Perfect Assimilation: Evolution of a Shapeshifting Slime!

Invention solves the limitation of a trait...

These heavy words spoken by Instructor Argenta affected Ayla far more than any other students currently sitting inside the lecture hall.

Before stepping into this higher world, she had always firmly believed that a person’s absolute growth highly depended on their traits and rarity of their traits.

To her primitive monster logic, the definitive heights a ranker could ever reach were completely locked by the system definitions of those traits.

That was the exact reason why she had always been so obsessed with hunting high tier monsters and obtaining high level traits from their brain.

Well, it’s true she also liked to devour brain’s...

She had genuinely thought that only that way could she continue to become more powerful and stay ahead of anyone.

Because of this rigid mindset, there were many lower tier traits inside her system status screen that she simply never tried to study or practice with, just leaving them sitting in the dark corners of her soul container like a pile of exotic treasures that had no immediate combat use.

However, right now, she was suddenly presented with a much wider, terrifying reality.

Invention...

Instructor Argenta’s rest of the classes were entirely focused on explaining the mechanics behind this second evolutionary step.

Apparently, according to the system laws of the higher world, everyone was completely free to have as much as inventions as they could possibly dream up inside their minds.

The system grid did not put a restriction on imagination. But the main problem was execution.

To actually execute those mental concepts and turn them into functional combat skills in the real plane, only a very small number of exceptionally talented people could ever do so.

"Even if you know logically that you can use the Fire element to create Ice by reversing the flow of thermal energy," Instructor Argenta’s cold silver gaze drifted across the desks, reaching all the way to the back row where she locked onto Ayla once more.

"Not many individuals inside this division could actually do so. If any of you currently possess fire element control, try it right now."

After her clear words echoed through the amphitheater, many of the proud students from the higher races immediately closed their eyes and tried to copy the process.

Red fire mana sparked across dozens of desks as the geniuses strained their minds, trying to force their flames to absorb warmth and create ice just like Ayla had done with the apple.

But within a few seconds, all of them failed completely.

The fire mana either exploded in loud pops or fizzled out into gray smoke, unable to hold the reversed concept. This total failure made the surrounding students glance back toward Ayla’s direction once more.

Their previous mocking expressions changed considerably, replaced by a deep trace of shock and unadulterated caution.

They finally realized that the small blue ball of jelly sitting in the back row possessed a level of conceptual control that completely surpassed their own bloodline talents.

Ayla hid all her inner thoughts and paid absolutely no attention to their staring eyes.

Her mind was currently completely filled with a chaotic soup of countless ideas and tactical pathways that she had never once considered during her time in the lower mortal planes.

When the introductory class officially ended for the day, all of the students from the Lower planes were left sitting in a deep, stunned trance.

Their traditional understanding of system skills had been completely shattered into pieces.

While the students who originated from the Ascendant plane weren’t as completely in a daze like them because they had heard rumors of these concepts before, they still looked highly serious as they managed to pack their items and leave the classroom.

Ayla too left the classroom earlier than the rest of the group. She rolled off the table and wobbled toward the exit doors before the main crowd could move.

Even though many of the nearby alien students tried to approach her coordinates to introduce themselves or make an acquaintance with the direct system recruit, she slithered past them with absolute speed, leaving the amphitheater without giving them a single chance to utter a word.

The moment she successfully reached the secure safety of her new accommodation room, Ayla rolled onto the soft white mattress.

She didn’t waste a single second. She focused her mind and immediately summoned her official status screen to review her entire biological layout.

Name: Ayla

Race: Mimic Slime

Rank: Silver Rank

Core: Apocalypse Silver Metal Core

Bone Fragment: Twin Lens of the Weaver

Vessel (1): Eight-Winged Goddess

Vessel Classification: Apocalypse

Traits: Perfect Assimilation, Emotion Weaver (Legendary-SSS+), Death Looper (Legendary-S+), Eight-Wing Transformation (Epic-A), Bloodnet (Rare-B+), Abyssal Shadow Blink (Rare-A+), Corrosive Abyssal Fluid (Rare-A+), Earth Armor (Rare-A+), Gale Acceleration (Rare-A+), Sonic Shriek (Rare-A+), Iron Grip Tendrils (Rare-A+), Abyssal Camouflage (Rare-A+), Venomous Barb Extraction (Rare-A+), Grounded Gravity Shell (Rare-A+), Vampiric Devouring (Rare-A+), Feathered Flight Matrix (Rare-A+), Thermal Vision (Rare-A+), Regenerative Cell Reset (Rare-A+), Steel Claw Transformation (Rare-A+), Emptiness (Rare-A+), Pyromancy (Common-C), Iron Will (Common-C), Wind Walker (Common-C), Life Link (Common-C), Earth Bind (Common-D), Bone Density (Common-D), Body Enhancement (Common-E)

Available Forms: Form 001: Human [Equipped], Form 002: Bloodnet Spider, Form 003: Goblin, Form 004: Hobgoblin, Form 005: Eight-Winged Bat, Form 006: Eyes of the Weaver, Form 007: Celestial, Form 008: Shadow Cat, Form 009: Wind-Rider Falcon, Form 010: Phantom Panther, Form 011: Subterranean Viper, Form 012: Voidling

Ayla stared intently at the long, cluttered rows of text displaying her massive arsenal of skills. If she could actually invent a proper way through Instructor Argenta’s logic, she could potentially incorporate all of these separate, messy traits into a single master framework.

She could fuse them like a unified ultimate technique without ever needing to constantly change her physical forms every single time she wanted to show off a specific racial ability.

Wouldn’t that massive consolidation increase her current combat strength further more than before?

Currently, her Voidling form combined with her Emptiness trait was by far her most powerful and reliable tool in battle.

That extreme dominance remained a concrete fact despite those specific traits not being that much high quality or rarity compared to her legendary SSS-rank trait.

The only reason they performed so exceptionally well in life or death situations was entirely because of the absolute void property attached to the Voidling biology and the Emptiness domain.

The void did not care about standard human armor or elemental resistance because it simply erased whatever it touched.

Ayla’s golden eyes sparkled with a wild predatory heat inside her translucent fluid. If she could use the step of invention to discover and pull out powerful hidden properties from her other low tier or mid tier traits, wouldn’t their destructive strength too reach the absolute level of the Void?

Perhaps, if she executed the concepts perfectly, they could even reach a level that was higher and more broken than the void itself.

Ayla shifted her weight on the white sheets and decided to try the invention process right now.

She carefully chose Emotion Weaver as her primary test subject, because this specific trait was her second most powerful asset based on raw system rating.

This legendary trait mastered entirely on the manipulation of minds and consciousness.

The most common, direct emotions that she usually dealt with whenever she encountered humans or beasts were happiness, sadness, frustration, and intense excitement.

What was there left for her to actually invent within this emotional matrix?

In its standard, unevolved template form, this trait simply allowed her to forcefully change these existing emotions on other people as she wished, making them fall into despair or become paralyzed with fake joy during a fight.

Or simply control them with her bone fragment.

But for that specific system conversion to happen smoothly, the targeted being needed to possess an active, functioning emotion at the very start of the process.

If there was no base material to weave, the trait could not lock onto the target. Ayla had already faced some extremely weird beings who completely lacked standard emotions during her previous timeline regressions.

The cosmic Voidling was an excellent example of this cold anatomy, and so was the original ancient owner of the Emotion Weaver trait itself.

That structural limitation meant that Emotion Weaver alone was completely defendable by certain high tier entities.

Because not all creatures in the infinite universe needed to have an emotion inside their brains for her to manipulate.

Not having an emotion.....

Ayla thought deeply about the phrase, her round blue body rolling slightly to the edge of the mattress as she focused her logical processing power.

Wasn’t the absolute state of not having any internal emotions the exact equivalent of the Void?

What would actually happen to a living human being or an alien ranker if they suddenly didn’t possess any emotions inside their consciousness at all?

Rather than wasting her mana trying to change or swap their existing feelings from sadness to happiness, what if she used the indirect property of the trait to completely erase their emotions altogether?

If a warrior was fighting her with an intense, burning rage, she wouldn’t just make them calm. She would systematically delete their capacity to feel anything.

A person who completely lacked emotion would lose their survival instinct, their fear of death, and their will to swing their sword.

They would become a blank, empty husk that simply stood still in the dirt, completely indifferent to whether they lived or died.

An intense, bubbling excitement started to grow rapidly inside Ayla as this broken conceptual idea simply formed in her mind.

She realized that by reversing the weaving process, she could turn her legendary psychological trait into a terrifying erasing tool that functioned exactly like her Emptiness domain.

She didn’t need to change into her ugly Voidling form to erase things anymore. She could just look at an enemy, wipe away their mind’s internal color, and leave them as a dead shell for her to eat.

"This is how I will build my own technique," Ayla muttered happily to herself, her blue jelly body letting out a series of joyful ripples as she prepared to test the new invention on the training room walls.