experimenting with, and how the monster did funny hops when there was a carrot placed in front of it, the monster’s form remained unchanged. It still looked like a monstrous patch of fog with dozens of eyes and eight legs.
This spurred Alice’s curiosity even further. After all, Alice had always thought of fog as being… well… malleable. It would have made perfect sense, in her mind, for the monster to shapeshift into a one-eyed patch of fetid swamp gas after Mimi’s beliefs were led in a certain direction. But the monster’s form remained the same.
It seemed likely that manaborn monsters would not change shape after they were born, regardless of what beliefs were fed into them. Once they were born, their forms were final, unless something physically amputated their limbs. While this contradicted Alice’s expectations, it was nice to confirm.
The second thing she confirmed was that, no matter what, none of the strings of mana that Alice suspected represented ‘belief’ ever penetrated through a fully enclosed layer of space with no mana in it. However, even if she totally blocked these strings of mana from directly touching a test subject, somehow, some amount of belief was still leaking through. This was very subtle, and hard to notice – but when Alice was feeding Jonathan’s children information about her ‘interesting test subjects,’ she noticed that some of the manaborn monsters had small behavioral changes, even when they were ‘isolated.’ Since they looked like they were half-dead after a certain period of time either way, it was barely noticeable.
Interestingly enough, this was not true if Alice removed all mana from the area. In this case, nobody’s beliefs about the manaborn monsters mattered in any way, shape, or form. This implied that mana itself was somehow connected in a subtle, hard to notice way, regardless of whether Alice isolated a bubble of mana from the rest of the world. This was interesting, but it was also a major pain in the neck for her.
Afterwards, Alice started focusing on a few other experiments she wanted to run.
The monster Alice had used to test Cecilia’s beliefs still had a body that was trying to do different things at the same time. Six of its legs were trying to lunge at Alice’s face and eat her, and the other two legs were trying to dance like a ballerina. Based on this, Alice had a new question. It was obvious that beliefs, aided by mana, could distort reality. But what happened if these ‘beliefs’ were removed from an area? Would the area revert back to its ‘natural’ form, or would the influence of other beliefs remain in place? This was a question she hadn’t considered before, but it could be very relevant. Thus, Alice decided to test how ‘sticky’ beliefs were in the face of anti-mana.