Justin had been bracing for something to happen immediately after making a selection in the Talent window, but nothing happened.

  There was no electric sensation of tingling or encompassing feeling, just an extremely slight sense that Justin barely noticed, that something had moved within him.

  ‘Is that it?’

  Justin flexed his body, turning over his arms and rotating his tentacles, but nothing felt out of place. Justin was about to make a small incision on his hand with a claw, but stopped.

  It hadn’t been more than a few minutes since he had defeated the doppelganger of Heinrich, and he was still to recover that health. It probably wasn’t the best idea to be testing out a talent that required him to be injured further, so he moved instead to return to the deepest cave of the tunnels where the starfish was.

  “Hear? Sense?”

  “Denial. Confusion.”

  Swimming past it to go deeper, he also briefly confirmed that it hadn’t sensed their fight above it. It was for the best, but he wondered how good of a protector it was if it couldn’t even at least sense that.

  ‘Oh well, limitations of those without the System.’

  Justin arrived before the metal hatch once more, diving in he arrived in the storage of whatever laboratory had manufactured these vials. Now with a little more knowledge at his disposal, he was able to look over them again with a keener eye.

  He hadn’t realized before, but he must have taken the container with the acidic slime-like creature from a particular category.

  There were far more containers of similar shapes down here, but not all of them had the viridescent hue of something algae-like floating behind their transparent slots.

  A majority were actually not that color, and from their position in the storage room they seemed to be sorted into categories by color.

  The majority, around two hundred or so containers, were blue. Once Justin realized this, he knew it was better to start taking a count in his head of the room’s contents. He had been too excitable at first, but now after realizing what these containers probably all were, he made a mental list to figure out later.

  The final total was thus:

  Blue containers: 215

  Green containers: 68 (Which didn't include the one he had opened.)

  Red containers: 46

  Yellow containers: 15

  As Justin swam deeper into the water-logged storage room, the number of containers decreased as their color changed.

  That trend continued, until he reached the end of the room. He quickly found he was faced with a frustrating conundrum.

  ‘This is where everything that wasn’t bolted down ended up when I released the water pressure in here.’

  Unfortunately it was impossible to go any further, as an avalanche of metallic instruments and sheet metal siding had been rammed into the far wall.

  Water pressure was no joke, and Justin supposed he was lucky that it had just blocked the far wall instead of damaging the shelves around him.

  Yet he could tell that it had all fallen upon a round, vault-like door. He tried moving the metal away, or cutting through it, but his tentacles weren’t tough enough for that and he couldn’t budge it even with his investment into strength.

  ‘Here is where it would be nice to have an offensive skill.’

  He couldn’t very well assimilate his way past a barricade, so he just resigned himself to exploring the vials in the current room.

  ‘I’ll be back for you, door of secrets.’

  …

  Half an hour later, Justin had reappeared in the highest cave on the small slab of dry rock. With him were four containers of different colors he had carefully chosen from the storage room.

  He still couldn’t read their labels, so he had taken his time in trying to intuitively figure out which ones were going to be less of a headache when he opened them.

  He had brought one of each color, including green again, in case it turned out to be different than the one he had first encountered. If that was the case, then he would have to go back and get a second of the other colors too.

  It could be dangerous, they all could be dangerous, but he had to try every avenue of opportunity available to him if he wanted to find his route out. Without the ability to grow stronger, he would never be able to get out of this cave system, and he was looking to these vials for that ability.

  Justin picked up the green one first, his tentacles already honed around him and prepared to strike.

  CRACK

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  He snapped the vial in his hands, watching as the slime that emerged once again fell onto the rock and drifted away from him and started to collect in a corner.

  This time, instead of letting the goop fall against the rock wall, he confined it to a smaller area by sacrificing his tentacles to keep it within a smaller space.

  Surprisingly enough, he didn’t feel any different when the gelatin touched him this time.

  SISSSSHHH

  Justin’s eyes widened. Thanks to the auditory clue more so than the dim lighting, he was able to understand what was happening.

  ‘It's acidic, just like the last one, but it's only able to dig through the rock below it. Could it be less potent than the previous specimen?’

  Justin thought about it for a second before dismissing that idea.

  He was no scientist, but the longer one continued to level up the more opportunities they had to learn certain things. During one job in his time after just having broken into C-Grade, the guild had taken a job on a planet where the only structure had been an abandoned manufacturing plant and laboratory.

  From that experience he knew that in most laboratory settings experiments were only locked away together when they shared a certain level of standardization. This meant that the green slime’s capabilities shouldn’t be too far from its predecessor.

  ‘Which means the creature from before must have been influenced by another factor. The salt rocks?’

  Justin remembered that clinging to the wall had been the first thing the previous slime had done.

  Could these things use the salt to power themselves up?

  No, it was more likely there was something inside the salt itself, whatever was making the crystals glow must also be enriching the biology of these gelatin creatures, at least the green ones.

  Justin contemplated as the green slime gave up on trying to dissolve through the rock or pass through his enclosure of tentacles. Without the nutrients it sought, it was evidently powerless to scar his flesh.

  With a tremor, Justin watched as its form shifted to another appearance. Far more slowly than his earlier opponent had managed, its surface rose to the height of barely a meter before reaching its limits.

  Cascading lumps of green gel fell down at its formed shoulders, a warbled expression filled its face, and its stubby extremities reached outward.

  ‘If I hadn’t seen the near duplicate of Heinrich, I wouldn’t know what I’m looking at.’

  But he had, and recognized the creature’s crude display for an offensively inaccurate semblance of Harriet.

  It confirmed more than these creature’s ability to wield telepathy, but also see past his surface thoughts.

  They had been designed to read the thoughts of others, to blend in with crudely-fashioned likenesses and the tactical ability to eat through flesh and stone.

  ‘They’re more terrifying than I thought. Its ability to adapt without the immediate requirement of sustenance is hard to believe. I’m lucky my unpreparedness didn’t cost me my life an hour ago.’

  With a hard expression Justin watched as it reached out toward him. He saw no point in communicating with it or letting it writhe about any further, so instead of connecting their mental link Justin clasped his netting of tentacles shut and forcefully scattered the gel inside.

  Having his suspicions confirmed and then some, he made sure the creature was dead long before moving on to the other vials.

  ‘There’s that feeling again, but no Feat reward this time. Will I be able to trigger it with one of the other colors?’

  It had been for the discovery and vanquishing of a ‘unique’ life form, so Justin supposed that the same color wouldn’t net him anything after a second time.

  Justin set aside the others before taking out the vial of blue liquid.

  He worried that if he wasn’t able to glean the remaining talent from the other colored containers, he was going to run out of options very fast. In that circumstance, he’d have to figure out a way to utilize the talent he did have.

  Before opening the next vial, Justin directed all of his tentacles downward to a spot on the stone.

  It was clear from the way both greens had acted, that whoever had worked in this laboratory ship had engineered these things to kill. He had been able to deal with the green ones, but he had no idea what to expect from the rest.

  He posed himself favorably just in case.

  CRACK

  SPLAT

  A light blue blob fell onto the platform with a dense thud. Its viscous form refused to flow outward as it was exposed to the cave’s atmosphere.

  Justin hesitantly prodded it with a tentacle, before realizing that he could hardly move further into the creature’s body without exerting himself. He was pleased to know that there was no feeling of acidity however, and the stone below it remained undamaged.

  ‘Is that it? I don’t see evidence of its telepathy either…oh.’

  Before Justin could doubt it too much, the gelatin started to rise in a familiar fashion as the previous two had. Justin watched it gain arms, a face, and sharp features before he quickly made the decision to scatter it.

  BAM!

  A tentacle swatted at the slime’s head, but was immediately stopped in the air. Unable to move, Justin wore a shocked expression as he witnessed how his extremity had become embedded within the creature.

  ‘Heyah!’

  Justin exerted himself this time, powering through the dense gel and slamming its head across the stone. That did the trick, splattering its vibrant blue gel across the cave’s wall.

  Before it could potentially regenerate like the first green one had been able to do, Justin did the same thing to its torso with a downward slash. Almost requiring him to invest his stock of attribute points into strength, he was able to clear the rest of the gelatin away before it could fight back.

  ‘Damn, I thought the starfish had been dense!’

  The potential these creatures could display just moments after emerging was frightening, Justin thought.

  From that little exchange, he was able to surmise that the category of blue had its priority in defense.

  His tentacles had felt slower and impeded upon making contact with its flesh, which gave credence to the fact that their specialization likely lay in shock absorption, or physical resistance.

  ‘That, and it's telepathic like the greens.’

  It had been attempting to transform before Justin had made its move, which again worried him about the possibility of the other mutant beasts sharing this trait.

  ‘Though without the salt’s energies, or properties, or whatever these things seek, it was a half finished job like before. It tried, but in no world would that thing have passed for Markus.’

  Yet Justin could hardly feel confident. In just the one room alone, there had been over two hundred of these creatures stored.