The Severity scale turned out to be much harder to make than previously anticipated.

  No matter what it thought might be the cause for the unpredictability of the Advanced Problematic Organ, another monster always proved it wrong.

  It got to the point that the only conclusion it could come to is that it simply didn't know enough to form a concrete hypothesis.

  Why did the Horned Rabbit suffer less than a Muscle Bear? Logically a Muscle Bear should have more in common with a human but that didn't seem to be the case in this particular situation.

  Truly the Unknown was the bane of The Core's existence, although it still preferred the fruitless experiments over the constant monotony of reworking the dungeon over and over again.

  Although it couldn't call the experiment completely fruitless as when put into a fruit tree it causes a sudden and explosive increase of fruit production before killing the plant.

  While The Core was looking over its list of available monsters to see what it might have missed, in case it repeated the blueprint mishap, it remembered something while looking at the design of a Foliage Shaper.

  It didn't check what changes the eaten Qi might have brought to the monster.

  The sudden revelation didn't involve any feelings of urgency in The Core, all the experiments it did before pointed at Mana being more volatile than Qi, why should that be any different this time?

  So it glanced at its 5th floor not expecting to see anything too out of ordinary.

  And it was proven right, what it saw was exactly what it thought it should see.

  The Foliage Shaper covering the ground and a few Trees. She seemed to have grown significantly over the course of the time that passed since she ate the Invader but that was a cause for celebration not concern. Although the Trees covered with vines seemed to be completely withered. The Core needed to replace them after its conversation with the floor boss.

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  It contacted the monster to see if she felt anything different as it couldn't sense Qi so if it was wrecking chaos in the monster's body or merely causing her the equivalent of a stomach-ache it wouldn't know.

  The answer it got was concerning, for The Foliage Shaper didn't respond at all.

  It tried again only to be met with failure.

  After repeated tries, with each one being more frantic than the last as The Core could sense that its monster was alive but for some reason wasn't obeying commands, did it finally receive a reply.

  It was filled with images of what exactly was happening within The Foliage Shapers body over the course of absorbing Qi, something the monster wouldn't have been able to sense before nor send it to The Core as an answer with this much detail.

  Apparently the Qi within the plant began to go wild sometime after its consumption so the Foliage Shaper made it join Mana within her energy circulatory system to neutralize further damage, however every time she tried to focus on something else it would begin to leave and she was forced to only concentrate on it until the act became second nature.

  After that she began to realise that she couldn't passively feed off of the dungeons mana nor could she contact The Core as she did before.

  The only reason the Foliage Shaper could do so now was because she clumsily copied what The Core did moments before and it was also open to such communication, not to mention the shortened distance.

  Bombarded with this new information The Core could only focus on how the Qi seemed to react in a similar pattern to Mana when faced with an organism adapted to the other energy before The Foliage Shaper asked for more plants or, rather, food.

  With no problems The Core revitalised the dead trees as that was easier to do than creating new ones within this limited space, showing that it still had complete control over the room and thus, indeed, the qi must have been the problem.

  The Core tried to ask further about the process of incorporating Qi into the monster's body but was met with silence as she didn't hear it.

  This begged the question as to why this lack of communication was happening.

  With the Lined Human even though it wasn't a member of its dungeon it could still communicate comfortably, even using the exact same technique that it did today.

  There must be some kind of fundamental difference that it was missing between the two encounters.

  Maybe the Lined Human didn't possess Qi? Or was it because a human's style of communication was different from a Foliage Shaper?

  But as The Foliage Shaper ate all the remaining life-force of the trees forcing The Core to revitalize them once again it decided to save these questions for later and instead focus on finding a reliable method of communication between itself and one of its monsters.