[Requirements not met; you cannot make your 16th floor before killing at least 100 sapient invaders]
Looking at the system notification that The Core knew would be there but was also secretly hoping wasn’t, it decided to do something with the time it had before invaders showed up.
With its current expansion finished, it had two options that it thought of before: it could do the hard versions of its current floorset, the ones for the stronger invaders, so that it always had the upper hand, although as of now it never needed that, or return to experimenting with Qi—something that it had neglected recently due to the new, exciting changes it could implement in its dungeon.
A quick decision was made: it wanted to finally make its humans useful, and for that, it needed to know how their original energy source worked so that it could modify them accordingly. After all, what use were monsters that it couldn't utilize?
It decided to use the swordsman blueprint for this experiment since it was already familiar with it. Staring at it, The Core looked closely at his energy circulation system to find the problem it thought was there. The major difference it did now, compared to before, was that it zoomed in so closely it could see the cells. If the energy circulation system looked the same from a distance but functioned differently, then the divergence must be small.
Of course, to properly compare, it had to summon a blueprint of a regular mana circulation system, as it didn't know how that one looked up close. It didn't choose one from a humanoid monster, believing it irrelevant, as the cells adapted to mana were the same no matter the shape of the body; it chose the first one that it saw. The way the vessels ran was the major difference that one had to account for, and it didn't need that at the moment.
The comparison revealed a surprising contrast that it really should have checked before, but it just didn't think of the energy circulation cells being different, even though the energy they dealt with was.
The cells that made up the energy circulation system of the human were much weaker; they weren’t meant to keep the energy in. Rather, the human’s will was required for that. It must have helped with casting spells, but it meant that one wrong move, a slip of concentration, and the whole thing got shredded by the energy it was meant to contain.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
A mana circulation system’s cells, on the other hand, were harder and also shaped in a way that prevented the energy from turning around, similar to the blood circulation system which helped spread the energy all over the body. The drawback of that was that it made casting spells a much harder affair.
The biological differences were made such that if one were to force one form of energy into a container made for another without proper preparations, the vessel would undoubtedly die, as was proven through its previous experiments.
The proper preparation mentioned was, of course, willpower. The very thing that was keeping qi at bay within their invader counterparts, which a newly created human monster might potentially have, but unless they knew what to do immediately after creation, would be unable to utilize.
This meant that when The Core put mana into a Qi circulation system, there was nothing that was capable of keeping it in place and moving in one direction, resulting in it dispersing through the body, ending in its death.
It didn't know how the Problematic Organ related to any of this since no mana-based body had anything similar for it to compare to, nor could it manipulate or even see Qi to perceive for itself what it did. It could have been used for storing or absorbing Qi, if the weaker cells of the circulation system didn’t allow for active absorption when the living being willed it.
There was also the issue with it being half physical and half in the soul realm, something that was unheard of for organs before it, at least in The Core's knowledge. It would be easy to just hand it over to The Foliage Sharper, but The Core was worried that something would go wrong and the only Qi-having monster in its dungeon would die, leaving it with no choice but to get another one.
With the comparison in its mind complete, The Core decided to get to work on modifying the unsuitable circulation system in a way that would leave the human in usable condition.
What it did was simply change the cells from Qi cells to mana cells. It didn't transplant an entire mana circulation system from a humanoid monster because previous tests showed that humans had the nasty habit of dying without their Problematic Organ, and anything other than them simply didn’t have it.
With the easy task done, it finalized the creation of the monster, waiting with both nervousness and unease as to what would happen next. The answer, as it turned out, was for the monster to live. There was no death; its hypothesis was proven true, and it finally could use humans as viable monsters!
