'Honestly speaking my first thought was some sort of elder at it's center but I honestly have no clue why it is so strange.' Alex said honestly. "We also thought it might be some sort of elder but after checking we found nothing other than a few interesting subspecies." the admiral said with a scratch of his head. "Nothing for it I suppose. Lets move on to the next order of business , this false appearance you are wearing." the commander said to Alex who looked away awkwardly. "Drop the look , we need to know what you actually look like for the records." the man was having none of it however.-
'Ugh , I hate my new appearance as it doesn't suit me at all.' Alex said but did as ordered returning to his flawless white coloration. "Whew! Now that's quite the sight to see." the admiral said with a whistle after seeing Alex's appearance. He couldn't be blamed as Alex was a stark white that shone brightly in the sun while also drawing attention to the red star shaped birthmark on his forehead and eyes. "So you did turn fully white like was theorized , looks like we'll need a new title for your species." the commander said with a small smile.-
Alex turned back to his "normal" black coloration 'I would rather you not do that if I am being totally honest.' he said seriously. "Not much say in the matter I'm afraid , guilds the ones who choose but I can send your request to them." the admiral said with a shrug. After that Alex finally entered astera properly and looked around at the new things. The next three days were mostly filled with him getting hounded by the handler to go hunt the super strong monsters of the guiding lands for her to eat.-
The reason she wanted him to do it was because while Zane could certainly hunt there he couldn't get the corpses back to astera thanks to the mountain range between the guiding lands and the rest of the new world. Alex on the other hand could still fly quite quickly despite the added weight of the hunted monsters making him perfect to get her some new food choices. He obviously did not do this since first that was a lot of effort for basically no benefit of his own and secondly he wanted to hunt the other subspecies that had popped up first such as the ebony odogaron.-
He did too as he systematically started to fill out his list of hunted monsters three per day for these three days. He gained a couple new traits from it as well , [Acidic poison] from the acidic glavenus , [fungal decay] from the black veil val hazok and [bioluminescence] from the namielle he found in the coral highlands. Two of them were easy to understand while the [fungal decay] trait was rather misleading in that it had nothing to do with decay at all.-
In truth it basically allowed Alex to control and create fugal spores within his body to do something or another if he wished. He immediately knew that he would basically never use this trait as first he had no intention of looking like the monster he got it from with rampant fungal growth all over him. Second he couldn't think of a purpose that would require fungus that he couldn't accomplish in some other manner. [Bioluminescence] was a rather fun trait to play with however as he developed special veins under his scales that allowed him to activate it in a rainbow of colors.-
He even found that he could form shapes with the light the trait produced even if they were rough so he basically spent all of his free time when not hunting toying around with these shapes. So far he had managed to get a crude snake to float across his whole body but that was basically the height of his designs at the moment. Finally the time came when Zane managed to track down the rajang snapping kirin horns in the guiding lands and Alex joined the hunt to test his might against the monster.