"Yeah, I saw those natives you mentioned here too, meow."
After meeting the village's natives under Shalmeow's guidance and gathering information, Xie Wen knew his own limitations well enough to contact Ai Haibara Meow, who was still at the Royal Palace.
It was worth mentioning that, to avoid displeasing Xie Wen, Shiki had taken the initiative to withdraw the Surveillance Den Den Mushi patrolling the village once he discovered that Xie Wen and the others had arrived there.
Even if he had not withdrawn them, though, it would not have made much difference. Xie Wen and the others had merely shared some food with the sallow, emaciated natives and had said nothing about any plans to turn against him.
"The feathers on their arms-or wings, to be precise-should be some kind of incomplete evolution brought on by consuming IQ, meow."
Ai Haibara Meow gave a reasoned analysis over the Den Den Mushi. "The effect of a plant like IQ is essentially to make organisms evolve in the direction of their own needs. More precisely, it's an accelerator that compresses evolution that would originally take thousands or tens of thousands of years into a few hundred, or even just a few decades, meow."
"And according to those natives, this island is a mountaintop taken off a cylindrical mountain, so the natives must all have really wanted to go down and see what was below. Naturally, that would make them want to fly like birds. The native maids here with me have all said things like 'I want to fly' and 'I want to become a bird,' meow."
"But compared to the animals that actively eat IQ, these humans have never used IQ as a regular food source, only as an antidote to Daft-Green. That made their evolution much slower than the