Chapter 66 Mind, Body, and Soul

“A DOLL GIRL!?” Utarou squealed as he began to aggressively examine the unimpressed Emily’s joints, who firmly shoved Utarou off.

Penelope quickly slid Emily a note before Utarou could get up and start examining the golem maid again.

“You’re allowed to break this man if he does anything you don’t like.”

Emily read the note, nodded and before Utarou could even get close, she grabbed his head and crushed his skull.

As the pieces regenerated he let out a sigh.

“Ah Penelope, you appear to have given this robo girl the misapprehension that she can break me whenever she feels like it just because I’m immortal.” Utarou sighed, causing Penleope to let out a girlish giggle before catching herself.

As this was going on, Pinklia, Bluelia, Bluelia, Redlia and Henrek had just finished their touching reunion at the gate of Dryholm, and now had to deal with the logistics of the situation.

Everyone’s favourite.

The two Bluelia’s glared at each other.

The one who had been frozen in Rolfcons for nearly a month had grown pale, notably investing into every ice resistance and regeneration skill that appeared on her skill tree.

The one who had escaped back to Dryholm was a deep blue, investing in the combat abilities that had started appearing in her skill tree.

Pinklia and Redlia, despite both being mana slimes, were clearly composed of a different gelatinous substance thanks to whatever process the Burtcons Alchemist and the Elves in Aviotica had used being entirely different for infusing them each with mana.

This was all the information Henrek had to explain what he was about to see.

The two Bluelias had been one up until the moment one had frozen, and now…

The pale Bluelia grabbed the dark Bluelia’s hand impatiently, wanting to get over the memory merging process like they had done with the green speckled Julia from when they first regained mass.

It didn’t work, with their hands phased into each other, the slime merging together in a swirl of dark and light blue, both of the Bluelias jumped back as they felt the uncanny feeling of their bodies not mixing, as if they were made of water and oil respectively.

Splitting off both of their arms, the combined fragment tried desperately to push the other fragment off as they kept swirling around in each other's bodies.

The rest of the Julias suddenly jumped back away from each other as they saw the combined fragment struggling to free itself from the incompatible slime.

“W-what the hell?!” Henrek screamed as he tried in vain to help.

“BleauhjrghuOFF ME!” The fragment screamed, a pale blue strand pulling itself out of the dark blue by stretching out to a nearby rock, slowly pulling its mass outwards.

The pale Bluelia stuck her hand out to the strand and reabsorbed it as it slowly freed itself, while the dark Bluelia could only watch on.

Pinklia was terrified while Redlia let out a scoff as she relaxed, realising she didn’t have to deal with this nonsense thanks to her splitting not producing fully sentient copies like the others.

Penelope noticed the commotion just as both the Bluelias managed to reconstitute themselves without the others mass in them, mostly.

Each of them still had speckles of the other slime in them, which had turned to the form of freckles.

“What the fuck was that?” Redlia asked, still from a safe distance away from all the other Julias of course.

“Y-You didn’t want to merge back!” The dark Bluelia shouted indignantly from one side of the path as Utarou walked over to see what the ruckus was about.

“Me?! Maybe I’m just so much more battle hardened than the one who ran away!” The pale Bluelia screamed from the other side of the path, with Henrek in the middle entirely unsure of what to do.

Fortunately, Utarou had a plan.

“Ladies ladies, there’s no such thing as too many Monster Girls-” Utarou began before Redlia and dark Bluelia smashed his head in from both sides.

Notably, the impact between the red goo and blue goo was like two balls of putty slamming into each other, they flattened but did not mix together at all.

“- And I think the easiest solution is more names! You shall be Navy Bluelia!” Utarou declared, pointing his finger to the dark Bluelia.

“Fine, whatever.” Navy replied, rolling her eyes.

“And you! Shall be Aqua Bluelia!”

“What the hell is this?! I’m gone for who knows how long and suddenly you have a bunch of replacements for me?! And I’m Julia, I’m not some variant!” Aqua shouted, glaring at the other Julias.

Henrek let out a sigh, he’d gone from one dying sister, to an uncontrollably alive sister, to a pile of goo, to suddenly an ever expanding roster of sisters.

All of which thought they were the original sister.

“LADIES! Ladies, what’s all the commotion?!” Barney shouted, jumping down from the watch tower to see what all the shouting was about up close.

Suddenly all the Julias blushed and turned away, mumbling various excuses.

“Fufufufu… Alright now that they’ve settled down… Onwards! Time for Miss Penelope to teach her first lesson!” Penelope declared, pointing towards the old Church Vicar John had set up years ago now.

“Eh?” The Julias asked in unison.

…

“Hmm, you are an interesting one…” Folosogg mumbled, she’d been intensely studying this small piece of Bluelia since it’d arrived, growing it and splitting it into various samples.

Interestingly, despite containing the same kind of spirit as Greylia, the same skills that could be unlocked and everything, they couldn’t grow any more than about the size of a pumpkin, with intelligence never seeming to exceed its most minimal state, still a bumbling and burbling ball of sludge.

Next to the burbling ball, there was a tray of Greylia’s killed body resting, Folosogg was experimenting, seeing that the spiritually dead slime didn’t react or combine with the blue slime at all.

Greylia stared from her tube, hatefully and quietly.

She was plotting.

…

“NOW! Education is important, the more you know, the more you can do, and you four lovely ladies have a lot to learn!” Penelope announced, the four Julias sat in separate pews, with Henrek hanging out by the door.

Emily was acting as her teaching assistant, passing out materials she’d hand copied for Penelope.

Pinklia raised her hand gingerly.

“Yes! Pink!”

“Uh, yeah… Why now?” Pinklia asked, looking to her left and seeing the frothing rage of Redlia as she snatched the paper from Emily.

“Brilliant question, first! You and Red are living mana batteries, if you two could learn magic hoo boy!” Penelope smirked as she imagined the firepower she’d be able to draw upon from them if they were able to cast through basic sigils.

“And us?” Aqua asked.

“You two need to learn something Utarou calls, the scientific method!” Penelope declared, quickly drawing up a diagram onto a piece of rock that had crashed into the church and had been flattened by Emily.

“The what method?” Navy asked.

“It’s simple, step 1, you form a hypothesis!”

…

Greylia had no sense of time in her cell, the only measure was when Folosogg was in the lab, and when she was out. When Folosogg was in, the lights were on, when she was out, the lights were off.

There were no windows, and it wasn’t obvious where in Aviotica she was.

She had taken to counting the seconds as best she could in between when Folosogg left and returned.

She had a theory, Folosogg left for at least an hour whenever she did leave.

If she wanted to escape, it’d have to be then.

…

“Alright… and then what do you do?” Aqua asked tentatively.

“Simple, you test it.”

“How?”

“Figure out an experiment! Like Utarou did when he was figuring out XP!”

“And how do you do that?”

“You try to isolate the variables, only changing one thing at a time!”

…

Greylia was alone, in the dark.

The clump of mindless Bluelia was making noises across the room in its own tube.

Greylia had time to try again.

She placed her hand on the glass wall and tried to feel the spiritually inert slime.

Instead, she felt something different.

Naturally, she clenched it with all the force her exhausted self could manage.

The burbling Bluelia stopped making noise.

“Huhuhuhu! Perfect! I was hoping you’d learn something!” Folosogg cooed as the lights turned on suddenly, immediately placing a barrier around what used to be the burbling Bluelia, the colour drained from its body, becoming another Greylia, absorbing the tray of dead grey slime next to her as it stared hatefully at Folosogg.

“It didn’t make any sense for a slime to be utterly unable to achieve a hive mind! Clearly young Grey-chan here needed the instruction of a mentor like me~!” Folosogg beamed as she looked at the small blob of Greylia as it stretched out limbs from its cores like an eldritch monster, crawling around its cage, trying to find an exit.

Folosogg’s experiment had confirmed something.

The Julias had the mind of a human, it just diminished with mass and couldn’t simply be regrown.

The Julias had the body of a slime, it was functionally identical to the substance slime monsters were made of.

The Julias had the soul of something entirely new, it wasn’t human but it certainly wasn’t a monster soul.

Folosogg was eager to see what other experiments she could run to confirm questions on this new species.