Moira stared at Alec for a few moments before asking,

"Did you just say it had side effects?"

"I did." Alec nodded.

"But those don't matter to me." Alec was confident he would overcome the increased burden on his brain, mind, and eyes with the power of the Poem of Neverlasting Wisdom. But there was no need to tell her about it. There was also the fact that he could modify the spell formation to better suit his needs.

"Can I watch while you use it?" Moira asked eagerly, looking at Alec's eyes like she was searching for where he was going to carve the minuscule spell formation.

"No." Alec wasn't satisfied yet. He also wasn't sure that carving it into the back of his eyes was the best way to use it, even if that was how Shim had used it.

'Lenses maybe?' Alec thought to himself while looking at the magnifying glass. Regular glasses wouldn't work. It would be too obvious and slightly impractical during combat. But a lens resting directly on his eye? That could work.

He just had to figure out how to make one.

But that wasn't a priority.

Figuring out monsterification was a lot more important.

Alec turned to look at Moira.

"What…?" She asked bluntly.

"Do you mind?"

"Oh, you want me to leave?"

Alec nodded.

Moira looked disappointed, but she sighed and turned on her heel. She stopped in the doorway and glanced back.

"I think you already know, but I can't let you leave."

"..."

Alec ignored her and started thinking about how to go about his mission.

He needed to figure out how monsterification worked in order to stop it from happening to him.

For that, he needed to figure out what happened during monsterification. That meant he had to compare a monster to a non-monster. For as thorough a comparison as possible, he needed a way to investigate the details of a physical matter.

The first step would be to use Eyes of the Mystic to improve Scan until it reached a level that could reveal everything he wanted to know. He had already improved Scan, but it wasn't enough.

It was difficult since Eyes of the Mystic was an advanced spell with different norms to Scan. But Alec found the Frame part more useful than expected.

The Core was centered around vision. The Regulator controlled the Frame and the mana circulation of the spell formation. The two weren't important to his current goal. He didn't need to use his eyes when using Scan, after all.

However, the Frame part, contrary to his expectations, given the spell formation's nature, was centered around enhancements. It improved the subject decided upon in the Core.

In theory, he could swap out the Core for another sense, and it would turn into the Nose of the Mystic, for example. The only problem was that he didn't know the runes for the other senses, and certainly not well enough to start using them in the middle of such a complicated spell formation.

But he could still take inspiration and runes from the Frame to improve Scan.

Alec surprised even himself. With his life on the line and a motionless Milo monster behind him, he managed to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to his research and study of the spell formations.

It was like only he and the runes existed in the world. Occasionally, when he stopped time, which he did whenever he had the skill energy, he wasn't wrong.

In the underground room with no passage of the suns and moons, Alec had trouble keeping track of the time. Stopping and resuming time all the time didn't exactly help, either. Eating also didn't help since he had irregular eating habits.

But time passed nonetheless, and eventually, Alec had a working prototype of a spell that saw down to the near-cellular structure of the body.

It wasn't right to call it Scan since it worked entirely differently after how many modifications Alec had made, but he couldn't be bothered to think of a better name, so for now, it was Scan 2.

He used Scan 2 on himself after eating the latest piece of meat brought by Moira to see what happened to it.

Not entirely unexpected, it broke down while traveling through his digestive system. It was slowly worn down until it reached his stomach. There, the breakdown process sped up, eventually releasing a small cloud of Aether into his body, which transformed into formless mana almost instantly.

It joined the stream of invisible, intangible mana floating around his body while waiting for the condensation of his second circle.

'That's it?'

Alec did not understand why such an ordinary process turned ordinary people into monsters.

He sighed deeply enough to make Moira think he had forgotten how to inhale.

It was because he realized a way to figure out how or why ordinary people transformed into monsters after eating.

It was to feed an ordinary person some monster meat and use Scan 2 on them while they digested it. If he did that, he would surely find out the answer to his latest question.

'No way.' That would make him no different from Shim. He refused to do it.

Instead, he turned his gaze toward Milo.

The monster wearing his skin hadn't moved an inch from the time Moira put him in the cell. But Alec hadn't missed the bloodlust that the monster emitted.

He had to test Scan 2 on him. For that, he needed Milo to be still. But Alec still hadn't figured out why his Sleep spell didn't work on him. So, he held off on that for a moment.

'First, a nap.'

For the first time since waking up and Moira telling him to get started, Alec rested, though it was more like he passed out from exhaustion. He lay down, his eyes closed before his back even touched the hard, cold stone floor.

He woke up feeling like he had dreamed something, which he usually didn't do. But he didn't remember even the slightest detail. It couldn't have been important.

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