After sorting his thoughts and recovering his Mana, Alec was ready to use Scan 2 fully optimised for power. But then he looked at the severed arm of the Milo monster. The experiments he had done on it had taken their toll.

It would be hard to get any useful information from it.

Alec slowly glanced back at Milo.

Now, he could wait until Moira came with food and use Scan on the monster she had killed and brought.

But Milo had a similar build to his current self. If he wanted to get as clear an image of the difference between man and monster as possible, Milo was the best target.

That was probably why Shim had kidnapped him as well, but Alec chose not to think about that fact.

Milo was no longer human.

Deep down, Alec wanted to save him. Deeper down, he knew that it was impossible. He was already dead.

He had to stop thinking of that thing in the cell as Milo. It was no different from the pigs, sheep, and the snake.

Alec suddenly cast a Cleaver at the monster's remaining arm, severing it before it could react. He then took the opportunity to practice his wood spells by replicating the vine he had seen Shim use.

He wasn't used to transforming his formless mana into wood mana since he hadn't done it before, but it wasn't as hard as he thought it would be. It was also easier than he thought to control it after conjuring it. It was like controlling an additional, very long, and skinny arm.

He wrapped around the arm and carried it over before nodding in satisfaction.

He let the blood drip over the floor as he put it on the workbench and closed his eyes to sense how much mana he had left.

'More than enough.'

Alec started drawing the spell formation for Scan 2, adding in all the modifications he made to make sure it carried enough juice to penetrate the flesh's resistance.

His stomach rose as soon as the formation completed from how quickly his mana was sucked out of him.

'Shit.'

It was a lot of mana.

Faint light gathered around the arm like a coat of translucent pain.

"C'mon, c'mon!"

The spell drained mana like someone had stuck a vacuum to his magic circle. The problem wasn't even that it was out of control.

The spell was doing exactly as it was designed. It drew enough mana to finish the cast. Until the feedback of the spell was done and it had finished constructing the arm's structure, it would continue drawing mana.

Alec had underestimated how much mana it would take for that kind of spell to get through the monster's flesh.

But he decided that he couldn't have been that wrong. Instead of aborting the cast and waiting for his mana to recover, he stuck with it and poured his mana into the spell, trying to force it into the arm.

It was like trying to push a raw potato through a piece of fabric.

Until suddenly, it gave way. Like a shattered glass flooding the area around it in one go, the spell's mana flooded the monster's arm, bouncing around inside and outside, mapping out its structure in excruciating detail.

The more mana it used, the more precise the spell ended up being. An unintended side effect that Alec would have celebrated if not for the fact that the feedback hit his mind like a sack of bricks.

His Stone rank Resistance and Intelligence stats and the continued use of the Poem were the only things that prevented him from blacking out from the overload of information.

It was a good thing. He did not want to have to go through it again.

But at least the results were good.

It took Alec a while to understand what he was looking at and what to make of it, but he finally made sense of it all.

He could now clearly say that the difference between man and monster was a mix of density, quality, and design.

The design of Alec's arm was simple and straightforward. A decent amount of muscle and not a lot of fat. It was an above-average, but still normal, human arm.

The monster's arm had less fat, less muscle, less bone, and was smaller overall. But it was still powerful enough to bend iron bars and throw Alec across the room with ease.

It was because all the different kinds of tissues were much denser. It was like the difference between steam and water. Everything was much more solid and powerful.

Alec couldn't be sure about this since he wasn't an expert on the matter, but he thought it looked like the cells in the monster's arm were also aligned much better. It was like all the imperfections of millennia of evolution had been removed. It made it easier for the monster to unleash 100% of its full potential.

Lastly, the cells themselves looked like they were sturdier and more complete than Alec's cells.

Improvements in three areas on such a foundational level were enough to turn a young, mild-mannered, scrawny, malnourished orphan into the perfect killing machine.

However, as he looked between the arm and the monster, Alec could not see a connection between the structure of the monster's flesh and the empty eyes, completely void of thought or cognition.

The monster hadn't even reacted when Alec cut off its arm.

Something was different between human monsters and ordinary monsters, but they were still the same.

If he investigated a monster with an animal origin with Scan 2, he would likely find the same kind of structure, just that of an animal's.

Most likely, the reason for monsterification was the same.

The reason why monsters lost all intelligence should be the same between animals and humans.

Alec frowned as he collapsed to the ground, barely able to breathe.

He should probably stop thinking about that right now and focus on restoring mana to his magic circle so that he doesn't die.

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