“General Song is—.”
Morgan began to speak, planning on listing out everything he knew about General Song’s abilities and Skills; however, the Basilisk King quickly shook his head.
The Professor was taken aback, first because he was surprised that this wasn’t the information Sylas wanted, and second because this beast had picked up on the fact that it wasn’t what its master needed so quickly as well.
This was the smartest creature he had ever come across, and for a moment, the scholarly side of Morgan almost geeked out. What he did best was study peculiar minds, and a mind like the Basilisk King had him on edge.
However, he quickly realized the situation they were in and that there wasn’t much time. If he was correct, Kael would certainly report this, and though it was easy enough to bullshit a rookie without much experience, he knew enough about General Song to know the stoic man didn’t have the mind of the meathead one might expect from him.
‘If not that, then…’ Morgan’s pupils sharpened. ‘… Could he see through that already? But how could he possibly take advantage of that?’
Sylas was correct; Morgan’s role here wasn’t simple.
The truth was that his role as a studier of neurodivergence in humans was almost a side project, though it would still be inaccurate to describe it as such.
He was a psychologist, psychiatrist, and, oddly enough, a linguistics expert. His real specialty was in studying the changes of the human mind over the course of history, with a focus specifically on the extremes of the spectrum.
In the infancy of his career, he was focused on things like depression and why there seemed to be an uptick in it despite the fact that by objective metrics, quality of life was increasing. But that led him down an interesting rabbit hole.
For his second PhD, he actually posited that the uptick in depression was due to the overall increase in human IQ. The greater the self-awareness and self-introspection, the ironically more susceptible to such things people became. He remembered that he had given it a particularly click-baity title as well, annoyed by the backlash he had been getting.
“Humans Were Better Off Dumb,” he called it.
Well, it was safe to say that he wasn’t very popular for those ideas, and his studies, though having some foundation, remained quite fringe. However, the idea still stuck with him, and he burrowed further into the rabbit hole until he stumbled onto neurodivergence.
What was interesting was that he found that while IQ was increasing overall, so too were cases of neurodivergence—though, to be sure, such cases in the past were hard to document. People were more likely to burn such people at the stake than actually study them. But that was why they were so lucky that the Sixth Summoning existed, making it much easier to track.
The reason this was so fascinating to Morgan was because IQ could be changed and even gamed in a way. You could quite easily train someone to boost their IQ score a few percentage points. Though you couldn’t put them in an entirely new bracket, it was easy enough to say that the general increase in IQ was due to better education around the world overall.
In fact, you could even track better IQ back to better living conditions and nutrition.
This was an important distinction. Because while training, nutrition, and living conditions could tick your IQ up a few points… it didn’t make any sense for it to create more neurodivergent people.
Logically speaking, neurodivergent existences—absolute geniuses who broke molds others couldn’t fathom, the Isaac Newtons and Nikola Teslas of the world—couldn’t be created just because of better living conditions.
Either you were such an existence, or you weren’t.
Interested in this phenomenon, Morgan began to tie it back to the homogenous mixing of Earth’s genes. Maybe there were more absolute geniuses now because the Human Race had pooled together all of their best traits.
In fact, one of the reasons he became a linguistics expert to begin with was because he wanted to see if it was because everyone spoke the same language now—as opposed to in the past where there were hundreds of them—that knowledge was simply passed from country to country more smoothly and thus allowed for more geniuses to emerge.
It could be said that he was absolutely obsessed with this study. So much so that he seemed to neglect the fact that he could only take it so far because he was one of the neurodivergents he claimed to only study.
This was all to say that when the Celestial Republic ran into a group of aliens that seemed to have set up shop near one of their World Wonders, the top of the list to study this matter was Morgan.
Not only was he a linguistics expert and could decipher their writings and language, but he was also the best suited to comprehending their culture, their thought processes, and how those two things would inform their decisions.
The reason he was called to the battlefield today, then, was obvious. General Song thought that there might be a chance that this Planar Convergence Gate situation was related to these aliens that they had detected the existence of. If it came down to it, Morgan being here might be the difference between them being wiped out or not.
But that was precisely why it was hard to fathom how knowing this would help Sylas. Even Morgan and the others hadn’t quite figured everything out yet, and they had yet to make contact with these aliens. It was just that a member of the Celestial Republic, even higher up than Morgan and General Song, had already confirmed that they must exist.
Even with his intelligence, Morgan really couldn’t figure out how any of this would be of help to Sylas.
However, that only made his eyes light up with more fervor.
He really wanted to see what kind of brain Sylas had.
