Dimensional Descent

Leonel asked the question that had been on the tip of his tongue for the longest time instantly, not holding back at all.

[ *Ping* ]

[ Replying to Seed, yes. ]

"How does it clone creatures?"

[ *Ping* ]

[ Replying to Seed, the creature clones by… ]

"Stop, stop." Leonel shook his head.

The dictionary had begun going on a long rant about the biological process that the tentacle womb underwent. Clearly, Leonel's question wasn't specific enough.

"Let's try… What do I need to give this tentacle womb in order to clone… Little Blackstar?"

Leonel didn't really have intentions of cloning Little Blackstar because he felt it would be a bit weird. But, after hearing the response, he realized that it was naïve of him to an extreme to even believe he could.

[ *Ping* ]

[ … ]

[ 1 283 490 985 Units ]

At first Leonel was confused. But, after several probing questions he came to understand the a 'Unit' in this context was the equivalent of one complete Beast Crystal. That meant that for this tentacle womb to clone Little Blackstar as it was presently constructed, it would need over a billion 'Units' of Little Blackstar.

Leonel soon came to understand that this was because of the Void Beast blood that Little Blackstar had ingested. But, even if this blood was ignored, according to the dictionary, it would still take 1 983 Units to clone Little Blackstar.

Leonel could only be left speechless by this.

For one, the value of Void Beast Blood had suddenly become very obvious to him. There was actually such a large gap between the value of Little Blackstar alone, even as a Shadow Sovereign, and just a vial of its Blood… Not even its Beast Crystal!

And secondly, he realized that just a beast as talented as Little Blackstar required almost 2000 Units alone.

"Hold on…" Leonel suddenly realized that he had forgot something important. "What's the amount of energy the tentacle womb would need to produce one Little Blackstar?"

Leonel almost didn't want to hear the answer, but when he did, he felt his body go numb. He had thought that the needs of the Silver Tablet were already ridiculous, but this tentacle womb made it look like child's play. Even if Leonel killed all the oceanic creatures Earth had to offer the amount wouldn't be enough.

Leonel shook his head. He hadn't considered one other thing as well.

This was all theoretical. Just because the dictionary calculated that the tentacle womb would need this amount, that didn't mean that the tentacle womb would survive swallowing such an amount. In fact, Leonel's next question confirmed this perfectly.

'So that's how it is. As of right now, the womb's limit is producing Fifth Dimensional creatures it needs to consume 13 Units to reproduce. If I tried to make it clone a creature worth 14 Units, it wouldn't be able to ingest it properly and would even end up hurting itself.

'It's no wonder the creatures it cloned were so small and weak comparatively speaking, that's its limit. The Swordfish was worth about 3 or 4 Units at most.

'The question becomes, then, how do you find creatures close enough in identity to count as Units of one another…'

This was the next problem Leonel ran into. These so-called 'Units' implied that you needed to swallow creatures that were nearly identical in species and ability. But, how was such a thing possible to find? Even among those sharing the same species, their abilities could vary wildly.

Even if this tentacle womb could handle cloning Blackstar and Leonel was willing to do it, the current Leonel only had one 'Unit' of Little Blackstar and didn't even know where else he would find another Shadow Sovereign Mink. How the hell would he even start this journey? It made no sense.

But, clearly, there was something he was missing, or else how had the tentacle womb created so many swordfish? Was there really a school of identical swordfish out there? What was he missing exactly…?

At that moment, Leonel's gaze suddenly sharpened as he thought of something.

After a series of pointed questions and inquiries, he landed on the response he wanted and his eyes glowed with understanding. The conclusion? Though this tentacle womb had a limit of 13 Units, the truth was that it could mostly only produce creatures worth between 3 to 5 Units.

The reason for this was simple.

Rather than absorbing multiple Units of the same creature, something that would be impossible, the tentacle womb instead swallowed up powerful creatures and then segmented their abilities into smaller Units to create these weaker level creatures.

So, say for example the tentacle womb swallowed up a creature worth 10 Units. It was impossible that it would find nine more exact types of this creature with the same genetic code and ability. So, instead of doing this, it would parse this creature into smaller parts.

Because the original creature was innately worth more to begin with, its smaller parts were able to cover all the Units these weaker creatures would need to be produced to begin with!

To put this in the simplest terms possible, the swordfish that Leonel had fought earlier likely came from a more powerful King Swordfish. Unable to reproduce this King Swordfish, the tentacle womb instead divided the King Swordfish up so that it would be worth multiple Units of the weaker creature it eventually came to represent.

'I understand… So, if this tentacle womb were to, hypothetically, absorb Little Blackstar, the creatures it would produce would be several weaker versions of Little Blackstar instead…'

Leonel's gaze glowed brighter and brighter as he thought of this, his thoughts spinning as one idea after another popped into his head. He thought of everything from using the blue whale dwarfing crocodile's corpse to create an army of living water guns all the way up to just what kind of monster this tentacle womb would be if he one day strengthened it enough that even giving birth to Void Beasts was no longer impossible.

Leonel understood now just how important this tentacle womb would have been to Simeon. If it was paired with the latter's genetic modification ability… It would be like giving wings to a tiger.

'I guess that favor can really be considered to be repaid…'

Leonel took a deep breath and didn't get ahead of himself. Just the birth of a single creature took a ridiculous amount of energy. Why else would the tentacle womb pair up with this golden scaled koi fish…?

That said… Wasn't that fish still right here?

Leonel's gaze shifted toward the frozen koi fish, still looking as beautiful as ever. He even almost fell into another trance.

"Dictionary, how many Units would cloning this guy take?"

Leonel was curious. Was Little Blackstar or this little guy better?