Lohan felt a deep shock upon realizing what had happened to Pip.
He hadn’t expected that a native creature, one who wasn’t a Player, could progress through the experience system in such an explicit way!
Ever since he’d met natives of this world like Aeliana, Lohan had discovered that their progression was completely different from that of Players, depending on real, natural progression through slow training and depending on the potential of their own body.
If a person didn’t have good potential, even reaching Level 11 in a lifetime would be an almost impossible task, let alone rising to a high level like 50.
That’s why people like Yrneha, who had reached extremely high levels, even if only after centuries or millennia of progress, were so valued and revered by the people of this world.
Unlike Players, they depended entirely on themselves to progress.
But now, Lohan had seen a different path for this!
Maybe the fact that Pip had previously been fused with the Beetle Queen’s essence, or the constant nourishment from Lohan’s natural energy, or him having joined a guild of Players, or Lohan’s living armor had attracted the experience and instinctively shared it with Pip’s body, breaking his biological limitations.
There were so many possibilities for this that it would be very hard for Lohan to figure out the reason right now, but he definitely had to find out.
If every native of this world who joined a Guild could progress like a Player, the power dynamics of this world would shift onto a path far more dangerous than Lohan had initially imagined.
But if this was something exclusive to Pip because of what he’d been through, or something only a few Players like Lohan could provide to natives of this world through some special skill, the advantage Lohan would have would be even greater!
’If I openly announce, or semi-openly announce, that our guild is capable of letting people from this world progress like Players, we won’t even need to focus only on recruiting Players... among the billions, or trillions, of natives in this world, a huge portion of them would definitely want to join us!’
The journey continued.
Over the following hours, Pip flew toward Silver Lotus’s territory, running into a few other smaller monsters along the way.
Lohan took the chance to test Pip’s capability, letting the fairy handle most of the fights, trying to figure out the reason behind his progress.
And the discovery turned out even better than Lohan had imagined.
Lohan had Pip fight in several different ways, fighting with Lohan just protecting him, fighting with Lohan attached without interfering at all, or fighting alone without Lohan nearby, and the only way Pip gained experience was with Lohan actively contributing to the combat, as if signaling to the world that he had fought and that the experience from that enemy’s death should belong to him.
With this "signaling," when the monster died, the experience really did go to Lohan’s clone body, and his close contact with Pip was what allowed a large portion, around 50% of the experience gained, to go to Pip, who somehow was also recognized as a contributor to the fight.
This meant two things, the first is that fortunately the other 99% of guilds wouldn’t be able to make natives of this world more powerful, the second piece of news is that unfortunately other Players with unique traits like Lohan’s could do something similar.
The problem they’d run into would be the efficiency of it, since it would be hard for Players with such unique traits, whether being small or bonding symbiotically with another being, to also have the ability to clone themselves like Lohan!
Lohan wouldn’t need to slow down his own development to let others gain experience! All he had to do was create dozens of clones and dozens of people could gain experience while he earned a share of it "while barely doing anything," and his main body would still stay independent.
’Looking at it this way, instead of hurting or slowing me down, I can put my clones with several natives, they’ll do the work of hunting the monsters and even while barely doing anything, I’ll gain 50% of these people’s experience! Instead of slowing down my development to let natives progress, they’ll actually be helping me with an insane Power Leveling!!’ Lohan thought, growing more and more excited.
And as he digested the carcass of a monster Pip had killed, Lohan realized that not only would he gain experience, he could also gain Biomass and new Evolutions from the monsters hunted by these people!
Although he hadn’t managed to gain any new abilities from those low genetic potential creatures Pip killed afterward, Pip kept steadily growing in power and confidence.
Watching Pip’s effort and wanting to test the limits of this evolution, Lohan decided to seriously invest in the little guardian’s future.
Using the Weaver Mother’s trait, Lohan began injecting half of all the biomass he gained from digesting those monsters directly into Pip’s core.
The sensation for Pip was indescribable.
He felt as though he were diving into a hot spring of pure energy every second. Not only did he feel stronger at the end of every battle because of the experience absorbed, but his muscles grew denser and his Mana became more refined under the touch of the vitality Lohan injected through the biomass digested from each monster!
Lohan, on the other hand, noticed that Pip was approaching a critical point. The fairy was about to break through a bottleneck, probably the barrier to cross from a Level 10 creature to Level 11!
Knowing how important this evolution was for anyone, Lohan grew excited for Pip.
"Master Halon, Pip feels like Pip’s heart is going to burst with joy! Pip has never felt this strong!" the fairy laughed, pulling off aerial maneuvers with much more ease than when they’d left the Guild, showing that he wasn’t just progressing in raw power, but that with his growing confidence, Pip’s mastery over his own abilities was also becoming greater!
Seeing Pip practically bursting with happiness and excitement over the rapid progress he was making, Lohan simply laughed, unable to reply to the little boy since he couldn’t speak at that distance from the guild.