A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World by acaswell

Category: Original

Genre: Action, Adventure, Fantasy, Female Lead, GameLit, High Fantasy, LitRPG, Magic, Mystery, Portal Fantasy / Isekai, Progression, Strategy

Status: Stub

Published: 2021-03-23

Updated: 2023-10-21

Packaged: 2023-10-27 22:10:37

Warnings: Graphic Violence, Profanity, Sensitive Content

Chapters: 93

Words: 353,761

Publisher: www.royalroad.com

Summary:

Alice is a girl who loves science and lives on Earth. Then, suddenly, she was punted into another dimension. A dimension where magic and monsters roam the land, and, for some reason, a System keeps dinging at her and telling her that her stats and levels are increasing. As someone who loves exploring mysteries, Alice is determined to get to the bottom of this mystery. After all, everything has to have a ‘cause,’ including the System, right?

(This story is also posted on Royalroad. If you see this story anywhere besides Royalroad, Scribblehub, KU, or Patreon it has been stolen).

What to expect: This story is going to be a LitRPG set in a fantasy world. However, unlike many LitRPG’s, the system has both a definite beginning and definite limits to what it is able to accomplish – rather than a singularly omnipotent, omniscient being that is tied to the laws of the world, the way systems are usually presented in LitRPG’s, the system is close to both, but has definite limits and rules which it operates by.

Note: the rest of volume 1 has been taken down, due to the requirements for the KU program. You can buy the e-book for volume 1 of Budding Scientist using the link below.

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

Or an Audiobook version here.

https://www.audible.com/pd/A-Small-Town-in-Southern-Illvaria-An-Isekai-LitRPG-Audiobook/B0CFRK9ZK7?qid=1692201343&sr=1-1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=83218cca-c308-412f-bfcf-90198b687a2f&pf_rd_r=JJ1BXHB9NTSPP5FPNYXF&pageLoadId=AsHXZmcAq15OGzRW&creativeId=0d6f6720-f41c-457e-a42b-8c8dceb62f2c

Uploads 1 chapter a week

Join my Discord!

https://discord.gg/5f5EAtSzy7

Chapter 1

The night was dark and quiet, with few souls passing through the dark and desolate forest. For most forests, even at night, the area would be teeming with life as animals hunted each other, foraged, and did their best to survive to the next day. However, most of the wildlife that had lived inside of these once-green fields had died or deserted this area.

One of the magically gifted would have noticed something wrong about the mana of the region, the way it rippled and distorted as if it was a healer’s patient struggling in its death throes. But even the non-gifted would be able to see the brown and decaying trees and dead wildlife, hear the eerie silence, and sense the empty feeling of an entire region laying on its deathbed.

And deep within this deserted hellscape wandered a lone girl with brown hair and green eyes, dressed in bright pink and white pajamas decorated with cartoon rabbits and swearing as she tripped over tree roots. Her name was Alice Verianna. She was from Earth, and she had absolutely no idea how she had gotten here.

The last thing she remembered was finishing her homework, eating dinner, chatting with her friends for a while on Discord, and then going to bed. When she woke up, instead of being inside her bedroom walls in the suburbs of Denver, she was in the middle of some godforsaken patch of wilderness. She had been wandering around this area for almost an hour now, and she had yet to see anything besides dead trees.

Alice stumbled over a tree root for the umpteenth time and swore. “Where the heck am I? What happened?” She asked nobody in particular, trying to distract herself from her aching shins and mounting exhaustion. Alice had never been much for the outdoors - she much preferred a jungle of concrete to an actual jungle.

“Am I dreaming?” she wondered, not for the first time in the last hour.

She pinched herself, hoping that perhaps this time she could wake up. Of course, deep down, she had already figured out this was mostly wishful thinking. Human logic tended to be turned off whenever one was asleep, which was why in a dream you could be dancing underwater while riding a unicorn and not find it the slightest bit odd. However, she was fully aware that her circumstances made no sense to her.

Logically, she had gone to sleep in her bed. In no way should the result of the action ‘going to sleep in bed’ result in ‘waking up in the middle of the forest.’ She definitely couldn’t have sleepwalked here: first of all, because she didn’t sleepwalk; and second of all because even if she somehow started sleepwalking last night there would be no way she would make it so far away from her house that she couldn’t find any trace of human civilization at all; and finally, the idea that she had somehow got out of bed, opened the door to her room and walked out, strolled out of the front door of her house, and then merrily wandered out of the city without anyone noticing and stopping her, or hitting her with a car while she walked through the streets asleep was simply absurd.

Pinching herself did nothing except hurt, and so Alice was currently pursuing the art of questioning reality and her life decisions. Truly a mystical art, it allowed her to realize that, indeed, she was still very confused, and no, she wasn’t currently ready to accept the conclusion that she had completely lost her mind. Without such high-level techniques, she likely would have gone insane somewhere around half an hour ago.

Sighing, Alice sat down on a particularly gnarled and thick tree root to catch her breath. Wandering aimlessly didn’t seem to be accomplishing much, so instead of continuing to do so, she needed to take a breath and figure out what was going on.

“All right, fact one. I went to sleep in my bed and woke up in the middle of nowhere. It’s obvious that this couldn’t have occurred naturally, or at least I can’t think of any reasonable way for it to have occurred naturally. Therefore, someone must have moved me here. That person doesn’t appear to be in the vicinity currently, but they must have either been an intruder or my parents.

"I can’t think of any possible reason for my parents to drop me off in the middle of the wilderness at all, especially on a school night, so…” Alice suddenly felt a chill surge through her body. Had she been kidnapped? She occasionally heard news about people being kidnapped from their beds and murdered by serial killers or other loons, but she had always figured the odds of that happening were about on par with winning the lottery - statistically unlikely, and not worth seriously planning around.

Alice looked around much more cautiously than before, fear making her take note of every shadow. Was there a serial killer in the darkness under the tree branch, coming towards her this very second? A moment later, she forced herself to calm her breathing, and began thinking more carefully.

Then, Alice realized that a serial killer kidnapping her didn’t make sense either. If a serial killer had abducted her, where were they? If she was about to be murdered, she figured that the person who abducted her would have at least bothered to make an appearance sometime in the last hour while she had been wandering around. Didn’t serial killers usually tie their victims up in sheds or something before killing them? Letting them wander around around aimlessly was just begging to be caught by the police. Her serial killer theory might be possible if the serial killer had very specific preferences for letting the victim flee before being killed, but it certainly wasn’t plausible.

Maybe one of her classmates was taking a prank way too far? But she couldn’t think of any of her classmates who would take a practical joke anywhere near this far - this was borderline kidnapping, after all. And how would they have gotten into her house in the first place? Her parents wouldn’t have let in one of her classmates in the middle of the night, or let an acquaintance drag her out of the house while she was still asleep.

Alice noticed that her thinking had run into a wall. No matter how she considered the situation, she couldn’t think of any logical explanation for her current situation. There was no single theory that connected all of the dots in a way that conformed to her understanding of reality. No one she knew had any motive to move her to a random patch of wilderness in the middle of nowhere, and she had no idea how someone could have accomplished the feat. She was relatively certain she wasn’t dreaming either, so she… had no idea.

I notice that I am confused. This means something I believe to be true is not actually true. She began running back through her thoughts and ideas, but she couldn’t think of any way that the current events were plausible. As of right now, she was just very confused and very lost.

Alice frowned, and then stood up and began walking again. Since she had no idea where she was, maybe if she kept walking she would bump into someone else who could help her figure out what was going on. Or at least she might reach the edge of the woods, which would help her figure out where she was. This time, she resolved to go in a straight line while looking for something to navigate towards, and kept walking. And walking. And walking.

Finally, after what felt like hours of walking and finding nothing new, Alice ran out of energy and sat down on the dirt again, dead tired, with her feet scratched up from walking around with no shoes, and still just as lost as before. And saw something completely absurd spring up in glowing letters in front of her eyes.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance: 46 -> 47

“What the FUUUUUUUUUCCCKKK.”

Alice felt a moment of total bewilderment, and then began giggling hysterically. Oh, it all made sense now! She was actually insane! First she believed that she had been dropped in the middle of a creepy, silent wilderness when that was obviously ridiculous, and now she was hearing voices in her head telling her that she was in an RPG! Or maybe she had been in a mental hospital for years, or maybe she was in a horrible car crash and she was now in a coma! The nice doctors, seeing that she had turned into a gibbering mess, had then hooked her brain into a virtual reality device from the future! Obviously!

A few minutes later, sanity finally reasserted itself and Alice managed to stop hysterically laughing. She began to reassess her actions and her situation. Even if she was in a coma, or insane, the world around her probably wouldn’t be this… stable, would it? She wasn’t familiar with any studies of coma patients, but this was… probably… not the result of her being in a coma? She also really didn’t want to believe that she was currently dying in a hospital bed.

Which left an option that seemed totally and completely absurd, and only ever appeared in novels, and that made absolutely no sense whatsoever. She was in an alternate world where the laws of reality were fundamentally different. Because that made more sense, obviously!Alice felt an overwhelming urge to kick a nearby tree stump, and began wondering if a stubbed toe would be worth venting her frustrations on mother nature.

“Endurance plus one! What the heck? That doesn’t even make sense! Even supposing alternate dimensions exist which are capable of sustaining life, how the heck would I even get there? Scientists worked for years to figure out how to build basic satellites that can investigate other stars and planets, and a lone human somehow accidentally wanders on her merry way into another planet with no aid or equipment at all? Those scientists clearly worked for nothing if going from one dimension to another is this easy! And even if I got there, why do all of the trees look just like the ones from Earth?

"World, do you even believe in biology? You clearly don’t understand it, so let me tell you that the probability of a planet evolving the exact same flora and fauna as another one is approximately a Bullshit out of 100 chance! Do you even biology, bro? And what the actual fuck is up with this ‘Endurance +1?’ Even if another world exists, are you trying to be a video game? And you speak English? And in the first place, adding a game system onto a planet isn’t just a little blatant disregard for all of the laws of physics like everything else, you’re basically just flipping off reality! Is this supposed to be an alternate dimension or something? I HAVE SO MANY ISSUES WITH THIS SITUATION THAT I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START! What, do I have some sort of status screen too, or-“

At the words ‘status screen,’ glowing blue boxes with black letters appeared in front of her face, as if this world wanted to emphasize even further that no, it did not biology bro. It did not physics either. Unlike biology and physics, this dimension did math, but that was probably it.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 44

Perception: 101

Dexterity: 47

Intelligence: 153

Endurance: 44

Willpower: 118

Charisma: 125

Magic: 0

Primary Classes: 0/5

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes

N/A (0)

Perks:

N/A

Skills

@*#$(%& language proficiency: #$*/1&

Achievements

@#($*^&% #%* $*%$(# @(*%&!)&!#$

There were glowing blue boxes with little numbers hovering in front of her. THERE WERE GLOWING BLUE BOXES WITH LITTLE NUMBERS HOVERING IN FRONT OF HER. Not only was the world apparently intent on informing her that “Endurance had increased by 1,” but now she had also turned into an RPG character! She really hoped there was no demon king or similarly contrived final boss in this world, or some sort of prophecy. If she was supposed to be the ‘chosen one’ who was more at home in her school’s science club than doing any form of physical exercise, she was going to bang her head against a tree until she suffered sufficient brain damage to lapse into a coma, thus hopefully escaping to a dream-world where at least something would make sense to her.

With a thought, her Status Screen closed.

Alice closed her eyes and focused on taking deep breaths. In, out. In, out. In… Gradually, she calmed down and relaxed. There was no way that was real, right? She was just imagining things. There was no way some sort of bizarre RPG system would just… create glowing, physics-defying letters that appeared in front of her. Right? That would violate so many laws of physics and reality as a whole that it was impossible.

That’s right, she just needed to try again, to prove that nothing would happen if she said the words of madness again, and then she could go back to questioning all of the other highly improbable but still technically possible events that had happened recently.

Alice tried to summon the status screen by thinking ‘status screen’ without saying a word out loud. Lo and behold, magically glowing letters and numbers reappeared. Her brain hurt. The words of madness were official. They had power that could shake reality and, more importantly, her sanity.

“That’s… That’s impossible! That doesn’t even make sense! RPG stat screens are built to make very simplified models of reality for the sake of entertainment in a video game, not to overshadow reality in its ability to simulate cause and effect! That doesn’t… That doesn’t even… RRRRGGGHHHHH.” Alice slammed her head into one of the dead trees nearby, trying to bash some common sense back into her brain. Sadly, it failed.

After all of the panicking, screaming, running around in circles, and tripping and falling on her face and cursing her low athletic abilities had ceased, Alice accepted that there was, in fact, some sort of RPG-game-like mechanic that governed this world. Or she had already gone bonkers and was only now realizing it. Come to think of it, it was impossible for just ‘another planet in the Milky Way’ to have this sort of totally different set of natural laws of reality. Unless it was just somehow nonfunctional on Earth, but for now she was going to assume she was somewhere the rules seemed to behave entirely differently.

Therefore, at the very least she was probably in a different dimension right now. Thus far, the laws of physics seemed to be mostly the same - gravity still seemed to be doing pretty much the same thing, and from what she could see of the sky it seemed kinda similar, although she couldn’t see it very well through the dead canopy so that could just be her misconception. The moon and stars looked… kind of similar to the night sky she was used to seeing as well.

She wished she had a piece of paper to start writing all of this down, but in lieu of that she began making mental notes.

Things I know

1. I appear to be in a dimension different from ‘home.’ This dimension, or at least this planet within this dimension, appears to operate off of an ‘RPG’ like system

2. The laws of physics appear to be mostly unchanged, at least the ones I can immediately observe (gravity).

3. I can breathe, indicating oxygen exists and is readily available within the atmosphere.

4. I am standing in what appears to be a very Earth-like forest. This indicates that, in addition to atmosphere, most other conditions should be fairly similar to Earth - even in another universe, unless something is VERY different, the laws of natural selection should still be at work, so the fact that trees independently evolved here means the environment is similar.

5. My status screen indicates there is something called ‘magic’ in this world. More investigation needed. In fact, scratch that-more investigation needed into the entire RPG-like system in general, including presence or lack thereof of magic.

Alice nodded as she thought over her checklist. It wasn’t anything concrete, but she at least had a starting point to work with now. If she just kept double-checking reality, she might even keep her sanity in the near future! Maybe. Probably not. To be fair, she might have already lost her sanity. After all, if someone said something and reality said something else, reality was correct and you were not, and she definitely felt like reality was wrong right now. However, reality also usually didn't teleport people into other dimensions with totally different laws in the middle of the night.

She took another deep breath, trying to calm down. She still didn’t have 100% definitive proof, but she was still pretty sure she was in another dimension entirely. A different world with an entirely different history of evolution, totally different species (although the trees nearby looked an awful lot like dead trees on Earth, so perhaps she was wrong), and an RPG system possibly governing everything in the world.

Immediately following this thought, she realized something horrifying. When the Europeans landed in the New World, the New World had suffered from a myriad of diseases as a result of two different continents suddenly meeting. She couldn’t even begin to imagine how different an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT WORLD’S diseases were - or how poorly prepared her immune system was to deal with them.

She was probably going to contract this planet’s version of the black death and die within a few days or a few weeks. She had some hope that maybe, maybe the RPG system would protect her, or help her in some way? Probably not, though-when she looked more closely at her status screen, her only Skill was a giant glitch sign with the words ‘language proficiency’ embedded somewhere in the words, and the RPG system seemed to have no knowledge whatsoever of any of her other characteristics. For example, she had spent almost a year working in the computer lab after school learning how to build robots using Arduino, and was relatively proficient in most of the subjects taught by the public school system. However, none of those skills were listed in her Status Screen.

That indicated…what, that the system had no idea what to make of her? That ‘Robotics’ or ‘Computer programming’ or whatever didn’t exist here? The glitched language proficiency sign was probably English, so it recognized her ability to speak English, but not do basic math? Alice didn’t really know what to make of everything she was seeing right now, honestly. And if the System had no clue what to make of her, the odds of it knowing what to do in order to prepare her immune system for whatever variant of magical smallpox existed here were probably something like a billion to one. And that was an optimistic number.

She was so screwed.

On the bright side, there appeared to be something called Perks and Achievements in her Status Screen as well. Maybe there was a solution somewhere in the System, if she could find it in time? Maybe there was a perk that would let her access magic, and then she would somehow manage to use spells to claw her way out of the plague?

She finally got up, twitching with nerves after processing the basics of her situation. Right. So I just need to find a way to deal with whatever this world’s version of the Black Death is before I die from contracting it, figure out whether the flora/fauna of this planet is hostile/poisonous/terrifying, figure out what the heck is up with this weird ‘RPG System,’ figure out what’s up with MAGIC, and figure out how the hell I ended up on another planet/dimension. Simple goals.

Alice looked at her to-do list and felt the urge to throw something. Was this to do list even achievable? She had been here for less than two hours! Two hours! Her worldview had been shattered, half of the laws of reality had taken a vacation and then decided halfway through that vacation that they were never returning, and she had no idea if eating would be lethal! For all she knew, the air might be poisonous to her or something, and she was already on the way to her grave this very second.

But, a seed of determination sprouted in her heart in the midst of outrage and fear. If she failed to survive here, no one would be coming to save her. If any of her guesses about the nature of her new destination were true, her parents and friends from the world she was from probably had no way to contact her, or even figure out where she was.

Even if they searched every single constituent atom of the Earth, they wouldn’t find a single trace of her. Heck, maybe her home dimension ran at a different time ratio than this one - she had heard stories from Irish mythology of people who wandered into Faerie Circles for a few days and came back decades older, or returning years later and claiming only a few days had passed. Since there was obviously something supernatural going on here, maybe the old stories had some truth to them. She had no way at all of knowing right now.

Either way, counting on someone else to help her was probably pointless. And Alice wouldn’t accept dying in the middle of the wilderness with no clue why or how she had gotten there in the first place. She wanted to know, and if she managed to survive this, she could probably learn more about the nature of reality and the universe(s) than any other living person, ever. It was a thought that was tantalizing enough to tempt even the least curious human being ever - and Alice was so curious it often got her in trouble. She just needed to avoid dying first.

Chapter 2

For every Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the world, there were probably hundreds of people who could have achieved similar heights of knowledge if they had the right questions and resources. Albert Einstein had spent many of his early years struggling to even get by before he had finally had the time and insight to begin making scientific discoveries, catapulting his position from a dropout struggling to get by in life to a world-renowned physicist that practically discovered half of the foundation of modern physics.

This was because he found the thing every researcher and scientist desperately needed in order to truly make discoveries: he had found a question. Alice, upon seeing a magical floating box filled with numbers quantifying her existence, had her own question. What the heck is this thing, and how does it work?

Alice, who had finally found a question…

Was lost in the woods, hungry, and a bit dehydrated. Her unimpressive athletic abilities were coming back to haunt her with a vengeance.

While she would have loved to explore whatever the System was and what was going on, what she needed now were more basic things - food, water, and a set of instructions to the nearest town would be far more welcome than the secrets of the universe.

As she moved, she paid careful attention to her surroundings, looking for a single trace of anything useful. All of these trees meant that there had to be some form of water here, or at least there had been in the recent past, right? Even if all the trees were creepy and dead, if they had been dead for too long, surely they would have withered away, right? Alice had little knowledge of the life cycle of trees, but she was desperately holding on to the hope that she could find water soon.

But there was no food or water here that she could find. In the three hours she had been walking, she hadn’t seen a single living thing besides herself, nor any hints of one. The forest was completely, eerily, unnervingly dead and silent. This made Alice more and more nervous as she walked - now that she was paying close attention to where she was going and her surroundings, every snap when she crushed a branch, every squeal of surprise when she misjudged where something was in the dim moonlight and walked into it, and every clumsy step she took seemed louder.

The only thing she had knew for sure right now was that there were an awful lot of dead trees in the area, and finding routes over/around fallen trees was a huge pain in the butt. Finally, Alice realized that she was probably an idiot for trying to find her way around this creepy forest in the middle of the night, and began trying to look for a place to sleep for a while. She would have more luck moving in the morning, when she had more light to see by and when her feet hurt less.

Unfortunately, even after she started looking for a place to sleep, she couldn’t find much, and she was getting cold. Just as she was starting to give up and wondering if she would die here, she finally found something that looked promising - a huge tree trunk had fallen, and for whatever reason, seemed partially hollow inside. The remaining space in the tree could probably fit ten of her inside pretty easily, and the shelter looked like it would probably do an okay job of keeping the wind away and keeping heat in. Almost gasping with relief at the thought of laying down, Alice stumbled towards the hollow tree trunk - and nearly died for her carelessness.

An animal that looked like a raccoon leapt out at her. Its body was covered in horrific, bleeding pustules, and one of its legs had fallen off. Fresh blood was slowly dripping from its wounds, and it was hard to tell what color its fur had originally been. However, Alice was certain that whatever was wrong with this thing, she wanted nothing to do with it.

Alice was now wide-awake, and immediately began sprinting away at full speed, ignoring the pain in her feet as she desperately tried to outrun whatever she had stumbled across. Its claws still looked sharp, and Alice was pretty sure this thing had some sort of disease. Who knew whether it was contagious?

After sprinting for a few minutes, Alice realized the animal had stopped chasing her, and fell to the ground, gasping and panting for breath. She tried her best to remain alert, looking around for any other animals, but the unnerving silence of the dead forest had returned: nothing around her moved or made a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. There was nothing to differentiate one direction from another and no way to see save for the moonlight.

Her head started pounding, and Alice started to quickly realize something - despite the fact that her sweat hadn’t cooled down yet, she was starting to feel freezing cold. She frowned, and her vision started to blur as waves of blackness started eating away at the edge of her sight. She touched her forehead with a growing sense of fear and suspicion, and confirmed that it was blazing hot.

Oh crap. She had hypothesized earlier that another planet would have totally different diseases that her immune system had absolutely no defenses against, and hoped that the RPG system might somehow protect her from that, because she had no way of taking precautions against diseases right now. But less than a few hours after she got to this world, she already had a fever. This speed exceeded the incubation speed of most diseases on Earth by an absurd amount, and Alice started panicking as she realized she was already sick. Was she really going to die like this? Without figuring out anything at all about how she had gotten to this world or what the System was, or even seeing magic after her status screen claimed it existed?

But her eyes felt so heavy, and she was desperately trying to stay awake so that she could at least drag herself somewhere where she might have a lower chance of getting eaten while she was unconscious, but she just couldn’t stay awake. Faintly, as she felt dizzier and sleepier, she faintly saw the words

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower 118 -> 119, Endurance 47 -> 48

Then everything went black.

* * *

When Alice woke up, her world was like fire. Burning waves of heat crashed through her body, and she felt like she was being dunked in a vat of acid. Alice desperately scrabbled around blindly, looking for water to cool herself off, but passed out before she could crawl very far. She woke up again a few minutes later, only to pass out again as pain overwhelmed her. The reality of being awake and being asleep began to blur together as she kept crawling around, aimlessly searching for something she couldn’t quite remember.

An eternity of crawling around later,, the forest gradually transitioned from gnarled, dead trees to living ones, and suddenly there were the words from the RPG system again, telling her about something, but Alice no longer had the mental leeway to process the glowing words appearing in front of her.

Finally, her arms collapsed, and she stopped crawling - her body didn’t have the strength to move anymore, and whatever illness she had contracted seemed to be drying up her body at an unnatural rate. Every time she tried to move it felt like she was crawling through molasses, her body slow and unresponsive. She just couldn’t summon the willpower to move another inch. Slowly, like a kite without wind, her body sagged into the dirt. Her vision was swimming in and out of clarity, and the heat in her body was growing worse and worse. For a second, she swore that she saw a rabbit hop up to her limp body, before sniffing at the area around her neck and then hopping off, completely uninterested in her.

I’m so close to dead that wild animals aren’t even afraid of me anymore, thought Alice, fighting the urge to close her eyes and give up completely.

However, as her thoughts grew fuzzier, she swore that, for just a moment, she saw a trickle of liquid out of the corner of her warped vision.

Alice’s thoughts cleared for just a moment, and with the last gasp of strength, she desperately crawled forward. If she could cool down the heat from her illness she might be able to survive! A few minutes later, inch by horrible inch, she crawled farther, until she flopped into a small stream. Even stream might have been the wrong word - if she had been standing up, the water wouldn’t have even come up to her knees, and it wasn’t even wide enough for her to fully lay down in.

However, right now this tiny little trickle of water represented her last hope to live. She had nothing to hold water in and no way to start a fire, so she had neither the tools nor strength to boil the water. She had to hope that there was nothing wrong with this water - if there was, she was dead. But right now, this was her one and only hope to live. With her body partially in the water, she managed to lower her face into the water and began to drink.

A few minutes later, the heat and pain from her illness came again, and the horrifying feeling of her bones and muscles being set on fire followed on its heels - she had the strength to scream now, but she managed to hold the need to scream inside of her throat; if she attracted a different animal and it attacked her in this state, she would die.

Time passed like glass falling through honey. Alice occasionally flopped around in the stream, sometimes managing to sit upright and other times collapsing back into the water. Eventually, by pure accident, a few terrifying moments passed as she landed face-down in the stream. The coolness from the water didn’t help the pain. Moving more by instinct than logic at this point, her body spasmed as she sucked in half a breath of water, before her body shuddered and she began coughing out the water in her lungs. With her last shred of willpower, she managed to drag her head back out of the water and roll over, then spat out the liquid in her lungs and sucked in another breath of air.

Eventually, Alice began to realize that she could feel her brain changing, and that she felt the weight of something slowly coming into existence inside of her ribcage, behind her heart. Slowly, the horrifying heat and feeling of acid tearing away at her being started to fade away, and a feeling of comforting warmth began to build up inside of her body instead.

Her limbs, by this point, had stopped flailing about, and were reduced to simply twitching in response to the pain. The fire that had consumed her body began to roll towards her heart and brain, and the pain everywhere began to fade. After a few hours the pain faded completely, leaving behind a flickering ember of warmth pulsing behind her heart, and the heat disappeared completely from her head. After a moment, she started to lose awareness of it as it faded away from her awareness. Alice opened her eyes, trying to remember when they had closed.

When she opened her eyes, a long list of notifications from the system rang out, starting with the one she had gotten sometime yesterday while her initial fever had been kicking in and destroying her ability to process the world around her.

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

You have come from another world, far from home and lost beyond the cracks of another dimension.

+30% faster attribute growth for all stats below 120, +50% class experience for all main classes below level 50, +15% class experience for all secondary classes below level 10, strengthened immune system, strengthened mana adaption and resistance, increased support from the System.

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

You are one of the four percent of survivors among the ungifted who have managed to survive mana poisoning. Furthermore, you even baptized yourself using broken mana instead of regular mana. You must really love taking risks!

+50% faster growth to the ‘Magic’ attribute, +25% growth to the ‘Willpower’ attribute, +30% experience gain for all mage and magic-related classes, +15% mana recovery, immunity to Mana poisoning from Broken Mana

You have unlocked the class [Survivor] as a result of surviving alone in the wilderness for multiple days and surviving a near - death experience. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes / No

You have unlocked the class [Explorer of magic] as a result of surviving the effects of mana poisoning and having the {Outworlder} Achievement. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes / No

Alice spasmed, trying to process what was going on. She was alive? She was alive!

What the heck had just happened? She was reasonably sure that no more than a day or two had passed – while she was incredibly hungry now, it didn’t seem like her body was suffering from the effects of malnutrition yet, just on the edge. In that case… had she just fought off a disease from this planet in just a day or two? Maybe this was the effect of her ‘strengthened immune system’ from the {Outworlder} perk? What the heck did ‘increased support from the System’ mean? What was Mana Poisoning?

Finally, she scanned through her Achievements and System notifications in more detail, before she realized that the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement told a very different story from her initial assumptions. The Achievement indicated that what she had just fought off wasn’t actually a disease – it seemed to be something called ‘Broken Mana poisoning.’

Also, she had apparently unlocked two classes. Bewildered, she pulled up her status screen, and saw that several things were quite different from before.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 44

Perception: 101

Dexterity: 47

Intelligence: 153

Endurance: 50

Willpower: 119

Charisma: 125

Magic: 5

Primary Classes: 0/5

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes

N/A (0)

Perks:

N/A

Skills

English (language proficiency): 100

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

The first thing she noticed was that the set of glitch-signs under the ‘skills’ list was gone and had been replaced with the word ‘English.’ She was now the proud owner of the English Language skill, instead of the proud owner of a bunch of weird letters and symbols. The system was… updating its information or something? However, even though the system had apparently updated its information and figured out what the English language was, it still seemed to have no awareness of any of her other skills that she had built up during her life on Earth.

Alice also realized that her {Achievements} were no longer empty, and had recorded her two feats of survival. Her body was also warm... much warmer than it had been moments ago. It was subtle, but she could definitely feel it. However, bizarrely enough, instead of cooking her alive, it felt... right. The heat from the center of her chest continuously pulsed, sending warmth throughout her body and driving away some of the cold from the environment. She had no idea what to make of that for now, so she opted to ignore it and move on.

Finally, her [Magic] attribute had increased from ‘0’ to ‘5.’ Although it looked fairly pathetic when she realized that her other stats were all well into the double-digit range, if her earlier endurance bonus from walking through the wilderness was any indication, all attributes could probably be improved with training. If she was willing to spend time exploring magic, she could probably get the stat up to a decent level eventually; although she had no idea how long it would take. She grinned to herself as she realized that she might very well be able to learn magic now, before she turned her attention to the other changes she had noticed.

She also wondered what a ‘primary class’ was, and how it was different from a secondary class. Her status screen listed primary classes as being ‘0/5’ right now, so primary classes were obviously a limited resource, while secondary classes might be totally unlimited in number. If that was the case, primary classes might be strengthened in some way? Of course, Alice had no clue what a class did at all, and so she had no idea whether making her two classes primary classes was a good idea or a terrible one. Finally, she closed her eyes and sighed.

Screw it. She accepted both classes as primary classes and hoped she wouldn’t regret this later. In this foreign world, what she needed was survival ability now, and Survivor sounded pretty useful for the purpose of not dying. Furthermore, Explorer of Magic sounded exactly like something she wanted to do if she survived her immediate circumstances. It sounded like a class that emphasized exploring the physics-defying nonsense that this world had to offer. Furthermore, if she could figure out how to throw fireballs or heal herself, that would improve her survival ability by several orders of magnitude. Maybe she would come to regret it later, but necessity was the mother of bad decisions, and right now she needed to not die instead of trying to optimize for a distant future that may never come.

While she still didn’t know for sure that other humans lived in this world, the fact that the System had mentioned ‘survivors’ and ‘ungifted’ in the other System messages indicated that the answer was probably yes. However, if there were people here, they had probably grown up with an RPG system that, based on her understanding of it so far, allowed (probably) supernatural increases in body strength, mental ability, and potentially drastically boosted their growth speed, and might even prevent skills from decaying. At least, that was how things worked in video games – character skills never decayed or went down. Whether that was applicable to this world was an open question right now, but since video games were the only point of reference Alice had to the System, she was at least going to prepare herself for what she might see.

Hmm… the {Outworlder} Achievement might be some sort of catch-up mechanism. It stops helping my Attributes grow higher at around 120… In that case, would an average inhabitant of this world have attributes of around 120?

Of course, she could also just be wrong about the {Outworlder} Achievement being a catch-up mechanism. She just had too little context to work with right now, besides the fact that {Outworlder} was rarity 10. Whatever rarity 10 meant.

She did assume that there was probably some correlation between higher rarity and usefulness, but the {Baptized by Broken Mana} Achievement seemed to give better bonuses than {Outworlder} when it came to magical potential. Perhaps the benefits from an Achievement were related to the actual difficulty of gaining the achievement? Or how specific it was? Alice sighed, scratching her head, before sighing.

She decided to put her thoughts on the matter to rest for now – she had too little information, and no way to find out more.

Alice took a look around. The area of the forest she had stumbled into in the middle of her mana-poisoning induced haze was much less dead than the place she had been in when she entered this world, and the occasional sounds of animals scampering around in the background and birds chirping in the distance put her at ease. Even if birds chirping flagrantly ignored the fact that natural selection should never have allowed the existence of a totally different planet with exactly the same flora and fauna as Earth.

Something to think about later, when she was no longer on the brink of starvation.

Alice scanned her status screen again, trying to look for any changes, but besides ‘Explorer of Magic’ and ‘Survivor’ being listed as ‘level 1’ under her primary classes section, she couldn’t find anything else different. She shrugged and closed her status screen - she suspected she would have plenty of time to figure out the nature of the status screens and the RPG system that governed this dimension later, so right now she needed to get moving.

The bigger question, for now, was where on Earth - ahem. Where in this dimension was she? She looked around, seeing the world clearly in sunlight for the first time. The only landmark she could see was the familiar patch of unnervingly dead trees in the distance, and the creek she had nearly drowned in earlier. If it weren’t for the status screen, she could have easily mistaken this place for Earth.

If she didn’t know where she was, perhaps she should just follow the creek - odds were decent that if she just followed the water far enough, she might find a river, which would hopefully lead to civilization. Alice knew that in ancient eras rivers tended to be where most villages and early cities were founded, due to their easy access to water. Besides, the creek was the only promising landmark she had to go on now.

She took a step forward and found that her body felt far weaker than before. That shouldn’t be right, though, should it? In the first place, she had recovered from… oh.

As her stomach growled at her, Alice suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten in at least a day, possibly two or three. She had no clue how long she had spent fighting off the effects of mana poisoning, after all. She was also quite thirsty.

She lowered her head back into the creek, and praying that she didn’t get some sort of horrible disease, noisily slurped down water until her throat stopped hurting. Then, she scanned the area around her, and tried to identify all of the plants and animals. Birds - edible, but hard to catch. I don’t have any confidence in hitting one even if I throw rocks or make a basic slingshot, and they don’t have much meat on them. I think while I was delirious I saw a rabbit, so I might be able to hunt one of them if I make a snare… how do you make a snare?

Umm… Alice looked at all of the brown and red leaves of the plants around the river, and realized she had no clue what was and wasn’t poisonous. In the first place, who in the modern world actually bothered learning wilderness survival? Alice was far more proficient at identifying the packages of food in a supermarket than identifying plants in a forest.

Besides, the plants and animals of this planet, even if they looked like the ones on earth, might be totally different. The air here had seemed pretty normal, but she had contracted mana poisoning from somewhere. If everything in the world breathed in mana, a good chunk of the wildlife was probably evolved to either handle or use the mana in some way, right? Even if she knew how to identify plants from Earth, it might be useless here.

Alice finally turned to the river itself and noticed something that filled her with hope: even though the water was somewhat shallow, lazily swimming towards the center of the creek was a fish about twice the size of her hand. While it wasn’t large, where there was one fish there would probably be more. Alice quickly grabbed a fallen tree branch and began tearing off the extraneous bits, and after perhaps five minutes she had in her hands the beginning of mankind’s most primitive hunting tool: a spear. Frowning, she poked the other end of the spear and confirmed that it was nowhere near sharp enough to be used for anything stabbing-related.

Perhaps instead of calling it a ‘spear’ she should have just called it a stick.

Alice began checking some of the pebbles in the area, and eventually managed to find a somewhat sharp edge on a stone that had broken in half. Turning back to her makeshift spear, she took the stone and began hitting the edge of the branch, trying to sharpen the edge of the stick into something that resembled a spear.

Five minutes passed this way, with a girl mercilessly beating a stick with a rock.

Ten minutes…

Fifteen…

Finally, after thirty minutes, Alice had a… spear. Yes, a very powerful and mighty… extremely sharp… somewhat sharper than average… pointy stick. Alice held it up and inspected it, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the system give her two notifications.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Woodworking: 0 -> 1

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 1 -> 2

“So you can recognize Woodworking and Survivor levels, but you can’t recognize {pathfinding} or {trying to find civilization} or {lost in the woods and dying, please send help}? Who makes the rules for Skills? I mean, the last two would be pretty ridiculous, but I could definitely see a Skill like {Pathfinding} or {Wilderness Navigation} or something along those lines existing. Aren't I supposed to have increased assistance from the System? I need assistance now. Please?”

Nothing happened. Alice sighed and turned back to the river. For now, she was unlikely to find any answers. Soon, she located another fish, and began phase two of operation ‘don’t starve to death.’

She stopped moving as much as possible, holding her pointy stick over the shallow stream and preparing to stab downwards. Soon, the fish began swimming closer to the side of the stream she was positioned on, lazily drifting down with the current. Closer…. Closer…

Stab! Alice stabbed the river, perfectly missing the fish. Frightened, the fish darted away, disappearing in a flash of scales and light as it zoomed into the distance. “Fuck,” Alice muttered, watching dinner escape. How had she missed? The fish had been right below her pointy stick…

Belatedly, Alice realized the problem. The surface of the water caused light to refract slightly, meaning that anything she was looking at in the water was slightly lower than what her eyes would tell her. Since she had mistaken this, given the fact that her pointy stick wasn’t entirely straight she had just barely missed the fish, instead of spearing it down the middle as she had meant to.

Part of this could also be attributed to her rather low accuracy and her lacking physical strength, which had certainly exacerbated the problem, but she chose to blame it entirely on the light. If I was able to think of light refraction problems afterwards, I should have been able to remember it before. Who knows when another fish will come, thought Alice. If she had been a little less careless, she could have been cooking the fish for lunch instead of quietly cursing by the creek’s side. She sighed, sitting by the creek’s edge and dangling her bare feet into the water. She was so hungry…

Come to think of it, even if she caught a fish, how would she start a fire? Rubbing two sticks together? That was supposed to work, right? It was worth a shot.

She began daydreaming of convenience stores. In America, it was incredibly easy to find food as long as one had a little bit of money. If she could just step into a convenience store or a restaurant and buy some waffles. Blueberry waffles with syrup sounded delicious right now… she felt a pang of homesickness.

Finally, after a few minutes of indulging in a pointless fantasy, Alice realized she was wasting time and stood up, trying to focus again. Perhaps I can hunt and follow the river at the same time. I can periodically check the water to see if I can find any fish to eat, and I might also run into other small animals of prey that I have some chance of successfully hunting and killing.

She began following the little stream downriver, which soon joined a few other streams and started to become a properly large river. As she walked, she noticed there were plenty of other lifeforms that were bizarrely similar to Earth’s flora and fauna here. Something to investigate later. For now, she had survival to focus on. She directed herself back towards the important tasks at hand.

Through training, you have increased an Attribute!

Willpower 119 -> 120

Alice snorted, not wanting to deal with the System right now. However, she felt as if her will had been fortified compared to a second ago - the change was slight, and Alice wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just her imagination, but she felt as if it was easier to understand her beliefs and easier to focus compared to a few moments ago.

She absently wondered if one single point in Willpower actually made this large of a difference – maybe this was actually just the placebo effect?

Finally, Alice found more fish in the river. Problematically, they also swam much farther beneath the water’s surface-Alice could barely even see the deepest fish in the water, now that the water had grown much deeper. If she fell into the river at this point, she could easily be carried off by the current and drown, meaning that hunting the deeper fish was a risky endeavor.

Alice found a more shallow part of the river, where her pointy stick could reach the bottom. Then, she gathered several sticks that could be used as kindling and a few thicker sticks that could be used to sustain a fire for a longer period of time. Then, she patiently lowered the ‘spear’ into the water, making sure that light refraction would no longer be a problem. Afterwards, she waited patiently, ignoring the rumbling of her stomach.

Finally, a fish wandered underneath the pointy stick. Stab!

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 2 -> 4

With a single stab, Alice gained two levels and a weakly struggling fish. She lifted the stick out of the water, careful not to let the thrashing fish slide off the stick in the process, and then quickly strode back over to the pile of sticks. Then, she grabbed a stick and began rubbing it against another stick, hoping to cause enough friction to start a fire.

After only a moment, though, she suddenly felt as if her preparations were somehow… insufficient. She frowned, trying to figure out where this idea was coming from, before finding a stick that had a hole in it and another stick that was around the same size as the hole. She placed one of the sticks into the other and began spinning the stick, trying to make the force of friction start the fire. Bizarrely enough, she felt that her first idea of just rubbing two sticks together would be harder than this method.

Five minutes later, her arms felt like they were going to fall off. Aside from that, no real progress had been made. Alice was starting to worry that she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with this, either because she was doing it wrong or because her arms simply couldn’t provide sufficient force to the sticks to actually cause a fire.

She finally set down the sticks and flopped onto the dirt for a while, panting. She didn’t have any way to gut or descale the fish, she couldn’t start a fire… even though she had caught the fish, she didn’t have the ability to process it!

Finally, Alice remembered something critical - theoretically, she had magic. Extremely questionable magic that she had no idea how to use, but maybe she could start a fire with magic somehow? She closed her eyes, trying to figure out how to use magic. In most novels, magic had a lot to do with imagination, so she tried imagining flames as much as she could, imagining the stick catching fire…

After ten minutes of concentrating, she felt incredibly stupid, and exactly zero progress towards starting a fire had been made. Apart from that, she still felt tired, hungry, and frustrated. She tried meditating for a bit in order to get a skill, since plenty of stories linked meditation and 'natural energies' - maybe it would help with magic?

Ten more minutes of wasting her time later, Alice decided this probably wasn't the right way to go about solving her problems.

At least the fish had stopped flopping around. Alice stuck her face into the river and took a long drink of water - even though she should purify it somehow, perhaps by boiling it, she had no water container and no clue how to make one. And even if she did have a water container, she had no fire. If she got a disease from the water and died, it would be pretty typical of her luck thus far, but the day or two she had spent here wasn’t enough to pick up all of the survival skills she desperately needed right now.

She eyed the dead fish. Was she desperate enough to just bite into it and hope for the best? Not quite. At least, not yet. She had eaten fish before, and even eaten sushi. However, while it was a common misconception that raw fish was safely edible, sushi was usually, at the very least, frozen first to help kill off any parasites. It was chilly right now, but she seriously doubted it was cold enough to kill off parasites at the current temperature.

Finally, she thought back to earlier, when she had been trying to start a fire. She had initially been planning on rubbing two sticks together and hoping for the best, but right before she started she had suddenly had the hazy idea of trying to spin a stick inside of another stick in order to start a fire instead. In the end, she failed, but she had no clue how to start a fire in the woods besides a vague idea on how it might be done. However, while the concept of spinning a stick inside of another stick had been hazy, it wasn’t something Alice would have thought of before today. Was this the effect of a new environment and desperation kicking in, or was it the effect of levels?

Alice opened her status screen again, trying to look at it and see if it would provide any clues.

[Survivor] was at level 4 - hadn’t the message telling her that she had unlocked the [Survivor] class said it had to do with surviving near-death experiences? And it certainly felt like she was more proficient at dealing with the outdoors than she had been yesterday… was her ‘survivor’ class just… directly inserting information into her brain?

As far as she could tell, levels and stats didn’t seem to affect each other at all. Stats were raised by doing things related to the stat. Assuming levels actually ‘did’ something, inserting knowledge into her brain was a reasonable guess. However, this brought up different problems. If the system was directly inserting information into her brain, how the heck was the System doing it? Brains were incredibly complex webs of electricity and neurons, packed together into a continuously evolving network of complex biological structures. Scientists had been studying human brains for years, and it was still pretty difficult to figure out exactly what was going on inside of the human brain. The process of a human having a single thought required incredibly precise electrical signals. The System inserting vague ideas into her brain in a way that she barely even noticed, without harming any of her ability to see or understand the world around her or turning her into a coma patient was incredible.

And absolutely ridiculous. She would have been more willing to believe that the world’s best heart surgeon liked using sand and their toenails to perform heart surgery as their tools of choice. However, reality clearly disagreed with her. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. If reality disagrees with you, reality is correct, if reality disagrees with you, reality is correct… She managed to stop thinking about the topic for a while, and began trying to think through the implications of her newest discovery. If the System was able to do help her vaguely grasp at information she didn’t have, did it indicate that the System was complex enough to interact with her brain without hurting her? What if it fucked up and fried her brain or something? Alice was suddenly very nervous.

Still, after several minutes of trying to figure out what the heck this actually meant, Alice finally refocused on the issue of food. She needed a fire, and it wasn’t going to make itself. And that was how she spent the next few hours trying and failing to start fire, continuously failing, and eventually falling asleep with hunger gnawing at her belly.

Chapter 3

The morning was cold and miserable, and Alice realized how little warmth the open ground of the forest floor provided. She looked at the remains of her attempts at lighting a fire, as well as the fish that had now been laying in the dirt for several hours, and sighed. The core of heat inside of her chest left over from her mana baptism thrummed with heat, warming up her chilled limbs, but it wasn't enough to completely drive away the cold. She shivered, before resolving to do better today. The hunger from not eating for a few days, as well as the fact that she still couldn’t even boil water yet, made her very aware of how close she was to a disaster that could appear at any moment. If she got sick or injured right now, she doubted she would be able to survive the aftermath.

And if she didn’t find something to eat today, she would start becoming thinner and weaker. She didn’t know how malnutrition interacted with her Status Screen, but she wasn’t willing to bet her life on the hope that she could keep working at full strength with no calories.

After thinking for a moment, Alice decided to try eating random plants instead of hoping to successfully make a fire this time. She wasn’t sure how to make a fire yet, and she didn’t have time for trial and error until she had a little more strength.

She began travelling down the river again, continuing her search for civilization while keeping an eye on her surroundings for anything to eat or any useful objects.

A few hours into her journey, she finally found something that might serve as food. A few berry bushes were growing close to the river, with blue-green berries about half the diameter of her pinky finger growing flowers on the branches.

Since she didn’t recognize the berries at all, she looked closely at and around the bush, trying to spot anything that might indicate whether or not the berries were edible. After a few minutes, she realized that the branches around her ankles were curiously devoid of berries, even though the flowers each berry grew from were present. Maybe small animals had been eating from this bush and had stripped the lower branches bare, but couldn’t reach the higher branches?

Alice had no idea if her guess was correct, but if she didn’t take a risk here she would need to hope to find a different source of food in the wilderness despite being totally unfamiliar with outdoor survival. She felt that she had to take a risk somewhere, and right now she had at least some evidence that these berries might be safe. Gritting her teeth, she grabbed one of the berries and then bit into it.

The flavor was somewhat odd. It tasted like a mixture of an apple and a blueberry, but it was much more tart than either fruit. She wondered if they weren’t ripe. Regardless, she had eaten one now. If this is poison, hopefully it’s a survivable amount, she thought, trying to clamp down the hunger pangs in her stomach as she sat down and waited. If some time passed and she didn’t feel any ill effects, she would consider the berries safe and eat more of them. If the berries were poisonous, hopefully one berry wasn’t enough to kill her.

After a solid ten minutes passed, two notifications suddenly sprang into the air in front of her.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower 120 -> 121

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 4 -> 6

Alice blinked away the notifications and went back to concentrating on her body, trying to figure out if eating the berry had any ill-effects.

After the better part of an hour, she still felt fine. Deciding she had waited long enough, she began ravenously devouring the berries, letting loose after spending a few days not eating.

After eating almost all of the berries off of the first bush, the rumbling in her stomach was finally gone. Instead, she now felt very full. It was the first time she had ever realized being full was such a wonderful feeling, and without realizing it, she smiled a bit to herself.

Alice sighed, realizing that her stomach actually felt a bit uncomfortable. Perhaps she had eaten too much. She took a look around before she decided to sit down, giving herself a small break as a reward for finding food today. Out of curiosity, she popped open her Status Screen, absently thinking about what each Stat actually meant.

Come to think of it, how do stats even work? I mean, on its surface, my [Endurance] Stat seems to raise as a result of me walking, but does that mean I’m getting more resilient against damage? Am I just getting better at ignoring pain and pushing forward? Do I have some sort of HP bar I’m not aware of, and Endurance is raising that?

[Strength] seems to indicate how much physical force someone can exert. But what happens if, for example, I only trained my leg strength for a long period of time? If [Strength] increases the same way [Endurance] does, training should raise my Attributes. However, if I get a point in Strength by training my legs, would each point of [Strength] make my legs stronger, or make my entire body stronger?

Also, what is the average for this world? I guess that based on my performance in gym class compared to the average student, the strength and endurance Stats average for my classmates on Earth would probably be around 80 or 90, but I have no idea how the more 'mental' stats would look at all. And I have no idea what a normal person looks like in this world, either.

Alice shrugged, before realizing that something she had never seen before was present in her Status Screen.

Next to her [Survivor] class, the words ‘level 5 perk available’ had appeared. Frowning, she concentrated on the survivor class for a moment, and suddenly her status screen disappeared, before being replaced with a new set of floating words. Detailed within the words were five different ‘Perks,’ along with various requirements to learn them.

Perks? Alice frowned, taking a closer look at the floating letters in front of her.

Foraging

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Gain knowledge of berries, vegetables, and roots, where edibles might be easily found in the wilds, and what natural foodstuffs are poisonous. Also increases abilities centered around food preparation.

Primal instinct

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher, Perception higher than 100

Allows you to very slightly sense where danger lies in the world around you. Higher perception will increase the effectiveness of this skill. The more knowledge you have of the cause of a particular kind of danger, the more quickly and easily you will be able to detect danger in advance.

Primitive warmth

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Grants you innate knowledge of how to construct crude tents and fires. Reduces the effect of cold weather on your body, allowing you to innately retain warmth as if the surroundings were 3 degrees Celsius warmer (this effect will not apply whenever the user’s body is in at or above comfortable heat).

Food Conversion

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

Your body converts food into energy more efficiently.

Forestwalking

Requirements: Survivor level 5 or higher

While you are within a forested region, you navigate through the area slightly more easily, allowing you to move more quickly and keep track of your surroundings more effectively.

How do these Perks work? Alice wondered as she looked over the Perks. She decided to think more carefully about this later, but first, she needed to actually take a Perk. After messing with the Status Screen for a bit, she realized she could only pick one of the Perks, and she was also free to not pick anything and re-open the screen later.

What do I need right now?

While {Food Conversion} actually seemed rather useful because it would require less food for her to gain the same amount of energy, the perk didn’t specify how much of an increase in energy extraction efficiency she would get, and she was hesitant to take a gamble on the skill. If it was a measly ten percent, for example, while it would help, it wouldn’t be that big of a difference, and she would still be left stranded in the wilderness with no idea what she was doing.

Alice would have been willing to gamble on the perk if she had access to food security, especially because she was actually really interested to see if she could learn something else about the System as a result of this. How exactly did this perk work? Did it change the physiology of her stomach or intestines or something, or did it just shrug away the laws of conservation of energy, or did it do something completely different? But right now Alice needed to prioritize her survival and safety over her curiosity.

Learning all of the various ways this dimension shrugged off the laws of physics was something she would have to put on the backburner until she had food security and shelter.

After a while, she decided to, grudgingly, discard {Primal Instinct}. Even though it would definitely be useful to know what areas were dangerous beforehand, the words ‘very slightly’ meant that the effect was probably pretty minor.

Furthermore, she had absolutely no idea what dangers might lie in this world where an RPG system and magic existed. She doubted the perk would be particularly helpful right now.

Besides, right now she was in imminent danger of starving, freezing, or dying of disease. Those were much bigger problems than wild animals right now. She could run from wild animals, but there was no running from malnutrition. {Forestwalking} was discarded for similar reasons.

So then, what was most important? Food, or heat?

Alice really wished she could pick both.

Alice eventually decided to pick {Foraging} and focus on food, because if she had more energy in her body, she would have more energy to make shelter and solve other problems. The strange residual heat left in her chest after her mana baptism was doing some work in keeping her warm right now, and because of that, Alice felt she could put warmth at a lower priority for now. And being less hungry would make it easier to concentrate on other things. This would, eventually, loop back around to help deal with the effects of the freezing cold, because with more strength Alice would have an easier time starting a fire. If she hadn't been so hungry and tired yesterday, she might have had the stamina to keep trying to start a fire using sticks, rather than collapsing from exhaustion during the process and accomplishing nothing.

Alice concentrated on the perk, and after a moment she felt a sort of… ding inside of her head, and then her status screen updated, removing the ‘perk available’ notification. Now, the {Perks} category included {Foraging}.

Alice looked back at the berries she had been eating, and instead of the uneasiness she had felt before, she felt a sort of… relaxed sensation. She had been expecting the Perk to involve something more like an item menu in an RPG game, floating above food and giving her a detailed information box about what was and wasn’t edible. Instead, when she looked at the berries, she now felt anticipation and comfort, letting her know the berries were safe to eat.

Curious, she glanced at the grass below her feet and concentrated on it, before getting a sort of… indistinct feeling of disgust, letting her know that it wasn’t poisonous, but wasn’t edible. She scanned the area around her, concentrating on various random objects, and began to get a better sense how exactly her perk worked. The most complex sensation her perk transmitted to her was when she saw some sort of tree - after concentrating on it, she got the feeling that there might be some sort of food on its branches. When she concentrated on the branches, she saw some sort of nut that she didn’t recognize on the branches, and had a vague urge to roast and then eat the nuts. Mixed into this sensation was a curious feeling of wariness towards the nut, making Alice wonder if her Perk was trying to tell her the nuts were poisonous if they weren’t roasted first.

Since Alice wasn’t done playing with her Perk, she sat back up and started exploring her surroundings to see what other sensations her Perk transmitted to her. She found a different kind of berry bush hidden behind some trees a short walk away. Unlike the first berries she had encountered, this one gave her the chills, and she felt a distinct sense of fear when she concentrated on the berries. These berries were probably poisonous.

Alice also took the poisonous berries as an opportunity, and compared the ‘poisonous’ sensation of the berries to the ‘poisonous’ sensation given by the nuts growing in the trees. The ‘poisonous’ feeling she had towards the nuts were fairly mild, which probably meant minimal effects. Perhaps it might result in some flu-like symptoms or vomiting, or other problems that were unpleasant but survivable if she was in good condition. The berries gave a much stronger feeling of danger, and Alice guessed she might just die if she ate more than a few of them.

She moved back to the original berry bushes and then gathered several fistfuls, using the front of her pajamas to make a bowl to help her carry the berries. She checked the sky, and found that the sun was approaching its peak. It was a little before noon. She turned to the fallen sticks near her, and began thinking. What she needed right now was the ability to store more food, and she had plenty of branches to work with. She decided to try weaving a crude basket.

She guessed she would need two components to make a basket. One component would be a sort of ‘bottom’ composed of harder branches, and then she would make a circle of branches that she could tie to the bottom. If she could figure it out, she would also make a handle, but even if she only managed to make a crude bowl instead of a fully fledged basket, she would be able to carry much more. That would be good enough for now.

She climbed up one of the trees in the area and began tearing off thinner, still-living branches, making sure to also collect the nuts she had noticed earlier while she was nearby. After she had enough material to work with, she climbed back down and got to work.

First, she stripped off all the miscellaneous twigs and leaves from the branches. Afterwards, she tried to weave the somewhat straight bottom of her basket out of the branches. Her hands felt unwieldy and her fingers were clumsy, but she persisted, trying to assemble a somewhat stable ‘floor’ of branches.

The bottom of the basket fell apart.

Alice tried to weave the branches together.

The basket fell apart.

Alice tried to weave the bottom of the basket together, and the basket once again fell apart, but this time Alice got another point in woodworking out of it.

Alice quickly realized the benefits of having an RPG System boosting her actions. Every single time she got a point in a Skill, she had a slightly better idea what the ‘correct’ way to make a basket was. If she had enough time, she would eventually become a professional at basket weaving even with no teacher, assistance learning, or even though required. Trying the same thing over and over again was still able to benefit her learning and growth.

With one more point in woodworking, she noticed a definite difference. Her fingers felt slightly more nimble and dexterous, and her motions became more fluid. The bottom of the basket took longer to fall apart than before. She looked at her previous clumsy attempts at weaving a basket and felt that something seemed off. However, she couldn’t quite pinpoint what it might be, so she tried again.

Five more failures later, she gained a point in dexterity.

Seven tries after that, she gained her first point in weaving. She began trying to twist the branches into a more circular pattern, feeling that perhaps her method of making the bottom of the basket was wrong from the very beginning.

Sixteen tries later, Alice finally had the beginning of a more regular bowl shape. It was the ugliest bowl Alice had ever seen, but the sides were tilted in a way that would at the very least let her store about a third of a meal’s worth of berries.

In all, her attempts had taken her around three hours of work, but now she could continue to follow the river while having a few light rations. She ate another meal of berries, and then began storing some berries in her makeshift container.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 6 -> 7

Alice stored her berries and started working on another campfire. This time, without hunger gnawing away at her thoughts, she realized kindling would make starting a fire much easier. After nearly twenty-five minutes of rubbing sticks together, Alice finally managed to light a small campfire, and was rewarded with warmth and another survivor level.

For dinner, she roasted the nuts by dumping them into the fire before using a wet stick to roll them back out of the fire once they were cooked. Afterwards, she let the nut cool down a bit before peeling off the outer shell and then eating. The nuts were oddly spicy, and a nice change of pace from the berries she had been eating all day.

After that, she walked over to the stream and greedily swallowed down several mouthfuls of water. She still wished she had the ability to boil the water, but her shoddy bowl definitely wasn’t watertight. Or fireproof. For now, she would just have to put up with it and hope for the best.

Finally, she began thinking about constructing a shelter to sleep in for the night. She thought it was still three or four hours away from darkness, at least based on the time the sun had set yesterday, but her sense of time in a world without clocks was hazy. Besides, sleeping next to a food source didn’t seem like a bad idea. She would have easy access to breakfast before she started moving again tomorrow.

After a moment, however, she frowned, realizing that other animals probably also fed off of the berries in this area. If lots of animals were present in the area, she might run into a carnivore, which had a high chance of ending badly for her.

After some thinking, she grabbed a burning branch to carry with her and ensure fire-starting would be easier later on, and then continued heading downstream a bit, moving far enough away from the berry bushes that she could move back to them easily, but ensuring animals wouldn’t directly stumble onto her while she was asleep. She quickly re-kindled her fire, placing some stones around the fire to avoid starting a forest fire, and then began trying to figure out how to build a basic shelter.

She had no cluehow to construct a shelter out of sticks. If she had animal hides, she figured she could have at least made a really crude tent, but she had nothing but sticks and leaves right now.

“Hmm… I probably can’t construct anything useful out of the sticks in the surroundings, I don’t have logs, I have no way to acquire them, and I don’t have anything to cover any holes in a makeshift tent, even if I manage to make one.” Alice thought about the problem for a while, but she still had no easy way to resolve the problem of freezing to death. Last night she had been so cold that she had woken up much earlier than she meant to, and when she had woken up her limbs were cold and numb. The source of heat behind her heart was enough to keep her alive, but it was still highly unpleasant.

She also had no idea what this planet’s seasons looked like. Assuming this world had seasons, which may or may not be correct. She could very well be about to enter winter, which would suck. And if winter was coming, she wanted a good shelter before the cold really set in.

After thinking about her crude tent some more, Alice realized that the ‘framework’ for a tent might still work. To make a basic shelter, she needed some sort of frame, some way to cover it up, and maybe a bit of luck to keep the mess together. Alice looked around again, and then realized that she was an idiot. The grass in the area around her reached close to her knees when she was standing up in some places. As long as she wove the long grass together, wouldn’t that perfectly cover a frame? If she could build some sort of frame out of sticks or wood or something, she could probably cover it with some sort of grass mat and it would at least keep some of the wind off of her and keep some of the warmth in. It would be good enough for now.

The only problem was that she had no clue how to weave grass together. And she somehow doubted the grass would be as easy to work with as the branches.

Alice spent a minute daydreaming about modern houses. She really wanted to return to modern society and sit inside a warm, insulated house again. Thinking of how well they kept the cold out and kept warmth in made Alice long for sturdy walls, before she shook her head and returned to her current reality.

Sighing, Alice got to work by plucking out several stalks of grass and then trying to tie them together. She had no idea what she was doing, but if she tried random ideas long enough, {Weaving} would bail her out, right? She just needed to keep grinding at it.

However, before she obtained a single point in any of her Skills, she realized that it would be much easier if she just used a stalk of grass to tie together other stalks of grass and then interconnected them… somehow. Possibly by tying together more stalks of grass.

She bunched a handful of grass together and then used some of the thicker stalks of grass to tie them into a bundle. Then she grabbed another handful of grass and did the same, over and over again…

After a bit, she got the second level of the weaving skill and her fingers started to feel a bit more nimble. She continued her boring and monotonous task, weaving together bundles of grass over and over again with an occasional break to grab a few more branches to chuck into the fire.

Two hours later, when she was at the fifth level of weaving, she felt a small change in the way the skill aided her. Before, each level of weaving would increase the dexterity of her fingers when weaving, but they weren’t yet strictly helping her weave so much as making her less clumsy. However, at the fifth level, she felt like her understanding of weaving itself grew a bit. She started to understand more about what made a stable knot of grass stalks. She still wasn’t entirely sure how to connect everything together in the most optimal way, but she was reaching the point where she could at least tie her grass knots to a wooden framework and make a crude outer layer to a tent. After making enough grass knots, Alice grabbed a few fallen branches from her surroundings, drove them into the ground to make a very basic wooden framework, and then began tying stalks of grass between the branches to make a crude shelter.

By the time she was done, the sun had begun to set, and her shelter still wasn’t particularly well put together or stable. However, it would do for the night. Alice eyed the fruits of her labor. The result of three hours of her life…

Three hours of staring at grass and trying to weave it into a wall for a shelter. It was, quite possibly, one of the most tedious things she had done so far. At least it looked like it would retain some warmth and keep the wind off of her. At this point, that was all she was really asking for. Tired and exhausted, she crawled into her crude tent and went to sleep, hoping tomorrow would be better than the last few days had been.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 8 -> 9

Chapter 4

Alice slept poorly - she was used to sleeping in a silent bedroom, and now that she was farther away from the massive area of dead trees and messed up animals she had first arrived in, shuffling sounds and animal calls kept her on edge throughout the night, making it hard for her to stay asleep. Alice woke up the next morning feeling groggy and irritable when the sunlight started creeping through the holes in the top of her ‘tent.’

She shivered and rubbed her arms, but she was much less cold than she had been yesterday. The fire burning somewhat near the shelter at night had helped with warmth, even though it had gone out sometime during the night. The strange warmth near her heart had also helped, although Alice was noticing that it was getting more and more faint as time passed. She didn’t exactly know what the strange warmth was in the first place, so Alice decided to simply take it in stride for now. Even if it certainly helped her temperature problems, it obviously wasn’t a long term solution, so she needed to adapt fast enough that she could survive without it once it was gone. She shook her head, trying to ease her doubts and worries, before she refocused on the world around her. Specifically, her tent.

I should be able to improve my tent construction after a few more tries, she thought as she took a careful look at the shoddy grass knots and attempts to make everything stick together. Surely more Stats and Skills will get me somewhere if I just throw more tries at learning how to do this? Then, she began thinking of how annoying it had been to construct her shelter. While the weaving process had gotten easier as she gained both skills and {Skills} related to tent-construction, it had still taken her quite a while to construct the tent. Perhaps there was some way to carry it with her so that she didn’t have to reconstruct one from scratch? She wouldn’t get any Skills or Attributes from retrying the process from scratch again, but she also desperately needed to focus on other things today, and being able to carry around her tent with her still help stave off the cold.

She began looking at the edges of the tent, trying to figure out a viable way to carry away some parts of it, and eventually, she realized that taking the frame of heavier branches she had stabbed into the ground to hold up the woven grass was impractical. In order to make it into a shape that wouldn’t be too awkward to carry, she would basically have to undo all of her work anyway.

However, the sort of… blanket-like outer shell of grass could be taken with her if she was careful. Therefore, she clumsily disconnected the outer layer of grass from the wooden stakes before folding it up into a blanket, then placed it underneath the berries in her bowl.

Fear me, for I am Alice, queen of terrible craftsmanship and grassy… blanket things. She winced. Everything she had built so far on this world really did look atrocious, and the shoddy craftsmanship really showed when she was trying to stave off the cold or stop her items from falling apart.

She went back to the berry bushes and restocked her food supply, eating all of the berries she had picked yesterday as she walked before refilling the bowl with fresh food. Then, she began travelling again, following the stream and hoping to find civilization somewhere.

A few hours passed uneventfully as Alice followed the stream, but she began to get more and more nervous as she looked at the sky. It was getting darker as a heavy blanket of clouds approached, gradually obscuring the sunlight and promising rain was coming soon. Once again, it dawned on Alice how truly far away from civilization she was. At home, a bit of rain didn’t mean much to her at all – she would be inside of a building for most of the day, and if she was in school the rain was just a sound effect that sometimes left puddles of water outside of the building.

However, right now, she was dressed in pajamas, had little food security, and shelter that was, at best, flimsy. Suddenly, freezing rain had changed from ‘interesting but unimportant’ to a life threatening disaster she couldn’t escape. She glanced at her grass blanket and quickly realized that it wasn’t going to keep the rain off of her. She stopped focusing only on following the river and paid more attention to her surroundings, hoping to find a cave nearby. If she didn’t find one, she was almost certainly going to freeze to death. The strange warmth near her heart definitely wouldn’t be enough to keep her alive if she was drenched in this weather.

Perhaps an hour later, the clouds finally arrived. And it didn’t start raining, contrary to Alice’s earlier fears. Instead, white little flakes began to drift down from the sky, fluttering lazily in the wind as they began to smother the earth, choking away the last remnants of warmth in the area. Alice, both feeling the ever-dropping temperature and her lack of thick clothing more than ever before, looked at the sky and resisted the urge to start swearing. Was it actually snowing? Of all the times she could have arrived in this world, she had arrived here right at the start of winter?

Alice felt increasing tension and fear as she almost completely stopped worrying about following the river. She needed shelter now, and a town along the river wouldn’t be enough to save her if she froze to death while travelling there. She began scouring her surroundings for any sort of shelter, praying for something to appear. She took note of what direction she could travel to get back to the river when the weather passed, but otherwise she completely broke away from the gentle slope of the river and focused entirely on finding something to keep the cold away.

The snow began to pile higher and higher, and after another ten minutes of walking, her bare feet, which were already swollen and had numerous small cuts along the bottom of her feet, were beginning to sink into a thin layer of snow with every step. Not only did she need to worry about pain and getting an infection, but she now needed to worry about frostbite. Her body wasn't reacting as poorly to the cold as she had expected it to, thanks to the strange warmth behind her heart, but she could still feel the cold creeping through her body and dragging her towards eternal sleep. The remnants of her mana baptism were slowing the process down, but not stopping it.

Am I going to die like this? She wondered. She had already wondered if she was about to die many times in the past few days, but this was one of the first times death felt so… stifling. She had almost died when she was dealing with mana poisoning, had somehow lucked out of getting this world’s version of smallpox so far, and had almost gotten mauled by a strange animal. Now, she was at risk of freezing to death as well.

She trudged through the snow, plagued by lonely thoughts as she wondered if perhaps someone would stumble across her corpse one day and wonder who she had been. Minutes ticked by while she searched for shelter and the temperature dropped, the stifling feeling of inevitability warring with increasing desperation as she tried to find some way to stay alive.

Finally, as her shivering was growing more and more uncontrollable, she stumbled across a ‘cave.’ It was really more like a rocky overhang with a sort of sideways bowl-shaped indentation in the stone around it, but it at least offered enough protection from the snow that she would be safer from the cold. She set down her bowl of berries, pulled out the sheet of grass she had used to create a crude tent the day before, and wrapped it around herself as a blanket.

It was wholly holey, but at this point anything helped. Then, after spending a few minutes shivering under her grass blanket, she realized her limbs were growing numb. She began rubbing her limbs together, trying to get some warmth back into her fingers and toes after recognizing the warning signs of frostbite.

Minutes ticked by, and she grew colder and colder while the specter of death loomed ever closer. Her fingers and toes still had some feeling in them, but she felt cold and increasingly sleepy. She looked over at her basket of berries and grabbed a few half-frozen berries to nibble on. Finally, she realized that this wasn’t a sustainable method of survival – even if it was desperate, she needed to go back out into the cold to grab some tree branches, hopefully dry ones, and get some sort of fire started. Otherwise, she would definitely die here.

She stepped out of the cave, trying to work her way through the biting cold as it penetrated into her veins. The snow had stopped falling, but the carpet of snow on the ground already reached up to her ankles. She might have found it beautiful, if she were at home and waiting for Christmas to come, but right now it seemed to blot out the color in the world, dyeing the world monotone shades of white and grey.

Quickly, she grabbed some cold branches from the area around her and shook the snow off, looking at the still-green leaves on the branches and wondering if they would catch flame. They looked damp, and she doubted she could dry them out, but it hadn’t been snowing for that long yet. Apart from the exterior of the branches and leaves, perhaps something here was still able to catch fire?

For several minutes, she grabbed branches and dragged them back towards her cave, trying to ignore the sinking feeling as her feet started to get more numb. Right now she didn’t have time to keep massaging her limbs and keep blood flowing to her fingers and toes, so she was stuck praying for the best. Then, back inside of her cave, she first peeled away the outer layer of bark on some of the branches. To her surprise, an entire outer ring of bark came off of each branch easily, leaving only the dry interior of the branches while casting away the outer layer of wet wood. She had no idea what kind of tree this was, but right now her trademark curiosity had been nearly stifled by her desperate circumstances. With no interest why these branches could be peeled so easily, she began rubbing sticks together with some tinder, hoping for a fire. A stick snapped, cutting her palm. She gritted her teeth and kept going, knowing that failure wasn’t an option.

Finally, a spark caught, and she leapt up and danced with joy. The tiny little ember of fire spread to the dry innards of the branches, and soon, a cheery blaze was burning away in her cave. She stuck out her hands and feet, warming them up while occasionally nibbling on a few berries. Within another hour, she could feel all of her toes and fingers again, thankfully, which meant that she should at least be able to avoid losing her fingers or toes to the cold. Warmer and more comfortable, she soon fell asleep again.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 9 -> 11

* * *

The next day, Alice woke up to find that the snow had stopped falling. Her campfire, unnoticed, had burnt out while she was asleep. Thankfully, the smoke had been guided away from the shelter by the shape of the cave, which was something she only realized once she woke up. She hadn’t paid any attention to the smoke at all, and if the cave had been shaped a bit differently she might have never woken up. She also realized that she had gained another two levels sometime last night, either when she had started a fire or when she was asleep. Either way, it had given her another perk slot, so she started out by taking a look at what was available. Her first Perk had given her the ability to easily identify food, something she desperately needed right now, and this Perk could also be a lifesaver.

Dark Vision

Requirements: Survivor level 10 or higher, Perception higher than 100

Allows you to see your surroundings as if they were fully lit up, regardless of the level of light present in your surroundings. This may be turned off. Will not physically alter your eyes.

Microbe Resistance

Requirements: Survivor level 10 or higher

Dramatically enhances your immune system's ability to locate, react to, and expel or kill foreign entities of microscopic size. Also enhances the overall power of your immune system.

Sense intentions

Requirements: Survivor level 10 or higher

Allows you to determine the intentions of other living beings towards you, as long as your perception or Charisma (Whichever is higher) is higher than the other entity's {Acting} and Charisma (as well as any other relevant perks or achievements). Has significantly weakened effects if the other party has a higher level than you in any relevant class or Stat.

Parasite Resistance

Requirements: Survivor level 10 or higher

Your body becomes naturally toxic to all parasites that naturally live inside humans. Weaker parasites will be killed shortly after entering your body, and stronger parasites will still be seriously weakened as a result of their environment. This will not adversely affect any living beings besides parasites.

Innate Mapping

Requirements: Survivor level 10 or higher, Perception 100 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher

Allows you to perfectly create a mental 'mini-map' of all places you have visited so far and your location relative to these places you have previously travelled to. You will not gain any information about places you have never personally visited, and this map will only detail geography.

The requirements for each Perk state that I must be level 10 or higher before being able to pick the Perk. The Previous Perk I got was at level 5, and it stated I needed to be level 5 or higher in order to pick a Perk. I assume that means perks are given every five levels, although I will need to verify that later. If I’m correct, I should get another Perk at level 15, level 20, and so on.

Now, which of these do I need the most? I could also go back and grab {Primitive Warmth} from level 5, since I can see my Perks from my previous level up listed as well. It looks like I can always pick up earlier Perks if I feel like it, although I assume Perks get better and better the higher level you are. Alice took stock of the area around her, trying to figure out what she was missing the most desperately.

The temperature is very low now, and if winter is coming it'll continue to drop as time passes, making warmth a huge priority. While I can still feel my arms and legs, if I step out of the cave, it won't take long for me to begin freezing again. The strange wood nearby does make starting fires easier, so I might be able to start fires more easily than I think I’ll be able to, but I also can’t always be near my fire if I want to survive. Food and water are still necessities, after all, and I can’t collect either if I’m sitting next to my fire all the time. Primitive warmth doesn’t solve that problem, and none of these Perks do either, so they can all be considered lower priority… Disease from this world is also potentially a massive concern - I don't know how useful the {Outworlder} perk is since it just says it 'strengthens my immune system' and doesn't go into further detail. This might mean I'm practically immune to diseases now, or it might mean that my immune system got 5% stronger and I'm going to die the moment I get the symptoms of any disease from this world, since my immune system probably has no idea how to react.

In fact, disease is extra scary right now because if I get a fever in this weather, I won’t be strong enough to get food or water. As far as food goes, I have berries and nuts that can keep me going, although I'm not sure how much longer the berry bush is going to be around if winter is really about to start, but if I can find more of those nuts, I have at least one other source of food. It’s not enough, but it’s something.

In other words, her food was at least partially secure, and what she was missing was shelter, warmth and possibly disease resistance, according to her assessment. It was difficult to gauge how badly she needed to improve her disease resistance, because she had no idea how much the {Outworlder} achievement helped.

Alice glanced back over the perks that she was able to choose more carefully, before ruling most of them out. {Dark Vision} and {Sense Intentions} were actually rather interesting, and Alice was genuinely curious to know how {Dark Vision} worked. If it didn’t physically alter her eyes, how in the world was the perk allowing her to see in the dark? In the first place, vision was just the result of human eyes interpreting photons that hit them, plus some extra complications. If there were no photons in the first place, what the heck was she using to see in complete darkness? If she could, later on she would love to get a similar perk and a lot of lab equipment to see if she could figure how in the world the Perk actually worked.

However, currently Alice was motivated by necessity instead of curiosity. She had to concentrate on not dying right now.

{Sense Intentions} was also something that Alice thought would be quite useful, since the perk didn’t specify that it was restricted to animals. If she ever found civilization, being able to determine whether or not people bore hostility towards her would be invaluable. It was a perk she would definitely consider coming back to if she had a perk slot to spare in the future.

However, her curiosity and the ability to sense the intentions of her fellow humans was nowhere near as valuable as disease and infection resistance. She had no idea what penicillin looked like or where to find it, and she had no clue whether or not the other people of this world had access to the drug either. If they didn’t, the ability to fight off infections would be one of the most valuable skills she could have even after she reached civilization. And right now, she had no access to disease prevention at all.

In the middle ages, a random cut might become life-threatening if it got infected and was allowed to spread. Her feet had already been cut up as she was wandering through the forest and she was very nervous about the chances of infection. Thus far, she had been lucky, but there was no guarantee that would continue.

Then, after some more thinking, she realized that she wasn’t strictly obligated to choose right now. The description of the {Microbe Resistance} perk made it seem highly likely that it would affect disease and infection retroactively, meaning that she could wait to see whether she got an infection or the plague first. If she did, she could grab the Perk and save her life. If she went… say, a few weeks with no problems, she could grab another Perk, or she get something else if she desperately needed one of the other options in the near future.

It didn’t seem like she had to pick right now, and since she was able to make fires already, she could deal with her warmth problem, even if her solution was kind of clumsy.

After that, she looked back at the branches of incredibly green leaves that lay outside of her cave, still bending a bit under the weight of the snow, and tried to figure out why the leaves weren’t brown and red. Did that mean it was actually the end of winter and beginning of spring? Were the plants here just weird? Alice had no clue. She sighed, realizing another problem.

“Does this world even have the same seasons as Earth? I mean, realistically speaking, most planets that are similar to Earth should have something like seasons, because of the way planetary orbits and tilt usually end up working out in practice. That would make sense, but…” Alice pulled up her status screen. Despite how absurd it seemed, there were still floating numbers in front of her face “In this world, who knows? Half the time this world seems to follow similar rules to Earth - gravity still works, I still need to breathe and eat, and the sun and moon look similar to the sun and moon at home. The other half the time, the old rules are just chucked out the window, and I get floating Status Screens and mana baptisms. I just don’t know.” Alice sighed again, before taking a look at her crappy grass blanket and shallow, bowl-shaped cave she was using as shelter.

She decided that, at least for now, she should prepare as if winter was coming. Being prepared never hurt, and if it turned out it was about to be spring instead, Alice would feel pleasantly surprised and eat through her stockpile of resources. There was no harm in preparing for the worst and hoping for the best, after all.

Once she had made a decision, she put it into action immediately. Alice crawled out of her little cave and scanned the surrounding area, hoping to find more of the strange sticks she had previously used as firewood. With every step forward, her feet sank into the snow up to her ankle, and she wished she had worn thicker pajamas when she was going to sleep back on Earth. Or that she had worn shoes to bed, even if she couldn’t think of a reason she would ever do that.

Alice moved around the area, picking up fallen tree branches, and then gathered a few more pieces of fallen wood before heading back to the cave.

Then, Alice began carefully peeling off the wet outer bark of the dead branches, exposing the dry innards of each branch of wood. She made three more trips to gather branches, before the cold began to go from horrible to unbearable. Then, deciding that she had enough wood to at least get some warmth back into her body, she used up one of her three trip’s worth of wood to get another fire started, saving the branches from the second and third trip.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 11 -> 12

Thank the caveman ancestors, thought Alice as she warmed herself up again. With a cheerful blaze growing, Alice felt much less miserable. She opened up her status screen, curious to see if there were any other changes she had missed.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 44

Perception: 101

Dexterity: 47 -> 48

Intelligence: 153

Endurance: 44 -> 50

Willpower: 118 -> 121

Charisma: 125

Magic: 0 -> 5

Primary Classes: 2/5

Survivor: 0 -> 12 (Level 10 Perk Available)

Explorer of Magic: 0 -> 1

N/A

N/A

N/A

Perks

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Secondary Classes

0

Skills

English (language proficiency): 100

Woodworking: 0 -> 7

Weaving: 0 -> 5

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

She closed the status screen, wondering how much she had changed in the short period of time she had been here. Already, she was desperately trying to level up in order to survive. Despite the fact that she was both nervous about the levelling system and baffled by its implications, it seemed like she also needed to rely on it. Otherwise, the myriad of problems an interdimensional traveler would inevitably face would probably kill her within a week.

After all, she was just a fairly normal girl from the modern world. She had no familiarity with camping, much less surviving in the wilderness with no supplies. Her body was wholly unsuited to survive in this world, disease and infection would kill her without access to modern antibiotics and medicine, and while some of the biology of this planet was suspiciously similar to Earth’s, the rest was totally alien to her. Without any help, she estimated her odds of surviving this planet to be close to zero. For now, the System was able to provide that help. If levelling up was the way to survive so that she could investigate the System and the magic of this world, she would need to level up.

Such were the thoughts of a young girl alone in the frozen wilderness.

Chapter 5

The rest of the day passed uneventfully, with Alice occasionally going to get a few more tree branches to peel whenever the fire started to run low on fuel, but she mostly stayed near the fire and occasionally ate some of her berries. They weren’t very filling, but they were far better than nothing.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance 50 -> 51

She spent the night huddled under her grass blanket inside of her cave, cold but alive. When she woke up, she realized that sometime during the night the cloud had moved away and the sun had returned. Alice was glad to see sunlight, but she felt uneasy after her close encounter with hypothermia.

After deciding she needed to eat something besides berries today, she began carefully making her way around, periodically checking the surroundings for food. She found more of the strange nuts that she had roasted a few days ago and put them into her basket, as well as some more dead branches that could be turned into firewood. Finally, she found a weird plant that looked like a fist-sized glob of wax. She had no clue what it was, but {Foraging} claimed it was edible, so she rinsed it off in the river and ate it. It tasted like cardboard, but hopefully it would make up some of the nutrients she didn’t get from berries and nuts.

She carried everything back to her cave and stripped the wet outer bark from the trees, gaining a point of [Dexterity] in the process. Afterwards, she turned a quarter of her firewood into a small blaze, roasted the nuts, and had a late lunch of roasted nuts along with the rest of her berries. After eating, she was still hungry, but at least the worst of the hunger pangs were gone.

Alice needed to decide whether to stay in the cave and try to survive the winter, or keep following the river and hoping to find civilization. It was a decision that could determine her survival. Her initial instinct was that she should keep following the river – after all, if there were more people around, her odds of surviving would be better if this was the modern era.

However, recent events and deeper thinking had caused her to wonder if that was just wishful thinking. As much as Alice longed for human company, it was entirely possible that she wouldn’t find civilization for a long while. And what would happen if she did find civilization?

As of right now, she was worse than a bedraggled refugee - she had no money, if there was even a currency system in this world. She had no ability to defend herself, no connections, and no reason for anyone to help her unless they felt sympathy for her. Frankly speaking, if the rest of this world had grown up with the System, right now she might also be as weak as a kitten compared to the average person, meaning that her ability to work in any useful capacity was questionable. Which meant trading labor for food would also be difficult.

She felt very uncomfortable placing all of her hopes on the kindness of strangers, especially if winter was approaching. If she found a village and they just considered her a useless mouth to feed, why in the world would they give her supplies and help her survive? And even more problematic was travelling barefoot through the snow - her feet were already scratched up, and although she had dodged frostbite so far, she seriously doubted that she would keep all of her toes if she tried to continue travelling through an unknown amount of snow.

On the other hand, if she stayed in the wilderness, she had no thick clothing, so staying warm when she wasn’t near the fire would be hard, even though she could warm up back in the cave. Wild animals might attack her, she still had no clue how to use magic despite numerous failed attempts, food was unreliable, and water she knew she could trust was a luxury instead of a staple.

However, she also had her cave, which was able to keep the worst of the elements off of her while she slept at night, and a way to obtain firewood, even if it was somewhat time consuming and labor intensive. While it required a lot of time and exposure to danger, her [Survivor] class was also helping her get the tools she needed to survive in this world, and would probably continue to do so as long as she kept levelling up.

She tossed her options around in her head, weighing her options as she tried to figure out which option had a higher chance of keeping her alive. Finally, Alice decided to stay in this area for now. It was a difficult decision: she had only been here for a few days, and she was already starting to feel lonely without being able to see other people and talk to them. However, continuing to search for civilization when she had thought it was spring or summer was completely different from trying to find civilization while travelling through piles of snow. As counterintuitive as it seemed, Alice thought she actually had a higher chance of surviving in the wilds right now since she had no clue where a city might be or how helpful it would be to find one.

Having made her decision, she began gathering more branches, this time not bothering to peel the outer ring of wet bark off since it would dry out from being near the fire anyway. As long as she was careful to avoid setting her stack of firewood alight it seemed like a workable plan.

Alice looked at her pajamas again. They were somewhat thin for this weather, and didn’t do a very good job of keeping heat in. If she could find some way to replace them, it would be ideal. Could she make some sort of clothing out of leaves? If she found a way to weave them together it might do a better job of keeping in heat. However, she discarded the idea after a bit. She didn’t have the supplies or {Weaving} skill required to pull it off, and the leaves might not last through the winter.

Alice sighed and returned to the camp, then sat next to the fire and tried to think positively. At least for now, she was warm and not too hungry. She found comfort in the small victories right now. She had a cheery blaze going inside of her little cave, and a blanket of grass to help keep the warmth in. Her feet hurt from getting scratched up walking through the wilderness, but at least she had an extra bit of firewood and a way to gather food. For today, at least, that was enough.

* * *

The next day, the snow had at least melted enough that she could see hints of green peeking through the snow again. She decided today was a good day to restock on food.

The nuts she had been roasting would probably keep through winter with no problems, so it was also a good idea to store some in advance, if she could. Nuts didn’t go bad after being picked, at least to the best of her knowledge. Furthermore, the shell of the nuts were poisonous, which meant that a good portion of the local wildlife probably avoided eating it. Therefore, she decided to gather as many nuts as she could today and store them for later.

Perhaps I could bury them in the ground, to make sure wildlife doesn’t get at it? After all, the nuts must have evolved the poisonous shell to avoid getting eaten by something, which means that whatever that something is, it probably also evolved some countermeasure for the poison… But I don’t have a way to plan around that right now. Alice sighed, realizing that she was once again stuck in a position where she didn’t know enough, and could only hope for the best.

Deciding she needed to get a move on, she started searching her surroundings, and managed to find several more baskets of nuts. She carted them back to her shelter, before she began to bury the nuts in the soil. The ground was hard, probably because it was still half-frozen, but with some effort she managed to use a few sticks to dig an untidy little food storage hole. Then, she covered the area up with soil again and stuck her digging tool into the ground nearby, to make sure she didn’t lost track of her food reserve.

Even though it was fairly obvious where she had buried her harvest, at least after burying it, the local wildlife would struggle to steal her food before she noticed and scared the animals off.

By the time she had finished her eighth haul of nuts and her third haul of firewood, evening had once again come.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 12 -> 13

Through Training, you have increased a skill!

Digging 0 -> 2

* * *

The next day, the snow had almost completely melted, and today she could see much more ground than snow. However, the leaves on the trees were finally starting to turn reddish-brown, somehow having done so during the few hours she had been asleep.

Alice was increasingly convinced that, although the trees of this world looked like the ones at home, they were some sort of species of tree she had either never heard of, or was unique to this world. The trees in this area were, strangely enough, still identifiably trees, and the fact they looked like the ones at home were baffling. However, Alice was pretty sure tree leaves on Earth needed way more than one night to go from green leaves to red and brown leaves.

Of course, the leaves turning brown also confirmed that she had probably entered this world right before winter, unless the leaves of this world changed colors for totally different reasons.

Another piece of bad news was that Alice had noticed a critical flaw in her grass blanket that she had failed to plan for. The grass was withering. It was a natural consequence of it being pulled out of the ground, and the grass hadn’t finished withering yet, but it definitely wouldn’t provide the warmth throughout winter that Alice needed. In hindsight, this problem was quite obvious, but Alice had somehow completely missed it while planning, possibly due to how desperate she had been when she first arrived here.

Alice decided that, if possible, she wanted to make a replacement of some sort. And while she was at it, she also needed more firewood, in case it got harder to find later in the winter, or in case she needed to focus on other problems in the future. While she was at it, perhaps she could also close the opening to her cave a little? That would help fix the problem of her grass blanket withering, since if the entire cave was warm she wouldn’t desperately need a grass blanket anymore.

She tried to think of a way to cut down trees for bigger chunks of wood, but couldn’t come up with any ideas. If she had an axe or something, she could at least cut down some of the thinner trees and make some sort of rudimentary log wall to cover up the entrance. However, she had no tools, and wasn’t really sure how to make any.

Alice sighed, and glanced at her [Magic] attribute again. If she could just figure out how magic worked, maybe it would provide a solution. Sadly, she had absolutely no clue what she was doing, and no matter what she tried she couldn’t make Magic work. She would probably have to find a teacher in order to get somewhere with magic, because her attempts at ‘sensing a muscle that wasn’t there’ and ‘pushing energy out’ and 'meditating to find her inner core' seemed to be doing absolutely nothing.

Alice sighed, and went back to gathering smaller branches and nuts. At least there was still available firewood in the surroundings. She had to stock up as much as she could for this world’s winter.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance 51 -> 52, Strength 44 -> 45

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 13 -> 14

* * *

When Alice woke up the next day, she felt cold, and her forehead was much hotter than usual. Her skin was also starting to swell in strange ways, especially on her arms and legs, and there was a piercing pain in her eyes. She quickly assumed it was some sort of disease, so she grabbed the {Microbe Resistance} Perk from the [Survivor] class.

Afterwards, gritting her teeth and doing her best to ignore the discomfort in her body, she grabbed her pointy stick and some of the more dry branches, before she made her way to the river. Now that she was able to start fires properly, she would be able to get at least a few fish meals in before winter. Furthermore, even if her knowledge of it was rudimentary, she knew that using smoke to cook meat and fish would help preserve the food. If she ate a diet of only nuts and random plants over the winter, she would definitely suffer from various nutrient deficiencies. Variety in her meals was important, and this might be one of her last chances to get fish from the river if it froze over during the winter.

Sitting next to the shallow part of the river as the disease and her Perk waged war in her body was uncomfortable, but Alice managed to put up with it and keep fishing. Then, ignoring the piercing pain in her eyeballs, along with the strange discomfort and lack of sensitivity in her fingers and hands, she waited near the shallow part of the river for some fish to come.

She had learned a great deal from her initial failures at catching and cooking a fish, and within an hour she successfully speared her first prey for the day. Then, she found another relatively sharp stone and made a second pointy stick. Although it was much less pointy than the first, it didn’t need to be as sharp as her hunting stick.

She pulled the dead fish off of her spear, and, after much fumbling, managed to slit open its belly and pull out what she figured were probably the intestines. She had no proficiency in descaling fish, but she could just eat around it. Afterwards, she slid the fish onto her second pointy stick and then propped it between two larger stones nearby, starting a fire underneath the fish and making sure to keep the sticks high enough to avoid letting the fish catch on fire. Alice hoped this was how people smoked fish.

At the very least, if she messed up her {Foraging} perk should tell her that it was no longer safe to eat. So the worst case scenario was wasting some time, instead of poisoning herself to death.

After another hour, Alice had successfully speared two more fish and had turned over the ‘smoking stick’ a few times to (hopefully) help the process even out a bit. Even better, Alice realized that the uncomfortable swelling and pain in her arms and legs, as well as the feverish sensation and pain in her eyes had already started to fade away. At this rate, within a day or less she wouldn’t be ill any more. {Microbe Resistance} was quickly paying off the Perk slot she had spent to acquire it.

She slowly ran her hands over her arms and legs, and realized that the slight swelling in her arms and legs was already starting to disappear. While she had been nervous about how much her Perk would protect her, this seemed to guarantee that she would be at least moderately safe from sickness and disease, which was welcome news. She started humming a little tune as she turned back to her fishing, thinking that it was about time something went well.

Finally, a few hours later, she noticed something far more odd than a fish drift into her corner of the river.

It was a book. The title was in an entirely foreign script, and Alice had no clue what it said, but it still told her several things.

First, there is, or was, something intelligent enough to write books using some sort of written code upstream - even though she had been travelling downstream ever since she arrived in this world. Alice felt irritated at the idea she had been heading in the wrong direction, but at least it confirmed that if she followed the river, she should be able to find civilization.

She had no idea whether this world’s civilization would be hostile or helpful, but at the very least it was comforting to know for sure that she wasn’t alone in the world. She had been trying to push the thought away, but the thought of wandering this world alone forever, with no human contact ever again, was terrifying. The knowledge that, eventually, she would be able to find other intelligent life forms was like a cup of hot chocolate on a cold day.

The second thing she knew was that she had no flipping clue what the book said. This meant that she didn’t have any sort of auto-translate function added onto her {Outworlder} perk. Still, she dutifully flipped through the pages of the book, and noticed that all of the pages were still relatively intact, despite the fact that it had been in the stream for an unknown length of time. In fact, the moment she had lifted it out of the water, the water slid off of it without leaving any indication that it had been there in the first place. That meant that whoever had made the book had somehow made the paper waterproof.

Alice had no clue whether this was accomplished via technology or magic. Since Alice had no clue how magic worked, she was still working entirely on guesses for how or what Mages looked like in this world.

There was also another bright side, which was that her status screen had {English (Language Proficiency)} listed as one of her skills. That meant that, with practice, she could probably pick up whatever language this book was written in, which would be critical when it came to communicating with the locals. Alice briefly wondered whether language skills differentiate between written and spoken language. Alice’s Status Screen only had the{English} listed, meaning that the System didn’t differentiate between reading and speaking the language. Then, Alice frowned. The System didn’t seem to have any sort of supernatural awareness of what skills she had possessed back home, so ‘written English’ might just not be listed in her Perks yet. She had talked out loud a few times after coming to this world, but she hadn’t tried writing anything yet…

She tried writing a few random sentences into the dirt with a stick, but didn’t pick up a {Writing} skill or anything of the sort. For now, she would take that as a light confirmation that language skills didn’t differentiate between written and spoken language. Which was a weird thought – was everyone on this planet literate as long as they had functioning eyes and the ability to speak a language? It would be hilarious if she stumbled across a stone age civilization with a higher literacy rate than a developed country on Earth.

Wait a minute… Come to think of it, I was able to read my Status Screen before the System had figured out what the English language was. What?

She pulled up her status screen, which displayed all of her attributes in nice, easily legible Arabic Numerals and English words.

But the System hadn’t known what language she was proficient in when she first arrived in this world. When she had just arrived on this world, her {Language Proficiency} had looked like a glitched-out error message. In other words, the System did not recognize the English language and had struggled to make sense of it. And yet, somehow, it had still displayed her entire status screen in a language it did not understand.

Alice struggled to comprehend what that meant, or how that was even possible in the first place. A few minutes later, Alice’s head started to hurt. That just didn’t make sense, did it? She could put aside the fact that the System had managed to figure out the English language in a day or two – while it was an unreasonably high learning speed, given what else she had seen the System do, learning a language in less than a week seemed downright normal in comparison. However, she had no clue how the System could make a Status Screen for her to read in English without understanding English.

She sat down and began to think, trying to figure out how these two seemingly contradictory facts could both be true at the same time.

There was a logical explanation somewhere, she just knew it. She thought about it. Very hard. She continued thinking…

Eventually, Alice slammed her head into the rock she was using to smoke her fish, just to make sure her brain was still working properly. If an outsider had been observing this moment, they probably would have pointed out that anyone randomly banging their head against a rock for seemingly no reason probably wasn’t all that sane to begin with. Fortunately, there was no such person nearby.

Alice lapsed into twitching as she rubbed her head. “All right, what does that actually tell me?”

Alice thought long and hard about the subject, before finally arriving at a conclusion.

"First, from what I know, the System is obviously capable of interacting with my thoughts as well as my physical body, at least on some level – otherwise, it would be impossible for it to do things like improve my willpower and give me hints about how to properly start a fire and make a basket. However, it seems hard for anything to able to communicate with me without understanding what I’m saying. Rather, this information is directly conflicting with itself, as far as I can tell. It’s like saying someone can speak and read English perfectly, but doesn’t understand the language at all – it almost seems like a definition error or something. So, maybe the System is somehow communicating directly with me without using language at all, or something?” Alice frowned. It was her best guess for now, at least.

“Also, a humanoid intelligence, if they were powerful enough to recalibrate my physical body without me noticing, read my thoughts, and watch over every second of my life while presumably doing the same for every other sapient intelligence on this planet, probably shouldn’t take several days trying to figure out what the English language is even though I think in the language, know exactly what the language is called, and don’t know any other languages. Which makes me wonder if the System is intelligent at all, because given the seemingly godlike abilities the System has thus far demonstrated, it doesn’t seem to make sense for them to be so bad at learning the name of the English Language. That feels more like an automated process stumbling over its feet, although I could be mistaken in my assumptions.” Alice shrugged. It was her best guess about the nature of the System for now, although she definitely needed more information to confirm or deny her assumptions.

Most of her reasoning was made based on rather loose assumptions. The biggest thing Alice could think of that made her theory likely to be correct was the fact that she couldn’t conceive of a human communicating without understanding their own communication at all, but a computer program did that all the time. In some sense, that was what most computer programs were doing anytime they functioned – a program was essentially long string of code telling a program how to do something and defining all of those ‘somethings.’ It was also why computer codes were hilariously finicky, and broke if even a tiny bit of syntax was wrong, while a human reading a language could usually work around a few minor grammatical errors and still figure out what they were hearing or reading.

However, Alice tried her best to remind herself that she didn't have enough information yet. She could be misunderstanding something, or totally wrong. However, it was an interesting train of thought to pursue.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Intelligence 153 -> 154

Had… had the System just given her an attribute point for concluding it probably wasn’t intelligent? It did make sense, at least in some ways – she had followed a fairly specific chain of thinking and logic in order to arrive at this conclusion, after all. Still, the System rewarding her for calling it dumb was quite amusing. She tried to feel out the changes caused by gaining one [Intelligence], since it was her first time gaining a point in that Stat, and realized that her thoughts were, perhaps, just a tiny bit faster and clearer than before. Her memory was also the tiniest bit better, and she was able to remember things a bit more clearly than moments earlier. However, it was fairly difficult to feel out the changes in a bigger and more concrete way, and the differences were slight enough that they could also be attributed to the placebo effect.

Alice shook herself out of her thoughts, and refocused on the book she had found. With the book, she might be able to pick up a language skill as well. She needed to finish catching and smoking her fish, but later on, she would have a book to investigate! Regardless of what the book was about, it would definitely be nice to have something else to focus on during her time here. If she was lucky, the book might have useful information about this world, and she would also get the ability to communicate with people if Language Skills worked the way she thought they did.

Alice got back to fishing. Less than ten minutes later, more things started floated across the patch of river Alice was fishing in. A few fragments of wood drifted by. Then a piece of cloth, that she couldn’t determine the use for but quickly ran over to snag. Maybe it could be made into clothes later on. Then some bruised purple and red round things that looked sort of like giant berries, but her {Forager} perk stated, in no uncertain terms, that eating it would be the worst, and last, mistake she ever made.

And finally, a horribly mangled human corpse floated downriver. She couldn’t tell what the gender of the person had been – male or female, it was hard to tell in this state. It looked like it had been tossed over and over in the river until it resembled a rag dunked in acid instead of a human corpse. Most notably, it looked like the heart had been carved out, although at this point it was hard to tell whether it had been dug out by a wild animal or a human.

Alice stifled a scream, lurching away from the river and feeling nauseous. She could have tried to stick around, either to scavenge more supplies or figure out what had happened to this person, but she had no clue if whatever had killed the man was nearby, possibly hunting for another meal. Something felt wrong here, and she didn't want to die trying to figure out what it was.

She immediately hurtled over to the fire she was using to smoke the fish and threw dirt on it to put it out, before grabbing her fish and erasing any evidence that anyone had been here. She had no idea what had killed this person, be it wild animal, human, or something else entirely, but she wanted to be as far away from it as possible.

She grabbed her new cloth and the book, and moved her way back into her cave and hid for the rest of the day, anxiously watching the surroundings for any sign of something or someone hunting her down. She waited for hours with nothing happening, until finally, she drifted off to a fitful sleep, startling awake at the smallest noises throughout the night.

Even until that morning, nothing came.

Chapter 6

When morning came, Alice was freezing. She hadn’t dared to light a campfire, afraid that whatever had killed the man in the river would find her if she made herself more visible. However, after several hours of nothing happening, her frayed nerves were beginning to restore themselves. Cautiously, she poked her head out of the cave, before slowly scooting her way back into the sunlight. After another tense minute of observing her surroundings, she breathed a sigh of relief, before she once again inspected the things she had found from the river yesterday.

Of greatest interest to her was the soaked piece of cloth she had found floating down the river. Since she frequently suffered from the cold weather in this world, having thicker and warmer clothing or better blankets for the night would drastically ease the difficulty of surviving. After taking another look at the incredibly soaked cloth, she unfolded it and placed it on a nearby rock, hoping it would dry out by nightfall. Then, she returned to the river, keeping a wary eye on her surroundings just in case. For the next several hours, she didn’t spot anything out of the ordinary as she caught and smoked fish.

Four smoked fish and one level in the {Fishing} skill and one level in [Survivor] later, Alice returned to the cave. Midday had come, and there were still no notable incidents. Since [Survivor] had reached level 15, Alice had another perk selection available, and she wanted to see what was available before she started studying the book she had found.

Enhanced Regeneration

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Any damage to your body heals at a significantly faster rate without increasing the consumption of calories and nutrition.

Enhanced Endurance

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

The effects of the [Endurance] Stat are increased by 5%.

Bone Strengthening

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Your bones become able to resist outside impacts more effectively and resist breaking more efficiently without any negative side effects.

Nutritional Balance

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Regardless of your food intake, your body will maintain proper nutritional balance. This does not substitute for lack of food - instead, it strips some of the nutrients out of various foods consumed and converts them into other vitamins and minerals based on what your body is lacking.

Friend of Animals

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher, Charisma 110 or higher

Simple minded-animals are less likely to bear ill will towards you, and are less likely to attack you or steal your food. Does not affect monsters.

Extremophile

Requirements: Survivor level 15 or higher

Extends your survivable temperature range by 10 degrees Celsius. You will suffer no ill effects or discomfort while within this extended temperature range. (This applies to both hotter and colder temperatures).

{Friend of Animals} was almost immediately struck off the list. She wasn’t sure what the distinction between ‘simple minded’ animals were and regular animals, which made the usefulness of the perk too uncertain for her tastes. Even though being less likely to tangle with the wildlife was somewhat tempting, it simply wasn’t tempting enough. She did note that the Perk mentioned ‘monsters,’ which made her quite nervous, but she had no idea how many or how few monsters might be present in this area. Hopefully she just wouldn’t stumble across any until she returned to civilization?

{Enhanced Endurance} was also eliminated by her, since it didn’t have a very big impact either. While it might be more useful in the long run, she also needed to live long enough for there to be a long run. {Bone Strengthening} and {Enhanced Regeneration} were also removed from consideration after some brief debate – she wanted them, of course, because they seemed like they would be useful. However, compared to the last two perks, they didn’t do anywhere near enough. She had no idea how much {Enhanced regeneration} boosted her regeneration by, and having sturdier bones and quickly regenerated wounds just didn’t seem to deal with the most likely ways she would die, which Alice currently believed to be hypothermia and starvation.

That left {Extremophile} and {Nutritional Balance} as the two Perks that she felt were most useful right now. Alice didn’t have to think for too long before she picked {Extremophile}. Problems caused by lack of nutrition seemed much less lethal in the short run than freezing to death, and an extra ten degrees Celsius of warmth could make a huge difference.

Although, Alice did wonder why the System seemed to consistently use the metric system. Not that she objected – even though she was raised in America, she naturally had to use the metric system in her Science classes, and had a good enough understanding and familiarity with Celsius and meters that it wouldn’t hinder her usage of the System. However, thus far she had been guessing that the System seemed to translate perks and ideas into language that she found most easy to understand, based on her analysis of its interaction with the English language, so the sudden demand that she think in metric units threw her off a bit.

Immediately after picking the perk, she felt the difference. The air around her felt warmer, the cold less biting, and the misery the weather in general seemed to disappear. Alice had been nervous for a while, because the strange warmth near her heart that had kept her alive after her mana baptism had been fading day by day, but suddenly the problem seemed utterly nonexistent. Ten degrees Celsius felt like more than enough to survive chilly weather, as long as she didn’t take a bath in ice cold water or something. If before she felt like she had been locked into a walk-in freezer, now it felt closer to a chilly room. She still found the temperature unpleasant, but it was no longer cold to the point of being life-threatening.

After a lunch of smoked fish and nuts, she began studying the book during the second half of the day. She first started by looking for any common and repeated characters in the book – it was important to know whether the language had an alphabet or whether it was closer to a language like ancient Chinese, where most concepts and ideas each had their own unique symbol.

Luckily, the book’s language clearly used some sort of alphabet. There were 39 different characters in total, and all of them were repeated several times. While she didn’t know what any of them meant, she at least didn’t need to decipher 10,000 or more unique ‘letters’ to read. After some more analysis, Alice started making a few guesses about some of the character she saw repeated throughout the book.

Are some of the characters punctuation, perhaps? She tried looking through the book to see if there were any common ‘periods’ or something that seemed to crop up after a certain amount of text had been written, and found a few different characters that seemed to show up less frequently and were more evenly spaced out. It could be a coincidence, or it could be punctuation.

At least it was somewhere to start. Afterwards, she began counting various other things, trying to find other patterns within the language. Fifteen minutes later, the real result she was hoping for finally appeared.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Illvarian Language Proficiency 0 -> 1

Alice was immediately able to translate a few of the words in the book. Not only that, in a way she somehow completely failed to comprehend, she was suddenly certain that she could also speak the words she had just learned out loud with no problems.

Testing it out a bit, she spoke a few words out loud, and was somehow certain that she was not only speaking the language correctly, but was also doing so with no noticeable accent. She only knew a few basic words like ‘hello,’ but the fact that the system allowed her to fluently speak a foreign language with no accent after twenty minutes of guesswork was… stunning. Was this some sort of benefit she got as an {Outworlder}, or were languages just really easy to learn in this world? Alice couldn’t help but feel a bit curious about how the System influenced language learning in this world as she flipped through the book over and over again. She set a small goal for herself of figuring out the book’s topic before sunset.

Unfortunately, while she could make out a few basic words, the book seemed to be more complex than she had originally thought. One of the only things she could make out was on the first page, which seemed to be some sort of… introduction?

Greetings …. …. ….. . I …… ….. …….. ….. years…. …. …. ………..

Beyond that, most other things she could translate were just random collections of words like ‘I’ or ‘the.’ She was missing so much context that the book was still total nonsense to her, even though she could occasionally recognize a word or two here and there. However, that didn’t deter her. If she persisted long enough, she would naturally be able to understand the book as long as the System kept giving her Skill levels. It was just a matter of patience.

She continued looking for clues about the language and the book until the sunset. When she went to sleep, she first checked the cloth she had left outside, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was dry. Then, she fell asleep in her newly acquired blanket. It was warm, her belly was closer to full than it had been in days, and she was able to study a new language without any immediate threats to her survival. It was the best night she had spent in this new world so far.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Illvarian Language Proficiency 1 -> 3

* * *

The next day, Alice started out by gathering some more firewood for the morning and then went to gather some more fish. Smoked fish would be a critical food supply for her over the winter, along with nuts, and the fish would be particularly difficult to restock after winter began since the river would probably freeze over. She also needed a way to store some water or a way to break down the ice chunks into drinkable water, which caused her to once again come back to the issue of boiling water. She wasn’t sure if she needed to be afraid of getting sick from drinking bad water, since {Outworlder} and {Microbe Resistance} seemed to be doing a good job of keeping her protected from illness, but it didn’t hurt to take more precautions just in case. She could try finding some sort of uniquely shaped stone, but it was unlikely to be able to hold any reasonable amount of water unless she got incredibly lucky, and Alice didn’t really fancy her chances when it came to luck these days.

That meant that she needed to make something. A stone bowl might be achievable – that would at least allow her to boil water. She could even, very roughly, guess how she might go about doing so – if she hit rocks together for long enough, that might allow her to at least make a depression in a stone if she found a softer stone and used a harder stone to chip away a bowl shape. As for storing the water… she had no idea.

Alice hummed thoughtfully as she started getting ready for her usual fish-hunting. Despite the fact that she had survived the past few days, it felt like there was still so much she needed to do, and she hadn’t had any time to prepare before winter was upon her.

Suddenly, Alice felt fear pierce through her body. She wasn’t exactly sure what it was, but she froze, listening to the sounds around her and trying to figure out what had disturbed her. After a few seconds of stillness, she saw something black scuttle around in the corner of her eyes. She turned her head to stare at it and saw something that looked like a mixture of a crab and a spider. That is, if crab-spiders were as tall as her waist, had four claws, ten legs, and twelve eyes. It looked like someone had simply stuck the two animals together in a blender with no regard for sensible biology.

The strange creature seemed to be sniffing the area, trying to find something. Her heart started to pound. Alice had no idea if it was her intuition or her levels in Survivor, but something was telling her that this thing was dangerous.

After a few seconds, it edged a little to the left, maintaining a distance with her. It ran its limbs over the ground, and Alice took a cautious step away from the fish she was cooking. She would be seriously upset if her three fish were taken away by this thing, but wild animals were attracted to food, right?

If it was looking for her meal, she would happily exchange it for her life. She took another step backwards. And the thing finally noticed her.

With a sudden shriek, the thing rotated its body towards her and pounced. Alice shrieked, then immediately turned around and began running towards the trees. She hoped that this thing couldn’t climb trees. The thing seemed to be entirely ignoring her fish. Instead, it was sprinting directly towards her, expressing no interest in her fish at all. Alice leaped up, grabbing at a tree branch. She slipped, nearly falling to the ground. At the last second, she managed to stabilize herself and haul herself onto the branch, scratching up her hands along the way. At the same time, she felt something painful latch onto her foot and bite down hard. Alice screamed and kicked, feeling some of her flesh tear as something heavy flew off of her leg. Screaming in pain now, Alice finally pulled up the rest of her body, her injured leg throbbing as she moved it. Unsure if she was safe yet, Alice moved up one more tree branch as she tried to stifle a moan of pain. The system started spewing out notifications, but she couldn’t spare the time to look at them or her status screen.

The creature that had tried to eat her had already shaken off her little kick and was already prowling underneath the tree, looking up at her. Thankfully, it didn’t seem to be able to climb trees, but her leg hurt where it had bitten her.

Alice clawed her way up another few tree branches, stifling whimpers of pain. Then the creature hurled itself against the trunk of the tree, over and over again to no apparent effect. After almost a minute of watching the creature try to reach her and fail over and over, Alice felt comfortable enough to inspect her wound.

Her foot didn’t look like it was in critical condition. However, there were two somewhat deep puncture marks near her ankle, and the area around those two puncture marks had two long and bloody gashes where she had dislodged the creature afterwards. She tried wriggling her foot a bit, and was thankful that it still moved properly. At least the spidercrab hadn’t injured a tendon.

Shakily, she stood up on the tree branch and tried to put her weight on her foot, and fiery pain bored through her entire leg. Gasping, Alice gave up the attempt. Instead, she tore off a strip of her pajama sleeve and then used the cleaner side to start wrapping up her wound. She needed to keep the wound from being infected, just in case her perk and achievement weren’t able to cope with an infection.

Given the creature was still snarling and trying to bash the tree down, Alice carefully made her way up one more tree branch, just to be safe, and then started checking the system messages she had been ignored. Please, let me have reached level 20. A Perk might save me. Please.

You have levelled up!

Survivor level: 15 -> 17

You have gained an achievement!

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Given the fact that they're everywhere, you're bound to encounter them sooner or later, right?

Increases the effects of the [Endurance] and [Dexterity] stats by 2%

Through training, you have increased an attribute

Endurance 52 -> 55, Strength 45 -> 47, Dexterity 49 -> 51, Perception 101 -> 102

Through training, you have increased a Skill

Medicine 0 -> 1, Sprinting 0 -> 1, Climbing 0 -> 1

What the heck did the system mean with ‘they’re everywhere?’ Alice had previously been hoping that monsters weren’t that common, even when she had seen them mentioned in the {Friend of Animals} Perk. It seemed that her hopes had been extremely misaligned with reality, and she would need to face monsters often in this world.

Suddenly, Alice felt very nervous. What was attacking her wasn’t just a wild animal, it was, for some reason, classified as a monster. Alice didn’t know what the difference between a wild animal and a monster was, but all sorts of crazy and scary ideas for what the difference could be sprang into her thoughts as she observed the spidercrab hurling itself against the tree below her.

It was also very clear that the System wasn’t going to save her here. Level 17 did not grant a perk, and she probably needed to get to level 20 before she got another Perk. In other words, she was on her own. Not to mention, even if she survived this encounter, the message accompanying {Monstrous Encounter} hinted that, rather than being unlucky she had stumbled across a monster, she might be lucky that she hadn’t found any so far.

Alice looked at the creature below her again, and imagined a giant swarm of them tracking her down and eating her as she tried to follow the river upstream. Then, she imagined a swarm tracking her down while she slept and eating her inside of her cave. She had no idea how she would survive either encounter. In the end, it seemed to come down the fact that she had no way to defend herself alone in the wilderness like this…

Panic seized her thoughts, and for a moment, she wondered if there was any way to survive at all. Even if she lived through this encounter, would she live through the next one?

No. She clamped down on her panic, trying to regain her focus. She refused to die here.

She frowned, and looked at the spidercrab. It was still hurling itself against the tree, over and over again to no effect. It didn’t seem particularly intelligent, and was very, very hostile towards her for some reason. However, it had no way of climbing up the tree, and didn’t seem able to use its spidery legs to climb for whatever reason.

Alice glanced around again, and confirmed that she had no weapons or offensive tools. If she had been thinking more clearly, she would have carried her stick with her instead of leaving it to keep smoking her fish by the fire, but she had panicked when she had seen the monster rushing at her.

The monster showed no signs at all of giving up, and if anything it was throwing itself at the tree more ferociously as time passed, so this wasn’t something she could just wait out. Alice looked around her, and saw browning leaves and dying tree branches… tree branches?

Alice grabbed one of the sturdier tree branches that she was able to reach, and after several tugs managed to break it off. The branch was around four or five feet long, and was much more unwieldy than a real spear, but at least it would help her attack from a distance. She inspected the point at the end of the branch, which had luckily produced something that at least resembled a sharp tip, and decided that it was probably able to make a dent in the softer parts of the spidercrab’s body. As the spidercrab hurled itself at the trunk of the tree again, Alice stabilized her position on her tree branch as best she could, and then stabbed towards one of the fleshier spider limbs.

She felt a tremendous jerk as she nearly dropped the branch, unprepared for how much force was behind the animal’s leap. However, fortunately, she felt something squish.

SKREEEEEEEE! The spidercrab’s howl sounded like nails being scratched on a dozen chalkboards at the same time. If before it had been thinking of her as a meal, now it was seriously pissed off.

More System notifications sounded in her ears, but she ignored them.

Although she hadn’t done any major damage, she had injured it!

“Die!” Alice yelled, half to hype herself up and half to try to intimidate her opponent. It would have sounded much more intimidating if her voice hadn’t quivered halfway through her statement, making her sound more terrified than brave.

She stabbed at the spidercrab again.

This time, her aim was much worse than before. She managed to stab the air above the spidercrab’s legs, injuring nothing besides her pride.

The spidercrab, seeming to have realized something from her previous attempt, leapt towards her again. However, this time, it swiped with its legs in midair, trying to knock the stick out of her hands. Alice instinctively flinched away the moment the monster did something unexpected, saving her from losing her weapon as she cowered back onto the tree branch. More System dings rang out, all of which she ignored.

The creature leapt for a final time, ignoring the tree trunk entirely this time as it tried to reach Alice. As it was doing so, she managed to steel her heart and stab once more towards its eye. More through sheer coincidence than any skill, Alice managed to penetrate the thing’s eye, and felt something else squish under the force of the stick.

The thing shrieked again, and Alice could almost feel its anger as it lost one of its twelve eyes. Upon landing on the ground again, it shrieked, then hurled itself against the tree trunk again as if it had lost its mind. Alice stabbed at it, trying to get in another lucky blow, but missed completely. Finally, Spidercrab failed one of its landings and flopped onto the ground below. Alice crawled down one or two rungs of tree branches and stabbed at its softer underbelly as it tried to claw its way back to its feet. Even with her terrible aim, she could hit a flailing stationary target, and stabbed it in the stomach. After she managed to get in a few good jabs, Spidercrab was noticeably injured and bleeding, favoring one of its sides as it finally climbed back to its feet. It screeched at her one last time, letting her know just how pissed off it was, and then scuttled back towards the trees. It wasn’t dead, but it had given up on turning her into a meal.

Alice stayed on the tree branch for almost an extra half hour, waiting anxiously as she stared at where the spidercrab had disappeared back into the wilderness. She couldn’t shake off the fear that the creature was preparing to ambush her the moment she lost her safe spot in the tree. However, eventually, she calmed down her wildly beating heart and rough breathing and realized that the creature was gone for now. Slowly, she checked her system messages.

Through training, you have increased an attribute

Strength 47 -> 50, Endurance 55 -> 56, Dexterity 51 -> 52

Through training, you have increased a Skill

Spearmanship 0 -> 5, Climbing 0 -> 2, Dodge 0 -> 1

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 17 -> 19

Alice looked over her levels and attributes and realized that she had gained more levels in the last hour than she usually got in a day. Not to mention, she had gained almost as many stat points during the fight as she had during her entire stay on this planet so far. This led her to some new guesses about how the System worked.

The ‘levels’ obviously seemed to work differently than they would in most RPG’s, since her ‘survivor’ class kept levelling up based on her wilderness survival instead of killing monsters or something. However, perhaps fighting monsters still boosted her experience point gain or something? Maybe that was why her magic class wasn’t levelling up… ?

Or, alternately, perhaps the system responded to danger. Since she had almost died in the last hour several times during the fight, she had been exposed to far more danger than she had at any other point in time on this planet. Perhaps that somehow increased the rate of stat gain or something. Or maybe there was a totally different set of rules that she wasn’t aware of. Honestly, she had no idea. Even if it were true, she wasn’t exactly eager to throw herself into danger in order to gain more stats and levels. That just seemed like a good way to end up in a monster’s stomach.

Alice finished climbing back down until reached the ground, making sure to keep her weight off of her injured foot as much as possible, and waited another five minutes at the tree base to make sure the spidercrab hadn’t just been waiting for her to get down from the tree before making a move. Then, after seeing no movement in her surroundings and deciding she was safe, she flopped onto the ground and took a few minutes to just rest her injured and tired body.

Afterwards, she slowly limped back towards her fishing spot. After seeing to the fish that she had been smoking, Alice was relieved to find that they were still intact. Although, that raised another question. Why had the monster gone for her and not the food? It seemed to be pursuing a meal, but many animals on Earth would have gone for the food she was cooking after scaring her off, rather than risking a fight with a potentially unknown animal.

Furthermore, the system hadn’t classified a single animal she had seen so far as a monster, but specifically distinguished this one as a ‘monster.’ Even the weird, scary raccoon-like creature she had seen on the first night hadn’t triggered the {Monstrous Encounter} Achievement. What was the difference? Aggression? Some quirk of biology? Alice had no idea.

Alice sighed. She had no idea how to answer any of her questions for now. What she DID know was that there was an entirely new component of the environment she hadn’t paid attention to before that had a very high chance of killing her. She hadn’t thought much about her initial run-in with the raccoon thing her first night, due to how much she was trying to process at the time, but this had brought that encounter back to the front of her thoughts. In addition to potentially toxic mana, starvation, freezing to death, and the difficulties of surviving alone in the wilderness, she had to worry about freaking monsters.

Chapter 7

After nearly getting eaten, Alice had to re-evaluate her priorities. She had a hard time keeping track of how long she had been in this dimension for, but she was sure that it had been a little under a week. In other words, within less than seven days of arriving on this world, she had nearly been eaten by a monster on top of all the other problems she had encountered.

Obviously, this did not bode well for her future if she remained as weak as she was now.

She ran over her options, trying to figure out what the best way to achieve at least some level of combat proficiency was.

Could I make a bow and arrows? I have no experience at all with shooting, so even if I made a bow and arrows I wouldn’t be able to use it. Perhaps a Skill would make up for that if I just practiced enough – but I don’t know if I can afford to patiently grind out an {Archery} skill when I could run into danger at any moment. This solution feels somewhat unreliable. Also, I have no idea how to build a bow either, meaning I would need to grind out the relevant crafting skill first. Woodworking would probably help me, but I’m definitely nowhere near the level of being able to make a functioning bow with it. It doesn’t seem like a solution that would be useful in the near future.

Knives? I can’t make anything that refined with stone yet – besides a knife wouldn’t give me the range I would want. Getting my hand near Spidercrab’s mouth just seems to be asking to lose a finger, or my whole hand.

Spear? A shoddy spear helped against the Spidercrab, although admittedly circumstances were favorable. However, it keeps monsters away from me if they want to bite me, and a spear is also pretty easy use. While a spear isn’t easy to make, it’s much less hard for me to make than a bow. It might be a pretty good option.

After a quick evaluation, a spear seemed like her best option.

She went back to the tree branch she had used as her makeshift weapon during the fight with Spidercrab and grabbed it. Afterwards, she moved back to her cave, scanning her surroundings carefully as she walked to avoid getting ambushed by a second monster, before she returned to her cave.

Then, she got to work. She began by finding a stone with a somewhat sharp surface, and then began awkwardly carving away the edges of the stick, trying to refine it into a sharp wooden spear point. However, in a flash of inspiration, she grabbed two more rocks – one that she was going to make into a spear tip, and one to use as a carving tool. She placed the first rock down on a particularly large boulder near the entrance to her cave, then placed the rock with a sharp edge against it.

Then, she began using the third rock as a makeshift hammer, banging it against the second rock over and over again to chip away at the edges of the rock.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Stoneworking +1

It took a great deal of time and work, with Alice nervously surveying her surroundings over and over again to see if the noise had attracted any monsters or wild animals, but thankfully, nothing showed up to attack her while she was working. Finally, she had a decent spear point. It was the first object she had made in this world that didn’t look like an incredibly shoddy, inferior knockoff item.

She looked back over to the piece of cloth she had found yesterday – then, she began trying to tear a strip of cloth from it.

The cloth was much tougher than Alice would have thought possible. In fact, it seemed quite bizarre, since she could clearly feel the fact that the cloth was somewhat coarse. It was a large bolt of some sort of rough fabric, nothing particularly fancy, but no matter how she strained against it, she simply couldn’t tear off a piece of the edge with her bare hands.

Finally, she began carefully poking little holes into the fabric with her stone spear point, weakening the edge of the cloth. Then, she managed to tear a rough strip of cloth from the edge of her new blanket. Finally, she tied the spear tip to the wooden branch with her strip of cloth, making the tightest knot she was able to with the assistance from the {Weaving} skill.

By the end of it, she was holding a serviceable spear with a stone tip.

Alice took another look at her work. It was really, really ugly. Functional. But ugly.

She waited. Usually every time she accomplished something that furthered her survival, the System rewarded her with a level. However, this time, nothing came up.

Seriously? Nothing at all? Alice felt depressed after a while. Maybe this was the difference between leveling up at low levels versus high levels? She sighed, before returning her focus back to her spear.

At least she had a stone spear now. It would be useful both for fishing and for fighting off any other monsters that wanted to maul her face off.

She glanced back at the strip of cloth, trying to figure out if she could make proper clothing out of it, before deciding that it was outside of the range of her current abilities. Perhaps in the future, but for now it would just continue to serve as a blanket.

Stone spear in hand and slightly more confident, Alice returned to fishing, although this time she kept a much closer watch on her surroundings. Her carelessness had cost her a painful bite on her ankle earlier, and she was determined not to let it happen again.

She caught another fish, and the system gave her a happy ding as a notification appeared.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Fishing +1

You have unlocked the class Fisherwoman as a result of catching several fish through your own efforts, as well as having access to the Fishing skill. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes

No

Alice quickly selected no, since she doubted she would use this class very much. The river might freeze over soon, and she wasn’t quite desperate enough to pick a class she didn’t think would be useful for more than a week or two, maybe a month at most. Besides, she was curious to see what the difference between a primary and secondary class was.

She also wondered why the [Survivor] and [Fisherwoman] class seemed to have such a high level of overlap. [Survivor], as far as she could tell, was a class that boosted her ability to survive in the wilderness by herself. It seemed to focus on giving her some aspects that wild animals benefited from, such as ‘fur’ through Perks like {Extremophile} and other beneficial traits like night vision, while also giving her knowledge and information early hunter-gatherer humans used to survive in the wilderness. Included within that were several abilities that were related to food, water, and shelter. Even though fishing was a bit different, at heart it was focused on providing food, making it feel like a more concentrated [Survivor] class in some respects. Were classes overlapping in abilities and purposes a good thing, or a bad thing? Alice decided that once she had a better idea what the difference between a primary and secondary class were, she would need to think very carefully about her primary classes. If she could get five overlapping magic-related classes as her primary classes, for example, she would have five times the amount of magic-related perks.

Alice sighed, and turned her focus back to catching and cooking her fish. Thinking about the future felt… nice. It was something she had precious little time to do over the past week as she drifted from one near-death experience to another. It felt almost normal.

After catching a few more fish, Alice grabbed her twelve smoked fish and carried them back to her cave. She could still feel whatever illness she had caught messing with her senses, but it was already fading away as her Perk worked on it. She silently thanked whoever or whatever had created the System for helping her avoid dying of whatever this world’s version of smallpox was, and then studied the book a bit, ate one and a half fish, and then went to sleep. It had been a long day.

* * *

The next day, Alice made a stone bowl, deciding to finally add boiled water to her supplies list. She wasn’t actually sure if it mattered at this point, given the {Outworlder} achievement and {Microbe Resistance} perk both boosted her immune system already, but she figured it was better to be safe when she could. After all, if she got sick, it might still become a death sentence for her. Now that she could finally make a stone bowl and boil her water, it made sense to take every extra precaution she could. Along with her stone bowl came a welcome surprise.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 20

It seemed like the bowl had tipped her over the edge into level 20 of Survivor, which meant another perk was available.

Flee

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

You may expend a significantly greater amount of calories in order to greatly increase your speed for a short period of time. This will cause you to grow tired more quickly.

Long Distance Running

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

The amount of stamina and calories you consume while running is significantly reduced, allowing you to run much greater distances if you pace yourself properly.

Photosynthesis

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

Your body gains the ability to convert sunlight into calories and nutrients at a slow pace. (Will not cause your skin to turn green). (You will not be perfectly sustained by this perk: it will simply decrease the amount of food you need to eat in a day to a significant extent.)

Directional Sense

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher

You gain the ability to always tell where the four cardinal directions are relative to where you are facing.

Camouflaged

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

While staying still, dramatically increases your ability to blend into the environment, making creatures around you much less likely to notice you. This can be turned off.

She glanced over the perks briefly, dismissing {Directional Sense} first. She was still lost, but she had confirmed that people had, at some point in the recent past, been farther upstream.

She didn’t know what killed the person whose corpse had washed downstream or why, but a sinking feeling in her stomach made her suspect that she was going to find out, sooner or later. However, figuring out where she was just didn’t seem to be as important as surviving right now, given the fact that monsters were roaming about and either monsters or people were killing people upstream.

{Long Distance Running} and {Photosynthesis} were also dismissed due to the fact that they didn’t help deal with monsters much. If it had been just two days ago, she probably would have chosen photosynthesis, because it both allowed her to experiment with the System more and it also addressed one of her bigger concerns, which was food. However, now she also needed to make sure she wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain.

That left {Flee} and {Camouflaged}. Alice briefly wondered whether or not she would have had access to a more offensively oriented perk if she had better physical stats, since the [Survivor] class seemed to rely a lot on the physical body and hers was incredibly lacking, but she focused back on her perk selection after a few moments of wondering. What-ifs and attempts to optimize her Stats were just impractical when a single misstep at any moment might kill her.

Eventually, she chose {Camouflaged}. It had some offensive ability if she used it to spring surprise attacks, which, while still risky, at least gave her more options for food if she got desperate. If she could find any more rabbits in the area, it might even help her get food, in addition to also providing a defense against getting eaten by monsters. It might also help her spear a few more fish, if the fish around here used their eyes to avoid danger. By contrast, {Flee} was a bit more useful for escaping monsters, but also worried her because she wasn’t sure how much food would be available over the winter. The Perk mentioned that she needed to consume extra calories to ‘fuel’ the Perk, and when her food situation was still uncertain that ‘extra consumption’ might kill her.

Afterwards, Alice began boiling some water in her new stone bowl, and in the meantime took a look at her book, trying to boost her language skill.

Finally, she managed to translate one of the most important words on the cover. One that gave her a huge rush of excitement when she realized that this book might answer some of her big questions about how to improve her current circumstances.

Magic. The book had something to do with magic.She didn’t know what any of the other words meant, but now that her Illvarian language had reached level 5, apparently it had been enough to translate this one important, critical word on the cover of the book. Alice could already imagine throwing fireballs around instead of struggling for firewood, creating a house out of thin air, and all of her worries disappearing under a few well-structured spells…

Okay, even with magic she probably wouldn’t be able to cure all of her problems at once. After all, if she had learned anything about the system so far, it was that it rewarded hard work and (possibly) danger. Still, having access to magic would hopefully give her an incredibly powerful tool to help her survive.

Besides, Alice was very curious about how this world could possibly exist with a system and magic. Obviously, as far as she knew, Earth didn’t have either of these things, which meant that something was different in this dimension. She wanted to know more, and firsthand experience would help her learn more effectively than anything else.

That being said, it also raised the question of why the person floating down the river had been next to a book about magic. Were Mages hunted down by society, the same way ‘witches’ had been burned at the stake back on Earth? That didn’t seem to explain why the man’s heart was missing, but it could be some sort of ritual ‘purification.’ It could also be a cult going around killing people, or the man could have simply been a merchant attacked by bandits, or it could mean any number of other things.

She thought about the corpse for a while, but couldn’t come to a conclusion. Right now, she simply didn’t have enough information. However, it was clear that something had killed the person. She didn’t know who, or what, or why, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach that she might find out why at some point. Especially if the man’s death was related to Magic somehow.

Or, perhaps, the reason might find her.

* * *

Alice spent the next few days devoting far more time and attention to the book than she previously had, raising her language proficiency and trying to translate the book as she nibbled away at her fish and nuts. She occasionally went back to fish some more and smoke some more fish, with growing nervousness as the river began to show more and more signs of freezing over. The {Camouflaged} Perk did help her a bit with catching fish, although Alice began diverting more and more of her time away from gathering supplies as she focused more on the book she had found. The fact she had a book about Magic kept her hopes up about her survival through the winter, even as the temperature dropped and supplies became more scarce.

On the fifth day, Alice’s {Illvarian Language Proficiency} reached level 22.

Her ongoing attempts at translating the book were getting closer and closer to paying off. She couldn’t translate enough of the book to make sense of it yet, but she could, at the very least, tell that the book was talking about the theories on the development of something called a Magic seed, and the four main forms of Magic seeds commonly used throughout the world.

Specifically, Alice had learned that a Magic seed was what allowed a human to use mana, although Alice couldn’t understand more than that yet. In other words, the reason so many of her attempts at using Magic had failed was because she didn’t have a Magic seed, and she needed to form one. However, she was very unclear on how this could be accomplished. As a result of her efforts at learning a new language, the system had also offered her a new Class, which was a welcome surprise after spending hours slogging through text she didn’t understand yet.

You have unlocked the class Scholar as a result of studying a single topic for several days, reading a book on the topic, and attempting to think beyond the teachings of the book and apply it to the world around you. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes

No

Alice thought very carefully about the question. [Scholar] was… not useful to her current circumstances. At all, in fact. One could say that, compared to [Survivor] it was a waste of a main class slot when it came to surviving her current circumstances. However, if there was one thing she loved doing, it was immersing herself into the study of knowledge.

This world had the bizarre, reality-breaking System in it, and it fascinated her. It also had Magic. There was a lifetime’s worth of things to study in this new world. She closed her eyes, hesitating for a moment as she tried to assess whether it was more important to think about the present or follow what she wanted to do in the future. Then, she tapped the ‘yes’ button.

There was no huge change in either her body or mind. That was to be expected, since the class was, after all, just level one. She hadn’t even noticed the effects of the survivor class on her actions even when it was at level five, and even now it just seemed to vaguely ‘help’ her think of ways to deal with problems she encountered that were within the scope of the class.

Still, after taking the [Scholar] class, she felt better. More resolved. In the nearly two weeks she had been here, she had spent the first week teetering from crisis to crisis, always on the verge of dying if she was just a bit unlucky when the next challenge came her way. To some extent, this was still true – she had no idea what had killed the guy who had drifted down the stream last week, although she felt ominous prickles at the back of her neck when she thought about the event even now.

She hadn’t seen any other monsters, but knowing that they were out there meant that she was at risk of being attacked anytime. She also had no clue whether spidercrabs were weak or strong compared to other monsters, and had no clue what she might need to defend herself from in the future. If she was particularly unlucky, stronger monsters might even be able to use magic, adding a whole new dimension to the dangers of the wilderness around her.

However, even with all of that, the [Scholar] class called to her. It made her feel as if she was planning for the future instead of just surviving in the present. And hope was something she desperately needed right now, almost as much as any practical ability. The [Scholar] class seemed to promise her that in the future, she would be safe again, and she would be able to study the things she loved once the current crisis was over. It might take some time, but eventually she would get there.

After taking her new class, she turned her attention back to the book. Finally, after a great deal of guesswork and translation, she finally managed to translate something a little more useful.

The basis … …. … Magic is a Magic seed. They are …… …… a mixture of ….. … .. …, and primarily fall under four. ... … .. . The kinetic-magic type seed, the …… type seed, the electromagnetic type seed, and the ….. … type seed. To form one, one must ….. ….. … [Magic] Stat must be above 0. This may be done by… … .. …….. …. with a high lethality rate. Assuming these conditions are …. ……….. …… …. Then, one must form a magic seed by ….. ….. on the concept one wishes for their magic to …… There appears to be… …. … …. …. . Once a seed is constructed, … … ……. …… .. That is also why ….. less likely. However, one cannot say that….. … basic four …. all magic. Plenty of other.. . …. …. After all, the basis …… …. ….. …. …. belief. At least, … …. humble author’s …. …. ……… … .. ….

The words were a mix of things she could actually translate as well as a few words she had guessed based on the way the Illvarian language and sentence structure worked, but she was getting more confident that her translations were correct, even the words that weren’t given to her by her Language Proficiency Skill. Her Illvarian language skill was also levelling up far more quickly than her other skills, like {Stoneworking} or {Weaving}, even though she still used the latter two skills more often. This baffled Alice. Perhaps Language Skills were somehow special? Or she was somehow displaying more proficiency with the skill since she was actively trying to translate beyond the Skill’s auto-translate abilities? It was a question to keep in mind for later.

She frowned, poring over the information she had learned from the passage. She was a bit nervous about the fact that the book had mentioned a ‘high lethality rate,’ but stopped herself before she could delve too deeply into her worries. Perhaps the book was referring to the method of getting the magic stat above zero? The Achievement she had gotten for almost dying of mana poisoning had mentioned something about a high lethality rate as well. Also, the fact that the book directly mentioned the ‘magic stat must be above 0’ told her that the other people on this planet ALSO had access to the System. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be referencing ‘Stats’ as if it was common knowledge in the book.

In other words, until proven otherwise she would assume that every living creature had exactly the same System as she did. Which brought up the question of what exactly the System was again, but Alice just didn’t know enough to make a good guess yet.

She could only translate two of the four types of magic seed, given the limitations of her Language Skill, but what interested her the most was that the two types of magic listed seemed to actually be based on physics. Unlike the System which could somehow reshape her abilities at a moment’s notice, the very fact that an ‘electromagnetic’ mage seemed to control electricity and magnetism gave her some hope that magic, at least, was based on something she was more familiar with from her time on Earth.

Of course, her translations of most of the book were quite patchy, so she was partially guessing at what an [Electromagnetic Mage] actually did, but given the name [Electromagnetic Mage] there were only so many different things they could specialize in.

She hadn’t managed to translate many of the other pages of the book in such great detail, so her understanding of a lot of the other parts of the book were still very weak. However, the other important she had managed to translate the page describing Magic Seed formation, and she had at least a guess about what she was supposed to do.

A Magic Seed seemed to require a few things.

First, one needed to have a magic stat. [Magic] Stat at zero meant that it was impossible.

Then, one needed to forcibly impress their understanding of a concept onto their mana, whatever that meant. Interestingly enough, there didn’t actually seem to be any Skills required for this, at least if her translation was correct. Even if one didn’t know how to feel, see, or detect mana in any way, shape, or form, as long as one had a [Magic] stat it was possible to form a magic seed. The author had seemed to be pointing out exceptions to some sort of rule of magic, but she hadn’t managed to figure out what exactly the rule he was talking about was. It seemed to be related to ‘extra seeds’ beyond the basic four, which Alice was fairly certain was the actual topic of the book – contrasting the ‘basic four’ magic seeds with whatever other magic seeds there were.

Either way, Alice had no understanding of [Magic] right now. A ‘basic’ seed sounded ideal for her if she was going to figure out how to do something without hurting or killing herself.

She thought carefully for a few moments longer, before finally, she made her decision. Even though the {Illvarian (Language Proficiency)} skill had been growing more quickly than her other skills, ultimately, it was still progressing more slowly as its level got higher. The words and grammar rules she got at each level of the skill were far more noticeable than other skills – after all, she could understand words that she hadn’t known a few minutes ago each time the skill levelled up. However, she had no idea when she would be able to translate the rest of the book, and a more powerful monster might show up and eat her if she waited too long to improve her safety. The spear would probably help against monsters like spidercrabs, but the fact that she had no clue what this world would throw at her next made her very uneasy.

Of the two magic seeds she could translate, kinetic magic sounded like it would be more useful. The author, unhelpfully, didn’t add in any explanations of the ‘basic four’ magic seeds beyond the names when he was comparing them to whatever the main focus of the book was. However, based on the name, she could guess what it was supposed to interact with. Thus, she quickly made her decision.

Tonight, she would try forming a kinetic magic seed.

Chapter 8

She spent the rest of the day anxiously making preparations, however futile those preparations might be. She peeled several roasted nuts in advance, in case forming a magic seed was really demanding on her calories and she needed a quick resupply partway through the process. She also filled her bowl with boiled water, just in case she needed it, either to drink or in case her first attempt at magic somehow caused something to catch on fire and she needed to put it out. Apart from that, she also got some smoked fish ready, as an extra bit of food if she needed it.

After preparing everything, she recognized that none these preparations were likely to be useful useful. She was mostly just trying to calm her nerves. She had no real knowledge of magic, and she was about to jump knee-deep into it in hopes that it would help her not get eaten. If she misunderstood something, or messed up, it might kill her. But the clock was ticking, and if she had already run across one monster in only a week, odds were pretty good she would run into more.

Soon, the sun began to set. It was time.

She did her best to follow her half-translated notes about how to make a Magic Seed, hoping that this wouldn’t kill her or cripple her. She had chosen to form a kinetic seed, so she focused on everything she remembered from her physics class.

The laws of kinetic motion, equations for force, a variety of half-remembered concepts and ideas about kinetic Energy floated through her thoughts as she tried to turn those ideas into a magic seed. After a few minutes of concentrating, she finally felt something move inside of her, just behind her heart where the unnatural heat had lingered after her baptism. She kept focusing on that sensation, trying to push her understanding of kinetic energy into that one specific area. She had a vague sensation of moving something, a muscle that she had never moved before, although it was very vague. After a few hours of trying to narrow down that peculiar sensation, finally, she felt something snap and change.

Suddenly, she felt something streaming through her, pulled out of the air before it flowed through her body and towards her heart. Then, she felt something thrumming deep in her chest, behind her heart, for a brief moment. It beat in time with her heart and her thoughts, over and over again, like a second heart, and she could feel warmth and energy flowing deep inside of her again.

It was like when she had suffered from mana poisoning, but rather than scorching flames and acid, this was more like a campfire, warm without burning her or hurting her. It was actually quite soothing, warm and friendly instead of hot and painful. She focused on that sensation, continuing to imprint her thoughts on kinetic motion into it in case she wasn’t done yet. The warmth behind her heart continued to soak up ideas and energy from the air around her like a sponge.

At the same time, she could feel the seed becoming attuned to something, and with a growing sense of realization she could feel the seed beginning to interact with motion.

She realized she was finally feeling mana in the air around her, filling her with energy that hadn’t been there before. It surged through her veins, and for a moment, she panicked, wondering if she had somehow lost control.

Then, with a second and final snap, seemed to fall into place. The heat behind her heart rapidly cooled down, the sensation of energy in the air around her disappeared, and everything felt strangely quiet. Everything except for a single kernel of energy that pulsed and thrummed just behind her heart, that is.

She felt a strange sense of loss as her sense for mana faded, as if she had been blind her whole life, and for just a brief second she had been allowed to see colors before losing her sight again. She opened her eyes, trying to fight off the strange sense of loss as a System notification dinged at her.

You have successfully formed a ‘kinetic’ magic seed (100%)

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 1 -> 4

100%? What the heck does that mean? Alice had seen the author reference magic seeds, but she didn’t remember him mentioning anything about random percentages. Alice frowned, but couldn’t figure out what it meant, so she ignored it for now.

Instead, she opened her status screen to see what had changed recently.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 52

Perception: 103

Dexterity: 52 (102%)

Intelligence: 154

Endurance: 57 (102%)

Willpower: 121

Charisma: 125

Magic: 5

Primary Classes: 3/5

Survivor: 20

Explorer of Magic: 4

Scholar: 1

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes: 1

Fisherwoman: 2

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Skills

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 22

Weaving: 9

Woodworking: 6

Fishing: 6

Spearmanship: 5

Climbing:3

Stoneworking: 3

Digging: 2

Sprinting: 2

Basic Medicine: 1

Dodge: 1

Magic Seeds: 1/1

Kinetic Seed (100%)

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Magic seed 1/1? So that means I can only have one magic seed right now. There doesn’t seem to be anything like ‘secondary magic seeds’ the way I can have unlimited secondary classes. Alice frowned again. She had been hoping to experiment more with the other kinds of magic in the future, but that was apparently impossible for now.

On the bright side, she could think of a lot that she could do with kinetic energy, if this seed worked the way she thought it did. Even if she wasn’t 100% sure what mages were capable of, influencing motion in the world around her sounded like it could be incredibly useful for self-defense and heating purposes.

She felt a buzzing feeling of excitement and happiness welling up inside of her. She had successfully formed a magic seed! She could finally use magic! She reached inside of her mind, trying to recover her vague sense of Mana that she had experienced during her magic seed formation. After a few moments of concentration, she felt something, although it was very… different now.

Kinetic mages should be able to move stuff, right? In that case… Alice focused on a nearby rock, and with a thought, a tendril of mana clumsily sudden sprouted out of her body, as if she had suddenly grown a third arm. She felt incredibly confused for a moment, wondering what the heck this thing was and what it was supposed to do. Clumsily, she moved it around, waving around. To her surprise, it couldn’t touch anything – in fact, it passed right through the wall when she tried to use her ‘third arm’ to touch it. However, when she touched the wall with her new arm, she felt something.

Alice fell into thought for a moment, before she tried something else. She moved her new limb towards a small pebble and then tried to lift it up with her mana tendril.

The rock, stubbornly, remained in place. If she couldn’t feel the presence of something through her phantom limb, she wouldn’t have realized her mana tendril was there at all.

Then, getting an idea, she tried using her mana tendril as a sort of pipeline, drawing some energy from the core inside of her chest and pushing it through her mana tendril. The mana slowly drained through her new phantom limb, moving as slowly as if she was trying to pump molasses, before it reached the rock. The rock suddenly popped upwards a few centimeters, as if she had gently tossed it upwards. It clattered back to the ground, but Alice was too busy cackling to care.

Magic! This is actual magic! She grabbed the rock again and popped it back upwards, before she tried to slow down its descent when gravity kicked back in. However, she failed. She quickly realized that her mana tendril needed to be directly touching something to influence it – it didn’t have any ability to influence objects she wasn’t touching. Furthermore, the range she could move her mana tendril was quite limited – she couldn’t move her tendril very far from her body before the cost of maintaining it started to increase exponentially. It could move perhaps a meter or two away from her at maximum.

Through training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic +1

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 4 -> 5

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Kinetic Manipulation 0 -> 1! Mana Control 0 -> 1!

Alice frowned, trying to figure out what the two new skills did. She reached out her mana tendril again, waving it around, before trying to pump a bit more mana into it. The other side of the mana tendril was only touching air, so all that she created was a slight breeze, but Alice got at least a rough idea what the two skills seemed to be doing as she felt the changes in how her mana worked now.

Mana Control was her ability to move the mana tendril around, granting her greater control over her new magical limb. It was difficult for her to control it right now, but with more levels in Mana control she might eventually be able to move it even more quickly and precisely than her real limbs. Kinetic Manipulation seemed to be related to how accurately she could actually move things. Before, she had thrown the rock upwards, but hadn’t had very much control over what direction and how hard she actually threw the rock. The single level of Kinetic Manipulation didn’t improve her control that much, but she could still feel a slight difference.

Alice grinned, and checked the available perks for [Explorer of Magic]. She had already had this class for almost two weeks now, and it was the first time the class actually did something for her.

Second Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5 or higher

Allows you to grow a second magic seed at a maximum 15% mana conversion ratio.

Magic proficiency

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5 or higher

Grants a greater level of intuitive control over your mana and its effects on the world around you, along with improved understanding of manipulating magic in general.

Magical Growth

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5

Increases the rate at which the Magic Stat grows by 20%

Hmm. Based on her understanding of Magic Seeds right now, Magic Seeds were similar to the ‘elements’ that one might find in most fantasy settings. However, instead of fire, water, earth, or air, it was kinetic energy, electromagic energy, and other types of Magic Seed that she couldn’t translate yet.

A second magic seed would probably be pretty useful to her in the long run, but having an intuitive level of control over her mana would also be important to surviving now. More importantly, she still wasn’t entirely sure whether there might some extra risks involved with magic, and if she hurt herself with her own magic it would incredibly dangerous since she had no way to fix any problems she caused. She also had no idea what mana conversion ratio was either, although the Perk explicitly mentioned it. That made it very hard to evaluate how useful {Second Seed} was as a Perk.

{Magical growth} looked sort of interesting at first, but given the fact that progress towards the next attribute seemed to take more and more work the higher the attribute was, she didn’t think that the effect would actually be very large. Not to mention, she already had a total of +80% growth to the [Magic] attribute from {Outworlder} and {Baptized by Broken Mana}. Adding 20% on top of those two didn’t seem particularly impressive, even if {Outworlder} wouldn’t keep helping once her [Magic] Stat reached 120 or higher.

Sighing a bit, Alice chose the magic proficiency perk. Alice knew that Electromagnetic energy had all sorts of strange uses, but frankly, her Physics classes hadn’t covered the core concept of electromagnetic Force in THAT much detail, and the parts of the force she understood would be difficult to apply and use in her current situation. While a second magic seed might be useful, it wouldn’t do her much good if she had no idea how to use it, and right now she had no clue what she was doing. Right now, she felt it was best to double down on what she already had and train it to a level where it was actually useful. It was much better to have one fully developed tool for survival, rather than having several undeveloped ones.

Furthermore, having an intuitive level of understanding her mana would probably allow her to grow her [Magic] Stat and Level up more quickly, based on how the system seemed to award Stats and Levels. It probably wouldn’t compare to the ‘magical growth’ perk, but it was more applicable to her current situation.

As the Perk adapted itself to her body, she could intuitively feel her mana more clearly than before. The information her phantom limb fed back to her improved, and while before she could only tell whether or not it was touching something, now she could at least get a very vague feeling of the ‘texture’ of whatever it was touching. More importantly, she could feel that the mana tendril was actually an active, if small, strain on the little mana seed inside of her chest. Every single second she maintained its existence, it ate a tiny amount of Mana in order to maintain itself, although the amount was quite small. She could also move her mana tendril more fluidly and precisely, as if she had gained several extra levels in the {Mana Control} Skill.

She could also tell how much energy was left in her mana seed more accurately than before. At the moment, it felt like she had a small thimble of water deep in her chest. It didn’t seem to ‘exist’ physically, but she could still feel it somewhere behind her heart. It was already almost half empty just from her moving the rock around a bit and maintaining her mana tendril, probably because her [Magic] Stat was a measly 6 right now.

She briefly glanced at her ‘preparations’ for creating her magic seed, and confirmed that besides settling her nerves they had done nothing useful. Although settling her nerves before trying something risky still had a value of its own.

She left her cave, satisfied for now, and checked her food and firewood reserves. Both were still enough to sustain her for a few days, especially after she got the {Extremophile} perk, which had drastically reduced her need to use firewood except for cooking. Still, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get more supplies. The temperature had been dropping sharply recently, and she would need more of practically everything if she wanted to live through the winter.

She went to her usual fishing spot, and noted with some worry that the river was definitely starting to show hints of freezing over. If the river froze, she would lose access to fish. Perhaps she could give hunting a try? Would there even be animals to hunt over the winter? This was definitely something she was worried about.

Still, for the next few days at least, she was fine. She went quietly back to fishing, humming a merry tune to herself. As she felt her mana slowly recovering, she used it to experiment, trying to lift and move small objects in her surroundings and figure out the limits of her new ability.

She found that moving any object, regardless of what it was and whether it was closer or farther away, was incredibly difficult as she ran out of mana. She attributed that to her low Stats and Skills, but right now she was only capable of nudging objects a few centimeters random directions. She could move an object ‘away’ from her or to the left or right, but it would often also shift in an unexpected angle due to her lacking control.

Furthermore, she couldn’t really ‘control’ an object for a long period of time – if she moved an object with her mana tendril, even if it didn’t move very fast, she had a pretty hard time getting the mana tendril to touch the object again while it was still in motion. It wasn’t as easy to ‘catch’ an object with her man tendril as it was to catch something with her hands. That could probably change with practice, but right now, it was too difficult for a beginner like her.

If she hadn’t had her Perk guiding her, she suspected it would have been even more difficult.

However, she did still manage to ‘catch’ a rock she had tossed upwards one time, although it was more by luck than skill. She confirmed that stopping an object in motion was possible, although it was very difficult for her right now. In the future she could probably use this to stop a charging spidercrab dead in its tracks, once she had enough mana to exert more than a puny amount of force on the objects around her. Holding a spidercrab in place and then stabbing it with her spear sounded a million times safer than trying to dodge and weave out of its way, or starting another desperate fight with a Spidercrap while stuck in a tree. It was impossible for her right now, but the System rewarded training and constant grinding, and Alice was more than happy to play with her newfound magic abilities. Of all of her Stats, this one would probably be the easiest to level up just because it was so fun to use.

For now, however, more complex usage of her new powers was out of her reach. She could finally use her magic stat, and she had a new tool that would hopefully drastically improve her survival odds once she got more used to it.

She completely ran out of mana partway through the fishing session, and got a minor headache once her body realized it was out of Mana. Rather than keep trying to push it, she waited for her mana to refill. She had no idea how long it took mana to regenerate, but at least her attribute gains were pretty sizeable for [Magic] today. She needed to keep training, as well as make some more plans for food, but things were looking up for her. The river wasn’t going to stick around for much longer, and when it went away, it would take her fish with it. But with her Kinetic Magic growing by the second, she would at least have a tool to defend herself against further monster attacks. And with what she had caught today, she probably had a week’s worth of food supplies. Even if that that wouldn’t last the whole winter, she had more time to fish right now. Now that one of the biggest questions and problems that had plagued her since entering this world were finally solved, she felt optimistic about her chances, however slim they might be.

Through training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic 6 -> 12

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 5 -> 8

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Mana Control 1 -> 2, Kinetic Manipulation 1 -> 3, Fishing 1 -> 3

Chapter 9

Alice settled into a routine over the next week as the temperature continued to drop. In the morning, she would wake up and train her magic, moving objects around and trying to improve her proficiency, as well as training {Sprinting} and {Spearmanship}, since those seemed to be relevant to combat and easy to train. She also tried throwing stones at herself using her magic to train {Dodge}, but her control over her magic wasn’t very good and it was hard to launch stones at herself that wouldn’t hurt her too much if she failed to dodge. After some training, Alice didn’t see a single notification that {Dodge} had increased, so she gave up on this part of her training after a while.

It became easier to keep up her training routine after the wound in her leg had finally healed, much faster than the wound would have on Earth. Alice attributed it to some influence of her increasing [Endurance] Stat. Along with this increased speed of regeneration, Alice had noticed that her [Endurance] Stat was gradually making her body stronger and tougher. Her feet didn’t get as scratched up as they used to when Alice walked over the forest ground without shoes, and her body was also becoming increasingly resistant to cold temperatures even without taking new Perks that improved her temperature resistance.

After her training in the morning, she would replenish her firewood and bury some nuts, then catch and smoke some fish. Afterwards, she would eat some berries, then work on creating some stone and wood tools to make her life easier. At night, she read her book by the fire, boosting her Language Skill and helping her level up [Scholar].

She had also managed to, with equal parts luck and skill, make a stone knife after several tries of using rocks as both hammers and chisels, even if the knife’s edge was rather uneven. With it, she had carved a few wooden boxes to store her smoked fish. Most importantly, she managed to grab some branches and smaller tree logs and had made a very rough that covered some of the edges of the cave. It wasn’t made very well, and didn’t cover the gaps in the cave perfectly, but it still helped keep the heat in. Slowly but steadily, her life in the wilderness was improving as she grew stronger and more experienced.

As time passed, [Survivor] had also leveled up to 21, [Scholar] had leveled up to 3, and [Explorer of Magic] had made it to Level 10. The progress was much slower now, but if Alice’s earlier guesses were correct, the System might respond to ‘risk of death’ by increasing her experience gain. During her encounter with a monster she had gained 4 levels in Survivor in less than an hour, while it had taken her a week and a half to get up to level 12 in Survivor beforehand, and now that there were no monsters and Alice had solved most of the major threats to her life in the woods, she was naturally at a much lower risk of dying than when she had first arrived in this dimension.

Her level 10 perks for [Explorer of Magic] hadn’t been too exciting, but she had grabbed {Enhanced Regeneration}.

Enhanced Regeneration

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 10 or higher

Allows you to regenerate mana 10% faster for all seeds.

Like all other stats, [Magic] increased when she used it. Therefore, regenerating mana 20% faster meant that she would have more training time than other people at the same level, boosting both her [Magic] Stat and [Explorer of Magic] Levels by a significant margin as time passed. Alice’s Magic still barely at a usable level, but Alice was determined to turn her Magic into a major tool for survival. Apart from that, she had acquired two more skills related to magic, both of which seemed quite useful.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Mana Precision 0 -> 1, Kinetic Force 0 -> 1

{Mana Precision} helped her control how much mana she sent through her mana tendrils. If the first time, she had been grabbing random amounts and pumping it through her mana tendril, now it was at least a bit more refined, allowing her to avoid wasting mana when she didn’t need to.

{Kinetic Force} was much more interesting, primarily because it seemed like the most odd Skill she had gotten so far. Most of the other Skills she had gotten so far improved her knowledge and instincts. Sprinting, for example, seemed to help her naturally adopt a proper running posture, something she could have theoretically learned even without the System. {Mana Precision}, as another example, improved her control of mana, but if she had sufficient practice, she probably could reached the same level of control anyway. It just would have taken a far longer period of time. By contrast, {Kinetic Force} didn’t seem to be doing any of that – instead, with the exact same amount of mana, she was able to exert more force on an object. Alice was baffled by the question of where this force came from, since she wasn’t using any more mana than before, but at least thus far she had no idea where the extra kinetic energy was coming from if it wasn’t fueled by mana.

Alice was also beginning to wonder how big of a role innovation played in her level growth, considering how much her levelling speed had slowed after her week in this world. She still got someprogress from repeating her routine and preparing for winter. However, she had gotten multiple levels per day during the first week, and now after a week of training she had only gained two levels in [Explorer of Magic]. Part of the reason Alice had been thinking about this was also due to the name of the Class. [Explorer of Magic] indicated that it was about learning and innovating with Magic, and all of Alice’s classes seemed to level up whenever she did stuff related to their name. However, [Survivor] still seemed to reward her when she ‘invented’ a new tool that boosted her survival odds, so getting rewarded for trying out new things obviously wasn’t unique to [Explorer of Magic].

Alice had also figured out how mana regeneration worked, at least to some extent. She found that if she drained her magic seed, it took slightly less than two days to fully replenish, or at least it had before she got the {Enhanced Regeneration} perk. She guessed that the ‘base value’ for magic regeneration was probably exactly 2 days, and then her 15% enhanced mana regeneration from {Baptized by Broken Mana} was boosting that regeneration speed by enough to make the math screwy, but with enhanced regeneration Alice took around 40 hours to go from no mana to full mana again. As a result, with her morning training sessions she made sure to leave a little over half of her mana available, to deal with any emergencies, while draining half to get whatever Stats, Skills, and Levels she could.

It felt good to settle into a routine. No sudden emergencies plunging her into a crisis, no trying to figure out how to deal with the influx of new problems, no near death experiences. Just slowly and steadily working towards her goal of surviving the winter. Although her start had been a bit rocky, she was finally starting to reach some level of stability after three weeks in this dimension.

However, her somewhat comfortable lifestyle came to an end one morning. A problem she had known was coming for a while finally reared its ugly head.

Specifically, the river finally froze. The fish had been thinning out for a while now, but with the river gone Alice would be fully cut off from her supply of smoked fish. Not only that, but the berry bushes she had found near her cave had stopped producing berries entirely. She had about two and a half week’s worth of food, give or take a bit, but that was far from the three months worth of food she needed for winter to pass. At least, assuming seasons were still around ninety days on this world, which was something Alice had yet to verify.

She wandered around the region, trying to find new sources of nutrition that would last her through the winter. She could rely on {Foraging} to help cue her in on what was and wasn’t edible, so she just needed to see new plants to hopefully find something to tide her through the winter.. Furthermore, although she didn’t remember it particularly clearly, but she was pretty sure she had seen a rabbit on her second day here, when she was suffering from mana poisoning. That meant there should be other rabbits in the area, if she could find them. She could also try going after some birds, although their thinning presence in the area meant that they had probably migrated for the winter and would soon disappear entirely.

However, as she stepped through the trees, concentrating on random plants, she felt a familiar icy sensation of fear trickling down her spine. Danger.

She looked around, avoiding moving too much, and spotted another spidercrab. This time, she didn’t fly into a blind panic. The creature was sniffing around the trees, about 10 meters away, but it didn’t seem to have fully caught onto her scent yet. She had a few moments to think about things.

Am I about to get stuck in a tree again? Alice looked at her stone spear, which had a sharp and sturdy point. Her kinetic Magic Seed was about 70% full, having recharged somewhat from her morning practice. She hesitated. Then, finally, she extended a mana tendril out from her seed, preparing for a fight with a Spidercrab. These things were obviously common around here, and if she couldn’t even defeat one of them it would mean that she would need to flee whenever she saw one. That would seriously hinder her attempts to find supplies for the winter, and so she felt the need to put the Skills she had been training to use. Not to mention, when she got closer to civilization there might not be as much tree cover as there was in this area. If she couldn’t fight spidercrabs on the way back to civilization she might get eaten before she arrived. Fighting at least one spidercrab at a time might be manageable for her, and if she managed to kill one she would vastly improve her survival odds.

The spidercrab seemed to sense it the moment she used mana, and turned towards her, giving off a screech that made her wish she was deaf. Then, in one swift movement, it pounced towards her.

Clumsily, Alice maneuvered her mana tendril towards the spidercrab as it got within a meter of her. Then, she gave it a shove with her mana the moment she had a proper connection, trying to throw the spidercrab to the ground and mess up its balance.

Instead of getting smashed into the ground, Alice felt as if a large part of her mana was trying to push through a barrier that had never been there before. A large part of the mana that she was trying to feed into spidercrab disappeared somewhere, throwing her calculations completely off balance. Alice panicked, but luckily, even though the spidercrab resisted over half of her mana, the remainder still threw it off balance and flung it to the ground. The spidercrab stumbled to its feet as it tried to recover its balance. Before it could, Alice shoved it again, this time committing much more of her mana to account for the creature’s mana resistance.

Then, Alice took a step closer before she stabbed at spidercrab with her spear. She managed to nick the monster on one of its legs. Green-white blood spilled out, and the thing released another screech, before launching itself towards her again. She used magic to flip over the two front legs of the spidercrab, stopping it in midair and leaving it struggling on the ground. While it was distracted, she stabbed its underbelly. The spear punched through its stomach, where none of its annoying chitin protected it, and it flailed and screeched for a brief moment before it managed to free itself again. However, she could see it was slower now, much more heavily injured than before.

Unlike the first spidercrab, this thing didn’t run away. It leapt to the side, then bounded towards her again, completely unfazed by how injured it was.

Alice tried to dodge and stumbled. She fell down, and the spidercrab’s teeth sank into her stomach. Alice screamed, and threw every last remaining shred of mana into throwing the spidercrab upwards. A sudden headache formed as her mana seed ran dry.

Spidercrab lifted several centimeters upwards, giving Alice just enough space to get her spear and ram the spear point into spidercrab’s head.

Spidercrab made a sort of warbling sound, trying to screech through the stone and wood buried in its throat. Then, it made a sort of warbling sound as its bottom legs scrabbled against the ground. Alice held on, not letting the spidercrab free of the spear before spidercrab started slowing down. A few seconds later, it stopped twitching entirely, its body going limp and sagging towards the ground.

Alice breathed in and out, blinking away the various notifications that had popped up in the middle of her fight. Her stomach hurt. She looked down, and saw blood. Panicking, she ran back to her cave as blood trickled out of her wound.

She cut another strip of cloth from her blanket, a larger one this time, while also using some boiled water to clean the wound. Fortunately, once she got a better look at it, she realized that it wasn’t actually that bad – it hadn’t managed to seriously mangle her flesh, or penetrate too deeply. Really, the wound was about a quarter of the length of her pinky. Which, while very painful, wasn’t lethal unless it got infected. It felt much better once a strip of cloth was wound around it. Hopefully her stats would do the rest of the healing she needed.

Calmer now, Alice tried to ignore the pain in her stomach as she took several deep breaths. She took a few minutes to relax, going through a vaguely remembered breathing exercise as her body and mind calmed down after the fight. After she settled her racing pulse and thoughts, she finally took a look at the notifications from the fight and its immediate aftermath.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 21 -> 23

Explorer of magic: 10 ->14

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower 122 -> 123, Magic 24 -> 30, Strength 54 -> 56, Endurance 60 -> 63, Dexterity 54 -> 55

Through Training, you have increased a skill!

Spearmanship 8 -> 11, Basic Medicine 1 -> 3, Dodge 1 -> 3, Kinetic Manipulation 6 -> 9, Kinetic Force 2 -> 4,

Mana Precision 2 -> 5, Mana Control 5 -> 9

Even though she got hurt during the fight, the gains were also nothing to sneeze at. However, beyond just the Levels, Stats, and Skills, there was one other notification that interested her.

You have gained an achievement!

Monster Slayer (I) (Rarity: 1)

You are no longer at the bottom of the food chain! Congratulations!

Increases the Effects of the Strength and Perception stats by 3%

After a few more minutes of some basic breathing exercises to help relax her, Alice finally began thinking back over the fight and its results.

The first thing to note was that her spear had held up reasonably well, but her body and skill with the spear hadn’t fared quite so well. She had been practicing {Spearmanship}, and now had at least some of the instinct and reflexes someone who actually knew what they were doing with a spear would have.

However, she was seriously lacking in several other departments. Her body simply couldn’t keep up with what it needed to do, and her thinking speed couldn’t really keep up with a fight very well either. Alice was more at home in a library than in a fight, and before today she hadn’t been in a fight. So she was entirely reliant on her Skills to help her, and while they certainly, they couldn’t cover her lack of experience. Furthermore, she had no idea what had happened to her mana while she was fighting the monster. The monster had, somehow or another, dispelled a big portion of what Alice had thrown at it, which had thrown a lot of her preparations into disarray when the fight started. She had managed to get her mana tendril where it needed to be after hours of practice, but because her raw mana reserves were so low the fight had still been a massive strain on her.

Despite all of that, she had managed to pull out a victory during the fight. Even if the fight hadn’t gone as well as she would have liked, she managed to survive a fight with a monster and kill the beast. Her Stats and Skills definitely needed more training, but she could defend herself in a pinch if she needed to. That thought gave her a feeling of security – before, she had been worried that basically anything she came across in this world might swat her to death. She had no clue what the power levels of monsters looked like, so she lived in fear of a level 30 or 50 monster sneezing her out of existence one day. However, for now she was at least capable of fighting off the weakest monsters in the area, and hadn’t seen any hint of stronger monsters so far. While she still suspected that high level monsters would be a huge threat to her, she wasn’t totally helpless now.

Apart from that, she had gained another achievement. This Achievement also had a number next to its name that wasn’t linked to the rarity, which was something Alice had never seen before. Since it had a roman numeral next to it, and the roman numeral looked a lot like the ‘tier’ System for Achievements Alice had seen in some games, for now she guessed the Achievement could be upgraded. The idea of an upgradeable achievement was something to keep in mind for the future, if her guess was correct. If she couldn’t find a way back home, upgrading Achievements might be a good way to improve her abilities further, since she had no clue what other Achievements existed in this world and Stats, Skills, and Levels would grow more and more slowly as her numbers grew higher.

Alice sighed, as she always did when thoughts of home came up. The last week had caused her homesickness to intensify, especially as she had settled in and her survival became easier. Without desperation to occupy her thoughts, they slipped towards the house she had been in less than a month before. Were her parents doing all right? What did they think after she had disappeared into thin air in the middle of the night? She hoped that they weren’t worried about her, but she ultimately knew that they were probably desperate to find out what had happened to her. If she could at least send a message to them and let them know she was alive, she would feel less guilty about being stuck here, wherever here was.

After a few minutes, she pushed the thoughts of home away. For now, they weren’t productive, and she needed to keep moving forward instead of drowning in memories and worries she couldn’t change.

She focused back on the fight, and suddenly had a thought - was spidercrab edible?

Even if its legs looked kind of spidery and gross, the center of its body looked much closer to a crab. Alice wasn’t quite desperate enough to resort to eating the spider shaped bits, but she had eaten crab on Earth multiple times. Maybe it’s worth trying?

Alice crept back out of the cave, keeping an eye on her surroundings in case another Spidercrab showed up while she was injured. After a bit of backtracking she found the body of her defeated foe.

{Foraging} let her know that, with some cooking, spidercrab was, in fact, edible. Thus began an entirely new ordeal -trying to drag the corpse back to her cave so she could butcher and cook it. Her stomach still hurt, even if it had stopped bleeding, and she had a hard time moving around too much weight due to her lacking strength and injuries. After some thinking, Alice took her stone knife and cut off the thing’s head first – she wasn’t going to eat the eyes or the mouth anyway, so it was adding on weight she didn’t need. Then, she also removed the ten legs – they were too spiderlike for her comfort, and even if it was irrational there was a huge ick factor when she looked at them. She might still eat them in the future, if she got really desperate, but for now, her disgust won out. Without the head and legs, the corpse was much easier to move.

Finally, she managed to get everything back to the cave, where she started dealing more carefully with the corpse. She quickly realized that the shell on spidercrab’s back was hard to remove – it was best to just try scooping out meat from the underbelly. After a messy process involving her knife, her bowl, a large amount of green blood getting everywhere, and a few edible chunks of meat getting stuck in parts of the shell or falling directly into her fire and becoming charcoal, Alice managed to get several chunks of spidercrab ready for cooking. Unfortunately, the internal organs weren’t safe to eat, according to {Foraging}, but Alice still salvaged quite a bit of meat from the corpse. Afterwards, she tried cooking the flesh until {Foraging} let her know the meat was safe to eat.

The meat itself tasted all right – somewhat similar to cooked crab from home, if a fair bit less delicious due to the lack of seasonings. She wasn’t sure if smoking the meat would work, but she gave it with the remainder of the corpse before she gorged herself on what she had already cooked. Once she healed up, she would try hunting another Spidercrab. Even if the first fight had been a bit desperate, she could improve her fighting skills with time and training. More importantly, she had found a source of meat for the winter.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 56 (103%)

Perception: 103 (103%)

Dexterity: 55 (102%)

Intelligence: 154

Endurance: 63 (102%)

Willpower: 123

Charisma: 125

Magic: 30

Primary Classes: 3/5

Survivor: 23

Explorer of Magic: 14

Scholar: 3

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes: 1

Fisherwoman: 3

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 27

Magic Skills:

Mana Precision: 5

Kinetic Manipulation: 9

Mana Control: 9

Kinetic Force: 4

Crafting Skills

Weaving: 11

Woodworking: 8

Cooking: 4

Stoneworking: 6

Physical Skills

Fishing: 7

Spearmanship: 11

Sprinting: 6

Digging: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Dodge: 3

Climbing: 3

Mana Seed: 1/1

Kinetic Seed (100%)

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (I) (Rarity: 1)

April Fool's Chapter

A note from acaswell

Stories you could have been reading instead: Alice, the summoned hero, and the might of the forced plot point

Obviously, this is not a real chapter. Happy April Fool's!

Alice looked at the ominous blue circle in front of her, wondering what the hell was going on. I did my homework, ate dinner, chatted on Discord with my friends for a bit, and went to sleep. How the hell did that result in waking up in the middle of a goddamn giant circle of-

Suddenly, the blue circle faded away, and Alice was deposited into the middle of a giant room.

“Hero! You have come!”

A guy with black hair and green eyes looked at Alice, his eyes shining with excitement as he looked at her.

Alice felt… disturbed. This guy’s gaze was a little…. No, WAY too intense. And-

“Wait, hero!? What the hell?”

“I know things must seem strange to you, hero, but we have paid a great price in order to summon you to our world. Now that you have come, you must embark upon a journey to slay the evil demon king before he destroys this world! Quickly! We have granted you a primary boon is that you grow faster, and that means you can level up skills and your class much more quickly than others. With the [Hero] class, you can provide the hope that this world needs! We must-“

“Wait, hold up. You just said you paid a huge price to summon me?”

“Yes, hero! We paid a massive price in order to summon you to this world, all in the hopes that you might slay the demon king!”

“And then, during the summoning, you decided that the best boon to give me was the ability to grow faster?”

“Indeed! Along with language translation, which we need to communicate with you, we also paid a hefty price to ensure you would grow much faster than others! It isn’t incorrect to say that half of the annual budget was spent on this summoning! All of this is to ensure that you can pick up many {Skills} and [Levels] along your journey!"

“And this seemed…. Optimal to you?”

“Opt...iii...mull?” The man wearing a steward’s robe tilted his head to the side, trying to sound out each syllable. In the end, he still seemed confused.

“So, you paid a huge price to graft a boon of growing faster onto me, who came from another world. Can I ask why, if you possess the ability to ALREADY GRAFT THIS ABILITY ONTO SOMEONE, you decided that it was a good idea to pay however much it costs to drag someone from another planet ONTO THIS ONE WITH THIS ABILITY INSTEAD OF JUST GIVING IT TO ONE OF YOUR KNIGHTS OR SOLDIERS?”

“I… I didn’t think of that.” The man seemed dumbfounded. “Truly, this is the wisdom befitting a hero!”

“What? Wait, no that’s just straight up ridiculous. If I’m not mistaken, just based on some guesswork I can figure out that reaching into another dimension must be expensive as hell – otherwise I would have heard of people on Earth occasionally being summoned to other dimensions, not just as a standard Isekai story I read as a guilty pleasure sometimes, but as a normal, frequently occurring part of everyday life. So you decided that, rather than giving someone who is already loyal to your kingdom or nation or whatever the ability to grow faster, thus dealing with whatever threat this planet is facing, the optimal solution was to reach into another dimension, paying dozens of times the cost of the actual ‘growth’ ability, just to summon a random person who MIGHT help you and then give them the growth ability? What the hell is your brain made of, cheese?"

“Well, when you put it that way it just sounds silly,”

“I wonder why,” said Alice, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Fuck this, I’m going home. This just makes no sense.” And in a puff of logic, the entire dimension disappeared.

A note from acaswell

The real chapter will come up later today at some point.

Chapter 10

With her first monster successfully slain, Alice felt a lot more confident in her survival in this world. Even though she had suffered a wound during the fight, it was a minor one, and as time passed she would get more Levels, Skills, and Achievements to work with. Since she had survived her first fight with a monster at her current level of strength, she could definitely survive future battles as her strength grew. For the first time, Alice felt prepared for the world around her, something that she wouldn’t have even been able to imagine three weeks ago.

However, after her crab meat party, she was starting to pay attention to other, less important problems. Previously, she had no way to address some of these problems, but now that she had solved fundamental problems like disease, food, and warmth, she was able to pay attention to details she had previously ignored. One thing that definitely hadn’t fared well over the last three weeks were her pajamas, which were growing more and more ragged as time passed. In the past three weeks, she had torn off part of the pajama sleeves to use as bandages, been injured by monsters twice, and gotten the pajamas scratched up as she wandered through the forest. Pajamas were never particularly sturdy in the first place, and by this point they were incredibly ragged after all of the abuse she had put them through.

Alice looked at the remains of her feast, then looked at Spidercrab’s chitin, trying to figure out if there was anything she could do to make it into clothing.

That’s not happening. Not only is there an ick factor, but I don’t think I can bend it without breaking it. Is there any use for this chitin shell at all?

Alice looked at her hastily built walls for the cave, and then at the round shell. Maybe it could be used as a construction material?

That was probably a terrible use of it. Hmm. Actually, it’s pretty close to the right shape for a bowl. Is it flammable? Alice shrugged, got a pile of snow, and tried boiling a bowl of water in the shell. Her previously made stone bowl had required a huge amount of labor to take shape, so if she could use the spidercrab shells as bowls to store food and supplies it would save her a lot of time in the future. Even after Alice exposed it to her campfire, the shell didn’t catch fire or show any adverse reactions to being heated up. After a while, she had a bowl of boiled water. She shrugged, and grinned to herself. So it does make a good bowl.

However, that didn’t solve her clothing problem. She looked, with some regret, towards her blanket, which was already missing two strips of fabric, and wondered if there was a way to make it into a new set of clothes.

Hmm… I think it’s possible, but I need some sort of needle, as well as a way to make thread. I have neither, and I definitely wouldn’t succeed in making stone needles if I tried. Maybe bone?

Alice looked at the remains of Spidercrab again, but saw no materials in the corpse that could solve her problem. After a while, she sighed. This was something she felt should be doable, but she just had no idea how to do it. Maybe she should fold it up and turn it into a toga when she returned to civilization. At least it would be better than her ragged pajamas, and she would be less likely to be mistaken for a beggar. Her pajamas would hold for a while longer, so it wasn't an immediate concern, but having better clothing to ward off the cold would have certainly been nice. She really wished she could go get something from a clothing store, though it was clearly impossible in this world right now.

At the thought of civilization, a familiar, growing pang of loneliness shot through her. It had been nearly a month since she had heard another human voice, and she had no one and nothing to talk to. There were some days where she swore that she heard human voices in the distance, and would get excited and rush towards them, only to find that nobody was there. Right now, her only companion was her Status Screen.

Alice sighed and looked back at the river. The book and the corpse had been washed downstream by the currents, which meant something was farther upstream. That being said, she had no clue why the corpse had no heart, and she felt all sorts of uneasy about what that meant. Perhaps a monster had killed the guy and eaten his heart, before his body was tossed into the river? Or maybe pirates had killed the man? Alice was afraid of walking right into the middle of a bandit camp and getting stabbed, although she had no better leads on where to find civilization either.

After a few minutes of thought, Alice sighed to herself. It was useless to speculate right now. In any case, without the cave, her ability to survive the journey north was still dubious. The weather was too cold, and the potential danger of stronger monsters meant she had to remain wary of her surroundings at all time. Any attempts to contact civilization would need to wait until winter ended.

* * *

A week after Alice had successfully slain her first monster, her wounds finally healed up. Her attempt at smoking monster meat had, for whatever reason, failed. On the bright side, Alice had gotten the idea of using the cold temperature and some {Stoneworking} to make a small fridge for herself, considering how easy it was to acquire snow right now. This idea worked much better than her attempts at creating smoked monster meat, and had even netted her another level in [Survivor]. Due to her training, she had also gotten another level in [Explorer of Magic], giving her another perk choice.

Sense Mana

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 15 or higher

Allows you to innately sense mana in a small area around you.

Lesser Combat Spellcaster

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 15 or higher, Magic 25 or higher

Living Creatures resist your mana less effectively

Another Seed

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 15 or higher

Allows you to grow another magic seed with a maximum 25% mana conversion ratio

She carefully thought over the three Perk choices, before she chose {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}. The Perk description finally allowed Alice to understand why half of her mana seemed to vanish during the fight with spidercrab. While inanimate objects had no particular resistance to her moving them around, it seemed that living creatures had some sort of innate resistance to external mana influences, or at least that was what the Perk made it sound like. Since Alice needed her Magic to improve her fighting odds against even weaker monsters right now, Alice chose {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}because it improved her combat ability and food-gathering ability at the same time. That simply felt too appealing to pass up.

On a side note, this was the third time a Perk choice from [Explorer of Magic] had offered her another Magic Seed, which Alice found quite interesting. She was beginning to suspect that it was somehow related to the Class, based on its name and the Perks it had given her so far. If she took the name [Explorer of Magic] literally, the Class seemed focused on learning about Magic and how it worked, and if that was true, having access to more Magic seeds would absolutely make it easier to learn more. However, Alice still didn’t want another Magic Seed that much. Even though Alice was very curious about how Magic Seeds worked, she still wanted to focus on her Kinetic Seed for now. She fully intended to pick up some more magic seeds eventually if her class kept offering them to her, but that was a plan for the future.

Apart from her new perk option, her magic attribute finally reached 50 after her week of training. After reaching 50, Alice noticed that the growth of the attribute had dramatically slowed down. Before, it advanced by leaps and bounds, sometimes going up by multiple points after a single intense training session. After it reached fifty, it slowed to a crawl, at least in comparison. From this Alice guessed that every 50 points in an Attribute there was some sort of ‘major reduction’ in growth speed. It would explain why she had such a hard time increasing Attributes like [Intelligence], while stats like [Strength] and [Endurance] had grown rapidly when she first entered this world.

Alice noted this for future reference, and continued training her physical stats and magic as much as possible each day. Apart from that, she kept translating the book and working on her Language skill. After Spring came, she would need a way to communicate with people in this world, as long as she made it to Civilization without getting killed by [Bandits] or eaten by monsters before arriving. Since she had a book that let her pick up the Illvarian Language skill, she could only hope that Illvarian would let her get by long enough to pick up other Languages if needed.

Finally, Alice had started carving little notches into her cave, in order to keep track of the days as they passed by. She had started out with around 25 notches in the cave, because she wasn’t exactly sure how many days had passed since she had first come here, and began recording each day from that point onwards.

Slowly but surely, things were getting better, and even though Alice couldn’t always find solutions to her problems in the environment, her basic Survival needs were getting easier and easier to meet as time passed. These days, she could even confidently leave her cave and try to hunt spidercrabs in her surroundings, something she never would have dared to do when she first arrived in this world.

* * *

Day 28

Alice finally found another Spidercrab during one of her hunting trips. It was the first time she had seen one that hadn’t already started tracking her down, and so before hunting it she decided to observe the creature for as long as she could. Any information she gathered now might make future hunts easier.

She realized after some observation that the monster also seemed to be following the river heading downstream rather than upstream. It wasn’t moving very quickly, and every couple seconds it would lower itself towards the ground and sniff around for a while.

Alice observed the creature for a few minutes, before it finally started picking up on her presence. Since she couldn’t observe it any longer, she prepared to fight.

This time, Alice already knew what to expect. Her wounds were healed, her Levels, Skills, and Attributes were all much higher than last time, and she had much better information.

She started off the battle by extending a mana tendril towards a nearby rock that was slightly larger than her two fists put together. The spidercrab immediately noticed her the moment she started using mana. Before it had just been sniffing around in her direction, but the moment Alice used magic the creature whirled around, faced directly towards her, and prepared to pounce.

However, Alice had enough control over her Magic now that she could properly aim during a fight. She sent a stone directly into spidercrab’s eyes, stunning it for a moment as it screeched in pain. Then, Alice reached out with her mana tendril and touched spidercrab’s shell, before shoving the monster directly towards the ground. With the help of {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}, the amount of mana the spidercrab shrugged off was much lower than before, making it far easier to push the creature around and knock it off balance. While it struggled to get up, Alice stabbed it through the eye with her spear, penetrating the monster’s brain and killing it. After confirming it had stopped moving, Alice couldn’t help but marvel at how much easier a few Perks and Skills had made the entire fight. Last time she had fought a Spidercrab, she had been bitten by it and had only narrowly scraped out a victory. This time, the fight was a one sided pummeling with almost zero risk.

The battle with spidercrab also boosted [Survivor] to level 25, granting her another perk. She quickly looked over her new options.

Tough

Requiements: Survivor level 25 or higher

Effect of the Endurance stat is increased by 10%.

Stoneskin

Requirements: Survivor level 25 or higher

Your skin becomes much tougher, allowing it to absorb impacts much more efficiently and heal faster.

Sixth Sense

Requirements: Survivor level 25 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Magic greater than 0

You gain some ability to intuitively sense the mana around you with a sort of ‘sixth sense,’ with particular focus placed on the fluctuations of mana that only monsters emit into their surroundings.

Harmful Energy Immunity

Requirements: Survivor level 25, Magic greater than 0

You gain immunity to various kinds of negative 'radiation' and similar effects, including broken mana, UV rays, and radioactive substances.

She looked at Harmful Energy immunity and snorted. It was a bit late to gain immunity to broken mana poisoning, now that she had already narrowly escaped dying from it. Although the fact that the perk directly referred to broken mana as something similar to radiation was interesting, at least.

She also didn’t remember finding any areas filled with broken mana in this world yet. While {Harmful Energy Immunity} might provide her protection against skin cancer, she had much bigger problems to worry about right now. Though, Alice did wonder how much mana there was in her environment, and whether there were any other unique ‘harmful energies’ in this world. Right now, she couldn’t even sense the mana outside of her body, so she had no way of telling what else she was missing in the world around her.

As she looked over the other Perks, she decided to avoid {Stoneskin} because she was afraid of getting skin literally made out of stone. The earlier perks had almost universally had guarantees that there wouldn’t be any… odd side effects if she picked them, but this one didn’t. This made her wary of the Perk. {Tough} was also discarded, because it simply didn’t seem useful enough to waste a Perk slot on.

Alice picked {Sixth Sense} and tried to figure out what had changed. After a while, she felt that she could detect… something in the air around her. It felt heavy, like a thick blanket of fog surrounding her, but her senses were still incredibly vague. Although the Perk claimed it gave her a sense of the mana around her, the ‘sixth sense’ was so weak and vague that it was practically worthless.

Alice wondered if she had just paid a perk slot for something useless. If the Perk’s ability to detect monsters was also weak, this Perk would have been a huge waste of a Perk slot. Alice read over the Perk’s description again, hoping to figure out if there were any activation conditions or boosts that would make the Perk more useful. She didn’t find any, but part of the Perk description she had previously overlooked did catch her eye.

Mana. That’s what separates monsters from animals. Normal animals don’t react at all if I use mana near them, and I didn’t get {Monstrous Encounter} from interacting with regular animals like fish either. By contrast, the moment I use mana near spidercrabs, they immediately detect me and attack. It also offers a better explanation for how their biology works, since they shouldn’t be able to support their bodies if their biology is anything like a spider back on Earth. If they use mana as some sort of replacement for food, or oxygen, or both, the question of how their biology works is answered, at least to some extent.

In that case, had getting a magic seed actually screwed her over? Did monsters leave people alone if they weren’t mages? Alice didn’t know, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered in either case – she hadn’t exactly had a choice in her mana baptism, after all. However, if Alice’s new guess about monster biology was currently, she suspected that the reason spidercrabs were so bent on hunting her down and eating her was because of her status as a Mage.

* * *

Day 31

Alice finally finished translating the other two kinds of magic seed described by the book she had found, and felt incredibly baffled when she looked over the names for the four basic Magic Seeds. The four basic seeds, according to the book, were Electromagnetic, Organic, Kinetic, and Thermal magic.

Electromagnetic and Kinetic magic seeds were pretty close to the laws of physics, and she was kind of fond of those names. Kinetic Magic had kept her alive for quite a long time in this world, and even though Alice doubted her rudimentary robot programming experience would be useful in the near future, she liked the idea of electricity being a fundamental component of Magic in this world. Electromagnetic Energy was also one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, and so seeing it show up in this world made her oddly happy.

Thermal Magic baffled her a little bit more. Temperature was, fundamentally, a measure of how quickly atoms in the air vibrated and moved around. If they moved quickly, the temperature was higher, and if they moved slowly, the temperature was lower. Therefore, the fact Thermal Magic was its own kind of magic seed, rather than just being part of Kinetic Magic, was something that confused her quite a bit.

And the last magic seed made Alice feel even more baffled, because she wasn’t quite sure what an Organic Mage did.

“What in the world is Organic Magic even supposed to be? Do they… manipulate organic material or something?That’s… that’s terrifying.” Alice suddenly had a vision of someone poking her with a mana tendril and warping her into a cthulu-esque monstrosity, or just denaturing all of the enzymes in her body and instantly killing her. She had no idea what an organic mage was capable of, but the name alone made Alice feel very uneasy. She had experimented quite a bit with her kinetic seed, and had naturally made some mistakes during her training. This had usually entailed accidentally throwing a rock in the wrong direction, or accidentally dropping an item she was trying to throw.

The idea of someone messing up while playing with the fundamental building blocks of a plant or animal were much more concerning, because it seemed like it would make a five-headed horse or a super plague if someone messed up in the right way.

Alice twitched as she looked at the final kind of magic seed, trying not to think about the implications. That being said, if [Organic Mages] were one of the four basic kinds of magic and had dozens of ways it could go horribly wrong and end the world, what did nonbasic magic look like? Why was this planet still in one piece and populated? Alice was pretty damn sure that if nations in the middle ages had access to bioweapons, civilizations never would have advanced to even the Renaissance era, because the human race would have stopped existing long before that point.

Slowly, she calmed down, trying to think things through. “Maybe there are extra restrictions on Organic Magic, or something else I’m not seeing? It can’t just be straight up manipulation of all Organic matter, right? I can manipulate all kinetic energy in the surroundings though… I suddenly have a terrible feeling about this.” Alice twitched. Maybe she was going to go upstream and find the ruins of a civilization that had created a zombie virus or seven different strands of the bubonic plague by accident? Though, she did suddenly find herself wondering if she was safer in the woods…

Day 33

With some of her spare time, Alice finally made an axe, intending to chop down some trees and use the lumber as building materials for her cave. She had often felt that the cave’s entrance was too open, and logs would provide a much more solid and sturdy way to close out her sleeping space from her surroundings and keep in heat. She had also recently realized that a spidercrab could, theoretically, waltz into her cave while she slept. However, if she built a nice sturdy wall to finish closing off her cave, it would at least help keep some heat in and random monsters/animals out.

She quickly realized that she had underestimated the difficulty of logging. However, it was still something she thought would be useful, and she now had enough food and water that she wasn’t quite so worried about supplies. She decided that even if cutting down trees was slow and difficult, it was worth it to keep going. Besides, Alice was hoping to pick up some sort of {woodcutting} skill to make the work easier once she tried enough times.

Day 35

Alice confirmed that there was no lumbering or tree cutting skill, or anything similar. This made Alice feel frustrated, but she kept working.

Chapter 11

Day 37

While Alice was logging, she finally got to observe the ‘monster sense’ component of {Sixth Sense} Perk in action. It quickly changed her opinion on the Perk, making her feel that it was very specialized, but incredibly useful. The moment a spidercrab walked within about 200 meters of her, she instantly noticed its mana. To her, it felt like a bright light had suddenly been turned on in the middle of the night. She could tell exactly where it was, and the spidercrab didn’t sense anything at all from her until it got much closer. She could even tell roughly how much mana the spidercrab had, although she didn’t know what to do with this information. She noticed, with some interest, that this spidercrab was also moving downstream for some reason. Perhaps Spidercrabs migrated downstream during the winter or something?

Either way, being able to tell the instant a spidercrab was nearby was incredibly useful. She was running a bit low on meat, and she still wanted to preserve her smoked fish as much as possible, so she moved to hunt down the spidercrab she had used as her test subject for her new Perk. With her growing stats and skills, hunting a lone spidercrab when she had the element of surprise was no longer a challenge, and so she simply walked up to it, held it down with kinetic magic, and stabbed it a few times. She only got a single level in [Explorer of Magic] from the fight, probably because she wasn’t really surviving a threatening encounter anymore. As a result [Survivor] got very little EXP. At least, that was her current guess for why the fight gave so few Status Screen related rewards.

Either way, it was good to know that the seemingly useless perk was pretty useful. It was just highly situational.

Day 39

Alice finally finished chopping down trees and building up the walls of her cave. Her shelter was finally complete, and was constructed of logs and sticks piled together. Alice hadn’t had a good way to make the logs stick to the ground properly, so she had ended up digging little holes to put the logs into, keeping them at least reasonably stable. However, there had been some gaps in between the log-based wall, so she had filled those in with rocks and sticks, making something that kept air and heat in reasonably well and blocked off monsters and animals. Even though it was far from perfect, Alice was still happy to improve her living conditions again.

Admittedly, her cave now looked like a beaver dam gone horribly wrong. However, it kept the cold out far better than before, and that was what mattered. She had a difficult time with smoke from her fires, since it didn’t leave the cave quite as easily now, but Alice could manually disperse it by temporarily opening a little chunk of the sticks near the top of her new wall with her Kinetic Magic to let out the smoke, so it wasn’t too big of a problem.

Her [Survivor] class jumped up two levels for the first time since it had reached level 25, reaching level 27 on the day she finished building her new set of walls. Alice grinned. Even though her levelling speed had dramatically slowed down after level 25, it was nice to know that big accomplishments would still reward her with a good amount of EXP.

* * *

Day 40

[Scholar] finally reached level 5, and Alice eagerly pored over the available perks.

Improved Memory

Requirements: Scholar level 5 or higher, Intelligence 100 or greater

Greatly improves your ability to remember information.

Speed Reading

Requirements: Scholar level 5 or higher, Perception 100 or greater

You read more quickly

Intelligent

Requirements: Scholar level 5 or higher, Intelligence 100 or greater

Increases the effect of the [Intelligence] stat by 2%

Alice quickly grabbed {Improved memory}. The other two perks were kind of bland and unimpressive. She had always wished she had a photographic memory, and this seemed like a good way to get much closer to her dream. Besides, Alice felt that {Improved Memory} would probably help her level up some of her Skills more quickly than before. Language, for example, was something heavily reliant on learning and remembering the vocabulary of a new language. Alice didn’t know if {Improved Memory} would actually increase the levelling speed of her Language Skill, due to the fact that the System controlled most of her language learning, but it seemed worth a shot.

Day 43

Alice found two spidercrabs at once while collecting firewood. Alice could only form one tendril of magic at a time, so even though she could easily kill one spidercrab, she wasn’t really that confident in taking on two at once. Her physical stats were improving, but they were still seriously lacking, even if she no longer found herself out of breath after a light jog through the forest for a few minutes.

Alice was certain that fighting them head on would end poorly, but after thinking back to her first encounter with a spidercrab, she realized there was a way to exploit the low intelligence of the creatures. She first got near them, climbing up a tree. Then, she watched for a few minutes as they bashed themselves against the tree trunk, making sure that their behavior wasn’t significantly different from other spidercrabs she had seen. Then, finishing her observations, Alice began manipulating her spear with her Kinetic magic, trying to use her mana as a ‘third hand’ instead of as a sling to hurl objects. It proved far more difficult than she had expected to hold an object in midair without dropping it or throwing it. To do so, she needed to apply exactly enough kinetic energy to counteract gravity without adding any extra mana, or she would accidentally send the spear flying into the air. However, she managed to accomplish her goal after some trial and error, after which she tried stabbing one of the spidercrabs with the spear without losing control of her projectile.

This failed, unfortunately. She launched the spear straight into one of the spidercrabs, but failed to control the speed well enough to retract the spear afterwards. The spear killed the first spidercrab, before lodging itself into the dirt. It was out of range of her mana tendrils, so Alice gave up on experimenting with her new idea.

With one of the two dealt with, Alice slid back down a few branches, getting the other spidercrab in range of her mana tendril, and then picked up the monster and slammed it into the ground. While it was stunned, she climbed down, pulled out her stone axe, and brained it.

In addition to the meat, she got enough levels in [Explorer of Magic] to level to 20 in one go, as well as push [Survivor] to 29. It seemed that her attempt at balancing her spear against gravity counted as ‘experimenting’ with magic, giving her a bunch of levels in her magic class, while killing two monsters at once for the first time gave her some levels in [Survivor]. Since [Explorer of Magic] reached level 20, she also had a new Perk slot. She looked over her options, and found one of the Perks a bit more interesting than what she was expecting.

Mana Interference

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 20 or higher

Increases the natural resistance against external magic produced by your skin by a slight amount. Your [Magic] Attribute moderately improves this effect. All levels, attributes, and skills very slightly increase this effect.

The first Perk wasn’t that appealing, but it did indicate Alice was correct in her earlier assumption that living creatures seemed to resist external mana intrusion. If nothing else, having the System provide more confirmation for her theory was nice, although Alice wasn’t that interested in the Perk itself right now.

Kinetic Senses

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 20 or higher, Kinetic Magic seed at 25% or higher

Improves your ability to sense kinetic movement and energy within ten meters. Your Perception Stat increases this range.

Interesting, but not that appealing. Although it does seem quite useful to improve my senses by a bit… Hmm…

Magic Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 20 or higher

Allows you to grow another magic seed with a maximum of 29% mana conversion ratio

Alice was still slightly interested in getting another seed, but she felt it was more important to develop her Kinetic Magic more. She didn’t have the time or training to pick up an entirely new magic seed yet, although eventually she wanted to for the sake of research purposes.

Improved Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 20 or higher

Allows you to improve one magic seed's mana conversion ratio by 10%. This is only effective on magic seeds below 200% mana conversion ratio.

So 100% isn’t the maximum mana conversion ratio a seed can have. I had assumed it was, but now I’m incredibly curious. Alice had been wondering what ‘mana conversion ratio’ meant for a while. It showed up in several of the Perks she had been offered by [Explorer of Magic], but Alice had zero context for understanding what the term meant. The book she had been reading didn’t mention the term either, so Alice was excited at the prospect of finally figuring out what this term meant. Since the other Perks weren’t incredibly powerful, she decided that she would grab {Improved Seed} this time, just to learn some more. Besides, this Perk seemed built to improve a magic seed, and since Alice wanted to concentrate on developing her Kinetic Magic this Perk fit her interests perfectly.

The moment she got the perk, she could see it move into her status screen, similar to other perks. However, unlike other perks, it also had a little + symbol next to it. She concentrated on it for a moment, and it displayed a list of her magic seeds. Of course, Alice only had one magic seed right now. She selected her kinetic magic seed, and a moment later, the little percent symbol next to the seed she had formed suddenly increased to 110%.

She frowned, trying to feel out the differences. It took a moment, but after a few moments, Alice finally realized what was different.

Her mana pool was suddenly bigger. She also noticed that it was easier to push kinetic mana through her mana tendril, by a small but noticeable amount. If she was to keep comparing her mana tendril to a pipe and her mana to liquid she wanted to move around, this felt like she had expanded the pipe and lowered its viscosity, making it pass through her mana tendril more quickly and easily when she willed it to.

She manipulated the environment around a bit, trying to figure out how much more mana she had than before, before coming to a conclusion that it was around 10% higher. Seeing that, she had a new guess. Maybe her ‘mana pool’ for kinetic mana was her magic stat multiplied by her magic seed’s mana conversion ratio? If that was the case, it seemed to indicate every magic seed had its own, independent mana pool.

Alice suddenly wondered if she had made a mistake in passing up so many other magic seeds. If every seed had its own mana pool, picking up a new magic seed would increase the amount of time she could fight, as well as the amount of tricks she had in combat and the amount of mana she could spend on making herself more comfortable every day.

A moment later, though, she realized there was a significant problem with that idea. The higher the magic seed’s conversion ratio, the easier it was to manipulate that particular seed’s mana. In other words, the reverse would probably also be true. The lower the conversion ratio, the weaker her control of the seed would be, and the harder it would be to use the mana from it. If she formed a bunch of magic seeds left and right, while her maximum mana would increase by a fair margin, it would be too slow and difficult to use in an actual fight. Of course, if she found other ways to improve magic seeds, having more Magic seeds would obviously be better. However, due to the differences in how easy it was to manipulate mana within a seed based on its conversion ratio, focusing more on one particular seed was probably optimal for combat.

Either way, it was a decision she could make again when she reached a higher level and saw her next round of perks. For now, she was just happy she had gotten so many levels from a single fight.

Day 53

Alice’s [Survivor] class reached level 30 while she was asleep. Alice wasn’t sure why. Her best guess was that perhaps something dangerous had prowled around the area while she was asleep, or perhaps [Survivor] just passively got a little bit of experience from her continued woodlands survival each day. She was extra cautious as she observed the area that day, but she didn’t find anything particularly new or deadly, and eventually decided her second theory was more likely.

She looked over the available perks, and felt a surge of surprise. After reaching level 25, the levelling speed of her class had slowed down dramatically. However, it appeared that the perks offered by her class also became far better.

Stronger, Faster, Better

Requirements: Survivor level 30 or higher

Your strength, Endurance, and Dexterity Attributes both increase 15% faster, and the effect of each stat is improved by 7%

Enhanced Training

Requirements: Survivor level 30 or higher, have followed a rigorous training regime for 30 days or longer

All stats grow 10% faster. You gain better comprehension of how to most efficiently maximize stat gains from training. For every fifty stats you have in one attribute, it gains 1% increased effect, up to 4%

Woman Versus the Wilds

Requirements: Survivor level 30 or higher

If you have not had contact with civilization in the past 7 days, your awareness of the area around you is dramatically increased, you gain some limited ability to detect danger, and all of your physical stats will be improved by 10 until you make contact with civilization again.

Born of Frost

Requirements: Survivor level 30 or higher, 'Extromphile' perk unlocked

Your body gains the ability to resist temperatures which are 40 degrees Celsius lower than was previously available (This stacks with extremophile for a total of 50 degrees Celsius.)

Born of Flames

Requirements: Survivor level 30 or higher, 'Extromphile' perk unlocked

Your body gains the ability to resist temperatures which are 40 degrees Celsius higher than was previously available (This stacks with extremophile for a total of 50 degrees Celsius.)

In general, while the perks before level 30 had been incredibly valuable for her survival, they hadn’t interacted so directly with other parts of the system. They had mostly focused around knowledge, her physical abilities, and empowering her to create the tools she needed to survive in this foreign world. However, at this level, it seemed like a lot of perks gave significant bonuses to attributes, as well as some sort of improved senses. The perks also had more requirements in order to make them work. Before this, there was never a time where she had a perk that could be turned off if she didn’t meet certain conditions. Now, {Woman Versus the Wilds} hinted that after level 25, Perks with certain conditions attached to them might start appearing more frequently.

Alice thought closely about the perks for a while, before eventually choosing {Enhanced Training}. She wondered if she would eventually curse herself for being too greedy, but it seemed to have the most growth potential, and she was doing pretty well right now. She had food, water, shelter, and warmth, so she felt she could afford to plan for the future instead of only focusing on what she got the instant she picked the Perk.

Furthermore, the [Endurance] attribute also directly helped her survive colder temperatures, meaning that this stat would eventually provide an extra way to deal with the cold. [Endurance] was far less useful than the {Born of Frost} when it came to dealing with temperatures, of course, but it also had a variety of other benefits, and {Enhanced Training} boosted all of her Stats. She also felt that whenever she found her way back to civilization, she wouldn’t have much use for {Born of Frost}, but {Enhanced Training} would prove its worth as time passed.

Day 60

Alice was growing increasingly tired of waiting for winter to end. It had only been a month since she had started counting the days, but she was lonely. Having a friend to talk to would make her ordeal in the wilds much more bearable. Her growing [Endurance] stat, along with {Extremophile}, enabled her to survive each day with increasing ease. So she gathered supplies, hunted a few spidercrabs from time to time, and trained and read her book. However, apart from that, there was nothing to do. She spent a good chunk of each day inside, reading her book over and over again. Illvarian language proficiency had nearly reached 100 now. It grew much faster than her other Skills, although Alice didn’t know whether that was the influence of {Improved Memory} or due to some other reason.

Life was increasingly boring.

She couldn’t wait for spring to come.

Day 70

Alice had finally reached a point where she could converse fluently in Illvarian. After winter ended, she would need to use this language nearly constantly, so reaching a high level of proficiency in the language made her feel much more secure about her post-winter plans.

Naturally, since there were no people and almost no animals in this region, she had a conversation with her newly found pet rock. She had named it ‘Taps’ because she liked the sound it made when she tapped it against the wall of her cave. It was a reminder that even though this world seemed dead and silent, there was still something here with her besides horrifying monsters.

She had even drawn a little face on the rock. She knew it wasn’t alive, but it was something to talk to.

Day 85

[Explorer of Magic] hit level 25 partway through her training routine. After some thought, she chose {Seeds of Magic} from the options she saw.

Seeds of Magic

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 25 or higher

You may gradually enhance one seed of magic and increase its mana conversion ratio by 25%. This perk may not increase a magic seed’s mana conversion ratio beyond 200%. This process will require that you actually focus on the concept governing your particular magic seed, and understand the forces that govern that seed.

Compared to the other perks offered at the same level, it seemed rather impressive, even though the System had offered a 35% seed. Based off of what she had seen so far, it seemed harder to improve seeds that already existed compared to forming new ones, and Alice thought that a 25% improvement to her kinetic seed could be incredibly useful for combat down the line. The fact that, as far as she could tell, the perk would put her in some sort of meditative state related to kinetic energy, was, if anything, a plus at this point.

At least it was something to do.

Although Taps didn’t seem to approve. Alice could tell from the way the inanimate object leaned against the wall. However, when Alice asked Taps what it thought she should pick for her Perks, it didn’t give her any good ideas at all. Since Taps was so picky and unhelpful, Alice didn’t talk to it for the rest of the day.

Then, Alice used the Perk on her kinetic seed.

When she used the {Seeds of Magic} perk, it felt like she had flashes of insight pouring into her mind, like iron filling a mold and patching up holes she hadn’t known were there before. These flashes of thought, however, weren’t strictly new to her. It was like she was back in her high school physics class, except with far fewer numbers involved and a much greater focus on the concept of kinetic energy itself. When pondering these topics, she could feel the ideas whirling around her brain getting engraved into her magic seed. As her magic seed changed, the heat inside of her chest grew stronger again for the first time in ages, shifting and changing as her magic seed improved. The perk worked slowly, but she could feel her mana pool improving over time, as well as her control over her magic.

[Scholar] levelled for the first time in weeks while pondering all of this information. Previously it had stopped at 7 once she had finished reading A Comparison of the Lesser Seeds and the Four Basic Magic Seeds. Alice quietly celebrated a bit with an extra serving of nuts that evening. She was getting quite sick of this food…

Day 95

The days were getting noticeably warmer. Alice was excited. Soon, she would be able to follow the river further. The book had washed down from upstream, and whatever had killed the guy she had seen earlier was hopefully gone by now. Be it monsters or [Bandits], Alice hoped that they had moved on after several months. And the fact that a corpse had come from upstream meant that there must be people if she headed in that direction.

Day 99

Alice was pretty sure that today was her birthday. She had lost track of time towards the beginning of her stay in this world, but she was still pretty sure that her birthday had either been a few days ago, or was today. The System still claimed that her age was 15, which puzzled her, but she figured that maybe the System was trying to track her age from the moment she had arrived in this world, counting the first day here as her 15th birthday. It was a bit far fetched of an explanation, but she didn’t have any better ideas to go off of.

She quietly gave herself an extra serving of spidercrab soup, mixed with nuts, and celebrated her birthday alone in the forest, with no humans around for several kilometers in any direction. There was no cake, no parents and friends to talk to, and nothing to look forward to.

But on the bright side, Taps looked thrilled for her.

Day 105

It hadn’t snowed for a few days, and the deep blanket of white over the land was starting to disappear. She could now see sprouts of green poking up from beneath the snow, also heralding the arrival of spring. Just as she was deciding that she would leave within a few days, a terrifying roar sounded in the distance. It was loud, terrifying, and wholly unfamiliar to her. The spidercrabs did not make this sound – they hissed and screeched, and sometimes made her want to claw her ears out, but they never roared.

This roar was different. When she heard it, she felt like a firefly staring at the sun. It wasn’t close enough for {Sixth Sense} to pick up the monster – which, honestly, she was thankful for. She quaked, like a leaf in a hurricane, as the terrifying roar echoed across the forest, far away but not far enough. She had thought, several times, that she was incredibly unlucky for getting dropped into this world near the start of winter. However, she had forgotten one thing.

Winter was when several predators hibernated. And in a world filled with magic and monsters, the predators at the top of the food chain were terrifying indeed.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 84 (104%)

Perception: 109 (105%)

Dexterity: 81 (103%)

Intelligence: 155 (103%)

Endurance: 89 (103%)

Willpower: 125 (103%)

Charisma: 125 (102%)

Magic: 91 (101%)

Primary Classes: 3/5

Survivor: 34

Explorer of Magic: 26

Scholar: 8

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes: 1

Fisherwoman: 3

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Combat Spellcaster (Explorer of Magic 15)

Improved Seed (Explorer of Magic 20)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of magic 25)

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Skills

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 88

Kinetic Manipulation: 31

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 25

Spearmanship: 19

Mana Control: 17

Kinetic Force: 14

Mana Precision: 14

Sprinting: 13

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Dodge: 7

Basic Medicine: 3

Magic Seed: 1/1

Kinetic Seed (135%)

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (I) (Rarity: 1)

A note from acaswell

So, I've been going back and forth on this for a while, and I want to know your opinions - do you guys want to see every single perk choice, or just the ones Alice picks? I have a list of perks for each class in my worldbuilding notes, and usually I pick the perks Alice qualifies for and show up to five perks at each choice. Do you guys want this trend to continue, or do you want to just see what perk Alice takes and skip the rest?

Final chapter of the first arc tomorrow. Woo! After that, I'm going to take a few days off, and then I'll probably switch to either uploading once or twice a week. I was originally planning on doing one chapter a week, but you guys have mostly been pretty awesome, and I feel a lot better and more motivated about my writing than I used to, so I've been debating whether or not I can handle two a week. I'll think about it a little more, but I'm leaning towards trying it and seeing how I feel afterwards. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read my story! For those of you who have commented, rated the story, reviewed it, or sent private messages, an extra thank you! It makes me happy to know that people are enjoying my writing for the most part. :) Have a lovely day!

Chapter 12

Realizing that it was time to leave, Alice grabbed the supplies she felt she needed, such as food, and stored them in her basket. She also grabbed her spear, stone hatchet, and stone knife, because having some weapons on hand in case she ran into something else terrifying might be critical. She spared a glance at her cave, which she had slowly worked to transform into a somewhat cozy home, before she turned back towards the entrance. She didn’t feel regret over leaving it behind. It had been her home for four months, but she missed other people far more than she would miss her time in the wilderness.

The only other thing she brought along was her book on magic, which she had long since memorized. It had taught her magic, and also a language. She was reluctant to leave it behind. Besides, in less technologically advanced societies, paper was hard to produce. Alice had no clue whether books were easy or hard to produce in this world, but there was a chance she could sell her book for a fair amount of money when she reached civilization.

She left behind Taps, the pet rock that she had painted a face on a while ago. Before she left, she knocked him against the wall one last time. He could guard the cave for her and keep it safe. Then, she took one last look at the cave, before she turned to the sky above this world. Despite the fact that it looked similar to the sky back on Earth, Alice knew that she was looking at a completely different sky now. Her thoughts drifted back to home.

Sorry, mom and dad. I still don’t know how to get home. I wonder if you two are thinking of me right now? The cops must have declared this to be a missing persons case by now. They might have even decided I was dead. I wonder if they’ve stopped searching for me. I hope you’re doing okay. It might take a while, but I won’t forget where I come from. Someday, I’ll see you again. I’ll try my hardest to get back soon, so don’t feel too bad while waiting for me, okay?

After that, Alice grabbed her stuff, and began walking upstream. She didn’t see any monsters with {Sixth Sense}, so the creature that had been roaring earlier wasn’t close enough for her to worry about yet. Based on that information, Alice kept a pace that would make good time, but would keep enough energy in reserve to let her sprint away if need be. With how much tougher her body had grown during her time in the wilderness, she no longer feared her feet getting cut up by the wilderness, and any lingering remnants of winter and the cold didn’t pose any threat to her.

Another roar sounded in the distance, but as far as she could tell, it didn’t seem to be moving closer to her. Still, she felt uneasy, and picked up her pace a little in hopes of escaping the territory of the creature in the distance as quickly as possible.

A few hours later, she heard another one of the terrifying roars. This time, however, it was much closer, almost on top of her. She froze, her heart hammering in her chest as she scanned each direction.

Something massive stepped into the range of {Sixth Sense}. When she turned to her left, she saw a bear towering over its surroundings. Its eyes were an inky black color, and it was looking right at her. Alice paused in shock for a moment, wondering why the monster had locked onto her location so quickly, and then her brain unfroze. She began running for her life, following the river and hoping she could run faster than the creature. However, her hopes were in vain, and the creature quickly caught up with her. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see that even the plants seemed to be quivering under the lumbering strides of the creature.

Then, a few blades of grass grew in length as they reached towards her ankles. Alice tore through them, since a few blades of grass couldn’t stop her from fleeing. However, ahead of her, larger, thicker cords of grass were forming. She realized that, somehow, the bear was controlling the grass around her.

Shit! That’s not one of the four basic magics!

Alice heard another roar, and she glanced over her shoulder, seeing the bear grow in real time as it rapidly closed the distance between them. Then, she realized it was literally growing. Before, it had stood two and a half meters tall on its four legs, but now it was closer to three. Panicking, she felt her stomach churn with dread as she realized she was going to die here. She was still trying to run away, tripping over the cords of grass and vegetation, but she wasn’t going to make it.

Half-blind as she struggled to focus, Alice took a misstep in the wrong direction, and crashed into the thawing river. The ice shattered, and freezing water snapped her out of the primordial terror that had torn into her brain moments ago. She saw, in a brief moment of lucidity, the bear seem to shrink instead of grow, but before she could process what had changed, the bear also jumped into the water to keep chasing her.

Suddenly, she felt much heavier. At the same time, she realized that {Sixth Sense} was now picking up on the presence of two monsters, instead of just one. Her eyes flicked down, and she saw a fern-like creature scuttling along the bottom of the river, its three-meter long plant maw filled with teeth opened wide as it pointed its mouth directly at her and the bear. She extended some tendrils of magic towards her makeshift toga and draggedherself upwards, desperately trying to stay away from the river-monster below. The creature’s mana felt like it was squirming around, and Alice realized that she hadn’t been imagining things earlier – the creature was somehow dragging her towards its mouth. However, the bear was much closer to the creature and much heavier than Alice.

The bear suddenly seemed to shrink into itself, and one of the trees from nearby tried to extend a helping branch towards the bear. The beast’s size continued shrinking as it desperately tried to swim away, until its height shrank to two meters. Then, its head dipped below the roiling current, and even its angry growl vanished beneath the waves. As Alice used her nonexistent swimming skills and Kinetic Magic to keep her head above water, the massive bear sank lower and lower into the water. Finally, the plant-monster’s mouth snapped shut, and the vinebear stopped thrashing. The plant monster stopped using whatever magic it had available, and Alice popped straight out of the water as her kinetic magic dragged her upwards.

For a brief moment, Alice flew out of the water, her kinetic magic launching her out of the stream like a cork from a bottle before her momentum faltered and she flopped back into the water. Alice struggled for a moment to get back into a swimming position, before She looked down one final time. Whatever was at the bottom of the river was working on swallowing the bear whole, and didn’t seem worried about her any longer. Terrified, Alice quickly swam back to shore, eager to get out of the way of the plant monster before it got hungry again.

After a brief swim she collapsed onto the sandy riverbank, exhausted and terrified. It had only taken the blink of an eye for the newly awakened monsters of this world to nearly kill her. Even though her physical abilities had nearly doubled since she had come to this world, she had barely survived. She couldn’t help but shake as she remembered how hopeless she had felt when she was being chased by the bear, as well as the strange abilities of the plant monster.

She took a few minutes to relax, just breathing in and out, before she finally checked her System notifications, realizing that this encounter had finally pushed her to level 35 in [Survivor]. She examined her surroundings to make sure she was safe, before looking through her new Perk options while praying they would give her new tools to survive the monsters she had just encountered.

Sense hostility

Requirements: Survivor level 35 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

Whenever any being gazes upon you with hostile intentions, you will sense it, as well as sense the direction of the entity in question and its power relative to you. If said being is significantly stronger than you, or is too far away, locating them may be impossible. Improves the effect of the {Perception} attribute by 20%. Enhanced by your Perception attribute.

Ambush Predator

Requirements: Survivor level 35 or higher, Stealth - related perk unlocked at any point in time within the [Survivor] class

While undetected, you gain the ability to see twenty meters around you in all directions with any senses available to you. When attacking a target which has no knowledge of your presence, you will be able to pinpoint its weaknesses more accurately, and it will lose blood much more quickly for two minutes after your first attack.

Hardy

Requirements: Survivor level 35 or higher, Endurance higher than 75, Magic higher than 25

Your body gains a significant amount of natural resistance against hard impacts and magic. Effects of the Endurance stat increase by 20%.

Slayer of Monsters

Requirements: Survivor level 35 or higher, Monster Slayer Achievement, 3 stats at 100 or greater, no stats below 50

If you have killed a monster within the last 7 days, all of your stats have their effectiveness increased by 15%. Your ability to track and locate monsters is improved. (When determining whether you have killed a monster, this Perk only counts the final blow.)

Alice quickly knocked out {Hardy} – even though it would be useful to someone who already had some level of survival ability when fighting a monster, Alice was pretty sure that would just end up with her taking longer to digest inside of a monster’s stomach. Her bones and physical abilities were so lacking compared to the creatures she had just seen that the Perk was useless – even with a 20% bonus to Endurance and extra resistance, she would still die in one hit.

{Sense Hostility} was kind of tempting – even with the 200 meter detection radius of {Sixth Sense}, the bear had been much faster than she had thought it would be. {Sense Hostility} had only bought her a few extra seconds to run. If she hadn’t been so close to the river, and if the vine monster hadn’t eaten the vinebear and ignored her, she would have died. Furthermore, {Sixth Sense} was obviously more geared towards sensing monsters, and would probably be useless when she got back to civilization. Having {Sense Hostility} would be a useful backup for letting her know when humans had bad intentions towards her.

{Ambush Predator} seemed more geared towards some sort of stealthy attack, which Alice also felt would be useless. She didn’t have the combat proficiency to contest the bears she had seen earlier, and attacking one would just be suicide. {Slayer of Monsters} was the only other major consideration she had – its effects were… odd. The other three perks had no real activation conditions – they were basically always on, and always at least potentially useful. {Slayer of Monsters} was interesting, but also had the requirement of having slain a monster in the last 7 days. Alice wasn’t sure how useful that would be while she was trying to survive reaching a town, though – she needed survivability now, and she had no idea whether or not a week had passed since her last spidercrab kill. Increasing her stats by 15% also felt like it may or may not be useful – after all, the only stats she could really rely on when fleeing for her life were [Dexterity], [Perception], and [Magic].

After some consideration, Alice decided more forewarning was the most valuable Perk, so she grabbed {Sense Hostility}. The moment she grabbed the perk, there was a stinging sensation in her eyes, and then suddenly everything was much clearer. She hadn’t had much growth in any of her mental stats so far, so this was her first time really understanding what [Perception] did. Alice had thought it might do something like make her eyes better, or improve her hearing, or something like that, but after the 20% increase in the effect of the stat, she realized that was only part of what [Perception] did.

Every single point in the Stat seemed to slow down the world around her, making her feel almost as if she had been watching a video and switched to playing it on 90% speed. It made sounds and sights crisper and clearer, allowing her more time to think and making it easier to notice things happening around her. She staggered, feeling slightly drunk as she tried to command her body to move, but even though she knew on some level that she was moving exactly as quickly as she had been before, it suddenly felt like her body was slow and unresponsive, unable to keep up with her new perception. Then, as she got more used to her new senses, she began walking back up the stream, wishing that her [Dexterity] and [Strength] were higher. Right now, she certainly didn’t feel like she was fully using her new [Perception] effectively. Her body just couldn’t keep up with it. However, the boost to her [Perception] did also help her scan her surroundings, as she had hoped it would. Noticing a monster before it noticed her and hiding seemed like the most reliable way to survive, so Alice resolved to hide anytime she felt threatened.

Then, she began creeping along the edge of the river again, hoping that she would reach civilization soon.

* * *

Two days into her journey, she was starting to realize just how good of a decision it was to take {Sense Hostility} together with {Sixth Sense}. The two seemed to feed off of each other, giving her the ability to sense monsters in a certain radius around her with much greater efficiency than either of the abilities alone would have provided. On top of that, she could detect when monsters were looking at her, which gave her a much better idea of when she should just sit tight with {Camouflaged} and hope they didn’t spot her and when she needed to run for her life.

This was even more useful than she had first expected, because during another monster encounter Alice had learned that even spidercrabs were a threat during spring. Apparently, spidercrabs being alone only happened during winter. She had no idea whether or not spring was mating season or something, but after the snow had started to melt, Alice hadn’t seen a spidercrab travelling on its own even once. Instead, the little monsters travelled in packs of at least six and sometimes up to ten monsters. She was pretty confident in killing them one on one – even two on one was pretty manageable for her these days. However, fighting six spidercrabs at once was suicide right now, even if she climbed a tree first. Her Magic seed didn’t hold enough mana to kill all six yet.

In short,{Camouflaged} finally became an incredibly useful Perk, saving her life in areas were the trees were less dense by keeping her out of fights with all of the monsters she was running into as she travelled.

She had also seen another one of the bears in the distance, but this time, it didn’t manage to detect her. Since this might be one of her only chances to figure out all of this thing’s abilities, she had observed it from a distance. Eventually, she had finally understood why the creature had shrunk and grown during her fight with it. The bear had some sort of ability to manipulate fear. Whenever it roared, her body would instinctively flinch, cowering and waiting to die, and the bear seemed to magnify the size of its body whenever its victim got a face-full of fear magic. When Alice watched it hunt a pack of spidercrabs, the creatures scattered upon hearing the bear roar while the monster seemed to grow in size. Afterwards, the bear would leisurely truss up its prey using some sort of plant-controlling magic, before grabbed it and chowing down. Alice decided to call them vinebears. They were the kings of the land, as far as Alice could tell – when they found spidercrab packs, they could simply stroll up and slaughter an entire pack without any tension at all.

She also noticed that monsters seemed to be able to detect her if they were close enough, regardless of whether or not she was camouflaged. For now, Alice wasn’t sure why this was. Fortunately, when she had discovered this, she had been close to a tree, so the spidercrab pack that had suddenly turned on her hadn’t been able to eat her. After tearing off tree branches and pelting them with sharpened stakes for a while, she had managed to kill one and injure a few more before they finally backed off.

These days, she also stayed away from the edge of the water. After her experience with nearly getting killed by a plant monster, she knew that the river was just as dangerous as land.

* * *

Another two days passed, and Alice’s hope of finding civilization finally bore fruit. One day, as she climbed to the top of a tree to escape a pack of spidercrabs, she spotted a giant wooden wall in the distance. Even as she looked at the group of spidercrabs below, firing a sharpened tree branch at them whenever her mana recovered enough, she began smiling happily. Soon, she would be back in civilization. She would have people to talk to, and she wouldn’t be alone anymore.

* * *

After that, she began travelling towards where she remembered the town to be.

In addition, as she was travelling, she got a surprising System notification.

You have gained an achievement!

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

You have managed to survive a winter away from civilization with no help from other humans. You are truly committed to survival!

+15% class experience for the [Survivor] class and any further evolutions. Your body is able to handle temperature 10 degrees Celsius lower than before. +15% growth to the Endurance stat. During the months of winter, the effect of your Endurance stat is increased by 10%.

She looked at it, shrugged a bit, and dismissed it. It was useful, but nothing groundbreaking. She was much more interested in when she would reach civilization. The walls were now visible in the distance, and they were getting easier and easier to see as she moved closer. Furthermore, as the walls grew closer, the monsters seemed to grow less active. Clearly, the humans here had put at least some effort into clearing out the nearby monsters, and so even though Alice hadn’t run into people yet she was increasingly sure that she would soon. It was also getting easier to move around, since she had to spend less of each day fleeing or hiding from monsters.

* * *

After a few more days of travel, Alice was finally in range of the walls. She could see, in the distance, humans in uniforms wielding bows and standing on top of the ramparts, and she hadn’t run into a monster in the past few hours.

The trees around the walls had been chopped down for several hundred meters, making it difficult for any monsters to approach the walls unnoticed. About half of the distance between the walls and the trees was also filled with farmland, and people worked on clearing out more land and planting crops as Alice observed the area. They primarily seemed to be using iron or steel tools, as far as she could tell, and looked just like normal humans.

At least, if every farmer had taken lessons from professional bodybuilders and had minor supernatural powers. Every single farmer she saw had something unusual available to them. Some of them threw seeds into their farmland, only for the seeds to start sprouting at a pace visible to the naked eye. Others had fences that repaired themselves anytime they got damaged. It was obvious that Perks, Magic, or some combination of the two were so widely used here that it was practically universal.

In one case, Alice saw a [Farmer] fall off the roof of the house he was constructing. Rather than become seriously injured, he just seemed annoyed, despite the fact he had just fallen nearly twenty meters. After shrugging it off, he climbed up a wooden ladder and got right back to it, paying no mind to the shattered log he had landed on. Below him, what she assumed to be his daughter cheered him on, laughing as a woman gently patted the little girl’s head while lifting up a beam with her other arm. Alice hadn’t ever seen someone on Earth lift a giant construction beam with one hand the way a random ordinary civilian could in this world, which was a pretty good indicator of just how different the two worlds were.

So this is what society looks like with a levelling System, Alice thought, dumbfounded as she watched the casual superhuman feats happening everywhere around her. It was with some relief that she noticed that, at least in her own age group, she wasn’t astoundingly weak – the other few teenagers she could see weren’t casually doing superhuman nonsense left and right, at least. They moved faster and more gracefully than her, but she saw one of them at least get injured when a log landed on him, and needed some help staggering towards what she assumed was a [Doctor] after a bad injury. She didn’t notice anyone move with superhuman grace either – even if the people here displayed a level of balance and dexterity that would have been hard to match on Earth, it was only around the level of a competent dancer. Which was still incredible, but nowhere near the level of casually shrugging off serious injuries.

As she observed the little farming town more closely, she realized that the age of people seemed to directly correlate to how superhuman their actions were. People around 30 and below still seemed somewhat similar to a mediocre Olympic athlete, while those between the ages of 30 and 50 seemed to be the ones who could give Olympic athletes a run for their money and also had a few supernatural abilities slapped on top of that. She also saw a few older people helping out, although they seemed notably weaker than the younger ones. Apparently, even the System didn’t prevent the physical deterioration brought about by old age.

Still, the casual superhuman strength everyone displayed with was astonishing for Alice to see. While they were all significantly slower and weaker than what she had seen from the bears that controlled plants and fear, they were much stronger than her. Alice had no clue what the soldiers of this world looked like, but if these people were average [Farmers] she should probably expect something far more ridiculous from people actually trained to fight. Despite this casual superhuman ability, the [Farmers] still kept one eye on the forest at all times, making Alice wonder if they were afraid of vinebears or monsters creeping up on them and attacking them.

As she walked closer, she could also see that there was a [Guard] post of some sort outside one of the walls. A group of wagons approached the guard on duty, resulting in some gesturing before the guard began moving to check the wagons. Some sort of tariff, perhaps? Wondered Alice as she observed the exchange. The wagons were pulled by horses, and she couldn’t find a single hint of automation or machinery anywhere. Therefore, the world she was currently was somewhere in the middle ages. This was important information, and made Alice somewhat more hopeful about the prospect of selling her book for some survival funds later.

Meanwhile, a large number of other people in plain clothes labored near the river, digging at the area for some reason. Back on Earth, the digging probably would have taken hours, or even days, while here it took mere minutes for visible progress to come from each [Laborer.] She was a little astonished to see the means of this new world at work as she watched some of the piles of dirt fling themselves away after people had stopped touching them, sliding away from the working site as if they were ice skating on dry land.

Alice took a deep breath, before trying to look as natural as possible and hoping nobody would accidentally squish her in passing. Considering how strong these people were, Alice felt that a casual fistfight with a regular inhabitant might crush her ribcage or kill her on the spot. Then, working up her courage, she kept walking towards the town, homing in on the [Guard] station.

Now that she was closer, she could see that the people around her weren’t quite as superhuman as she had first thought – while the [Farmers] and [Laborers] were, without question, far stronger and more durable than she was, she didn’t see people moving fast enough that she struggled to track them, or anything of that sort. Putting together what she had seen from her own perks beyond level 25 in [Survivor] and her rudimentary understanding of Stats, she quickly realized that most of these people were probably several levels higher than her in some sort of [Farming] class, and that probably gave them several boosts to [Endurance] and [Strength]. At least, that was her best guess about why these people seemed to have such stilted physical attributes – their dexterity was definitely higher than hers, based on speed they moved, but the difference didn’t seem to be overwhelming.

Finally, she reached the guardhouse. The people there were wearing leather armor and holding long, metal pikes. Alice nodded to herself, more sure than before that the industrial revolution had yet to reach this world. Then, she marched towards the second guard outpost, trying her best to seem normal while she fabricated a story. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do on short notice. Before that, she had to wait in line, since the guard was apparently still checking the wagon in front.

While she waited, a group of kids playing scrambled by as Alice watched in bemusement.

“Tag! You got eaten!”

“Ahh! I got eaten again! That’s no fair!”

Another kid showed up, wearing a yellow armband. “Bzzt! I got the monster!” he said as he touched one of the other kids.

“Aww!”

“All the monsters are dead! Civilians and Mages win the round!”

“Who are the mages this time?”

“I want to be a monster!”

“I got eaten three games in a row! I want to be something besides a civilian!”

The group of kids drifted off while Alice pondered. At the very least, it doesn’t seem like Mages are hated here. That’s a relief. Although, if normal people can do this much, what the heck killed the guy whose body I found? I might have suspected a vinebear before, but there’s no way he got killed by a monster even I escaped from if this is what an average civilian looks like. There must be much scarier monster than just vinebears somewhere around here. Or scarier people. Alice shivered.

The guard finally finished checking the wagon in front of her, collected some silver coins from the group, and waved them through. Alice stepped up to the guard.

He looked at her, and seemed surprised for a moment. Alice winced. Her ‘toga’ was definitely weird compared to the other clothes she had seen – most people wore tunics and pants, or dresses and skirts, depending on gender. She hadn’t seen anyone else wearing what looked like a clumsily folded piece of cloth. At least, although there were a few holes and bite marks here and there, it still covered everything, but her attire definitely stood out.

“Name? Occupation? Actually, do you have an occupation? What’s your reason for travelling here?” Asked the [Guard] giving her a suspicious look. It was probably more than Alice deserved, considering the fact that she had shown up looking like a filthy beggar, but the [Guard] didn’t seem to mind.

Alice took a deep breath before launching into her pre-prepared story. She wasn’t sure if the guard would be able to tell from the minute twitches of her body or something equally ridiculous if she was lying, so she kept her statements as close to the truth as possible.

“My name is Alice. My father was a [Merchant], but I encountered misfortune, and I’ve been surviving in the wilderness alone ever since. I am here because I have been looking for a town or some other bastion of civilization, and I saw the walls from the distance.” Technically, everything she said was the truth – her father worked to sell electronics, which was a kind of [Merchant]. She wasn’t interested in divulging the fact that she was an {Outworlder} until she knew more about her situation – it was best to pretend to be a local for now. If she needed to run, she was pretty sure she had zero chance of escaping the civilians here, so she really needed to blend in… as much as she could when she walked slower than the average twelve year old and was covered in a few days of mud and dirt. At least her dunk in the river while fleeing from the vinebears had worked as some kind of bath and helped her clean up a bit, and after she had figured out how to boil water she had begun occasionally wiping herself down with a wet cloth to stay clean, or she might have smelled like a marsh monster. If she hadn’t, Alice wondered if the [Guard] would have chased her away before she could even enter the city.

The guard raised an eyebrow, and suddenly Alice felt as if he could see through her for a moment. Then, the feeling faded as he shrugged and waved her forward. “Do you have any Perks which allow for the storage of items?”

“No?”

She felt as if the guard was looking inside of her again, although {Sense Hostility} still didn’t pick anything up. She tried to identify what was going on, and after a moment, made a guess. Some sort of lie detection Perk? It does seem to be in-flavor for a [Guard], at least.

Please read this statement out loud.” He handed her a block of stone with some words carved into it.

“I am entering this city while bearing no hostile intentions towards the city, nor do I anticipate my intentions changing before I exit. I do not intend to physically harm any person within the walls, nor do I anticipate my intentions changing before my exit. I am not a spy of the Sigmusi Empire. I am not a spy from any other nations. I have no outstanding arrest warrants, and do not intend to take any illegal actions while within the city walls.” The feeling of the guard seeing through her returned. After a moment, he nodded.

“Good enough. Go to the guardhouse just inside the gates and talk to the receptionist.” For the first time, Alice saw a hint of sympathy in the man’s gaze. “If you’re interested, at least. He can help get you caught up with whatever you’ve missed, and possibly help out a bit with getting familiar with the area. At the very least he can offer you some information.”

Alice nodded, trying not to think any more about her parents that she might never see again. For now, at least, she was in the company of humans for the first time in months. She had finally reached a town, and it seemed like monsters avoided this area. She stepped through the gates, filled with a mixture of nervousness and hope.

A note from acaswell

Note: the rest of volume 1 has been taken down, due to the requirements for the KU program. You can buy the e-book for volume 1 of Budding Scientist using the link below.

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

My grandfather will not make it.

My grandfather will not make it. As of today, it has been a week since he was admitted to the hospital, and today we received news that he’s not going to get through this. He’ll survive a few more days at most.

I thought it was likely that he might not make it, but I was really holding on to hope that he would get through this. I was thinking that he was really strong, and maybe he would pull through somehow. I was trying to go through everything with the idea that he was just staying in the hospital for a bit and that he would be leaving it soon.

He has been a big part of my life. He will be greatly missed. When I was young, he was always happy to spend time with me while I was a kid. He played a big role in the person I turned into. He has had Alzheimer’s for the past year, and so lately he hasn’t recognized me. I thought I was more prepared for him passing away than this. Mentally, he hasn’t been fully present for a long time, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt as much when he finally went.

It really hurts. I was wrong. I’m sorry. I can’t think straight right now. I’ll see everyone in April or something when I can think again.

Chapter 63

As the boat sailed up the river, Alice took time to admire the view of the river gently drifting by. A sight that was only occasionally marred by a special [Archer] shooting a Lurker, a strange plant-like monster that Alice had briefly seen during her flight to Cyra. Apparently, they were more common in this part of the river. The arrows seemed completely unhindered by the water they travelled through to reach their targets, which Alice found even more curious because of the small speckles of green, unknown mana sprinkled into each arrow. The Archer certainly wasn’t a Mage – Alice could see Magic Seeds now, and the woman certainly didn’t have one. How was the mana getting into the arrow? She pushed the thought away. For now, at least, it was irrelevant. Just another thought to add to her list, and she was trying to relax right now.

It was the first time in quite a while she had just relaxed and looked at the scenery. She couldn’t help but reflect a little on that. Even though she loved spending time investigating the System, she should probably make a bit more time for other activities as well.

Such as observing her surroundings in more detail. This river, for instance, was actually quite fascinating. It continuously branched out as it travelled downriver, and each branch looked like a canal that was riddled with weird mana constructs. This made Alice increasingly suspicious of whether this river was ‘natural’ or not. The mana constructs were nowhere near as complex as some she had seen. Still, she couldn’t figure out what they were doing. {Mana Construct Modelling} gave her a bunch of weird magic seeds such as ‘water’ and ‘examination’ in addition to some more normal ones like ‘kinetic magic.’ Alice had never heard of examination mana.

Alice frowned, as she realized she was getting caught up in her own little world again. Spending such an obsessive amount of time indoors working on her own projects couldn’t be healthy. Even when she was outside and supposed to be relaxing, she already found her thoughts drifting back to research. That was surely a sign she had spent too long with her nose in her notebook. She couldn’t help but shake her head and smile a little at herself.

When she and Cecilia reached the capital, she would make it a point to interact more with people. She would start with the contact that Illa had advised her to seek out, then she would spend more time with people she was close to. Maybe take a night at the end of every week to just hang out with Cecilia, along with anyone else she got to know better and had a good impression of.

Heck, maybe she could make some quick and easy replicas of board games from home. Alice’s control of kinetic mana was getting good enough that she was able to ‘cut’ objects instead of just pushing and pulling things around. It would take some time to get right, but maybe she could try carving wooden board game pieces as a hobby? It wouldn’t be a bad way to take some time away from her research, and it would probably get her some levels in kinetic magic skills and classes as well. It was somewhat plausible that a market for it existed somewhere, or could exist somewhere if people had enough leisure time in the capital.

After a few more minutes of random thoughts, Alice realized she could start working on spending more time with people right now. She went off to look for Cecilia, who she found sitting on the other side of the deck and watching a pair of passengers the boat had picked up from Riverbranch. The other girl was fiddling with a pair of roots that seemed to conduct mana in a particularly interesting fashion, though, Alice didn’t see any actual mana moving near the roots. Since the other girl wasn’t actively enchanting anything, Alice didn’t see a problem interrupting her.

“What’s up?”

Cecilia seemed a bit startled when she saw Alice, before she smiled and gave Alice a nod. “Are you enjoying the journey so far?” asked Cecilia.

“I’m enjoying this. I’ve never been on a boat before,” said Alice. “I think I would have found the rocking motion to be pretty nauseating if my [Endurance] wasn’t high enough, though. Even now I find it a little unpleasant. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t have the [Endurance] that I have.

Cecilia chuckled. “That’s a pretty common problem for children. Plenty of kids get seasick when they’re on boats. I hear some noble families actually have their kids sit on boats while they do other training in order to boost both [Endurance] and [Willpower] while still boosting other stuff.” The two fell into a comfortable silence as they watched the river. Finally, Alice was the one to break the silence.

“What gives for this river?” asked Alice. Even if she was swearing off spending all her time on research, now that she had seen the mana constructs she was curious. Besides, this way she could mix socializing and research. It was basically a win-win in her book.

Cecilia snorted softly, seeming amused by Alice’s choice of conversation topic. But she still answered. “Back when Southern Illvaria was still firmly controlled by Illvaria instead of monsters, the area was altered to better suit human habitation. A lot of this region is naturally pretty dry. No water, no crops, so the area was only sparsely populated by Illvaria at the time. The [King] hired an outside Immortal to help create an artifact to change this situation. Combined with a huge budget and the support of a bunch of Illvarian Mages, the Crown succeeded in forging an Artifact.

“The artifact changes the river, creating what you see here. A perfect irrigation system that doesn’t need manpower or maintenance to keep it running. More importantly, unlike manmade irrigation canals, these rebuild themselves if monsters mess them up. Which is particularly relevant here. It increased the region’s prosperity by a massive amount after it was implemented, because the population was finally able to start growing its own food. Combined with the rich mana of this area, the Illvarian south produced far better quality and a much greater quantity of enchanting materials than the rest of the continent. With the population to actually exploit this, Illvaria started to get far wealthier and more prosperous.

“Of course, the high mana density comes with a pretty serious downside. Monsters in the area are both more populous and more powerful than other lands inhabited by humans. We’re just barely under the threshold for mana poisoning most of the time. When the war with the Sigmusi happened several decades ago, the Crown was forced to start dipping into the [Guards] and Mages in this region to support the ongoing war. The Sigmusi took advantage of this delay and the Illvarian troop shortage to attack this region. They marched an army all through this area, razing most major cities to the ground and enslaving or killing most of the population.

“After that the monster population no longer had any checks against their repopulation. They made a rapid resurgence. A bunch of different alphas rose up within the next few years, leading to a lot smaller monster attacks against human settlements.

“Most of the inhabitants left the area within the next decade or two, leaving this region once again sparsely populated. For a while, the Artifact regulated a river almost no one cared about or had access to. The previous king always wanted to take the area back, but the northern nomads got extra aggressive for a few decades and tied up too many troops. Without the income provided by southern enchanting materials, it was difficult to scrounge up the money and manpower needed to really get recolonization going even after the war with the Sigmusi Colonia ended in a stalemate. Until recently, of course. Right now the Nomads seem busy fighting among themselves, which freed up Illvarian troops to cull the monster population here. After that the crown opened up settlements and provided noble titles to people who found towns and keep them at a certain population limit and certain other requirements, providing incentives for wealthy merchants to invest in the region and also help the Crown gain some political advantage over the Noble Estate.” Cecilia shrugged. “There are probably other internal political reasons, but that’s all I know or can guess.”

“Does the Artifact never power down?” asked Alice, thinking back to her ideas about human mage cores and ‘permanent’ enchantments. As well as the weird mana constructs she had spotted along the river. They clearly weren’t being powered by anything, as far as she could tell.

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen a real artifact. I only know what this one does because it’s a well documented piece of history, and most [Enchanters]enjoy talking about famous enchanted items from time to time,” said Cecilia. Then she frowned, as she started to look thoughtful. “You know, I suddenly realize that the lack of power is a fair bit more odd than I gave it credit for. I never thought too much about Mana and power sources before, but after last weekend this really does make me wonder how ‘self sustaining’ enchantments actually work. Say, have you ever taken a closer look at System Enchantments before?”

“Why System Enchant – ah.” Alice quickly realized what Cecilia was getting at. Much like Artifacts, System Enchantments just worked, seemingly without any power sources at all. Traditional and Consumable enchanting both needed a bunch of materials to get working and then needed power sources to keep working. However, System enchantments didn’t need monster cores to power them. Alice was suddenly very curious to know how they worked. If the System had massive underlying structure and logic to it, System Enchantments surely did as well.

And now that Alice could actually see System mana, she might be able to see something more interestingwhen she inspected a System enchantment.

The two fell back into silence as they watched the river pass. Soon, the bright sunlight began to fade away, and the sky grew darker as the two watched the sun set over the river.

“Do you think our stars are the same ones you saw at your home?” asked Cecilia, breaking the silence after putting up a privacy Perk.

“What?” The question caught Alice totally off guard. Mostly because Alice had long accepted that she was in a different dimension. The odds of her looking at the same night sky as the one back home seemed miniscule. And the stars she saw in the sky were totally different from the ones she remembered back on Earth.

“In the Church of the System’s holy teachings, they claim that all of the stars in the sky are actually suns, just like ours. All of them are huge, glowing balls of gas and heat that make the planets near them habitable. Just like our sun. I’ve never thought too closely about it before, because I always thought it was just faraway religious stuff. But when I talk to you sometimes… I mean, it’s not like you bring up your home a lot. But you always have such unique perspectives on magic, and it just got me thinking about what your home was like. And I realized that I don’t know too much about your previous world.”

Alice silently boggled at the idea of basic astronomy being ‘religious stuff’ in this world. Not to mention, it sounded like decent introductory astronomy. Even if it was a little simplified, if Alice had seen that statement in some sort of kid’s book about stars and the cosmos she wouldn’t have batted an eye back home.

“Not to mention, in recent centuries a few [Scholars] challenged the idea that stars were inherently nonmagical. I’m not too well versed in that particular academic debate, but I know my father mentioned it back when he was still alive. I wasn’t too focused on the idea at first, but when I talk to you, sometimes I wonder,” said Cecilia.

“I doubt it,” said Alice. “The stars here are different. The moon looks surprisingly similar to the one at home, at least as far as I can see. But I doubt they’re the same… here, hold on.” Alice frowned, trying to pull up a few images in her head. She hadn’t had any of her memory related Perks when she had lived back on Earth, which made it much harder to recall her memories from home with the perfect clarity she was now accustomed to.

But even if she couldn’t recall everything with perfect clarity, she had loved astronomy and looking at the night sky. Her computer’s wallpaper had been a slideshow of random images from the Hubble Telescope, mixed with a few pictures taken from sources like the Apollo missions. She could still remember…

“Hey, let me share a few memories with you,” said Alice, as she placed her finger on Cecilia’s arm. Cecilia didn’t push away Alice’s attempt to use {Shared Memory}, and so rainbow mana flooded out of Alice’s body and into Cecilia’s.

“This is what the constellations used to look like from my home,” said Alice, feeling a bit of longing as she pulled the relevant memories out her thoughts. “There are a lot of other pictures, too – here, this is a picture of what my old world looked like from the moon,” she said, grinning a bit. {Shared Memory} definitely hadn’t been useful in the original, intended way so far. However, she was suddenly eager to see the other girl’s reaction to one of the most famous pictures from Earth.

“Wait… FROM the moon?” Asked Cecilia, as she accessed the memory. “Was… is your moon like our moon? Like, the white orb that shows up in the sky at nighttime?”

“Yes, when I say moon I do mean the moon” said Alice, her grin widening as she watched Cecilia’s reaction.

“Is that your planet there? The little blue semicricle? It looks so… small. But how did your people go to the moon? Nobody here has even thought about travelling to the moon. It’s so… far away. And why is your planet not round? Is that something unique to your world?”

“Well, actually the planet IS an orb. It’s just hard to see because half of the Earth is covered by shadows in this image. But to answer your other questions, it was part of a massive contest between two major powers in my home. They called themselves the United States and the USSR…” Said Alice, as she began to pull up the relevant memories and images to accompany it. She was suddenly having a fun time with this. She started to create a sort of ‘mental slideshow’ in her thoughts, using her ability to perfectly multitask to pull up images that could accompany her impromptu history lesson as she talked about the Cold War and the Space Race. The fact that Alice felt like she was recreating a sort of odd, low quality movie also helped feed a little bit of her nostalgia for home.

Cecilia was a great listener when it came to Alice’s visual storytelling. She oohed and aahed at the right moments, making this kind of ‘storytelling’ even more enjoyable than Alice had originally expected it to be.

It was obvious that Cecilia didn’t understand everything. After all, this planet was still stuck in the middle ages. Even if it made a decent stab at being ‘modern’ in some surprising places like medical technology, it was far from the world Alice had grown up on. But even though Alice could tell the other girl was sometimes confused about things like nuclear bombs and aircraft, Cecilia was more than happy to sit around while Alice did her best to explain those topics and reminisce about her homeland.

Alice realized she was having a lot of fun as time passed. Even though she would occasionally chat with Illa about her home back when she was in Cyra, the older woman never seemed quite as… interested in Alice’s home as Cecilia. It was always like Illa was looking for ideas. Alice got the impression the woman was searching for useful components of Alice’s political system she could implement in Cyra. Which Alice didn’t mind – after all, if this world improved and became a better place to live in, Alice, as one of the people who lived in this world, would also benefit. Still, the dry conversations about political systems Alice only had surface level knowledge of didn’t compare to how much fun she was having just talking about a topic she liked and was enthusiastic about. She had always enjoyed technology and science far more than politics, after all.

As the story about the space landing finally came to an end, Alice had a quiet thought to herself.

If we did something like this again, it wouldn’t be so bad. She smiled as she went to sleep that night.

* * *

Jek, leader of the Old Followers, stared at tents filled with [Raiders], [Nomadic Warmages], and [Nomadic Archers] arrayed around him. Despite how glorious everything seemed to be, he couldn’t help but have a sinking feeling in his stomach. The upcoming battle would be hard. The Old Followers had been leading the New Followers in a great circle, dodging the enemy army to amass whatever dregs of support they could muster from the local tribes.

It never seemed like they had enough time or support to make things happen.

He was higher level than Feik in the [Heir of the Steppes] class. There was no way he wasn’t – his former friend almost never displayed any of the extraordinary Perks Jek had gotten from the class. Feik seemed to lag well behind him in levels for [Heir of the Steppes], but that was the only advantage he had. Feik had more troops under his command than Jek did, and far better enchanted items for him and his trusted [Raid Leaders]. The level of the leader of an army could only make up for so much.

“Are you worried?” Asked one of his [Raid Leaders] as Jek paced about in the tent.

Jek forcibly stopped himself from pacing. Seeming anxious about the upcoming battle would be terrible for morale. A leader must appear confident. Showing how worried he truly was about the battle would only give rise to doubts about his fitness for leadership. Even if most of the Old Followers saw him as the rightful leader of the steppes and tundras, he couldn’t have internal problems rising up with a major external threat already looming overhead.

“No,” said Jek. “We will win this battle, regardless of how many dogs Feik has brought to his side. The average level of our army is higher. The System favors us, for our actions are right. With the System’s favor, our advantage should outweigh our disadvantages. We are simply biding our time and waiting for the right chance to engage the enemy.” Inwardly, Jek scoffed at that statement. If they were in an advantageous position, would they need to flee from Feik’s army like injured rats, trying to find an opportunity to break the situation?

“Yes. Since the System favors us, surely we will emerge victorious.” Said the [Raid Leader].

“Naturally.” Jek’s voice was cold and collected. As a leader’s voice should be. “Is there any news of the Fallrin tribe?”

“They have given us a variety of excuses,” said the [Raid Leader], his lips curling into a sneer. “I suspect they intend to sit on the sides and wait to see who wins, before aligning themselves with the victor.”

Jek repressed the urge to sigh. This was the greatest problem he encountered when trying to resist Feik’s army. If the other nomads put their foot down and rallied around him, crushing Feik would be easy.

Jek couldn’t help but bitterly think about how much things had changed in a short decade. When he and Feik had first discovered the tomb of the long dead first leader of the nomads, he and Feik had been filled with excitement. The System had validated their excitement, granting them a rarity ten Achievement and a brand new class. At that time, the two of them had planned to unite the nomads together, reforming the great horde and finally avenging the humiliating loss their ancestors had suffered centuries ago during the invasion of the Corellion Empire.

And then Feik had sold the bow to an outsider. A strange Immortal who travelled with a man that seemed half man and half metal, and offered them a great deal of enchanted items in exchange for the bow. As well as the demand that they let him inspect them with some special tools for a few days.

The man had given Jek a bad feeling. This feeling didn’t come from a Perk or a Skill. It came from his then-thirty years of experience as a [Raider]. He had declined the offer.

Feik had accepted. He had reasoned that the bow was merely a symbol – it offered no tangible benefit. They had already gotten a Class and an Achievement for it – they were only lacking money and weapons to properly lead an army. If they traded away the bow, they would be able to unite the nomads and lead them back to the Corellion Empire again.

Quietly, he sighed to himself. Perhaps he was the fool for not accepting the offer. Feik had taken the bow behind his back, sold it to the weird Immortal, and then begun raising the army. Nothing bad seemed to have happened to his former friend after selling off the symbol of the former leader of the steppes. He had fallen out with his friend over the matter, until things had come to where they stood today. A decade of rising tensions, of skirmishes, of conflicts had killed much of the feelings he used to have for his former friend. And soon one of them will die.

“Even if the cowardly lesser clans refuse to join us, we will win. It just means they won’t have a share of the loot when we gain victory. The System watches over us, and our forefathers will guide our arrows in this battle,” said Jek.

When the battle finally came, it might very well be the last battle of his life. Or the decisive start of his legend. But with every clan’s refusal to aid him, he felt his odds growing dimmer and dimmer.

He took another long look at the tents spread around him, before he dismissed his [Raid Leader] and returned to his own tent.

A note from acaswell

Author’s Note:

Shameless plug! For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon

If we’re using the Apollo 11 pictures, the earth looks kind of like a semicircle rather than a blue orb. At least for the picture I decided Alice was using. Hard to see the rest of Earth if you don’t already know where you should be looking. Or at least that’s my assumption for how it would look for Cecilia here, since this planet has a fair bit less of a comprehensive understanding of astronomy.

Anyway.

Author's new Note: I probably won't have much to say for a while. I'll attach original author's notes to chapters while I try to get back into the swing of things and focus on doing something.

Chapter 64

Alice and Cecilia spent the rest of the boat ride relaxing and talking. After another day or two of sailing, Alice decided to follow up on one of her earlier ideas. On the boat there was also a fairly high level [Merchant] who had a storage Perk. After talking to the man for a bit, Alice was happy to find out that he was in the habit of stuffing random bits and bobs into his Storage. This included some scraps of wood he hadn’t been able to sell for several months now. After a few minutes of negotiation, Alice managed to talk him into trading some wooden scraps to her in exchange for her vinebear bones. She was happy to have actually found a use for them.

She considered the size and shape of the wooden scraps for a while, and then got to work. Her goal was simple. She wanted to make some board game pieces.

A few hours later, Alice eyed her work. The results were… lumpy.

That wasn’t to say that her mechanical skill at carving the pieces was terrible. Alice wasn’t that great at using her kinetic magic to carve the wood into other objects, and had botched the first six attempts. However, with time and practice, she was getting better at it. Now that she wasn’t lifting up construction materials at the docks, she had a surplus of kinetic mana to dedicate to carving wood.

The problem was that Alice’s artistic abilities were basically nonexistent. No matter what she tried to carve, the pieces just looked off. Even after she started to get the hang of manipulating the wood, shaving and cutting it into the right size, she was rapidly realizing that she wasn’t that great at translating her memories, materials, and mana into tangible objects.

The only real upside was that she ended up getting another level in {Woodworking}. Alice had nearly forgotten about the {Woodworking} Skill entirely – after all, she had used it literally zero times since arriving in Cyra. It was more of a long-lost relic of her time in the wilderness than it was a meaningful part of her abilities.

Unfortunately, {Woodworking} did not improve her artistic ability. It improved her ability to make a piece of wood stable. It helped her figure out how to transform wood into something useful.

Even the System was apparently unable to improve someone’s art if they just bashed their head against it long enough, unlike literally everything else in this world. So the level in {Woodworking} did nothing to help her with her current goal.

Alice had grown used to the System assisting her whenever she tried to do something. If at first she couldn’t succeed, all she needed to do was look up the unlock condition for a Skill and then practice. To actually need to resolve something by researching what she was doing wrong, and then try to figure out how to improve it, was an experience Alice had started to forget. It also made her far more interested in developing her artistic wood carving skills, if only to show that she could still do things on her own without the System.

Apart from Alice’s exploration of her nonexistent artistic skills, Alice and Cecilia ended up talking a lot more. Alice had grown used to talking with the other girl about research and the System, but even without research providing a common topic, Cecilia turned out to be surprisingly interested in other aspects of Earth culture.

Alice found that some of the technology from earth was very easy for the other girl to understand. Artillery and gunpowder were surprisingly close to things that already existed in warfare, for example – the only difference being that in this world a ‘piece of artillery’ was just a group of [Kinetic Mages], and ‘gunpowder’ tended to be pretty close to what a competent [Kinetic Mages] did with their surroundings in battle.

Cecilia pointed out that something similar to dynamite already existed in this world. In fact, the first time Alice had gone to Cecilia for help with enchanting, the other girl had been in the midst of trying to develop her own knockoff version of it. While the dynamite in this world was based entirely on kinetic mages and enchanting, and was also unwieldy and underdeveloped right now, it was still a valuable tool for mining. Once the parallels were pointed out, Alice was surprised to realize that she had missed some of them, even though many of them had been right in front of her the whole time she had been here.

Cecilia’s comments gave Alice another reminder that interacting with the outside world didn’t necessarily slow down her research. On the contrary, holing herself up and focusing exclusively on her projects might end with her missing obvious ideas and points of interest that she might find useful. This world’s version of dynamite, for example, seemed like something worth taking a peek at in the future.

The rest of the boat ride passed by in much the same manner. While Alice worked on her carving skills, and, by extension, her kinetic mana skills, the two took this as a time to relax and unwind. The boat kept sailing its way upstream, gradually sailing towards its destination.

Finally, the boat arrived. The river didn’t directly connect to Metsel, the capital of Illvaria, but it arrived in a medium sized fishing town located a few hour’s ride away from the capital. As Alice and Cecilia walked around, taking some time to get used to the ground no longer swaying, they saw [Guards] and [Soldiers] patrolling the riverbanks and city streets with much higher regularity than in the south. Each of the patrolling [Soldiers] made it a point to give the two respectful nods and a ‘good day, Lady Mage’ whenever they saw them. Unlike in the south, where the address had always seemed more friendly than anything else, the [Soldiers] and [Guards] had a certain edge to their greetings. This caught Alice a little off guard because it felt so different here.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, she realized why people seemed so nervous near her in this fishing town. On the southern frontier, many of the people went there to make a new life for themselves. Institutions like the five Estates and the influence of nobles and magic academies were much weaker, since the towns were newly established and mostly founded by wealthy merchants. There wasn’t any urgency to the acknowledgement of her status in Cyra, and there wasn’t any fear either. Here in the North, the Mage’s estate and Noble’s Estate had a much greater presence.

Alice didn’t know how she felt about that. On one hand, it was nice to be treated well by random strangers. Everyone was courteous and polite towards her the moment they saw her mage insignia. On the other hand, it felt unnerving for random people on the streets to be afraid of her. There was a strange sense of being divided from the other people she saw on the street that hadn’t been present in the South.

The two of them decided to cut their stroll short after a few hours, tired of the wary glances people gave them out of the corners of their eyes. They were starting to run low on cash, so they decided to look for a caravan they could guard on the way to Metsel. If they could find one, it would neatly solve the problem of transporting Cecilia’s luggage, and also get them a little extra money. Even if neither of them specialized in combat, they were still Mages that could hold their own in a fight. Most caravans would jump at having a Mage or two reinforce their guards, just for the sheer intimidation factor.

Sadly, it seemed rather hard to find a caravan that was looking for more [Guards] right now. The people in the North found the Sigmusi threat to be very distant from their day to day lives, and with the amount of troops transferring around and dealing with monsters as they headed to the South, bandits were surprisingly rare in the area. Therefore, most caravans were running light on [Guards] right now.

While the two of them couldn’t find a convenient caravan to make some money during the journey to Metsel, they did come across a friendly farmer. Seeing the two of them carting around Cecilia’s luggage everywhere, he offered them a spot on his donkey-pulled cart. He claimed to have a farm pretty close to Metsel, and was returning after selling his crops in the port city. Judging by the amount of mana in the guy’s body, Alice was pretty sure he was higher level than she was by a fair bit, which was probably how a [Farmer] had harvested and sold a batch of crops barely a month after the end of Winter. It was nice to see that a some people maintained a friendly attitude towards them.

They happily took him up on his offer, and hopped into the back of the cart after loading up Cecilia’s luggage. The cart smelled like wheat and strawberries, which was an oddly pleasant combination.

“Thanks for letting us ride along with you, mister…” Alice trailed off, realizing she didn’t actually know the [Farmer’s] name.

“Horton!” said Horton, with an easy laugh. “And it’s no trouble. I don’t mind a couple passengers, and neither to do Bessie and Honks,” he said, giving the two mules friendly pats. The two snorted at him, apparently less than thrilled at his assertion, but he just chuckled as they kept plodding along. Alice decided she liked Horton’s attitude. Instead of the visible uneasiness much of the townsfolk seemed to feel towards them, Horton seemed happy to chat with them.

“It’s not often I see young ones like yourselves wandering about, Lady Mages. If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m heading to Metsel to enroll in one of the Magic Academies, if things go well,” said Alice.

“And I’m heading there to set up an enchanting shop,” said Cecilia.

“Aren’t there still a few weeks left before the Magic Academies start their new terms? They usually make a big fuss about it near the beginning of every summer, and I don’t think age is catching up to me yet. I still have all of my Intelligence Stats, unless I’m really losing it,” said Horton.

“I’m looking for a patron. I’m not too eager to join the army, so I figure I’ll need a few weeks to look for someone interested in sponsoring my time at the academy. If things work out, at least. Otherwise, I guess I’ll be enchanting with her for a while until I can come up with my tuition on my own,” said Alice, with a light laugh. “I guess I’ll see how well my luck holds out soon enough.”

“True, true. I’ve heard it can be hard to get in contact with them nobles, but if you’re an exceptionally prestigious Lady Mage or have something unique to offer, maybe things will go well for you. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, Lady Mage,” said Horton, giving her a cheerful nod.

Alice took the man’s cheery words as a good luck charm. The three of them settled into a relaxed discussion about crop prices soon afterwards, where the two learned that food prices were on the rise. The South hadn’t gotten all of its agricultural centers properly set up yet. Naturally, the people moving south still needed to eat, so they were pulling in as much food as they could get access to from the north. According to Horton, it was a good time to a [Farmer] right now. From there, the discussion drifted away from the topic, and began to shuffle towards more random ideas and tidbits of gossip.

Eventually, they arrived at Metsel. The two thanked Horton for giving them a ride before they entered the city.

Since it was getting late, the two found a cheap inn, had dinner, and went to sleep.

The next morning, the two had a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs. After that, Alice and Cecilia decided to check out Cecilia’s potential new shops first. Illa hadn’t extended any help to Cecilia, probably because it wouldn’t a good idea to reward people for fleeing Cyra. Currently, Cecilia had a few contracts with people that basically let her reserve the right to purchase the building for a few weeks. She still needed to decide which one she was actually buying, which required seeing the buildings in person.

It took Cecilia the better part of the day to finalize her decision and make the purchase. The two spent the rest of the evening unpacking Cecilia’s various enchanted items, enchanting materials, and assorted bits and bobs. Alice was more than happy to help out, and considered it the least she could do for the other girl since Cecilia was so willing to accept her even though she was from another world.

The next day, after sleeping in Cecilia’s workshop, Alice went off find the company owned by Illa’s husband. Illa’s note had indicated that she was looking for a company called ‘Enchanter’s Stockhouse,’ and that they should already be expecting her.

The company was surprisingly easy to find. It was housed in what Alice mentally dubbed the ‘upper middle class’ section of the city, which was where a lot of working class mages lived. The third person she asked knew exactly where the building was located, and was willing to lead her there if she paid them a copper artisan for their time.

Less than five minutes later, Alice walked to the building in question. She found herself in a fairly well populated shop stocked to the brim with enchanting materials. There was far greater variety than had been present in Cecilia’s shop – there were cheap materials that could only remember a few instructions, expensive materials that could remember six or seven instructions each, and even enchanting materials that could interact with multiple different kinds of mana and combine them together into a coherent set of instructions. There were six different workers keeping the place stocked and attending to customers, and Alice noted with some amusement that four of them were fairly attractive ladies and two were fairly attractive men.

She walked up to one of them, showed them Illa’s letter of introduction, and after a few confirming questions, was quickly ushered into a room on the second floor of the building.

Upon reaching the room, Alice swallowed nervously. This decision might make or break whether she could actually attend a Magic Academy or whether she needed to put her plans on halt for a year or two.

* * *

Somewhere on the Southern Continent stood two people. One was an Immortal, who was hard to notice. The second was something that looked like a person, but was partially made out of metal.

Before them stood a research base, packed to the brim with people going about their business. [Hidden Guards] bustled about, keeping the perimeter secure and monitoring the area for intruders. [Forbidden Researchers] occasionally entered and exited the base, carrying materials around.

Of course, an ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to notice the base’s existence at all. There was a four layered enchantment that surrounded the entire research base, making it exceptionally difficult to notice. The first layer sensed what the surroundings looked like, and then fed that information to the other two layers of the enchantment. The second layer mimicked the colors and shapes of the surroundings, creating an effect similar to a chameleon from Earth. The third layer prevented any obvious signs of mana leakage, making it exceptionally difficult for even an experienced Mage to spot the massive concealment enchantment. Finally, the fourth layer of enchantment detected Organic life that crossed the enchantment, and raised an alarm whenever anyone not already keyed in to the enchantment and above a certain mass crossed through the area.

None of the attempts at concealing the enchantment mattered to the man and his assistant, who were able to simply ignore the attempted camouflage. One of the Immortal’s two main specialties was large, structured Enchantments. It would take much more than this to fool him. The Immortal looked at the base, before he grinned.

“I think we finally found what we’re looking for,” he said, whispering to his assistant. Even though he had a Perk to keep his conversations with his assistant private, the number of Perks that existed to counter other Perks was practically uncountable.

“I agree, master. The people here inhabit a hidden research base in reasonable numbers. It doesn’t appear to have the markings of the local government, meaning it’s probably a base of the Society of Starry Eyes. I smell a great deal of death in this area as well, meaning plenty of people have died in this research facility. Given these factors, it should be a Society research facility.”

The Immortal’s grin grew even wider. He took a look around, inspecting the [Hidden Guards] and seeming to make a variety of estimations. Finally, he frowned slightly. “There are a few that might be able to notice me, even with my Perks and Achievements. I didn’t think there would be many people with this much mana concentrated inside of their bodies… how troublesome. Did you bring my equipment?”

The half-metal man nodded. “I have everything you asked me to bring. What would do you need?”

“Hmm… How high is the combat power of this area?”

The half-metal man seemed to frown, looking at the base for a while. “I believe it’s impossible to win a frontal assault. If you were a combat oriented Immortal, storming a base this small would probably be viable, but as it currently stands, you have no ability to win a normal fight.”

The Immortal nodded in agreement. “Good analysis. No matter how powerful Immortals seem, most powerful Perks have a limited number of uses per day, or are limited in scope. Human bodies are also similarly limited in stamina. I don’t have the stamina or mana to fight a base filled with people unless I counter them perfectly, or unless I am willing to spend an obscene amount of materials and enchanted items. You have grown a great deal from when I first rescued you.”

“I was not in my right mind at the time, master,” said the half-metal man with a nod. “I am grateful for the second chance at life you gave me, and regret my less well-considered ideas when I was recovering.” The Immortal smiled at that, giving his servant a simply nod of acknowledgement. Then he turned back to the base.

“Since a frontal assault is impossible, and some of the [Hidden Guards] have the ability to spot me if I wander in, what do you think my best course of action is?” asked the Immortal, maintaining a relaxed and confident smile .

“Hmm… given my knowledge of Master’s abilities, if you knock out the [Hidden Guards] who can potentially spot you, I don’t think anyone else in the base would see you. So if I were master I would simply take a few ranged weapons and kill them, before walking in? There are a few piercers that I brought along, and they should be sufficient for taking out the ones capable of noticing master…”

The Immortal shook his head. “Stealth Perks don’t quite work like that. Even if my Stealth Perks make it very hard to notice me, that’s contingent upon the idea of people not realizing there’s anything to notice in the first place. If I waltz into a nobleman’s house, for example, as long as they don’t have high level [Guards] patrolling they usually won’t notice anything wrong if I don’t do anything easily noticeable. But if I stab someone in the face, they’re absolutely going to realize something is wrong, and stop subconsciously overlooking me. As will everyone around them. Shooting down the [Hidden Guards] that can see me would break my stealth Perks and force me into a head on fight.”

“Hmm… is there a quieter way to get into the base then?” Asked the half-metal man, giving the question more serious thought.

“Your thinking is improving, but it still has some way to go.” said the Immortal with a sigh. “Give me these tools…” before listing several enchanted items. After that, he put on a few different items. First, he put on a necklace, which had the strange effect of redirecting mana towards it while shielding itself from being easily noticed. He also put on two bracelets, which began distorting the flow of mana in the air around them, before taking a small metal rod and stabbing it into the side of the enchantment surrounding the base.

The metal rod started to disappear from his view. Within a minute or two, it was completely invisible to the naked eye. The Immortal and the Metal Man left the area and retreated several hundred meters away, keeping the area in view but making sure they were hard to spot.

Eventually, the enchantment surrounding the base began to shiver. It didn’t look like anything unnatural was happening to it – it just looked like the area wasn’t being powered properly. If one hadn’t seen the Immortal place the metal rod there, it would have been very hard to realize what was happening was unusual.

A few hours passed as the ‘unpowered enchantment’ became weaker and weaker, until chunks of the enchantment started to totally lose its effect. Instead of a base that blended into its surroundings, chunks of the base were now visible to the outside world, with chunks of stone and metal seemingly floating in thin air. A few more minutes passed before a few [Forbidden Researchers] came to investigate the area. They quickly found the problematic area and began to dig into the soil. Soon, they uprooted several spikes of wood, all of which looked like they were incredibly ordinary. Unless one was able to observe mana, in which case they would notice that each spike of wood was continuously pulling several different kinds of mana out of a large attached container of monster cores.

As the researchers dug out the wooden spikes, the [Hidden Guards] spread out, increasing their patrol area to make sure no curious passerby accidentally stumbled upon the base. Since the enchantments keeping the base hidden were currently offline, they needed to make extra sure that nobody saw the area while they were repairing the enchantment.

The number of [Hidden Guards] in the area rapidly thinned out. The Immortal and his companion quietly shifted their position, taking advantage of their vastly superior [Perception] Attributes to track the [Hidden Guards] they wished to avoid. They skirted past them, weaving their way out of each problematic person’s line of sight until the potential threats left the area.

Then, once the [Hidden Guards] weren’t directly watching the enchantment, the Immortal activated several Perks.

He quietly strolled around the perimeter of the Enchantment, keeping a wary eye on the problematic [Hidden Guards], until he came across an area that was currently devoid of other people. He took a final cautious look around, before he began to fiddle with the enchantment. If the Enchantment were still operating, it would have been incredibly obvious someone was working to subvert the enchantment. However, since it was currently not operational, the man’s tampering went unnoticed by anyone.

Once the Immortal finished, he strolled into the base. The localized part of the enchantment the man had subverted was now online again, although the mana flow was irregular. Most importantly, the enchantment was now shielding itself from the view of the people who had originally built the enchantment. And the enchantment that was supposed to conceal the base now had a different function – it actively shielded the man from people’s eyesight, making it very hard to notice him even if one managed to get past all of his Perks. This tampering would certainly be discovered eventually, but it would be hard to spot unless someone was very carefully examining it. It would do, for now.

Just like that, he walked into the base, strolling curiously through room after room. He saw a room filled with humans, some of whom were in various states of agony as they went through forced mana baptisms while instruments at the sides recorded the state of their bodies. Mildly curious, he picked up one of the research logs.

Experimenting to see if it’s possible to increase the success rate of human mana baptisms?It seems the [Organic Mages] of the Society of Starry Eyes have some interesting projects they are working on. The Immortal nodded to himself before putting the research log back down.

He left the modified humans to their fates, completely indifferent to their suffering. He saw rooms filled with experiments on dimensional mana. In these rooms, he sometimes took another look, sometimes shaking his head in disappointment or nodding in wonder. Even though he didn’t understand all of the experiments at a glance, at least some of them were close enough to his own research and interests for him to make a few rough guesses about what he was looking at.

Finally, he came upon a room filled with records. Unlike the other rooms, which were in the middle of active experimentation, this room seemed innocuous. It was filled with maps, as well as discussions of anomalies found across the world and discussions of what they might mean. This was the reason he had come here.

He rooted through stacks of papers, reading them in seconds as various Perks boosted his reading speed to ridiculous levels. He scanned stack of paper after stack of paper, until finally, he found what he was looking for. He grinned, placed all of the papers back exactly the way he had found them, and strolled out of the base. He had perfect memory, so he had no use for the physical copies of the notes.

At the edge of the visibility blocking enchantment, he paused to undo his little modification. The metal rod he had used to force the enchantment to leak would dissolve into oxygen over the course of the next few hours. There would soon be no evidence he had ever been here.

He beckoned to the half-metal man, who nodded when the Immortal returned. The two of them walked away from the base.

“Did you find it, master?” Asked the half-metal man.

“I have a much better idea where it is now,” said the Immortal. “In hindsight, it makes a great deal of sense. I would have tried looking in those areas earlier if I had realized the mana density couldn’t possibly be natural. Even monsters don’t produce quite so much Broken Mana, and I should have narrowed the search to those areas instead of focusing on total mana density. Oh well – there were a dozen different possible places it could have been, and each of them is infested with monsters. Best to double check other’s work instead of risking our lives trying to check each one.” The Immortal sighed, before he shrugged. “I am more than a little frustrated my original train of thought seems to have been a dead end, though. I was really expecting Dimensional Mana to play a bigger role. I wonder if perhaps their ideas are going in the wrong direction, and the areas I pulled from their notes are dead ends?

“In any case, we have much more specific areas to look at now. It should be worth investigating them to see if we can find it. Let’s bring this to a conclusion, shall we?” He recovered his jolly smile, and led his assistant away from the base.

Within the base of the Society of Starry Eyes, after the enchantment was fully repaired, everyone returned to their respective tasks. Not a single person noticed the intruder who had strolled through their base and looked over their research, or the temporarily made modifications to the enchantment hiding everything.

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 65

After being ushered into a room on the second floor, the store worker poured Alice a cup of tea and sat her down at a table in the center of the room. The woman gave Alice a wink and a friendly nod, before she turned around and left. Alice noted that the table she sat at was obviously expensive, even though she didn’t know much about furniture. She couldn’t tell what wood it was made out of, but it was clearly different from the tables she had seen in Cyra. Alice decided to take this as a sign that they were taking her visit seriously, which was an encouraging thought.

Alice spent a few minutes sitting at the table and sipping at her tea as she idly stared at the decorations in the room. At least half of them were enchanted, which was an impressive and ostentatious display of wealth that Alice was willing to bet was lost on most of the people who sat in this room until they sat down and observed for a while. The seat she was sitting on, for example, was enchanted with some kind of red and blue speckled mana that seemed to be adjusting the seat temperature to make it comfortable for the sitter. It was working with a different blue-purple colored mana that Alice didn’t recognize, and couldn’t figure out the function of at all. Alice suspected the red and blue mana was probably thermal mana, and realized that she had almost no familiarity with the fourth major branch of Magic in this world. Which was something she should probably correct when she had some spare time.

The rest of the objects in the room were similarly enchanted with a variety of enchantments, some of which Alice could make out the purpose of and some of which she couldn’t. However, even if she didn’t understand everything she was looking at, being able to peruse high end minor enchantments proved to be surprisingly interesting for Alice, making the minutes she spent waiting a source of fascination rather than tedium.

Finally, after seven minutes, an older gentleman who appeared to be somewhere in his early forties walked into the room. Even though his physical age appeared to be around his late thirties, his chronological age was much harder to guess. Based on the amount of rainbow mana present in the man’s body, Alice guessed he was aging quite slowly. He was fairly attractive for an older man, though Alice guessed that was simply because he was a successful [Merchant], and any successful [Merchant] was bound to pick up plenty of points in [Charisma].

The man sat down at the other end of the table, before giving her a courteous nod. “Miss Alice, yes? A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I am Rupert, one of the higher level [Managers] that work under Abraham’s various enchanting shops spread throughout Illvaria. I have received a letter from Lady Illa, as well as a confirmation from her husband Abraham, stating someone with your physical description would be arriving soon. However, simply for the sake of certainty, would you mind confirming that you are, in fact, Alice Verianna, who Illa indicated would be arriving soon? Just restate your name and identity out loud, please.”

Alice saw a few speckles of rainbow mana settle over the man’s eyes. Some sort of truth detection Perk? She couldn’t think of any other reason for the man to try to get her to restate her identity out loud. Now that she could see System mana and was interacting with people enough to see System-human interactions, she was finding all sorts of interesting little tidbits she had previously missed.

“I am Alice Verianna. I spent several weeks working under Illa while I stayed in Cyra, and I have been told by her that if I seek out one of her husband’s branch companies I would receive assistance in trying to find a Patron during my time at the capital. This Patronage is to assist me in paying for my time at a Magic Academy, since I would struggle to do so myself, and would need to either gather funds for several months or give up on the notion entirely if I need to work everything out on my own. I have also spent multiple weeks receiving instruction from Illa, who taught me how to defend myself using magic. She has also given me some basic instruction in things relating to the theory behind Magic and Mana, but only in very practical areas,” said Alice, making her identity as clear as possible. If the man was using a truth detection Perk, she may as well be as detailed as possible to make verifying her identity easier. While there were some things she needed to hide, her past working for Illa certainly wasn’t one of them, and it was the only thing likely to concern him.

The man smiled. “That does indeed sound like Lady Illa. Very practical woman. As far as I can tell, you are the person I was told to watch out for. Then, once again, it is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Lady Alice,” he said, chuckling as he extended his hand across the table to her and briefly shaking her hand. “Now, regarding your Patronage, may I have some better information about what you want and what kind of Patron you are looking for? Illa mentioned you have a strong desire to do research, but I admit, the details were rather brief in her letter, and your introductory letter doesn’t go into much further detail. May I ask what specifically you plan to research, and what your strengths as a Mage are? Tell me a bit about yourself and your future plans as well. Treat this as something of a sales pitch for a noble – it will help me figure out the best way to help you. Of course, with me, it is also best if you are as open as possible about gaps in your knowledge or weaknesses – it will help me figure out if there are quick ways to address those gaps, as well as what kind of Patrons are simply going to be uninterested the moment they find those flaws. Some things can’t be hidden, after all.”

Alice thought for a moment, organizing her thoughts before she started to speak.

“Well, I would say I’m primarily researching two things. First, I am researching the nature of mana. There are plenty of scholars that have delved into the secrets of mana in the past, but much of their work was sadly unavailable to me while I was residing in the south, due to the limited population and lack of magic academies and knowledge resources in the newly colonized territories. I hope to use my time at the academy to synthesize what information already exists about the true nature of mana and use that as a springboard to further my own studies into the topic.

“Second, I am researching enchanting, and how it can tie into the nature of mana. I have seen several things recently that make me wonder what better control of mana manipulation would look like. For example, I want to study why some enchantments seem to be able to sustain themselves indefinitely, whereas others cannot, and I wish to study this in greater detail and see if there is a way to replicate the self-sustaining aspect of some enchantments in wider use,” said Alice, thinking about the artifact that apparently ran Southern Illvaria’s river system. “There are a lot of other topics I am discovering and interacting with involving enchanting, but they are a tad more specific and convoluted in nature,” said Alice, thinking of some of her other experiments with the System. Those topics did, indeed, involve mana, but Alice didn’t know if there was any practical value to these discoveries at all right now. She was definitely curious about these topics, and was personally willing to devote time and energy into the topic purely out of interest. However, trying to find a noble or merchant who would want to invest in her personal hobby might be asking a bit too much if she couldn’t find a practical use for that information. At this thought, Alice frowned a little bit.

“Hmm…” The man frowned, tapping a finger against his chin. “Illa said you are primarily a Kinetic Mage, yes?”

“That’s my primary mana seed. I have an Organic Seed that I don’t have very much experience manipulating, and I also have a pure mana seed that I have a fair amount of proficiency with. While limited, I have already made some successful enchantments which I managed to sell in Cyra, and I expect that I will get better and better at enchanting if given the time and resources to practice. I also have a fourth mana seed slot I haven’t used yet, and if you think there’s something that would extra valuable in that slot, I am willing to grab something new,” said Alice, after thinking for a bit. If she really hated the seed, she could always replace it later, and then start using her Organic magic seed as her ‘experimental magic seed’ slot. Since she could swap around her seeds at will as long as the seed hadn’t been enhanced by other Perks, she didn’t feel there was too much need to be hung up over the specifics about her mana seeds. Being able to replace one seed every month meant that choosing a magic seed was still important for her, but it was nowhere near the potentially life altering decision most Mages needed to treat every seed as.

“Let’s not talk about permanent decisions like choosing a new Magic Seed for now. You should be careful with those, because you might regret making a decision in the future if you don’t think about it carefully. You said you have already made a few working enchantments?” Asked Rupert, his eyes brightening. “What kind? What do they look like? Do you have an example of your work that you can show me?”

Alice grabbed the ring that revealed mana in one’s surroundings she had made in Cyra and pulled it out of {Sample Storage}, before handing it over to Rupert. “This is a copy of a ring that I didn’t manage to sell back in Cyra. I sold most of the ones I made to [Adventurers].

The [Merchant] looked at the ring, frowning, before he picked it up and began carefully inspecting it. Even though Alice could tell that the man wasn’t a Mage himself because there was no magic seed located near his heart, she still saw a variety of Perks start to activate in his body, especially near his eyes as he carefully inspected the ring. He turned back to her and nodded. “This is interesting. It isn’t terribly useful to [Adventurers] with enough levels behind them, because those [Adventurers] already have ways to locate potential spots for mana poisoning and evaluate potential enchanting materials. However, the cost of production is low enough that you can sell it cheap to [Adventurers] who are just starting to get their feet under them. I wouldn’t say it’s the best way to make money, but it’s creative. It even manages to turn a Pure Mana seed into something with commercial value.”

Alice nodded. Rupert’s assessment of her rings struck her as a fair one.

“The craftsmanship is a little shoddy, but since you managed to create this design by yourself, I can at least give it a decent grade. It shows promise, if nothing else,” the [Merchant] said, nodding to himself. “Having someone able to make decent enchanted objects from their own designs at your age can’t be said to be rare, but it’s definitely not a skill everyone masters at your age. Not bad.

“What makes you think that you are capable of discovering secrets about enchanting that long-established researchers and [Enchanters] have not for hundreds of years? You are investing a great deal of time and resources into studying topics that have already been picked over by scholars time and time again. Do you really hope to find something nobody has ever found before?” Rather than dismissive, he seemed genuinely curious. Alice suspected Illa’s recommendation probably helped with that. If Alice didn’t have Illa’s backing, she would just seem like an overconfident teenager. In fact, if people knew she had been baptized by mana, and less than six months ago at that, most people would definitely write her off as overconfident, since it would indicate she had been handling mana for less time than a natural born mage.

“First, I’m very confident that my perspective on mana is unique in a way no one can replicate. It has to do with some of my life experiences that I am unwilling to discuss in further detail, but I have a good ability to find weird edges about how Mana works and then use those to learn and discover more. Second, I have an Achievement that is rarity nine and is directly related to the results of my research. I am only a few months into my research so far, and getting an Achievement up to rarity 9 already seems to be a good indicator of how much potential value my research has. It allows me to see through some extra intricacies behind the workings of mana, giving me much better ability to see what I’m doing and find more details and information. By sharing the results of my studies with Illa and another two friends of mine, I was able to consistently give them rarity three Achievements. I feel that this is a good indicator of how valuable my research can become.”

“Oh? Rarity nine is actually very impressive, and the ability to share Achievements is certainly valuable. What Achievements did the three other people get specifically? And what are the details of the rarity nine Perk?”

Alice shuffled a little bit. “I can’t discuss the rarity 9 Perk in full detail – it has some correlation to combat ability, however thin.” Or, more accurately, it is tied a bit too closely to my identity as someone from another planet, and I don’t want the Society coming after me. Granting an extra class slot is definitely related to combat, so I’m not lying. “As for the Perks the others got, it helped them see mana a bit more clearly, and boosted a few useful attributes like [Intelligence] and [Perception]. There were other effects, but I am uncertain what they were because the others were unwilling to share it, and I didn’t push the topic."

The [Merchant] was frowning now. “Hmm… your sales pitch needs a little work. Noble Patrons usually want one of two things when sponsoring a Mage. They either expect that the Mage is going to work for them after graduating, getting them a competent worker who can help them deal with the Magical aspects of running a territory if they can’t use magic themselves. OR they want exclusive or firsthand access to something that will increase their power. Economic, military, political – any of these aspects are important pillars for the influence of a noble. Granted, plenty are willing to prioritize sponsoring a promising [Enchanter] or warmage who will work for them in the future – however, right now, you don’t demonstrate the promise as an enchanter you would need to get special treatment for it. Merchant patrons tend to prioritize economic value, but as it currently stands, it doesn’t sound like your research directly correlates any of the useful categories. Even though it has plenty of places it might go, the end goal is still quite uncertain. Am I mistaken in saying that?”

Alice frowned. The [Merchant] had a good point, actually. Why would anyone want to fund her research?

“I… think that’s a fair statement?” Said, Alice, uncertainly.

“Does your research have any value in producing weaponry, or are you willing to tilt your research towards that area? [Kinetic Mages] and fighting go hand in hand, after all.”

Alice shuddered, thinking of machine guns and artillery back home. If she researched how to make those and distributed them in this world, it would probably be very easy for her to become powerful and wealthy. Heck, she didn’t even think it would be hard for her to do. However, she wasn’t willing to bring gunpowder or make magical equivalents in this world. It was entirely possible this world would stumble into hot weapons on its own within the next few decades, and there were already hints of it starting to crop up here and there. However, Alice wasn’t willing to speed that process along. If this world discovered how to make guns, it would be doing so entirely without her assistance. “No.” Her answer was firm and deliberate. “I am not willing to look deeply into the topic of making weapons or improving them if I can avoid it.”

“Hmm. Is there any wriggle room in that statement?”

“No.”

“Is there any way you can think of which would allow your research to generate a lot of wealth?”

“Maybe?” Alice thought about it. Her research was primarily focused on the nature of the System, and how it interacted with the world around it. That could… probably be used to start a revolution in magic and enchanting. Eventually. However, that was a very far-off, overarching goal, and trying to translate her ideas into ones with concrete benefits, whether economic or military in nature, seemed difficult right now.

In theory, if Alice succeeded in copying and learning the mechanisms behind how the System worked, she could almost certainly advance this world’s magic and enchanting decades or centuries ahead of its current state. But that was a very big if, and right now Alice only had the ambition, with only a rarity nine Achievement to her name to show for it. Rarity nine Achievements were impressive, but nowhere near ‘overhaul the entire world’s enchanting system’ levels of impressive.

In short, right now her research was like a bottomless abyss of resources with no concrete benefit for succeeding.

“Hmmm…” The [Merchant] frowned again after seeing Alice fall silent for several seconds.

“I will tell you both your advantages and disadvantages in looking for a Patron, Lady Alice. First, you are a Kinetic Mage that does not specialize in warfare. This is a disadvantage. While Kinetic Mages have plenty of routes to making money, nobles are primarily interested in the warfare and construction aspects of a Kinetic Mage. While Illa did mention that you are above average at defending yourself compared to Mages that don’t try to learn at all, by her and your admission you are not really focused on violence. Pure Mana also isn’t a very widely used magic seed, because its value is quite limited outside of a research environment, and you having taken a magic seed for it likely won’t be seen in a positive light by most potential patrons. Your research also seems like it is hard to put into practice as a viable method of generating money, political influence, military influence, or other resources.

“Now, that being said, the fact you have a rarity nine Achievement related to research is also quite impressive. Especially given your age. You’re what, nineteen or so if I make a rough guess about your chronological age? I recall Mages get a natural reduction in aging speed, though I admit I do not recall the exact numbers. My work doesn’t tend to deal with the nitty gritty details of aging.”

“I’m sixteen,” said Alice.

“You’re actually the same age as you look? That is quite surprising. Newly Baptized? Hmm. Your Achievement is quite notable, and borderline unique, but you are also fighting against some notable negatives. All right, I have a better idea what I’m working with now. Let me see…” the [Merchant] drummed his fingers against the table for a few moments, before his eyes lit up. “I have a few candidates in mind. Tell me, how do you feel about having a Mage as a sponsor who managed to acquire a nobility title through their own merit instead of a more established noble? They won’t be comparable to someone like Illa, and they also won’t have the wealth of an established noble or merchant. However, they will have a lot more interest in pure research than either of the above, and they will still be able to pay for part of your schooling, even if they won’t be able to pay for all of it. It seems like you would get along much better with that kind of person as well, if I’m not mistaken, yes? We can also search for a more traditional patron, but to be honest I think you would have a harder time with that route.”

Alice only thought about it for a moment before she nodded. “A self-made Mage for a patron is fine with me.” It was much better to have half of a patron than no patron at all. She could do her best to find a way to make up for the rest of the money herself. It just meant she might end up becoming far more familiar with Cecilia’s shop than she had originally intended, but Alice honestly didn’t mind that. Working on enchantments under Cecilia’s shop was something Alice found enjoyable, and it was a good way to make some money as well. Alice wasn’t sure if it would make up the rest of her schooling yet, but it got her money and levels, and it was certainly worth investing her time into. The rest could be figured out when she knew more.

“That’s fine by me. Illa recommended I come here, and thus far Lady Illa has been nothing but fair with me in the time I have worked with her. Since she recommended you, I’ll go by whoever you think is the best choice for me,” said Alice.

The [Merchant] grinned. “Good. Where are you staying right now?”

Alice gave him the details of Cecilia’s shop, since the other girl had mentioned Alice could stay there while she was getting her situation worked out. Being near the place she would be putting her enchanted works up for sale seemed like a good policy anyway, and Alice was quietly happy that the other girl was willing to help her out while she was getting settled.

“I’ll start contacting people and get you a meeting with the Mage I have in mind. He’s known to be a fairly reclusive sort, but I think I can still get a meeting with him pretty soon. I’ll send a [Messenger] to let you know when I can get a meeting between you two set up. Unless something goes horribly wrong, it should be within a week.”

Alice nodded. “Sounds good to me.”

“Then I’ll see you soon, Lady Alice,” said the [Merchant].

Alice left after a few minutes of parting pleasantries, before she returned to Cecilia’s shop. If she was going to be facing a funding shortage, she would need to work much harder at converting her remaining time and materials into funding. With that thought, she decided that she would at least temporarily take Cecilia up on her offer and start making enchanted items to sell in Cecilia’s shop. She had precious little time to work with, but she was determined to make the most of every moment.

A note from acaswell

You can read three chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 66

When Alice returned to Cecilia’s workshop, she started getting ready to work on enchantments. If she was going to make it into a magic academy, she needed to make the most of every minute she had left before the semester started. She had about a month left before registration started. Registration would take another week, and she could sign up anytime during that period. After registration ended Alice would need to wait another year before entering a magic academy. Which would mean another year of bumbling along without the massive libraries and collections of information she would be able to access as a student. More importantly, Alice wouldn’t know what the people of this world considered ‘normal ideas’ about how Magic and mana worked – something that would be almost impossible for Alice to discover on her own. These ideas might prove hindrances in her quest to get funding and resources for her projects, or might inspire her to take her experiments in new directions. Either way, Alice wanted get a better feel for what ordinary Mages believed to be common sense.

Alice decided to be semi-optimistic with her plans for the future right now. Rupert had told her that the Mage he was planning to talk with probably wouldn’t be able to fund her entire stay in the Magic Academy. Alice had already done some quick asking around, and had learned that it would cost around 40 golden suns to pay for one year at the Magic academy she wanted to attend. 40 golden suns was equivalent to 400 silver crowns, or 2,000 silver suns, which was equivalent to… quite a bit of money. A silver crown was usually enough to pay for someone’s living expenses for a day, and magic academies did provide food and dorms for their students, meaning about half of her tuition would just go into food and housing. However, it was still a massive sum of money for someone to come up with at once, especially if they needed to do so multiple years in a row while spending their time learning instead of earning money.

If the Mage agreed to sponsor her studies, and he was feeling especially generous, maybe Alice would be able to cut that price in half. In other words she needed to find a way to scrounge up 20 golden suns for her tuition, or 1,000 silver suns. If she was less optimistic, she might be paying for a higher percentage of her tuition – she didn’t know how much funding the Mage actually had available to him, and how much he might be willing to part with, after all. That being said, Alice doubted he had less than ten golden suns available as liquid assets – after all, Rupert had recommended him as a potential source of Patronage, which meant he had at least some amount of funds readily available. Otherwise Rupert wouldn’t bother putting her in contact with him in the first place. Right now, she had around two golden suns if she put together all of her assets and sold them, or about one golden sun if she didn’t sell off her spare enchanting materials. She had 19 more to go…

Alice wondered if it was even possible to make up the rest of the tuition cost on her own. With only five weeks left, getting together 19 golden suns seemed like a dream. Patronage wouldn’t be able to cover all of her expenses, after all. Briefly, she wondered if student loans existed on this world. It seemed more than slightly absurd to her that even after coming to another world, she might still end up putting herself in debt to fund her time at a university. Some things never changed, even on another planet…

Alice shook her head ruefully, before she decided to wait for Cecilia to return before talking her plans over with the other girl. Her friend was offering her temporary shelter and a place to sell her enchanted items, and Alice’s skills didn’t really merit that treatment yet. Even if plenty of [Enchanters] either ran their own shop or worked for enchanting shops, Alice was still a novice in the field. Having a place to sell her items with no fees was incredibly generous of Cecilia, and Alice appreciated her friend’s generosity in giving her a way to survive and thrive. The least she could do was talk her plans over with Cecilia.

It was around half an hour before Cecilia returned. When she came, she was leading a few [Laborers carrying different pieces of furniture. Display shelves, glass displays, and so on were being carted around by people whose bodies were practically filled to the brim with System mana helping them move. All of it was furniture useful for running a proper storefront, replacing what Cecilia had left behind in Cyra. After Cecilia instructed them on where to lay down their burdens and the [Laborers] left, she gave Alice a relaxed grin before she sat down.

“I’m back! The shop should be ready to open up in a few days. How did your meeting with the [Merchant] go?”

“Good news and bad news. Good news, the merchant thinks there is a Mage who might be interested in sponsoring me, and he’s working on setting up a meeting so we can talk. Bad news, the fact that I’m not particularly inclined towards making weapons and don’t have a good way to convert my research into money is a big knock against my potential patron pool. Having a rarity nine Achievement related to my research is pretty good, and the ability to ‘share’ lower rarity Achievements is also pretty good. However, they’re ultimately not quite valuable enough for a lot of [Nobles] and [Merchants] to heavily invest into, since the rarity three Achievement is more convenient than groundbreaking. The fact that my research is a bottomless pit of resources with questionable returns diminishes its value as well. Patron interest shouldn’t be nonexistent, but according to the [Merchant]’s assessment it won’t be as high as I was hoping for, either. And the Mage he’s planning to contact won’t be able to sponsor my entire stay at the academy,” said Alice, frowning. “So how much funding I can get from him is up in the air, if he even agrees to sponsor me. If that doesn’t work out, I don’t know what happens. Maybe the [Merchant] starts trying more traditional patrons in hopes of one sticking? Or maybe I’m just out of luck at that point. I get the feeling that patronage isn’t exactly a common way to get the funding for a magic academy,” said Alice, absently.

Cecilia frowned, before shrugging. “From what I hear, the number of students that get through academy via a patronage is less than ten percent. Most poor students just join the army and go through the crown’s recruitment program to pay for magic academy, and rich nobles just pay for their time in the academy. Those two types are the ones that most commonly enter magic academies, and while other sorts do join the academies they tend to be rarer.” Then, after some thinking, Cecilia frowned. “I’m sorry to hear your patronage prospects aren’t as good as you were hoping for. A potential half patron isn’t bad, but still… if you need or want it, my offer is still there. I could use some help while I’m getting the shop up and running, and even if your enchantments aren’t optimized, they’re not half bad. Owning a properly enchanted item, especially a rare or well made one, can be a pretty prestigious thing for most people. You have a penchant for picking weird seeds, and if you can find creative things to do with them I’m sure you can create something people will be interested in.”

Alice paused, giving Cecilia’s words a little thought.

She had a lot more flexibility in magic seed choice compared to most Mages, due to {Broken Seed} letting her swap out magic seeds once a month. She decided to check if there were any unmet needs in the market that most mages wouldn’t stake a potentially life-altering magic seed on, and see if maybe there was something she could do with that. Alternately, she could go with some truly ‘suboptimal’ choices for magic seeds that most mages hesitated with, since Alice could just swap out seeds once she felt like they weren’t pulling their weight anymore. Healing magic seeds, for instance, were strictly inferior to organic magic seeds because they wasted far more mana than an organic seed, spewing out huge percentages of their mana storage as broken mana while organic seeds could run nearly perfectly in the hands of a highly trained Mage. But for enchanting purposes, they were much better than organic seeds because they were less prone to error.

“I’ll be taking you up on your offer to work in your shop for at least a few weeks. Since the Mage can’t afford to pay for my stay at the academy, I’ll need to scrounge up some of my funding myself. That means I need to make and sell some enchantments,” said Alice, giving her friend a grin. “And my classes give me a bit more flexibility with Magic Seeds. I think I have some ideas I can use for enchantments with weird seeds, if we can find materials to take things in properly.”

Cecilia nodded. “Any specific plans or needs? I still need some time to get the marketing for the store going, and start establishing a base of regulars. If you have some sort of crazy idea for a never-before seen enchantment, it would go a long way in helping both of us sell our work. So far, I’ve been doing some research on what the other stores in the area are selling, to see if there’s anything I can do better than the neighbors or if there are any unmet needs in the market, but…” Cecilia sighed, before handing Alice a piece of paper. “Well, here. These are the results of my research so far.”

“Hmm…” Alice took the paper from Cecilia, before she started to slowly look over it. Most of it was a very quick list of what Cecilia had noticed being sold in the area. Various enchanted items were listed, including things that sounded mirrored modern inventions such as ‘cold-boxes’ and ‘air-heaters.’ The most popular items that Cecilia noted were from three different magic seeds. Most products of Kinetic magic were already abundant in the market, thermal magic products were surprisingly popular among merchants and the nobility, ‘healing’ magic items were both well known and in high demand, and System-enchanted items were abundant. Alice made a mental note that whenever she got more time, she should definitely grab a few System-enchanted items and use them as references for her research. System Enchanted items were made by nonmages, which was already a point of interest for Alice, and the fact that they ‘buffed’ the user’s System-related abilities like Attributes and Perks while needing no fuel source made them even more interesting to Alice.

“You’re right. It’s a bit hard for us to break into the market here, since both of us are primarily Kinetic Mages. Hmm… for pure mana items, maybe we could try seeing if there’s any demand for those mana-sight rings I made back in Cyra?” There aren’t many [Adventurers] in these parts, but there should still be some. I could at least make a batch or two and see if they sell, and if it draws in customers, it could help spread word of mouth about your store, and bring in other customers…”

“I think that might not be a bad idea. Apart from that, we could also try and see if we can put together any decent consumable enchantments. People aren’t as picky about those since they’re all going to get used once instead of being used over and over again for years before they finally break. I already kind of specialize in consumable enchantments, and I think I’ve almost got a working prototype for blast crystal…”

Alice and Cecilia began tossing around ideas for enchantments for the next several hours, trying to figure out what they could make that would actually sell. The market in Metsel was definitely much harder than the one in Cyra. The material costs were higher because they needed to be shipped from the south, although the prices were still vastly lower than they were before the recolonization effort began. The [Enchanters] were also more numerous and higher level here, because of the greater presence of magic academies and higher mages per capita present in Northern Illvaria. Alice could see why this made it harder to make a living here as an [Enchanter] – after all, while still a very small and rare part of the population, it was obviously cheaper and easier to acquire an enchanted item here than in Cyra. At the same time, it was also something of a golden opportunity in disguise. In Cyra, she had access to better market conditions, but her paths for growth were much more limited because she had no reference points to work with for improving her craft besides Cecilia.

At the end of their discussion, the two of them decided to focus on a few enchantments for now. Alice would start out by making more of her mana-sight rings, to see if there was any interest in them here. Apart from that, both of them would do their best to try recreating some ‘blast crystals’ out of cheap and disposable monster cores. Even though neither of them were sure they would sell, they figured it was worth a shot. If they got it to work, it would be a decent avenue of profits, and if it didn’t end up selling, it wouldn’t be that big of a loss. They only needed to throw some ‘instructions’ onto spidercrab cores and get them to work, and spidercrab cores were one of the cheapest enchanting materials available on the market. Finally, Alice decided to grab a ‘healing’ magic seed and start slapping together healing rings that injected mana into the wearer upon a switch being flipped. It probably wouldn’t heal anything life threatening, but if she made them correctly they should still be able to help stabilize a wound. It was worth a shot.

With their plans roughly finalized for now, Alice and Cecilia got to work. Alice went into a private room and formed a healing seed, quietly treating the seed formation as another small experiment. The results helped her confirm her previous theory - the System mana once again actively helped her form her magic seed if she didn’t interfere with anything. She would need to wait a little longer to test what happened when she formed a seed without System help, but right now she needed funding more than she needed to advance her levels and experiments.

The next couple days passed by in a whirlwind of enchanting. Alice woke up, ate breakfast, and then enchanted objects until lunch. After that, her pure mana seed and newly formed healing mana seed were both usually tapped out. In the evening, she experimented with Cecilia to try to get a working blast crystal model. If she had any kinetic mana left over at the end of the day, she would spend a few minutes here and there working on carving board game pieces, and her art gradually stopped resembled a Picasso painting thrown into a blender.

During the days of enchanting, Alice’s levelling progress slowed to a crawl in most of her classes.

Alice was finally starting to notice how big of a difference the buffs a teacher applied to student levelling speed really was. During the days of repetitious enchanting, she barely limped her way up one more level in [Kinetic Manabinder], finally reaching level 7. [Apprentice Enchanter] went from level 20 to level 22, which wasn’t exactly bad progress, but was far from excellent. The Perk she took from level five of [Kinetic Manabinder] did help a fair bit with Alice’s spidercrab core experimentation by reducing the risk of it blowing up in her face.

Mana's Binding

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 5 or higher

When creating an enchantment using Kinetic Energy, the enchantment will become much more resilient against wear and tear, and also makes your enchantments more resistant to damage from both internal and external factors and improves internal stability.

Apart from Alice’s progress in her levelling, Alice also went to see a [Tailor]. She was going to meet a potential patron, and while Alice wasn’t entirely sure what the customs were in this world, she figured having a semi-formal set of clothes to wear wouldn’t hurt. Dressing nicely for a meeting was never a bad thing. She ended up getting a formal custom dress made for her at the cost of two hours and one silver crown, a speed that probably would have been impossible back home.

Cecilia’s shop finally opened for business after the third day, a product of the abnormal efficiency of this world’s workers. Alice had made a small stock of her mana-vision rings, and while they weren’t exactly bestselling items, they seemed novel and interesting enough to get a few customers to check out the store and buy a thing or two. Alice made back the money she spent on materials from selling the rings, and another few silver crowns besides. A small but welcome increase in her purse size. Some of Cecilia’s enchanted items also started selling, partially due to the customers Alice’s unique enchantment brought in and partially due to Cecilia’s own talent and products. Alice also used her vinebear cores to make some healing rings after several hours of experimentation, and made two successful products and one ruined core. At the end of the week, Alice was seventeen silver crowns richer, and out of vinebear cores.

On the fifth day the two of them finally managed to slap together a reasonable facsimile of magic dynamite. It was crude, but it was no longer at risk of blowing off the user’s hand. It also did its job at breaking down chunks of rock and metal in the testing area, at least when the two tossed it at some boulders outside of the city. Figuring out how to get the spidercrab cores to explode after a few seconds had been surprisingly difficult to figure out. However, eventually the two worked out the problems involved and created a working model. Alice still had no intention of revolutionizing this world’s warfare models, but at least in this case she felt she was safe. Blast crystals already existed in this world, after all, and the biggest reason gunpowder had influenced warfare so much in her previous world was that guns had been cheap and easy to use. ‘blast crystals’ in this world were made by mages, meaning they were nowhere near as cheap and easy to produce as gunpowder had been in her previous world. It was fine… probably.

The next day, a [Messenger] arrived at the shop. Alice was to finally meet her potential patron the following day for lunch at Tannerson’s monstrous meats, a local restaurant that made full use of the wide variety of meat available on this planet. It was neither cheap nor expensive, and had small rooms people could use for business meetings. Alice swallowed down a hint of nervousness when she knew the day to meet her potential patron had finally come.

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 67

Alice put on her new semi-formal dress before going to the meeting. The [Waiter] confirmed her identity before moving her to a private room, where an older man was waiting.

He had lower [Charisma] than Alice had expected. On Earth, people were born with their looks, meaning that people’s attractiveness tended to vary quite a bit. In this world, [Charisma] was a stat that was easy to improve if one put effort into it, boosting one’s physical attractiveness. Most people didn’t mind looking a little better, and since raising [Charisma] required doing things most people already enjoyed like hanging out with friends, most people in this world were physical attractive. Alice hadn’t seen very many people her age or older with less than 100 [Charisma], and Alice wouldn’t be surprised if [Charisma] was the highest average stat on this planet.

The Mage Alice was was meeting was certainly below 100 [Charisma]. He still probably had 80 or 90 [Charisma], but Alice could very quickly tell that he didn’t like socializing enough to raise it much. His teeth were slightly crooked, and his sitting posture wasn’t great. He had black hair and blue eyes, but both features were slightly mismatched with his face. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and had average rainbow mana in his body for a mage, indicating an average-ish level. He was wearing a semi-formal set of clothes; though they had some care put into them, they were slightly creased, showing a certain lack of awareness and care towards formal etiquette.

The man’s physical body was far more interesting. The amount of rainbow mana actively operating inside his skull made Alice think the man had six thinking Perks active every second. Since the man was only average level, it was obvious just how much time and energy he had devoted to acquiring and raising his research-related classes. The Mage simply sat at the table in the center of the room, lightly drumming his fingers as he stared into space. When Alice sat down, he seemed to jolt back into awareness before looking at her.

“Ah, Lady Alice, yes? I have heard that you acquired a rarity nine Achievement from your research. Is that true?” The man asked, giving her an intense and focused expression.

Alice felt slightly taken aback before she started to think more carefully about the person she was meeting. She thought that she had a better handle on this man’s personality now, despite having only seen him for ten seconds. At the same time, she was beginning to understand why Rupert had recommended him as a potential Patron. She felt herself relaxing a bit – she might be able to get along with this person.

“Yes, indeed. I’ve put a lot of time into researching the nature of mana and the intricacies of its interaction with the human body. I’ve looked into many related topics, of course, but I would say that my primary focus has just been trying to figure out the underlying principles of mana. At least in Cyra, I couldn’t find any books on the topic, so I had to start guessing and working on getting a baseline of knowledge myself,” Alice said before frowning.

She suddenly realized that the man hadn’t introduced himself yet. Alice was certainly happy the Mage seemed interested in her research, but she felt that introductions were still improtant. Right now, she didn’t even know this Mage’s name, and a little bit of extra information about who he was and what he had worked on in the past certainly wouldn’t hurt either. Since the man seemed like a pretty direct person, he probably wouldn’t mind if she just brought up the topic herself.

“May I ask what your name is, sir Mage?”

The man seemed shocked before he turned slightly red. “My apologies, Lady Alice. I jumped to the topic that interested me the most and skipped over introductions. My name is Ezrien, though you can also call me Ez for short. It’s nice to meet you.” Despite the man’s awkwardness, Alice felt herself relaxing even more. Although this guy’s manners were a little lacking, Alice was sure it wasn’t out of malice – he was just someone who devoted most of his attention to things he cared about. Although Alice had started to get used to the formal manners of Illa, it was certainly relaxing to know that Ezrien didn’t pay much heed to noble manners and etiquette. And now that she had brought up the subject, he seemed more than happy to introduce himself to her.

“Let’s see – I guess I should introduce myself a bit before asking more questions, yes? I am Ez, as I already mentioned. I have a lot of different topics that interest me, and I have made a few deals with nobles to research more specific topics and sell the results in exchange for funds right now. I have done quite a bit of research with kinetic and thermal mana, and I’m currently working under Count Aelraeda to refine a few specific ideas further. I recently led the research team that discovered a way to make cooling boxes easier and cheaper to produce, making a number of smaller improvements to the design along the way. However, my passion lies in pure mana innovation. Sadly, while I can never find anyone interested in funding research into the topic, it is still the concept that interests me the most. When I have spare time and funds, I devote them to researching pure mana further. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” he said, extending his hand. Alice shook it.

“I’m Alice. As I’ve already said, one of my bigger focuses thus far has been trying to figure out how mana and the human body interact with each other, as well as trying to observe the underlying principles of mana. As you have already heard, I have a rarity nine Achievement due to my studies into the topic, which gives me hope that I might figure out how everything actually works someday,” said Alice.

The two of them started discussing their research. Alice quickly affirmed her earlier suspicions- there was no reason to bother with ‘manners’ the way she might have needed to if she were dealing with Illa or a noble. Ezrien wouldn’t even notice if she made a few mistakes, Alices time spent trying to pick up a few points about etiquette meaningless here. Heck, Ezrien probably wouldn’t notice if she stopped addressing him as ‘sir,’ even though Mages were all supposed to be addressed as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady.’ If she wanted to communicate with this Mage, it was best to be blunt and know the topic well enough to debate or agree intelligently. Alice was delighted to discover that, while Ezrien did have a stronger foundation of knowledge on this world’s scholarly works related to mana, he was more than open to debating the minutia of smaller points. When Alice talked about how Attributes and Perks grew weaker in the absence of mana, but magic seeds didn’t, Ezrien seemed intrigued even as he pointed out the research done in this world that suggested her results shouldn’t be possible.

At no point in time did Alice find herself bored – Ezrien often had minor insights that Alice found interesting. She found herself impressed by the breadth and depth of his knowledge about the history of magic and enchanting. Knowledge such as the fact that ‘broken mana’ had been referred to as ‘corrupted mana’ several centuries ago, and had previously been believed to be the source of monsters and evil in the hearts of men. While this kind of information wasn’t critical, it gave her context and ideas for where to look for more information whenever she had access to academy libraries, and would have been hard for Alice to find out on her own.

By the time the food had arrived she was deep into a discussion on what broken mana might actually be. The two had also started debating why broken mana was so much more likely to kill someone during a mana baptism. While no in depth research had ever been done on the topic, due to ethical reasons, it was a topic most Mages and scholars found interesting, and Alice was more than happy to discuss Ezrien’s thoughts on the topic and compare them to her own experiences.

By the time the two of them finished the meal, they were chatting amiably about Alice’s research so far. Ezrien was intrigued by the notion that humans didn’t need mana in their environment to survive. Although dubious, he did say he would consult some records and try to see if there was any historical precedent on the topic. He did also warn her to be careful about experiments related to the topic – after all, ethics committees were quite strict in Illvaria, and while using yourself as a test subject was allowed, it came with a lot of caveats and truth-detection and questions. Alice was gratified by the fact he was willing to listen to her thoughts on the subject.

“All right, Lady Alice. I will be upfront with you. I do think that I enjoy speaking with you about research,” said Ezrien, tapping his thumb against his chest as a nervous habit. “Although you’re still quite young, you have ideas that break the mold of more traditional academia in some fascinating places. Your foundational knowledge is a little lacking, but you aren’t afraid to work at fixing these flaws. I appreciate that, but I also don’t want to make up my mind from just one meeting.” Alice supposed that was fair.

“In that case, what do you propose?”

Ezrien grinned at her. The smile was a little crooked, but it held a certain good-natured mirth. “I want to see how you think and approach new problems and ideas. So I want to hear one thing you’re working on as an experiment and see how you go about learning more about it. The experiment can take as much or as little time as you want, and I don’t mind even if the results end up being ‘boring.’ What I want to test is how you think about problems and how you go about solving them. If you manage to impress me, I will make you an offer. I personally lead a team of Mages and have made some small but valuable discoveries throughout my time as a [Researcher]. If you are willing to work with me on some of my passion projects and less critical work for my research team during your spare time, I am willing to pay for half of your tuition outright. While my money is kind of tight right now, I am also willing to loan another 20 golden crowns – on the condition that you are willing to work for me to pay for it during your time at a magic academy. One of the research assistants that I hired recently simply isn’t meshing well with the team, and if I can replace him, I would be able to cut down on some costs over the next year and pay off the balance of your loan. As long as you can make up the last five golden crowns on your own, you would be able to pay for your tuition. Are these conditions acceptable to you?”

Alice’s brain kicked into gear as she tried to think about the current projects she was working on. Replicating the System …. Obviously wasn’t suitable here. Not only was that a distant goal, even by her standards, but she had strictly avoided discussing her research into the nature of the System. There was no need to cross one of the few genuinely problematic lines she could touch. Alice loved learning about the nature of this world, but when it came to some of the deeper secrets of this world, she wasn’t going to publicize her results until she had a way to ensure it wouldn’t blow up in her face.

However, that was far from the only thing Alice had recently looked into. Ezrien had said that he wanted to see how she investigated problems. In that case, what could she use?

Alice felt a grin tugging at the corner of her lips. She had recently been thinking about energy sources and perpetual enchantments, and during her conversation with Ezrien she confirmed that the knowledge about ‘how Artifacts work’ wasn’t well-known object for most people. And nobody, at least as far as Ezrien knew, had bothered trying to figure out how System Enchantments worked through the lens of mana. She had found the time to briefly glance at some of the System-enchanted dresses for sale in one of the shops nearby, and she had confirmed that they were filled with rainbow mana, even if they had no normal-looking enchantments in sight.

There was something to investigate there, right?

A note from acaswell

Author’s note: My apologies for the fact that this chapter is a bit shorter than usual. Tuesday and Wednesday I wasn’t feeling very good, and I lost both days as writing days. I was debating cancelling the chapter this week, but I figured it was probably better to put out a shorter chapter instead of nothing, even if I’m not entirely happy with the result.

(Note from the future – obviously, this author’s note was written three weeks ago, when I posted this chapter on Patreon. I’m fine now.)

Public: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 68

“You said that it doesn’t matter if I get boring results, right?” asked Alice, turning to Ezrien.

“Indeed. It doesn’t matter even if you discover nothing at all. The only requirements for my challenge are that you investigate something you find interesting, and that you must not have researched it before. Ah, I say you can’t have researched it before, but it’s fine if it’s directly related to things you have researched before – I just want it to be something you don’t already have results for. My apologies if that was confusing,” said Ezrien. Ezrien had a bit of a strange habit of swapping back and forth between formal and informal speech as he spoke, but Alice was starting to get used to it. She nodded, grinning to herself. “Apart from that, if you need materials, I can supply up to three silver crowns of materials – that’s how much I brought with me, after deducting the cost for this meal and rounding to convenient numbers.”

Alice nodded. “I know what I want to look into, then. I told you that I was looking into the specifics of the nature of mana, as well as perpetual enchantments and the human body, right? I have recently been meaning to see if I can figure out how System Enchantments work. Specifically, I want to see if I can figure out what’s powering them, or if they need external power sources at all.”

Ezrien thought for a moment before he nodded. “I haven’t heard of anyone investigating that before, but it certainly sounds interesting. I could see the experiment being worth investigating, and it could produce interesting results. If you can actually figure something out, it could change a lot of how enchantments work – at least, if it’s cost efficient. At least assuming there’s something new to discover in the first place. This would be an acceptable experiment,” he said. “That being said, if you fail, or if there’s nothing to discover, don’t worry about it. I just want to see the process of you investigating a problem – not the conclusion of that process.”

Ezrien paid for the food before the two left the restaurant. It took Alice a few minutes of walking before they arrived at their destination – the shop she had seen selling System enchantments while heading to the meeting.

After Alice got Ezrien’s permission, she used three silver suns to purchase an iron necklace. It was a simple braid of leather, meant to be hung around one’s neck, with a small iron disc attached to the cord. The leather itself was irrelevant – the only important part of the necklace was the iron disc at the bottom. To an ordinary passerby, the iron disc would have looked like an ordinary hunk of iron – however, in Alice’s eyes, it was filled with rainbow mana.

After quickly settling the payment with the shopkeeper, Alice immediately left the shop. Ezrien continued to watch her the whole time, curious about how she was going to investigate the item.

Alice moved to the side of the street, out of the way of any stray pedestrians or horses, and then put on the necklace while carefully observing the iron disc. The rainbow mana surged out of the iron disc, worming its way up the leather cord before it began sinking into her neck. While Alice couldn’t see her own neck without a mirror, she was able to see rainbow mana spread throughout her torso and into the rest of her body, connecting to each of her muscles in an extraordinarily intricate pattern. She took a moment to marvel at what she was seeing.

This ‘System Enchantment’ wasn’t just increasing her strength by two. It was basically doing its best to mimic a human heart – carefully pumping rainbow mana to the muscles around her body in order to strengthen them all equally, providing her body with a very slight increase in strength. While the actual effect was a measly two points in Strength, the process of getting there was fascinating.

At the same time, Alice began to feel ever so slightly stronger. Her stance became sturdier, her grip became firmer, and she felt that she would be able to lift ever so slightly more weight. In other words, it was the standard effect of gaining a few points of [Strength].

The entire process was done entirely with rainbow mana, meaning someone without her Achievements wouldn’t be able to see what was happening. However, Alice could clearly see that System mana was now flowing out of the iron ring on the necklace in a neverending trickle.

Absently, Alice noticed a fair amount of mana being filtered by System fractals before entering her body. She was probably getting experience points for [Scholar], [Explorer of Magic] or [Scientist]. Or all three.

Alice checked the shop advertisement for the necklace she had just bought.

“Iron necklaces of +2 strength for sale! Recently, one of the longtime smiths of the shop has gotten to level 65 in [Blacksmith]. To celebrate, we’re going to be selling lots of system-enchantment equipment for the next month! Custom orders are now available! Up to +15 in any stat! +5 or more requires a custom order. Upon request, up to one level five Perk from a few specific classes may also be attached to an item of your choice, provided the item does not already have a System enchantment. A detailed list may be accessed in the shop upon request. Buy during our special sale for this month, before prices increase again!”

Alice examined the necklace again, double checking the rainbow mana in the iron disc. Sure enough, even though mana was continuously pouring into her body, there was no noticeable decrease in the disc’s mana reserve. Unlike the enchantments Alice made, System Enchantments didn’t seem to chew through any sort of mana reserve as a power source. It just… worked.

“Curious,” said Alice. Absently, she wondered how the necklace figured out when someone was wearing it. If there was one thing she had gotten used to during her time enchanting, it was the fact that Enchantments needed pretty specific instructions to work properly. As far as she knew, System enchantments all needed to be worn by a human in order to work. How did they know when a human was wearing them?

“So what are you planning on doing to test the necklace?” asked Ezrien, interrupting her thoughts. “I’ve never thought about investigating System enchantments as a way of looking into artifacts and sustainable enchantments. I always felt that they aren’t really the same thing, personally.”

Alice felt a grin tugging at her lips as she looked at the iron ring at the center of the necklace. “Something I’ve learned as I have advanced my own studies is that ultimately, everything seems to loop back around to mana. Including this necklace. I intend to see what happens if I cut out the mana supply in its surroundings,” said Alice. “I can make a manaless box with some leftover sap pretty quickly, so I’ll try starving it of mana to see what happens. If it turns off the enchantment, it would mean the necklace is powered by ambient mana. If it doesn’t, I start coming up with the next test.”

“What do you expect the results to be?” Ezrien didn’t sound sarcastic. Instead, he seemed genuinely curious.

“Honestly? Nothing. I figure that the System enchantment in this necklace probably works on a similar principle to magic seeds. That is, the mana it needs to keep working probably comes from seemingly nowhere. But I still want to check first and see if starving the necklace of mana shuts off the whole thing. After all, if I build a bunch of other experiments on the idea that ‘System Enchantments work even without mana in their surroundings’ and then I find out halfway through those experiments that my base premise is totally wrong, that would be pretty embarrassing. So I will start out by testing that before I go any further.”

Ezrien laughed. “That’s a good philosophy to have towards research. Testing the basic premise of your experiment is pretty important. What do you plan to do to test your base idea?”

“I’m thinking of making a smaller version for this experiment. Some sort of manaless box, or pouch or something. The entire necklace is powered by this iron disc, right? So I figure if I just enclose the iron disc in a manaless box or pouch and then wear it, if I still keep getting a +2 [Strength] boost I will know for sure that this thing doesn’t need atmospheric mana to keep working. I can then design further experiments from there.”

Ezrien simply looked at her, as if waiting for something. Alice had seen the expression on her teachers from Earth from time to time – it was the look that said she was forgetting something.

Alice frowned, running over the experiment. It was a solid way to test whether or not the necklace worked without mana, right? What was she missing?

“Aren’t you forgetting to prove that the enchantment is fueled by the iron disc? What if the necklace is what makes the whole thing work?” Asked Ezrien, looking at her.

What was the point of proving that? There was only rainbow mana in one of the two-

Ah.

Alice realized once again that most residents of this world didn’t have the ability to see System mana. Without that, the question of where the whole enchantment came from was a far more interesting and debatable one.

“First, I will take the necklace and the iron disc apart and try connecting each one to a totally unenchanted, but otherwise similar item and verify which one gives me the +2 [Strength] enhancement. Would that work?” asked Alice. Since it was her first time messing with System enchantments, she was honestly unsure of whether this would break some part of the necklace. Even though the iron disc was the only thing with rainbow mana in it, she didn’t want to break this necklace. Even if it wasn’t very expensive, Alice was broke right now.

Ezrien nodded. “System enchantments are able to keep working if you replace the unimportant stuff with copies. Still, you should keep in mind that whenever you’re doing a formal experiment, you need to verify how the components of your experiment work. People all have different Perks, and that means whenever you use objects created by other people, you need to first verify what their Perks change. The shop’s advertisement claims that the System enchantment is made by a level 65 [Blacksmith]. Now, all crafting classes have the option to start taking Perks that make System Enchantments the moment they start getting post 50 Perks. In other words, starting at level 55 their items might have System Enchantments. However, how do you know he doesn’t have an extra set of post-55 Perks in [Leatherworker]? You need to keep in mind that absolute standardization is often impossible to achieve, and so you need to make adjustments and double check how those adjustments work before you get into the serious business. This is something you need to do every time you start an experiment, all right?”

Alice frowned. That philosophy went… VERY heavily against what she remembered from Earth. On Earth, if two people conducted an experiment and got different results, it either meant someone was about to discover a weird exception to a rule that might make them famous, or, much more likely, one of the two fucked up and needed to figure out how they fucked up. Or keep going down the wrong path, inform the newspaper of their mysterious finding, and make a sensation buzz about the fact that they messed up their experiment, tricking guillible people into following a neverending feed of bad science because newspapers usually didn’t know how to fact check science experiments.

Alice was only slightly bitter about this.

The point was, this world’s philosophy towards scientific exploration seemed very odd to her. On further reflection, Alice could understand why this philosophy existed. After all, in this world everyone had an ever-so slightly different set of Perks, from [Farmers] to [Guards] to [Blacksmiths] to [Scholars]. Getting exact uniformity in items and tehcniques used for scientific exploration was probably a pipe dream for people in this world. So the best they could do was track possible changes in items, try to account for those oddities in their methodology, and hope they were getting useful results from their experiments. At least the System explained most changes it made, so it was possible to track down and understand what Perks might be influencing an item or experiment. Still, it seemed like a nightmare to deal with a quagmire of uncertainties every time someone started an experiment in this world.

“Do you have leather cords and iron discs available, or do I need to grab those as well?”

“We’ll need to grab a few,” said Ezrien.

Alice nodded, turned around, and walked right back into the blacksmith shop. The clerk seemed more than a little bemused to see her again less than a minute after she had exited the store, but fulfilled her request quickly after she made her order. Since this time she was just asking for ordinary materials, the price came out to three copper artisans and a few copper paupers.

Having acquired the materials she needed for her experiment, Alice packed up the two strings and two metal discs before Ezrien led her to a more well-built building in the center of the middle-class section of town.

Inside of the building, Alice saw three other people – two females and one male. The male and one of the females looked to be in their late twenties, and had ordinary levels of mana in their body. Since Alice could faintly see kinetic magic seeds stored behind their hearts, she quickly confirmed that they were Mages.

The second female appeared to be in her early twenties – however, the amount of mana in her body was much denser than her colleagues, making Alice suspect she might be the same age as the rest of them and just had a higher level than her team members. She was also a Mage, but had a Thermal and an Electromagnetic seed instead of a Kinetic one. She was one of the only Mages Alice had seen besides herself and Cecilia that had bothered picking up a second magic seed.

“Hey, team leader!” said the high-level and young-looking female mage, giving Ezrien a cheerful wave before turning back to her work. The woman looked rather cute, making Alice guess that she had a [Charisma] of around 130 or so. The highest of anyone in the room, including Alice.

The other two Mages ignored Alice and Ezrien entirely, too focused on taking measurements for a flat metal disc that Alice had a hard time guessing the purpose of. It was covered in Kinetic Energy, and Alice could tell that it was supposed to move objects in its surroundings under specific circumstances. However, she couldn’t figure out what the conditions to activate it were, or what purpose the enchantment had without taking a closer look.

“Good afternoon, Anne. I’m surprised to see you here today. Isn’t it your day off?”

“I figured I would stop by and chat for a while. Besides, you can’t get levels by slacking off, you know? It’s important to be as diligent as possible if you want to lead a long and healthy life!” She gave Ezrien a cheeky grin, before turning to Alice. “Who are you? I don’t think I’ve seen you here before. Nice to meet you! I’m Anne!” She said, holding out her hand for Alice to shake.

“I’m… basically auditioning to be part of your research team, I suppose? In the capacity of an [Assistant] if I’m not mistaken?” said Alice, after a few moments.

“Oh, is that so?” Asked Anne, turning to Ezrien. “Are you finally replacing Geralt?” Anne’s face wrinkled as she mentioned Geralt’s name, completely overturning her originally cheery vibe. Considering how friendly Anne seemed so far, Alice had to wonder just what Geralt had done to get such a bad response from the woman.

“Hopefully,” said Ezrien, uneasily. “I’m thinking of acting as a patron for her to pursue time in a magic academy. I’m mostly planning on delegating some of the administrative stuff to her in exchange for 15 gold suns, paid up front in exchange for the next year of labor. And acting as patron for twenty coins, in hopes of furthering my research topics of passion in the future. The twenty coins are coming from my own savings, so don’t worry about those.”

“Isn’t 20 crowns a little too harsh for her? I mean, it’s a fair price for her labor for a year, but if she’s acting as a student, she’s already losing a lot of time every day. Assuming she works for us as assistant, that chews through most of her spare time. She still needs to come up with five gold coins on her own, plus food, room, and board for herself for a year. I know academies usually give out uniforms, and if you’re signed up for the military program they usually provide way more, but it doesn’t sound like she’s going into the military program if she needs a sponsor. Just keeping herself afloat might be difficult, don’t you think?” said Anne, giving Ezrien a dubious look.

“I already have another part time job of sorts lined up,” said Alice. “A friend of mine runs an enchanting shop, and I have a penchant for picking weird magic seeds. So I can dump my mana into enchanting every day and turn that into my living expenses – at least, that’s my current plan. It’s not ideal, since a lot of my enchantments are a bit sub-par right now – but my classes are also pretty low level right now, so it’s easy to boost them higher. As I pick up Perks my classes will get better, and I figure it’ll be easier and easier to get. I just need to push through the hard part which is… now. It probably won’t be pleasant, but I can do it.”

“Hmm…” Anne tapped her finger on her lips, as if deep in thought, before slowly nodding. “If you’ve thought it through and that’s what you want to do, I won’t stop you, I guess. Pushing yourself can break some people, but it can also give you more levels and Stats than anything else. Just be careful not to push yourself so hard you shatter, all right?” she said. Alice noticed that Anne’s look towards her had become more respectful than before. It wasn’t by much, but the difference in attitude still made Alice feel a bit better about her plans.

Ezrien simply smiled at Anne, before giving Alice a friendly nod. “Anne is the group mom. If things work out, be nice to her – it’s pretty hard to piss her off.”

“How did Geralt did it then?”

“Geralt is a total asshole,” said Anne. “He’s competent enough, but he came to work drunk three times so far. Then he rants about how he’s a better worker than the rest of us, and how it isn’t fair his level is lower than mine. Excuse me?” Anne snorted. “He’s said some nasty stuff to two of the others as well, so the team is getting kind of sick of his antics. He’s both unprofessional and a jerk.”

Alice turned to Ezrien, who was making a strained smile. Alice took that as light confirmation of Anne’s words, and decided not to delve deeper into the topic.

“Anyway, good luck on your test, new girl! I hope you join the team.”

The other two researchers who were present simply ignored what was going on, continuing to take measurements while messing with the flat metal disc.

Ezrien nodded, and took Alice into a separate room to begin her test.

A note from acaswell

You can read three chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 69

Alice first confirmed that the metal disc on the leather cord was what was providing her with a stat buff. Even if Alice could just look at the rainbow mana popping out of the iron disc, since others couldn’t see rainbow mana Alice was forced to prove the iron disc was what provided the System enchantment. She decided to treat this as good prep work for grounding her assumptions in reality, rather than just a nuisance, and went through the necessary steps to prove the iron disc was the source of her +2 strength buff. After that, Alice moved on.

Next, Alice put together more mana-blocking sap with leftover ingredients in {Sample Storage}, grabbed a wooden box laying around, used her kinetic mana to drill two small holes on the top, and then slathered the mana-blocking sap over everything. After that, she put the strength-boosting necklace inside of the box, pulled the strings of the necklace through the holes, and used her mana to drive out all of the mana and System mana inside of the box, forming a small net on one end of the box and then gradually dragging it out of the box. Since System mana avoided other mana, it continuously retreated from Alice’s mana tendril web, leaving her with a totally manaless box.

Then, Alice put on the leather cord while the iron disc part of the necklace was still inside of the manaless box. It wasn’t exactly a perfect experiment – after all, Alice would have preferred to just drive out all of the pure and System mana in the room before starting the experiment. However, with other people involved in the experiment as well, Alice needed to make sure the experiment wouldn’t raise concerns with an ethics committee, which limited her ability to use herself as an experimental subject. While using yourself as a subject was fine if you were also the only person in the experiment, this experiment was unquestionably linked to Ezrien, since he paid for the ingredients and instigated her to start the experiment. If Alice then used herself as a test subject there was a good chance Ezrien would end up in legal hot water, even if a bunch of people with lie-detection Perks went over their statements.

Finally, everything was set up. Alice watched as the necklace activated with no problems whatsoever, completely ignoring the fact that no System or pure mana was in its surroundings, as well as the fact that the iron disc should have had zero ways to detect whether or not Alice was wearing it. Rainbow mana travelled through the leather cord until it reached her neck and then boosted her strength by two. Whether or not the necklace had access to outside mana seemed completely irrelevant.

“Huh,” said Alice, looking at the necklace. “I’ll admit, I kind of expected it to work even with no ambient mana, but I still can’t help but feel surprised.”

After that, Alice pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing some observations down.

‘Iron disc does not need atmospheric mana to keep working – it operates independently of external fuel sources.’ Of course, the notes were only for the sake of Ezrien – Alice had the System’s version of {Photographic Memory}, meaning that she didn’t really need to take notes for herself these days.

After that, Alice started trying to narrow down whether the necklace used other fuel sources. While she strongly suspected it just ran on nothing the way her seeds seemed to, it was worth double checking whether it ran on heat, sunlight, etc.

None of the above seemed to be correct. The necklace was just… creating mana somehow. Alice, for the life of her, just couldn’t figure out how this process worked. In fact, Alice couldn’t even figure out how the necklace knew when someone was wearing it. It just… knew.

She tried suffocated the necklace of pure mana and only letting it interact with System mana, as well as letting it interact with pure mana but no System mana. Neither stopped the enchantment from working, so she lathered the leather part of the necklace in mana blocking sap (along with some small wooden plates she wore underneath the sap-coated necklace to avoid making a mess). This also failed to prevent the necklace from activating, since the System mana began working out more and more convoluted routes to reach her, before it finally seemed to get frustrated and pushed its way through the mana-blocking sap. Alice had never seen this happen before – the System mana actively fought with the sap for almost a minute before it finally drilled a little hole in the mana-blocking sap enchantment and started boosting her [Strength] again. Alice quietly scribbled down more observations, making sure to just note that ‘the activation was delayed’ for Ezrien’s copy of her notes, before quietly making her own personal note that ‘blocking mana’ apparently wasn’t as absolute as she thought it was. It was the first time Alice had seen mana break through a mana-blocking enchantment. She found this process fascinating, and decided it was worth investigating later. Finally, she tried to directly interfere with the necklace using her mana tendrils, just to see what happened.

Direct interference was also somewhat effective. It caused the rainbow mana to pause for a moment, as the System mana tried to avoid her mana wherever possible. Then, it created a bizarre path that skirted around her mana and finished making its way towards her neck.

Whenever Alice wore the necklace, the matrix of rainbow mana in the center of the necklace started creating mana again. Since Alice still didn’t know how ‘creating mana’ worked, Alice decided to use {Mana Construct Modelling} to see if that got her any useful information. It was becoming increasingly obvious that blocking mana wasn’t getting her any closer to figuring out how mana creation worked.

{Mana Construct Modelling}gave her the information that System mana, Pure Mana, and Organic Mana was used to construct the glyph in the center of the necklace. Alice recalled the other time she had used {Mana Construct Modelling} on a System glyph. That time, the fractal had also contained those three kinds of mana.

Curious, Alice took a few sneak peaks at Ezrien, quietly trying {Mana Construct Modelling} on his class glyphs. Every singleone of his class glyphs had System Mana, Pure Mana, and Organic mana inside of them, though about half of them were mixed with a fourth kind of mana as well. Alice grinned. There was a point of interest here, if she had the time and energy to discover it. While that might be lacking in the immediate future, she was certainly going to file it away for further investigation.

She turned her attention back to the necklace. She didn’t know much about interacting with Organic Mana yet, and every time she tried to form a System magic seed the System blocked her. So for now, she could only experiment on the mana fractal with her pure mana seed. After a quick check with {Safety Analysis} that warned her of light but manageable danger, she started trying to poke at the mana matrix itself with her pure mana seed. It wiggled, squirmed, and avoided the touch of her mana, but after some struggling she managed to trap the system fractal and touch it.

This was quite possibly one of the hardest feats of magical dexterity Alice had done so far, and made Illa’s training feel easy by comparison. When Alice finally managed to trap the glyph of rainbow mana, she extended a single mana tendril into the fractal. She wanted to pry apart the edges a little bit and see if she could observe it working. Even if it was likely going to destroy the enchantment, Alice figured she might learn something if she could observe parts of the glyph working. Right now, there was just too much going on for her to understand anything, but if she took it apart piece by piece she might be able to figure something out.

Unfortunately, it stopped working much faster than she expected. She managed to poke something and the entire mana matrix instantly stopped working. Mana immediately stopped flowing through the fractal, and Alice’s original goal of observing only part of the fractal working failed.

The last dribbles of rainbow mana continued towards her, but Alice felt something different about it now. It was less directed than before. It made its way into her body, and then Alice felt a very faint burning sensation in her muscles. It started to get worse, and Alice immediately used {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to fix whatever was going wrong. {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} burned some of the calories from lunch, and the faint burning sensation in her muscles was healed away.

Meanwhile, the necklace fractal kept trying to create more rainbow mana. However, it was no longer going anywhere. It was like an engine leaking fuel. One minute later, it stopped producing any mana at all. The necklace fractal turned dim, and Alice could no longer observe anything happening. While spamming {Safety Analysis} enough to start getting a headache Alice tried injecting some pure mana into the fractal. However, it was now broken beyond repair. Alice reviewed her memories of when it had worked (thanks to {Photographic Memory}) and then sighed. She couldn’t quite figure out what each part of the fractal did yet, or how mana generation worked. There were too many fiddly bits to the fractal, and she wasn’t even sure what caused the whole thing to break. On the bright side, Alice was confident that if she observed enough System Fractals breaking she could probably get somewhere with the whole endeavor. It would just require an unknown number of System-enchanted items, all of which were almost certainly going to become worthless in the process. And each System-enchanted item was bound to cost a fair amount of money, which Alice currently didn’t have.

Once again, it all came back to not having enough funds…

“The necklace no longer works,” said Alice, turning back to Ezrien. She tried to stop herself, but she was grinning madly the whole time. Today she had confirmed that she had a chance to go in the right direction, and gotten some hands-on experience breaking the System. She had confirmed that it was possible to mess with the System, even if she barely knew what she was doing and needed to rely on her Perks to keep her safe during the whole process. It felt great, even if it had broken an item worth three silver crowns in the process. For a regular [Laborer] that was about three days of work if they didn’t eat or sleep.

Ezrien looked shocked, as he gave the necklace a dubious look. He looked over the notes and observations Alice had intermittently penned during her experiments, before he returned his gaze to her. “You managed to break a System enchantment? But the iron disc is still intact! There’s no other way to break a System enchantment besides destroying the physical object it was attached to! All you did was poke it a bunch with pure mana for some reason and-“ Ezrien stopped, completely lost in thought. Then, he gave her a grin. “I have no clue whether or not you’re moving in the right direction for your experiments. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what you did. However, nobody has ever managed to break a System enchantment like that before, at least as far as I know. Even if I don’t know whether you’re heading in the right direction or not, you’ve managed to stumble onto something interesting. A lot of your preparatory steps and double-checking methods that you used earlier in the experiment were decent enough that I have no major complaints with them. There are some minor issues with your documentation methods during the experiment that we’ll need to talk about, but when you remembered to record stuff, it was decent. I don’t know if you have a good memory or something, but even if you do, keep in mind that if you’re part of a team other people need to be able to see your thoughts and what you’ve done. But this can be fixed,” he said as he held out his hand to Alice. “Welcome to the team.”

Alice smiled.

* * *

After that, Alice was introduced to the other two [Scholars]. There were two more [Scholars] on the team who had a day off, but she was assured they would be there in two days once their weekend ended. After signing a legally binding secrecy contract, she also learned what the team was working on as well. Apparently, the team was working on trying to find a way to substitute [Kinetic Mages] during construction. The number of mages was always a major bottleneck for some industries, and construction in this world was very reliant on [Kinetic Mages] to act as heavy construction equipment. While construction could happen without Mages, it was far less efficient, making [Kinetic Mages] something that any serious construction work needed to be competitive.

The team of researchers was trying to create a metal plate that could substitute some of the jobs a [Kinetic Mage] usually took care of. This metal plate, which had a variety of smaller enchanting materials stored inside of the metal shell, was supposed to float a specific object up and then keep it there while allowing the user to freely adjust the height. While this sounded simple in theory, making a simple metal plate accurately figure out how much kinetic mana to spend levitating one material, and allow the user to freely adjust the height was insanely hard in practice because of how stupid enchantments were. Enchantments could certainly do something like ‘push the object above this metal plate,’ but adjusting the strength of the push to keep it in place required a great deal of precision, trial, and failure. Especially since the team’s objective was to make the metal plates cheap and affordable enough to replace real mage labor. However, Alice could certainly see why manpower and funds were being devoted to the subject as well. While the project had some chance of failing, due to the requirement of the metal plates being cheap and easy to make, if it succeeded it could drastically cut down the cost of making new buildings.

Four weeks passed in a flash. In that time, Alice settled in at the local inn while she continued to make and sell enchantments in Cecilia’s shop. The blast crystals started to be purchased by miners on a small scale, where they acquired a reputation for being safe and affordable. Alice’s mana-sight rings occasionally sold, and although they were never super popular they at least generated a small amount of income for Alice. Alice’s healing items proved to be the most popular item she could make, though they were also the items with the lowest individual returns. Magic materials that could absorb healing-related instructions were rather expensive. They were annoying to make, but provided very steady returns because they flew off the shelves. After deducting her future fees for the magic academy, she would have a little over three and a half gold suns remaining.

Much more importantly, as time passed and Alice steadily worked in Cecilia’s shop, worked with the team of [Scholars] making kinetic plates, and occasionally worked on her carving skills while making botched board game pieces, Alice continued to accumulate Levels, Skills, and Perks.

Explorer of Magic: 47 -> 51

Scholar: 29 -> 34

Scientist: 29 -> 38

Kinetic Manabinder: 6 -> 12

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 20 -> 24

Explorer of Magic was the first class Alice had that hit level 50. She hadn’t gotten her first post-50 Perk yet, but the moment Alice had gotten a class to level fifty a massive rush of mana far beyond her previous level-ups had flooded her body. Alice had already had her suspicions, but after witnessing the tidal wave of mana after getting to level 50, Alice was pretty sure that the biggest ‘break points’ in aging speed were exactly the same break points for when Perks got better. Every 25 levels, the Perks one could get from their classes got some sort of upgrade, and one’s aging speed dropped significantly.

Alice got five new Perks over this period of time as a result of her levels.

Improved Multitasking

Requirements: you must be at least 50% of the way to commanding a third mana tendril and control no more than two mana tendrils, {Divided Attention} Skill 10 or higher, Scholar level 30 or higher, Magic 100 or greater

You gain the ability to concentrate on four different tasks at once. You may ‘amp up’ your focus once per day, increasing the ability to multitask by an extra one task for ten minutes. (Note – this process may feel disconcerting if you are unfamiliar with it, and will also require increased nutrients for the day.)

Advanced Mana measurement

Requirements: Scientist level 30 or greater, Perception 100 or greater, Precise Mana Measurement Perk

You gain the ability to measure broken mana with the {Precise Mana Measurement} Perk.

Degraded Seed Slot

Requireemnts: Scientist level 35 or higher, Explorer of Magic class available, Magic at 100 or greater, have all magic seed slots taken, use magic Seeds themselves as a source of experiments and inspiration for new advancements

You gain a magic seed slot with a maximum 5% mana conversion ratio. This magic seed cannot be boosted by other Perks and can never be combined with other Perks.

Reset

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 50 or higher

Once per month, you can reset the cooldown on a Perk as long as that Perk is related to Magic.

Enhanced Focus

Requireemnts: Kinetic Manabinder level 10 or higher

While enchanting an object, you can focus more effectively. Time will seem to slow down while you are working, improving your work speed by a significant amount.

Alice was extremely happy with her new perks. {Improved Multitasking} allowed her to control four mana tendrils at once without difficulty. {Divided Attention} and {Folds of Magic} had been picked by her because she had originally thought they would get her to two mana tendrils – however, while the combination of the two had always been close to letting her control an extra mana tendril, they never quite got all the way there. Eventually, she had simply given up and taken {Split Mind} to give her a second mana tendril. {Improved Multitasking} was also a Perk that came from the [Scholar] class, rather than her magic related class, meaning that Alice could save her magic class Perks for better options in the future. With the ability to focus on four things at once, Alice’s multitasking ability and self-defense abilities both rose by leaps and bounds. It was useful both in a crisis and when she was researching, so she was naturally happy to get this Perk.

{Advanced Mana Measurement} was also very useful. Because {Precise Mana Measurement} didn’t let Alice measure Broken mana, it had gradually fallen out of use for Alice. While she did use it to confirm that there was no ‘normal’ mana in a given area during some experiments, and she occasionally used it for other experiments, Alice dealt with System and broken mana a lot more than she had originally expected to. Most Mages weren’t crazy enough to mess with a potentially poisonous substance that was likely to force a second mana baptism with a high chance of killing them, but Alice was already immune to the problem, which meant there was a lot of unexplored territory in the subject. Combined with the fact that it seemed increasingly relevant to her interests, Alice was extremely happy that she could now measure broken mana. While she still couldn’t measure the rainbow mana accurately, Alice no longer had to buy or rent cumbersome instruments for this purpose. It was also a great improvement in her ability to contribute to the research team, since it let her measure how much mana various sub-enchantments spent per second much more quickly and effectively than the instruments the team previous used and how much broken mana was being produced by some sub-optimal enchantments. It went a long way towards endearing Alice with the other members of the research team, some of whom hadn’t been convinced of her value until then.

{Magic Seed Slot} was picked since Alice had filled up her fourth magic seed slot with a healing seed. Since Alice had been seeing organic mana pop up in all of the System fractals she investigated, she wanted to keep the seed around and learn how to use it whenever she went to magic academy. That meant that she had no slots left to experiment with, and Alice obviously wanted to keep investigating how seed formation worked. This magic seed slot was far worse than the other Perks Alice had gotten from classes like [Explorer of Magic], but considering the fact she was getting a magic seed slot from the [Scientist] class Alice wasn’t particularly surprised. She decided to just be grateful for the fact she was getting a seed slot when she needed one. None of the other Perks at level 35 Scientist had been particularly exciting, so it ended up being a surprisingly easy pick.

{Reset} was picked because it let Alice use {Broken Seed} twice per month, instead of once per month. Alice had a lot of experiments she wanted to perform when measuring how the System and mana seed construction interacted with each other, and only being able to make one observation a month was really dragging down the speed she investigated things. {Reset} would solve at least some of this problem.

With Alice’s two chances this month to form a new Magic Seed, Alice formed and then destroyed two flawed electromagnetic seeds and confirmed two new things.

First, if a Magic Seed was formed without assistance from the System, there was a fair chance that it wouldn’t work very well. The first electromagnetic seed Alice formed was done in a new manaless room in Cecilia’s workshop, where she had driven out all of the System mana and then flooded the room with pure mana from her pure mana seed. The first Magic seed made Alice feel nauseous after a few hours. It was nowhere near as bad as the time Alice tried to form dozens of failed seeds in a row. However, Alice certainly didn’t feel good after making the seed – it was like she had come down with a bad case of the flu. In the process, Alice also realized that she accidentally messed up several parts of the magic seed. Several parts of the magic seed looked off when she compared it to the electromagnetic seeds she had made with the help of the System, and the new seed looked… sickly. Patchy. Alice had a hard time putting into words everything that was wrong with it, but it was definitely broken. This information opened up new questions about what had happened all of those months ago, when Alice had tried to form a bunch of magic seeds based on physics from Earth. Why hadn’t the System helped her form those magic seeds then? Why did it help her form some magic seeds but fail to help her with others? Alice was tempted to try forming a few seeds based on photons or other earth-physics concepts again, but the trauma from that time was still fresh in her mind. She decided that she would go back to the topic in the future, but she would wait… just a little longer. She would try again later.

Alice learned from this, and later that month, tried again. This time, the seed looked closer to okay. Alice didn’t get sick just from having the mana seed in her body this time. However, when Alice gave the seed some time to generate mana and then tried to move a silver coin around, she started to feel incredibly sick. Alice was forced to use {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} and then destroy the seed with {Reset} as she started to feel more and more ill. It was obvious that she had fixed some of the errors from her first attempt, but she certainly hadn’t succeeded yet.

Alice took advantage of these attempts to start training herself in something new. Anytime Alice tried to make a ‘System’ magic seed, the System would actively interfere with her. Alice had some guesses about the reasons for this, which were probably related to the reason System mana actively hid from other mages and avoided ‘touching’ human mana whenever possible. However, at the end of the day, Alice was now a girl with a dream. She wanted to try seeing if she could interact with or replicate the feats of the System – and for that, it seemed increasingly obvious that a System mana seed would be needed. If the System stopped her from forming a System mana seed, Alice needed to form a mana seed in an environment where the System wasn’t present. In other words, Alice was now starting to consider the process of forming failed magic seeds and breaking them down to be training for when she formed a System magic seed in a room where pure mana was present and System mana wasn’t. Alice also started wondering if she would get another level in [Survivor] soon. Even though she had started to consider the class pretty useless during her time in Cyra, it was surprisingly good at letting her use herself as a lab rat.

The final perk Alice picked was {Enhanced Focus}. It was Alice’s attempt to solve a problem she expected to kick in once she started her time at Magic Academy, which was lack of time and sleep. She was already aware that the schedule she had planned out for herself for the next year or two was going to be hard, and {Enhanced Focus} would lessen at least some of this burden by reducing the number of hours each enchantment took to finish. When Alice tried it in practice, it seemed to shave off about 20% of the time it took her to make each enchantment, which would add up when her schedule started kicking into nightmare mode.

At the end of four weeks, Alice registered at the magic academy of her choice. After a fairly quick and painless signup procedure, Alice was enrolled as a student of the Magic Academy for the Advancement of Mana and Research. She was to begin attending classes next week, and was given five uniforms after signing up. And at the end of the week, she also finished making her first board game from home. It was time for ‘the settlers’ to make its debut on Luliv.

* * *

As Alice signed up for her magic academy, other people were also making progress. Somewhere far away, there was a massive cloud of broken mana. The amount of mana here dwarfed almost every other location on Luliv – the mana was so thick here that even a normal person would have been able to feel it just by breathing it. Or they would have figured it out from the horrendous pain of going through a mana baptism, since the environment would have forced any non-mage to start a baptism within seconds of walking into the area.

And in the area, two people stood. One was an immortal, and one was a humanoid being partially made of metal. There were no other people around them – it was just the two of them.

“Is this it, master?” Asked the half-metal man, looking at the massive cloud of corrupted mana.

The immortal smiled. Through his eyes, the cloud of broken mana looked like it could dwarf the size of most cities. Of course, he could see far more than that.

The broken mana that leaked everywhere in this area was astonishingly dense. However, he was able to see one other thing. Something that, perhaps, only ten or fifteen other Mages in the world could see. As one of the oldest immortals, he hadn’t gained the right to see it until he had acquired an obscene number of Achievements and Perks, before finally lucking into one that let him see a whole new world.

Deep within the cloud of broken mana existed a very different kind of mana. A kind of mana that resembled a rainbow. And in this place, it was far, far denser than anywhere else he had ever seen. The Immortal smiled. This… this might finally be it.

Of course, there was much work to do before he could start investigating in earnest. The monsters in this area needed to be cleared out before he could investigate further, if he didn’t want to get surrounded and eaten. His classes weren’t specialized for combat, and while stopping the monsters from sensing any mana leaking out of him might be possible, it was a very dangerous position to place himself in. He would need magic to investigate this place thoroughly, and he didn’t fancy the odds of something noticing him, even if he tried to disguise himself. But even though there was still a lot of work to be done, he couldn’t help but feel excited. This could be the end of his journey.

“I think this is the place. Let’s get started.”

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Longer chapter this week. Next week, I might miss a day of writing on Monday if something goes longer than I expect it to. We’ll see how long the anesthetic lasts. I think it should be fine, but we’ll see. If next week’s chapter is shorter than usual, just pretend I’m making up for it in advance, okay? (Note from the future - it's slightly shorter than usual, but pretty close to normal size).

Also, if it wasn’t already obvious, ‘The Settlers’ is based on the Settlers of Catan.

Chapter 70

Alice looked at the table which contained her (questionable) rendition of The Settlers. Cecilia looked at the board game, before turning to the third player Alice had managed to convince to join the group. She had invited most of the other researchers she worked with to join the game, but the only ones who had expressed any interest in the idea were Ezrien and Anne. Ezrien was busy today, and since Alice was going to start classes at her magic academy tomorrow, she expected to be busy in the future. Sadly, this meant it was a three player game and not a four player game this time, but Alice hoped that in the future she would get a chance to play other board games with more people. Though, admittedly, that may take a while, since Alice needed to make each game and carve the pieces out of wood, and she was going to spend most of her future free time in the library she had spent a ridiculous amount of money to gain a year of access to.

Anne gave Cecilia a cheery grin. “So you’re the ‘friend who owns an enchantment shop’ that Alice mentioned a few times? It’s nice to meet you!” said Anne, giving Cecilia a warm handshake. “I’ve never been in your shop before today, but the enchanted items are decent quality. For someone so young, you’re doing pretty well at managing a shop on your own.”

“It’s nice to meet you as well,” said Cecilia, who visibly brightened up at Anne’s compliment. “Alice has mentioned you a few times when talking about getting to know the research team. I hear you’ve given her a bit of help meeting new members? Thank you for looking out for my friend.”

“Alice leaves a decent enough impression on her own. Even if she’s a bit quiet and spends a lot more time thinking than talking, she’s at least passionate enough about the team’s goals and her work as a researcher to make up for it,” said Anne giving Alice a mischievous grin. “So this board game is from your homeland?” asked Anne, giving the various numbered tiles a dubious look. Alice was glad that she didn’t need to explain what a board game was. This world, apparently, had a few board games already in place, as well as a few card games played with semi-standardized cards that [Scribes] sometimes produced.

“Yeah,” said Alice, deciding to ignore Anne’s impression that she was ‘quiet.’ “The rules are actually pretty simple – every turn, you roll the dice. Then, tiles with the same number as the dice produce resources, and every player with a settlement or city touching those tiles collects a copy of the resource. For example, if I roll an eight, all of ‘8’ tiles produce resources. If I have a settlement on a ‘brick’ resource tile that is numbered ‘8,’ I get 1 brick. You spend resources to build more towns, cities, and roads. The basic goal is to 10 points, which makes you win the game. Every time you build a settlement, you get one point, and upgrading it to a city gives you another point. The player with the longest road gets 2 extra points, and loses those points if someone else beats their road length. The resource costs for everything are explained in the little panel at the corner of the board. There are more specific rules, such as the robber and rules about settlement placement detailed in the little booklet I gave you. Any questions?” Alice asked.

“So the objective is to win the dice rolls and acquire resources, thus building enough settlements to choke out your competitors and monopolize as much land as possible?” asked Cecilia.

“That’s… one way to put it?” Said Alice.

“I see,” said Cecilia, nodding. “The important thing to do is mess with the other players as much as possible. If they have no resources they cannot win. In the meantime, you want to monopolize as many resources as possible.”

“Uhhh…” Alice

“Is it possible to trade with other players as well, or are we just working to screw everyone else over?” Asked Anne, giving the board a more careful look.

“You can trade, but only during your turn.”

“Hmm… It’s an interesting way to build up Magic Skills and [Perception],” said Anne, after a moment.

Alice had an ominous feeling about that statement, but decided to move on with her explanation for now.

After a slightly more detailed explanation of some of the more specific rules, the three set up the board. Alice had carved the board itself out of wood, before using cheaper colors made from plants grown in Illvaria to dye different tiles and make it clear which tile produced which resource. Sure, the ocean surrounding the continent looked a little funny when it was grey colored, but blue dye imported from the Corellion Empire cost almost a gold crown for a small quantity, while grey dye was half a silver sun for the same amount. The continent was also kind of lumpy and looked a little funny, but it no longer looked like a potato.

In addition to the board itself, Alice had made ‘special event’ cards out of smaller wooden slats, dice made out of a mixture of wood and iron (the iron being used to give the dice a proper weight and make it sturdier), and a variety of little wooden towns, roads and cities Alice had carved herself. The settlements and cities that she had tried to make with exquisite detail also looked kind of off, but they were serviceable.

Once everyone roughly understood the rules and the board game, Anne went first. She threw the dice into the air… and immediately stretched out a mana tendril towards the dice. Then, electromagnetic mana shot out of her and swapped around the trajectory of the dice. The dice landed on eight. Anne grinned. “Two sheep please.” She held out her hand at Alice, who was managing the resources for the group.

“Anne? What are you doing?” said Alice, trying to resist the urge to glare at Anne.

“What do you mean?”

“You changed the trajectory of the dice with magic!”

“And?” Anne seemed genuinely baffled by the notion that she had done something wrong.

“That’s cheating,” said Alice.

“Why would it be cheating? Isn’t the point of the game to boost your ability to manipulate mana? It seems like an ingenious way to train [Perception] and Kinetic or Electromagnetic magic. Its use for Thermal and Organic mages is a fair bit more limited, since the wood used in the dice is already dead, but it’s quite a clever game. I do think the penalties for having weaker control than the other players is a bit harsh, since you only get resources when you force rolls on the right number, but it’s a decent training method. Isn’t that the goal?” Anne’s genuine confusion made it hard to respond to her statements, and Alice’s bad feeling intensified.

“But- I mean, that’s not-“ Alice felt a sudden headache. Cecilia was frowning. Alice turned to her, hoping that Alice had another ally willing to enforce fair play in the game, before Cecilia experimentally reached out a mana tendril.

“I see,” muttered Cecilia, before she handed Anne two sheep tokens and picked up the dice. She tossed them into the air before shooting out one of her mana tendrils. Anne did the same, and the two immediately began struggling to control the rapid spinning of the dice in midair. Cecilia, whose Perks were much more focused on precise manipulation of mana and boosting enchantment quality instead of ‘active’ mana use, was only able to influence one of the two dice. Meanwhile, Anne tilted the other die to make it a 6 and tried to tilt the second die into a two. Cecilia tried and failed to make it the second die land on four to give her a brick and a wood resource tile, but Anne reached out another mana tendril and slammed the die into the table. After wobbling a few times, the die finally landed on five. The total roll ended up being an eleven. Nobody had any towns or cities on tiles with the number eleven.

“No, Cecilia, wait, that’s not- I mean, aren’t you also upset?”

Cecilia also gave Alice a baffled look. “Why would I be?”

“You aren’t – I mean, that’s not… using magic to change the outcome of the dice isn’t in the spirit of fair play, don’t you think?”

“Why wouldn’t it be fair? She used her own perks and abilities to change the outcome of the dice, right? And we’re all Mages, so using Magic is pretty reasonable. If there were any non-Mages at the table it might be a problem, but we can all influence the dice so it’s pretty fair right?”

Alice felt increasingly baffled by Anne and Cecilia’s attitude towards rigging the dice rolls. Was she the crazy one here?

“What do you mean it’s fair? Isn’t playing the game this way… odd?”

“Isn’t it just normal?” Asked Cecilia, frowning in concentration as she looked at Anne’s sheep and waited for Alice to roll the dice. “I mean, in the first place, it’s similar to a [Gambler] having their Perks activate, right? It’s just that the user needs to be a bit more conscious about what they’re trying to do, and the outcome of the game doesn’t have any money riding on it. Which is a good thing – [Gamblers] only get experience towards their next level while gambling, but they don’t actually learn anything in the process. This game instead trains a lot of different things, from {Basic Mathematics} to Attributes like [Perception] and [Magic]. It even builds skills for a variety of magic abilities, like {Mana Control}. While it might not be terribly optimized for non-Mages… ah.” Cecilia finally seemed to remember Alice’s homeland didn’t have magic or the System in it. She gave Alice a sympathetic look, before shaking her head. “I see. Your games were actually just determined by luck. Don’t worry, here you can control the outcome of the games and play games determined by skill.”

Alice’s bad feeling was fulfilled. Not only did Anne and Cecilia not see a problem with using magic to rig the outcome of the game, Cecilia, after realizing Alice’s circumstances, found Alice’s thoughts about fair play to be absurd. Alice felt a headache begin to build up as she tried to figure out how to convince these two to play the game properly.

Wait, is this actually a problem? Alice suddenly had a strange thought. If three mages were trying to control the outcome of each dice roll, the odds were probably pretty close to random anyway, right? And even though they weren’t playing the game the ‘original’ way, it wasn’t a terrible idea to use the game as a training ground. Anne was a woman who spent her days off working on getting levels and Stats. Cecilia wasn’t quite as obsessed with levelling as Anne, but there was nobody in this world that minded getting a few more Attributes and Levels whenever they could. Even Alice wanted to level up as much as possible, because levels gave her new tools to explore this world, increased avenues to earn money, and reductions in her aging speed. All three of those appealed to her. If Alice could have fun playing the game while getting some Levels and Attributes, wasn’t it the best of both worlds?

Alice wrestled with this thought for a few moments as she looked at the dice in her hands, before she decided to give up and roll with the punches.

She probably wasn’t going to be playing a ‘proper’ game of the Settlers in this world, given how different the culture was. So she instead decided to set up a few extra rules that she ‘forgot to mention.’

First, one could only use magic to ‘spin’ the dice while they were in midair. They couldn’t push the dice ‘up’ with their magic – the could only rotate it. If they seriously altered the influence of gravity on the dice, they were disqualified from getting resources for that turn. This made sure that the dice didn’t infinitely hover in midair as the three mages tried to contest the outcome of each dice roll, adding a fair bit of difficulty to the game and avoiding multi-minute turns. In addition, the group was forced to set an upper limit on how much mana each player could spend per second trying to manipulate the dice. This was mostly a technical limitation – One of the dice slightly cracked when Alice and Anne were getting really into a battle to make one of the dice land on a one versus a six. From then on, the players all limited how much mana they could use at once to keep the dice from getting damaged.

There were all sorts of other disputes in the rules, such as whether using more than two mana tendrils at once was fair, or whether there should be some sort of ‘dropoff’ point where players could no longer manipulate the dice (it was eventually decided that one could not influence the dice once they were ten centimeters above the table, which made it even harder to mess with the dice and, oddly enough, upped the speed [Perception] increased).

The game lasted for a total of thirty-seven turns, before Cecilia threw out three once-per-day Merchant Perks and conned Alice into trading away three sheep and a brick for one piece of wood, letting Cecilia immediately win the game one turn before Alice would have won. In that time, Alice refined her control over Magic in a way she had never expected to, learned why pretty people were always dangerous in this world, and realized that her interpretation of ‘fair play’ in a game was very, very different from the inhabitants of this world. At no point in time during the entire occasion did she find herself bored, and while she found the experience bizarre due to the cultural clash in rules, she had fun. The three played a few more games before Anne decided to go home. Alice returned to her inn room as well, before she started preparing for her first day tomorrow. It had been a surprisingly fun last day of freedom, though to be honest, Alice was excited for tomorrow. Soon, she would finally be able to access the academy knowledge bases and libraries.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 106 (112 -> 122%)

Perception: 127 (155% -> 165%)

Dexterity: 105 (114 -> 124%)

Intelligence: 164 (128%)

Endurance: 119 (121%)

Willpower: 143 (108%)

Charisma: 127 (107%)

Magic: 138 (117%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 41 -> 44

Explorer of Magic: 42 -> 51

Scholar: 24 -> 34

Scientist: 22 -> 38

Kinetic Manabinder: 1 -> 12

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 9 -> 24

Evolved Classes: 1

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

Secondary Classes: 1

Fisherwoman: 3

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Sense Hostility (Survivor 35)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Combat Spellcaster (Explorer of Magic 15)

Improved Seed (Explorer of Magic 20)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)

Broken Seed (Explorer of Magic 35)

Infusion of Comprehension (Explorer of Magic 40)

Mana Construct Modelling (Explorer of Magic 45)

Reset (Explorer of Magic 50)

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement (Scholar 10)

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Timer (Scientist level 15)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 98 -> 99

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 0->7

Basic Mathematics: 122

Intermediate Mathematics: 78

Advanced Mathematics: 18

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 48 -> 57

Mana Control: 33 -> 41

Mana Precision: 31 -> 43

Kinetic Force: 29 -> 37

Projectile Awareness : 9 -> 12

Divided Attention: 8 -> 16

Basic Enchanting: 6 -> 19

Broken Mana Purification: 0->12

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 25 -> 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 18

Dodge: 18

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Magic Seed: 4/5

(Unused Seed: Max 5% mana Conversion Ratio)

Kinetic Seed (135%)

Organic Seed (10%)

Pure mana Seed (50%)

Healing mana seed (10%)

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (III) (Rarity: 9)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)   (Upgraded)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

I only recently realized how long it has been since I last showed Alice’s status screen, so I figured it was about time for an update.

Alice is… finally getting to level 50 in classes. The Perks page that has been slowly getting more and more bloated can finally start to stabilize and shrink. I kind of wish I had made ‘combining Perks’ unlock before level 55, just so that I didn’t have to deal with this increasingly ridiculous list of Perks. Blehh.

Chapter 71

The magic academy’s architectural design had obviously taken some level of inspiration from castles. Even though it clearly wasn’t actually a castle, each corner of the building was a turret tower made of stone instead of a more traditional building design. There were even crenels at the top of each tower, to allow defenders to shoot arrows or miscellaneous objects at invaders if need be. The sides of the building also had small slits in them near the top, giving defenders even more options to attack invaders without being attacked themselves. Every single stone of the building was enchanted with Kinetic Magic – Alice had a hard time figuring out exactly what the enchantments were doing, but it looked like it made the building sturdier, as well as… something else? Alice couldn’t figure out the second function at all. It was too far removed from other Kinetic Enchantments she had seen before, but she assumed it was related to defense somehow.

The building was located right next to one of the four gates that allowed entry to the noble quarter at the center of the city, and could clearly double as a military outpost to control traffic and lock down the city if need be. Alice wondered if all of the magic schools in the capital were built like small fortresses. If so, were the buildings structured for defensive ability, or teaching first?

Perhaps both, she mused as she walked up to the school gates.

“Student ID?” A handsome teenager was standing just inside of the gate with a bored expression. Alice wordlessly produced the ID she had been given after registering for the school. Rainbow mana activated near the gatekeeper’s eyes, before he turned towards her. “Please repeat this statement. My name is Alice Verianna. I am the person who signed up for this ID last week. I hold no intent to inflict violence upon any other people in this institution, no intent to sabotage this institution, no intent to interfere with the regular operations of this institution, and do not anticipate these intentions changing before I next exit this building.”

Alice repeated the statement.

The handsome teenager relaxed a bit. “Good to see another first year. When is your first class of the day?”

“Twenty minutes from now. Why?” The teenager grinned at her.

“It’s good that you gave yourself enough time to find your way around. Some people get lost – this building only has a few stairways, and they’re all near the back of the building. Which is pretty inconvenient for [Students] trying to walk around, though it would buy a bit of time and create some nice choke points if a Sigmusi army was trying to storm the school. Anyway, head to the back of the first floor if you’re looking for stairs – a lot of first years get confused by that. Good luck!” The boy opened the gate for Alice, seemingly done talking to her.

The interior of the school was quite different from the militaristic exterior. As if to flaunt the school’s wealth and magical know-how, the walls were lined with a variety of globes, most of which floated in midair and well out of reach. Alice took a step closer to one, before looking up and chuckling to herself.

The first globes she saw were designed to sense the surrounding temperature, and then drop the temperature if it was too hot and boost the temperature if it was too cold. Even on another planet, air conditioning was alive and well. Some of the other globes were pure mana globes, and seemed to be in charge of regulating mana flow inside of the building. Alice guessed it was supposed to keep areas with lots of experiments ongoing supplied with adequate mana. There were several other globes, many of which contained kinds of mana she had never seen before. She spent a few seconds looking at them, but was forced to give up because she couldn’t figure out what they were doing.

The globes were all encased in little lantern-shaped objects made of some sort of clear, thick glass. At the bottom of each lantern were a large number of monster cores, linked together in some sort of ingenious circuit that made it easy for them to supply the enchanted globes with mana whenever they ran out, and also made it easy to replace the power sources needed.

Finally, there were little metal hooks buried in the sides of the walls that were also enchanted. They seemed to be a kind of enchantment she hadn’t seen before, but she was able to intuitively guess the use of them: they were enchanted as a ‘pair’ with the floating lanterns. The knobs themselves were only able to influence the object they were paired with, and the only thing they did was make the globes float in midair and keep them from moving around or falling down. Alice grinned to herself when she observed the floating metal lanterns – she could see where Ezrien had taken inspiration for the device the research team was trying to build. While the two enchantments were very different in scale and purpose, they seemed to share a certain ‘base’ to them. Ezrien’s project was, essentially, a plan to make it easier and cheaper to produce the metal hooks she was looking at, and make the enchantment work without being a paired enchantment. She wouldn’t have realized it if she hadn’t seen the metal hooks, but after a month of working on the kinetic plates, there was no way she would miss the similarities between the two. She chuckled to herself, before she decided to look at the floating lanterns more closely later. She might get more ideas or inspiration from a more detailed examination.

It had been less than a minute since she had entered the building, and she had already found a few types of enchantment she had never seen before. Alice grinned to herself before she continued walking towards the back of the building. It took her a few more minutes before she found the stairs while she eyed her schedule.

All students were supposed to sign up for anywhere between three and five classes for the year, based on student preferences. Two of them were mandatory classes for first years: self defense, to make sure mages trained in Illvaria had at least a minimal ability to keep themselves alive, and public morals, because Illvaria felt the need to preach about public responsibility. Or maybe the ruling class of Illvaria wanted to make sure that Mages, who had the highest average combat ability in the population, were less likely to run amok and wreak havoc on the country. Alice expected both classes to be rather dull, but since they were mandatory in every educational facility there didn’t seem to be a way to dodge out of the classes.

Apart from the two mandatory classes, Alice had taken theory of mana (since it related so closely to her interests and based on the class description, it was also likely to be heavily related to pure mana), an introductory course to Organic Mana (because it was one of the three consistently repeating mana types she found in System fractals, and she had a seed for the mana type but couldn’t use it), and biology of monsters (because monsters didn’t have access to the System, Alice deemed that they were interesting ‘exceptions’ to her primary topic of interest.) She wasn’t actually sure if she would get anything useful out of the last one, but she figured it was worth a shot. Apart from the fact that monsters ate mana, she didn’t know much else about the species, and maybe she would get some interesting ideas or information from studying them. This lack of knowledge made her uncomfortable, so she wanted to correct it in case she was overlooking something obvious that might help her.

Her first class of the day was monster biology.

Alice finally located her classroom, before she stepped in.

Unlike in her high school at home, the classes weren’t just rows of identical tiny desks shoved together in a room with a blackboard. Instead, comfortable sofas were arranged throughout the room, all of which were surprisingly well made according to this world’s furniture standards. Floating in front of each sofa was a small wooden board. On the floor in front of each sofa were more of the paired metal hook enchantments that kept each board floating in exactly the same spot.

Lounging on the sofas and talking to each other were nine other students, most of which were somewhere between their mid teens and early twenties in age. However, there was one student who was noticeably older – a woman who was in her early thirties was seated near the front of the room, completely ignoring others as she looked through a textbook for another class. Near the podium at the front of the class, a teacher was floating in midair with his eyes closed, practicing balancing himself with kinetic mana. It was a highly impressive feat of magic, and one that Alice had seen Illa use and had tried (and failed) to emulate herself multiple times. The teacher was also in possession of an Organic seed, making him one of the few people to bother branching into multiple magic seeds besides Alice. The teacher looked to be in his late twenties, and was thus younger looking than the student in her early thirties. Though, since he had denser mana Alice suspected he was probably older than the woman and just had a younger body. The teacher had short black hair and a severe looking expression, and seemed a bit on the shorter side. There was an angry looking scar on his left hand, which made Alice wonder if a vinebear had mauled him at some point in the past and he had never gotten the scar removed by an Organic Mage.

Underneath the teacher’s desk, Alice could also see a spidercrab trapped inside of a cage. There was some sort of enchantment on the cage that Alice assumed was reducing the sound the spidercrab should have made, but it was still throwing itself against the cage over and over again as it tried to escape and eat the students. Alice felt one of her eyes twitch, before she turned her attention back to the students.

“New girl?” asked one of the boys sitting near the center of the room. The group of people he was talking to also lifted their heads, giving her curious glances as she walked in.

She glanced at the boy who had spoken, and noticed that he wearing a gold ring decorated with a symbol she didn’t recognize. He also had a fairly high [Charisma] score. It was probably in the high 130’s or lower 140’s? Maybe he was a [Noble] or a [Merchant]? Otherwise, it would be decidedly odd for him to devote so much time to boosting his [Charisma] and for him to own gold jewelry. Deciding that being polite was in her best interests, Alice nodded at the group.

“Yeah, I’m new. My name is Alice. Nice to meet you.”

“My name is Luka Frien. It’s always nice to make new acquaintances!” Said the handsome boy, giving Alice a cheerful grin.

“My name is Arsi,” said another boy in the group. He was the oldest one in the talkative group. Unlike Luka, Arsi was much more average looking by this world’s standards. However, he had three magic seeds – Kinetic, Organic, and Thermal. The amount of rainbow mana in his body was impressive. Alice guessed the boy was probably higher level than her, despite the fact that he was only physically eighteen or nineteen.

“Laila,” said the girl. She was relatively pretty, and wasn’t wearing a uniform – instead, she was wearing a red dress that covered most of her body but left her shoulders bare. The dress was funneling rainbow mana into her brain, meaning it was probably boosting either her [Intelligence] or her [Willpower.] The enchantment didn’t look small, either – it was clearly providing a much bigger boost than the puny +2 strength necklace Alice had destroyed earlier. She was willing to bet that it was giving a +15 bonus to the girl’s mental stats, or an even higher boost. Even though the girl didn’t have any outstanding personal characteristics, for a family to give her a dress that boosted her mental stats and the influence to get the girl an exception to the school’s uniform-based dress code meant they were both wealthy and influential. The girl gave Alice a shy smile.

“Erkki Peniten,” said the last boy, giving Alice a friendly nod. He had three rings on his fingers, all of which were enchanted. However, they didn’t look professionally enchanted – they looked kind of like Alice’s enchantments. Homemade and not professional, but good enough to work, even if they were a bit crude. He had the lowest [Charisma] of the group, and looked to only be fourteen or so. He had above-average mana in his body, though it was nowhere near Arsi’s mana level.

“Nice to meet you, fellow classmate,” said Luka, picking up the reins of the conversation again. “What’s your background? Noble? Commoner looking to join the army? Something else entirely?”

“Errr…” Alice felt a little nervous. Milo had said that the [Nobles] of this world didn’t bother picking on commoners when she had talked to him several months ago. According to him, it was a stupid action for them to take if they wanted to hire Mages for the sake of their territory in the future. However, she still felt a little nervous about just outright saying she was a commoner who could barely afford to enter the academy.

“I take it you’re a commoner then,” said Arsi, giving Alice a relaxed grin. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have hesitated to talk about it. Don’t worry – I know some commoners really hesitate to mention their backgrounds, since sometimes there are ridiculous stories about nobles bullying commoners for their ‘noble pride’ or other kinds of nonsense. However, you don’t have to be nervous. There is almost nobody stupid enough to do that in real life – if nobles actually acted like that, they would lose the loyalty of their soldiers and citizens before getting overthrown in a rebellion. If their retainers didn’t just loot their house dry by embezzling and sneaking funds around first. I’m a commoner myself, but I’ve made a name for myself because of my high competence in various fields of magic. And even before I made a name for myself, I was never treated poorly.” He gave Alice a mischevious grin.

Since Arsi had pointed it out, Alice didn’t see a reason to hide her background anymore. “Yeah, I’m a commoner. I’m sponsored – I don’t want to join the army, and there’s no way I would be able to afford magic academy this year on my own.”

“Oh? Sponsored? That’s quite impressive. Not many people actually manage to get into a magic academy that way. What do you specialize in?” asked Erkki.

“Enchanting and research. I know some kinetic Magic for self defense as well. But mostly, I’ve been learning enchanting.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard of you in any enchanting circles. Are you new to the city?” asked Erkki. However, Alice noticed interest in the boy’s expression now. He was giving Alice an excited grin. Based on the rings on his fingers, Alice guessed that he was an enchanting enthusiast.

“I’m recently baptized. I just became a mage half a year ago, give or take a bit.”

The interest in Luka’s eyes sharpened. “To merit a patron with only half a year of magic behind you is very impressive. How did you come this far in half a year?”

“Luck?” Alice frowned. To be perfectly honest, a lot of things since she had come to this world had been based on her luck. She had survived a mana baptism from broken mana, which dropped the already low odds of survival even further, and had been lucky enough to get a high rarity Achievement for making some simple observations. Those had let her snowball into getting more Achievements, levels, and Perks, which had then let her keep snowballing things until she had reached where she currently stood. While she was glad she had made it this far, she definitely didn’t think that it had been due to her innate skill or otherworldly knowledge – by and large, she had gotten this far because she was lucky. She had been able to make use of that luck with her own hard work, but luck was what got the ball rolling.

“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine. But I don’t believe that you could get the abilities to pull a sponsor with just luck” said Erkki, his polite smile from earlier transforming into a more genuine one. “I didn’t have a sponsor during my first year here – I was originally on the military track before I impressed a Marquis with my abilities and he paid for my continued education. I’m glad to see another talented [Enchanter] in the school. Let’s get along well, all right?”

“I don’t know if I would say I’m talented – I’m still figuring out how to do things on my own. I’m working on it, though,” said Alice as she reflexively grinned a bit.

The five continued to chat for a few minutes, waiting until the official start time of the class. Alice learned that Luka was the third son of an Earl, but had no interest in governing and wasn’t in the line of succession. Instead, his older brother, who was highly competent and motivated, was set to inherit the territory. However, Luka was set to work for his older brother and lead the Mages of the territory, so he had subtly formed this group of people based on a desire to get to know other mages.

Erkki was the son of a fairly well known [Enchanter] in the city. His father had an excellent reputation, and Erkki had inherited his father’s talent for both magic and enchanting. He was steadily making a name for himself.

Arsi, like Alice, had been born a nonmage. He was a former kid from the slums, and while he was on the verge of starvation, he decided that it was better to gamble on the four percent chance of surviving a mana baptism than the much smaller odds of finding food for the next day. He managed to survive his mana baptism and became a mage, and was now on track to join the military. Alice was slightly baffled by the fact he was present in the research focused academy and not the military focused one, but since Arsi didn’t mention it, she decided not to ask. If they got to know each other better in the future, maybe she would bring it up.

Finally, Laila was the daughter of a wealthy merchant family. Both of her parents were nonmages, but she had won the genetic lottery and ended up with a talent for Magic. She didn’t seem to be particularly passionate about magic or enchanting, or selling and buying things – instead, she seemed content to drift through academy, never failing but never excelling as she did things at her own pace. But even though Laila didn’t seem particularly motivated or enthusiastic, she was pleasant enough to talk to for a brief conversation.

Finally, as more students streamed into the classroom, the total number of students in the class reached about forty. The teacher stopped levitating himself in midair and opened his eyes when the time for class came, before he took a good look at the classroom.

“So, you’re here to learn about monster biology. I’m professor Esaiyas, and this is introductory monster biology. Can anyone tell me about monsters? Yes, you – the tall girl with black hair.” He said, pointing to a girl near the front of the classroom.

“They’re violent and universally hostile to humans.”

“All right, a good start. What else?”

“They eat mana.”

“They aren’t very intelligent, and in the past the church has sometimes claimed they’re manifestations of human laziness or evil.”

“They can eat broken mana, even though broken mana is usually dangerous for humans.”

“Good. Then why study monsters?” asked the teacher, once he was done collecting student responses. Without waiting for anyone to answer, he launched further into his speech. “We study monsters because doing so gives us a better idea of what we might encounter in the wild. There are a lot of other reasons why one might study monsters – however, knowing what might try to kill you tomorrow is definitely one of them.

“Humanity lives on two of the three discovered continents – monsters live on all three. In mana-dense areas, monsters are strong. The species of monsters are so strong and numerous in mana dense regions that even an army of Immortals would avoid those areas. South of Illvaria is the great unknown, because human explorers don’t live if they try to explore those areas. The Western Continent is even worse – the number of humans who have successfully set foot on that continent and returned to tell the tale number less than twelve in all of recorded history.

“Studying monsters pinpoints their strengths and weaknesses, and ways we can survive encounters with them. Of course, they can also provide valuable insights into scholarly studies. Studying monsters has given us valuable insights on how vital mana is to life, for example, and monsters can serve as valuable test subjects for experiments that we can’t test on humans for ethical reasons. There are many reasons to study monsters.”

The teacher walked over to the cage that held the spidercrab, before he opened it. The spidercrab leapt out of the cage, before it froze in midair. Belatedly, Alice realized that the man wasn’t using kinetic mana on other parts of the spidercrab, nor had he been using kinetic magic on the hairs of the spidercrab’s legs. He was just using kinetic magic on the spidercrab’s skin, and paying for the massively increased cost and difficulty of using kinetic energy on a living being. It was the same thing he had done when levitating himself in the front of the classroom earlier. How big were his mana reserves?

“The lowly spidercrab is one of the most common monsters in the world. They are stupid, even for monsters, they breed quickly, and they have minimal fighting power. Even a normal farmer considers a solitary spidercrab to be more of a pest than a real threat. The only exception is during spring, which is breeding season. During that time, spidercrabs group up around females and form packs, forming threats to solitary humans and children if they aren’t dealt with. However, on the whole they’re the most common and least threatening species of monster on the two inhabited continents.”

The spidercrab that was hovering in midair suddenly tore in half. In two neat motions, the teacher’s mana tendrils flooded the spidercrab’s body with kinetic mana. With a neat twist, the spidercrab was ripped asunder in midair. Instead of bleeding, all of its blood and guts hovered in midair, as the teacher carefully turned the halved spidercrab innards to face the students.

“In this class, I’m going to show you what a variety of monsters looks like. We will observe them in their natural habitats, we will dissect them, we will discuss their strengths and weaknesses and how to neutralize them if you find yourself in a fight with them. We will discuss their uses in magical and nonmagical branches of study, observe their organs and innards in detail, and learn how to kill them. Welcome to introductory monster biology.”

The teacher gave the students a manic grin, as some of the students grinned or cheered. Alice noticed, with some surprise, that there weren’t any squeamish students who flinched from the monster guts frozen in midair. The effect of a completely different cultural mindset in this world, perhaps?

The teacher spent the rest of the class going over a more routine syllabus – it was something Alice was used to seeing in her former high school classes. How grading was done, what classes would look like, etc. However, the floating spidercrab corpse, as well as the very brief display of where a spidercrab core was located, gave Alice the feeling that the class might be very different than her expectations.

After the class, Alice had something to do before her next class started. She had three hours of free time before her first mandatory class of the day, Self-Defense, started. A short enough period of time that going back to her inn room or going to Cecilia’s workshop would be a waste since she needed to spend forty minutes walking to and from the academy, but a long enough period of time that she needed something to occupy herself while she was waiting.

And luckily, she had something she had been looking forward to for a long time.

It was time to visit the academy library.

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 72

Before heading to the Library, Alice made a quick stop near another of the floating lanterns. She spent a few more minutes trying to observe how the metal hooks and the paired lanterns worked, before she finally nodded to herself and moved away. While she didn’t get any new ideas for the metal plates, she at least got a better idea how linked enchantments worked. She might try to make a few of them sometime in the future, just to see if she was understanding the theory behind it properly.

After that, Alice reached the academy library.

Alice’s first impression of the library when she stepped into the school’s library was that it was filled with books.

There were shelves and shelves of books scattered across the room. Alice was big fan of libraries. Even before leaving Earth, Alice had loved spending time surrounded by books, and had been inside public libraries many times in the past.

The library she was currently standing in dwarfed the libraries she had seen even on Earth. An entire floor of a building that took architectural design from a castle was a whole different scale from the libraries she was used to. And considering how expensive ink and paper were in this world, Alice was seriously impressed by how dedicated the academy library was to storing and accumulating knowledge. This library must have cost a fortune to build.

Illa’s ‘private collection’ of books had only amounted to a little over fifty books. This was the private collection of a woman who had founded a developing town, was well on track to getting her own inheritable nobility title, was a high level mage who had served in the military for years, and had a husband who was extremely successful as a [Merchant]. Alice hadn’t been sure how optimistic she should be about the academy libraries, though she had figured it would certainly be worth checking out. What she found, however, outstripped her imagination.

The library was filled with students. Free access to the library was one of the bigger Perks for students of the magic academies. It was one of the biggest reasons that Alice had put so much time and energy into accessing the academy, and clearly, it had a hand in the actions of many other students as well. Far from the partially deserted libraries she was used to at home, this library was busier than a market square. It also wasn’t quiet, unlike libraries at home. The place was filled with quiet conversation. Even though it wasn’t loud, compared to the silence or low buzz of noise Alice had been expecting, there was certainly a fair bit of background noise here.

At the front desk of the library was a trio of people, all of whom were quietly watching the Library, as well as the students inside of it. Each [Librarian] was filled with rainbow mana. The amount of mana each [Librarian] had was comparable to Illa, give or take a bit. There was even a small clump of rainbow mana that extended out of one of the [Librarians] and filled the rest of the library with small doses of rainbow mana. Alice had no idea what it was doing, since it wasn’t as clear cut as something like a lie-detection Perk. However, Alice wasn’t used to seeing Perks influence an entire area at once, so she was still quite impressed by it.

“Student ID?” asked one of the librarians, upon seeing Alice standing near the entrance in a daze.

Alice looked at the woman, not comprehending what she was asking for a moment.

“Your student ID. You do have yours with you, yes?”

“Ah. Yes.” Alice quickly flashed her student ID at the woman.

“Please repeat after me. My name is Alice Verianna. I am the person who signed up for this ID, and this ID is my posession. The information about me on the ID is correct and contains no false information or omitted information. I hold no intent to inflict violence upon any other people in the library. I hold no intent to sabotage the library. I do not possess a Thermal magic seed, or, if I do, I have no intention of using it while near the books. I do not possess any enchanted items or other items which can produce a flame of any sort – or, if I do, I intend to deposit them with the [Librarians] at the front desk. I will not start any fires in the library. I will also fairly and accurate report any damage that occurs to the books as a result of my handling, and will pay the fines associated with damaging the books before I leave the library. I do not anticipate any of these statements changing until such time as I leave the library.”

Alice was even more surprised than before. The truth-detected statement was much longer than the one she had needed to repeat just to enter the building. After realizing why security was so high, however, Alice repeated the statement.

The librarian smiled at her. “All right, you’re free to enter. If you leave the library with any books, we will require a separate lie-detection statement, as well as a few documents for you to fill out. All right?”

Alice nodded. She wasn’t intending to take any books out of the library today, though she would probably do so in the future. For now, however, she finally set foot in the library.

She spent the better part of half an hour familiarizing herself with the library’s organizing system. It was organized loosely by category, but the system was a lot more… loose than things like the Dewey decimal system, which was what the libraries back at home had used. Books that covered enchanting were in one section, for example, and books that covered kinetic mana were in another section. However, if a book focused specifically on kinetic mana enchantments, it seemed to be randomly sorted into one of two categories, without any real rhyme or reason. Alice couldn’t help but think that the organization system of the library kind of worked, but it needed a serious overhaul.

Luckily, the books did at least have a system that consistently returned them to the same spot each time. After observing the movement of the people around her for a while, Alice finally figured out what the Librarian’s Perk was doing. The rainbow mana covering the library seemed to notify the librarian at the front desk what was happening to the books at all times, and whenever a student placed a book in the wrong location or one of the return trays, one of the [Library Assistants] would be notified to grab the book and place it in the correct spot. Alice doubted that was all the Perk was doing, but considering how the mana lit up before one of the [Librarians] dispatched an assistant to fetch the books half the time a student put a book back on a shelf, Alice was pretty sure that was what was happening. The Perk also seemed to make the books rather resilient against damage, considering the fact that the books felt oddly sturdy when Alice touched them.

She shrugged to herself, before she grinned and headed to the enchantment section. Alice had a very, very wide variety of things that she wanted to investigate, from monsters to the System to the workings of mana to enchantments, but since it was her first day in the library, she decided to just explore what interested her the most. Right now, that was paired enchantments. She had a year here, so it wasn’t a big deal if she shopped around for ideas and ways to make money before doubling down on her primary focuses. After selecting a few books and walking over to one of the tables, Alice buried herself in her book.

* * *

About two hours later, Alice put the book back on the shelf. Due to the perfect memory granted by her Perks, she had an easy time placing the books she had borrowed back into the perfect positions. She quietly checked the page number and location of the book again, to make sure that she could get back to reading the book later on. It was a good book for getting an introduction to the topic, and had fairly detailed diagrams for how to set up basic paired enchantments. Since Alice had found a new direction to take her enchantments, she wanted to at least explore the idea a little more, since it opened up new possibilities for how to tell enchantments to target their surroundings Alice hadn’t considered before. After that, she began to stroll out of the library, where she ran into Arsi.

“Hey, Alice! Good to see you again,” said Arsi, giving her his trademark grin. “Where are you heading?”

“I have Morals in twenty minutes, and then I have Self Defense as my final class for the day. I’m trying to figure out whether I should head home to work on some enchanting or come back to the library after that. My other two classes are Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

Arsi shrugged. “I’m heading to Morals myself. Wanna go together?”

“Sure.” The two walked and talked, chatting about miscellaneous topics as they went. Alice was surprised to hear Arsi easily talk about Count Aethelred’s fourth mistress and how she had become a hot topic among nobles, as well other gossip such as viscount Scheiffer’s heir proposing to a talented female mage. Considering the fact that Arsi had introduced himself as a kid from the slums, Alice hadn’t expected him to know anything about noble gossip – she had assumed he would be as clueless as she was.

“I’m surprised to hear you’re so familiar with noble gossip,” said Alice idly, as the pair made their way to the fourth floor of the academy.

“It comes with being in a magic academy, you know? This is one of the places where commoners and nobles mingle most often. At least half of the Mages in the country try their best to get into one of the magic academies scattered throughout the country, because the teachers and teaching facilities are top notch for the Shil Confederacy in general. Combine that with the fact that there are some foreign mages and nobles mixed in as well, and the academies are a surprisingly good place to learn more about the rest of the world beyond Illvaria. Most importantly, plenty of nobles find excuses to mingle with the promising Mages of the magic academies whenever they can. Every territory that wants to function economically needs Mages, so if you want to get a job as a Mage, the easiest way is to find an employer while attending an Academy. Since I’m well above average, I have an easy time talking to nobles and getting to know what their circles look like.”

“[Nobles] poke their noses into the academy frequently?” Alice hadn’t noticed anything of the sort so far, although she had only been here for half a day so far.

“Well, a [Noble] having their kids attend is one way to get inside the academy. The school has opportunities for kids to bring their parents to school here and there – school dances, parent-teacher conferences, et cetera. So any noble with a kid talented in magic has a pretty easy time getting into the academy now and then to scout future talents and try to establish good relations, or hire them in advance. Then, there are also public dances and parties. Nobles that don’t have kids who won the magic talent lottery have a harder time wiggling into the academy, but they still have options. One of the ways they do that is by holding a public party in a residence they own near the academy. They just let any Mage or [Noble] who feels like attending join in, and mages who are interested in making connections or finding an employer show up and mingle. It’s a less formal system than actual Patronage, of course, but plenty of Patronage starts at a public party – and plenty of employment offers do as well. Finally, every year there’s an awards ceremony held by the academy that nobles can attend. Ostensibly, it’s so [Nobles] can ‘offer congratulations to the talented mages of the nation’ or something ridiculous like that. But honestly, it’s a recruiting drive for those who are talented.” Asir chuckled. “Well, those are the major avenues. There are other ways as well, like just sending a [Messenger] to directly ask a Mage if they’re interested in talking more. If you get an invitation, you can decline it without offending the [Noble] in question, though if you want to keep getting offers you should at least meet the person who sent the message once before declining. Well, [Messengers] are seen as kind of blunt by most people, so they’re a rare way of contacting Mages these days. But those are the most common ways to get in contact with potential Patrons or employers. If you’re interested, I could show you around. Not that you need a Patron, since you already have one.”

“You seem to know a lot about these things. Given your Level, I thought you would spend a lot more time focusing on magic and getting more Levels and Achievements.”

“My level? Ah, I guess I’ve hinted at it a few times, even if I keep some information to myself. I didn’t think you were that well informed though,” said Asir, giving her a friendly wink. “I’m currently on track to join the military, but that doesn’t mean I’m not open to other offers. I go to those events to mingle and see if anyone is interested in me and can make me a good offer. I’m entertaining an offer from Duchess Elva right now. She offered to pay for a year of my stay in the research academy, in exchange for accepting some monitoring from her [Butler] and sending my evaluations to her residence to be examined. If things go well and I impress her, I might also have a patron starting next year and no longer be on the military track. It’s up in the air right now, but I think it’s an interesting offer.”

“Is that so?” Said Alice, as she mused to herself. Parties and nobles, huh. She had been curious to know how exactly Mages got integrated into the rest of society after education, but parties with nobles certainly hadn’t been the answer she was expecting. However, it also meant that Alice’s chance of interacting with them was practically nil – which might be a good thing, honestly. Alice liked her current lifestyle, so she didn’t need to find an avenue to change it right now. She was getting levels, progressing her research, and getting access to bigger and more interesting knowledge bases. Even if she might need to change something in the future, she was content for now.

Finally, the two arrived at the classroom they would be sharing. Alice looked around the room, to see if she recognized any of the other members of the classroom, but sadly, the other three students she had met in her first class didn’t seem to be present.

This classroom was much larger than the introductory monster biology classroom, and was nearly filled with students. While the first classroom she had entered had perhaps twenty students in it at full capacity, this classroom easily had room for about a hundred. At the front of the classroom stood, not a high-level Mage who looked like they could go toe to toe with Illa in pure level like Alice had been expecting, but a petite woman in her late thirties. She had a decent amount of mana in her body compared to some of the students, but honestly, Alice found her level to be… lacking. Alice estimated that in a month or two, she would probably be at the same Level as this woman, who probably didn’t have a class over level 65.

Furthermore, the woman was too pretty. Since physical attractiveness was a literal Stat one could raise by working hard, the attractiveness of a person also gave a surprisingly good indicator about someone’s personality if you knew enough other information about them.

And this woman was one of the prettiest Mages Alice had ever met. While she didn’t reach the absurd, too-pretty-to-be-human levels of Allira, given the woman’s high attractiveness, unimpressive level, and below-average Thermal magic seed, Alice wondered if the woman had put any effort into her magic at all. The woman’s physical appearance would have made much more sense if she was a [Merchant] instead of a magic teacher.

Alice’s questions were answered shortly after the class began, however.

“Ahem. I am Professor Eidwiss – a representative of the Illvarian crown. All of you, for various reasons, have acquired the rare and extraordinary gift of magic. I heartily congratulate you! However, as Mages, it’s important to understand how to use your newfound powers in a way that benefits the country and people around you. I’m here to talk about how a Mage should conduct themselves…”

Alice twitched. The rest of the class, honestly, could have been summarized in a couple sentences.

‘Hurting innocent people is bad. With the power of magic comes a responsibility to help others. Don’t get arrogant just because you’re Mages, and be a good person.’

Alice quickly started to feel like the whole class was a waste of time. If her [Willpower] had been any lower, she probably would have nodded off halfway through the lecture. Some of the male students were still greatly interested in the class, but Alice was pretty sure they were paying more attention to the teacher’s looks than the content of the lecture. When Professor Eidwiss finally stopped talking, Alice heaved a sigh of relief.

Arsi, perhaps seeing her bored expression, laughed at her as he walked over to her seat at the end of the class. “Nice and excited about this fascinating, riveting class?”

Alice just snorted.

“It’s pretty commonly agreed that this class is the worst by most people, especially the ones who love magic and learning. Don’t worry – we only have it three times a week, for two hours a day each time, any time you’re attending magic academy for any reason…”

“It’s not just a year one thing?”

“Nope.”

Alice groaned, before she sighed and began trudging to the last class of the day. “That is… unfortunate. Are the test hard? If I fail them, am I going to get dragged away to the Gulag or something?”

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Rus@#$%@# (Language Proficiency): 0->1

“That was actually worth a point in a language proficiency skill? Seriously?” Alice said, looking at the notification.

“I don’t know what a gulag is, and I didn’t get any points in a language proficiency skill yet. But if you aren’t doing well in the class, that’s honestly kind of… impressive. It’s pretty easy to pass, just boring. Half of the grade in this class is pretty much just attending it. Well, if you actually do start to fail, the teacher has the right to pull you aside for some extra lecturing on what it means to be a good person. Which is very exciting and may or may not cause one to consider the pros and cons of banging your head against the wall until you pass out. But it’s not like there are any legal ramifications.”

Alice breathed a small sigh of relief as she and Arsi walked out of the classroom. Even if she had never failed a class before and had no intention of starting now, it was relieving to know that there wasn’t much on the line. As she was preparing to ask Arsi about Self Defense, her final class of the day, Arsi bid her farewell. Apparently, his classes were done for the day.

Alice arrived at the final class for the day. Luckily, in this class as well she was able to quickly find someone she knew – this time, it was Luka Frien and Laila. Since Alice already had two people she knew in the class, she moved to them and started chatting with them until class started. Since Alice had people to talk to, she felt no need to introduce herself to more new people, as a natural consequence of her below average interest in socializing. It could be said that if Alice had been born on this planet and not Earth, her [Charisma] probably would have never reached triple digits…

The final class for the day, Self Defense, didn’t end up drawing much of Alice’s interest. It was the first class to take place in an outdoors area, situated behind the school in a flattened area filled with weights, practice weapons, and other miscellaneous objects. The teacher was a man named Professor Tanmi. He was physically in his late twenties, and was much closer to the high level Mage Alice had been expecting to see – although that wasn’t all. His movements were fast and fluid, betraying his incredibly high [Dexterity], and since he casually moved heavy weights around the training ground as students shuffled in, he clearly had quite a high level of [Strength] as well.

Once class started, he introduced himself by displaying many different types of combat proficiency – including swordsmanship, bare-handed fighting, and even competence with a bow, before he moved on to showing proficiency with Kinetic and Organic magic as battle methods. Alice was more than a little bit surprised to see that the man used a combat style she had never seen before – apparently, the man had taken Perks that boosted the strength of his Kinetic Magic to extreme levels, but only worked when he was influencing objects very close to his body. If most Kinetic Mages could take objects and then fling them into the distance the way a cannon might, professor Tanmi instead used Kinetic Magic as something closer to a supplement for his already incredible physical abilities. In exchange for giving up a lot of his long range abilities, however, he could do things with his mana Alice had never seen before – for example, he could slap a sword that was swung at him and break it in half with his bare hands safely and reliably. Combined with the fact that he was using Organic Magic to boost his abilities even further, Alice was pretty sure that this Mage would be a nightmare to fight in close quarters combat. She had no idea if he had learned how to heal himself with Organic Magic, but if he did, he would be the nightmare of any [Spearman] or [Swordsman].

Alice hypothesized he had taken [Kinetic Brawler] as his class when he had evolved it from his lower-limit student class, or he at least had a similar class.

After giving an introduction to the man’s melee-magic proficiencies, he started getting the students to jog around the training classroom, before running through some other basic exercises. He then started… throwing objects at everyone while they ran, relying on his great physical strength and speed to make the soft objects hurt if one failed to dodge them.

Alice felt that professor Tanmi would have gotten along well with Illa.

After two hours of jogging, dodging, and other magic exercises, Alice crawled out of class completely exhausted. She had originally been debating going back to the library after class, but at this point she just wanted to go to bed. She dragged herself back to her inn room, before forcing herself to stay conscious long enough to spend her remaining mana enchanting objects to sell. Then she took a bath, laid on her bed, and almost instantly fell asleep.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 73

Alice woke up the next day still tired, but at least she had enough mana and energy to get her day started. She absently wondered if this was going to be her routine, now that her academy had started up for the year – ending each day horribly exhausted. Still, she didn’t hate the idea. She was working hard to finally build a proper baseline of knowledge for herself, and earn a living. While it was much earlier than it would have been on Earth, even if she was exhausted she was still enjoying unravelling the mysteries of magic and the System.

She spent the morning working with Ezrien’s team to create a cheaper and easier to produce kinetic plate, as usual. Now that she had seen the lanterns at the magic academy and was taking another look at the enchanted plate, it was easy to see that the enchanted plate took inspiration from the floating lanterns. The primary differences were that the plate wasn’t a paired enchantment, and instead tried to ‘intelligently’ sense whatever object was directly above it. Combined with the fact that the kinetic plates were also supposed to be able to change what height they floated the target material at, the seemingly simple upgrade ended up incredibly complicated if one was trying to make them easy to mass-produce. Alice wondered if this project was a little more ambitious than it should be. Still, she did her best to record results, make suggestions when her opinion was sought, and make measurements, as usual. Anne kept the team in high spirits and made contributions, Ezrien suggested wild but interesting improvements to the design, and the other four did their work diligently. It was a team Alice could be proud of working with.

After her work with Ezrien’s team for the day, she ate a quick lunch at the inn before heading to class. After showing her ID and repeating a string of phrases to make sure she didn’t bear hostility towards the school, she entered the academy. She was a little early, so she headed to the library and formally checked out the book she had started reading yesterday. The book was worth almost one and a half golden suns, and Alice would apparently be responsible for replacing it if she damaged it. Since Alice only owned about four and a half golden suns, this made her a little nervous since it could wipe out a third of her savings in one go…

After that, she headed to her first class of the day, Introductory Organic Mana.

She looked around the classroom to see if she knew any of the other students, before sighing with regret. Unfortunately, in this class she didn’t see any of the five other students she knew. Since she didn’t feel like introducing herself to anyone new, she pulled out her book and read until the teacher started the class.

“My name is Professor Felissa. It’s my pleasure to meet all of you,” said the teacher, a strict-looking woman in her early thirties. Alice nodded to herself when she saw the professor for the class. The woman was a bit lower level than the teacher for monster biology, but she was still quite impressive. She was borderline unattractive for this planet, which was already unusual, and given how much mana was concentrated in her brain Alice was sure she had plenty of [Intelligence] based Perks and classes. While that didn’t necessarily equate to being a good teacher, it meant she probably knew her subject very well.

“Now, a lot of teachers prefer to start out the first day of class introducing you to what the subject matter is going to be about. I don’t particularly like long introductions, but I’ll still introduce my class a little bit. Introductory organic mana is a class about organic mana. Specifically, the uses of organic mana, how valuable it is to humanity, and its history. Many people believe it is the most powerful and advanced of the four basic mana types.

“What is Organic mana? Simply put, it allows you to influence the physical structure of anything alive. If it is alive, it can be influenced by Organic Mana. Whether it is the most basic plant, a monster, or a human, it can theoretically be manipulated by an Organic mage.

“Of course, this also means that you’re going to directly run into a major problem – all life in the world has some innate resistance to other sources of mana. This is a universal rule, and the more mana a creature has inside of it, the greater its resistance to external mana intrusion. If you want to, say, heal someone’s muscles after they’re cut by a sword, the patient’s body is going to try to stop you from changing it. If you try to stop someone’s heart from beating while they’re trying to kill you, the problem will be even worse – your opponent will be continuously moving, making it hard to target the right place with your mana tendrils, meaning it’s hard to do anything with your mana at all.

“How do you solve this problem? There are a few ways. The most common solution is to use Perks. There are dozens of [Organic Mage] Perks that let you find ways around this problem. The most well-known one is {Patient’s Consent,} which allows you to mess with another human being as long as they don’t reject the intrusion of your mana. If you want to be a healer, this Perk or a similar one is practically required. A normal human being is complex enough and has enough mana inside that influencing it will be incredibly expensive and difficult, and so finding ways to reduce consumption is critical. {Patient’s Consent} is a Perk that only requires you to be level 20 in [Organic Mage] to take, and has no other requirements. It’s very easy to access, and very effective.

“Of course, that isn’t the only way to resolve this problem. You can also take [Organic Mage] in completely different directions, such as focusing on healing yourself and increasing your physical abilities, because you yourself don’t resist your own mana very much. There is still some resistance, of course, but it is significantly reduced. However, this is only really useful if you want to swing a sword around or engage in heavy physical labor. It’s also almost impossible to do things like enhance your [Willpower] or [Intelligence] – human brains are so complicated that most people who try to mess with them make mistakes and die, unless they have very high level Perks backing up their actions.

“Finally, you can just bulldoze the problem. Mana density in a target increases the mana cost and difficulty of influencing them. However, if you just have better concentration abilities and more mana, you can overcome this problem by brute forcing it. You need very high [Intelligence] and [Magic] to pull this off, but it’s technically a solution as well.

“Most people just take the Perks though, since most [Organic Mages] are healers.

“So how does one heal as an [Organic Mage]? How does one acquire the class, how does one level it, and how does one heal someone? Simply put, you must know the human body. You must know it very, very well, because if you mess up you might accidentally drill a hole in your patient’s heart, or cause their liver to malfunction and make them very sick or very dead. There are dozens of ways to mess up as an [Organic Mage]. This is why anybody interested in healing must pass a very strict set of tests to get a healing license. Anybody who heals other people without a license better either have a VERY convincing case about extenuating circumstances or be ready to go to prison for several years. Therefore, one of the focuses class is a study about the human body and its structures. Your Perks will eventually help you avoid the worst mistakes if you heal people in the future, but you shouldn’t rely on them for everything. So the first part of this class is dedicated to learning what makes humans tick. Organs, blood vessels, muscles – we will cover all of these in great detail.

“But before we start studying the human body, a word of warning.”

The serious expression of the strict woman tightened, and for a moment she looked positively furious. Alice felt a shiver run down her spine as she saw the woman’s expression.

“If you misuse Organic Magic, I will hunt you down to the ends of the planet and kill you myself.

“Let’s talk about an old story. Once upon a time, there was a [Nobleman] Count who was able to use magic. He lived about three hundred years ago, and his name was Reldion.” Alice saw several of the students in her surroundings turn slightly pale. Alice felt a twinge of nervousness as she saw her classmates shiver – how infamous was Reldion if he was this feared three hundred years later? Or worse, was he still alive as an Immortal somewhere?

“Reldion was an incredibly gifted Mage. While we will never have an exact estimate of his level at the time he went mad, most [Historians] agree he was very close to Immortality at the age of 23. To reach the class evolution at level 100 and then get near the ‘final break point’ at level 25 of the next tier class at only age 23 is incredibly difficult. One might say that Reldion’s talent and work ethic were one in ten million. If only the same could be said about his ethical standards…

“Reldion thought that it was a shame humans were separated by birth and luck. Why did some people have the gift of using magic, while some did not? Why were some people blessed with social status without needing to work hard, while some people scrounged in the gutters for scraps of food?

“Reldion might have been an extraordinary Count if he had kept this question in mind and led his territory wisely, trying to make it a better place for the poor and disadvantaged.

“Instead, he began trying to think of a way to make all humans Mages. That is also not a bad thing, in and of itself. If all humans were mages, mana poisoning would no longer kill people, and monsters would be a much weaker threat to humanity as a whole. One could say his goals were quite admirable. But one’s goals cannot justify one’s actions.

“Reldion began delving into human experimentation. He began to kidnap citizens and to dissect them while they were still alive. He took Mages and non-mages alike, try to discover what made them different. He began trying to find ways to make non-mages into Mages more easily. The records we’ve recovered today show that he tried dozens of things. The most infamous experiment was one where he used his Organic Magic to cut out the mage core of a mage, transplant it into a non-mage, and then use Organic Magic to grow the mage core back for the original mage. This failed, killing the non-mage and driving the Mage insane after several repetitions, but serves as one of the most chilling reminders of what lacking ethics and a good cause can do to people.

“In the end, almost none of his experiments bore fruit. And in the process he dissected, tortured, and killed nearly twenty thousand people before the [Spies] of his country finally caught word of his experiments. Less than a week later [Soldiers] stormed his keep and killed him. His body was brought before the townspeople and torn to pieces by the furious mob.”

Silence fell over the classroom, before the [Teacher] looked over the students, seemingly satisfied with their responses. Alice felt a deeper twinge of horror while listening to the story. At the same time, she couldn’t help but feel that Count Reldion’s actions had a certain similarity with the Society of Starry Eyes…

Regardless of Alice’s thoughts, Professor Felissa’s words continued.

“Count Reldion’s research, in a way, paved some of modern Organic Magic’s knowledge of the human body. He is one of the only people who managed to get any research done about mage cores at all. He could also be said to have founded the Society of Starry Eyes. Some madmen who followed his legacy, known at the time as the Society of Eyes, sought to continue his experiments and continue his path through human experimentation. This eventually merged with another society known as the society of Stars, a group of Mages who wished to research dimensional magic for unknown reasons. These two merged together in the semi-recent past to become the Society of Starry Eyes.

“And if any of you become the next Count Reldion, or become a part of the Society of Starry Eyes and inflict horror and suffering upon the people of Illvaria, I will bring a squad of [Soldiers] that I know from my army days and behead you. I have done so twice in the six years I have taught, and I am sure I will have to do it again.” The tension in the class grew as Alice and a few other students unconsciously nodded.

The strict woman’s face became more gentle, as she nodded. “Good. Now, with that out of the way, I’ll begin to introduce my lesson material. We’re going to start out with human anatomy before we get into the more magical bits of the lessons, and we’ll cover the history of Organic Magic in further detail later on. It may be a bit boring at first, but it’s very important to learn everything you can if you intend to mess with human biology. We’ll start out by learning about skin, because I think it’s one of the easier and simpler components of the human body. And it’s also very hard to kill someone if you mess up skin, making it a good subject to start out with. Human skins is comprised of several layers…”

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic human biology 0 -> 18

Alice found herself impressed as the professor started to get into her lesson contents. She hadn’t been sure how good this world’s understanding of human biology was. However, for all that this world lacked in technology and technical know-how, it couldn’t be said that this ignorance extended to the human body. The understanding this professor had about human skin easily rivalled what Alice had learned in her middle and high school classes before she came to this dimension. Even if these people hadn’t figured out how to make printers, their knowledge could match a modern day biologist and doctor rolled into one. Or at least, as far as Alice could tell with her very limited knowledge of biologists and doctors, this seemed to be true.

Alice quickly settled in to began taking mental notes, paying extra attention to the professor’s words as the lesson continued. At first, Alice started to feel worried that this class might be less useful than expected – after all, human biology didn’t directly link up to any of her interests. However, after some thinking, Alice realized the class might actually be a jackpot of information. As far as she could tell, System worked by filtering mana and helping the human body adapt to it. This was… probably how Attributes worked – filter external mana, help the human body absorb it, replace muscles with mana, and then make people stronger. However, while mana was still the biggest component of the System’s actions, knowing more detail about the human body might give Alice key insights into how the System made the human body work with the filtered mana. She wasn’t sure if this class would go into that level of detail, but it was certainly possible for her to learn valuable information from this class. This class would be as useful as she had hoped it would be, if she asked her professor the right questions and paid attention.

* * *

Alice’s final class was Theory of Mana. In this class, she did spot Erkki, the enchanter’s son she had met in her first class. Alice was more than happy to talk to Erkki, because she had been learning about paired enchantments recently and none of her classes directly related to enchanting. Which was a bit of a shame, but with the two mandatory classes and all the other classes she wanted to take competing for her time, she hadn’t ended up having room for it this year.

Erkki was more than happy to talk about paired enchantments, and Alice found herself learning bits and pieces about how to set them up through the conversation. Most interestingly, she learned that the two components of a paired enchantment didn’t need to be set up at the same time, and they weren’t completely impossible to swap around either. A paired enchantment worked more like a radio channel than a direct bond between two objects – it was, in theory, possible to make a new object correspond to the ‘frequency’ of a paired enchantment, if the original item broke or something. It was just difficult and time consuming, because once the connection between two objects was established they tended to stick to each other and reject new connections. It was also possible to create ‘tri-enchantments’ and ‘quad enchantments,’ or even create giant groups of enchantments that were all keyed in to each other. However, it grew increasingly complicated and hard to keep functioning as the group of enchanted objects grew larger and larger.

After that, the teacher for the final lesson started the class. The teacher introduced himself as Professor Kosk, and seemed like a fairly affable man. He wore a casual suit, unlike the other teachers who either wore military uniforms or full-on formal wear, and seemed pretty average in level and strength. He spoke with a confident and relaxed tone, but Alice quickly realized that he had an even bigger tendency to get sidetracked than she did.

“Theory of Mana is a class that I often wish was mandatory, though unfortunately, it isn’t deemed important enough to be part of the mandatory curriculum,” said professor Kosk. “In this class, we deal with a lot of the theoretical underpinnings of magic and mana. Where does mana come from? What is broken mana? What is the nature of mana, and why are only Mages able to directly shape it? Why is life reliant upon mana? Does anyone have any guesses about any of these questions? I like to run this class with a lot of student ideas and feedback, because this is one of the classes that is most open to interpretation.”

After some hesitation, a few students raised their hands. After some thinking, Alice also raised her hand. While being wrong in public might be a bit embarrassing, it also served as an opportunity to check how much credence others would give her theories. It was worth answering, if she could.

“Yes, the young lady with brown hair,” said the professor, pointing to Alice.

“Broken mana is mana that is produced whenever a mage uses magic imperfectly, right? And it also seems more like mana that has adopted a specific ‘pattern,’ or some sort of property from whatever mana was originally used. For example, if one uses kinetic mana to move a cup of water, a little bit of mana will get ‘wasted’ and escape into the air, becoming a small blob of broken mana. Since Mages can see different colors of broken mana based on the original kind of magic used, it implies that there are different kinds of broken mana, at least in my opinion. The history of the Tragedy of Allenheim further supports this idea. When humanity first experimented with dimensional mana, they attempted to connect two different points of space together. However, when they instead caused a massive spurt of broken mana to kill off most of the capital city and the city they were connecting, a bunch of people went through broken mana baptisms – and, importantly, some of those people became ‘infectious,’ accidentally causing people they came in contact with to go through their own broken mana baptisms. Since no other kind of broken mana causes it, it seems clear that different kinds of broken mana exist.”

The professor frowned. He gave Alice a curious look, as he rubbed his chin in thought.

“I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about that in detail before. May I ask where you heard that theory? Did you read it in a book, or did one of your other professors discuss it?”

“I came up with the theory myself,” said Alice, thinking back to the first time she had seen broken mana. It had been months since then, but it was the first time she got to seriously debate her ideas with someone. At the time, she hadn’t had a good idea of what she was looking at, but the more she learned about broken mana and regular mana, the more she wondered what exactly set the two apart. It didn’t seem like it was critical to her primary area of focus, which was the inner workings of the System and mana, but she still found it to be an interesting topic.

“I think it makes sense,” said the professor, with a bit of interest lighting up his eyes. “Most people don’t pay much attention to broken mana, because it’s considered harmful waste product of magic users. Most Mages learn to clean it up and then lose further interest in the topic. The answer I was looking for was just ‘waste product of mana.’ You took the answer well beyond that point, in a direction I’ve never thought of. Even if the answer doesn’t seem very important, it’s very interesting. Well done, young lady!” The professor gave Alice a cheerful grin.

Alice felt a smile tug at her lips. She was glad that her theory wasn’t being tossed out the window – and more than that, she was glad to hear someone seriously consider her ideas. Based on professor Kosk’s statements, it sounded as if broken mana was a pretty underdeveloped field of study, except for those who analyzed its relationship to mana baptisms. Though, given the potentially deadly nature of mana and broken mana poisoning, Alice did kind of understand why people wanted to stay away from it as a field of study…

Instead of following up on some of his earlier statements, professor Kosk began to lead the class in a totally different direction, trying to get other students to think of other historical incidents or experiments that proved or disproved the idea of different kinds of broken mana having different properties. Other students began to raise their hands and mention other smaller experiments that delved into the nature of broken mana. Alice was more than a little please to hear this discussion – after all, she would never have known what to look for if she hadn’t started this discussion. She had access to the library of this academy, and it was a wonderful resource she had fought to access. However, she also needed to actually know where to look if she wanted to make the most out of it.

She quietly began filing away studies she wanted to look up later. Most of the studies the students mentioned didn’t explicitly focus on the nature of broken mana. Instead, they focused on studies run by (mostly Organic) Mages that had tried to treat cases of mana poisoning that had occurred by accident and ways the attempts to treat broken mana poisoning differed from regular mana poisoning. Such studies were very rare – after all, any incident involving potentially fatal incidents came under heavy scrutiny from Illvaria’s experimental ethics committee, and so such cases needed to truly be random. Despite that fact, random case studies sometimes came into Illvarian libraries from accidents.

After the students finished debating the topic, the teacher finally got the discussion back on track. He started talking about scholarly theories regarding why some areas of the world were almost covered in mana, while some weren’t (in short, [Scholars] had been debating this but had no real conclusions.) Alice was also a little surprised to learn that mana density wasn’t as uniform as she thought it was. There were all sorts of small regions that had higher or lower concentrations of mana – for example, there was a small maelstrom of broken mana to the southwest of the central continent, between the Sigmusi Colonia and Sigmusi Imperia called the maelstrom that was known to be a massive shipping hazard due to the mana and monster density. There was also a region of exceptionally dense mana on part of the Corellion empire’s east coast, another (much smaller) broken mana zone in the Nomad steppes to the north, and a few low-mana regions scattered across the Shil Confederacy.

Alice ended up realizing that the class ‘Theory of Mana’ was a bit different than what she was expecting. In this world, mana was literally everywhere, and it was almost a matter of philosophical debate rather than strict scientific debate because it was so omnipresent. Or, at least, that was the way the class treated mana. For most of the questions the teacher raised at the beginning of class, the most correct answer Alice could have provided based on the teacher’s answers was ‘nobody really knows, but here are some interesting ideas and theories that have been tossed around by [Scholars] and [Scientists] in the past.’ Still, the discussion between the teacher and the students gave her a lot of new ideas for areas of research to find in the library, from case studies about mana and broken mana poisoning to geographical studies about low and high density mana regions. Even though the class wasn’t quite what she was expecting it to be, by the end of the three hour class she was still happy she had taken the class.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug:

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

I would like to say, for the sake of worldbuilding, that each class is standardized at 6 hours per week. Since Alice’s Theory of Mana and Organic magic classes are Tuesday/Thursday classes, they last 3 hours per class instead of 2 hours for the Monday/Wednesday/Friday classes. Not very important, but I wanted to sneak that in for people who were confused.

Small fun fact: While I was trying to copy-paste this chapter (to get it from my word document into Patreon/Royal Road/Scribblehub) I accidentally hit ctrl-X instead of ctrl-C. I had a miniature heart attack before I hit ctrl-Z and restored the chapter… if I had accidentally deleted the chapter and been forced to restart my editing process from Thursday’s draft right after finishing it, I might have cried a little.

Chapter 74

After Alice had adjusted used to her classes, life began to settle into a stable, but hectic, rhythm. The rest of the week passed quickly as she adapted to her new daily schedule.

In mornings, she would work with Ezrien’s team to perfect the kinetic plates, slogging through different builds and ideas as they tried to make each plate easier and cheaper to make without losing any functionality. Alice had originally thought that the team’s goals were interesting, but a bit too ambitious. After all, it wasn’t easy to make a better product with fewer materials, especially if one also wanted to make the product easier to make. Also, producing a set of instructions to mass produce an object was a heck of a lot more complicated in this world, since everyone had a very different set of Perks. This threw an extra layer of complications on the already difficult process of making more with less.

However, surprisingly, the team was making progress. It was slow, but steady. Alice had been part of the team for several weeks now, and the kinetic plates were still nowhere near becoming a viable replacement for kinetic mages in construction. However, at the start of her time in the team, it had been so incredibly far off that the kinetic plates barely worked at all if one didn’t have a hefty amount of Skills and Levels backing them up. It would have been basically impossible to just hand the recipe to an [Enchanter] and have then churn out working copies of the plate. It would take hours or even days of fiddling with the smaller components and enchanting materials to get a working copy, and a few mistakes might make the whole product totally unable to work.

Now, an average level 50 enchanter could, at the very least, probably make a functioning version of the kinetic plate within a day once they wrapped their head around the blueprint. The team had eventually decided to try making some of the enchantments that ‘sensed’ objects a little bit simpler. The product had a slightly higher chance to pick the wrong object to start floating around now, but the enchantments related to sensing objects became several times easier to make as a result. Since the kinetic plates had a working ‘off’ switch by this point, it wasn’t a big deal if they starting lifting up the wrong object: the operator could just turn it off, move the wrong object out of the way, and try again. Even though the product was worse, it became far more easy to mass produce once the team starting cutting down small but complicated details like this one, which meant less time and effort for the average [Enchanter] to make a copy of the product. Which, ultimately, was the whole point of the team’s research.

After spending her mornings on enchanting the kinetic plates, Alice would go to the library and study. She had decided that after she finished reading the book about dual enchantments, she wouldn’t keep looking into ‘random topics that interested her.’ It was time for her to return to her major topics of study.

Which led Alice to a startling revelation.

Right now, Alice had way too many different goals and research topics. Most of them still kind of complemented each other, but Alice was starting to feel a pressing need to refine her area of focus down a little bit. For now, she decided to focus on a few directions.

First, she needed to boost her enchanting abilities. Right now, enchanting was the primary method she used to feed herself. She wanted to boost her enchanting skills more, so that she would have the money for new research projects. Enchanting and research materials weren’t cheap, after all, and Alice was running dangerously low on basically everything. Since she had started education, her free time had, rather inevitably, dropped to practically nothing, and she had been forced to temporarily abandon her newfound hobby of carving and making board games to play with her friends. She hadn’t even gotten around to repairing the die she had cracked during her last game with Cecilia and Anne yet. She was also having a hard time keeping up with her enchantments for Cecilia’s shop. As a result, Alice’s funds were starting to shrink, albeit at a very slow pace. Since Alice didn’t have much money to begin with, this concerned her. However, if Alice didn’t spend as much time as she could in the library and in classes, all of the time and suffering she had poured into getting admitted to a magic academy would have been for nothing, so Alice was determined to find a way to make this work. She just needed to focus a little on boosting her funding sources in the near future, or she would run out of money to feed and clothe herself.

Second, she wanted to explore mana fractals and any historical changes to the system. She didn’t see any mentions of the former in the library, but given its somewhat confusing organization system, Alice was hoping maybe there was a mention of it somewhere in the shelves of books that she simply hadn’t come across yet. Regarding the history of the System, Alice was able to find all sorts of historical studies detailing how and when the System had made specific changes. Apparently, classes, Perks, and Skills were nowhere near as static as she had first assumed. Sometimes, a Class would change a little bit here and there, with the level requirement for Perks going up or down by a small margin or a new class getting ‘discovered.’ There was all sorts of debate about whether these classes had always existed and were simply discovered by chance, or whether they were actively created by the system to meet people’s needs, but there was no decisive conclusion. Alice found this to be both fascinating and relevant to her interests, so she intended to read up on this academic debate when she had more time.

Third, she wanted to see if anyone else had explored topics related to how mana and the human body interacted. This was one of the bigger cornerstones of her research, and she needed to see if there were easy ways to boost herself past some of the awkward first experiments and tests she would need to do to establish a working base of knowledge for herself. She might still need to redo some of the experiments, due to her ability to see System mana while others couldn’t, but that wouldn’t make all of the experiments she might be able to find completely worthless. Since she could share ‘memories’ with Cecilia and Cecilia was still interested in sharing Alice’s research, she would have a second set of eyes to go over her results, and that was good enough for her.

Finally, she wanted to learn more about magic seed creation. Her failure to create a working magic seed without the help of the System was frustrating to her, and the cooldown for {Broken Seed} was nearly over. Once that happened, she would have another two chances to try to make a magic seed on her own without accidentally killing herself in the process.

Unlike the study of mana and the human body, Magic Seed creation was very well researched. So much so, in fact, that one could find a theory that conflicted with nearly every other theory about how and why magic seeds were made.

Luckily, most of the Mages in this world understood that theories without tests to back them up were often worthless, and the mage library had a fair number of studies on people trying out different methods of forming seeds for the sake of Science. Seed slots were precious, but plenty of bright Mages in the past had tried ‘improving’ the technique of seed formation. Some of them had even succeeded. And, for the sake of future Mages (or because they wanted to boost their level in [Scholar]), most of these attempts were recorded in great detail. Alice was sure she could figure something out if she started looking through these studies.

Therefore, after Alice finished reading her book about double enchantments, she temporarily shelved her study of double enchantments and other topics of personal interest. She only had a week and some change before her next attempt at forming magic seeds, and she wanted to be more prepared this time. She started reading through other people’s attempts to improve the process of forming a magic seed, to see what their thoughts were.

Apart from Alice’s time with the academy’s library, she continued attending her classes. She didn’t make any new major connections with her classmates, because she was already starting to feel seriously stretched for time. However, she was at least able to make smalltalk with most of the students in her smaller classes and greet them if she saw them walking through the halls. She paid a bit more attention to her connection with Erkki, Arsi, Laila, and Luka, because they were fellow Mages who had shown her some level of goodwill and Alice wasn’t opposed to getting to know them better. Especially Erkki and Arsi – Alice was able to talk about bizarre and eclectic magic topics with them and have interesting conversations about them, which made her value their conversations a fair bit more than the smalltalk she shared with her other classmates.

The lessons slowly, but surely, let Alice start building a better idea of what ‘normal’ Mages thought about mana, magic, and the world around them.

In her organic magic class, they studied more about human biology, with the teacher promising that in a few weeks promising students would be allowed to test for special licenses that would let them treat basic, nonlethal conditions under the supervision of more experienced healers. Professor Felissa also promised that the top five [Students] in the next test would be allowed to tag along while Professor Felissa visited one of her friends who ran a clinic if they were interested.

In monster biology, they started learning about the weaknesses of monsters. Vinebears and spidercrabs seemed to be the early focus of lessons, though the teacher did also briefly mention Lurkers, a type of plant-like monster that crawled along the bottom of rivers and could influence ‘weight’ with magic. Alice vaguely remembered that this monster had nearly eaten her during her flight to Cyra, all those months ago…

She also started to wonder how monsters got around the problem of influencing other living creatures with magic. Monsters couldn’t access the System, so they didn’t have Perks that let them ignore mana resistance. How did they deal with the problem?

When Alice asked the teacher about this question, Professor Esaiyas had no clue. Alice mentally filed it away as something to check out in the library when she had the time.

In Theory of Mana class, the class went on to discussing the theory of ‘mana vents,’ one of the current leading theories about why some areas of the world had much denser mana than others. It stated that some parts of the earth, for various reasons, emitted mana as a kind of… energy source that then slowly spread across the rest of the world. Honestly, Alice wasn’t too impressed with the theory. It was overly simplistic, and seemed to have no idea whatsoever why there were a variety of odd little variations in mana density from area to area. She was, however, relieved to know that this world had at least put some effort into figuring out where mana came from, even if this theory didn’t really seem like a good answer to that question.

In Morals class they did… nothing, really. Alice considered this class to be a bigger and bigger waste of time every time she showed up to the class. She had never skipped a class before, but for morals class she was seriously starting to get tempted…

However, on Friday Alice was surprised by self-defense most of all.

“All right, we’ve learned at least a bit about some of the more vital skills a Mage needs in order to survive. {Dodge} is a skill that improves your ability to react to sudden attacks and to avoid getting hit, obviously, and it’s one of the most important skills you have if you don’t want to either wear armor at all times or die during a sneak attack. However, just having a high {Dodge} skill and lots of levels in your classes isn’t enough to fight something. I first have a question for you. How many people here have killed a monster before?”

Perhaps three quarters the class raised their hands. Alice joined them.

“All right, a little lower than I was expecting, but I still figured most of you would have the Achievement for killing a monster by now. For those of you who haven’t gotten it yet, this is for you.

“Normally, as all of you know, Mages are one of the biggest specialties of Illvaria. They are the backbone of the Illvarian military and economy, and it isn’t wrong to say that Mages have directly shaped the nation of Illvaria as a whole. Plenty of people even claim that Illvaria is the magic capital of the Shil Confederacy, which isn’t exactly wrong.”

The students nodded.

“Well, starting this year, the Crown has decided that [Students] need to get a little more in shape – IF they want to. Self Defense class is mandatory, but for those of you who are interested in more practical lessons, by order of the crown I am now going to be offering extra classes for free at certain timeslots, which are written down on this piece of paper at the front of the classroom. You can join in on one of them, or all of them, or none of them as you see fit. It’s up to you. These lessons will involve joining a group of your fellow classmates to hunt some carefully vetted monsters or small groups of monsters together, after some assessments to see what you’re capable of.

“The first thing I want to make abundantly clear is that this is NOT mandatory. You don’t have to join in if you don’t want to. I honestly figure that most of you have already killed monsters before, so this is more of a way to keep your skills sharp than anything else. It’s meant to be a controlled form of practical combat training, but if you don’t have the time or don’t want to take any risks, that’s perfectly fine. The second thing I want to say is that this will be slightly dangerous, although not greatly dangerous. The [Spies] and [Scouts] of the crown carefully vet target monster areas before you join, so if you do decide to join in, there won’t be something shocking like an alpha leading a swarm suddenly popping up and ravaging the group. There will also be a few high level [Knights] keeping watch over groups to make sure nothing bad happens, and some of the Organic Magic teachers have also volunteered to tag along as healers if something goes wrong. As long as you don’t instantly die during these extra classes, you will be healed free of charge, and we are taking every measure we can to protect you during that time.

“That being said, even if it’s a very controlled fight against monsters, a fight is a fight. Accidents happen. It’s unlikely, but not impossible for you to die. I will say that we’re borrowing from the military’s pool of [Spies] and [Scouts] that find bandit groups for Mages who join the military to kill, in order to get their first bloods. Their track record, so far, has a less than 0.3% fatality rate across the last decade. So your odds of dying are pretty darn low and you should be safe.

“Those that are interested, you don’t have to say anything. Just check the timeslots at the front later, and come if you’re interested.

“Oh, one more thing. Due to some shortages in manpower in the Illvarian army recently, the benefits for joining the military track are going to be formally increased starting this year. The monsters of the south are proving to be more troublesome than expected, so the military is upping the benefits for joining the army. There will be a more specific set of details later, so stay posted if you are either in the military track or thinking of joining. Anyway,” said Tanmi. “The extra lessons will start next month. In the same vein of thought, in two weeks we’re going to begin sparring with other classmates as well. Something to keep an eye out for.”

Alice frowned, thinking it over.

Truthfully, her first instinct was to reject the idea of the extra classes. She was already stretched for time, and she also didn’t like fighting very much. This world also wasn’t overly violent. There weren’t crazy murderers and monsters around every corner of the planet – it was surprisingly ordered and neat. Humans were a very adaptable species, and humanity in this world had adapted to suit its environment well. Civilization was a relatively safe and stable place. Even though it didn’t quite match up to the rule of law in her previous world, with the help of the System the world was still mostly safe and peaceful.

However, even though she originally felt like rejecting the extra classes would be for the best, after some thinking she realized that she wasn’t in the same position as ordinary residents of this world. Even if she hadn’t seen them yet, the Society of Starry Eyes still posed a potential threat to her. Sticking her head in the sand and hoping that they never found her might work out, but it was a solution that relied entirely on luck and hoping for the best. Keeping her combat abilities up to date wouldn’t be an awful idea, and these extra lessons were one of the few ways she could do so while maintaining some semblance of safety.

She tapped her chin in thought, before she turned to the other classmates she knew in self-defense, Luka and Laila.

“Are the two of you planning to join in?” asked Alice, hesitantly. She had already mostly made up her mind to join, given how threatening the Society could be if it ever noticed her existence, but she was still a little hesitant. Having some people she knew along for the ride would make it easier to stomach being exposed to danger when she could hide away from it.

“I don’t think I’m going to,” said Laila, shrugging. “I’m honestly not too interested in fighting, and my family said I should avoid it in case I get hurt. I’m a Mage, but I’ve never really been terribly interested in… you know, Magic. My family mostly pushed me to join the academy for the prestige of having a Mage in the family, and I don’t really want to push my luck in this kind of thing.”

“I’m definitely going to join,” said Luka, grinning at both of them. “It’s a good opportunity to make connections, and it’s also good training for the future. If I’m going to serve under my brother as one of the head Mages of the territory, I shouldn’t be lacking in combat experience. I’m probably going to be weeding out monsters all the time in the future, and I should keep my skills steady. Are you joining in?”

“I’m thinking about it,” said Alice. “I haven’t totally made up my mind yet, but I’m leaning towards joining in.”

“Let me know if you decide before the extra classes start next month. We can go together, if there’s a day that works for both of us. I’ll ask Arsi and Erkki as well.”

Alice nodded.

Duels in a few weeks, and maybe monster subjugations after that, huh? Alice felt a nervous shiver run down her spine. She wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but she was quietly resolving herself for the future.

* * *

Somewhere far away, a group of people sat in a research base. An Immortal sat together with four other men and women, who were discussing something in hushed tones.

“So you mean to say that the oddities are increasing?” Asked one of the women, looking at one of the other researchers.

“Yes. The way that it’s increasing is very… strange, as well. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But the way that mana itself is behaving recently seems… odd.” Said the other assistant, a male who looked to be in his late thirties.

“Do you have any data to back that up? I haven’t noticed anything in my day to day usage of mana.”

“If you take a look at the mana series of experiments, the recent studies of case 44, 46, and 47 have all produced abnormal results that don’t seem consistent with any of our earlier hypotheses. Furthermore, when we re-tested experiment mana-42 in a few different labs, the results were abnormal, diverging significantly from the first few times we ran the test. In the first tests we ran, people who suffered odd symptoms as a result of mana deprivation recovered almost immediately from the symptoms after being placed back into a normal mana-rich environment. However, as of now the streams of mana take a couple extra seconds to reconnect to their body properly. This isn’t a big deal in and of itself – in fact, if it were just one or two, we might have assumed it was just the result of a few Perks screwing with things. However, for all of the tests to suddenly have slightly different results is very odd indeed.

“Furthermore, I’ve recently learned that one of the child test subjects we purchased from the Sigmusi has unlocked the System despite only being four. Children don’t get access to the System until the age of six, but we have run him through seventeen different Perks that all acknowledge the fact that he is four. This is the first time I’ve heard of a case like this… ever. The child has acquired the [Experimental Subject] and [Slave] classes already, and we have confirmed that after running more tests on him, his flesh is getting harder and his body is getting harder to injure. Just like someone’s [Endurance] stat increasing. For a four year old to do this should be impossible, but it’s somehow happening right now.”

The Immortal who was standing at the head of the table frowned upon hearing this news.

“A four year old with levels? Have you checked to see if there’s some sort of… odd discrepancy between his biological and chronological age? If he were born a mage, he could be 20% older than his biological age claims he is, which would still make this odd, but…”

“The child’s biological and chronological age are confirmed to be four. The boy is a non-mage, and there seems to have been no particularly unusual circumstances in his upbringing up to the point where he was kidnapped and sold as a test subject.”

“Bring in the boy to the primary labs for further inspection. Also, we need to find some other four year old children and see if we can find out what caused this oddity. Are there any good ways to acquire some human children on short notice?”

“We’ve bought some from the Sigmusi slave trade, but their supplies are running now,” said the other female assistant. “Apparently they’re running into supply problems. A crackdown on the central continent is happening because for once the church of the System and the church of mana managed to put aside their differences and jointly denounced the Sigmusi empire for practicing barbaric and backward practices such as slavery. They put some pressure on the republic to do a better job of maintaining their borders, and as a result [Smugglers] aren’t having an easy time kidnapping and selling people to the Sigmusi Imperia right now.”

“Irritating,” said the leader, frowning. “Recently, dimensional abnormalities have also been increasing. We haven’t quite gotten a centralized notification system up yet, but field agents have recently detected evidence of three dimensional cracks having appeared in the past twenty years. This is far cry from the original one we found that started the Society of Stars, and the one we found after uniting the Society of Stars and Society of Eyes. While it could just be a fluke, this isn’t the time to lose our test subjects. How can we procure more?”

“I have a couple ideas, though most of them will have long term repercussions if something goes wrong,” said the final [Assistant.] He stood up, before grabbing a piece of paper and pushing it to the center of the table.

The other four members of the meeting grabbed the piece of paper, before they began to slowly pore over the contents. Finally, the Immortal spoke.

“I think raiding a few smaller groups in Illvaria is for the best. Their military is already starting to lack manpower, since they’re trying to launch their recolonization effort and they’re also trying to keep up the maintenance of their armies on the western front as well, in case the Sigmusi are crazy enough to launch another war. They’ve mostly relaxed their guard against the northern border, since the nomads are focused on their civil war right now, which means that there’s a big opening in their norther territories right now. Illvaria just doesn’t have the population and wealth to cover all of their territory right now, and because their roads aren’t in the best shape it will take them a lot of time to shuttle their manpower back north, even if they discover a problem. I feel that with their lowered security, we could probably procure some test subjects from there, as long as we are careful and stealthy. Does anyone else have any thoughts?”

“I think that we could also target a few other countries in the Shil Confederacy. Norwick and Eldren are at each other’s throats right now, and while two of the big five countries in the Shil Confederacy probably won’t go to war while tensions with the Sigmusi are ramping up, with those two countries it’s never quite possible to tell. They’re already starting to skirmish with each other again, and that will waste a huge amount of their manpower and military resources. I think those two are also good targets,” said one of the female [Assistants].

“It’s not an ideal long-term solution, since it might give those countries a way to actually attack us, but we need to be paying attention to changes in experiments and the behavior of mana right now. Something about all of this makes me feel… off…” said one of the male [Assistants]. “I don’t know, it’s just a hunch. I know those aren’t very reliable, but…” he shrugged. “I feel like something big is about to happen.”

“I think it’s a reasonable course of action to take,” said the Immortal, after considering the input of the two. “All right, start contacting the bases and manpower near the region to see if they can procure more test subjects. Focus on the poor and criminal elements of society, wherever possible. They’re the ones that won’t be easily missed. If it’s possible, disguise some of the disappearances as failed mana baptisms. Plenty die to that every year anyway. The countries in question will catch on sooner or later, but we can maybe buy some time that way.”

The meeting was adjourned as plans were set into motion.

* * *

Somewhere far to the north, an Immortal and his servant grinned. They hadn’t finished clearing out all of the monsters in their area yet, but they were getting closer. Soon they would be done.

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 75

On Friday, Alice finally got around to repairing the dice she and Anne had cracked during the last game of The Settlers, and reinforced the dice a bit with some leftover enchanting materials and some scraps of iron. It wasn’t perfect, but it should resist any major Mage-fights more effectively now. On Saturday, She, Cecilia, Anne, and Ezrien got together for another game of The Settlers. Ezrien got acquainted with the magically influenced rule set quickly, and the four of them enjoyed playing another round of the game. Alice was starting to wonder if this would probably become something of a weekly tradition, based on Cecilia and Anne’s newfound enthusiasm for the game. Despite the fact that the rules were totally different from what they had been back on Earth, Alice was still gratified to see that one of her favorite games from home was popular here. Besides, having some small amount of social interaction with her friends was an important way to maintain her social life, and considering how stretched for time she was already this was about all she could manage. Whenever she had more time, she would like to carve a few more board games from home, but that was impossible right now.

After Friday, the weekend began. Much like back on Earth, weekends in the world of Luliv were free from classes, so Alice had enough free time to catch up on her enchanting. This helped restore some of her slowly dwindling funds. Alice did some rough calculations and determined that, if things continued to sell for the same price and at the same rate, she could probably hover somewhere between three and five gold suns per week. It wasn’t exactly financial stability, but it also wasn’t as bad as she had been thinking it would be when she was looking over her finances earlier in the week.

Apart from that, Alice finally picked up the 25th level of Apprentice Enchanter. Because [Apprentice Enchanter] was a Student/Apprentice type class, it maxed out at level 25, meaning Alice had her final Perk in the class, as well as her second opportunity to go through a class Evolution. She chose the Perk fairly quickly, based on her continuously increasing need to increase the number of hours she could spend awake and productive in a day.

Speed-Enchanting

Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level 25 or higher, Endurance 100 or higher, Intelligence 125 or higher

While working on an enchantment, you may spend more mana to produce the Enchantment more quickly. This effectively allows you to trade mana for time, wasting more mana in exchange for producing the same product more quickly.

In general, Alice spent at least two hours and no more than five hours working on enchantments every night. This was becoming seriously hard to sustain, because she had so many competing objectives to sink time into. This might not exactly be an optimal solution for that problem, but it was about the best she expected to get from an Apprentice class at level 25. It would require her to waste some mana to activate, but it was still less wasteful than doing nothing with the mana at all. Then, Alice turned her attention to her class evolution.

This one only had three options, unlike her first evolution.

Class Evolution: Apprentice Enchanter

Enchanter: An Enchanter that focuses on having a balanced approach to the school of enchanting. They specialize in neither speed nor in rare but incredibly detailed enchantments. A jack of all trades within the enchanting profession, but also the one that holds the most versatility when it comes to selecting Perks.

Unlocked as a result of: Having the Apprentice Enchanter class at level 25

Increases Effect of [Magic] Attribute by 10%. Your ability to assess the effects of Enchantments you have not encountered before increases significantly, and the speed at which you can produce an enchantment is improved by 20%. The quality of items you enchant will receive a small boost, especially when it comes to mana efficiency (other aspects of items will still receive a boost, just a less significant one).

Mass-Enchanter: An enchanter specializing in producing large quantities of enchantments quickly. Mass-Enchanters often specialize in producing consumable enchantments, because that type of enchantment benefits the most from being able to produce multiple items at a time. The Perks of this class reflect this bias, but do not restrict the class. Most suitable for those that wish to produce large numbers of average-quality enchantments, or produce consumable enchantments

Unlocked as a result of: Having [Apprentice Enchanter] class at level 25 or higher, produce at least 10 consumable enchantments, produce more than 20 enchanted items within a week

Increases Effect of [Magic] Attribute by 20%. Your multitasking abilities will become more easily applicable to enchanted items.

Careful Enchanter: An enchanter who specializes in producing very specific, unique enchantments with a great variety of details, often at the cost of producing enchantments quickly. Suitable for those who wish to one day forge Artifacts for Immortals to fight with… or for those who are simply very ambitious when they create new enchantments.

Unlocked as a result of: Spend more than a month working on one specific enchantment or item, [Apprentice Enchanter] class at level 25 or higher, Intelligence at least 150.

Increases the effect of the [Intelligence] Stat by 10% when planning the details of a new item. Your enchanted items will receive a very noticeable boost in quality, but it will become even harder to apply your multitasking abilities to creating different items at once. At the same time, it will become easier to use multitasking abilities when all split focuses are working on producing the same item, and items will receive a further boost in quality for every division of your attention focused on producing an item at once.

After some thinking, Alice decided to take the [Careful Enchanter] class. One of her biggest problems remained the inability to get enough hours in the day to do everything she wanted to, but [Kinetic Manabinder] already seemed like a class that would provide Perks that solved that problem, given enough time and Levels. [Scholar] and [Scientist] also had some Perks that helped her save time or improve the use of what time she had, and so she would just start hoping that the System gave her some options from those classes instead. After all, the System explicitly responded to what people wanted when choosing the Perks people could take every time one of their classes reached the appropriate level, so Alice didn’t feel the need to devote another class to solving this problem when she could already solve it, given enough time and Levels in her other classes.

And instead of churning out mass produced enchantments, Alice felt that it was better to make a smaller quantity of well-made enchantments. One of the reason Cecilia’s shop struggled to make a foothold in Metsel, and the reason both she and Cecilia had a harder time selling some of their work, was that their products just didn’t quite match up to the quality one would expect from a professional Enchanter shop. The two lowered the price of their objects to account for that, but it was still hard to get customers in the door sometimes, according to Cecilia. One of the only reasons Cecilia’s shop still managed to get by was the fact that Alice’s enchantments tended to be based on weird seeds or weird ideas most [Enchanters] didn’t bother building enchantments around, meaning that her enchantments didn’t have much competition in the market. And once customers were already in the door, Cecilia could use her [Merchant] Perks to figure out what customers wanted and how much they were willing to pay, meaning she could usually get customers to buy a few more things once they were already there. However, this wasn’t exactly producing buckets of money. If some sort of enchantment was needed by large numbers of people, [Enchanters] would already be producing it, so the market Cecilia’s shop currently catered to was quite niche. If the two wanted to make enough money to feed themselves, their enchantments needed to get better so that they could expand their customer base.

Besides, Alice also figured that once she finally made a proper System Mana seed, she would want to be able to make enchantments with it. If for no other reason than the sheer curiosity of finding out what she would be able to make, since besides filtering mana Alice wasn’t really sure what else System mana even did. [Careful Enchanter] seemed like it would make that process easier and faster.

Apart from that, Alice got a little bit of progress in her other classes over the weekend, especially in [Explorer of Magic] and [Kinetic Manabinder], as well as a bit of progress in her new [Careful Enchanter] class. Grinding out enchantments wasn’t the fastest way to level, but it was still slowly and steadily getting her some Experience towards levelling her classes.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder: 12->14

Explorer of Magic: 51->52

Careful Enchanter: 1->3

Scholar 34-> 36

Admittedly, Alice didn’t absorb very much mana before going from level 51 to 52 in [Explorer of Magic]. She had probably been really close the next level already. But she decided to take her blessings when they came and leave it at that. After picking her [Scholar] Perk, the week continued with little in the way of new and important events.

Scholar of Magic

Requirements: Scholar level 35 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, at least 1 magic seed is at a mana conversion ratio of 150% or higher, at least 3 magic seeds present.

When reading a book, listening to a lecture, or interacting with schoolwork related to a certain kind of magic seed, if you have a correlating magic seed inside of your body at that time you will be able to raise the mana conversion ratio of the seed beyond its limit.

Note: This process is rather slow, and the speed will slow down further the higher the current mana conversion ratio of the related seed is.

Alice took {Scholar of Magic} due to the fact that would help her improve her magic seeds a step further. The value of increasing the mana conversion ratio in her seeds by any amount was huge, since it allowed her to regenerate mana every day. This improved her ability to train her Classes and Skills, make more enchanted items every day, and improve her quality of life and combat ability. Best of all, the Perk would activate as a result of her going about her regular, day to day life. She didn’t need to take time or energy to work on using the Perk, because it would just passively activate in the background as she went around her daily schedule. Even if it was a Perk that was absolutely devoted to ‘long term growth,’ Alice felt it was well worth investing a Perk slot into. She had the safety and financial security to invest a bit in her future right now. And since Alice had 5 Magic Seeds, the value of improving her magic seeds was much higher than the normal value someone might get out of this Perk.

Another week came and went. Alice attended her classes, worked with Ezrien’s team, and enchanted objects to sell at Cecilia’s workshop in the evenings. {Scholar of Magic} started to show its effects, however minor they were, by raising her Organic mana seed by 1%. The speed the Perk worked at left much to be desired, but Alice was still content with the newfound potential for her seeds to keep improving.

About halfway through the second week, Alice got two small surprises.

You have unlocked the class [Student] as a result of spending more than fifty hours in classes in an educational facility. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

You do not have any primary class slots available. Class automatically added to secondary classes.

Alice put aside some of her time in the library to go to the branch of the Church of the System closest to her and check out what the [Student] class actually offered. Unfortunately, it wasn’t particularly exciting. The class mostly offered some boosts to the [Intelligence] and [Willpower] Stats, as well as other miscellaneous buffs such as improvements to memory. Alice already had photographic memory as a result of her other Perks, and already had a fair number of stacking multipliers for her Intelligence and Willpower stats, so the class wasn’t particularly appealing. The only other thing the class offered before evolving that might be considered noteworthy was a couple of boosts to experience points for other classes, as well as some enhancements to how effectively one could cram and some more reductions to the body’s need for sleep. The last of which Alice actually found pretty useful, if she could actually get those Perks.

In any case there was no penalty for having more secondary classes, so she just figured it was a nice smaller boost to her learning abilities and left it at that. Since secondary classes leveled at only 20% of the speed of a primary class, and only counted as half of their level for the purposes of Perks, she doubted she would be seeing any benefits from the class in the near future. Maybe someday it would provide a few useful Perks, or fodder for some post level 75 Perks?

The second small surprise was an Achievement.

Capable Enchanter (Rarity:5)

You have produced 150 enchanted items. Your practice and skills as an [Enchanter] have begun to improve, and your hard work is beginning to pay off.

+5% Effect of the [Magic] Attribute. +15% levelling speed for all Enchanting-related classes. Speed of making enchanted items is very slightly increased.

For a Rarity 5 Achievement, the effects were a bit lacking, but it was still better to have it than not have it.

Apart from that, Alice spent the week focusing on reading the journals of various people who had tried to improve magic seed formation. The majority of people who had tried this tended to create a worse product than just normally forming a seed by concentrating on a subject while dragging in mana, but a few people had found some tips and ideas that could slightly improve Seeds.

However, once Alice discovered a journal detailing one of the more successful ‘innovations’ to seed formation, she was more than a little surprised.

The journal in question was from a mage about eight hundred years in the past. It discussed how, in addition to just concentrating on the concept one wanted to base a magic seed off of, one needed to work on filtering the mana in their surroundings. The author stated that it was best to use a pure mana seed in order to help ‘straighten out’ the mana in their surroundings while forming a mana seed. Specifically, since atmospheric mana was usually mixed with small hints of broken mana here and there, the author proposed that it was best to help filter out all of the little bits of broken mana and use purer mana when forming a mana seed. The journal discussed, in detail, how this would make it easier for the human body to use and adapt to the newly formed seed, and even had a few diagrams helpfully drawn inside of it on how to set up a ‘mana fractal’ that purified the mana in its surroundings.

And Alice had seen parts of this fractal before. In fact, with her photographic memory, she was able to recognize with perfect clarity the fact that some of this fractal was present whenever she tried to form a magic seed with the help of the System. The System version of the purification fractal was vastly more complicated, but it was sort of like looking at a house and then looking at a mansion. Even though the size, complexity, and decorations of a house and a mansion might be utterly and completely different, both were ultimately still buildings people lived in, and there were some similarities in how they were built if you looked closely enough.

This puzzled Alice. If the System already helped people ‘straighten out’ mana, how did someone make a name for themselves doing something that the System was already doing a much better job of? The reason Alice had picked up the book was because one of the other journals she had read had discussed the discoveries made by the author of this one, and how they had revolutionized some of the theory of magic seed creation. But that made no sense at all, since this person was just doing an inferior version of what the System already did for free. Something was wrong here.

Alice started searching through historical records of the time, and was able to find a book from 500 years ago titled ‘Records of major magical innovations and a brief discussion of their effects on society.’ When she looked through it, sure enough, the discussion of ‘filtered mana fractals’ was listed as an important innovation that, for a time, had made a name for the Mage who discovered it. Even though an individual couldn’t use the method in question unless they already had a pure mana seed and the ability to multitask, it was also entirely possible for a fellow Mage to ‘help out’ during the seed formation process. This had, for a while, led to an explosion of popularity for a class known as [Seed-Boosters], a type of class that was solely devoted to helping Mages and soon to be Mages form their magic seeds in exchange for money or other services.

However, this class had died out less than a hundred years after it started to gain popularity. The reason was simple – Mages had started to ‘exhibit signs of assistance from a [Seed-Assister] even if they didn’t purchase the services of one.’ At the time, this had become one of the unsolved mysteries of Mages and the study of Magic, but since the end result was good and it was hard to make any discoveries about why [Seed-Boosters] had become irrelevant, most Mages appeared to have eventually dropped the matter and forgotten about it over the course of the next few centuries. After all, when it came to the study of magic in the world of Luliv, there were always new and interesting topics for [Scholars] to study. An unresolved mystery would only remain in the limelight for so long before people found new topics to research.

Alice frowned when she learned about the history of [Seed Boosters] and mana filtering. Even though it was just a guess right now, her first assumption after doing more research was that the System had ‘copied’ the help a [Seed-Booster] could provide and then just… automated the whole process. Perhaps along the way, it had started to pick up other, more specific tidbits of information that helped it boost the strength of people’s seeds in the process? Or maybe the System had found other, better ways to go about making magic seeds easy to form and stable? Whatever the case, it seemed unlikely that the System had always helped people build seeds the way it did now. Or, perhaps, it had done so in a different way in the past, or… something.

Alice had no way of predicting exactly how the System worked hundreds of years ago when nobody besides her was able to see System mana. The fact that nobody else had even confirmed its existence (as far as she knew) made trying to guess when and how the System did things in the distant past an exercise in frustration and futility, after all. Still, this historical tidbit seemed to strongly suggest that the System was more adaptable than Alice had first thought. And, more importantly, it also gave her a much better idea of what she might be doing wrong when she tried to form magic seeds on her own.

Alice spent extra time poring over the journal, making extra sure to memorize the diagrams and the details of each diagram in as much detail as she could manage. She decided she would try it out this Sunday, when she created another experimental magic seed.

With her Enchanting abilities coming along nicely, and her research on the System coming along nicely, no other major events happened during the week. The following weekend, Alice invited the four classmates she was on good terms with to play The Settlers with her as a way of boosting their friendship. Erkki, Laila, and Asri accepted her offer. Luka stated that he was going to attend a party on that day, but he would come next Saturday if Alice welcomed him.

Another game of totally-not-messed-up Settlers passed by, and Sunday came. After dumping a little over half of her mana on enchanting (as well as most of her morning and afternoon), Alice asked Cecilia to let her use a workshop room as a manaless room again. Alice swallowed nervously after blocking mana entry into the room.

It was about to be her fourth (and fifth) time trying to form a magic seed without the help of the System. Maybe this time she would finally succeed?

Alice first spent almost three hours trying to replicate a working mana filter. She had assumed that the shape and complexities of the mana construct wouldn’t be too hard to control – after all, Alice had the ability to split her attention into four different focuses right now. No matter how complex and detailed the mana filters were, it wouldn’t be hard to control when she could split her attention in four, right?

This assumption turned out to be incorrect. Anytime Alice tried to build a filter, whether inside or outside of the manaless room, she always found that she had messed up a few tiny details when constructing the filter, causing the whole thing to fall apart. However, at the very least, Alice didn’t think that she was totally messing up the whole thing, even though her attempts failed over and over again. It was simply that she was trying something very complicated for the first time, and if she messed up some of the smaller details the entire thing ended up not working. Cecilia, who eventually came by to help look over Alice’s experiment and freeload some XP and Achievements, ended up helping Alice by pointing out a few of the smaller details Alice kept messing up on, once Alice shared her memory of the mana construct she was trying to make and Cecilia inspected Alice’s attempts to replicate the mana construct. The ability to divide her attention into four different focuses wasn’t quite enough to make the filter easily, but once she had the muscle memory for what she was trying to do down, it started to get easier and easier with each failed attempt.

Finally, when Alice was almost completely out of Pure mana, she managed to make a working mana filter with Cecilia’s help. When mana passed through the filter, it looked very subtly different than before. Alice wouldn’t have noticed the subtle difference in mana coloration if she hadn’t been paying close attention, but the mana was easier to command and work with after it had been filtered once.

After that, Alice walked back into the manaless room and tried forming another Electromagnetic magic seed, after going through her usual safety checks and precautions.

The fourth attempt failed, as usual. Something was still off about her electromagnetic seed, and {Safety Analysis} informed her that keeping the seed in her body for an extended period of time would be dangerous. Alice spent an hour looking over the seed, taking note of which parts felt weird to her and comparing those to the Mages with working Electromagnetic Mages she had seen, before she used {Reset} and started her fifth attempt at making a seed without the help of the System.

After making her set of filters, letting some more mana into the room before cutting it off from the outside world again, and preparing to form her magic seed, Alice started drawing in mana again. She put to work her three months of failed attempts at magic seed formation, as well as her renewed understanding of the topic from the library and her now semi-functional mana filter, and started concentrating on what she knew about electromagnetics. Not the fundamental force of Electromagnetics that she was familiar with from back on Earth, but the simple concept of electricity and magnets, as well as the way they worked. Since that was what Electromagnetic seeds were limited to on this world, Alice didn’t want to get too ambitious until she had a few control experiments to work with.

The surrounding mana was filtered by her mana fractal before being absorbed by her body, and it quickly began to compact itself in the extra organ behind her heart. Within a few minutes, Alice’s fifth attempt at making a magic seed independently was formed.

Alice frowned, as she ran {Safety Analysis} on the experiment of ‘keeping the seed inside of her body.’

And, for the first time ever, she got a result indicating that the seed wouldn’t harm her if she kept it inside of her body. Even though Alice’s electromagnetic seed still looked a little wonky, and still seemed to be missing some of the shape and elegance most electromagnetic seeds possessed, it was the first time Alice had made an Electromagnetic Seed that didn’t seem likely to poison her if she held onto it for an extended period of time.

Alice tried to suppress a quiver of excitement as {Safety Analysis} gave her the most promising result she had obtained so far. Then, she reached towards the door of the manaless room and prepared to take a step outside. Had she finally succeeded in making a magic seed without the help of the System?

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 76

Alice stepped out of the manaless room, and Cecilia, who had been waiting outside, looked at her with hints of anticipation in her expression. Mana started rushing towards Alice, but for now, she ignored all of the System notifications that were popping up. She would deal with them when she was done with the experiment.

Alice tried to extend a tendril from her newest seed, before frowning. In her excitement, she had completely forgotten that new magic seeds tended to start out pretty empty of mana. Right now, her newly made electromagnetic seed only had a 5% conversion ratio from her Magic Stat.

My magic stat is currently 142, multiplied by 1.22 because the effectiveness of my magic stat is 122%. Since my electromagnetic seed gets 5% of that… This thing has an absolute maximum of about eight and a half Mariums? Suddenly, Alice felt a small headache. It seemed… surprisingly difficult to test her seed right now. She only regenerated 2.7% of her maximum mana every hour, and she would need at least a Marium or two to start messing with metal objects in her surroundings if she wanted to get a good read on how well her new seed was working. Previously, Alice hadn’t gotten this far in her seed production experiments. After all, the normal process of forming a seed without the System was ‘form seed->realize something is wrong with it-> mess with it for a bit before breaking it with {Broken Seed}.’ Since this was Alice’s first potential success, she wanted to try it out. But since her seed was so ridiculously inefficient, it would take around four hours to get a Marium of mana. Assuming this seed regenerated mana as effectively as a normal seed, which was probably a pipe dream.

Alice sighed. It seemed like she would need to wait for a while before she could test her new seed out.

“Did it work?” asked Cecilia, seeing that Alice was finally done thinking and musing to herself.

“I don’t know!” said Alice, grimacing. “I want to test it, but I don’t have any mana inside of the seed to try it.”

“But is the seed dangerous like usual? Most of the ones you form make you sick if they stick around in your body for extended periods of time. Did this one finally fix that problem?”

“It seems that I can keep the Electromagnetic seed without hurting myself,” said Alice, nodding. “At the very least, {Safety Analysis} isn’t giving me any warnings at all about this one, so I should be safe. If nothing else, that’s a huge step up in quality from previous attempts. I just don’t know if the seed actually does anything yet.”

“That’s disappointing,” said Cecilia, frowning. “How long do we have to wait until you can test it?” she asked, impatiently shuffling from side to side as she looked at the mana in their surroundings.

“By my very rough math, about four hours,” said Alice. “But that’s assuming the seed regenerates mana at the same rate as a normal magic seed. It’s entirely plausible that I made a seed that doesn’t hurt me, but doesn’t work at all, or that the seed is super inefficient at regenerating mana. Or has some other flaw like being unable to make mana tendrils or something. Who knows whether this thing works or not?”

“That makes sense,” said Cecilia, sighing. “The last couple seeds you formed without the help of the System were all pretty messy, and most of them were downright dangerous. We don’t know how many different ways there are to form a magic seed incorrectly, but I’m betting there are quite a few ways to mess up. Just because it’s not dangerous this time doesn’t mean it’s functioning.”

Alice sighed, wishing time would pass more quickly. Since there was nothing the two could do for a bit, Alice decided to check on her System notifications and see if the System had anything to say about her new Magic Seed. She ignored the Level, Skill, and Stat notifications for now because she could deal with them later.

You have gained an Achievement!

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

You have taken steps to create a magic seed on your own, without the assistance of the System. While some may argue that this is a waste of time, due to the fact the results are directly inferior to making a seed normally, it cannot be denied that a great deal of time, effort, and research were put into this moment.

+75% class experience for all magic-related classes. +50% for all research-related classes. The cooldown time for {Broken Seed} or its evolved Perks are reduced by 50%. You may now use the Perk on other people if you make physical contact with them. (Note – you cannot break the magic seeds others without their consent. They must knowingly and intentionally allow you to break down their magic seed.)

All magic seeds in your body (Both current and future ones) gain 10% to mana conversion ratio.

For a rarity eight Achievement, the rewards seemed to be quite good, perhaps due to how difficult it was to actually acquire this Perk. Alice grinned to herself as she looked over the Achievement, not just because of the rewards for this experiment, but because the System seemed to be confirming her experiment had been a success.

She had, indeed, formed a proper magic seed without help from the System! Even though her math was obviously wrong now, because the Electromagnetic seed now had a mana conversion ratio of 15% and not 5%, Alice was more than happy with the results of her experiment and the Achievement. Instead of waiting around 4 hours, they would only need to wait… somewhere between one and two hours now? Alice’s math was getting a bit fuzzy, but she was pretty sure it was around one to two hours before she could spend exactly one Marium of electromagnetic mana on a test. She made a mental note to start keeping track of her new seed’s mana available using {Advanced Mana Measurement}.

“It looks like I got credit from the System for forming a new magic seed without the System’s help,” said Alice. “That’s a pretty good sign. I should have managed to accomplish something here, at least.”

“That’s great!” said Cecilia. “If you actually managed to form a seed without help, it confirms that it’s possible. And it also gives us a lot more insight into what the System is actually doing behind the scenes, which is critical if we want to keep investigating it in detail. Does the Achievement give any good benefits?”

“I can use broken seed on other people if they let me, and the cooldown for {Broken Seed} got reduced to once every two weeks instead of once a month. Apart from that, something vaguely combat related, so I won’t talk about that benefit, and there are some Experience buffs. The important part here is that I can run three tests a month instead of two now.” Alice suddenly felt thoughtful, as she looked at Cecilia. “Do you have any magic seeds that you want to swap around, actually? I didn’t ask you before, since I could only use my Perk on myself. But now, if you want to switch a magic seed around, just let me know. I’m willing to help you make a new one if you want.”

“Hmm…” Cecilia sank into thought. “I wouldn’t mind trying to form a magic seed of my own without the help of the System, actually. I doubt I would get the same Achievement you did, I’d probably still get something for trying and succeeding. Also, if I can switch them back around later, I might not mind having a few slightly more fringe magic seeds for a while. It’s not something I had to think about when my… my father and I moved to Cyra, because there weren’t any other [Enchanters] there and so there was no competition in the market. But now that there are a bunch of other enchanting shops in the city, it’s pretty hard to compete with the well-established, high level enchanters. Having some weird magic seeds to make enchantments with would probably make it easier to sell stuff until I get more levels behind me. If I can swap them back once I have a more competitive level, it would probably be fine.”

Alice nodded. “That would probably make it easier to keep the store running, yeah. I can do that for you. I haven’t used {Reset} this month because I don’t seem to need to break my new seed. I intend to keep the Perk on standby for a week or two, in case the seed has some sort of delayed problem I need to get rid of, but if two weeks pass and I haven’t used {Reset} to activate {Broken Seed} again I’m willing to help you make a seed without the System’s help, and help you swap around some of your other seeds if you want to. Just let me know what you’re looking to change.” Cecilia grinned, and the two began to chat about more mundane things while they waited for Alice’s mana to regenerate. Even if Alice seemed to have confirmed her new seed worked, she still wanted to test it out.

Finally, the Electromagnetic seed had some mana laying around after two and a half hours. Alice had divided some of her attention into keeping track of the Electromagnetic seed’s mana regeneration, and she now completely sure it was regenerating less than 2.7% of its maximum mana every hour. Which was a pretty good indicator of how much worse Alice’s magic seed was than a System-manufactured magic seed. Still, even though she knew it was inferior, Alice was still excited to test it out.

Alice dug out two silver suns she had in {Sample Storage} and began to stretch out a mana tendril towards each of them, with the intent of making them repel each other.

The mana tendrils Alice extended out of her body didn’t quite look the same as the tendrils made from her other seeds. If the other ones had a certain sleek beauty to them, these ones looked… lumpy. Furthermore, some of the ‘lumps’ in the mana tendrils oozed out broken mana as she tried to force her mana into the coins.

Only half of her Marium of mana made it to the coins, with the other half leaking out as broken mana. When Alice used her Kinetic magic seed, she lost less than five percent of her mana as broken mana, so losing almost 50% was a massive difference in quality. Furthermore, the mana traveled far more slowly through the mana tendrils made with her new seed than they did when she used her other magic seeds. Alice winced slightly as she watched the mana wobble their way towards the coins she had set on the table.

0.25 Mariums of electromagnetic mana entered each coin, before they pushed away from each other. The coins slid off the table before falling to the ground, with about as much force as Alice normally flipping a coin. The result of two and a half hours of regeneration was seriously unimpressive compared to her kinetic magic seed.

But despite the disappointing results of her magic seed, Alice couldn’t help but madly grin as she watched the coin clatter to the ground.

Even though this seed seemed pathetic, it was a magic seed. One that Alice had formed without the System’s help! She had already known her experiment had probably succeeded once she got her Achievement, but it was different from seeing her seed work with her own eyes.

Even if the results were obviously inferior to the System-produced seeds in almost every way, the fact remained that Alice had successfully made a seed without the help of the system. For Alice, it was like a miracle. A reward for all of the work, time, and research Alice had put into making a magic seed without the help of the System. And a very important point of data, because she was getting more and more familiar with how the System worked to help people form magic seeds. Even if she could barely keep track of what the System’s mana-constructs meant and how they worked to help people form things like Classes and let people Level up, she had cracked a very small, important part of the puzzle. From here, she could start slowly working out more and more of what each System fractal did, and use that to infer and copy more and more of the System’s abilities and actions. It would be a slow process, but Alice had taken her first step forward.

Cecilia watched the two coins clatter to the ground before she gave Alice a celebratory hug. “It really worked! It’s the worst magic seed I’ve ever seen someone use, but it works!” Alice tried her best not to break into a happy giggling fit of her own, giving Cecilia a brief hug back. After the two separated, she took another look at the broken mana that had leaked out of her new magic seed’s tendrils. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be anything particularly unique about it, so Alice simply cleaned it up before finally checking her other System notifications.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 52->54, Scholar: 36-> 38, Scientist 38-> 43, Survivor 44->46

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Broken Mana Purification: 13-> 14, Mana Filtering 0->8, Seed Formation 0->12

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic 142-> 144, Willpower 144-> 145, Endurance 121->122

Now that her experiment was over, Alice took more time to process her new Achievement and levels as she felt even more excitement start to bubble up in her thoughts. Even the seemingly unimportant Exp bonus from {Seed Creator} gave her a sizable boost to growth speed. She had 3 magic-related classes: her [Enchanter] class, [Kinetic Manabinder], and [Explorer of Magic]. She also had 4 research-related classes: [Explorer of Magic], [Scholar], [Kinetic Manabinder] and [Scientist]. These got a 75% boost to Exp and a 50% boost to XP, respectively. Alice recalled seeing the Holy Church of the Almighty System’s holy book mention that most people who reached immortality had experience bonuses of at least 1000% on the lower end, and often more than 1100% or 1200% of an XP boost to their highest-level class. Having a 125% experience bonus from her new Achievement applying to [Explorer of Magic], coupled with her other experience-boosting Achievements like {Seeker of Truth} and {Baptized by Broken Mana} helped to really cement her class growth. Alice originally hadn’t been sure if she would ever reach Immortality, but the closer she got to having the needed XP bonuses to counteract growth penalties, the more she felt her small dream of becoming an Immortal materialize. If she had the choice, she would be more than happy to avoid dying of old age. She wasn’t sure if she would actually reach this goal or not, but it had slowly changed from a completely impossibility to something actually achievable for her.

She took a brief moment to look back through her Status Screen, trying to total up all of her experience bonuses to [Explorer of Magic]

Let’s see… Bookworm gives a 10% bonus to research-related classes… then another 200% from {Seeker of Truth}. Then another 125% total bonus from {Seed Creation}. I still don’t know what ‘increased support from the System’ means from the {Outworlder} Perk, but the rest of the bonuses from that Achievement have started to fall off because they lose effect at level 50 for each class. {Baptized by Broken Mana} gives me another 30% bonus XP to magic-related classes… the other Achievements I have don’t seem to be useful, at least for XP gain related to [Explorer of Magic]. Finally, there should be a 10% bonus from Kinetic Manabinder for all classes related to magic? This class isn’t related to enchanting, so none of the enchanting xp bonuses count. That brings up a total of 375% Xp bonus for [Explorer of Magic]? So I’m over a third of the way there. Most of that number is coming from two Achievements, while the more common Achievements provide almost no XP bonuses. Having the ability to see and experiment with System Mana while no one else can really gives me a huge leg up when it comes to getting Achievements… Alice shook her head as she grinned to herself, before she moved on to Perk selection.

Sadly, [Explorer of Magic] had yet to reach level 55, so she couldn’t see her first Perk fusion yet. However, [Scientist] and [Survivor] all had a new Perk choice available.

Adrenaline Rush

Requirements: Survivor level 45 or higher, 2 or more perks related to perceiving the world around you have already been taken within the [Survivor] class at an earlier level, Perception 125 or higher, Magic 100 or higher

At any point in time, if you are highly likely to die or potentially die within the next five seconds, your perception of time will speed up significantly for five seconds. Your Dexterity, Endurance, Magic, and Perception stats will have their effectiveness increased by 100% for these five seconds. This skill may only be used once per week.

Note: This Perk consumes a fair amount of calories to activate. It is advised to eat a large meal whenever it is used.

Alice grabbed this Perk because it seemed like a way to save her life if things went horribly wrong. Coupled with {Moderate Tissue Regeneration}, Alice had the ability to dodge or heal from most injuries if they didn’t kill her instantly. Even though this Perk could only activate once per week, it worked as a final round of insurance for the combat against monsters she would be taking part in next week, as well as another round of defense against surprise attacks from the Society of Starry Eyes. The Perk didn’t specify that she had to notice the danger first, after all, and so if Alice wasn’t misunderstanding how the Perk worked it would activate even if she was taken by surprise. She hoped that the Perk would never be necessary, but it was never bad to have a plan B.

Not to mention, recently, Alice had been feeling… odd. She had a strange gut feeling that soon, things were about to go terribly wrong. She wasn’t actually sure if that gut feeling was correct, and she suspected she was just nervous because the class’s battle practice outside of the classroom would start in about two weeks. However, she decided to work with a mentality of ‘better safe than sorry,’ just in case something actually went wrong.

Researcher’s Speed

Requirements: Scientist level 40 or greater

When you are working on an experiment, the pace at which you think, process information, and work will increase by a significant amount, allowing you to conduct experiments notably faster than before.

There wasn’t much to say about {Researcher’s Speed}. It helped solve her problem of never having enough hours in a day, because it should boost her work efficiency while working on her personal projects and when working with Ezrien’s team. It wasn’t exciting, but it addressed her needs well enough that she was happy with it. She would need a bit more time to assess how much work the Perk was actually doing, of course, but at this point any Perk that helped her save time was a Perk she desperately wanted.

Alice grinned to herself, finishing her Perk selections for this experiment. While the number of Perks this time had been rather low, the real prize was clearly the Achievement.

“Any thoughts on why your seed seems so much weaker than the System version?” asked Cecilia, bringing Alice back out of her thoughts.

“I have a few ideas. First, the structure for my electromagnetic seed still seems off compared to a normal one. Now that I’ve managed to get a working model for an Electromagnetic seed, I think I should start to copy more of the System’s ‘final products.’ I’ll see if I can invite some friends or pay some people to let me inspect their seeds for a while, and see if that gives me any ideas what specifically I need to look out for. Besides that, maybe I can try forming an electromagnetic seed with the System’s help next month? That would help me get a better idea of what the System is doing when it helps someone form a seed. I still don’t know what the Organic and System mana is used for in most System constructs, and those are obviously important parts of the final product. And I’m pretty sure I’ve only copied around a third or a fourth of the pure mana fractals the System makes for most seed formations, so I’ve still got a lot left to explore in that department as well. So there are a bunch of avenues of improvement to pursue from here. Which reminds me, I still want to make a System magic seed, and I still want to see if I can link everything to permanent enchantments as well. It would, finally, turn my research into something of practical value,” said Alice, chuckling a bit. “I figure that one will probably require me to learn a lot more, since right now I’m not even 100% sure what I would need to learn to make a permanent enchantment possible. Well, basically, there are lots of things I need to do better to make a better magic seed. But I’m just happy I got it working, finally. I’ve been tinkering with this for three months now, and finally having a working magic seed is a huge relief.” Alice gave Cecilia a grin, and the other girl smiled back at her.

The two began to go over the more specific details of the seed-forming process, trying to see if they could spot any other problems or weaknesses that Alice could fix to improve the next generation of Magic Seed. Alice also began to put {Shared Memory} to work, letting Cecilia look over Alice’s memories of Magic Seed Formation with the help of the System, as well as Alice’s memories of forming her own seed without the help of the System. The Perk was finally pulling its weight in a research setting.

At the end of the discussion, Alice had a few ideas for smaller improvements she could make to her mana filtration fractal, as well as a few other ideas of what might be wrong with her magic seeds compared to ‘standard’ electromagnetic magic seeds. It would take a lot more practice to make a ‘high quality’ magic seed, but she was finally on the right track. Which meant that soon, Alice would need to find another magic seed slot, for when she started trying to make a System magic seed. After all, she intended to do a lot of experimentation with that seed, and 15% mana conversion just wasn’t going to cut it at that point.

Still, that was a problem to be solved in the future. For now, Alice intended to spend the next two weeks making some defensive items for herself, just to appease the gnawing uneasiness in her gut, as well as help Cecilia start working towards whatever watered-down version of {Seed Creation} she was able to get with Alice’s help in two weeks, if nothing went wrong. After that, the class’s first battle exercise would start.

A note from acaswell

On Patreon, this proved to be a point of minor confusion, so I will quickly repost the Perk here.

Degraded Seed Slot

Requirements: Scientist level 35 or higher, Explorer of Magic class available, Magic at 100 or greater, have all magic seed slots taken, use magic Seeds themselves as a source of experiments and inspiration for new advancements

You gain a magic seed slot with a maximum 5% mana conversion ratio. This magic seed cannot be boosted by other Perks and can never be combined with other Perks.

This Perk states that it cannot be influenced by other PERKS or combined with other Perks. Achievements and such are still fair game. I probably could have worded this to make it a bit clearer though, which was my fault. I tend to get overly technical with my own world-building notes sometimes and lost track of what assumptions others might build about how Perks work in their head, and as a writer its kind of my duty to keep better track of that. But just editing an earlier chapter wouldn't clarify things for readers that don't reread the chapter,  so instead I wanted to point it out here, for the sake of clarification.

Chapter 77

After Alice’s experiment, she went to sleep for the night. The next day, after working with Ezrien’s team, getting through her first two classes of the day, and visiting the library, her self-defense class began. This week, the class had begun having the students duel each other.

“So we’re finally going to start practicing against each other?” said Luka, grinning a bit as Alice and the two classmates she knew stood in the training field. He was practically bouncing on the heels of his feet with excitement.

“It looks like it,” said Alice as she pondered the value of learning to duel Mages.

Thus far, most things Alice had learned that were combat related were dedicated to surviving ambushes and keeping herself alive. Dodging or deflecting projectiles were definitely key skills for Mages, since the primary way Mages died was being caught off-guard before they could get their magic seeds engaged in the fight. Most Mage classes had several Perks dedicated to coping with exactly this scenario.

However, there was much more to learn than just this. While most early self-defense training in this world was devoted to making sure a Mage could survive the initial burst of fatal attacks when an [Assassin] attacked them from the shadows, surviving that initial outburst of danger was nowhere near enough to survive an attack from a dedicated killer-for-hire, high level combatant, or even just a large group of people.

And there was another threat to Mages besides surprise attacks and high-level combatants. The threat of other Mages.

That was what the magic duels section of the class was dedicated to.

And this was also the most relevant Skill set for Alice, since the biggest threat to her life was the Society of Starry Eyes. Since the Society was almost exclusively made of Mages who wanted to experiment with illegal and immoral types of magic, if Alice ever got into a conflict with them she would need to know how to fight other Mages. These lessons were exactly what she needed.

“All right, I will preface this lesson by saying that we’re now fully investing our time into learning how to fight and kill other human beings. Some of the skills we learned earlier were quite relevant against monsters as well as humans, but these classes will be based on the magic seeds of your classmates. Monsters form very different magic seeds than we do, so the applications of these lessons against monsters will be far more limited than our previous lessons. Now, I don’t know how many of you have acquired the {Murderer} Achievement, and it’s none of my business who has and who hasn’t. For those of you that don’t have it, killing another human being is… different.” Professor Tanmi looked solemn as he stood in front of the group of students.

“The military will make Mages who enlist kill a bandit or someone of similar origin during their time in the military, as preparation for what a real battlefield looks like. It isn’t the kind of training a regular soldier gets access to, because there simply aren’t enough [Bandits] and similar lowlifes in the country for every single soldier in the military to kill someone, but for a Mage, this kind of training is vital.

“This is because you’re blessed with Magic. This is something almost everyone who isn’t a Mage envies. If you were born with it, you probably grew up hearing how lucky you were. If you survived a mana baptism, you’re one of about four percent of people who survive the process. Either way, you were lucky, and you’ve doubtless had a much easier time in life as a result of being a Mage.

“But being a Mage isn’t a one-sided benefit. For all of the financial leeway you get as a Mage, as well as the newly opened Perks, Classes, and reduced aging speed all Mages benefit from, there are also new dangers and temptations. Some of them are simple – the desire to experiment on humans, or start learning about other dangerous branches of magic such as dimensional magic. All of these routes of experimentation can, indeed, benefit the human race if the research into them was successful, which leads many well-meaning but easily tempted people into a twisted path of murdering innocent people for the sake of the ever-nebulous idea of the ‘greater good.’ Aside from these more obvious temptations and dangers, you’re also more likely to be targeted by people who want to hurt you. The Sigmusi’s attempts to assassinate Mages in the south, for example, or the occasional attempts by the Society of Starry Eyes to use Mages as experimental materials. While they are rare, these new dangers exist, and if you’re unlucky you may find yourself face to face with them.

“And that is why we require students to learn not only how to survive ambushes, not only how to survive monsters, but how to fight other Mages as well. This is why you don’t have the leeway to flinch if someone is trying to kill you, and why the crown places such great importance on you being able to defend yourselves.

“The dueling portion of the class is meant to teach you how to deal with these new threats to your life.” Professor Tanmi gave them all serious looks, and Alice heard Laila gulp beside her. Alice spared a quick glance in the usually lackadaisical girl’s direction, and saw that her expression was surprisingly stern for once. Far from her usual indifferent or relaxed expression, the other girl looked nervous.

“Now, pair up with someone nearby and stand together. Whoever you’re standing with will be your partner for the lesson.”

Alice looked at Laila, who also looked at her. They shrugged, before standing closer together. Alice wasn’t as close with Laila as the other three students she was familiar with, but she didn’t mind spending time with the other girl. Luka paired up with another boy, and the other students in the class were also quickly getting into pairs. After the students in the class were paired up, professor Tanmi continued.

“Now, first thing to note. As a teacher, I have a special Perk called {Student Dueling} that makes it much easier for me to react to any dangers my students create for each other. In short, this Perk helps me keep you safe if one of you would actually harm the other. However, for the Perk to work, you must first announce that you intend to fight a practice round and raise your hands for a few seconds while standing within five meters of me. Are any of you above level 75 or in possession of any incredibly noteworthy Classes, Achievements, or Perks? You don’t have to tell me what they are, just tell me if there’s something I need to be super cautious of.”

Nobody raised their hand.

“Good. Sometimes I get a student or two who’s just sticking around for the experience bonus for learning under a [Teacher]. I get it, and more power to you if you decide to do that in the future. However, I’m only a little above that level, and a level 75 fighting at full power against a [Student] that might only be between level 20 and 40 is incredibly unfair, and it’s honestly not great practice for either of you. And on a more practical note, it makes it much harder for me to keep you guys safe if something unexpected crops up during the duel. I have excellent Perks for fighting, and I can use those to keep any lethal blows you guys might strike from hurting each other, but if you’re at level 75 it starts to get dicey with some perk combinations or combined perks, and I don’t play games with the lives of my students.

“Now, one pair after another, I’m going to give you guys the opportunity to come up next to me and duel each other. You must first raise your right hand and announce that you will be dueling the other person. Then, you must WAIT until I give you the signal to go ahead. If you attack before I give you the go-ahead, I will personally drag you to an after-class lecture about safety for a few hours and then deduct all of your grades by ten percent for the rest of the semester for flouting my rules about safety, and I’ll kick you out of future duel practice as well. Final rule, you can use any amount of practice weapons and enchantments in the duels, but you need to show them to me first, and I can veto an item if it seems too powerful for the fight. This is to train each other, after all, and in a real fight people are going to be throwing around enchanted items left and right if they’re wealthy enough. But safety is still more important. You can also start the duel with no weapons if you prefer – I personally recommend this. Especially if you’re a [Kinetic Mage], it’s a good way to simulate what to do if someone catches you off guard and you survive the initial volley of attacks. Now, are you guys ready?”

Seeing most students nod, Professor Tanmi grinned.

“Good. Now, you two – the girl and boy standing closest to me. Do you two want to be the first ones up?”

“I don’t mind,” said the girl casually. The boy, who seemed a bit shyer, hesitated for a moment before he also nodded. Alice noted with some interest that the girl had an Organic seed, and the boy had a kinetic one. The girl was also holding a wooden sword. The boy carried no weapons with him.

“Stand closer to me. Now, raise your right hand and announce you’re dueling…”

The two went through the cumbersome starting procedures to activate Professor Tanmi’s Perks. Finally, he nodded. “Remember, fighting continues until I say the fight ends. You may attack each other with full force until then, but the moment I say stop, you stop. If you keep going after I tell you to stop fighting, you get a safety lecture and have your grades penalized. You can start now,” he said, waving his hand in the air to let them start attacking each other.

The girl immediately sent organic mana swarming through her legs, strengthening them until they reached levels humans on Earth would never be able to achieve. She dashed towards the boy, bringing down her wooden sword in an overhead cut to ‘kill’ the boy.

The boy extended two tendrils of kinetic mana towards the girl. Before she could respond, he grabbed her clothes with both and tried to shove her to the ground.

The girl stumbled, before collecting herself and throwing her sword at the boy like an overly large arrow. The wooden sword sailed through the air towards the boy as the boy watched, dazed. However, he still managed to catch the sword with a mana tendril, causing it to stop flying towards him and begin aimlessly floating in midair.

While he was distracted by the sword the girl had corrected her running stance and started sprinting towards the boy again. She caught up to him and… then punched him in the face with organic mana-enhanced arms, causing him to stumble back while flailing and shrieking. Blood began streaming out of his nose as the girl grabbed him by the neck and lifted him up with one hand. She began punching him in the face with her other hand, causing the boy’s attempts to free himself to end with painful groans and ineffective flailing. The boy completely lost any semblance of control over his magic and began jerking around and trying to free his windpipe from the girl’s grip. Instead of a fight between Mages, the duel resembled a street brawl at this point.

“Stop!” said Professor Tanmi, once it became clear the boy couldn’t fight back any more. His mana tendrils whipped out of his body and shoved the two students away from each other. The boy gave a few coughs, rubbing his neck tenderly as he wiped blood off of his face. “Give me {Patient’s Consent},” said Professor Tanmi. The boy nodded and closed his eyes, and a moment later professor Tanmi healed his bleeding nose and seriously bruised neck before handing the boy a cloth to wipe away the sweat and blood on his face.

“A good first duel. Do you know where you went wrong, Eri?” Asked Professor Tanmi, turning to the boy.

“I… should have reacted faster when she threw her wooden sword at me. I got so focused on stopping the sword that I lost track of her, and that let her get close to me. Since she was sprinting towards me, it was pretty obvious she was an [Organic Mage] focused on boosting herself, so I should have been much more focused on keeping her away from me. Once a physically-oriented [Organic Mage] gets close in a fight, my odds of winning are probably gone.”

“That’s part of it, but not the whole story. Tell me, what is the biggest advantage of a [Kinetic Mage] in combat?”

“Manipulating… kinetic energy?” asked the boy. It sounded like he was hoping to just stumble onto the right answer, instead of being sure of himself.

Professor Tanmi chuckled. “It is the ability to make everything into a weapon, and to deflect everything. Trying to use her clothes to trip her up was a good idea, but you neglected to use her sword. It’s true that trying to wrestle for control of the sword when it was in her hand would have probably ended poorly for you. But once she threw her sword, she also gave you an opportunity. If you were fast enough, you could have used her sword as a projectile, and then used it to hit her in the neck or something,” said professor Tanmi, giving the boy an amused look. “Also, there were plenty of other things you could have used as weapons in your environment. I said starting the fight with no weapons would be good practice, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grab things from your surroundings to use as ammunition. While they aren’t quite in range, if you had taken the start of the duel as an opportunity to flee towards the weapon stockpiles at the corner of the training field, you would have a ready-made pile of weapons to use. If you have a storage perk, you can also use all sorts of random nonsense in there as ammunition to throw at your opponent. Even coins can make good killing weapons if you shoot them at your enemies with enough force.

“As for you, Ellie, throwing your sword worked this time, but an experienced opponent will punish you heavily for ditching your weapon in a fight like this. You didn’t get the chance to try many other tactics, since the fight ended quickly, but that’s a massive flaw in your fighting style that you should correct before it gets you killed.” The girl frowned, seeming a bit resentful of professor Tanmi’s criticism, but after a few moments she sighed and nodded. Professor Tanmi gave both of them encouraging smiles, before he waved his hands to them. “All right, that’s your turn over with. Next!”

The class began to walk up to the front of the group and duel each other in pairs, over and over again. Alice saw no less than six duels take place, mostly between students using Kinetic or Organic mana to fight each other. [Organic Mages] who had Perks dedicated to healing still ended up trying their best to fight, but their ‘fighting’ was usually hopeless flailing against their opponents until they were pronounced ‘dead.’ Professor Tanmi paid extra attention to those [Students], forcing them to concentrate on ways to enhance their muscles and dodge around attacks, even if they didn’t have Perks dedicated to it. Alice got the feeling that these [Students] were the intended targets of this class – [Organic Mages] who thought that being a healer excused them from any potential to get killed by a real opponent. At the very least, Professor Tanmi was very focused on the healing-oriented [Organic Mages] and knew lots of ways to give them some fighting power through Skills and Attributes, even if their Perks were dedicated to healing. Finally, it was Alice and Laila’s turn.

Alice strode to the front of the class along with Laila, doing her best to quell her nerves as she walked. As the two stepped forward together, Alice gave the other girl a quick assessment. Laila had two seeds – one Organic and one Kinetic. The Organic seed was larger and more developed. Was Laila a melee fighter, or a healer?

The two quickly moved through the initial procedures to activate professor Tanmi’s Perks, and Laila began submitting enchanted items to professor Tanmi for him to inspect. She started by pointing to her sleeveless dress, which Professor Tanmi allowed pretty quickly, and then began showing Professor Tanmi another enchanted item… and another enchanted item…

Alice started wondering just how many enchanted items Laila was carrying around in her storage Perk. How much money did her family spend gearing her up? Alice did her best to avoid seeing Laila’s enchanted items in advance – after all, what Alice wanted to test was her adaptability and combat strength. She wouldn’t get a proper measurement of her abilities if she came into the duel knowing all of Laila’s tricks before the match started.

Finally, Laila was done getting her enchanted items ok’d, and the two began to fight.

Alice began by retreating towards one of the barrels of practice weapons at the sides of the training field, keeping an eye on Laila the whole way. Sending a volley of practice weapons at Laila was Alice’s first idea for how to win the fight.

Laila didn’t just let her retreat unimpeded. Before Alice had taken more than five steps, Laila frowned and then activated five rings on her fingers, all of which had different enchantments.

System mana spread throughout Laila’s body, spreading to her limbs and sensory organs.

The System mana exiting the rings was much higher than Alice was used to seeing. Laila was probably getting a +30 or +40 bonus to everything, at the cost of each bonus being temporary.

Laila rushed towards Alice while pulling out a bracelet of metal beads from her storage Perk. Immediately, another enchantment was activated, and all of the metal beads ripped themselves out of the bracelet and began flying towards Alice like tiny bullets.

Alice created four kinetic mana tendrils and used them to rip up chunks of the training field, using the clumps of earth as shields. However, the soil began crumbling the moment it left the ground. It wasn’t held together well enough to use as a shield. The dirt was too loose. As Alice processed her mistake, {Adrenaline Rush} activated.

Alice’s perception slowed down. Every single second was suddenly divided into glacially slow tenths of a second. She noticed two beads from Laila’s bracelet had already nearly reached her. Professor Tanmi’s mana tendrils were already reaching out towards Alice, ready to stop the beads from tearing through her organs and killing her. However, perhaps due to the fact that her Perk was unwilling to leave her safety in the hands of someone else, {Adrenaline Rush} had activated anyway. The Perk was surprisingly trigger happy.

Alice maneuvered her mana tendrils towards the metal beads, and immediately shoved kinetic mana into them. Kinetic Mana disappeared from her seed, and the beads reversed directions and began flying back towards Laila in slow motion. However, Alice winced as more mana than expected disappeared. Since the beads were enchanted and Alice had been forced to just brute-force the trajectories of the beads, it had cost a fair amount of mana to reverse the direction of the beads.

Alice decided to try something different. She retracted one of her kinetic mana tendrils, before converting it into an organic magic tendril and reaching into some grass near Laila’s feet. Since grass had almost no mana resistance, it was easy to manipulate, even with Alice’s small Organic Magic seed. Alice forced the grass to reach up and try to grab Laila, while still using her kinetic mana tendrils to reverse the trajectories of Laila’s beads.

Laila’s shoes lit up with mana, and the girl was suddenly airborne. She had a flying enchantment in her shoes? How much money did it cost to add that into a piece of clothing?

{Adrenaline Rush} ended, abruptly cutting off Alice’s slow-motion perception of the world. Caught off guard, Alice nearly fell over has her enhanced speed and strength suddenly disappeared and time began flowing normally again.

Alice nearly missed the final set of metal beads she had been trying to repel, but managed to just barely touch them with her mana tendrils. She shot the last round of Laila’s beads at the now-flying girl while Laila tried to fiddle with another enchanted item.

Alice finally reached the basin of practice weapons. Before Laila had time to finish whatever she was doing, Alice immediately began shooting volleys of weapons at Laila. One of Laila’s rings began deflecting Alice’s makeshift projectiles, but it wasn’t able to keep up with her groups of missiles, and right as Laila’s new enchanted item activated a wooden sword hit her in the neck.

“Stop!” said Professor Tanmi, reaching out a mana tendril and stopping Alice’s projectile volley. Laila’s ring spewed organic mana into the girl, doing… nothing in particular, as far as Alice could tell. She wondered what the item did, but professor Tanmi was already starting to break down the fight. He gave Alice a measuring look.

“You… aren’t very talented at fighting, but you still managed to put on a good show. You must have trained pretty hard to reach a point where you can manage all of this even with your lack of talent. Were you trained before?”

“Illa taught me for a few months,” said Alice. “She only taught me basic self defense, but with my new Perks and my hard work, I’ve managed to grow some as a fighter. I’m not very talented at fighting, but I’ve tried to make up for it.”

“Illa, huh? Haven’t heard that name in a while. If you learned from her, just follow her teachings and you’ll be fine. That woman was always talented. Anyway, do you know what you did wrong in the fight? Even though you won, there were many places you could have done better.”

“Hmm…” Alice frowned, running through her memories of the battle. What had she messed up on during the battle? Besides the attempts to use the grass and soil. Neither of those had been very effective… Though, admittedly, part of that was because of the ridiculous number of enchantments Laila was carrying around on her.

Seeing her pause, Professor Tanmi began speaking again.

“I saw that you sped up for about five seconds, and you lost control right afterwards. Whatever Perk you used for that, get more familiar with it. Life-saving Perks are amazing, but you need to know how to actually follow up after using them. Right after the Perk ended, one of Laila’s beads whizzed right by your face, and you didn’t notice it at all. In the future you might not be so lucky. Also, your idea of using the ground from the training field as a shield was pretty good, but you need to pay more attention to soil types if you want to use that kind of tactic in the future. This dirt in the training field is pretty loose, so it’s not very good to use it as a shield. You should have used another mana tendril to tighten up the soil a bit, or abandoned the idea entirely. The attempt at using grass to trip your opponent was also kind of dubious. That kind of tactic is super effective against melee fighters, but Laila was attacking you with ranged magic. It might mess up some novice Mages, but most proper combatants will have enough [Strength] to tear up the grass if you don’t reinforce it. I expect you were inspired by the way Vinebears fight, but keep in mind that vinebears aren’t just commanding the plants around them – they also strengthen them to make them into actual threats.

“And, I’m sure you’ve heard this multiple times today already, but I recommend you start carrying around ammunition on your person or in a storage Perk if you have one. Not something you could have fixed today, but in the future it’s a good idea. You learned some from my suggestions to other students, and I commend you for trying to take that advice into account when you started running towards the practice weapons. However, it’s also important to keep in mind what you should do when there aren’t nearly as obvious weapons in your surroundings.”

Alice nodded. Now that Professor Tanmi was pointing out her mistakes, she felt that she could have done better during the fight. Still, that didn’t take away her exhilaration at winning the fight. She had won a combat encounter with someone of around the same age group as her! She felt like it was proof of how hard she had worked to correct her deficiencies during her time in self-defense classes, as well as an affirmation of the time she had spent learning under Illa.

“As for you, Laila… I don’t really know what to say. Your fighting skills are a complete mess. Is your fighting plan just to bury your opponent in enchantments? I mean, I get that your family is wealthy, and you definitely have excellent enchanted items. An inexperienced fighter who is below level 40 or 50 will probably usually lose to you as long as you just throw enough items at them. But still, try to at least competently use one mana tendril in a fight, okay? I don’t think you used your own magic a single time during the entire duel. At least try to follow the purpose of the class. It’s your life that could be on the line here. Enchanted items have limited amounts of mana, while you yourself regenerate mana every minute. And an enchantment will never be as flexible as a competent Mage, because they can’t adjust their instructions on the fly unless you have some incredibly high-level [Enchanter] Perks.”

Laila blushed and nodded. Professor Tanmi gave her a final nod, before he dismissed the two of them. Alice frowned in thought after the end of the battle. Having seen all of Laila’s enchanted items, she had a few new inspirations for items of her own to make. Just in case she needed them in the future. Professor Tanmi had said that Laila would be able to bury an average combatant between level 40 and 50 under her enchantments? In that case, Alice might be doing even better than she thought at learning some combat skills.

As professor Tanmi moved on to the next pair of students, Alice found her attention wandering for the next two fights. She kept replaying the fight over and over again in her mind, trying to figure out ways that she could have improved or changed. She had won this time, but what if Laila had a pile of enchanted items and was good at fighting? If she ever fought with the Society of Starry Eyes, she doubted her opponents would be as inept as Laila with their personal mana control.

Finally, her attention was drawn to Luka’s fight. He was also a kinetic mage, and was able to summon four tendrils as well. However, he was far more natural at fighting than Alice was. He used his environment, already carried ammunition, and had a few small but effective enchantments. Altogether, it took him less than twenty seconds to trounce his opponent, earning him a rare ‘well done’ from Professor Tanmi’s mouth. Of all the [Students] in the class, Luka was probably one of the top five fighters. Alice was fairly certain that if she fought against Luka she would lose, even Luka didn’t use any of his enchanted items.

Alice sighed, before deciding that she really needed to get working on some enchanted items for herself. Fighting with Laila had given her some ideas for kinds of items she could make, and she only had two weeks left until the extra lessons started. She wanted to be ready by that time. She didn’t have enough time to make any preparations besides that, but seeing how powerful the enchanted items of some of her classmates were inspired her to take her enchanting in new directions. Since Alice wasn’t that talented at fighting, maybe she could just compensate for it with a pile of items?

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 46 -> 47

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Dexterity 107->108, Perception 128->129, Magic 144->145

Through Training, you have increased a Skill!

Projectile Awareness 17->20, Divided Attention 19->23, Kinetic Manipulation 63->64, Kinetic Force 40->41

* * *

Far to the north, an Immortal and a half-metal man grimaced as they looked at the corpses of various monsters scattered around them.

“Master, are we almost done? This monster layer is… really something. They seem to keep coming whenever we deal with the last layer,” said the half-metal man.

“The area keeps getting flooded with mana every time the monsters dry up,” said the Immortal, frowning. “I was expecting there to be some defenses here, but to think that the first layer of defense is to intentionally lure in waves of monsters to kill invaders. I wonder why the monsters don’t flood the insides. It seems like a dangerous design choice, since the monsters inside would probably break things beyond repair if an error occurred, but the defensive layer clearly hasn’t ever malfunctioned. Hmm…” the man frowned as another group of monsters stepped into an area.

Immediately, an enchantment buried under the earth exploded with kinetic mana, hurling fragments of metal into the bodies of the monsters and killing them instantly.

“This is really just impossible for us to deal with if we keep trying to clear out the monsters. I’ve spent too many enchanting materials on this, and at the end of two weeks of work we haven’t made any progress. If it’s going to keep doing this, we might need to try to sneak our way in instead,” said the man, grimacing. “I don’t feel that great about it, but I’m not willing to give up. One way or another, we’re going to get in.”

A note from acaswell

You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 78

Two more weeks passed in relative quiet. Apart from being ludicrously inefficient, Alice’s new electromagnetic seed didn’t harm her in any way. Alice spent a few minutes every morning just running through whatever variants of ‘is this dangerous’ she could feed into {Safety Analysis}, as well as using her once-per-day usage of {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to make sure that there were no problems. After that, she would run some basic tests with the seed, moving coins around, producing little sparks of lightning, and generally just trying to compare and contrast her electromagnetic seed with a more ‘normal’ seed made with the System’s help.

Apart from messing with her new deformed seed, Alice went to work on Ezrien’s kinetic plates every morning, went to classes, and read at the library. Now that Alice had made some progress on her research into the System, she was able to redirect her attention to learning more about Enchantments. Her research into the subject was nothing groundbreaking, but since Alice’s finances were barely stable she felt that stabilizing her income was a good use of her time. In the evenings, she tested out her new ideas, making slow but steady progress in reducing the broken mana production and energy waste of her enchantments and boosting the effect of her healing stones and dynamite. Apart from making money, Alice had decided she was unlikely to make any major breakthroughs in her research in the next two weeks since most of her Perks were either on cooldown or being kept for the sake of her safety. Her bad feeling was also getting worse and worse as time passed, so Alice decided to prepare for the worst, just in case her bad feeling was correct.

Since Alice had seen a variety of other enchanted items, especially Laila’s giant pile of enchanted items, Alice had felt quite a bit more inspired about what enchantments she wanted to carry around for herself, and had made three new enchanted items.

First and foremost, Alice had grabbed a ring, stuffed it with a few blue rocks that could interact with organic and healing mana effectively, and enchanted it with her healing magic seed to heal whoever was wearing the ring upon activation. This ring suffered severely from wasting huge amounts of mana due to the fact that it was using Alice’s healing seed instead of her organic seed, as well as the fact that Alice’s enchantments were still far from optimized, but it was an extra layer of lifesaving protection if Alice needed it in a pinch. Even if the enchantment would probably break in a few years, and would waste almost half of each monster core by turning it into broken mana instead of making it do something useful, it got around the fact that {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} could only be used once per day. Alice wasn’t entirely sure whether this ring would come in handy, but it only cost one and a quarter golden suns to make and she definitely felt that it wouldn’t hurt to have around.

The second enchantment Alice made was a bracelet similar to Laila’s bracelet she had used during the duel. Trying to power each bead had stumped Alice for a while, but eventually she came across the idea of taking monster cores from smaller monsters and melting down an enchanting material, specifically a type of stone, before hardening it around the monster core. This basically made the stone beads into consumable enchantments, and needed some help from a [Blacksmith] who specialized in more unusual materials, but it got the job done.

Upon activation, all of the stones attached to the bracelet would fling themselves at a target via a burst of kinetic mana. Alice had gotten some inspiration from her organic magic as well, and had done her best to add a special function to the stone beads. After touching anything ‘organic,’ the stones in the bracelet would try to ‘rip’ all of the flesh around them, making a wound significantly worse than it otherwise might have been. Since the enchantments were already basically consumable enchantments, Alice figured she might as well go all out in using up the mana from each bead, which would hopefully let the beads overpower the natural mana resistance of whatever she shot the beads at. It probably wouldn’t work on anything that was too strong, but it would do the job against weaker monsters or humans. Hopefully.

The only real reason Alice added the second enchantment to the bracelet was because Cecilia ended up buying a bunch of two-instruction stones that accepted kinetic and organic mana for a fairly cheap price, and so Alice ended up buying them from Cecilia for pretty cheap as well. Since the enchanting material could hold two instructions, it just seemed like a waste to leave an empty instruction slot laying around.

The third thing Alice made was a little hoop of… monster sinew. Which was kind of gross, so Alice wrapped it in leather with the help of a [Tailor] to turn the monster sinew into a necklace that she could wear without touching monster guts with her bare skin. At the bottom, she got a [Blacksmith] to make a little metal container with a lock that could be easily undone, but wouldn’t come undone unless she undid the contraption keeping the lid shut. Inside of it, she planned to store a few monster cores to feed the necklace as needed.

The monster sinew itself was given the ability to, when activated, stop all Kinetic Motion within about ten meters of the necklace. It would ignore living creatures with a high enough amount of mana inside of them, which was a slightly tricky instruction that Alice took a few tries to get right, but at the end of the day she had created a good second layer of defense for herself if more than four projectiles were about to hit her and {Adrenaline Rush} didn’t save her.

Alice wanted to make more enchantments if she could. Even if she had no clue how she might make something like a flying enchantment, and her ability to keep herself airborne with just her kinetic mana was dubious at best, it would have given her a mobility option if she needed it. However, by the time Alice was done making her first three tools, she was flat broke again.

On the bright side, even if Alice was now basically penniless, she had gained quite a few levels and skills from her enchanting spree.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder 14 -> 19, Careful Enchanter 3->13, Scholar 38->39, Student 1 -> 2

Sadly, Explorer of Magic didn’t level up during the two weeks. Alice was beginning to really appreciate how heavy the growth penalty was for a class above level 50. The class gained levels more slowly than it had in the past, and even two weeks of steady work wasn’t enough to gain a level. Even with a 375% bonus to growth rate, she had barely managed to get [Explorer of Magic] to level 54. It was no wonder people found it hard to reach Immortality. Thinking about it another way, it was actually incredible that she managed to push the class to such a high level despite having a massive ‘late start’ in this world. Alice was a little disappointed she couldn’t see her first Perk fusion yet, but she knew she would be able to see it sooner or later. With another major experiment or enough slow but steady work, she would get there.

For her three new Perks, Alice was delighted to start getting more options to improve the quality of her enchantments and improve her control over her Kinetic Mana.

Vastly improved Kinetic vision

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 15 or higher, {Improved Object Control} Perk, {Projectile Awareness} Skill 20 or greater, Perception 100 or greater

You gain the ability to see in all directions at once, as well as drastically enhanced perception of any and all kinetic energy or objects in motion within your surroundings.

Note: Vision of your surroundings created by this perk is different from your regular vision. You will only be able to see in black and white, and will not be able to see mana in your surroundings without using your real eyes.

The ability to see in all directions was one of the fundamental boosts that Kinetic Mages relied on to survive potential ambushes. The bonus of being able to see in all directions and avoid getting sneak-attacked was well worth a level 15 perk slot, especially because the two earlier versions of this perk, {Object Control} and {Improved Object Control}, had more than pulled their weight.

The Perk didn’t disappoint. The moment Alice took the Perk, she gained the ability to see in all directions. After some testing, Alice determined that every single inch of her skin now acted as something like an inferior pair of eyes, even the back of her neck and her arms. While they weren’t able to see mana or color, this still greatly reduced any potential danger an [Assassin] or otherwise might pose towards Alice, since she almost literally had eyes in the back of her head now. She could also sense any objects moving with crystal clarity now. Even though an [Assassin] with enough stealth perks would still be able to sneak up on her, anyone without a highly specialized build or enough levels to just overwhelm her with a greater quality and quantity of Perks wouldn’t be able to sneak attack her ever again. More importantly, Alice would have a much easier time tracking pieces of flying objects during a fight. [Kinetic Mages] were theoretically able to make themselves almost totally immune to projectiles and physical objects during a fight, but that required a [Kinetic Mage] to first notice them all and have enough mana tendrils free to deal with all of the oncoming threats. Alice had taken another very important step towards becoming a competent [Kinetic Mage].

Repurposing

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 5 or greater

You gain the ability to 'repurpose' old enchantments much more easily than before.

Alice had grabbed this Perk from {Careful Enchanter} without much thought. One of the bigger ‘tuition costs’ for learning how to enchant objects, and create new enchantments was the number of times she would fail to make an enchantment work the way she hoped it would work. While she could sometimes salvage the materials from a failed attempt, most of the time once she failed an enchantment she ruined the materials and had to buy a new set. This Perk made it much easier to ‘salvage’ these materials, and also provided a surprisingly noticeable boost to Alice’s status in Ezrien’s research team. Normally, when the team discovered a problem or tried to optimize part of the movement plates, they had to make a new part and then swap out the old part. Even though the movement plate prototype was made of several different enchanting materials stuck together in some bizarre patchwork of an enchantment, needing to physically remove one component without messing up the others and then replace it took up a lot of time, and each enchanting component lost chewed through some research funds. After getting this Perk, Alice was able to salvage enchanting materials more often. It was a small, but nifty, bonus to the team’s budget, and was also the reason Alice managed to make her new bracelet and necklace, even with her limited budget.

The second perk from Careful Enchanter helped Alice improve the quality of her enchantments, though not in a way Alice had expected.

Blueprint

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 10 or greater, Intelligence 150 or greater

You may create up to three different 'blueprints' inside of your memory, by carefully imagining each enchanting material you wish to add to the enchantment and then imagining what kind of 'instruction' you wish to add to each enchanting material. You will be able to get some sense of how well the enchantment will work in practice - and you will also be less likely to make mistakes when making a physical copy of a blueprint if you spend a larger amount of time on making the item.

Note: You can freely delete old blueprints, but some amount of mental taxation will occur. Frequent use may cause headaches or migraines, so it is advised not to delete blueprints too frequently.

This Perk was one that caught Alice a little off guard at first, since she wasn’t actually very prone to making big mistakes while making an enchantment. If she made a major error that ruined a material, it was usually because she was trying something she hadn’t done before. However, she did make lots of smaller mistakes during the course of making an enchantment – after all, there was a reason Alice’s enchantments were prone to leaking more mana and creating more broken mana than a professional [Enchanter]’s item would, even if both enchantments did the same thing. Part of the reason was just that Alice didn’t have enough Perks and Achievements backing up her actions, of course, but another part of the problem was that Alice didn’t have years of practice and Skills behind her yet. She was able to spend mana to hurry up the completion of an object now, thanks to {Speed Enchanting}, but even though that allowed her to use all of her mana every day she still had a long way to go.

{Blueprint} was surprisingly effective at helping Alice create dozens of different copies of the same item, while making minor changes to the item’s design over and over again. She might not be able to fine-tune the enchantment in blueprint form, but after Alice started using this Perk to evaluate her healing rings, she was at least able to spot some of her bigger mistakes and start fixing them when making the actual products. It didn’t bring her enchanting up to the level of a professional [Enchanter] yet, but it was getting closer and closer. In addition, it proved to be another minor bonus to Alice’s standing in Ezrien’s team. Ezrien was starting to joke that he should have paid her more than just forty gold suns to work for his team for a year, and after some thinking, he had given her a bonus of an extra four silver crowns midway through the second week. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but Alice was grateful for the little boost to her strained finances and the intent behind the gesture. Legally speaking, when Alice had joined the team she had already signed a contract stipulating that Ezrien had paid her wages for the next year in advance, so he wasn’t obligated to give her even a bent copper coin. A small bonus was still a bonus, and Alice appreciated the gesture as an acknowledgement of her growing skill and value to the research team. This brought Alice’s finances back to about five silver crowns in total, or half of a golden sun.

Apart from her new Perks, Alice got to see {Scholar of Magic} working more over the two weeks. Now, every couple days of her hard work would get rewarded with another 1% bonus to one of her Magic seeds. To Alice’s delight, when this happened she would see a new System fractal pop up and start pushing mana into her body. This was in line with what Alice had expected to happen, and apart from recording each fractal with {Mana Construct Modelling} and carefully memorizing it, she didn’t have much to work with in order to figure out what the fractals here were doing yet. After all, there was still way too much information in each fractal and she could only make sense of bits and pieces of it. Seeing a new System fractal still made her happy though, even if she couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing yet.

As a result of two weeks of classes and Library reading, Alice got a 1% bonus to her Pure Mana seed, 3% bonus to her Healing Seed, and 4% bonus to her Organic seed.

Finally, besides focusing on improving her enchanting and income, Alice spent a fair amount of time trying to look up information about what a ‘normal’ electromagnetic seed looked like in the library. Sadly, the seed slot generated by {Experimental Seed} couldn’t be influenced by other perks, so Alice’s research didn’t end up boosting the seed. Though, this was perhaps for the better, since the seed suddenly gaining new properties mid-experiment would have been a massive headache. Overall, Alice’s findings were limited, but she was at least able to get a better idea of what an electromagnetic seed should look like if it was developed by the System. Next time she made a seed on her own, it would be better.

Since she didn’t come across any new problems, after two weeks, Alice set up a mana filtration system and helped Cecilia set up the manaless room again. Then, using Cecilia’s newly opened magic seed slot that the girl gained from her level 45 [Enchanter] Class, Alice helped Cecilia as she tried forming a healing magic seed without any System assistance.

“How does the seed feel?” Asked Alice, as she started feeding questions into {Safety Analysis}.

Cecilia frowned, before she shook her head. “This seed feels very… weird. Do you have any info from {Safety Analysis}?”

Alice frowned as her Perk started giving her responses to her questions. “The seed is no good. Give me permission so I can break it back down.”

Cecilia nodded, before leaning against the wall and stretching out her other hand towards Alice and letting Alice break down the faulty healing seed.

Cecilia sighed. “Darn. I was hoping it would go faster, since you were helping me along the way and you even had the mana filter set up in advance for me. I guess there are more problems in the seed-making process than just mana filtration… How much time did it take you to make a seed without System help?”

“Three months. And the best result I got is that terrible electromagnetic seed. But since I’m helping you out, it should hopefully take less time than that. We can also do three tries a month instead of two, since my Perk cooldowns are getting shorter and shorter.”

Cecilia sighed again. “I don’t mind working for it, I guess. Good achievements take time to earn. I’m just starting to feel a little bad – I know you probably have other experiments in mind and I’m using up your Perk activations instead.”

“I don’t mind helping you,” said Alice. “This isn’t useless to me. And you’re my friend. I can forego a little bit of progress to help you out, especially considering all of the help you’ve given me since I came to this world. Just having someone I can talk to about Earth when I’m feeling nostalgic or lonely is a huge help, honestly.”

Cecilia smiled at that. “I’m glad. Since we’re both on our own, I like having someone to talk to as well.’ She paused, as she looked at Alice. “Say, what do you plan to focus on, once I get my Achievement squared away?”

“I want to see what a System Magic Seed looks like. And I really should try forming a seed based on Earth’s knowledge again, when I finally work up the nerves to do it. If I can figure it out, I also want to link it all back up to self-sustaining enchantments, and maybe turn that into a source of revenue. But I don’t actually have a seed slot free for use right now. My {Experimental Seed Slot} is probably fine for testing Earth stuff, but for System Magic I need a useful slot ready. I really wish my last couple {Careful Enchanter} Perks had offered me a new magic seed slot, but I haven’t gotten an option for it yet. Maybe at level 15 or 20?” Alice shrugged.

Cecilia chuckled. “If you can find time in your schedule, the Church of the System almost definitely has a Perk list for [Careful Enchanter].”

“Finding time is the problem,” grumbled Alice, absently. Then, she shrugged again, before smiling to herself.

Even though today was a failure, they could keep trying. The two spent an hour or two just chatting as they made a few more enchanted objects. Every so often, a customer would come in and look around, although they usually left without buying anything. The day drew to a close, and eventually Alice returned to her inn room for the night.

As she went to sleep, Alice tossed and turned as she thought of tomorrow.

The next day was the first day the self-defense class would do its ‘extra’ activity. She would be hunting monsters fairly close to the capital, along with many of her classmates.

She had made three new enchantments just to keep herself safe. She had practiced how to use {Adrenaline Rush} with the help of her self-defense teacher during her classes, gotten a handle on how to deal with the sudden loss of extra [Agility] and [Magic] when the Perk ended, and had boosted her Skills and Stats by small but useful amounts during the two weeks of duel training. She would even be going to the extra training sessions with the classmates she had come to know better, minus Laila who wasn’t interested.

It was just a routine program the crown had initiated, in order to deal with increasing manpower shortages and safety concerns in wake of the southern recolonization effort. But even though Alice intellectually knew that this was an important step towards keeping herself safe in the long run, she was nervous.

* * *

Somewhere far to the north, two people finally reached their destination. An Immortal and his servant, a man who seemed to be half-made of metal. After sneaking past the monsters surrounding their destination, they snuck through the outer layer of protection and finally reached the place the Immortal had been looking for.

However, their entrance was imperfect. Both of them missed something. They might not have cared about it, even if they had noticed it. After all, in many ways, it wasn’t their problem.

The outer layer of defenses had the ability to flood an area with mana whenever the monster population got too low. Using monsters as a defense mechanism had a very obvious drawback, which was the fact that the monsters might make a mess if they got inside of the place they were supposed to protect. The place the Immortal had been investigating had a very well-made enchantment embedded in the metal walls, insulating the rich mana inside of the area from the senses of the monsters outside. Since Monsters were universally stupid and mana-hungry, most of them bumped into the incredibly well-made, regenerating physical wall before ignoring it completely. When the Immortal and the half-metal man snuck past the monsters, they left a small crack in those defenses.

And as the two laughed and began walking into the area they had sought for so long, a monster began creeping towards the crack. It was a relatively small monster, difficult to notice if one wasn’t paying attention. It looked like a spider, but had thirteen eyes instead of eight. It was a creature specialized in stealth and manipulation of shadows.

Before the wall finished rebuilding itself, it found the little crack and wriggled its way in.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

It's too hot. can someone turn down the sun a bit? I'll share the rest of the plot for the story with you if you do! I mean, I can imagine like fifty reasons that's a terrible idea, but I'm sure it'll all work out in the end, right? I have faith in you, readers!

Chapter 79

After Alice got through her regular classes for Monday, she went to the classroom professor Tanmi had set aside as a meeting location. There, she met up with Erkki, Arsi, and Luka, before she quietly sat next to them. While she was much more familiar with Cecilia, the three were still friends she enjoyed chatting with, and she had come rather early. There was plenty of time left before the actual meeting and hunt began.

“How are things going for you recently, Alice?” asked Luka, giving her an encouraging grin after he saw her sit down. “You’re always so busy that it’s hard to see you outside of class. The only relaxing activity you seem to make time for is playing The Settlers with us from time to time. I worry a bit about you. It’s not good to spend too much time working, okay?” Alice noticed that Luka had put on some levels since the last time she had seen him. Perhaps he had gained a new Achievement that helped him level faster? She was glad to see her friend doing well.

Alice thought for a moment, before shrugging and grinning. “Maybe. I really enjoy working on my personal projects though, and I’m making decent headway as an [Enchanter] and a [Scientist]. I had a breakthrough in one of my personal research projects two weeks ago, and I’m trying to help Cecilia get a related Achievement. I’m also super excited to see what new directions I can take my research after all of my miscellaneous tasks are done, and between that and managing my financial situation, finding time to relax is hard. I just don’t have enough hours in each day yet. Once I get a few more levels and a few more time-saving Perks, I should have more free time in my schedule.”

Luka frowned, before sighing. “I mean, it’s your life, so do what you see fit. But as one of your friends, I hope you don’t exhaust yourself too much. Make some time to relax a little more occasionally. Life is about more than money and levels.”

Alice fell silent. She couldn’t really retort to Luka’s statement, but her financial situation didn’t really give her much wriggle room. And she enjoyed her research, so she wasn’t willing to give up on it either. But after Luka mentioned it, she really did feel bad about making so little time for her friends as well… Alice began to sink into her thoughts, trying to figure out if there was anywhere else she could scrape away some time to make room for other things.

“Is it your first time actually fighting a monster in the wilderness?” asked Erkki, allowing Alice to escape from the awkward situation.

“No, I used to do it a lot,” said Alice. When she had first come to this world, she had nearly been eaten by a spidercrab. Now that she knew just how low spidercrabs were on this world’s food chain, she found this fact rather embarrassing. “For a while, I needed to rely on spidercrab meat to survive because I ended up lost in the wilderness some time ago. I also went on an expedition to deal with a group of vinebears led by an alpha in the south. I don’t know if the second one really counts as fighting a monster in the wilderness though. The group was led by an Immortal. She pretty much removed every strength vinebears have before the fight even started, and took out nearly a quarter of the group on her own. The rest of the group was just there to mop up the survivors, really. But I have some experience fighting monsters, even if I can’t really say it’s a huge amount.”

“You actually saw an Immortal?” Asked Erkki, seeming shocked. “Which one?”

“It was Allira, Immortal of Song and Shadow.”

“Is she as beautiful as the stories say she is?” Asked Erkki, leaning closer and closer to Alice as his eyes shown with curiosity. “I’ve heard that she’s one of the prettiest women in the kingdom, and that her singing voice is enough to make one drunk on the sound alone…”

Arsi rolled his eyes, before knocking Erkki on the head. Erkki frowned, looking at Arsi, who simply snorted. Erkki finally seemed to realize that he had made a mistake, before blushing slightly. “Erm… sorry. There aren’t as many stories about Allira as other Immortals, like the Sun Knight, but I’ve always wanted to see her in person. And the other Immortals of the kingdom, too. Meeting one of them in real life would be amazing, you know? And Allira’s most well known trait besides her singing is her beauty, so…”

Alice nodded. “Honestly, she’s very beautiful. However, there’s a certain…” Alice faltered, trying to find the right word. “Oddness to her beauty, perhaps? A certain sense that she’s not… hmm… It’s kind of like a dream. If you’re asleep, you can see all sorts of absurd things in a dream, right? But when you wake up, your memory of your dreams seem hazy and fragmented, and you start to realize that the contents of your dreams don’t really make sense after you wake up. Her physical features are kind of like that – they’re so beautiful that they seem unnatural, and when you look at her you get a sense of how unrealistically perfect she looks.” Alice shrugged. “Well, she actually seems pretty nice and down to earth when you talk to her. At least, that was my impression of her. I haven’t spent much time with her, but she didn’t have her nose in the air the way I was expecting.”

“That’s fair,” said Erkki, nodding to himself. Then, seeming to realize that he had led the subject astray, he focused back on Alice. “If you have a lot of experience in the wilderness, do you have any helpful tips to share? It’s my first time hunting in the wilderness. I have the {Monster Slayer} Achievement at tier two, but I got the Achievement entirely from caged spidercrabs. My mother and father never let me fight one for real, so I’ve only ever attacked ones that couldn’t fight back before now.”

“Hmm… I mean, always keep your eyes on your surroundings, I guess?” Alice frowned. “To be honest, I relied a lot on my Perks to keep myself safe at the time. I can sense monsters in my surroundings within a certain range, so I should hopefully be able to keep an eye out for any problems. But I’m sure the [Scouts] have even better options, so if they miss something I’m probably not going to spot it. Just don’t get too careless.”

Luka put an arm around Erkki’s shoulders. “Don’t worry. I’ve got a lot of experience fighting monsters in the wilderness. I’ve got some extra items on me and some pretty high-level Perks to deal with unexpected problems, and as long as you don’t get too far away from me I can probably cope with most situations we would find in this area. And since this is the first hunt and plenty of the people here are new [Students], I doubt they’ll pick a group of monsters that’s overly strong or hard to deal with. It’ll probably be something big and slow, or something that isn’t too hard to deal with in groups. That way the [Knights] accompanying us can keep us safe if worst comes to worst. The academy should be prioritizing our safety over everything else in this exercise, because the political backlash of getting some [Students] killed in these exercises would be frustrating to deal with. I am willing to bet the academy will do everything they can to make this exercise safe before making it effective.”

“Makes sense,” said Erkki, quietly. The enthusiasm he had displayed when talking about Allira seemed to fade away, replaced with a certain somber focus and nervousness. “Accidents can still happen, though. Thanks for bringing along a bunch of extra items and offering to help out. I hope nothing goes wrong, but having more layers of backup is never a bad idea.”

“Yeah, we appreciate your presence,” said Arsi, grinning. “I’m probably the most nervous of all. Truthfully, it’ll be my first time even seeing a monster. When I was still a poor kid from the slums, I know some kids were desperate and tried to hunt monsters outside the city, as a way of making up for the lack of food and money. Some of them even managed to hunt a monster or two and make some money with the help of some luck and some… well, mostly luck. It was always a throw of the dice for them, since nobody from the slums had the money to buy a map labelling mana pockets and monster territories. I’ve never come face to face with a monster before.” He gulped. “I’ll try my best not to hold the group back.”

Luka chuckled and patted him on the back. “Don’t worry too much. Everyone struggles until they get a few Achievements and Levels backing their actions. Even if you hold us back this time, just treat it as a learning experience, okay? Keep yourself safe, contribute when you’re able to, and get what you can out of this exercise. We aren’t people who will complain if you mess up a few times. Just make sure not to hit us with any stray attacks and we’ll be fine.”

The four of them fell into a comfortable chat, with Luka and Erkki debating what kind of monster they would hunt while Arsi and Alice occasionally chimed into the conversation. As the group of four chatted, other [Students] started to trickle in. Eventually, a group of adults also entered the room.

Alice took a moment to analyze the adults who had joined the group. There was a group of seven [Knights], all of whom were probably above level 75. They all wore well-made metal armor, and each one had a few pieces of enchanted equipment on them. While none of the [Knights] had their entire suit of armor enchanted, they had a minimum of two enchantments, and the highest level [Knight] had six different enchanted items on him. Most of them were physically in their late forties, though there was one [Knight] that looked to be in her late thirties instead. Her level was also a bit lower than the others, probably just barely beyond level 75. They walked with a fast, steady pace that belied their extraordinary control over their bodies and high levels of strength.

Behind the [Knights] were three people, all dressed in simple tunics. They were much lower level than the [Knights], probably only between level 60 and 65. A bit higher than the average level for an adult, but Alice didn’t find them to be particularly impressive. These were probably the [Scouts].

Finally, professor Tanmi walked in, along with four [Organic Mages]. One of them was Professor Feliza, Alice’s Introductory Organic Magic teacher, and the other three were unknown to her.

Once the adults walked in, the sixty or so chattering [Students] began to quiet down. Alice was more than a little impressed by how much manpower the Academy had invested into this hunting trip. Getting this many high level adults together just to babysit a bunch of [Students] couldn’t have been easy, and there were only four times as many students as there were adults in this hunt. Even if this kind of hunt only happened once per week per academy, it still seemed like quite an investment.

“All right everyone, settle down,” said professor Tanmi. “For those of you that decided to come today, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to brush up on your combat abilities. I know a lot of [Students] don’t feel like this is an important subject, and in a lot of cases they’re right, but having no preparations for an emergency situation is also inadvisable. Now, I know a lot of you don’t want to waste time, so I’ll get right to the point.

“Today we’re going to work on a fairly easy hunt to get used to this kind of exercise. This is an opportunity for you to work with your classmates and learn how to fight, both as a team and as individuals, so the first exercise is meant to be pretty low risk. Think of it as more of a warm-up for later hunts. We’ve tracked down a few packs of eight-eyed wolves that are located a fair ways away from Metsel. Normally, the army would have wiped them out before they could pose a threat to [Farmers] and towns in the region, but since they’re relatively isolated from humans right now they’ve been left for you guys to deal with.

“A few things to keep an eye on. First of all, eight-eyed wolves are pack animals, like most other wolves. They are, however, much weaker than other kinds of wolves. They tend to stick in packs of five or six wolves. Their bottom four eyes are actually magic cores. If you kill them without damaging those eyes the cores belong to you. However, if you struggle with the fight, destroying them will make things easier for you.

“Eight-eyed wolves are a kind of monster that don’t have outstanding magic abilities, unlike most monsters. They aren’t quite as weak as spidercrabs, but their magic ability only lets them communicate with each other and ‘see’ from all directions at once. So they’re abnormally perceptive and good at cooperating with the rest of their team, but they can’t do anything like shoot fireballs or manipulate weight around them. One on one… they’re maybe slightly stronger than the average farmer? Their lack of offensive magic makes them suitable for your first hunt.

“Now, get into teams of at least four students. I see that we have around 60 people… so we’ll handle this by dividing into a ‘main group’ and a few active hunting groups at a time. Each hunting group will have at least one [Knight] in it, and the main group will always have at least 3 [Knights] protecting it. The main group will be made up of [Students] who have either completed their hunt or are waiting for their turn. That way everyone has a [Knight] watching over them at all times, but you don’t end up outnumbering the wolves, since that would make the fight easy to the point of obviating the whole purpose of the hunt. The [Knights] should be able to handle the entire wolf pack by themselves in the worst case scenario, so don’t be afraid to fall back on them if necessary – but do your best to make sure they don’t need to intervene. The [Scouts] have checked out the rest of the area to make sure nothing unusual is lurking in the area. They will do one more round to make sure nothing has changed once our group arrives, and after that they’ll direct individual groups towards their fights. Does anyone have any questions?”

“Are there any restrictions on enchanted items or anything else we should take note of?”

“No. Use whatever will benefit your learning the best. I expect most of you will get more out of the exercise if you don’t use enchanted items, but ultimately, your choices are your own. I know some Classes give Perks that enhance the use of enchanted items, for example, and while those Classes are very rare I don’t know what Classes you have or don’t have. Just make the most of this learning opportunity in whatever way suits you the best.”

The student nodded to herself. Professor Tanmi worked his way through a few more student questions before the [Students] who weren’t yet grouped together found groups to work with. After that, a [Knight] was assigned to each group before the extracurricular group set off.

“Nice to meet the four of you. I’m Arin,” said the [Knight], as the group walked towards their destination.

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Arin. I’m Luka,” said Luka, giving Arin a courtly nod.

“Erkki,” said Erkki, giving Arin a relaxed grin. “Thank you for taking time to help us out with this.”

“Of course. Now, a few things I want you guys to do for me. Stand together for a second and state ‘I accept the protection of [Knight] Arin. That’ll help me activate a few Perks I want ready, just in case things go wrong. Apart from that, I expect that the four of you will remain near me and within my eyesight at all times. I want to keep you guys safe, but I need you to help me do that. All right?”

The four of them nodded and followed Arin’s request, before Alice saw a curious kind of System mana latch on to Arin and the four members of her group.

The group rejoined the main group, and after a few hours of walking the extracurricular group arrived at a small patch of woods located a few hours away from the capital. The sprawling farmland directly surrounding the city and the area directly surrounding the region had begun to fade away, and had begun to resemble a very low density forest instead. It was nothing compared to the incredibly lively forest Alice had seen when she first arrived in this world, but the trees and vegetation were still dense enough to block easy sight and provide annoying undergrowth to humans travelling around the area.

Alice and the others followed the main group as the [Scouts] began to check around the area one final time. Soon, Alice’s first hunt would begin.

* * *

Rees and a few other members of the Society of Starry Eyes quietly looked over the village from a nearby hill. He turned to one of the other members of the team, who frowned for a moment as he closed his eyes and began activating Perks to enhance his eyesight. After looking around again, his gaze sharpened as he looked at a specific area. Then, he nodded.

The four of them began to activate their Perks. Rees used [Unseen], [Traceless], and [Quiet] in quick succession, making it hard for unwary villagers to see, hear, or track Rees’s movements without hindering the ability for his teammates to see him. They wouldn’t be able to talk, but they could communicate with hand signals. His companions activated their own stealth-related Perks, before the four of them got to work.

They slipped into the village, strolling past people who were carrying around equipment and crops to and from various areas. While strolling brazenly through the village in open daylight might have been risky in other circumstances, in this village nobody had the right Perks or high enough levels to spot the four intruders. The intruders ignored the villagers as if they were decorations, and the [Farmers] of the village didn’t even notice that the four intruders were present.

Rees followed his companion, who was quietly scanning the crowd with his gaze, before he pointed to a few targets.

Near the outskirts of the other side of the village, near where the village ended and the farmland began, four very young children were playing together. One of the four was chasing after the other three, while the other children screamed and laughed as they dodged and wove around buildings and trees to avoid the child who was ‘it.’ The children all seemed to be between the ages of four and five.

Most importantly, there were no adults in the immediate area. Perhaps it was a moment of carelessness on the part of the [Farmers] of the village. Perhaps the adults in this area were simply negligent in general. Perhaps the children had snuck away from their parents to play in peace. Either way, it didn’t matter anymore.

Rees looked at his three companions, and then the three of them each chose one child and stepped up to them.

[Coma] was activated by four different people, and four children fell unconscious. Debuff Perks had a variety of restrictions – they all universally required physical contact, and people with high enough Stats and Levels could just shrug them off. The young children had no way resisting these Perks though, and so they instantly fell into a deep slumber.

Rees grinned at his companions, who also smiled back at him. This had been surprisingly easy. Now they just needed to hide the evidence and they would be free to go.

“I have some bone chunks left over from my last experiment. I can use [Speed-Manipulation] and my Organic seed to warp the chunks into bones shaped like a human child’s. I’ll add in some blood splatters from some livestock,” said Rees, whispering to the other four. “I was checking around, and for some reason the military missed a couple packs of wolves in the area recently. We can just ‘stumble’ across a small monster lair and leave some ‘human corpses’ behind.”

The only woman of the group, who appeared to be in her early thirties, nodded. “I have access to [False Trail] and [Kidnapper’s Bag] from my time as a [Flesh Trader]. Give the other three to me,” she said, as she opened a large bag and stuffed the four-year old child inside of it. The other three stuffed their own children into the bag, and the four of them reactivated their stealth Perks which had fallen away while attacking the children.

Their actions wouldn’t fool a high level [Investigator] or [Guard]. But there probably won’t be anyone above 65 or 70 in the area, so it shouldn’t matter. A group of kids getting too adventurous and then getting eaten by monsters happened from time to time, so nobody should pick up on anything suspicious from this incident. Even if people started to notice that children disappeared more often in Northern Illvaria these days, it would probably just be attributed to the lack of available military manpower while the recolonization effort was in progress. Monsters becoming more active when the military was tied up was nothing new, after all. In a way, the idea that this happened due to weakened military presence wasn’t even wrong.

Rees grinned to himself as he and his companions began walking towards the woods outside of Metsel. After years under the Society of Starry Eyes, he didn’t think much of kidnapping a few kids as test subjects anymore. Once they dealt with the cleanup, they could smuggle the kids back to a more suitable testing site. As the three left earshot of the peaceful farming village, he started to hum a cheery little tune while his female companion hefted the [Kidnappers Bag] and made some adjustments to the Perk, disguising it as an ordinary [Peddler’s Sack.] Then, after moving far enough away from the village, they dropped their stealth perks and slowed down, doing their best to appear like a normal group of [Peddlers]. The best way to avoid suspicion from [Guards] and [Investigators] was to look like they belonged there, and Rees and his companions were well versed in this art. They didn’t leave any tracks behind them, but that was nothing unusual. [Peddlers] had all sorts of weird Perks to avoid getting hit by [Bandit] parties, and while a Perk to mess with tracks was a little weird even for a [Peddler] it wouldn’t seem too unusual. Since Rees had a very, very low level Secondary Class in [Peddler], he should be able to trick most lie-detection Perks with some careful wording. Even if that would never work when trying to get into a city, it should let them get through any random encounters in the woods unless they were unlucky.

The four kept a wary eye on their surroundings as they walked, while the woman left a [False Trail] parallel to the group. The [False Trail] looked like the remains of four kids running through a wheat field. As the four began to make their way to the nearest monster layer, Rees gave his companions a more genuine smile. They hadn’t seen a single [Guard] so far. It seemed like luck was on their side today.

* * *

Far to the north, a spider monster wandered through a world filled with mana. It had already evolved into an alpha.

Instinctively, the spider alpha tried to call other spiders to itself, the ability innate to all alpha monsters.

The spider skittered past a trap, one which had already been dismantled. The spider did not know that the dismantled bits of enchanted wood and steel had been a trap once. All it knew was that there was mana everywhere, and it had been able to feast without fear ever since it had come to this place. Not quite as much as when it killed a moving thing and ate, but it was still very easy to find more food here.

Since it had plenty of food and didn’t have any other monsters of its kind to lead, after some hesitation, it began to lay eggs. These eggs had already been fertilized some time back, and it simply hadn’t deposited them somewhere to hatch yet. Although the temperature of this area wasn’t quite perfect, it was good enough. The eggs were very nearly mature, and it needed to place them somewhere to hatch soon. The mana density here made it quite suitable as a hatching ground…

The spider quickly finished laying its eggs. Then, it continued down the corridor, heading towards the source of all of the mana. Since the food was richer there, the spider naturally yearned to move ever closer to the source of the mana.

Instead of one group of troublemakers, there were now two.

A note from acaswell

Not quite sure how I feel about the last line of this chapter. Meh.

Public: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 80

Once the group of [Students] arrived at a relatively flat area, the [Scouts] departed from the group to double-check the locations of various monster packs, scout for any abnormalities, and do a final patrol of the area. While the [Scouts] were gone, the [Teachers] had the [Students] draw lots to determine which groups would do their hunts first, second, third, or fourth. Alice’s group ended up drawing lots for the fourth round of hunting, meaning they would have to wait until all the other [Students] finished their hunts.

After the group finished drawing lots, the [Teachers] set up a resting area where the [Students] could relax after their hunts. Professor Tanmi and one of the other [Organic Mage] [Teachers] worked to build a very crude two meter high wooden wall around the camp from a mixture of organically manipulated plant life and logs Professor Tanmi cut down with kinetic magic. Walls of this height wouldn’t be enough to stop a relatively high level attacker, but they would get in the way of most local monsters and buy time if something unexpected cropped up. Alice was once again impressed by the level of professionalism the group of adults showed – even though this should be a fairly safe, low level excursion, they made sure each group of [Students] not only had an adult with them at all times while hunting, they even went to the effort of fortifying the resting area just in case. And Alice was also left stunned by how quickly a small group of high-level Mages managed to whip together a fortification. Even if it was unquestionably crude at some points, and had some occasional gaps or uneven parts to it, it only took the [Teachers] about half an hour to put the whole thing together. Afterwards, one of the [Teachers] even pulled out a bunch of food and drinks from a Storage Perk and began setting up small tables of snacks, before letting everyone know that they could help themselves. Some students even took over some of the stumps from Professor Tanmi’s logging operation, and a small rest area with food and drinks was quickly prepared.

The [Scouts] returned after about an hour. Seeing the newly-made wooden wall, none of them seemed particularly surprised, and simply walked up to one of the walls and waited for one of the [Organic Mages] to unravel the wall. Alice wondered if this was a typical part of life in the army – Mages building crude fortifications in a short period of time, before deconstructing and abandoning them the next day. Many of the teachers at the academy were former soldiers, and she couldn’t help but feel that all of the adults seemed rather numb to the whole process.

“There aren’t any new abnormalities in the area,” said one of the [Scouts]. “Have you finished figuring out hunting order?”

“We have. When you’re ready, you can take the first groups with you,” said professor Tanmi.

“Sounds good. We’ll take a five minute break to get some water and sit down for a bit, then we’ll head out. Tell the first group of [Students] to get ready,” said the [Scout]. The scouts headed off to the side and began grabbing some light snacks and drinks, while the first round of [Students] started getting whatever enchanted items they had ready, prepping any applicable weapons, and generally setting up for the hunt. A few minutes later, the first groups of [Students] departed, each one led by a [Scout] and a [Knight].

While Alice’s group waited for their turn, Alice decided to kill some time by using her organic mana to widen and flatten out a tree branch before she fashioned it into a simple game board. She didn’t want to spend any Kinetic Mana, since that was her primary combat resource, but Alice had discovered through repeated trial and error in professor Tanmi’s class that her organic mana just wasn’t useful in combat right now. If she had some Perks to boost it up, that would be one thing, but without any Perks it was easy to make mistakes and hurt herself if she tried to boost her Stats with Organic Mana, and healing mid-combat just wasn’t feasible for her without much better control. So for now, Alice didn’t mind wasting it.

After making some slightly lopsided squares on her newly made game board, and then making some very … artistically inventive depictions of chess pieces out of twigs and leaves, Alice began teaching her friends how to play chess.

And so the group of four spent a few hours playing chess while the first few groups departed and returned. After about half an hour of playing, a few other [Students] came over to see what was going on, and by the time the first group of [Students] had finished hunting a few other groups of chess players had sprung into existence around Alice’s group. Since Alice finally a bit of free time while waiting, she felt that she might as well bring another board game over from home, even if her bishops and pawns were so poorly made that they were hard to tell apart.

As she played a few friendly rounds of chess with her friends, Alice realized that she had gotten used to the high-speed dice manipulation and magical chaos of The Settlers (Luliv Edition). Now, she found the comparatively tame games of chess to be surprisingly dull. It wasn’t very effective at training people – after all, it didn’t give users any opportunities to practice their physical or magical attributes at all. Its usefulness for training [Willpower] and [Perception] was also quite limited, meaning the one and only Attribute chess was able to train seemed to be [Intelligence]. Alice could use magic to lift up and set down her chess pieces, but she wasn’t willing to spend much of her kinetic mana before a fight. The rest of Alice’s friends also didn’t seem to find the game anywhere near as engaging as The Settlers, and the game ended up being treated more as a way to pass time while chatting instead of something to really get into the way The Settlers was.

Alice started to wonder if this world’s obsession with being productive and training Stats and Levels had influenced her more deeply than she had realized. Even she was starting to find chess, a game she used to love, surprisingly dull due to its lack of training value…

Finally, as the sun was beginning to set and paint the world a reddish-orange color, the third group of [Students] returned from their hunts. After the [Scouts] took their customary five minute water and relaxation break, it was finally their turn.

“All right, final group of the day before we can go home. Are you guys ready?” asked Arin, the [Knight] who was in charge of protecting Alice’s group. He seemed a bit tired, which was only natural. There were fourteen groups of [Students] and seven [Knights] total, so Arin had guarded another group of [Students] during the first and third round of hunts, and had been standing guard around the small camp during the second hunt. Even though the man seemed a bit tired, he still had a sharp, alert look in his eyes as he scanned the surroundings.

“We’re ready,” said Luka as he gave the other group members a few quick glances.

“Let’s go then,” said Arin, giving them an authoritative nod.

The group walked up to one of the [Scouts] as he took several smaller sips from a water container, and Arin also grabbed a few sips of water before waiting at the side. The [Scout] finished stretching and resting up before he took a look at them and nodded. He pulled out a chunk of bark from his pocket. Rainbow mana surged through his fingers and into the bark, and the bark quickly transformed into a rough map of the surrounding woods. The [Scout] pointed at a few specific areas, which turned red.

“There are five areas where I can take you for your hunt,” said the [Scout]. “These are the locations we found earlier today where packs were located and where no [Students] have gone yet. That being said, Wolves do move around sometimes, so don’t be surprised if we end up needing to wander around a bit before we find the pack. I can track them down, of course, but be patient. Do you guys have any preferences for fighting locations or anything of the sort?” Alice thought about it for a moment, before shaking her head and turning to look at her friends. To her, one location was basically the same as another location. Luka and Erkki shook their heads, and finally, Arsi shrugged.

“Somewhere with lots of open area, I guess?” said Arsi. “Makes it easier to shoot objects at the monsters during a fight, and I don’t think any of us benefit too much from specific terrains or need to level any terrain-specific Classes.”

The scout frowned, before turning back to the map. “Which of these two do you want? They’re both in relatively clearer parts of the woods, but this one is close to a river,” said the [Scout], pointing at two of the red marks. “Of course, if the wolf pack moves you might not end up getting your preferred area anyway. But we can at least try.”

“Do you three have any preferences for fighting near a river or no river?” Asked Luka, scanning over the map. Since nobody responded, he shrugged. “This one is fine,” he said, pointing towards the red mark that wasn’t close to a river.

The [Scout] gave them a cheery grin before he nodded.

“All right, let’s go.” The group walked up to one of the sides of the camp, where one of the [Organic Mages] undid part of the wall.

The [Scout] and the [Knight] led the four [Students] into the wilderness. As they walked, Alice noticed that the [Scout] had activated some sort of Perk that worked on the rest of the group. Alice took a few moments before she figured out what was happening. The group seemed to subconsciously avoid tripping over underbrush and tree roots, and walking became easier and faster. In short, it seemed like it made the group walk through the forest as if they were more familiar with the area than they actually were.

The group trudged through the forest in relative silence. The cheery laughter and relaxed atmosphere of the camp faded away, and Alice quietly checked her Status Screen for two Perks she hadn’t used in a very long time – {Sixth Sense} and {Sense Hostility}. One of them gave her information on the location of nearby monsters, and the other gave her the ability to sense when someone stared at her with bad intentions. Neither Perk had seen much use in several months, since she had spent most of her time in relatively peaceful areas, but now Alice felt reassured by their presence, even if they were relatively lower-level Perks. Alice was bemused to realize that these days, [Survivor] was used to keep help her stay safe while using herself as a test subject instead of being used as a Class focused on wilderness survival, before she shook her head and focused on her surroundings again.

After about twenty minutes of walking, the group came upon the den of the wolves.

However, even as the group crept up on the location of the wolf pack, Alice couldn’t sense any monster presences with {Sixth Sense}. She frowned. Were they farther away than expected? She gave the [Scout] a confused look, but he had an annoyed expression.

“Looks like they’ve moved. Let’s head to the den so I can {Track} them,” said the [Scout] irritably as he led the group forward.

When the group finally came to den, Alice’s eyes widened. There were no monsters there, but there was certainly something else.

There, in the middle of the wolf den was a small pile of badly mutilated human bones, covered in blood.

Alice felt shaken as she looked at the bones. The size of the bones was very small… the owners couldn’t have been older than six, at most, and had probably been younger. Why were there a pile of children’s bones here?

The rest of Alice’s group had also stiffened, simply staring at the pile of mutilated bones in horror.

Alice turned towards Arin, hoping for him to figure out what the heck was going on. There hadn’t been any children in the woods before, right? Had they come from farther to the East, and somehow dodged the other [Scouts] and [Students] hunting here? What was going on?

Alice took a closer look at the bones, and noticed that some of them still had little bits of Rainbow mana stuck to them. She frowned, before taking a closer look and realizing that the area also seemed very slightly low on mana. {Advanced Mana Measurement} confirmed that this area’s mana per square meter was about four percent lower than the surrounding area. Which could have been chalked up to the usual ebbs and flows in mana, but Alice was starting to get an increasingly strange feeling about this scene. How had children gotten this far without being noticed?

The [Scout] was also frowning as he looked at the pile of bones, before he looked around.

“These weren’t here two hours ago,” he said, frowning. “But… how could they get here?” He seemed at a loss for words, as he began to creep closer to the bones.

Then, suddenly, the [Scout] frowned, before turning to the woods ahead of the group.

“Who are you? Come out!” He hissed, raising a bow and pointing an arrow at the underbrush. Alice whirled towards the underbrush, trying to see if she could find anything.

Even though all of her normal senses couldn’t pick up a thing in the underbrush, she spotted several clumps of dense rainbow mana in the underbrush. Since monsters couldn’t interact with rainbow mana, that meant there were humans hiding in the underbrush right next to a pile of suspicious children’s bones. Alice immediately started reaching towards her enchanted items, preparing to use them if the other party attacked.

“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” yelled a man in simple travelling clothes, holding his hands above his head as he stepped out of the underbrush. Following him, three other people stepped out of the underbrush, also holding their hands in the air.

“Who are you people? Why are you skulking about here?” asked the [Scout]. Now that he had something to focus on besides the missing wolves and the children’s corpses, he sounded much more composed, but Alice could still hear an edge to his voice that hadn’t been there before.

“I’m just a [Peddler], and these are my [Guards]. We’re just trying to avoid [Bandits] and Monsters in the area,” said the man who had spoken up. His voice quavered while he spoke, as if he was incredibly afraid of the [Scout] with a bow pointed at him. However, once Alice got a closer look at the people, she immediately realized something was off about these people.

They were all Mages. Every single one of them. They were all fairly high level, too. Somewhere between 60 and 70. Not as high as the [Knight] guarding the group of students, but still a massive threat.

And their magic seeds were incredibly weird too. All four of them had Organic seeds, which was pretty normal for Mages. However, two of them had bizarre seeds too. Ones that Alice had never seen before. The woman standing behind the vocal man had a purple magic seed that seemed… fractured. Finally, one of the two remaining men had a more standard kinetic seed. It made Alice uncomfortable when she looked at it. The vocal man had a bizarre blue seed that Alice had also never seen before, and looked even more messed up than the purple seed. The woman was also carrying a bag that had moderately dense System mana inside of it. And inside of it, Alice could also see one chunk of weird System mana. Normally, System mana was very… beautiful, for lack of a better term. Overwhelmingly complex and almost impossible to track with regular human eyes, but also aesthetically pleasing in an odd way. However, the system mana chunk inside of the bag were strangely garbled, as if multiple chunks of System mana had been stuffed together and hadn’t organized themselves.

There were three other chunks of pure mana inside of the bag, although those ones seemed to simply repel mana and purify very small amounts of mana, before letting it in. Alice frowned. She didn’t remember the System ever having such a strange and garble fractal before. The three normal globs of pure mana were probably enchanting materials, but the fourth item baffled her. What was inside that bag?

Alice started to feel very uncomfortable. Weirdly powerful Mages claiming to be [Peddlers], and wielding strange magic seeds that Alice hadn’t ever seen before… And all of them had Organic Seeds…

A frightening possibility started appearing in Alice’s mind. She really hoped these people weren’t who she thought they were. Feeling increasingly tense, Alice stepped behind Arin.

“Is that so?” The [Scout] immediately frowned at the so-called [Peddlers], before gesturing towards the pile of children’s bones on the ground. “What happened here? Do you know?”

“We don’t know either. We were just moving through this area when we came across these bones,” said the vocal [Peddler], shifting uncomfortably. “After that… well, I have a Perk that lets me know if other high level people are moving around in the area. I sensed someone coming closer, so we decided to hide. Before that we were also trying to figure out how such a tragedy could have occurred.” He shook his head, seeming lost for words. “To see the bones of young lives cut short so unfairly like this…” The man let out a sad sigh.

Alice wondered if Arin and the [Scout] knew something was wrong with these people. If she whispered something to Arin, would the other side use a Perk to hear her? If she said nothing, would Arin and the [Scout] realize something was wrong even if she didn’t say anything? Her heart started hammering in her chest.

Before she decide what to do, Arin took a step forward, frowning.

“What kind of goods are you selling?” He asked.

“Oh, just some normal items you can find all throughout Illvaria. Nothing particularly special,” said the [Peddler], neatly dodging the question.

Arin’s eyes narrowed, and his hand began drifting towards his sword. “I’m going to need some more specific answers from you four.”

“Sirs and Lady, we’re just simple [Peddlers]! Please, don’t hurt us!” said the [Peddler], taking a step back as his eyes widened in horror.

Alice decided to speak. If she wasn’t mistaken about who these people were, they had probably just killed some children less than an hour ago and possibly watched them get torn apart by monsters. If she was wrong, Arin and the [Scout] would hopefully be able to sort out the situation. However, there was something really off about these so-called [Peddlers]. Alice took a step closer to Arin, before she stood on her tip-toes to get a bit more height and said as quietly as she could.

“All four of them are high level Mages with Organic Seeds. I have a special mix of Perks and Achievements that lets me check.” Revealing unusual abilities that natives of this world didn’t have wasn’t what Alice wanted to do. The danger of the Society of Starry Eyes was present all the time. But there was good chance some of their agents were standing in front of her right now, and if Alice died keeping her mouth shut secrecy would be pointless. Besides, there were all sorts of strange and unique abilities one could get access to. Just revealing she could check levels and magic seeds shouldn’t be a big deal on its own.

Arin didn’t take his eyes off of the four Mages, but he stopped moving. “Are you telling the truth?” he whispered as rainbow mana spread through his throat. Alice now heard his voice strangely clearly, even though he was practically mumbling.

“Yes.”

“I don’t have a lie detection Perk, but if we go back to town and I get a group of [Guards] and such to question you, will you still say the same thing? Lying to a [Knight] in this kind of situation could be a capital offence, depending on circumstances. Being a Mage might get you off, but the consequences will still be bad. Are you sure you’re telling the truth?”

“Yes.” Alice felt terrified at the idea this might devolve into a fight, but things looked like they might already heading in that direction. In that case, letting Arin know what he was about to fight might be the difference between the group getting wiped out here or surviving another day.

Arin drew his sword, and rainbow mana started pouring into his body from his class fractals.

“I need the four of you to come with us. We will be taking you back to Metsel for some questions. If you’re who you say you are, and you really had nothing to do with this tragedy, you’ll be released with an apology from me, but finding you next to these bones in these circumstances is suspicious. Please comply or things will get violent.”

{Sense Hostiliy} started going crazy, and Alice knew that the four people in front of them were about to attack.

The [Peddler] raised his hands even higher and began to kneel down, as if he was going to comply. And at the same time, the purple mana seed in the woman’s body activated, spewing mana into her surroundings…

“Dimensional Mana!” yelled Luka, immediately activating his kinetic seed. Seven tendrils of mana pulled out branches from the group’s surroundings, flinging them at the female Society member who was using dimensional mana.

The mana in the area quickly twisted, breaking as a whirlpool of infectious broken mana started forming in the area.

Arin’s body exploded into motion. Alice’s eyes somehow completely lost track of his presence for a moment, before he suddenly appeared in front of the woman and swung his sword.

Rainbow mana cascaded through her body, and she dodgedthe blindingly fast attack.

The Society woman charged her body with massive amounts of Organic mana, and a second pair of arms ripped themselves out of the sides of her dress. The first pair of arms grabbed Arin’s sword arm and tugged, breaking his balance, while a dagger overflowing with rainbow mana sliced towards Arin’s side. At the same time, her final arm threw a dagger directly towards Arsi … before it vanished in a whirl of purple dimensional mana, teleporting directly in front of Arin’s face.

Arin activated rainbow mana, and his armor suddenly seemed to become sturdier and bigger. The two daggers clattered off of his armor, and he wrenched himself away from the woman’s first pair of arms. He took a step back.

This gave Alice a clear line of sight, so she activated her bracelet. Twenty-seven organic and kinetically enchanted beads ripped themselves off of her bracelet and flung themselves at the woman. Six of them connected with her arms, and organic mana poured out of the beads and ripped away at the woman’s flesh.

Her two right arms were ripped off by the impact of the beads, and she screeched like a banshee. She turned towards Alice, eyes glowing with hatred while her three companions finished boosting themselves with rainbow mana and organic mana. The three of them dove towards Arin, temporarily tying him up.

Another portal made of dimensional mana appeared in front of the woman and in front of Alice, and then the woman threw two daggers through the portal and towards Alice’s face.

{Adrenaline} activated. Alice activated her kinetic-energy stopping necklace. The two daggers froze in midair, before Alice used her tendrils to pick up two ordinary stones and the two daggers and lobbed them at the three Society members fighting Arin. Since he was the strongest fighter here, if Alice freed him up they would win. One pebble tore a man’s thumb off, but he snarled and kept attacking Arin. The other three projectiles were blasted away by a burst of kinetic energy.

Arsi and Erkki finally reacted, sending a shower of missiles towards the woman and forcing her to dodge. The [Scout] turned to one of the three male Society Members before shooting one in the neck. One of the four enemies finally dropped.

Arin turned away from the two remaining people attacking him, giving one of them the chance to fire a pebble towards his left arm. Iron armor crumpled under the impact, and he gasped, before his figure flickered again. Suddenly, he appeared in front of the woman, swinging his sword at a nearly imperceptible speed.

The woman turned towards him, her eyes widening in terror, before a final burst of purple dimensional mana flooded the area. Before she could finish whatever she was trying to do, her head sailed away from her body.

The woman’s two companions, finally realizing that things weren’t going their way, put all of their organic mana into their legs, turned around, and began running. The [Scout] dropped his bow, gasping, and Alice turned towards him before realizing he was covered in broken mana.

Erkki, finally reacting to the situation, turned to one of the two fleeing Society members before he held up an enchanted necklace, pointed it towards the two fleeing Society members, and activated it. Kinetic Mana flickered in far greater quantities than Alice had ever seen a living mage command. Something flew through the air faster than Alice’s eyes could track, propelling something grey towards the fleeing man…

And one of his legs fell off. He shrieked, before growing a new leg on the spot and kept running. Alice propelled another group of four pebbles into his head and he went down, dead.

Arin grimaced, rubbing his broken left arm before he changed his grip on his sword and turned towards the final Society member.

Arin’s figure flickered one final time, before he appeared behind the man and stabbed him in the stomach. The man turned to Arin, howling as the sword lacerated his innards, and tried to reach out a hand towards Arin’s neck in a last ditch attempt to kill Arin and save himself.

Arin’s sword flicked out once more, and the man’s arm flew off. Then, Arin delivered a heavy punch to the man’s face and the man collapsed, unconscious as Alice’s {Adrenaline} Perk wore off. Alice began gasping for breath, fear and adrenaline warring inside of her body. Then, realizing it might be a problem if no one dealt with it, she fired a few mana tendrils at the area of broken dimensional mana, intending to purify it away…

And realized that the [Scout] was still inside of the cloud of broken dimensional mana. Instead of calm, he was starting to become increasingly frantic, his fists scrabbling at the ground in desperation.

Alice realized what was happening a moment later. Broken mana baptism.

Alice breathed heavily, adrenaline and fear still coursing through her body as she panted in exhaustion, not even having the time or mental energy to process the System dinging at her.

She turned to Arin, panicking as he brought the only living prisoner towards the rest of the group. “Is there anything we can do for him?” She asked, feeling desperate even though she was pretty sure she knew the answer already.

Arin turned to the [Scout], before he sighed, uncomfortably. “No. There is no way to treat a mana baptism. Once it starts, you succeed or you die. And nobody can improve the odds or help at all. Many, many, many people have tried to research a way. But nobody has ever succeeded. All we can do is keep watch over him and make sure monsters don’t eat him while he’s trying his baptism.” Arin grimaced, before he raised his sword towards the prisoner again. “Do any of you have the ability to heal something?”

Alice frowned. “I have a healing seed with some mana, but not much. I have a ring with a healing enchantment too. What are you planning?”

Arin raised his sword towards the prisoner, and then cut outthe mage core located behind his heart with his one good arm and his sword. “Heal him. But don’t restore the mage core. And heal up the cut in his stomach, too. If we can get him back to camp we can interrogate him later. Can any of you lift the [Scout] out of the cloud of broken mana? Also, please highlight where the broken mana is so I don’t accidentally stumble into it myself.”

Luka nodded, using a few mana tendrils to lift the man out of the cloud of dimensional mana and then levitating him just behind the rest of the group, while Alice healed the stomach and ruined spine of the prisoner. The group quickly grabbed the various objects the Society members had dropped, including the bag with weird mana inside of it, before shoving everything they could into various storage Perks and holding whatever they couldn’t. There was no time to look over their spoils of battle right now, or even for Alice to look at her System notifications.

“Let’s head back to camp. We need to tell the other [Knights] what happened here, and report back to the capital. Keep an eye out for monsters, if you can. We don’t have a [Scout] to tell us where they are yet.

Alice’s group nodded, and as Luka levitated the twitching [Scout] behind the group they began to make their way back through the woods.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 81

Alice’s group of [Students], along with the injured [Knight] and the convulsing [Scout], made their way back towards the hunting camp in silence. Alice decided to reveal that she could discover the location of monsters with the help of [Sixth Sense], since the group no longer had a [Scout] and monster detection wasn’t exactly rare in this world. Since nobody else had a good method of tracking monsters, Alice ended up taking the lead. She also took over the duty of levitating the [Scout], since Alice wanted to observe the process of a broken mana baptism. Nobody else in this world had ever been able to make the process of undergoing a mana baptism any less dangerous during hundreds of years of research and failed attempts, but as far as Alice knew nobody else could see System mana either. She could probably learn a lot from observing the process, even if she failed to improve the whole process.

Luka was more than happy to give her the duty of dealing with the injured [Scout], and so Alice was able to observe the [Scout] with one of her four mental focuses while the other three scanned her surroundings with her regular human eyes, {Sixth Sense}, and {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision}.

Every single second, atmospheric mana seeped into the [Scout’s] body through his skin. Upon entry, the System would automatically convert the atmospheric mana into the purplish broken mana Alice had seen the [Dimensional Mage] use during the fight. After being converted, some of the purplish mana looked especially odd, and was far less… pure than normal dimensional mana. Whenever this mixed mana cropped up, the System would quickly put it through a second round of purification with slightly different mana glyphs, giving Alice a few new insights about what the System thought was important to do during a mana baptism. Since the System focused so much on keeping all of the mana similar to the kind that had started the baptism, perhaps it was safer to finish the process using the same kind of mana? Alice wasn’t sure if her assumption was correct, but it was all she had to go on right now.

Once the mana entered the [Scout’s] body, it immediately began heading towards his heart and brain, ignoring the rest of his body.

However, the way the mana entered and interacted with his body seemed to cause a fair amount of damage to other areas, even if the mana used them only as roads to reach the important organs. As the mana came into contact with the man’s skin, the skin seemed to deteriorate, developing strange lesions and injuries at times, and at other times bubbling up like accelerated tumors. Alice was baffled when she saw this. She had never seen mana actively harm tissues and organs before. In fact, mana seemed to be fairly beneficial when it was below the threshold for a mana baptism. Why was the mana involved in a baptism so different? Alice had no idea, but she took note of her observation to make sense of when she had more information. She also wondered if this sensation continued inside of the man’s body. Right now, Alice had no ability to see what was happening to the man’s organs. She could observe the mana there, but she couldn’t see the actual fleshy bits and observe them in any way, which made Alice feel more than a little bit frustrated.

However, the reactions of the mana inside of the man’s body painted a disastrous picture. The mana passing through various areas in the man’s body would occasionally explode, releasing little fountains of broken dimensional mana as they spun wildly out of control. The man’s complexion was steadily getting worse, and at times his breathing began to sound labored as the group continued to walk. The strange lesions on the man’s body also began to bleed occasionally as well. The sight was gruesome enough that Alice very nearly lost her focus, but she did her best to push her thoughts and feelings aside for now. She wasn’t willing to force someone to undergo a mana baptism against their will, so this might be the only chance she had to observe one up close. Even if she sympathized with the man’s plight and hoped he would pull through safely, she needed to learn what she could here.

She redirected her focus to observe the System Mana in her surroundings. System Mana was naturally present during the entire process. It seemed to be doing two things. First, it was trying to help filter and guide baptism mana away from areas it didn’t need to touch, which helped reduce and control the damage the mana did to the [Scout’s] body and (presumably) organs. Second, the System mana was working overtime to try to mess with the mana near the [Scout’s] heart and brain.

The mana in those areas was quite a bit more… violent than in other areas. In most parts of his body, mana seemed to damage it mostly by accident as it was passing through. However, near his heart, mana was actively and violently shuffling around, erupting towards the nearby organs as they built… something. And near his brain, it seemed like a few extra bits of mana were trying to fashion themselves into a new part of his brain that didn’t currently exist. Alice was guessed that the new part of his brain was what allowed Mages to actually control their mana – without it, they might have a mage core but no actual magic abilities, making the entire process a very dangerous and lethal accident with no upsides. She didn’t have a way to verify this guess right now, so she added it to her mental list of things to search for more information for when she had the opportunity, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption. As for the mana near his heart, it was probably trying to form a Mage core.

This was also the place where System mana was mostactive in the man’s body. Right behind the man’s heart, the System was throwing an obscene amount of Organic Mana at the man’s body, trying to do… something? Heal? Keep flesh intact? Alice frowned, trying to make out what was actually happening and what the System was trying to do, before she realized something.

Slightly behind the human heart, there was a rather important part of the human body. This was the spine, which the human brain used to relay commands to the rest of the body. Mage cores were always, without exception, located behind the heart. Even though they didn’t touch the human spine, they definitely got kind of close to it. And unlike class fractals and such, the Mage core was an entirely physical organ. If a new organ grew right behind a human heart, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if it damaged the spine or messed up arteries or something in the process. Even a light consequence might be the newly formed mage core pinching a few vital nerves, causing a newly baptized mage to lose the ability to move anything below their ribs or something. Alice wasn’t a doctor, and she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if a fist-sized organ was suddenly added behind the human heart, but she didn’t need much medical knowledge to realize it would be bad.

This gave Alice a much better guess what the System was doing. Even though she couldn’t make out the small, specific details, most of the chunks of Organic Mana Alice could figure out the purpose of were either rerouting the nerves in the man’s spine so that they didn’t get pinched or destroyed by the new organ, and at the same time, shifting the placement of the human heart ever so slightly so that the newly growing mage core and the heart didn’t get in each other’s way.

There seemed to be some other, smaller details that Alice couldn’t quite make out, but she was pretty sure she at least had the gist of the System’s purpose correct.

The other area with the heaviest concentration of System mana was the man’s brain. Alice was pretty sure a small part of what the System was doing there was making the new part of the brain, linking it up to other parts of the brain, and keeping everything else in the man’s skull working during the whole process. However, there were also about twenty different things going on with System Mana, Pure mana, and Organic Mana that, frankly, Alice had no understanding of at all. The lack of quantity present near the [Scout’s] brain was more than rivalled by the sheer complexity of whatever was happening there.

For now, Alice just memorized everything she could see while throwing every fractal she could get a full picture of into {Mana Construct Modelling}. Even if she had no clue what she was looking at right now, she could look more closely at the other System fractals she didn’t understand and try to interpret them later. It wasn’t much, but it was a plan at least.

And then something strange happened. The System fractals, which had previously been clearly working to guide and control the mana in the man’s body, seemed to mess up for a moment. Mana surged and spiraled out of control for about two seconds, and for a brief moment, the mana in the [Scout’s] body no longer had a guide carefully controlling the mana entering his body. The man arced his back and screamed in unbearable agony. The relatively minor lesions and bumps on his skin grew much worse, as if his condition had suddenly worsened over the course of a few seconds, before the System fractals reasserted control over the situation. Alice stared at the System fractals in shock, trying to figure out what had happened. Was this normal? Did something happen?

Was the System mana messing up the reason why the fatality rate was so high when it came to mana baptisms? Was this some sort of quirk related to dimensional mana? Was this just a result of the man’s unique biology? Was it something else entirely? Alice had no clue what was normal or a problem in this situation.

She was sure that the [Scout’s] situation was becoming more and more dangerous. The System mana stabilized and got back to work. Anxious, Alice stretched out a mana tendril and tried feeding the man a bit of Healing Mana. After all, Healing mana didn’t have any major side effects even if one had no clue what they were doing. It was absurdly wasteful and often struggled to handle major injuries with the level of precision they deserved, but it was never bad even if it was strictly inferior to Organic mana in most situations. Which was perfect since Alice had no clue what she was looking at right now.

And then after Alice tried to feed the man a little bit of help, Alice’s mana vanished into the whirlpool of broken dimensional mana like a drop of water thrown into the ocean. Alice saw no results of her action, and the man certainly didn’t heal. If Alice hadn’t been closely observing the whole process, she might have doubted whether she had even tried to heal the man in the first place.

Suddenly, Alice had a better understanding of why Mages struggled to make this process easier or safer. Since the System converted all kinds of mana into the ‘correct’ mana for a mana baptism, and the man seemingly needed to stick with one kind of mana from start to finish during his baptism, trying to use any kind of healing-based mana during the healing process might be useless. Since most of this world’s complex healing procedures involved magic, that meant that every single kind of treatment this world specialized in would vanish directly into the vortex of mana and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Alice frowned, but didn’t try to heal the man anymore. In fact, she was beginning to feel a massive headache as she tried to think about how to improve this process. Anything she did with mana would have no effect, and without that Alice felt surprisingly helpless. If she couldn’t use her magic, how could she help?

The System mana was still clearly doing something. Maybe she needed to use Perks or something? As Alice wrestled with the question of what let System mana work here while healing mana didn’t, the group finally returned to camp.

“Open up! We have one injured and a prisoner!” Yelled Arin, at the top of his lungs, the moment the group came within sight of the camp. “We ran into some members of the Society of Starry Eyes! Get me some Organic Mages! Also, the injured has come in contact with what might have been dimensional mana. Keep him quarantined.”

Alice heard professor Felissa yell something she couldn’t make out, and the wall of the encampment was almost immediately torn apart. Four Organic Mages rushed out, before separating the group of six and quickly taking a look at the [Students] first. Meanwhile, two of the other [Knights] took the seriously injured Society member and dragged him away.

“You appear to be largely fine, Student-Lady Alice,” said professor Felissa, after giving her a quick checkup with a few Perks and injecting a bit of organic mana into her. “Just some scratches and minor bruises. Even if I don’t do a thing, you probably won’t even notice the injuries, but I gave you a heal anyway.” Then, Professor Felissa ignored her and focused on the remaining people from Alice’s hunting group.

[Knight] Arin’s arm was quickly healed up by another Professor. However, the [Organic Mages] simply took a look at the [Scout] before one of them used kinetic magic to gently set him off to the side. They gave him a bed someone pulled out of Storage, but otherwise didn’t touch him or interact with him. An enchanted item was even set up to keep other people from getting close to the [Scout], since nobody had confirmed whether he was contagious or not.

“How is he doing?” asked Alice, once one of the [Organic Mages] finished checking up on the [Scout].

“Poorly. Generally speaking, a successful mana baptism tends to be a faster baptism. The longer it takes, the worse his odds are,” said the [Organic Mage]. “Combined with how quickly his organs are deteriorating, and how much damage his body is suffering… I do not think he is going to succeed. He might pull out of it, because it’s never too late to succeed a baptism until you’re dead. However, at this point, I don’t like his odds.” Alice frowned, but nodded. She also wondered what a ‘normal’ speed for a mana baptism looked like. She seemed to recall that her own mana baptism had taken a much longer period of time than the [Scout’s], and yet she had succeeded…

She shook aside her thoughts, refocusing on the [Scout’s] desperate struggle for survival as she ignored her System notifications. Another hour passed as she watched in silence. The System mana in the [Scout’s] body never seemed to make another ‘error’ and lose control of the mana the way she had observed earlier, but the man’s situation continued to deteriorate.

The [Organic Mage] didn’t heal the man, but he was more than happy to narrate the situation to Alice in detail. His organs became more and more damaged by as time passed, his mage core continuously failed to form properly, and the System’s frantic attempts to feed mana into his brain never stopped, but never seemed to finish whatever it was trying to do either.

Finally, his body reached its limit. The man’s thrashing and screaming began growing weaker, and finally, his breathing stopped. The rainbow mana in his body seemed to give up, dispersing back into Alice’s surroundings, and atmospheric mana stopped flowing into the man’s body. Alice realized, with a small pang of sadness, that the man was dead. She didn’t feel any great amount of grief at his passing – after all, she had never met him before today, and she could count on her hands the number of sentences they had spoken to each other. She didn’t even know the man’s name.

But Alice still allowed herself a few minutes of silence for the death of the [Scout] that had fought with her and the rest of the group. Even if she had barely spoken with him, his death was worthy of a few minutes of silence and respect.

Finally, Alice returned to her own area. Night was beginning to set in, and the [Teachers] began preparing to move the [Students] back to town. A few of the [Organic Mages], led by Arin, had returned from investigating the bones Alice’s group had stumbled across, and had reported that the bones weren’t human – they were just chunks of organic matter heavily manipulated with Perks and organic mana to look like bones. This had set Alice’s heart somewhat at ease, because she had felt rather bad for the kids who had died earlier. With the investigation finished and the [Scout’s] fate already decided, there was no reason to stick around anymore. The [Teachers] in charge of the hunting trip announced that they would leave in thirty minutes. Which gave Alice just enough time to look through her Status Screen and system notifications, and after that she should still have enough time to go to the rest of her group and figure out what to do with the items they found on the bodies of the Society members. She started out by looking over her previously ignored System notifications.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 47 -> 50, Explorer of Magic 54-> 55, Kinetic Manabinder 19 -> 23, Scholar 39 -> 40

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance 122 -> 123, Magic 145 -> 146, Perception 129 -> 130, Dexterity 108 -> 109

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Kinetic Manipulation: 64 -> 65, Mana Control: 44 -> 46, Mana Precision: 45 -> 47, Kinetic Force: 41 -> 44, Projectile Awareness : 20 -> 23, Divided Attention: 23 -> 25, Broken Mana Purification: 14 -> 15, Basic Human Biology 26 -> 28

Even if today wasn’t exactly a day Alice could feel happy and celebrate about, given the fact that the [Scout] had died and Alice had finally had her first encounter with the Society of Starry Eyes, at the very least her levels had progressed quite nicely. She would be getting four new Perks. She would also be able to see her first Perk fusion, which she had been waiting to see for months now.

She opened up her Perk selection menu and started with [Explorer of magic]. As usual, there were three new Perk options. However, there was also a new icon at the bottom of her Perk selection screen.

Since this class is above level 50, you may combine two Perks. Resulting Perks will be labelled ‘tier 2 Perks’ and will not be able to be used as fuel for further Perk combinations until after level 75.

Perk 1: ____________ + Perk 2: _______________ = ??????

Note: While a rough description of the resulting Perk is often at least moderately accurate when predicting the result of fusing two Perks together, please keep in mind that the exact details may vary somewhat.

Upon focusing on one of the two empty slots for Perk combination, a list popped up of all of the Perks Alice had acquired for the [Explorer of Magic] class so far.

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Combat Spellcaster (Explorer of Magic 15)

Improved Seed (Explorer of Magic 20)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)

Broken Seed (Explorer of Magic 35)

Infusion of Comprehension (Explorer of Magic 40)

Mana Construct Modelling (Explorer of Magic 45)

Reset (Explorer of Magic 50)

The exact same list of Perks appeared when Alice focused on the empty Perk slot for Perk two.

Just out of curiosity, Alice tried putting ‘Improved Seed’ and ‘Three seeds’ into the first and second slot. It didn’t appear to finalize her selection until she clicked ‘confirm,’ so she was free to experiment a bit with what the System thought would come out of each Perk combination.

The system description for the result was far, far less concrete than the Perks Alice was used to seeing.

Perk 1: Improved Seeds + Perk 2: Three Seeds = ??????

????: Perk probably retains your original three magic seeds gained through the ‘three seeds’ Perk, then drastically improves the Mana conversion ratio under the effects of ‘improved seeds.’ May also boost effect of mana stat by a small to medium amount, or give the seeds some sort of ability to improve themselves through continuous use?

Would you like to combine these two perks?

Alice looked at the description and couldn’t help but feel a bit weird. She had already gotten used to thinking of the System as less of an odd, omnipotent law of this world and more as some sort of concrete, massive mechanism with definite, specific flaws that, despite occasional mistakes, seemed to be largely benevolent in purpose. However, despite the fact that Alice had already confirmed the System wasn’t omniscient, it was still pretty darn close, at least from Alice’s perspective. This was the first time Alice had seen the System directly admit that even it had no idea what would happen when she tried something. Though, the System had also glitched out when trying to figure out what language ‘English’ and ‘Russian’ were before it fixed the names of both Skills in her Status Screen later on… Alice shook her head, refocusing on her Perk combination.

The resulting Perk didn’t seem too appealing. Alice already had {Seed Creator} and {Scholar of Mana} to help her boost the mana conversion ratios of her seeds, so even a ‘drastic increase’ in the mana conversion ratio of her pure mana seed, organic mana seed, and healing mana seed didn’t feel significant enough to waste a Perk slot on right now. It might finally bump her up to the minimum requirements for [Organic Mage], but considering how heavy the penalties were for a secondary class, Alice didn’t feel the need to waste a perk slot on getting the class. Especially since she would eventually meet the minimum requirement of a 40% mana conversion ratio on her seed by using {Scholar of Magic} for a longer period of time anyway. Alice discarded that combination and started looking at other options.

She spent several minutes just cycling through Perks, trying to get a feel for how the whole process worked. It didn’t seem to matter what order she put Perks in – there was no difference between the first and second Perk slot in a Perk combination. There were a variety of options that seemed appealing to her, and the three new Perks weren’t good enough to be worth considering. After much consideration, Alice decided to combine {Infusion of Comprehension} and {Reset}.

Infusion of Comprehension

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 40 or higher, at least one magic seed, Intelligence 150 or greater, Magic 100 or greater, At least one achievement related to magic at rarity 5 or higher and 1 or more Achievements related to Scholarly or Scientific investigation at rarity 5 or higher.

You may select one of your seeds. Over the course of the next eight hours, you will gradually improve both your internal comprehension of the seed as well as the seed's conversion ratio. The results of this perk will vary based on how quickly you understand the concepts inherent to the magic seed, but will have an absolute minimum improvement of 30% and absolute maximum improvement of 100%.

Warning: You will be helpless during this time, so it is highly recommended you activate this perk only when your safety is assured and you are in an environment where you will not be interrupted.

Reset

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 50 or higher

Once per month, you can reset the cooldown on a Perk as long as that Perk is related to Magic or granted by a magic class.

Perk 1: Infusion of Comprehension + Perk 2: Reset = ??????

????: You will probably lose the Mana Conversion Ratio bonus from Infusion of Comprehension, and the Perk will completely detach itself from your Pure Mana seed. Instead, some amount of times per month, you will gain the ability to use a lesser form of ‘infusion of comprehension’ on a magic seed of your choice. The lesser form of {Infusion of Comprehension} will probably give you the ability to increase your understanding of a certain magic seed you have already formed, and may or may not increase your mana conversion ratio by an unknown amount. It should probably be possible to change the target of this Perk each time you use it, though this is uncertain. May have other minor beneficial effects?

Would you like to combine these two Perks?

The reason Alice decided to combine these two Perks was simple.

Infusion of Comprehension was a Perk Alice had taken quite a while ago, in order to try to understand more about the nature of mana. She had gotten a few interesting clues and ideas from activating the Perk on her Pure Mana seed, some of which she still hadn’t connected into her growing overarching theories about how the System and this world worked, but Alice had only been able to activate the Perk once. She had only gotten a 40% bonus to her Pure mana seed, and while Alice certainly HAD gotten plenty of economic value out of her 40% boost to pure mana capacity, Alice now had {Scholar of magic} and {Seed Creator} to fall back on for the sake of boosting her mana conversion ratios. She would still be losing some economic stability after losing her 40% bonus to her pure mana seed, but Alice’s levels in her enchanting related classes were becoming higher and her Skills were all becoming better as time passed. Her position on Ezrien’s team had also become more secure as she picked up new Perks, and Ezrien had become more and more willing to give her small bonuses for her work, even though he had already theoretically paid her for the next year of labor. Alice felt that she could survive without her boosted Pure mana seed now, even if she might need to cut down a bit on her already nearly nonexistent free time for a while.

As for {Reset}, Alice was a bit more hesitant to lose access to this Perk. She had started out by using this Perk to let her use {Broken Seed} more often. However, {Seed Creator} had already drastically increased the flexibility and frequency at which she could use her {Broken Seed} Perk. {Reset} was still useful, giving her the option to mess with unusual seeds three times per month instead of twice, but Alice felt that being able to ‘see’ more about the nature of various kinds of mana would ultimately be more valuable than a third seed experiment a month. If she was able to figure out more about the ‘true nature’ of things like Pure Mana, Organic Mana, and most valuable of all, System mana, she would be able to optimize her attempts at making Enchantments with each kind of mana. Even if she didn’t get any concrete benefits out of it, Alice thought that she might be able to learn new and interesting things with this Perk. She did need to successfully make a System mana seed to maximize its value, of course, but Alice was pretty sure she could make one with enough trial and error. Her attempts to make a magic seed without the help of the System had already proven that she could make seeds without the System, it was just much harder, and that gave her more courage when she thought about taking this Perk. And even while she waited to form a System magic seed, she could at least mess with her pure mana seed while she worked on forming a System seed.

Alice activated Perk fusion for the first time.

Alice watched as Rainbow mana flooded towards her brain. She lost sight of what was going on inside of her skull, sadly.

After about a minute, Alice felt something change.

The {Infusion of Comprehension} bonus to her pure mana seed melted away. The sudden loss of 40% of her pure mana seed’s mana conversion ratio felt… uncomfortable. It was sort of like being inside of a manaless room – Alice could feel the lowered amount of mana in her body, and it made her feel uncomfortable. However, soon, Alice’s new Perk was formed.

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2 Perk, level 55 Explorer of Magic) (Level 50 Explorer of magic Perk + Level 40 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Infusion of Comprehension + Reset Perk sacrificed to create this Perk.

Once per two weeks, you may select one of your seeds. Over the course of the next hour, you will gradually expand your understanding of the Seed, as well as the concepts associated with it. The clarity will be lower compared to directly using {Infusion of Comprehension}. In addition, the Mana Conversion Ratio of the seed may improve by small amounts with each use of this Perk. At maximum an increase of 5% may occur. This Perk may never improve the Mana Conversion ratio of a given seed by more than 50% in total.

Warning: You will be helpless during this time, so it is highly recommended you activate this perk only when your safety is assured and you are in an environment where you will not be disturbed.

Despite how depressing and long most of the day had been, Alice almost felt the urge to smile now. No wonder people said Perks made by combining Perks were much stronger. {Scholar of Magic} was a Perk that was subject to diminishing returns, like most other Perks. Alice wasn’t entirely sure what those diminishing returns were, but the Perk directly stated that the higher the mana conversion ratio of a seed, the slower its further growth would be.

This Perk instead had an upper limit on growth, but that upper limit was massive. Even if each boost was only 2-3% every time, it would take four uses to directly outstrip the bonus of {Improved Seeds. And unlike {Scholar of Magic}, it didn’t suffer from diminishing returns the more powerful a seed was, making it ideal to push high power seeds even further. Alice had gotten a 40% bonus to one seed from {Infusion of Comprehension}, but this seed offered the chance of improving every seed by 50% as long as she had enough time, and scaled with every single new seed she formed for the rest of her lifetime. Combined with the ability to get glimpses into the nature of a certain kind of mana, providing her with all sorts of information and research ideas to boost all of her Research related classes, the Perk was worlds beyond what many of her other Perks from her classes were able to accomplish. It was basically a weaker version of {Infusion of Comprehension}, which Alice had sacrificed, but it was now usable once per two weeks instead of usable once in her entire lifetime. It was a huge upgrade, even if it did slightly weaken her immediate financial situation and take some time to get working.

After that, Alice went through and grabbed her other three Perks. These three were much less exciting.

Extended organics

Requirements: Survivor level 50 or higher, Endurance 100 or higher, Magic 125 or higher

The area which you will naturally apply resistance against magic to is extended by 3m. Your body’s natural resistance to mana is greatly enhanced. This can be turned off. This does not apply inside of other objects. This area is counted as ‘inside your body’ for the sake of other magic-related Perks   you control as well, allowing you to extend magic tendrils from anywhere inside of this space without the need to form a tendril and move it outside of your body, or use any point within this three meter range to form tendrils before moving them elsewhere.

Alice took this Perk mostly because of the fight with the Society of Starry Eyes. The woman with dimensional mana had teleported a dagger very close to her, nearly catching Alice off guard and getting a hit in. Alice wasn’t sure if one dagger would have killed her or not, but the rainbow mana surrounding the dagger suggested some kind of Perk was activated on the dagger, and she would rather not take her chances. Even though Alice didn’t want to fight with the Society of Starry Eyes due to the large risk of dying in the process, having the ability to turn off teleportation in her immediate surroundings could prove surprisingly useful in some scenarios. This also had a rather useful effect of suppressing a wide variety of monster abilities. After all, monsters that used magic needed to fight against mana resistance just like Mages did. Vinebears would almost directly lose the ability to use plants against Alice as a result of this Perk, since most plants couldn’t reach three meters away very well, and Lurkers would lose a lot of their ability to potentially drown and eat her. Alice wasn’t familiar with the massive variety of monster species in this world, but since the Perk almost outright nullified the combat abilities of some monster breeds she was familiar with, Alice suspected that the Perk would be surprisingly valuable against a wide variety of monster types. Even if the Perk was utterly worthless against nonmages, Alice felt that it was worth taking.

Lesser Organic Vision

Requirements: Scholar level 40 or higher, Perception 125 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, Organic Magic seed present

You gain the ability to spend some organic mana to temporarily look inside of people's bodies, assuming they give you permission or are unconscious. The level of detail may vary.

This Perk solved a pretty immediate problem that Alice had very recently encountered, which was the inability for her to see things besides mana inside of people’s bodies. If she had gained her extra level in [Scholar] before the [Scout] had started to undergo his baptism, she would have been able to get more information about the process. Sadly, the level in [Scholar] had come from her observations.

She wasn’t entirely sure whether she would need this ability in the future, but the other options weren’t that appealing this time. Alice knew that not every single level in every class would have amazing Perks, and since this one seemed like it might be useful in the future she took it and moved on. She had gotten {Scholar of Magic} just 5 levels ago from [Scholar], so getting a weaker Perk this time wasn’t a big deal.

Overclock

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 20 or higher

For two hours, only while you are enchanting, drastically increase the speed and focus you have while thinking and manipulating mana. Does not apply to any mental processes or magic-related abilities besides enchantments. Only usable once per day.

Alice was finally starting stabilize her schedule a bit. However, she still often found herself cutting away time from her sleep, or time away from her friends in order to make everything fit together inside of a day. Alice wasn’t sure if this Perk would totally solve the problem, but with every new Perk related to time management, Alice felt the growth speed of her classes and the stress of her schedule get better. Even though Alice was effectively working two jobs, acting as a very nearly full-time student, and stacking her own research projects onto her already overburdened schedule, with the sheer number of Perks she had improving her efficiency and reducing her need for sleep, she was almost on top of her schedule now. Maybe this Perk would be the one to finally fix her time management problems, or maybe she would need another one or two Perks or Achievements to get there. Either way, every bit of progress helped.

After Alice finished selecting her Perks, she went over to the other members of her group. Arin was now healed up, and the other [Students] all had their various bumps, scratches, and minor wounds looked over and healed if necessary.

“What do we do with all of the stuff we got from the Society Mages?” asked Alice, turning to Arin. As a [Knight] he probably knew the legal code better than she did, and asking him before she broke a law by accident seemed pretty reasonable.

“Legally speaking, all of the stuff you scavenge from the Society members belongs to you, as well as a small bounty the Crown has issued for anyone who kills a member of the Society. That might take a while to process, because the Crown needs to verify that they were Society Mages, or at least very likely to be, but it should go through within a few weeks. You will also need to fill out some paperwork. I’ll get back to you four on that tomorrow, after we have a nice rest.

“As for their items, the Crown does first want [Knights] or [Guards] to check over the bags and such. Just to make sure there aren’t any illegal items inside. If any are found, you will get a small ‘finder’s fee,’ although you’ll need to read out some statements under the watch of some lie-detection Perks to make sure you aren’t involved in the operation first. Any information or documents about the Society’s future movements are also legally required to be turned over to the Crown, also rewardable with a finder’s fee after some paperwork. So if any of the items you find have information we miss during this initial inspection, please report it to the [Guard] immediately. If any of you end up with written texts of the Society, you can look over them now, but I’ll need to take them from you so that the [Guard] can inspect them, and I’ll return them tomorrow.” Arin shrugged. Alice nodded. Even though most of what Arin described sounded mildly irritating, most of it also sounded like pretty reasonable precautions to take. She would deal with that later on.

“As such, let’s open the bags first and see what’s actually inside of it. The [Scout]… he also gets a share. I’ll be sending that to his family. His family should also have a secondary reward issued by the Crown soon, as is standard for those who fall in the line of duty to the country. But I’m not going to steal from a dead man and his grieving wife and children.”

Nobody objected to this, and the group pulled out all of the various bags that they had looted from the battle. They started opening the bags one by one, finding a few miscellaneous research materials, (Which nobody wanted, and so Arin offered to handle selling it and divide the money fairly) some research records written down on valuable paper, (Which Alice took. She would never do unethical research on her own, but she had no problem stealing information from the Society and using it to help make their Society of unethical jerks obsolete) and a few random enchanting materials (Which Erkki mostly monopolized, since Alice had already taken her share of everything). However, once they opened the bag with four weird mana signatures, Alice was dumbfounded.

She had honestly been expecting to see four slightly weird enchanting materials pop out of the bag. Instead, four kids, maybe four or five years old, were sleeping inside of the {Kidnappers bag.} Alice finally realized that the fake children’s bones the group had stumbled across were probably meant to cover up the kidnapping of the children, but that left a few rather important questions unanswered.

First, the most obvious question was where these kids came from. Where they orphans? Did they have families looking for them somewhere? If they had parents, the group needed to figure out where they were so they could return them.

However, Alice also had another, very different question when she saw the four kids. What the heck is up with the mana in their bodies? The three kids who had pure mana bubbles deflecting most of the mana in their surroundings made sense to her. After all, Alice had already learned that kids didn’t unlock the System until they turned six, and she also knew that the System used mana to operate. The System helping the kids by forcefully keeping mana out of their bodies made perfect sense with that information.

However, the fourth kid had no such ‘anti-magic’ bubble around him. Instead, it looked like two different system fractals were jammed into the same space, both trying to activate at the same time, and neither of them was working perfectly. Was this… a second System error on the same day? What in the world was she looking at?

A note from acaswell

Shameless Plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3!

This chapter very nearly needs to get split into two chapters. But I kept it as one chapter. Extra long chapter this week, I guess??? I think there is literally only one chapter in this story so far that is above 6K words, and that chapter was posted during the early days of the story when I was just editing and posting chapters from my stockpile. Most chapters are somewhere between 3K and 4K words, and this chapter is very nearly 7K. But I figured it would be a bit weird to split it up partway through the chapter, so I instead just ended up writing a double length chapter I guess.

Also, I’ve been looking back over the first chapters of the story, because I figured it wasn’t a terrible idea to go over some of the earliest chapters of the story and fix them up a bit. I’m not planning to change anything huge, mostly just cosmetic stuff like word choice and phrasing (and maybe fix the way some System messages are displayed, since I have changed some parts of how System Messages show things like level, as well as how Status Screens look, and I figured putting those cosmetic changes into early chapters along with some revisions to sentence flow, grammar, etc. wouldn’t be a bad idea.)

The way I worded things when I was just starting to write this story feels so weird and different to me now. A lot of my early writing stuff feels overly wordy and clunky. I wonder if that’s just me? Anyway, I’ve been trying to tinker with the earlier chapters in my free time for a while, but it’s proving harder to revise them without breaking the chapter than I expected. Just random thoughts, I guess. As I’ve written more, my own writing style has become more distinct and the influences of other stories and writers I like have become weaker. Which is a good thing, but proves rather annoying when trying to revise my early chapters where my voice as a writer was weaker and I was trying to get a handle on how I wanted to set up the story and manage flow, structure, pacing, etc. Overall it’s a very interesting experience, but certainly annoying. I probably won’t post the revised versions of chapters until I feel they’re in a better state, but I thought the experience was interesting enough to make into a writer’s note. Idk, my author’s notes have always been kind of random.

Chapter 82

The group of [Students] and Arin looked at the group of children they had found inside of the bag, dumbfounded.

After a few moments, Arin snapped out of his surprise, giving the children a closer examination while frowning. “Well, that is certainly… unexpected.”

Alice also stared at the children, especially the one with the weird System fractal, before she thought back to the fight. At the time, the group had stumbled across Society Members near a pile of children’s bones. The [Organic Mages] who had checked the area while Alice was watching the [Scout] had reported that the bones were fake, which had left Alice both baffled and relieved at the time. Now that she could see the children the Society members had kidnapped, she was finally able to make some guesses about what the Society had been trying to do.

“If they were planting fake children’s bones near the monster den, and they kidnapped these children, perhaps they were trying to cover up the acquisition of test subjects?” said Alice.

Arin frowned, before nodding. “The [Scouts] sent to investigate the area also found some rather odd trails that appeared sometime within the last hour or two. They certainly weren’t there when we started the hunt, and none of the [Scouts] from the last round of hunts stumbled across the trails either. We thought that the Society members just happened to have been sneaking through the woods right as the last group of [Scouts] were bringing students back to camp and missed them because of that, but if they were trying to make it look like the kids wandered off and got eaten by monsters, perhaps they were using some sort of Perk to make a false trail? The [Scouts] did say that some of the tracks were off compared to the bodies, but we just figured they were trying to use a Perk to change their own trail instead of disguising their trail completely and then making a totally new one.” Arin sighed. “I doubt we’ll find much else out unless we can pry information from the prisoner. The bigger question is why the Society is actively kidnapping children in this area.”

Alice frowned, before she turned back to the child with the strange rainbow mana glyphs. Then, she went over everything she knew about the Society of Starry Eyes. They had weird magic seeds, they were prone to unethical experimentation, and they often delved into branches of research most areas banned because they were either unethical or dangerous…

Was the Society of Starry Eyes able to see System mana? Thus far, Alice had yet to see any evidence at all of someone else being able to see System mana. Most people completely ignored it while they went about their daily lives, and Alice got several high rarity Achievements just by messing with System mana. Since Achievement rarity was dictated by the number of people who had an Achievement and the difficulty of acquiring it, Alice was sure that the ability was still quite rare. After all, while Alice did do a fair amount of hard work and experimentation to get some of her knowledge, she definitely felt that the rarity of her Achievements were inflated compared to the work she put in, meaning either no one or close to no one had the same Achievements. However, if the Society had a few higher ups who could see System mana, maybe they knew something about the messed up system fractals, and wanted to get more subjects to experiment with that?

“Let me see if the research journal has any information,” said Alice, popping open the book she had acquired from the group’s spoils of war before thumbing through it. Arin nodded, waiting to see if Alice could dredge up any information quickly, while Luka also leaned closer to hear more. Arsi and Erkki, though they looked concerned, were also beginning to look slightly uninterested in the conversation, perhaps because they had little ability to influence the situation.

After giving the research notes a quick skim, Alice found that the first parts didn’t have much related to System mana. Instead, it contained a great deal of information about subjecting humans to broken mana baptisms. The Society member whose research she had stolen had approached the idea of experimenting with broken mana baptisms from a very different angle than Alice wanted to. Instead of trying to figure out what the System was doing during a broken mana baptism and then reduce human fatalities, the Society member had tried subjecting numerous test subjects to different kinds of broken mana in order to… see what happened. When Illa had discussed the tragedy of Allenheim, the country that had basically destroyed itself messing with dimensional mana, she had mentioned that some people who got infected with dimensional broken mana became ‘contagious,’ subjecting other people to broken mana baptisms if they interacted with them for too long.

The Society member whose notes she was reading was apparently inspired by the Tragedy of Allenheim, and had started to wonder if Mages baptized with different kinds of broken mana might have additional ‘extra’ properties. Thus, they had captured a wide variety of people and forced them to go through broken mana, before trying to investigate whether or not the survivors had any ‘interesting’ properties, as well as investigating whether or not some kinds of broken mana had higher or lower survival rates. The known statistic for surviving a broken mana baptism was 0.8% in Illvaria, while the Society researcher claimed that the survival rate for dimensional and organic mana baptisms seemed to be lower, though the Society member had also mused that this may have also been due to low sample size.

The Society member also discussed the value of having a ‘broken mana’ magic seed, allowing them to forego the need for others to participate in the… process of testing out different types of broken mana, giving Alice a guess about the Society Mage they had fought with earlier who had an even weirder Magic Seed than the others.

The other research focus of the journal was discussing whether it was possible to force humans into different body shapes that better conformed to various specific roles, seemingly as a method of expanding the Society’s knowledge of the human body and how it interacted with mana. This method of experimentation was primarily used on [Slaves] the Society acquired through either purchase from the Sigmusi or kidnapping, and the owner of the journal seemed to have focused on trying to permanently enhance muscles and the skeletal structure and make test subjects better [Soldiers]. This branch of research was apparently already somewhat developed in the Society, and they had already created a way to turn [Slaves] into more efficient soldiers at the cost of drastically reducing their sanity. The [Slaves] that were ‘enhanced’ this way tended to lose their minds in the process sometimes, losing the ability to respond to external stimuli and instead performing pointless and repetitive tasks over and over again until they died of dehydration or exhaustion. The ones who survived this process semi-intact were sold to the Sigmusi Empire, and provided one of the primary sources of income the Society of Starry Eyes used to survive and continue conducting research. Alice started to feel sick as she read through the details of a few particularly horrific deaths caused by this vein of experiments, before she started to skim through the research notes more quickly.

Finally, near the end of the book, a note of a rather unusual experiment was recorded that shed a little more light on what was going on. Apparently, one of the Society’s upper echelons had found a rather unusual boy a few weeks ago. The boy had signs of activating his Status Screen and beginning to acquire Levels, Stats, and Skills.

However, the boy was four years old. And children normally unlocked their Status Screen whenever they turned six, meaning this was a truly bizarre case. Alice frowned as she read through the research data and notes about the boy’s information. Another System glitch?

Something felt increasingly off recently. Alice had spent several months in this world, and had only encountered a few System ‘errors’ before today. The first time she recalled the System ‘bugging out’ was when it tried to figure out what language she was speaking. It had taken the System a day or two to straighten out the {English Language Proficiency} skill, and after that the bugged out Skill name in her Status screen had quietly been fixed. The Second time Alice remembered the System freaking out was the day she tried to create Magic seeds from Earth physics. The third time had been when she and Cecilia had investigated the strange stone the Expedition had found, back when Illa and co. had gone to investigate the broken mana region where Alice had been dragged into this world, and had almost certainly been deliberately caused by someone. Finally, Alice’s {Russian Language Proficiency} Skill had also bugged out for a few days before the System got the name for the skill correct and stopped displaying the Russian language as {Ru@#$%n (Language Proficiency)} in her status screen.

And today, she had gone from knowing of four System bugs to seven. The number had nearly doubled in a single day. Alice frowned, before shaking her head. She didn’t know exactly what to make of this yet. She would think about it more when she was alone. She turned back to Arin, before pointing to the experiment she had found at the back of the research log.

“I expect that this is the reason they’re kidnapping children,” she said. Arin leaned over before he also looked at the passage, before nodding.

“If the Society found one weird case, it makes sense that they would try to see if they can replicate it. Thank you for finding it, Lady Alice. If I were to take it back to the [Guard] it might have taken several hours to discover, and during that time more children might have disappeared. I will bring this information back to my superiors. If they’re targeting four year old children, we can alert the surrounding nations and take precautions in our own borders too.”

Alice looked back at the four year old child with the weird System fractals. She contemplated for a moment, debating to herself. Should she reveal what she saw about the boy and his odd System fractals? If the Society had found one kid with a Status Screen activated two years before it was supposed to activate, that meant it was possible for it to happen again. And given this child’s weird mana fractals, Alice felt a second case might be happening right in front of her.

If that was the case, the Society might already know something about the kid. Out of all the children in the entire country they had kidnapped, this group had just happened to stumble across this child, who probably had a similar state as the original test subject? They also kidnapped three normal kids, so it could have just been sheer coincidence, or it could have been some sort of Artifact or Perk letting them know there was something interesting in this region without giving them more precise information. Alice had no way of knowing what Perks the Society had access to, and even less of an idea what Artifacts they might have and what they could do.

What mattered was the fact that the kid might be targeted again. Alice debated for a moment, before she decided to reveal a little bit more. Even if she wasn’t entirely sure whether the Society knew something or they were just plain lucky, she wasn’t going to let a four year old kid potentially die because of her inaction.

Besides, she had already revealed to Arin that she had a rather unique set of Perks and Achievements that let her access unusual System-related information. Specifically, Alice had hinted that she could tell Mages and non-Mages apart with just her eyesight, and distinguish whether they were high or low level. If she revealed that she found something incredibly strange about the boy using the same mixture of Perks and Achievements, that should be enough. It would alert the [Soldiers] and [Knights] of the possibility that the boy was some sort of potential target for the Society, and it shouldn’t put Alice in much more danger than she was already in. The Illvarian government stood pretty firmly against the Society of Starry Eyes and unethical research, so Alice doubted they would turn around and make the boy a test subject if she revealed that there was something unusual about him. He might have some restrictions placed on his freedom of movement, but Alice doubted his parents would prefer to have their child kidnapped and killed by the Society of Starry Eyes if the alternative was just dealing with some restrictions and annoyances.

“[Knight] Arin, may I speak with you for a moment?” asked Alice.

“You may, Lady Alice,” said the [Knight], before the two of them walked away from the rest of the group. Once there weren’t any other people nearby, Alice sighed.

“First and foremost, may I ask that you keep my abilities a secret if possible? I do not wish to be targeted by the Society, and while I doubt they would target me over this, I still wish to avoid their attention wherever possible,” said Alice.

Arin frowned for a few moments. He gave Alice a very intrusivestare, and Alice couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable. She looked at him, wondering if he knew something.

Finally, he sighed, and nodded. “I can understand your concern. I don’t know if I agree with your concern over the matter, and I doubt this ability would make you a target of the Society on its own. However, even if I don’t agree, I will honor your choice anyway. Though, I also want you to know that if you ever feel interested, Illvaria would probably be willing to reward you handsomely if you use that ability for the crown. I’ve never heard of anyone being able to check who is or isn’t a magician with just eyesight, as long as they aren’t wearing a Mage insignia. Since it seems that you can also check levels, it would allow the military to work with much greater safety during large engagements. A squadron of high level [Soldiers] or [Mages] appearing behind an army and ambushing the Mages in the backlines has sometimes turned a battle against the army, and the ability to just look at the enemy side and see if all of their high level troops are missing would be invaluable. But your life is yours to live, as much as I wish I could recruit you into the army. Is that all you wished to talk about?”

“No. I wanted to tell you that the same mixture of Perks and Achievements is telling me there is something… unusual about one of the four children that were kidnapped. I… suspect he might also have some sort of ability to access his Status Screen before he should be able to, although I am not entirely sure if that’s what I’m seeing. However, there is something… very odd about him. I don’t know if the Society has any ability that mirrors mine or not, but if they do, they might explicitly be targeting that kid for use as a [Test Subject]. I could be wrong here – like I said, while I have my suspicions I don’t know exactly what I’m looking at yet, and I have absolutely no clue what the Society is or isn’t aware of. I just wanted to raise the possibility and let you decide how to handle it.”

“Is that so? Hmm… Interesting,” said Arin, frowning in thought. After a few moments, he turned back to Alice. “So you can at least potentially detect test subjects that the Society might be interested in? I wasn’t aware of that. Yes, I can absolutely see why you would want to keep this information hidden. I will find another excuse to give the [Guards] – I will simply say that the Society seemed especially interested in these children, and they may have some sort of reason for it. That is just true enough to avoid tripping a lie detection Perk without exposing your involvement in the matter, and it will give me an excuse to place some [Guards] around the child and his friends. I doubt I would need to read out a written prepared statement over something like this, so it should be fine. Thank you very much for this information, Lady Alice. Your willingness to help may have saved a few lives today.”

Alice nodded. She wasn’t used to near-strangers giving her gratitude, so to be honest, it made her a little uncomfortable to have [Knight] Arin so openly express good feelings towards her. The fact that he looked kind of like a grandfather helped her shrug off her momentary discomfort, and she shrugged.

“I don’t want my inaction to cause a kid to die. That’s all I wanted to say here.”

Arin nodded, looking thoughtful.

“All right, here’s what I propose. For now, we’ll head back to Metsel with the rest of the group and hand the kids over to the [Guards]. They have [Investigators] who are a bit more specialized in tracking down crimes like this, so they’ll follow up the tracks we found in the woods and see where they lead to. If they find an Illvarian village or something at the end of those tracks, we’ll see if we can find the parents of the kids there and sort things out with them. If we find a base of the Society or something, I will get a [Messenger] to let you know that I will be unavailable in the near future, and will inform you whenever I finish cleaning things up. You come back tomorrow with the rest of your friends from the [Student] group if I don’t send you a [Messenger], and we’ll get you the bounty money, deal with paperwork, and get everything else sorted out. You can keep the research notes we found, but tomorrow I’ll still need to borrow it from you so that we can do final checkups and make sure the book doesn’t have any critical information. We can also get you to meet with the parents of the kids you rescued, if they have parents and we can find them. If you’re willing to, you can expose your ability to see System information to help convince them that their kids are in danger and they should accept our help in keeping them safe. Sometimes, people can be really stubborn, and I would appreciate the help, although since their children were already kidnapped once I imagine it probably won’t be a problem. Anyway, we can figure it out tomorrow when we know more.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Alice, after a few moments of hesitation. “But I’m a little worried. What if the Society tries to take revenge against us, or something like that?”

“Revenge?” For the first time that day, [Knight] Arin laughed. “Revenge? The Society of Starry Eyes is a secret society. In other words, they hide, because they are not able to take over a plot of land or work their way into being an officially recognized institution by any government, and more importantly, they are weaker than most countries. Not to mention the fact that they are almost universally reviled. If they weren’t weaker than most countries, they would stop being a secret society and transition into something else. Probably a country or part of one. If a secret society like the Society of Starry Eyes decided to suddenly randomly throw [Spies], [Operatives], and Mages at you just because you were part of a group that killed some of their low-level operatives, the entire Society would need to expose a large part of its combat resources to do so. And in the process, it would risk losing some of those resources forever, or even being completely destroyed if things went poorly. Any secret society that reveals itself in order to take revenge on a group of random [Students] with no background is a society about to be tricked into an ambush, and will stop existing within a decade or two. Any leader of a secret Society who starts randomly trying to assassinate or kill you just over this is either an idiot or a traitor to the society they’re part of.” Arin shrugged. “At least, based on what is known of you right now. If you’re hiding other secrets, maybe if they discovered one of those and thought the gamble was worth it they might target you. But there’s no way anyone with a brain would pick a fight with your group of friends over this. And the Society has existed for decades now – it isn’t led by brainless fools.”

“Is that so?” Alice felt much more relived at that statement.

The two of them ended their conversation for the night, and the group of [Students] and [Teachers] returned to the capital soon after. Alice and the rest of her group split up with the rest of the [Students] and [Teachers] and helped carry the still-sleeping children to the [Guard] station. The [Guards] who received the kids were more than happy to arrange a few teams to investigate what they could, as well as arrange a comfortable place near the station for a few [Guards] to take care of them and keep watch over them until the kids woke up.

Alice quickly let the other three know that Arin wanted to see them at the Guard Station tomorrow to get some paperwork and information straightened out, and that if they wanted to they could tag along to see the parents if they wanted to. Then she returned to her inn room and collapsed into bed, exhausted. She fell asleep nearly the instant her head hit the pillow, not even having the time or energy to use her newly acquired [Explorer of Magic] Perk.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 106 -> 109 (122%)

Perception: 127 -> 130 (165%)

Dexterity: 105 -> 109 (124%)

Intelligence: 164 -> 165 (128%)

Endurance: 119 -> 123(121%)

Willpower: 143 -> 145(108%)

Charisma: 127 -> 128(107%)

Magic: 138 -> 146 (117% -> 122%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 44 -> 50

Explorer of Magic: 51 -> 55

Scholar: 34 -> 40

Scientist: 38 -> 43

Kinetic Manabinder: 12 -> 23

Careful Enchanter: 1 -> 13

Evolved Classes: 2

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 25

Secondary Classes: 2

Fisherwoman: 3

Student: 1 -> 2

Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Sense Hostility (Survivor 35)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Adrenaline Rush (Survivor 45)

Extended Organic (Survivor 50)

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Combat Spellcaster (Explorer of Magic 15)

Improved Seed (Explorer of Magic 20)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)

Broken Seed (Explorer of Magic 35)

Mana Construct Modelling (Explorer of Magic 45)

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 55)

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement (Scholar 10)

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Scholar of Magic (Scholar level 35)

Lesser Organic Vision (Scholar 40)

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Timer (Scientist level 15)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)

Researcher's Speed (Scientist 40)

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision (Kinetic Manabinder 15)

Overclock (Kinetic Manabinder 20)

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Speed Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 25)

Repurposing (Careful Enchanter level 5)

Blueprint (Careful Enchanter level 10)

Skills

Academic Skills:

Basic Mathematics: 122

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 99->100

Intermediate Mathematics: 78

Advanced Mathematics: 18

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 7

Basic Human Biology: 0-> 28

Russian (Language Proficiency): 0->1

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 57 -> 65

Mana Control: 41 -> 46

Mana Precision: 43 -> 47

Kinetic Force: 37 -> 44

Projectile Awareness : 12 -> 23

Divided Attention: 16 -> 25

Basic Enchanting: 19 -> 24

Broken Mana Purification: 12 -> 15

Mana Filtering 0->8

Seed Formation 0->12

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 18 -> 21

Dodge: 18 -> 22

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Magic Seed: 5/5

Kinetic Seed (135%) -> (145%)

Organic Seed (10%) -> (25%)

Pure mana Seed (50%) -> (21%) (Dropped because Infusion of Comprehension was sacrificed for new Perk)

Healing mana seed (10%) -> (23%)

Electromagnetic Seed (15%)

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (III) (Rarity: 9)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

Careful Enchanter (Rarity N/A)

Capable Enchanter (Rarity: 5)

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 83

The next day, Alice woke up a little earlier than usual. Since she had a bit of free time, she tried using her new Perk to start building her knowledge of organic mana. This was mostly for the sake of satisfying Alice’s curiosity. The System primarily used a mixture of organic mana, pure mana, and System mana to do most things, and right now Alice felt that her ability to mess with organic mana was much worse than her familiarity with pure mana. She didn’t know how to mix the three, and she still had no access to System mana, but it was clear she would ultimately need familiarity with all three kinds of mana eventually. Since that was the case, it didn’t seem like a bad idea to occasionally use {Expanding Comprehension} on her Organic Seed as well as her pure mana seed. Besides, she might come across some interesting realizations and ideas by using the Perk on her organic seed this time. If it succeeded, she might be closer to figuring out what the System was doing behind the scenes, and if it didn’t work she would only waste one use of the Perk.

After setting up a few quick enchantments to keep her inn door closed and protect herself, she activated {Expanding Comprehension} on her organic magic seed.

After using the Perk, Alice felt her sight of the real world start to fade away. Instead, her thoughts and vision were filled with images of… organic material. Muscle fibers, nerves, neurons, organs, plant fiber… Alice’s thoughts were suddenly filled with a churning vortex of disconnected thoughts and images. Unlike the time she had used {Infusion of Comprehension} on her Pure mana seed, the images Alice saw were much more comprehensible and easy to understand, since she already roughly knew how a lot of organs and tissues worked, at least in rough terms. Nothing below a certain size limit appeared during her vision trip, but considering the fact that this world’s knowledge of the extremely microscopic world seemed lacking this was within Alice’s expectations.

Towards the end of the set of images and ideas, Alice finally latched on to a few more interesting tidbits. For a few minutes, Alice saw something very different from regular flesh and blood.

It was a muscle, but not made out of traditional physical materials. It was, instead, a lump of mana. Unlike the mana Alice saw in most of her surroundings, this mana was solid, and seemed very different from regular muscle fibers. Alice felt that there was something else underlying the mana-muscle fiber that she couldn’t quite understand. It was a sort of organic mana, but wholly different from the mana most Mages produced when they use their organic Magic seeds. It was some sort of… composite material made out of organic mana and System mana, separated by tiny layers of pure mana to keep the two from mixing together. And the feedback from Alice’s Perk let her understand that this material was better than regular muscle fibers. It consumed mana to strengthen itself, but even without mana, it could vastly outperform muscles made out of regular flesh and blood materials…

The visions faded, and Alice’s vision abruptly snapped back to the physical world. Alice grinned to herself. She hadn’t gotten much out of the vision trip this time – after all, she had already theorized that when people absorbed mana with the help of the System, they were actually using that mana to rebuild their muscles, bones, and so on out of mana. However, it was also quite strange. In Alice’s first use of {Infusion of Comprehension}, she distinctly remembered seeing an image of herself, built entirely out of PURE mana. However, in this vision she saw a muscle fiber built out of a mixture of pure mana, organic mana, and System mana. After a few moments of thinking about it, Alice decided the Perk was probably showing her ‘possibilities’ when she used {Expanding Comprehension}. Things that were theoretically possible, even if they may not be exactly what she would find with a microscope if she had one available. However, this image of a muscle fiber felt more ‘correct’ to her.

This was because when Alice had sat in a manaless chamber for a long period of time, she would often feel that her Attributes were lower than usual. In fact, Alice had theorized this was why people believed that mana deprivation was lethal – lowering one’s [Endurance] stat directly weakened one’s physical health, meaning that in corner cases it could very well be lethal to have no access to mana. An elderly or sick person losing access to some of their [Endurance] stat might very well have mana deprivation tip them over the edge and cause them to die, after all. With the image she had seen of a mixed-mana muscle fiber, Alice had an underlying theory for why stats dropped without access to mana. If the strange muscle-fiber Alice had seen at the end of her vision trip was what the System helped people rebuild their muscles and organs out of, it was natural for people accustomed to the System to have much stronger bodies than people from Earth. However, it also meant that when the strange muscle fibers lost access to mana, they would lose some of their power. They would still outperform regular, nonmagical muscle fibers and organs, even with zero external mana to eat, but they would also face a reduction in their efficiency.

She made a mental note to herself that, in the future, she wanted to experiment with the strange muscle fiber she had seen a bit more. She had seen two different possible variations for how a human body could be built using mana during her first use of {Infusion of Comprehension} and her first use of {Expanding Comprehension}. While the ideas presented from her vision trip this time felt correct, the essence of science was to test things she assumed were true.

Alice also didn’t know why her Perks lost some of their power without access to mana, but she could save that for a later test.

After that, she went to get breakfast. After this, she would probably go back to using her new Perk for Pure Mana until she built a System mana seed, but she was still glad she had tried out her new Perk on her Organic Seed once. It had definitely given her some new ideas to look into.

Through Perk Usage, you have improved a Seed!

Organic Seed (25% -> 28%)

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic Human Biology: 28 -> 29

Mana Biology: 0 -> 1

After breakfast, Alice quickly sped through the first section of her daily routine, as usual.

She met with Ezrien and his research team. Recently, Ezrien and his team had solved a lot of the smaller problems related to the kinetic plates, and had started to take the research for the remaining problems in a new direction. One of the biggest problems the research team still faced was making the movement plates figure out how much mana they should throw at an object based on its weight, since heavier objects needed more mana to stay afloat. Ezrien and his team had no luck figuring out how to perfectly solve this problem, due to how overly complicated the whole enchantment was already.

This had eventually led to the team’s current research direction. Instead of trying to throw everything together into one unbelievably complex enchantment that no normal [Enchanter] would be able to copy, Ezrien and his team were now trying to make a few smaller pieces of enchanted equipment that could be used together at the same time. One of the objects was a paired enchantment built around a kinetic plate and a… sticker, for lack of a better term. The first kinetic plate sensed the weight of objects and then applied a proper amount of ‘upward’ kinetic energy to whatever the ‘sticker’ was attached to, keeping it afloat the whole time. The second function of the ‘upward’ kinetic plate was to sense any other ‘kinetic energy’ input and amplify it based on the object’s weight. The sticker itself was some sort of rubbery substance that kind of reminded Alice of glue. If it was exposed to water, it would lose its sticky properties until it dried out again, making it fairly easy to attach and remove the rubbery object from items that needed to be lifted. It was a bit messy if one didn’t use a bucket to collect and reapply the substance over and over again, but it took less than fifteen minutes to dry out, and a [Thermal Mage] could enchant the bucket to speed up the process a lot.

Meanwhile, the original kinetic plate was a separate object that was used to apply very small amounts of kinetic force to the floating object and gently nudge it in different directions. Since the second enchanted was basically used to make weight less of a headache to deal with, the original enchanted plate was able to cut a huge amount of complex sub-enchantments away. This made the object no longer a nightmare to copy, and even though the material costs went up a bit, the mana costs to make the paired enchantments and the amount of man hours required to copy the plate went way down. The object still wasn’t quite ready for mass production yet, but it was finally starting to reach a point where it could match the cost of hiring a kinetic mage. Now that the base ‘concept’ of the enchantment was fully nailed down, the team just needed to optimize smaller parts until the cost dropped below the cost of hiring a [Kinetic Mage] before they accomplished their goal.

After working with Ezrien’s team for the day, Alice went to the [Guard] station, instead of going to the library. She felt a slight tinge of nervousness as she did so. During her time with Ezrien’s team, she had been thinking over what she wanted to do in greater detail.

Alice had directly seen what looked like two System errors yesterday, and had received news from the Society notebook that a third recent System error existed somewhere under the observation of the Society. Alice had a strong suspicion that looking further into this subject might provide her with a new direction of research to study the System. Alice had no interest in conducting inhumane and immoral experiments, of course, but there was another way she could learn more without violating her morals. Alice wanted to see if she could involve herself in protecting the kid, or find ways to check up on him regularly, or just find a way to observe him from time to time. She could even see rainbow mana and mana seeds while others couldn’t, meaning she could actually be helpful in keeping the kid safe from Society attacks if they tried to launch a sneak attack on the defenders assigned to the kid. Anytime Alice was nearby, Mages wouldn’t be able to hide unless they had Perks that circumvented her abilities. There was a huge difference between being caught in a surprise attack and starting a confrontation before the other side was ready, and so Alice would get what she wanted and would still be genuinely helpful if she managed to wriggle her way into ‘helping out’ the [Guards] around the kid. Therefore, what Alice wanted was to talk with the parents of the children and see if she could get the right to help guard the little kid, in exchange for the right to observe his daily life from time to time. This was something Alice hadn’t thought of yesterday, but after a night of sleep she felt more refreshed and was able to think more clearly.

And so, with this thought in mind, Alice walked to the [Guard] station to see what they had found out, and make arrangements for her future plans. Alice wasn’t dead set on being able to observe the strange kid, but she was definitely interested in seeing if it was possible.

When she arrived, one of the [Guards] led her to a small room inside of the building. There, Alice found Arin, sitting on a chair waiting for her, along with someone she assumed was a [Scholar]. There were also three [Guards] sitting in other chairs around a table. One of them was boiling a pot of tea with the help of some kind of Perk, while the others idly chatted about which tavern had the best alcohol. As the tea finished brewing, the [Guard] handed everyone a cup of tea, which Alice took a sip of before putting her cup down for a moment.

“[Knight] Arin, may I speak with you for a moment?”

“Of course, Lady Alice.” The two quickly stepped into another room, where Alice informed Arin of her plans to participate in guarding the strange boy from time to time.

Arin frowned, as if running over her words, before he nodded. “I can set that up for you. Still, I can’t help but say I’m a little surprised. When I went through your [Student] file it says that you’re not part of the military track, and most people that don’t join the military track don’t like fighting much. Can I ask why you’re interested?”

“It’s because the boy interests me. The way his System information seems messed up happens to potentially coincide with some of my interests, so I want to see if I can get permission from his parents to observe him. If I’m already around, it would make sense for me to help out with keeping an eye on his surroundings, even if I wouldn’t be able to do so for long. After all, my schedule is already packed to the brim.”

“Can you promise me that you don’t intend to do anything that an ethics committee wouldn’t approve of?”

Alice nodded. “If you want to, you can have some lie detection Perks double check my answer or something. I mean no harm to the child, and regardless of what direction my research goes I will not do anything to harm him and do not expect my intentions to change in the future. I currently intend to just observe and ask questions, so at worst his parents might find me slightly annoying.”

Arin nodded. “That’s not a problem. I’ll tell the [Guard Captain] to let the [Guards] around the kid know to expect you to pop around from time to time. Assuming his mother doesn’t take issue with either the presence of you or the [Guard], of course.”

Alice nodded. That was what she wanted.

Afterwards, the two returned to the room.

“While we wait for the others, may I borrow the research log you got yesterday?” asked the [Scholar], right after Alice settled back down with her cup of tea. Alice handed it over without a word, and the man started flipping through the pages of the book at an extraordinary pace while sparing a moment to shoot her a reassuring grin. “Once we make sure there isn’t any important information related to the Society inside and make a copy of everything, we’ll give the book back to you, so don’t worry too much about it. It’s just standard procedure.” Alice simply nodded.

After a few more minutes of waiting, Arin broke the silence. “Do you know when your three friends are coming?”

“They should be here soon, unless something came up,” said Alice. A few minutes later the other three arrived. Arin nodded at all of them.

“All right, bounty money paperwork. I need the three of you to read out these statements while these three gentleman do some lie detection.”

Alice was handed a list of statements she needed to read out loud, which basically claimed that yes, they had reasonable suspicion that the people they fought yesterday were members of the society, they had no involvement in any smuggling operations related to the items they had found and either taken or turned in for rewards yesterday, they weren’t spies from another country or the Society, and a few other miscellaneous statements basically ensuring that there hadn’t been any shady business. Reading through the long list of statements was surprisingly time consuming, and the group was forced to deal with a few rounds of paperwork afterwards, but after about an hour of dealing with the cumbersome process, they were finally done. Arin smiled and handed each of them a pouch of money.

“One gold crown, one golden sun, and three silver crowns each. Definitely not bad, eh?”

Alice counted over the money, before suppressing a grin. Her finances had tanked to a few silver crowns as a result of her enchanting spree, and if she converted the golden crown into golden suns she had just received six golden suns and some change. This amount of money was more than enough to tide her through the next few weeks, and even let her replenish her enchantments she had spent or damaged during the fight. She might even indulge herself in a few board game materials, or a few days off from enchanting to read some less research related novels. It had been a while since she had last read a book for fun, and with her tightly packed schedule Alice was definitely feeling the stress she had signed herself up for.

After the paperwork was dealt with, Arsi, Erkki, and Luka gave Arin tired smiles. “Is there anything else we need to do?”

“If you want to interact with them, you can go see the parents of the kids you guys rescued. We confirmed that the tracks left by the Society members lead back to a pretty normal farming village, so we found the parents this morning. They were practically pulling their hair out with worry, and they should arrive here soon. If you want to meet up with them you’re free to stay. Of course, if you’re busy, don’t feel obligated to stick around. Mages are known to be busy, so I’m sure they won’t take offence.”

Erkki seemed to think about it for a moment, before he shrugged. “Personally, I’m kind of short on time already. I have a class that I should go to later on today, and even though the [Teacher] would definitely understand if I missed, given the amount of stuff that happened yesterday and my involvement in it, I don’t want to miss this class in particular. It aligns with my interests pretty heavily. I’ll have to give the meeting a pass.”

Arin gave Erkki a simple nod as the boy exited the room. “In that case, you’re free to go. Thank you for your assistance yesterday.”

Arsi frowned for a moment, before he sighed. “I think I’ll also duck out. I’m not bad with people, but I’m pretty tired after yesterday, so I think I’ll give this meeting a miss. I have a meeting with my potential Patron for next year in a few hours, so I need to prep myself for that. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Thank you for helping out yesterday and coming today. Tracking down people to deal with paperwork if they forget or skip out is always a pain,” said Arin.

With that, Arsi also left.

“I’ll stick around,” said Luka, shrugging. “It’ll be good practice for my duties in the future, since I’ll need to interact with commoners from time to time. Honestly, my experience in that realm is a little lacking right now, and these people will probably be a lot more forgiving of any mistakes I make than others. There’s never harm in practicing skills you need for the future, right?” Luka flashed Arin a mischievous grin.

“As I already discussed with you earlier, I’ll also stick around,” said Alice. Arin simply acknowledged her statement, and the three began waiting for the parents to show up.

The three [Guards] excused themselves from the room since their duty was done, and about ten minutes later, the [Scholar] finished flipping through Alice’s research notes and returned them to her, before excusing himself. Arin and Luka made small talk while Alice ignored them in favor of looking over the research notes from the Society. Even if reading through the experiment log made her feel a little sick to her stomach, she wasn’t going to waste one of her only glimpses into the Society experiments that might prove useful to her.

Just as Alice was finishing up reading through the second experiment recorded in the notebook, seven adults came into the room. There were three pairs of parents who were each holding on to their child, while the final kid only had one parent accompanying him. The child with only one parent was the kid with weird System mana.

The first three pairs of parents gave Alice, Arin, and Luka thanks for a few minutes, and one group of parents even gave the group some homemade bread as a thank-you gift. Even though Alice wasn’t very used to talking to people outside of her social sphere, it felt nice to be sincerely thanked by people. The homemade bread was quite tasty as well. However, the mother of the kid with weird mana was the one Alice paid the most attention to.

“Thank you very much for saving him, Lady Mage.” said the mother, clasping her hands together and putting one foot behind the other for a moment as she dipped her body slightly downwards, as if she were trying to curtsy or bow. “After his father died, he’s all I have left. I was so worried when he didn’t come home last night. If he had been taken away by the Society, I would have never known that what happened to him. If you hadn’t caught the Society members in the act…” the woman shuddered, before shaking her head. “I might have thought he wandered off and got eaten by monsters for the rest of my life.”

“May I ask what the half-kneeling motion is about? Also, you haven’t introduced yourself. What’s your name?” asked Alice. Since she wanted to spend time observing the kid, she naturally wanted to get to know his mother better as well.

“Ah, my apologies, Lady Mage. My name is Natasha. The half-kneel is a custom where I come from. I was born in Eldren, but I moved here with my child two years ago, because tension between Eldren and Norwick seemed to be spiking and we were sick of the constant war taxes and draft calls. Not all countries rely on volunteer armies like Illvaria, and we didn’t want our son to be drafted into the army when he got older. As for the half-kneel… commoners are supposed to either do a half curtsy or clasp their hands while quarter-kneeling when speaking to a minor [Noble], and in Illvaria Mages are essentially [Nobles] here, so I felt it was appropriate. I learned from a relatively high level [Tailor] in my hometown, so I’ve occasionally interacted with [Nobles] when my [Teacher] made them some clothes. It’s a habit he made sure to drill into me.” Alice nodded to herself. The woman’s level wasn’t very impressive, and probably hovered somewhere between level 50 and level 60, but it also wasn’t bad. If the woman had a high-level [Teacher] and still only managed to get to this level, it was more than a little disappointing, but Alice certainly wasn’t going to make the woman feel bad by commenting on it.

“So you’re raising him on your own now?” asked Alice, looking at the kid with strange System mana. The child hadn’t said a word during the meeting, unlike the other three kids who seemed more cheerful and lively. It seemed that they hadn’t woken up until this morning – meaning that the entire time they had been kidnapped, they hadn’t been conscious for a single moment. Perhaps due to that, the fact they had nearly been kidnapped didn’t seem to have sunk in yet. At least, three of the kids were still rambunctious and squirmy. The parents, on the other hand, had short fuses with their children right now, the worry of having their kids go missing and the relief of finding them boiling over into a strange mixture of love and irritation.

“My husband died about three years ago in a construction accident while we were building a house with some of the other villagers. A beam that wasn’t nailed in properly fell from the roof and hit him at a bad angle. His Perks were mostly focused on boosting crop yields…” the woman laughed bitterly. “I always told him that everyone should have at least one lifesaving Perk, but he never listened. He always said that he would definitely pick one up by the time he reached level 60 in [Farmer].” The woman sighed. “Idiot always was too stubborn for his own good. Anyway, I can keep the house going on my own. I’m a higher than average level [Tailor], so we get by. If you want, I could patch up your clothes or make you something nice as thanks. I hear Mages need to wear uniforms while they’re attending an academy, but you can wear normal clothes outside of classes, right? If Lady Mage wishes for it, I would be happy to make you a nice dress or casual clothes to express my appreciation for your help.”

Since Alice was pretty unfamiliar with how the Shil Confederacy worked and the woman had moved here from another member-country of the loose alliance network, Alice started chatting with the woman about the differences in cultures between member-states of the confederation. She mostly wanted to keep the woman behind without letting the other three sets of parents know she wanted to talk in private. After all, letting anyone else know that the woman’s kid was unusual would put him in more danger if the Society somehow found out, and might bring Alice into danger along with him. Over the course of a few hours of small talk, Alice learned that the about nine years ago, Eldren had tried to call for a council to settle its borders with Norwick, but Norwick, Sel’thas, and Kraelden hadn’t agreed to the council, leaving the two countries locked into a stalemate of skirmishes and bickering for several more years. This had been a big sensation among the Eldren peasantry at the time, because [Messengers] had seen a sudden boom in employment (and levels) for several months while Eldren tried to get everything in place. Apparently, the two were fighting over a strip of land between two rivers which was particularly rich farming land, and grew some sort of unique berry used to make wine successful merchants favored. The strip of rich farmland also contained a few iron mines, and even though it also bordered the land with the nomads and the iron mines were nothing special it was still considered very valuable land.

Alice was more than slightly fascinated about how well informed peasants of this world were, compared to what she had expected. Even though nothing so formal as a newspaper was in circulation, due to the high efficiency of [Messengers] and the boost to productivity the System granted people compared to Earth in the Middle Ages, most [Farmers] had at least a decent idea what was happening in the world around them.

Finally, the other three families left, leaving Alice, Natasha, her son Boris, and Arin in the room. Alice finally didn’t need to stall anymore, so she got to the main topic.

“I’ve been trying to hold you back here because there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” said Alice.

“Oh? What does Lady Mage wish of me?”

“I think there’s a possibility that your child might continue to be targeted by the Society. I’m not 100% sure it’ll happen, but just in case…” Arin said, taking over for Alice. “I’ve been looking over some information we captured from the Society of Starry Eyes, and they were describing the kind of test subjects they were looking for. Your son might fall into that category. So I wanted to know if you were interested in having a small [Guard] detail attached to you and your son for a while. If the Society targets him again, it would be much safer for both of you if you were had some help…”

“And if you don’t mind, I wanted look into your son’s situation as well,” said Alice, looking at Natasha. “I have some Perks that can help me find Society members early, so I’ll be helpful when I’m around. And, to be honest, I’m also more than a little curious about some other things related to my own research. I just want to observe your kid and see what he does on a daily basis – I won’t do anything that will harm him.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed slightly as she heard Alice’s request, before she seemed to wrestle with something. Then, her gaze relaxed. “Truth be told, if you hadn’t taken part in helping my boy, I might have rejected you. But if you wanted to harm my boy, you probably could have spirited him away before I got to see him today.” Natasha sighed, before nodding at Arin. “And I’ll take you up on that [Guard] detail. Even if it’ll be inconvenient, my child is all I have left. Tell me if there’s anything I need to do, or if there’s any way I can help make things easier for the [Guards].”

Arin nodded, and Alice broke into a wide smile. Even if visiting Natasha and Boris would be another huge time sink, and Alice would need to spend money renewing her enchantments in case she got caught up in another Society attack while she was there, Alice also had a potential way to expand her research in a direction she had never expected before. Only time would tell if this branch of research would prove useful, but with every day that passed and every new discovery, Alice felt that she was closer and closer to unravelling what the System was and how it worked.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 84

After Alice worked out some more specific details with Natasha, she took a moment to lament how bad her schedule was becoming. Anytime she managed to get a Perk boosting her work speed, it seemed like she immediately spent whatever time she freed up. Then, Alice sighed. After Ezrien’s team finished up their research, or when her one year contract with Ezrien ended, she would take a week or two to relax. The Magic academy took two month-long breaks every year, one at the beginning of winter and one near the end of spring/beginning of summer. The winter break was used as an opportunity to arrange second-semester classes, shuffle schedules, allow [Noble] children to visit their parents and/or territories if needed, and otherwise give students some time away from classes. The summer break was to allow [Students] to graduate, let new [Students] join the academy and get their schedules handled, and allow children to visit their families. If Alice’s enchanting abilities had reached a high enough level by next summer, she would hopefully be able to pay for her own tuition, freeing up one of the portions of her schedule. For now, since she had decided to visit Natasha and Boris about once a week, she would just have to make due with even less time than before. She would also have more free time whenever winter break rolled around, although she would still need to work with Ezrien’s team and work on her enchanting, so her schedule would still be busy.

Then, Alice went to her classes for the day. Alice’s group of [Students] had made a noticeable ruckus yesterday, so everyone knew that something had happened during the trip. However, most of the adults had been busy running around and trying to figure out what the Society was planning and what was going on, meaning that everyone who had been involved in the hunt yesterday had a different version of events that they were convinced was correct. Some said that Alice’s group had awoken a great, sleeping monster in the wilderness and had barely escaped with their lives. Some claimed that the group had been caught in some sort of freak mana accident that ended up involving the [Scout], and claimed that Alice and her friends had escaped consequences because they were already Mages, but the [Knight] guarding them and the [Scout] were either dead or newly baptized. Oddly enough, some otherwise claimed that Alice and her group had wandered into a pocket of broken mana by accident, and Alice and her group had all failed their broken mana baptisms and died.

So when Alice went to her first Tuesday class, she got a big surprise when a couple [Students] that Alice barely knew the names of approached her and asked what had happened yesterday. Alice decided to avoid saying anything in depth on the issue, and redirected her curious classmates towards Erkki, Luka, and Arsi. She did notice that the [Students] who approached her were noticeably more attractive than her other classmates, indicating higher than average [Charisma] scores, and also seemed to have unusual class fractals near their mouths. [Gossips], or some similar class, perhaps? Alice wasn’t entirely sure, but since plenty of weird Perks existed Alice decided to just say as little as possible and let other people deal with it. She didn’t know how to handle these people, and so her solution was to fob them off onto people who could manage the situation more effectively.

However, on Wednesday, a person Alice couldn’t ignore asked Luka, Erkki, Arsi, and Alice about the events on Monday. Unlike the classmates Alice barely knew, she couldn’t just brush this question off.

“Are you guys all right?” asked Laila, nearly the moment she walked into the room. For once, the girl’s characteristic lackadaisical nature was nowhere to be seen. Instead of seeming like she would prefer to take a nap somewhere, she seemed concerned, her gaze almost penetrating straight through the four of them as she sat down. “I heard that you guys got caught up in some sort of accident. Well, I heard the hunting group on Monday got caught up in some sort of accident, but when I asked people from the actual hunt, it seems like the issue hit your group in particular. Are you all right? Are any of you hurt? My family has connections with a few pretty good [Organic Mages], so if you need a healer specialized in something weirdly specific I can help,” said Laila. “I mean, Luka’s family probably has better connections than I do, but if there’s anything I can do to help…” The girl shuffled uncertainly, before giving them all penetrating looks of curiosity. Alice felt a strange mixture of warmth and a desire to laugh. It was nice to see that Laila lost her characteristic laziness when their lives were potentially at risk, but the danger from Monday already seemed to have ended.

“We’re fine. We got into a bit of a scuffle on Monday, but we didn’t get hurt” said Alice. “The [Scout] that was guiding us went through a broken mana baptism and didn’t make it, though.”

“Yeah, we ended up getting caught in a fight with the Society,” said Arsi, shaking his head. “It was awful. We had to fight for a chance to survive, and after the fight ended, we even found a couple of kids they had kidnapped. We managed to get out of it in one piece, but it probably would have ended catastrophically if the [Knight] wasn’t with us. Before the hunt set out, I thought the academy was being ridiculously overprotective, but now, I’m thankful they put in so many safety precautions for the hunt. If they hadn’t, the four of us might not have come back here today.”

Laila shuddered. “The Society? What are they doing in Illvaria? I thought they weren’t very active these days, at least not in the Shil Confederacy. They’ve always seemed more inclined to trade with the Sigmusi and raid the Free Cities and the Nomads, since the Free Cities are pretty weak individually and each individual Nomad clan is also very weak. Their presence here has seemed to be expanding for a few decades, but why the sudden surge of interest from them? Aren’t there other, much softer targets on the Continent?”

“On the Central Continent both churches issued a joint denunciation of slavery pretty recently,” commented Luka. “It’s putting a fair bit of pressure on some of the channels the Sigmusi Imperia usually uses to collect slaves, which in turn cuts off the easiest route for the Society to get test subjects. As for the Nomads and Free Cities…” He shrugged. “I haven’t heard any news on those fronts. Maybe the Society is still targeting them, and they’re just targeting us as well to make up numbers? The Shil Confederacy is one of the softer targets on the Continent, since the member-nations are so disunited. At the end of the day, I don’t know the situation on the Northern part of the Southern Continent in much detail because roads and [Messengers] aren’t as plentiful in those areas.”

Erkki frowned. “The fact they’re targeting Illvaria is pretty scary. I hope the Crown manages to drive those bastards out of the country. Luckily, all five estates are pretty united in hating the Society of Starry Eyes, so if an assembly of the estates is called, they should have a pretty easy time working together to help drive the Society away. Even if only the Crown estate and the Noble estate work on halting the actions of the Society, it should be possible to mount some dedicated searches and defenses against them, though it might be a little troublesome. Those two are the strongest estates, after all, although the Mage estate is a pretty influential one as well. Hopefully they decided to call for an actual assembly, but even if they don’t I doubt anyone will just sit around and hope things blow over.”

Luka nodded. “I already reported what happened on Monday to my family. I’ve been told that the Crown will make a more official announcement at the end of this week or the beginning of next week, after they have more time to investigate, but my family has already nearly doubled the number of patrols from our [Guards] and started strongly encouraging overtime while we try to hire more. The Crown estate is already preparing to counterattack, so I expect they’ll reveal the results of their investigation soon. It’s much harder to kidnap children when everyone is on guard against strange outsiders taking their children away, after all, and if there’s one thing people take seriously is the safety of their kids.”

“Is the problem that serious?” asked Arsi. “In the slums, I always heard stories about the Society and their actions behind the scenes. I always figured they were at least occasionally active. They’re sort of like monsters – a constant fact of life that never quite goes away. Or at least that was the impression I got.”

“The problem is scale,” said Luka. “Finding a couple groups of Society members every year is normal, and there are probably more that manage to avoid being noticed. However, they’re never a big problem because Illvaria’s military is pretty vigilant against them, and so they usually don’t want to set up research bases in our territory because of manpower and money costs. But the army is already taxed on manpower because it’s pacifying the south, dealing with the Sigmusi Colonia doing some sabre rattling at the borders, and cleaning up the leftover messes from the Sigmusi espionage campaign in the south several months ago. And they still need to protect the North, in case the nomads finish whatever they’re doing and start raiding us again. I’ve heard that the questioning of the prisoner we capture yielded some results already, and while the prisoner is apparently unable to remember the location of the base after being captured, whatever Perk he’s using to mess with his thoughts doesn’t let him hide the existence of the research base altogether. So we know that they’re working on constructing an actual research base in the area, or have possibly completed construction if they got some high level people to speed things up, meaning the Society is changing their policy towards us.

“On top of that the Sun Knight will be on vacation during the months of Autumn soon, like usual, meaning the Northern armies will lose a noticeable part of their mobile fighting strength, since the Sun Knight’s Perks make marching much faster and easier. Normally, that’s fine, since the land of the Nomads tends to have more abundant animals and food sources during autumn, making them less likely to raid us, but with how many other things Illvaria is dealing with right now the Sun Knight taking a three month vacation is bad news.” Luka sighed. “Honestly, it’s kind of a mess of lacking manpower and shifting policies. The crown and the noble estate will definitely do their best to keep the Society out of their lands, but we’ll need to see how well things go in practice.”

The group continued to discuss recent events, with Erkki occasionally weaving in stories of the group’s terrifying fight against the Society, until class started.

* * *

On Friday, [Messengers] began standing around the city and announcing the presence of the Society to the people of Metsel. Alice guessed similar [Messengers] were making their way to other cities of Illvaria, working to spread the news, and perhaps some were even making their way east, to announce their news to other member-states of the Shil Confederacy. Along with their announcement, the Crown also began making sweeping statements about doubling the [Guards] in every city, as well as adding in easy avenues for citizens to report suspicious activity to the [Guard], and otherwise all but declaring a crusade against any Society members found within their borders. The pay of average [Guards] increased by about 40%, specialized [Teachers] were called in to boost the average Level and Attributes of new and veteran [Guards], and a variety of money was thrown at [Blacksmiths], [Tailors], and [Enchanters] to start replacing the equipment of the [Guard]. Cecilia told Alice that sales had improved dramatically within a few hours of the announcements being made, though it also made Cecilia wonder if taxes were going to increase soon. The Crown’s budget didn’t come from nowhere, and with how many resources the Crown had sank into the southern recolonization effort they had to be running low on reserves, or at least that was Cecilia’s speculation.

That night, in addition to finishing rebuilding the disposable beads Alice had used during the fight on Monday and replacing mana cores where needed, Alice started making copies of some other kinetic mana-related enchantments to sell in the shop. Even normal people were nervous about potentially coming under attack from the Society, and so the lower quality standards of Cecilia’s shop were suddenly good enough for commoners with lower spending ability, giving Alice a boost in her levelling speed and financial situation. On the downside, enchanting materials also started to go up in price as well, although Alice was still overall profiting from the sudden boom in enchantment purchases.

You have leveled up!

Careful Enchanter: 13 -> 14, Student: 2->3

Of course, Alice only heard about some of this news when chatting with her group of friends before class.

That Saturday, Anna, Luka, and Laila showed up to board game night in a rather more somber mood than usual. Alice and Cecilia ended up strangling Laila’s settlement placement for resources pretty early in the game before Cecilia managed to clean up the game and win, but the battles over dice manipulation were less heated than usual, and the group finished in a somber mood. After lunch, Alice began heading to the village [Knight] Arin had located.

It was time for her first ‘real’ interaction with Natasha and her child, Boris. Alice had prepared a small list of questions she wanted to investigate by observing Boris, such as observing whether or not he had rainbow mana in his body besides the messed up System fractal, and what his physical abilities looked like compared to a normal four year old. Alice had no good way of testing his intellectual abilities, since she was sadly unfamiliar with what a ‘normal’ four year old was able to do, but she could definitely see what his physical abilities looked like much more easily. After all, even average people with access to the System tended to be able to do absurd things like sprint faster than an Olympic athlete and bench press their own weight with minimal difficulty, while children didn’t have access to the System until they turned six. Even if Boris had only had access to the System for a few weeks, the first fifty stats were pretty easy to build up because there were no growth penalties in effect yet. Alice had physical stats of around 50 when she came to this world. If the kid was already as strong as Alice before she came to this world, that would confirm he had a Status Screen. No normal four year old should be able to outperform a fifteen year old girl, even if Alice had been rather disinclined towards exercise back on Earth. If Boris was able to use a Perk, that would be even more interesting, and would also give Alice a bit more information on what to expect if more children with weird System mana cropped up.

After wiping out some spidercrabs en route to the village, she asked a few [Farmers] for directions before they pointed out the direction to Natasha’s house. Alice was more than slightly amused to see that the spidercrabs she bumped into were no longer travelling in packs. Apparently, mating season was coming to an end. After seeing the Mage insignia Alice wore, they were happy to help her get her bearings in the village.

As Alice approached Natasha’s house, she wasn’t surprised to see a few [Guards] sitting around and chatting about the harvest for the day. They were dressed like [Farmers], but after observing them for a few moments Alice was able to pick up on the abnormally fluid motions they made. Farmers also had high [Strength] and [Endurance], but they usually didn’t have high [Dexterity]. Then, Alice frowned. If even she could spot the problem here, the Society would also be able to figure out something was wrong. She would mention this problem to the [Guards] before she left the village.

Finally, Alice reached Natasha’s house. When she knocked on the door, she saw more than two clumps of rainbow mana inside of the house. Alice frowned, quietly readying her combat-related Perks. She had only expected Natasha and her son to be in the house. Why were there more people?

When Natasha opened the door, Alice relaxed again. Inside of Natasha’s house, two [Guards] she vaguely remembered seeing working last time she went to the [Guards] station were inside, this time dressed as [Peddlers].

Natasha nodded at Alice, giving her a friendly smile. “Lady Alice! It is good to see you again. Welcome to my humble abode. I’m glad you decided to come over. Are you perhaps going to take me up on my offer to make you some clothes? I might not have the prettiest or richest materials available to me, but I’d be happy to make you something fit for at least an informal gathering with other [Nobles]. It would at least be enough to make sure they wouldn’t look down on you! Don’t mind these two – they’re my cousins from out of town, and they’re visiting me for a few months. Something disastrous happened to their last trading attempt, so I’m helping them out for a while.”

Alice quickly realized that if she had a lie-detection Perk, it would almost certainly be going off right now. Last Monday, Natasha had no clue who these [Guards] were. There was no way they would just suddenly turn out to be related. However, Alice also decided to play along, even though she didn’t spot any suspicious Mages while she was coming here. Just in case someone was using a [Stealth] Perk or something else that worked around her skill set.

“Indeed, I was glad to hear your offer. I would like some casual clothes. Maybe just a sturdy skirt or pair of pants to walk around in, along with a shirt or something?” said Alice. She was taken a little off-guard by Natasha bringing her offer to make Alice some clothes for free back up, so her answer was a little vague.

“As Lady Alice wishes,” said Natasha.

“How have you and your son been over the past week? Recovering from the recent fright, I hope?”

“It’s a little troublesome, actually,” said Natasha, frowning a bit as she looked at Boris, who was sitting in the corner. “My son isn’t talking as much as he used to, and he isn’t playing with his friends anymore. The kids were asleep when they were kidnapped, so the other kids haven’t been affected too much by the whole incident. It’s only my son that seems to be reacting differently after the incident. I would understand if he got a fright from the whole incident, but from my [Caring Wife] class I have Perks explicitly devoted to helping my kid keep his mental health stable. They just don’t seem to be working anymore. On top of that, recently, he seems to have a strange obsession with farming now. I don’t mind him farming, but he’s not old enough to get a class yet. What’s the point of him wasting all of his time trying to train Skills and Classes? Kids should just play until they turn six, then slowly learn a trade after that.” Natasha frowned.

Alice frowned, taking a closer look at Boris. However, she quickly realized that the rainbow mana in his body was quite different from earlier this week.

On Monday, when Alice had rescued Boris and his friends from the Society, the three kids had some sort of anti-mana bubble surrounding them, while Boris had seriously messed up System mana fractals surrounding him. However, the messy System fractals were gone. Instead, the boy’s body had a single class fractal, located on the right half of his chest. But there was much more oddity to his condition than Alice had expected to find, because his body had a large amount of mana contained inside of it. Far more than anyone should ever be able to acquire in a week. Alice would have found it pretty normal if a level 10 or 15 had that amount of mana, but Boris had no class fractal five days ago. Getting fifteen levels in a class in five days was very unusual without some seriously extenuating circumstances, or some very high quality Achievements boosting leveling speed. Furthermore, the mana wasn’t carefully layered inside of his already existing muscles and bones, the way Alice saw most other people’s mana. After Alice had seen the strange, multilayered mana-based muscles in her organic mana vision trip several days ago, she had begun to look more closely at the mana inside of people’s bodies, and had confirmed that the mana in most people’s bodies had a slightly greenish tint compared to ‘pure’ mana. It was hard to notice, but Alice had taken that as weak evidence that the System mana used to rebuild people’s bodies was probably mixed with at least light amounts of organic mana mixed in. However, the mana in Boris’s body didn’t have that light green tint. It was very… pure. Oddly pure, in fact. And it looked much more random and haphazardly scattered through his arms and body than other people’s mana.

Seeing these abnormalities, Alice felt uneasy. Even though she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at, Boris’s condition was ringing alarm bells in her head. She had previously assumed that the reason the System didn’t let kids below the age of six get Classes and Attributes was pretty obvious. Classes like [Brawler] or [Swordsman] being placed in the hands of a toddler was a pretty obvious recipe for disaster, and would be about as wise as handing a toddler a fully loaded shotgun. However, Alice suddenly wondered if there was another reason why the System didn’t let kids below the age of six come into contact with large quantities of mana.

After getting Natasha’s permission, Alice used {Lesser Organic Vision} to take a look inside of Boris’s body, but didn’t get a clearer idea of what the System was doing (or failing to do) inside of Boris’s body. Most of what was happening just seemed to be taking place on too microscopic of a scale for Alice to interact with. However, for now at least, Alice memorized everything she could about the mana structures in Boris’s body, as well as throwing everything she could into {Mana Construct Modelling}. The Perk told her that she was currently looking at pure mana, at least from what she could analyze, but Alice wasn’t sure whether that was just because she didn’t have a clear picture of the smaller mana glyphs in Boris’s body or whether everything in his body was actually pure mana. For now, she could only sigh in frustration at how much she didn’t know right now.

After spending a few hours talking with Natasha about Alice’s new set of clothes, as well as Natasha’s increasingly concerned observations about her son over the past week, Alice left for the day. However, mentally, she raised the importance of visiting Boris by quite a bit, as well as the importance of learning to manipulate Organic mana more effectively. She wanted to get a clearer picture of what was going wrong here, if anything. And, if necessary, Alice hoped that she would be able to help Boris avoid getting hurt, if worst came to worst.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

I also hesitated a little bit to mention the ‘golden years’ of levelling speed again. I have no idea how long it has been since I last mentioned it, but I suspect it was at LEAST 40 chapters ago. I probably should have mentioned it a few more times, because I was starting to wonder if people would have no clue what I was talking about if I referenced it again…

Revising the first chapter of this story is too difficult. Anytime I finish editing it, I read it over and wonder if it’s actually better than the version up right now. Maybe I should just stop messing with it? Trying to fix it without actually changing the content is unexpectedly difficult, so perhaps it’s best to just do some quick grammar edits, fix the System messages in the early chapters, and call it a day.

This week my monitor appears to be dying. Technical difficulties continue… I guess this one is five or six years old now, so it does make sense that the monitor is about to die, but still. It’s annoying that I need to replace it.

I’m not really sure what’s going on with my grandfather’s family-style funeral, honestly. My grandmother is the one that I feel has the right to organize it and figure out what’s going on there, but I haven’t received much word on what’s happening, or what to expect. I originally heard we were planning on doing something this summer for a final goodbye, but Summer appears to have mostly passed and she hasn’t brought it up again. Bringing it up is pretty hard, so as of right now I just don’t know what’s happening on that front.

Chapter 85

Life settled back into Alice’s usual routine. Alice continued to help Cecilia form a magic seed without the help of the System, go to classes, work with Ezrien’s team, build enchantments for Cecilia’s shop, and spend Saturdays playing board games with her friends before visiting Boris and Natasha. As the group got tired of The Settlers, eventually Alice switched to Infection, a game built around stopping a series of plagues from destroying humanity, although she swapped the continents around to match Luliv’s geography instead of Earth. As weeks passed by, Alice reached the end of summer.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic : 55 -> 56, Scholar : 40 -> 43, Scientist : 43 -> 45, Kinetic Manabinder : 23 -> 27, Careful Enchanter : 14 -> 19, Student : 3 -> 6

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance : 123 -> 125, Dexterity : 109 -> 111, Strength 109 -> 110, Charisma 128 -> 129, Perception 130 -> 133, Intelligence 165 -> 166, Magic 146 -> 150

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic Human Biology : 29 -> 33, Kinetic Manipulation 65 -> 66, Mana control 46 -> 48, Mana Precision 47 -> 48, Kinetic Force 44 -> 45, Projectile Awareness 23 -> 25, Divided Attention 25 -> 27, Mana Filtering 8 -> 17, Dodge 22 -> 25

During the weeks that passed by, Alice accumulated a fair number of levels, Skills, and Attributes just from going about her day to day routine. It was nowhere near the explosive increase of levels she experienced whenever she finished an experiment, but she was still glad to get ahold of three new Perks.

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 15 or greater

You gain another magic seed slot with a maximum 15% mana conversion ratio.

First, Alice gained another magic seed slot. Frankly, she had needed another seed slot in order to build up a System Magic seed whenever she got one working. The {Experimental Seed} she got from her Scientist class wasn’t suitable for her current needs because Alice intended to use this Seed for more in-depth enchanting and experimentation, rather than learning about the process of building a seed. Thus, having a System seed limited to 15% mana conversion ratio, even after her Achievements were factored in, just wouldn’t give her the mana needed for her experiments. This Perk could be influenced by other Perks, so once Alice got the actual seed built its conversion ratio would start quickly shooting up as she used {Expanding Comprehension} on it. She wasn’t sure whether {Scholar of Magic} would apply to her System seed, since {Scholar of Magic} upgraded her Seeds when she read a book or took a class related to the magic seed, and Alice wasn’t technically taking classes or reading books on System mana since none existed as far as she knew. Maybe if Alice read through the Church of the System’s holy book she would be able to improve her System seed that way? Alice had no idea, and she might not have time to experiment with the idea if her schedule stayed busy. However, {Expanding Comprehension} could at least get her a good chunk of the way towards the mana reserves she needed to properly experiment with the seed.

Kinetic Enchanting

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 25 Or higher,

If you interact with an enchanting material for an extended period of time while focusing on this Perk, you may increase the amount of 'instructions' the Enchanting material can remember by 1 permanently. This extra instruction may ONLY be used to increase its memory for Kinetic enchantments, and the material must already have some affinity with Kinetic mana or the Perk will not work.

This can only be used on a given material once, and will fail if other similar Perks, Achievements, or any other effects have already been used on it.

The second Perk Alice ended up grabbing was from her Kinetic Manabinder class. While the Perk was highly limited in its activation requirements, when it actually worked Alice would be doubling the amount of ‘instructions’ a cheaper enchanting material could remember. Many of the materials she currently used were only able to remember one or two instructions each, because while magic research and Perks had ways to artificially produce lower-quality enchanting materials, higher quality materials were still rare, and thus beyond Alice’s financial reach. Adding an extra one instruction to these materials would give them a big boost, which was especially valuable for the items she personally used. She was excited to make kinetic beads that launched themselves at her foes before suddenly accelerating mid-flight, for example, or beads that detonated when they hit something and hurled fragments of stone or miscellaneous materials everywhere. Increasing the number of instructions a material could remember greatly expanded what she could do with her enchantments.

After some experimentation, she determined that it took about a week of concentrating on a material to get the Perk to activate. Which made it rather limited in commercial use, since Alice would make more money mass-producing enchantments instead of spending a week working on one piece of equipment in that time. Still, Alice at least managed to turn her new version of the disposable stone bead bracelet into a bracelet of exploding beads, as well as partially automating her necklace that stopped projectiles from hitting her. Instead of only activating when she consciously used it, it was now also capable of stopping any objects moving faster than a certain speed towards her, which was a big improvement to her defensive abilities. It could stop an arrow, a dagger, or a sword coming at her as long her necklace had a working mana core ready. Sadly, her self-healing ring didn’t get any benefits from this Perk, since the material had no affinity at all for kinetic mana.

Finally, Alice picked up a new Perk from [Scientist].

For Science!

Requirements: Scientist level 45 or greater

Whenever you successfully complete an experiment related to science or magic which you do not already know the results of (with reasonable certainty), you gain a permanent increase in levelling speed of 20% for all Research related classes. You will also gain a permanent +5% bonus to the attribute growth of all mental stats. (This will be added to your Status Screen as an Achievement named {Scientific Discoveries Rarity: N/A}. Upon reaching five completed experiments, an additional beneficial effect will be added to the Achievement.

Alice hadn’t really had anything specific in mind that she wanted when she reached level 45 in her Scientist class, since the things she currently wanted were mostly related to building a System seed right now, and that wasn’t exactly the specialty of the [Scientist] class. This seemed to have showed in her Perk selection this time, since the options were pretty random. Alice eventually settled on {For Science!} because it seemed like a relatively useful Perk to pick up long-term. Alice had been doing experiments for months now, and she had successfully concluded several experiments in that time. An average Immortal had around 1100% levelling speed for their main class in order to offset the growth penalties every twenty five levels, plus or minus 100%, and the fact this Perk applied to ALL research related classes made it rather appealing. Alice considered [Explorer of Magic] to be her main class, and since she was interested in reaching Immortality eventually, boosting her levelling speed didn’t seem like a terrible idea. With this Perk, she might be able to reach 400 or 500% levelling speed by the end of the year, which would hopefully get her through the post-level 50 stretch of levels. It wasn’t anything that was particularly useful short-term, but Alice was in a position where she could take slower Perks that took time to build up now. This one seemed promising, at least. Furthermore, Alice was a little curious. She had never seen a Perk that had such a… weird ‘operating mechanism’ before. A Perk that created an Achievement was novel and interesting to her, so Alice wanted to see how it worked behind the scenes, whenever she finished another experiment.

Apart from Alice’s new Perks, she had still been using her other Perks and trying out new projects. She used {Expanding Comprehension} whenever it came off cooldown. Alice had debated whether she had a reason to use it on her Organic mana seed more, but had ultimately opted to focus back on her pure mana seed for the time being, leaving her organic seed to only improve as a result of {Scholar of Magic}. The lacking mana conversion ratio made it surprisingly hard to experiment with pure mana while still making enchantments, and Alice definitely needed to keep paying for food and a place to sleep. The two Perks added a slow but steady boost to her seeds.

Through Perk Usage, you have improved a Seed!

Kinetic Seed (145% -> 146%), Organic Seed (28% -> 34%), Pure Mana Seed (21% -> 36%), Healing Seed (23% -> 25%)

The amount Alice had learned from her vision-trips into the nature of Pure Mana weren’t exactly groundbreaking, primarily because each vision was shorter and less detailed than {Infusion of Comprehension} had been. However, with every single usage of the Perk, Alice would notice more and more oddities in the way her Perk… ‘described’ Pure mana, for lack of a better term. It showed a lot of things that Alice would never have thought to associated with pure mana, such as [Fishermen], [Knights], and other things. Alice wasn’t quite sure why the Perk was so insistent on pointing out there was a connection between mana and classes, since Alice had already guessed the System used mana to make Stats and Classes somehow and the relationship seemed pretty obvious. However, she kept feeling like she was missing something important there. For now, she couldn’t make sense of it, so she put the question aside and focused on Boris.

In the final week of Summer, Cecilia finally formed her Magic seed without the help of the System, granting her a rarity six Achievement and finally freeing Alice up to experiment and focus on her own interests again. Since Alice no longer needed to use {Broken Seed} on Cecilia, in two weeks she would finally start working on building a System seed. Alice grinned to herself, already imagining how much time and effort she would be able to put into trying the seeds from Earth again, as well as experimenting with System mana seeds. At the same time, Alice couldn’t help but let out a small sigh. Without her realizing it, nine months had passed since she arrived in this strange world. Alice found herself increasingly grateful for her memory, which had become photographic as a result of her Perks and ever-increasing [Intelligence] stat. Those two things kept her memories of home from degrading more than they already had, allowing Alice to never forget where she had come from. She had no idea whether she would ever be able to return home, and studying dimensions was a touchy subject due to the way it interacted with broken mana and the actions of the Society of Starry Eyes. However, even though Alice felt her prospects of returning home were dim, she didn’t want to ever forget her friends and family back on Earth, because even if she might never see them again, she wanted to remember their faces and the times she had spent with them.

During the last weeks of summer, plenty had happened in Illvaria as well. The country had continued to prepare for armed conflict with the Society of Starry Eyes, and two research bases had been found and attacked in that time. People on the streets also started to vanish or get sick, although it was still a small portion of the population overall. The [Guard] had started to pay attention to the children of the slums, who seemed particularly vulnerable to disappearances, and after tracing back records, witness reports, and a variety of other information, they realized that people had indeed started to disappear from the slums. Most of the disappearances were children, although plenty of adults had also disappeared. [Beggars], [Courtesans], and other people who weren’t easy to notice the disappearance of occasionally just stopped appearing one day, and sometimes it would take days or weeks for people to notice. By that time, the person in question had usually disappeared for long enough that tracking them was impossible. The people of Metsel were on edge, and a quiet, oppressive atmosphere had descended over the city. Most people stayed indoors at night, and avoided dark alleys as if they contained hordes of monsters in every shadow.

Apart from that, however, while listening to her friends gossip before class, Alice had learned of a few more bizarre recent happenings.

It seemed that recently, mana baptisms were failing more often than usual. Luka and Erkki had only briefly mentioned this, saying that the people seemed particularly unlucky this year, but Alice couldn’t help but wonder if it was the start of something more dangerous. It was entirely normal to fail a mana baptism – after all, the success rate was a mere 4%. This was the reason why only people who were desperate usually opted to go through a baptism – someone who wasn’t desperate wasn’t usually willing to throw the dice and try to become a mage if they had a 96% chance of dying a horrible and painful death. But even though other people didn’t find more frequent failures to be terribly unusual, Alice couldn’t help but wonder if it was related to the way the System had seemed to mess up during the [Scout]’s mana baptism. Alice didn’t know enough to figure out the whole story yet, but she was sure something was going wrong right now. And she desperately needed to figure out what was going on before it affected her.

It was with an oddly melancholy and worried mood that Alice welcomed the first week of Autumn.

That weekend, like any other, Alice went to Natasha and Boris’s village after playing board games. When she arrived, however, Boris’s behavior was even more unusual than before. After Alice greeted Natasha, and then greeted this month’s ‘relatives’ who were staying in Natasha’s house after ‘falling on hard times,’ Alice gave the mana in Boris’s body a closer examination, as usual.

The results of Boris’s oddity were growing increasingly evident, at least in Alice’s eyes. Boris had not developed a second class, even though by all rights he probably should have picked up another class just by sheer coincidence at this point. After all, levelling up a class like [Farmer] required a fair amount of physical exertion and labor, so picking up a class like [Laborer] should have almost certainly happened by now.

The class fractal in his body looked increasingly faint, which was incredibly odd. The more someone levelled up a class, the more colorful, mana-dense, and vibrant the class fractal in their body would get. This was the basis of how Alice guesstimated the levels of people around her. However, Boris was definitely growing stronger and sturdier, and better at farming… without his class fractal getting brighter and more packed with mana. The amount of mana in his body now resembled somebody who was level 30 or 35, despite the fact he had only had his class for less than two months, and his class fractal didn’t look like it was becoming higher-level. Alice had no idea what to make of this.

Boris still did not talk very much, either. According to Natasha, the number of sentences he said on a daily basis could be counted using her fingers, and Boris no longer enjoyed playing with his friends. He spent all of his time obsessively farming. He learned more about how to farm, spent time in the fields with the grown-up farmers working with them, and otherwise taking actions that should normally result in Boris levelling up. Alice wouldn’t have thought much of his behavior if she hadn’t heard what the boy used to be like from Natasha – after all, even many of the [Farmers] who worked in the fields of the village every day seemed to find his behavior cute, rather than weird, and Alice had seen plenty of other people who grinded out levels whenever they could in hopes of reaching Immortality before they died. Being a hard worker was nothing unusual, but having someone’s personality radically change this way was definitely unnatural.

“Lady Alice, do you know what’s wrong with my son?” Asked Natasha, breaking Alice out of her thoughts.

“I’m sorry?” asked Alice, shaking off her train of thought.

“My son. Why is he so different? I know you said that the Society might be targeting him, but we haven’t seen them a second time, even though over a month has passed now. Instead, my child is growing increasingly different. He wasn’t awake when he was kidnapped, so even if he was shaken up a little bit, the effects on his personality shouldn’t have been this severe. But every day, he grows more distant from me…” Natasha said, shuffling a little bit as she eyed her son. Boris didn’t pay very much attention to the two of them, and was simply staring at the door. His hand twitched and occasionally moved, as if he were imagining holding a hoe or plow in his hands, and even Alice found his behavior concerning.

Alice sighed. She didn’t want to talk about some of her abilities, but she also didn’t feel that it was entirely right hiding everything from Natasha, who was only worried about her son. However, telling Natasha more might cause the woman to make a mistake that put her and her child in more danger than they were already in, as well as put Alice herself in danger. Alice pushed down a strange feeling of guilt, before she turned back to Natasha.

“I don’t think telling you will help you fix it, or allow you to take any countermeasures against it. On the contrary, knowing may put you under greater threat from the Society without having any beneficial effects…”

“But you know the reason why he’s becoming different, right?” Natasha said, stepping closer to Alice. “Can you help my son? I’ll pay you for your time – whatever I own, I can give you. I’ll do anything, so if you can stop whatever is changing my son…” Natasha shivered, and Alice felt an even greater surge of guilt as she looked at the woman.

Then, she turned back towards Boris. Could she help him? Alice wasn’t great with little kids, but that didn’t mean she disliked them. She did have some thoughts of helping him if she was able to. The problem was that she had no confidence in fixing the problem. Alice barely even understood what the problem was, honestly. She knew that the System wasn’t supposed to give people classes before the age of six, and was beginning to suspect that getting one ahead of time might be the cause of Boris’s mental problems. She wasn’t sure why the problem existed though, and she had no clue how to fix it. After all, removing levels from another living human being in this world was impossible, as far as she knew. Once one gained a class, they had it forever. If they really didn’t like it, they could move it to the secondary classes section and replace it with something they actually wanted, but that usually required speaking with a [Priest of the System] who was higher level than them and paying a fee to the church. People usually only did so to pick up a marriage-related class, or on rare occasions when they wanted to change professions and didn’t have a free main class slot. That didn’t give Alice any idea what she needed to do to remove a class entirely. Alice didn’t even know if the class itself was the problem, or if it was the symptom of deeper problem, because correlation did not equal causation and Alice had yet to establish exactly what the ‘root cause’ of Boris’s abnormality was.

In short, Alice had no idea where to begin.

Furthermore, messing with Boris’s body would put Alice in a rather dangerous legal position. In Illvaria, people weren’t allowed to heal other people without a license. This was to prevent incompetent people from trying to sell their services as a healer to others and messing up, harming or killing patients in the process. The Law wasn’t entirely rigid, and there were some circumstances where it could be ignored. If an [Organic Mage] stumbled across a man who was bleeding out and there was nobody more qualified nearby who could help, for example, they could try their best to save the man and wouldn’t suffer from legal consequences if they failed to save him, and there were some other exceptions. However, this clearly wasn’t the scenario Alice found herself in right now. Boris wasn’t in immediate risk of dying – Alice only suspected that bad consequences would occur if the problem continued to grow worse and wasn’t fixed somehow. The fact Alice didn’t have a healer’s license was suddenly proving unexpectedly annoying. Her Introductory Organic Mana class with Professor Felissa would allow her to apply for an apprentice license, but that would only let her heal while under the supervision of someone with a proper license, and Alice had simply never found the time to get an apprentice license.

Alice realized that she might need to work towards picking up an apprentice healing license if she wanted to help Boris without landing herself in legal hot water. How would she even convince professor Felissa to oversee Alice’s attempts at healing the boy when half of Alice’s attempts at healing the process were dubious, and related to secrets Alice didn’t want to expose? If Alice wanted to heal without supervision, she would need a full license, but she didn’t have the qualifications to get one yet.

If Alice did nothing, she might not be able to get to the root of whatever was happening right now. She didn’t know all of the minute details behind why mana baptisms were failing more often, but she still suspected it was related to a much bigger problem that would eventually affect her if she didn’t figure out what was going on. However, if she did do something, she ran the risk of being targeted by the Society, which was already showing itself to be more and more active in Illvaria as the country desperately tried to hire more [Guards] and [Soldiers] to fill in the gaps of its military. Alice had always been wary of the Society, and things were getting worse right now.

She felt a growing headache as she wrestled with this problem, before sighing.

“Let me think. I don’t have a healing license, so I need more time to figure out what’s going on. Let me… let me think for a bit,” said Alice. She made some small talk with Natasha for a few more minutes, before she returned to Metsel after excusing herself. In the past month, things seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse, and Alice had some harder choices she needed to make.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

The board game Infection is essentially Pandemic, for those who are familiar with that board game. For the record, one can still practice magic while playing by using it to shuffle the deck of cards (actually pretty hard with kinetic magic) and using it to move pieces around.

Last chapter I mistakenly stated that Alice’s Careful Enchanter class moved from level 23 to level 24. This should have been level 13 -> 14. My apologies for any confusion resulting from this typo. This has been corrected.

Chapter 86

After Alice returned to Metsel, she began to work on a few new projects, in hopes of figuring out what was going on with the recent decline in successful mana baptisms and Boris’s increasingly strange behavior.

First, Alice continued combing through the library in hopes of learning more about magic seeds and the System, as a form of preparation for forming a System mana seed. She had a sneaking suspicion that it would extremely useful in the future, and might be the key to fixing some of these problems long-term.

Second, Alice started looking up the requirements to publish academic papers related to research. For a long time, Alice’s research had drifted in a kind of strange limbo, where she shared it with Cecilia so that the other girl could get Achievements, and occasionally Illa and Milo when she was still in Cyra. Otherwise, her research was more for the sake of her own curiosity, and she had never felt that it was particularly important for the rest of the world to know or pay attention to. She never talked with people about her research discoveries, or connected them to the wider community of [Scholars] and Mages that existed in Illvaria. However, now that a problem was starting to crop up on a larger scale, Alice was beginning to suspect she might need to start sharing her findings as well. She had done her best to avoid putting herself in the eyes of the Society, but Alice seriously doubted Boris was the only kid who was starting to suffer from weird mana buildup and early access to a Status Screen. If Alice’s findings could legitimately help people treat the issue, she felt it was worth sharing, and it could also build up some of her credentials as a [Scholar] and maybe give her a few levels along the way. Considering how active the Society was these days, Alice did have reason to be more afraid of them – however, Illvarian countermeasures against the Society were also becoming harsher and more effective as the Illvarian government learned to deal with the increased activity of the Society. Overall, Alice felt she could publish at least some of her findings once she knew a bit more about the process.

In the library, Alice discovered that she actually already had the minimum qualification to publish an academic research paper as long as she remained a [Student] of the magic academy. However, it needed to be reviewed by one of her professors, and then would be submitted to one of the Academy [Librarians], who would review it again. From that point onwards, with the help of some Lie Detection to make sure her results were based on real experiments, and some followup paperwork to clean up any final details, Alice would be allowed to place a research document detailing her findings into the library. If any of the academic journals popular in Illvaria took a fancy to her paper, they might pay her to put some copies of her research into that month’s edition. If they didn’t, her paper would still be available in the library for others to read and learn from. [Merchants] might also find something interesting in her paper and wish to speak with her further on the topic, and Alice would automatically be granted a patent on any material gains related to her research for five years after her paper was published.

With that in mind, Alice began thinking about publishing her findings related to mana and mana filtration. The idea that mana deprivation might not be lethal was pretty new from an academic standpoint, but it would potentially help ground some other academic theories in the future that would be relevant if something really was going wrong with the System. More importantly, this also had some potential of helping Alice treat Boris without legal troubles.

She didn’t know why Boris getting a Status Screen two years early was causing his behavior to change so radically, or how to solve the situation permanently. However, she had a sort of band-aid solution she thought might work, even if it didn’t really address the root of the problem.

Boris’s primary problem seemed to be the fact that he was unlocking a class and absorbing mana well before he should be able to. Alice didn’t know why this was a problem, and also wasn’t sure what a more detailed solution to Boris’s problem might look like. However, that didn’t mean it was untreatable. Alice currently thought that, even if it wouldn’t help long term, stopping Boris from absorbing mana from his surroundings might prevent the problem from getting worse. Alice had already tested whether or not mana deprivation was lethal multiple times in her experiments from several months ago, and had determined that while it lowered one’s [Endurance] stat, it wasn’t likely to kill someone that wasn’t already sick or in a weakened state. Alice also knew as a result of her experiences with her manaless room that one couldn’t level up without mana. Instead, everyone’s body seemed to sort of ‘remember’ how many levels they were supposed to gain and then just pick the levels up whenever they had access to mana again. If Boris levelling up was the problem, then stopping him from levelling up should solve the problem for now, right?

That was the idea, at least. {Safety Analysis} had at least informed her that her test wouldn’t harm Boris, even if she had no clue whether it would help or not. It was worth a try, right? It wouldn’t work long term, of course, because Levels were practically a requirement to function in this world. However, maybe once Boris turned six the issue would solve itself? In any case, Alice felt that it wouldn’t hurt to try.

As a third project, Alice began investigating the requirements for a healer’s license. If she published a paper on mana deprivation, and then found a way to link it to Boris’s case in a more concrete fashion, then coupled with an Apprentice Healer’s license Alice would probably have a pretty solid case for treating Boris with only minor legal penalties. If Alice could get one of her professors such as Professor Felissa interested in her research, she could probably even ask them to watch over her treatment of Boris. This would remove any legal problems completely.

The requirements to get an apprentice healing license were less annoying than she expected them to be. It had a total of three requirements. First, one needed proof of being under mentorship with someone who had a license. Alice already had that, since she was enrolled in Introductory Organic Mana through the academy. The magic academy pretty explicitly required that the teachers of Organic Mana courses were licensed healers, since most [Organic Mages] wanted to be healers. Therefore, as long as Alice showed up with her student id and a copy of her schedule, she would pass this requirement.

Second, one needed to pay a registration fee of one golden sun. Losing one golden sun was a bit painful, but Alice’s income was improving enough that she could handle a minor fee without financial strain now.

Finally, one needed to take an exam. Since it was just an Apprentice license, the requirements weren’t too strict. One needed to pass a written test, related to the infrastructure of the human body, and then needed to pass a practical exam. For the practical exam, a high level [Organic Mage] would give themselves some sort of minor injury, such as a slight cut on their hand or a minor bruise, and then tell the [Student] to heal it. The [Student] did not need to heal the injury perfectly – they just needed to help the injury recover by some amount without making any catastrophic mistakes along the way. Since the license examiners were high-level [Organic Mages], they could pretty quickly fix any problems that popped up if the [Student] actually made a mistake. However, frankly, the practical exam was pretty lenient – after all, the apprentice license was just to ensure people were seriously learning how to treat people before they started more difficult work.

Of course, if one wasn’t a Mage, the practical exam was different. While [Organic Mages] were the most well regarded healers, [Doctors] and such also existed in this world. However, Alice didn’t bother looking too closely at the alternate exams, since she intended to get an apprentice healer’s license for a Mage.

The practical exam could prove to be a bit awkward for Alice, since she didn’t have the [Organic Mage] class at all. As of right now, she still hadn’t met the minimum requirement to pick up the class, which was to get her mana conversion ratio for her organic seed up to 40%. In other words, Alice was going to need to do the test entirely without Perks, which would make it far more difficult. Perks for an [Organic Mage] were more important than for a lot of other classes, because it was very easy to mess up and break something while healing people. Perks fixed that problem quite neatly, and most [Organic Mages] threw at least three Perks into stopping themselves from making big mistakes during the healing process. A test could be scheduled at any time through the academy, or by directly going to one of the offices of the Mage estate scattered throughout Metsel.

After learning all of this, Alice returned to the inn for the night. After that, Alice started practicing on herself, giving herself minor cuts with a dagger and trying to heal them. Healing a minor cut with Organic Magic rather than with {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} was slow, difficult, and time consuming. Alice’s first attempt would have certainly left a strange, lumpy scar on her finger if she didn’t have her [Survivor] Perks to patch up her mistake, and probably would have resulted in a fail if she took the test. However, Alice kept working on healing small scratches and bruises until she ran out of mana for the day. She would look more closely into starting the process for publishing her research results near the end of the week, but she felt that she could probably publish a smaller research paper with a bit of legwork, some time, and some energy. It would be a start towards fixing Boris’s issue, and also getting Alice’s name as a [Scholar] out there.

It made Alice nervous, to finally start showing some of the results of her hard work over the months to other people. But at the same time, she couldn’t help but feel a little excited. For a long period of time she had buried her results in her thoughts, and she would finally be able to have her discoveries examined by other people. That meant others could use her research as a reference for future research, which might cause totally new and unique ideas about the nature of mana to crop up. Alice was looking forward to seeing the results of her work after others used her findings to learn even more, even if the Society’s presence still made her nervous.

* * *

On Monday, when Alice returned to her classes, she found something else unusual. For the first time ever, Alice saw a seriously broken looking kinetic seed.

Most Kinetic Magic seeds looked pretty similar to each other. Alice theorized this was because the System helped people form Kinetic Magic seeds. Since an automated System was helping them in the construction process, it made sense that the final products all looked pretty similar.

However, the Kinetic Magic seed inside of the girl who sat at the back of the classroom just looked off to Alice. She frowned, before scooting to the back of the classroom. Laila, Luka, Erkki, and Arsi would just need to talk without her today – what Alice was seeing troubled her far more.

Alice decided to sit next to the girl, as she struggled to remember the girl’s name. Finally, she recalled that the girl’s name was Samantha. She was a somewhat gossipy girl who drifted from group to group when talking to people before class.

“How are you?” asked Alice, fumbling for a way to start up the conversation. Since the girl had a strange mana seed, Alice was suddenly interested in knowing more about the situation.

Samantha gave Alice an interested look. “Oh hey, you’re the girl that got caught up in that mess last month, aren’t you? Along with the rest of your group during the first hunting trip?”

“Yeah, that was me,” said Alice, wincing. She would rather that not be the first thing people thought of when talking to her, but it couldn’t be helped. After the disaster of the first hunting trip, the Illvarian crown had more or less begun openly waging war on the Society of Starry Eyes. As a result, it no longer had the manpower laying around to babysit [Students] anymore, even if that manpower investment would help it solve its manpower crisis after the [Students] were a little more grown up. Almost everyone associated with the military was now hunting around for members of the Society of Starry Eyes, if they weren’t stationed on one of the borders or cleaning up monsters in the South. The Sun Knight had even apparently been forced to cancel his vacation for the year, and was working overtime instead.

“I heard from Luka that things got pretty dangerous for a while. I’m glad that nobody from our class got hurt,” said the girl, nodding at Alice as she dismissed the death of the [Scout] during the excursion. “I heard that incident was what tipped off the Illvarian government about the presence of the Society, right? What was the actual fight like?”

Alice wasn’t usually very talkative when interacting with people she didn’t know well, but right now, she was glad to have a way to start a conversation with Samantha. After telling Samantha the story about the fight with the Society of Starry Eyes, Alice eventually found a way to turn the topic towards Samantha herself. Alice didn’t learn much about the girl’s background, mostly because while the girl was a chatterbox, she was also prone to distraction and got easily sidetracked. However, Alice did eventually manage to steer the topic towards mana seeds, which was the real reason she had come to talk to this girl in the first place.

“You know, I recently formed a new magic seed,” said Samantha, grinning. “I’ve been thinking about branching out into enchantments for a while, since it’s a pretty good career choice. My parents are wealthy enough to pay for most of my education here, but we’re not super wealthy, you know? I don’t really want to join the military, and so I was originally planning on using my organic seed to become a healer. But…” Samantha sighed. “Honestly, I don’t think I have the right aptitude for it. I’ve never been that good at studying human biology, and my {Basic Human Biology} Skill is only at 41 even after spending almost two years on it. Recently I’ve been thinking it might be a better fit for me if I swap around my studies a little next semester. I think that enchanters make decent money, right? Also, Enchanting is more interesting in my opinion, and there’s a lot less pressure if you mess up since you won’t kill someone. Speaking of which, I recently heard that the prices of enchanting materials are starting to rise up again because of the Society. Do you think the Society might actually attack us? The fact that they’re concentrating on this region is really scary. My parents have a few connections with some wealthier [Merchants], and I hear that they’re scrambling to hire better [Guards] to keep themselves safe. Say, that reminds me of a story I heard two weeks ago, where a Merchant tried to hire [Guards] only for a [Thief] to steal the money from him during a negotiation with a [Guard]. The Merchant couldn’t pay for the contract right after he finished signing it, so the deal fell through and [Guard] got super pissed off. But if he couldn’t even spot a pickpocket robbing the [Merchant] during the negotiation, isn’t his level a bit too low? He doesn’t seem like a very good [Guard],” said Samantha, laughing.

Trying to get detailed information about one topic from the girl was like trying pull teeth. Alice wondered if the girl would be able to enchant things properly, if she was this easily distracted, before she started to redirect the conversation again.

“What kind of experience did you have forming the magic seed?” Asked Alice, once she managed to wrangle Samantha back towards the topic of magic. “I’ve been looking into a few topics of my own, just because I’m curious. How would you describe the process of seed formation?”

“Hmm… I’d say it was a little weird. I felt like I missed something near the end of the seed formation,” said Samantha, frowning a bit. “I’m a bit fuzzy on my first magic seed formation experience though, since it was years ago and I never picked up any mental Perks to boost my memory. Maybe I’m just overthinking it? It’s probably fine though.” Samantha shrugged, before she began to distract herself again and started talking about the recent prices for enchanted objects, and how much she wished she was a qualified [Enchanter] so that she could make a quick couple silver crowns. This led her into a rant about how her parents had decreased her allowance recently, since they apparently disagreed with the girl’s plans to learn enchanting. Alice kept talking with the girl, aimlessly drifting from topic to topic until class started, but at the same time she was rapidly making mental notes for herself.

Alice had already heard that the rate of mana baptisms was starting to drop recently, but that could also be attributed to statistical flukes or the nature of rumors. After all, most people that tried for a mana baptism were people who were in dire economic straits, and desperate enough to gamble their lives on surviving a four percent chance of becoming a Mage and changing their life. Naturally, these people were usually invisible before their baptism – they were the kind of people who were hard to notice the disappearance of. That factor alone made it hard to get concrete numbers about sudden increases or decreases in the success of mana baptisms, and so even though rumors were flying around that more people than usual were failing, there was nothing concrete.

However, the messed up Kinetic Seed near Samantha’s heart was a different matter altogether. With her own eyes, Alice could see that something was off about Samantha’s kinetic seed. For now, Alice decided to regard this as yet another weird case study of something that probably shouldn’t happen.

Alice also decided to get a better feel for Samantha’s personality and keep an eye on future developments. If Samantha looked like she would get seriously hurt as a result of her weird kinetic seed, or Alice and the other girl established enough trust with each other, Alice would help the other girl remove the weird kinetic seed and form a functioning one if Samantha wanted help. If the problems caused by the seed weren’t severe enough to notice, or if Alice felt talking more about her secrets with Samantha would put her life at risk, she would pretend she didn’t see anything and just observe from the side. While Alice was happy to help people where she could, she didn’t want to die as a result of her actions, so she would still put her own safety first.

However, after seeing Samantha’s weird Kinetic Seed and confirming that the girl hadn’t done anything particularly unusual during her magic seed formation, Alice was growing increasingly nervous. From Boris’s peculiar case, to the increased activity of the Society, to Samantha’s weirdly broken seed…

Alice wasn’t sure what was going on, but her half-baked suspicions were starting to grow more and more solid.

Whatever had gone wrong recently was getting worse.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Starting on Monday (of the week this chapter was posted on Patreon, 3 weeks ago) my technology decided it didn’t need to work anymore. It was only on Thursday the broken stuff finally got fixed/replaced and I could actually get things moving again. This week my writing process was fueled by caffeinated tea.

Chapter 87

Alice spent the next week practicing her healing skills, before finally reaching a point where she could heal a small cut in the practical test for her healing license. Her organic magic skills were still far from good enough to use when she could just activate {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} or one of her enchanted rings, but she was at least good enough at healing that she no longer left permanent side effects behind. It was good enough to get her license at least, and also good enough to heal other people with far more control and vastly better mana efficiency than her healing mana seed could provide. Since her memory was excellent now, she should have a pretty easy time passing the written part of the exam, so she quietly scheduled and took the test that Friday after finishing her classes for the day. The examiner noted that she had barely squeaked by on the practical, but at the end of the day, Alice had an apprentice healing license.

During the week, she also picked up a new Perk and a few new levels.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder : 27 -> 28, Careful Enchanter : 19 -> 20, Student : 6 -> 7

Pride of a Craftswoman

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 20 or greater

The efficiency of mana manipulation in your finished enchanted products is drastically increased.

With {Pride of a Craftswoman}, Alice’s finished enchantments were finally almost on par with a fully developed [Enchanter]’s finished products. Alice didn’t have quite the levels fully grown [Enchanters] might have, and she also had zero Perks that boosted her ability to make consumable enchantments. She was also still a little slower in actually making an enchantment, but the difference wasn’t huge anymore. At this point, the only thing she was missing to compete with a more well-established enchanting shop was the money to buy better enchanting materials, as well as the ability to branch out her enchantments into different kinds of Enchantment beyond just traditional enchanting.

Alice couldn’t help but feel a bit of pride when she looked at her Status Screen. She now had a slightly above average stat line even compared to most normal adults in this world, her highest level classes could basically match an average adult’s levels, and her Achievements were well beyond what a normal adult’s Achievements looked like as well. In short, Alice had finally achieved a measure of financial and physical security for herself, even in this world of incredibly strong and resilient people. Instead of only being able to compete with those in her age group, Alice was now able to compete with an average adult here, and Alice still had at least four years before she turned twenty and lost the boost in levelling speed and Attribute Growth all humans had between the ages of 12 and 20 years old. Given her current Levels, the fact that she was a Mage, and the rarity of her Achievements, Alice was also aging slower than other people, although she didn’t know how big the difference was. That meant she might spend quite a bit longer than four years being under twenty. For somebody who had arrived in this world less than a year ago and had started so far behind everyone else, Alice felt happy that she had finally caught up, and even surpassed average people.

After Alice finished pondering her gains for the week, she turned her head to Cecilia, who was helping her clean up board game night for the week. Erkki and Anna had already left, and since Cecilia’s shop was usually where the group met for board games, Cecilia and Alice were the ones tasked with cleaning up the cards, board game pieces, and so on whenever the group finished up. This also gave Alice the opportunity to discuss some things with Cecilia privately.

“What do you think about all of this?” asked Alice. “Recently, I’ve been seeing more and more strange things. Boris, Samantha … what’s your take on all of this?”

Cecilia fell into thought. “It’s a little hard to say right now, since I haven’t seen Samantha’s weird seed, and that makes it a little hard for me to form an opinion. However, based on the previous experiments concerning the relationship between mana and the System, as well as the way the System helps people form magic seeds… is there something wrong the System?” As she said it, Cecilia’s face had a rather strange expression on it. Alice could see that the other girl was wrestling with her own statement, trying to make sense of something that seemed absurd to her. Just five months ago, Alice knew that Cecilia had at least vaguely believed that the System was some sort of deity. Cecilia may not have been a devout believer of the Church of the System, but it was the dominant religion in Illvaria, and it was inevitable that Cecilia’s thoughts would be influenced by the people around her as she grew up. Even though her experiments with Alice had somewhat dispelled the ‘divine halo,’ most people believed the System had, it would still be hard for the other girl to accept the idea that the System might malfunction. The fact that Cecilia could see the problems with the System right now was proof of how far the girl had grown in being able to challenge her mindset.

Alice sighed, before nodding. “I also think something is up with the System. I feel strange saying it, because the System has clearly functioned just fine for hundreds, or possibly thousands of years with no issues, but…” Alice sighed. “I don’t know what else to think, honestly. Something seems wrong with the System recently.” After that, Alice paused, sinking into her thoughts for a moment before she refocused on the conversation. “Here, do you want to see Samantha’s weird seed? I can use {Shared Memory} if you want to take a look. I think it’s quite interesting.”

“Sure.”

Alice stepped closer to Cecilia and used {Shared Memory}, showing Cecilia Samantha’s strange kinetic seed.

“Hmm…” Cecilia sank into thought as well.

“Doesn’t this just look strange? It’s not quite like the seeds we formed without the help of the System, but it’s still definitely messed up.”

Cecilia opened her eyes, before nodding. “It has been a week since she formed the seed now, right? Is she sick?”

“A little bit, but not as much as I might have expected,” said Alice. “I’ve been keeping an eye on her for the past week now, and I spend a few minutes chatting with her every morning we share a class, but she doesn’t seem seriously ill right now. I do notice that she occasionally coughs every so often, but it’s nowhere near a serious illness. And frankly, her symptoms are practically nothing compared to the seeds I made with no System assistance whatsoever. Those were very noticeably messed up, and I started feeling sick within a few hours. Her symptoms are very mild compared to my first failed attempt at making a seed by myself. Her symptoms are so different that I seriously wonder if she just has a cold or something.”

Cecilia paused, before shaking her head. “In the first place, it isn’t that common to get sick in this world. It still happens, especially to young children and people who don’t have high [Endurance] stats, but I think you’re underestimating how uncommon illness is here. You’ve mentioned a few times that the study of illness was a lot more advanced in your world, and you said that was probably because your technology at home was more advanced. I agree, but I think a big part of the reason Luliv’s study of the microscopic world has stagnated is because nobody needs to bother studying it in the first place. An adult might get sick once a decade here. Immortals are literally never ill, at least to the best of my knowledge, and even children don’t get sick too often either. I don’t know how often kids get sick on your world, but at least here, diseases are rare. And even if someone gets sick, it’s not that hard to get treated. Perks can deal with smaller infections in most cases, and specialized [Doctors] or [Organic Mages] can clean up other problems with the body even without the base of knowledge you had at home. Since it’s already a ‘solved problem,’ nobody bothers spending time and money researching it when they could put those resources into something useful. Why bother spending time and money solving a problem that’s already solved?” Cecilia shrugged. “At least, that’s my take on it. But the point is, her getting sick and staying sick for a week is unusual.”

“Even children don’t get sick here?” Alice was taken aback for a moment, before frowning. Now that she thought about it, if most adults in this world were close to immune to most diseases, it made sense that diseases here wouldn’t evolve to be able to infect humans. After all, most humans here were very resistant to the diseases as a result of their high [Endurance] stats and good physiques, which meant that diseases naturally wouldn’t be able to use those people to continue reproducing and infecting more people. This probably gave the inhabitants of this world a completely accidental herd immunity to most diseases, even if it didn’t quite remove diseases from the ecosystem entirely. There were still plenty of diseases running around, but Alice realized that this world was nowhere near the plague festival the Middle Ages on Earth had been. After realizing that, Alice nodded to herself. “That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought that before now… anyway, what do you think I should do? She is getting sicker. She doesn’t seem to be a bad person, either, or I wouldn’t bother thinking about it. If her magic seed is what’s causing her to get sick, I can fix it with {Broken Seed}. But I can’t think of a way to use a lot of my abilities in public without putting myself in danger, at least for now.”

“You said that you were planning on making a small name for yourself by publishing some studies on the way mana and human bodies interact right? In that case, if you wait until you get a little bit more of a name for yourself, people will be less likely to question the origin of your abilities. Most people that make weird and important discoveries get high rarity Achievements that do weird stuff. If you wait until then, and after that you say that Samantha’s body has some sort of unusual problem that involves the way she interacts with mana, you can probably skirt by a lot of scrutiny and potential problems that lie detection Perks might bring up. Although… hmm… I don’t know how much the Society would value the ability to break magic seeds. If they thought the ability was extremely unique and interesting, maybe they would hyperfocus on you after learning about this ability of yours? To be honest, I don’t know what those lunatics are thinking, so it’s hard to say. But Samantha’s case doesn’t seem that urgent right now, so you can wait a little and see how things go as well. Maybe tomorrow the Society will give up on their attacks on Illvaria, and go look for a softer target to attack. In that case, you would be much safer, at least, even if you revealed some unusual abilities. And if you can display something that makes other people value your abilities and presence, you would be qualified to get higher level protection as well, if you don’t mind working for the Crown or something. But Samantha’s illness isn’t urgent, and it seems like you can solve Boris’s problems without revealing anything too unusual, so waiting is probably your best choice for now.”

“That’s a good point. Thanks for sharing your thoughts,” said Alice, smiling at her friend.

“So what other plans do you have?” asked Cecilia, turning to Alice.

“If I can’t use my {Broken Seed} Perk on Samantha in the near future, I think it’s finally time to start working on a System magic seed?” said Alice, after some thought. “My Perk is off cooldown next weekend, and if possible I would love to get a System seed set up so that I can start throwing {Expanding Comprehension} into it. Apart from that, I need to start writing up my experiments on mana and publish some of them, so that I can start building a reputation.”

“Makes sense,” said Cecilia, nodding at Alice. “Stay safe, though. You’re a smart girl – don’t get hurt, okay?”

Alice grinned. “I’ll be careful. I want to help where I can, but I value my own life first and foremost.”

* * *

The next few days passed as Alice gradually burned through some of her recently recovering finances, buying writing equipment and copying all of her memories related to her early mana experiments that she felt were relevant. She edited a few parts out to avoid revealing any of her unique nature as an {Outsider}, and completely avoided any mention of System mana, since that was a secret she definitely didn’t want to expose until she had a better idea what kind of hornet’s nest she might be poking with that information. Apart from that, she took care of some of the paperwork needed to start handling publishing some experiment papers. Finally, on Tuesday, she published a record of her first scientific experiment and a few follow up experiments, with the paper titled ‘A Discussion on Mana Deprivation and its non-Lethal Results.’

In it, Alice listed her observations about how humans could remain in a room with no mana for an extended period of time with no harm, but noted the fact that their body seemed to get weaker if they spent a long period of time inside of such an environment. She studiously avoided phrasing the idea as ‘Stats dropping,’ and instead simply talked about how one’s physical abilities seemed to drop in a manaless environment, as well as how those who were already ill or weak may genuinely experience severe harm or death as a result of the experiments, but in other cases, entering an environment with no mana was an unpleasant but otherwise harmless experience.

Attached to Alice’s thoughts that she wrote into the paper, she also discussed the methodology for her first few experiments on manaless rooms. After publishing the paper, Alice even picked up a level in [Scholar], going to level 44. [Scientist] seemed to get nothing at all from publishing the paper, but her [Scholar] class clearly got some extra experience after she wrote down her experiences and made them available for others to study.

On Thursday, however, something that took Alice totally off guard happened. As she was going to her Introductory Organic Magic class, professor Feliza pulled her aside after the class and began talking to her.

“Lady Alice, I see that you’ve applied for an apprentice healing license, and that you’ve also submitted a research and discussion paper recently?” Asked Professor Feliza, squinting her eyes at Alice. For some reason, {Sense Hostility}, the Perk Alice barely used from her [Survivor] that let her detect other humans who felt hostile towards her, started ringing a very light alarm at her. It didn’t feel like Feliza was very hostile to her, but Alice could definitely feel a trace of danger from her gaze. At the same time, Alice noticed rainbow mana creep into her [Teacher]’s eyes, which usually meant a lie-detection Perk was being activated. Alice had no clue what class professor Feliza might have that gave her a lie-detection Perk, but she was much more confused about why her professor might feel hostility towards her. She quietly started preparing for a fight, slightly adjusting her body posture and making it easy to access her enchanted items if needed.

“Indeed, Professor Feliza. I did a few experiments on myself after my mana baptism, and I felt that I could probably share my interesting results with the magic community. A lot of people have always held to the belief that mana deprivation is lethal, and I can see why that belief would form, but after testing it on myself it seems to be a false assumption. While it isn’t a big deal in and of itself, since there are no naturally occurring manaless environments in this world, small misconceptions about the nature of reality can build themselves into much bigger problems if we aren’t careful, so I was hoping some other people would take my conclusions and lead them into new and more interesting experiments and realms of information. I want to know the truth, and I probably won’t be able to finish all of the experiments I want to on my own in the near future, and I definitely won’t think of every direction I can take my results. So I wanted to see what other people made of it.”

“Can you swear that you have never taken part in or planned an unethical experiment?” asked professor Feliza.

Alice finally realized why {Sense Hostility} was pinging at her. Professor Feliza had discussed in detail how much she hated unethical Mages on the first day of class, and had even stated outright that if any of her [Students] used what she taught them to join the Society of Starry Eyes she would kill them. She had also strongly hinted she had followed through on this threat a few times in the past. It had certainly been one of the more memorable first classes Alice had taken part in.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have never placed anyone in danger as a result of my experiments except for me. I do not mind people calling me reckless, but I have never harmed other people in my pursuit of knowledge and have no plans of ever doing so,” said Alice.

{Sense Hostility} stopped activating, and Alice subconsciously relaxed.

“Good. I didn’t think anyone would be brainless enough to submit research findings to the library that were obtained through unethical experiments, but it’s always best to double check. Sometimes even with high [Intelligence] people can take some truly baffling actions,” said professor Feliza, now grinning broadly at Alice.

Alice was reminded of Boris, since she had hoped to get this professional healer to boost her treatment of Boris along. After a moment of hesitation, she decided that now was a good time to at least bring it up.

“By the way, recently, I’ve discovered someone who seems to be a bit… ill. As a four year old, he has a much heavier density of mana inside of his body than any four year old has a right to have, and as the mana density grows, his behavior is becoming increasingly strange. I have been wondering if these two things are related, so I’ve been wondering if you had any thoughts…”

Alice didn’t discuss System mana with professor Feliza, but she did describe Boris’s odd behavior in broad strokes. Professor Feliza also frowned as Alice discussed the oddities she had encountered during the process of observing Boris, before finally, she began discussing her thoughts with Alice. It wasn’t particularly in-depth, since professor Feliza had never seen Boris in person, but Alice could at least tell that the other woman was interested in the issue. Even if the woman didn’t promise to investigate the case further, Alice could tell that professor Feliza had quite a bit more interest in Alice than she had shown a week ago. Which was exactly what Alice was hoping for. By arousing some amount of interest as a ‘good [Scientist]’ she would hopefully acquire the social capital needed to treat Boris without legal issues, and she would hopefully be able to use that as a springboard for learning and understanding more about the world around her. It would take more time to build up Professor Feliza’s interest and expectations in her, and to bring up the issues Boris seemed to be experiencing, but Boris’s situation didn’t seem urgent. Besides, Professor Feliza was an old hand at healing and organic magic. There was an entirely reasonable chance Alice had missed something, and professor Feliza might spot it and help Alice administer treatment.

For now, Alice was content to keep working on preparing what she needed to actually treat Boris. It might take another few weeks before she could finish laying out all of her plans, but she was steadily making progress towards her new list of goals. As Alice went back home for the day, she couldn’t help but smile to herself as she walked back. Although progress might be a bit slower than she hoped it would be, Boris’s problem was unlikely to kill him within a few weeks, and hopefully Samantha’s weird kinetic seed wouldn’t either. At the very least, Alice was starting to build up the trust and credibility she would need if she wanted to start interfering with these cases. Slowly but surely, she was moving out of the strange limbo her experiments had previously existed in and was stepping towards achieving recognition and the ability she would need to get to the bottom of whatever had changed with the System recently.

She just hoped that it wouldn’t be too late.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 88

On Friday, Professor Feliza requested for Alice to join her during her office hours after Alice’s classes. After some deliberation, Alice accepted Professor Feliza’s offer, and found herself in the steely woman’s office again the following day. When Alice entered the [Teacher]’s office, she barely had time to find a chair before professor Feliza got straight to the point.

“After careful consideration, I think your research has some promise to it,” said professor Feliza. “I spoke with your Theory of Mana professor, and he said that you have a lot of unique takes on broken mana as well. Is that true?”

“Yes, it is. I wouldn’t say I’ve focused much of my research on it – after all, my primary interest is in a different area. However, broken mana is at least tangentially related to a lot of my other interests, so I do end up picking up bits of data and ideas about broken mana that I sometimes delve further into,” said Alice, shrugging.

Professor Feliza nodded after some thinking.

“In that case, it seems like you have a lot of interest in mana and broken mana. Can I ask what direction you yourself see your research leading towards?”

“I intend to do a lot of things with my research when it gets more advanced. I want to see if there’s any way I can apply my research to enchanting, for example, and while I don’t really have the funds right now, I suspect that my research will eventually intersect with my work as an [Enchanter]. I originally didn’t have any other solid ideas where my research would lead, because while it could lead to a variety of unique conclusions it could also very well lead to nothing in particular. However, as I mentioned yesterday, Boris’s case seems at least vaguely tied to my research on how mana works. If other children are also suffering from similar problems recently, I think my research could shine some light on whatever is causing them to behave strangely, and perhaps might help them.”

Professor Feliza looked even more thoughtful for a few moments, before she actually smiled. “Learning to treat new and interesting diseases before they appear is definitely something I admire. Just don’t recklessly try to apply your treatments without consulting a medical professional first.” Alice nodded wordlessly.

“In your paper, you also stated that you’ve done the experiment regarding mana deprivation on yourself?”

“Yes. Multiple times, in fact. I even use manaless rooms regularly as the basis for some other experiments I’m running, and sometimes need sit inside of a manaless room for several minutes or even a few hours. Apart from the stated reduction in my Endurance Stat after mana deprivation starts to set in, I have yet to experience any further side effects. The effects seem to ‘cap out’ around fifteen minutes, and after that I notice no further loss of Stats. I eventually allowed some of my acquaintances into the manaless room as well, but only after I was fairly certain it was safe. I got a very good Achievement from my manaless room experiments, and after I mentioned the benefits I obtained from finishing my experiment, a few other people expressed some interest in my experiments as well,” said Alice.

“Any chance you can tell me what the Achievement does?” Professor Feliza seemed curious, rather than aggressive.

“I’m afraid not – some of its weirder effects are directly related to my combat ability,” said Alice. “However, I will say that it gave me a rarity eight Achievement, and the Achievement’s rarity was upgradeable. It’s an excellent Achievement, even if I’m unwilling to discuss its specific details.”

Professor Feliza seemed to sink back into thought, before finally, she nodded. “I’ve decided. I’ll try running a manaless room experiment of my own this weekend to see what happens. Come back to my office next week, so that we can discuss in further detail what I find,” she said.

So fast? Alice was surprised by how decisive professor Feliza was. She hadn’t expected Professor Feliza to be willing to test the experiment merely a few days after reading over Alice’s research paper. Even if this world had lie detection Perks and Professor Feliza knew that Alice’s experiment results were accurate records of the past, wasn’t she afraid that Alice had made a mistake somewhere in the methodology, or that Alice had some weird Perk or Achievement interaction that made her results different from other people? Alice certainly took most studies from this world with a grain of salt just because of how much variance there was to this world’s academic studies. And how well connected was Professor Feliza that she was able to set up a manaless room in only a day or two?

Alice suppressed her wandering thoughts and continued conversing with Professor Feliza. Since Alice’s study had apparently piqued the woman’s interest, professor Feliza was more than happy to discuss Alice’s ideas about mana deprivation and what it might mean for the human body. Professor Feliza admitted that she had never considered the idea of mana deprivation being nonlethal – after all, in this world mana was regarded as something vital to life, and nobody tended to question the result in the same way nobody questioned how useful oxygen was. However, Professor Feliza admitted that while Alice’s study of mana deprivation seemed rather useless on the surface, it could change a lot of the background information other academic studies used as a framework. The only reason Alice’s study was fairly worthless and theoretical was because, at least in this world, there was no naturally occurring area without mana present.

Professor Feliza also let slip the reason that she had learned about Alice’s research paper so quickly – apparently, the library had a sort of automated system that let professors know when one of their students submitted a paper to the Library, since one of the requirements for graduating from this particular magic university, in addition to being level 35 in one’s main class, was to submit a research paper and defend their findings against a set of randomly chosen academic teachers with relevant credentials. The [Teachers] were thus made aware of any studies submitted by their [Students] so that they could set up the relevant follow-up procedures for a thesis defense.

Once Alice learned about this, she couldn’t help but chuckle. She had intended to use the papers as a way to accumulate some amount of prestige and trust, but she had honestly expected to need to do more legwork to get things moving. Now that the library was essentially promoting her paper to her professors for free, that might help speed things along a little more. Best of all, it required zero effort or funding on her part.

Putting aside the good news given to her by professor Feliza, Alice took the rest of the conversation as an opportunity to get to know Professor Feliza herself a little bit better. The more Alice interacted with professor Feliza, the more she found the woman to be both difficult and easy to get along with. Professor Feliza was a woman who stuck by her principles no matter what, as evidenced by the number of her own [Students] she had cut down in the past after they had joined the Society or gone down an unethical path. She was also someone oddly enthusiastic about saving lives and the progress of healing and research, and as far as Alice could tell she seemed to think Alice was enthusiastic about the subject. During the conversation she also dropped interesting tidbits about human biology and her experience as a healer into the conversation, giving Alice new insights about this world’s understanding of human biology and the way [Organic Mages] handled the business of healing people.

Finally, near the end of Professor Feliza’s office hours, she smiled at Alice.

“I’ve decided I intend to look into the way mana deprivation works this weekend. After I finish verifying your results, I don’t mind looking into Boris’s situation a little more. You’ve mentioned him a few times, so it seems like his case is weighing heavily on you. In a week or two I should be free to visit him with you. I had something else originally planned, but I can cancel my meetings and shift my schedule around.”

Alice fought the urge to grin madly. This had been exactly what she was hoping for when she starting publishing her research results – the ability to heal Boris freely, without any legal obstructions. Alice wanted to see what she could discover about the nature of the System from Boris’s case, and she also wanted to help Natasha and Boris out.

Besides, maybe Boris’s case would provide a breakthrough point for her to figure out more about whatever was going on recently.

* * *

Sunday afternoon, Alice’s Perks were finally off of cooldown. Which meant that, at long last, it was time for Alice to try some new experiments. She decided to start out with something she had been afraid to try again.

Alice took a deep breath, before walking outside of her manaless room. She wanted to see how the System reacted to her actions in this experiment, and honestly, she wasn’t sure if she was ever going to try this experiment inside of a manaless room. After that, Alice inspected her empty seed slot, before she took a shaky breath. She started thinking about the physics she remembered from Earth. Black holes, gravity, photons, electrons, atoms…

Her hands started shaking as she stood in the hall of Cecilia’s workshop, as much as she tried to keep her hands still. Her first attempt at trying this experiment had nearly melted her body into putty, back when she had barely known what she was doing. As much as she tried to control her nerves, part of her still found the idea of repeating this experiment to be suicidal, and her nerves were frayed to the point where she felt tempted to call the whole thing of. Alice took another deep breath, before she used {Safety Analysis} to check the experiment over. The Perk told her that failing to form more than one seed from Earth today would be dangerous, but failing to form one seed should be safe.

Then, Alice used {Safety Analysis} six more times. Just to make sure she hadn’t misinterpreted the results of the first Perk usage, of course. Finally, after using the Perk enough times that she was starting to get a headache, she forced herself to take the next step in her experiment.

Alice took another deep breath, before she found a chair and sat down. Then, she started pulling in mana and focusing on the concept of photons. She carefully kept her eyes open, using every sense she had available to her to keep an eye on how the atmospheric mana and System mana in her surroundings reacted to her attempt.

Mana was pulled in towards her mage core, her body hungrily pulling in mana like a starving man seeing bread. At the same time, Alice noticed a broken, messed up seed starting to form inside of her mana core. It looked like somebody had taken a regular magic seed and then jammed it into a wood chipper.

Less than five seconds later, the System mana went crazy. It started out by trying to help Alice filter mana and do whatever else System mana did to help a magic seed form, as usual. Alice took a moment to note that several of the fractals she had never managed to identify still formed around her, but a few seconds later, they were discarded. In fact, apart from mana filtering, the System mana seemed to have no clue what to do. It tried to form multiple different glyphs at the same time, but each of them failed and shattered into pieces seconds later. The System tried again, but before it made a single functioning fractal, it shattered again. After six cycles of forming and then breaking mana fractals over the course of about a minute, the System finally seemed to give up. Instead, it drew closer to her mage core, as if it were trying to inspect the new magic seed Alice was trying to form.

At the same time, the seed in Alice’s core was slowly taking shape. The broken, messed up nature of the seed was also getting worse and worse, letting her know that something was very wrong with this seed. It bore many resemblances to Alice’s failed attempts at making an electromagnetic seed, but it was dozens of times worse than her unsuccessful electromagnetic seeds.

Finally, the System seemed to realize the seed was a failure. It moved closer to her core, and then carefully disentangled all of the chunks of mana Alice had gathered from her surroundings, before gently extracting them from her body. Random chunks of mana were still left over, even after the failed seed was removed from her mage core, and the System spent several minutes hunting down the stray bits of discolored mana and purging them. Alice’s attempt at forming a photon magic seed failed yet again.

Alice’s jittery nerves finally settled down, after a few minutes of taking deep breaths and waiting for something to go wrong. Then, with her frame of mind starting to stabilize again, she took a few moments to go over her memories of the experiment and figure out what she had observed.

The magic seed looks much worse than my first attempt at forming an electromagnetic seed, even though this time I let the System help me, and I also have much more experience forming magic seeds now. Is it because the System kept discarding some of the unidentified fractals every couple seconds? Alice frowned, wondering what would happen if she tried this experiment in a manaless room, before she shook her head. {Safety Analysis} told her that trying this experiment in a manaless room would be much more dangerous than trying it outside of one. She had no clue why – according to her first guess, part of the reason the magic seed had become so messed up was because of the System trying and failing to help. However, apparently the danger of this experiment became much, much worse if she tried it without access to the System, and Alice had no idea why.

After thinking it over for a few seconds, Alice simply sighed and shook her head. Even if she wasn’t sure why this experiment would be more dangerous in a manaless room, she wasn’t willing to try out the experiment and see what happened. She would just have to leave this mystery unsolved for now.

But even though this experiment left a minor point of confusion behind, she had gained a lot of ideas from this experiment. She now had a pretty good guess about why her first attempts at making a magic seed based on the physics of Earth failed. The System had clearly tried to help Alice form a magic seed, but seemed to have no clue how to help. It kept forming other mana fractals with the intent of ‘helping out,’ but every few seconds it discarded those fractals, resulting in a bunch of failed assistance attempts. Meanwhile, when Alice tried to form a more ‘normal’ magic seed, like a kinetic seed or an organic seed, the System’s fractals were clear, easy to observe, and Alice could usually at least understand some of the functions of the easier to comprehend fractals.

From that, Alice guessed that the System probably had a few ‘templates’ it used to help people make magic seeds. That was her best guess for why the System struggled to help people form new magic seeds, but had an easy time helping people form popular magic seeds over and over again. If the System had some sort of library or database it used to record magic seeds, and then had some sort of list of mana fractals it needed to make to help someone form those seeds, it made perfect sense that the System struggled to adapt to weird and off the wall magic seeds. It would also explain why the System kept making fractals and then tossing them out the window – the System was probably trying to find the right ‘template’ to use before scrapping each set of mana fractals because they didn’t fit correctly. It also gave Alice a much better guess at what the unidentified mana fractals she often saw did. If her theory was correct, the mana fractals she had yet to understand were probably supposed to help her form one specific kind of magic seed.

Alice was satisfied with her first experiment for the day, so she put aside her thoughts about the magic seeds from Earth, and focused on her second experiment for the day – trying to form a System magic seed.

For this experiment, Alice moved into the manaless room and emptied the room of mana, before using her pure mana seed to replace the atmospheric mana she needed. Alice began filtering mana while focusing on what she knew about the System, before she tried forming a seed.

As usual, mana began drawing towards Alice as she focused on the process of condensing her ideas and mana together to form a seed. A few seconds passed by, as she struggled to put those two things together and pack them into her mana core… before the two fell apart. She frowned, before trying again.

This time, the mana and ideas stuck together as a magic seed, but in a way that was seriously imperfect. The rainbow color of System mana was nowhere to be found in the magic seed – instead, not only did it look like it had been run through a shredder and then run over by a train, it was also grey, green, and red, without any of the other colors Alice was used to associating with System mana. She frowned, trying to figure out what each of those colors represented, before she gave up. Whatever she had done this time, it was so far off base that she wasn’t even close to making a functioning System seed. She would just have to keep trying and failing before she nailed down what parts of this process she was getting wrong.

However, after observing her new, messed up magic seed that looked even worse than the photon magic seed, Alice realized a few more things.

First, System seeds were very unusual, even by the standards of the other magic seeds she had tried to form based on Earth physics. This was in line with Alice’s expectations. Considering how powerful and complicated the System was, she would have been pretty surprised if it was easy to form a System magic seed. However, getting several of the colors wrong wasn’t something she had expected – all of her other failed magic seeds had at least had the same color as a successful one, but this one was missing most of the colors proper System mana had.

Second, Alice learned that using {Expanding Comprehension} on a messed up magic seed was dangerous. She had been about to use her Perk to see what she could learn, since she had been expecting to destroy the seed later anyway. Luckily, right before she activated {Expanding Comprehension} she thought to use {Safety Analysis}, which told her that her current plan was a very bad idea. Alice once again had no clue why the experiment was dangerous, which finally revealed one of the major weaknesses of the {Safety Analysis} Perk. Even if she knew whether something was harmful or not, she had no context for why it was harmful, making it hard to mitigate danger or change the experiment to remove the problem. Her head was already starting to hurt from overusing her mental Perks, so she decided it was a problem for next time.

Thus, Alice put her plans to the side for now. After that, Alice cleaned up her failed magic seed with {Broken Seed}, before she threw {Expanding Comprehension} at her pure mana seed again. The mana conversion ratio for her pure mana seed was already high enough to provide her with financial stability, but Alice wanted to get a little bit of extra money laying around before she started focusing on other seeds. The only exception she would make was if she formed her System seed properly, but that looked like it would take more trial and error.

Alice drifted into a whirling mass of thoughts and images concerning pure mana, as usual.

But during her vision trip, Alice saw something more than what she usually did.

Her vision trip started out by showing Alice a variety of forms of pure mana and the ways it could transform into other things. Kinetic mana, kinetic energy, heat, and so on were things she was quite used to seeing at this point. However, near the end of her vision trip, Alice watched as pure mana once again condensed itself into two different things.

First, Alice saw pure mana condense itself into a magic seed. This was a very familiar looking kinetic seed, and looked very close to the one located inside of her mage core. She had seen plenty of kinetic mages walking around with a similar seed inside of their body by now, and at this point she didn’t think of this kind of seed as being very remarkable. However, now that Alice got to observe the process of a magic seed forming up close, she noticed a few things that she hadn’t before.

When the mana and ‘idea’ of a magic seed reached a certain level of density, the loose mana changed in a way that was hard for her to understand. It gained a certain amount of color it hadn’t had before, and the color gained a certain richness to it. This extra color started to become more muted over the next few seconds, and the difference was so subtle it was hard to spot if she wasn’t paying very close attention to it. However, she could still sense that the compacted mana had a very different nature than it had moments ago. With {Expanding Comprehension} feeding her bits of information, Alice knew that the seed was now ‘activated,’ in a way it hadn’t been before. She even began to suspect that this brief moment of rich color was what made a magic seed a magic seed. Once it was formed, it started to produce mana inside of itself, creating energy from nothing and allowing its user to perform magic.

The second thing she saw, however, was far more baffling. Alice watched step by step, as mana began compacting itself into a dense set of lines, much like the magic seed she had seen form earlier. These lines were comprised of System mana, organic mana, and pure mana, but when they were all put together, they looked just like a class fractal Alice was used to seeing. Much like the magic seed she had just seen formed, for a brief moment, it gained a rich new color, before it started to fade away. However, this ‘seed’ behaved very differently from a magic seed.

Instead of producing mana, it started to vacuum up the mana in its surroundings, like a black hole. It didn’t absorb all of the mana around it – it absorbed very small amounts of pure mana, but it also absorbed mana that seemed less ‘pure’ than other atmospheric mana. It took a moment for Alice to put her finger on what the difference was.

The second ‘magic seed’ she was looking at was comprised of ‘fishermen’ mana. And it absorbed other mana that was relating to the idea of fishing. And the ‘magic seed’ now looked exactly like a class fractal.

Alice felt her head spinning as the implications of what she had seen finally started settling in her brain.

Alice realized that just like magic seeds, class fractals resided inside of human bodies, often near the brain or heart. And both class fractals and magic seeds required huge amounts of atmospheric mana to form, and also consumed mana to improve with the System’s help. Both class fractals and magic seeds gave people supernatural abilities which were impossible to find on Earth. Classes were much worse at giving people supernatural abilities than a magic seed, of course. A kinetic mage, for example, could shift the trajectories of arrows around them even at level zero, the instant they had a working magic seed and a basic grasp of their powers. However, a high level [Archer] could also shift the trajectories of arrows they fired. There was no way someone on Earth could ever do either of those things without technology assisting them, and at a high enough level, class seeds did an awful lot of things Mages could do as well…

Alice thought about Class fractals, and then about magic seeds. Class fractals… no, class seeds. After using this Perk, Alice felt that one of her vague suspicions that she had never had precise details or guesses about was nearly confirmed. Was her Perk telling her that classes were some sort of drastically weakened magic seed?

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

What is a System but a miserable pile of knockoff secrets? But enough talk! Have at you!

Chapter 89

After Alice came to her hypothesis about the nature of class seeds, she felt a whirlwind of excited thoughts start to spin around in her head. If classes were actually magic seeds that had been altered in some way, she had made a huge step towards understanding how the System worked. She had never previously come across the idea of classes being based on magic seeds, because it was so far outside of her previous guesses about the nature of mana and the System that she simply wouldn’t have ever thought of the idea.

Then, Alice took a few deep breaths as she did her best to shake off her excitement. Even if class seeds and magic seeds looked like they were close to same thing when she had used {Expanding Comprehension}, she needed to do more testing, to make sure her ideas were correct. She also needed to figure out what this actually meant in concrete terms. If class seeds were actually some kind of weird, deformed magic seed, what were the notable differences between a class seed and a magic seed? What were the similarities?

Alice frowned, going back over her thoughts and memories as she tried to highlight the differences between a magic seed and a class seed.

First, one needed to go through a mana baptism to use a magic seed. A mana baptism formed a mage core, and was a fundamental requirement to use ‘magic’ in the truest sense of the word. Class seeds didn’t require one to go through a mana baptism at all. Instead, one could use them safely with zero danger. So the fundamental danger each kind of seed posed to the user were very different, because class seeds were much less strict in their requirements than a magic seed was.

Second, class seeds were much, much weaker than a magic seed, especially at first. Any Class provided few benefits before one started getting to a high level, and before level 50, most classes were still strictly inferior to magic seeds. However, class seeds continued to ‘grow’ as people took actions related to their class. If Alice explored Magic, for example, her [Explorer of Magic] class would keep levelling up, granting her new abilities every so often.

Magic seeds never did this. Once they were formed, they were basically totally finished unless Perks or Achievements started to boost them up. Therefore, while the initial power level of a class seed was much, much lower than a magic seed, they seemed to have a much higher growth limit, but it also took much more time, effort, and work to get there.

Third, in Alice’s vision trip with {Expanding Comprehension}, she had noticed that magic seeds seemed to keep generating mana without any need for external resources or input. This correlated pretty well with her tests in manaless rooms, where she had proven unable to find any real ‘source’ for the mana a magic seed produced. As far as Alice could tell, magic seeds seemed to just never heard of the law of conservation of energy, and had no intention whatsoever of following them. While class seeds also worked without external fuel sources, they grew weaker without them, which was unlike a magic seed.

Alice also realized that in her vision, a class seed would keep consuming more mana from its surroundings as long as it was related to the seed. There seemed to be no point at which a class seed stopped absorbing mana, actually. Maybe that was how a class gained levels? They just… kept absorbing mana?

Alice also didn’t understand why class seeds absorbed mana only after someone took an action related to their class. Why didn’t class seeds just keep absorbing mana every second? If absorbing mana was what made classes level up, there was no logical reason to tie mana absorption to classes at all. Someone taking the time to train themselves in the art of swordsmanship would obviously get better at swinging a sword around, but it didn’t make sense that swinging a sword around gave them more mana, even if that mana was used to fuel magic abilities vaguely related to swordsmanship. Why did class seeds gain mana and level up from doing things totally unrelated to magic?

Alice frowned, wrestling with various ideas as she tried to come to a conclusion on how levelling up actually worked, before she gave up on thinking about the idea. She just didn’t have enough information to guess yet. Finally, she began thinking of Boris’s situation again.

Couldshe use {Broken Seed} on a class? She had never thought of trying, but thanks to {Seed Creator} she was able to break other people’s magic seeds, as long as they were willing to let her. And if classes and magic seeds were fundamentally the same idea with minor revisions, she should at least theoretically be able to break a class seed the same way she could break a magic seed.

Which was a very strange idea. As far as Alice knew, nobody in this world had any way to remove a class once it had been acquired. A [Priest of the System] could change whether a class was a primary or secondary class, but had no fundamental ability to remove a class. Once someone had a class, it was permanent. Granted, there was zero reason to remove a class once someone had one – classes were never bad for the user, even if they were sometimes useless. However, if {Broken Seed} was able to remove any magic seed, and classes were fundamentally magic seeds, could {Broken Seed} outright delete a class?

Alice tried feeding the idea of breaking a class seed into {Safety Analysis}, with the idea of removing her [Fisherwoman] class, pushing through her worsening headache from using mental Perks over and over again. Alice was willing to delete the class if it would give her more information, since she had no real intention of ever developing the class any further than level 3. To be honest, on most days Alice largely forgot that she even possessed this secondary class, because it was so utterly useless to her. She hated fishing, and was no longer in a position where she needed to desperately scramble to feed herself. And it didn’t offer her any useful Perks, either – she was still seven levels away from getting her first Perk in the class, and she doubted she was ever going to acquire those levels, or use the Perk even if she got it.

Her Perk informed her that destroying her [Fisherwoman] class was safe. Of course, that could also just mean that she would accomplish literally nothing during the experiment. She asked {Safety Analysis} what would happen if she deleted the class seed from Boris. After all, if Boris having access to the System before he was supposed was creating all of these weird problems for him, maybe she could outright remove the Class? She thought that might work better than just cutting Boris off from mana. If it worked, hopefully Boris would just lose his Status Screen until he turned six, and then he would unlock it again like normal. That would be a much better solution than Alice’s first idea, which was just to cut off Boris’s access to mana. Cutting off Boris’s mana would indeed stop Boris from levelling up, and Alice thought it was likely that it would prevent Boris’s problems from getting worse. However, it also prevented him from levelling up and forced him to become reliant on expensive enchantments to stay alive, and both of those were problems in the long run. Not to mention, it wouldn’t fix whatever problems Boris already had, because the mana accumulation and class seeds in Boris’s body wouldn’t decrease no matter how long she cut him off from mana.

As Alice contemplated breaking Boris’s class seed, a feeling of suffocating dread crushed her as {Safety Analysis} blared out warning signals. Alice shivered as the feeling started to dissipate.

Clearly, removing Boris’s class seed was a bad idea. Why though?

Alice took a moment to collect herself, before she began brainstorming reasons for why destroying Boris’s Class seed would be dangerous.

There were a few possible conclusions. First, there could be some sort of fundamental difference between primary and secondary classes, making one safe to break down while the other wasn’t. Alice wasn’t absolutely sure if Borris’s farming class was a primary class, but given how fast it was picking up levels it was probably a primary class. Alice would investigate this later, when her headache got better. Since {Safety Analysis} was fairly safe and easy to use, Alice could run lots of experimental ideas through the Perk and see what was and wasn’t dangerous when she had more time.

Alternatively, Boris might not be in danger because he had a class seed. Instead, perhaps his class seed wasn’t sucking up ENOUGH mana? Whenever someone was exposed to enough mana for a fair amount of time, they would undergo a mana baptism, where they had a small chance of becoming a Mage and a much greater chance of dying on the spot. This was a good reminder of how dangerous mana actually was. Maybe class seeds worked to suck up mana, and the fact Boris’s mana seed wasn’t sucking up enough mana was what was causing his weird personality changes?

Alice wasn’t entirely sure how that would work, but it seemed as plausible as any other theory she could come up with. Alternatively, maybe Boris could actually go through a mana baptism as a result of the mana buildup in his body or something. Alice had never heard of anyone going through a baptism because there was too much mana inside of their body, and she had no clue whether it was even possible. However, if it was possible, it made perfect sense that Boris’s situation was becoming increasingly bizarre and dangerous as time passed on, and it also made sense that deleting his Class Seed would put him in massive danger. After all, even if his class seed wasn’t working as it was supposed to, removing it entirely might speed up the potentially dangerous mana baptism Boris was at risk of going through. Being forced into a process with a 4% survival rate definitely seemed dangerous enough for {Safety Analysis} to blare a bunch of warning signals at her.

Or her theory could be totally wrong. Alice was in totally unfamiliar territory at this point, there was just too much she didn’t know. Alice sighed in frustration, before she shook her head again. At the very least, it seemed like trying to remove a class seed with {Broken Seed} would do something if she tried using it on Boris. She would figure out how to test her ideas some more when her headache settled down a bit, and when she had better ideas for testing things without putting Boris in danger.

Finally, Alice stepped out of the manaless room. The moment she did, mana flooded into her body, and level up notifications started ringing like crazy.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 50 -> 51, Explorer of Magic: 56 -> 59, Scholar: 43 -> 51, Scientist: 45 -> 52

Seeker of Truth (III->IV) (Rarity: 9 -> 10)

You have glimpsed something that not many know. While you may not understand what it means, you have certainly seen   something that others have not.

+1 Primary Class Slot(s), 200% -> 400% class experience for all research-related classes, +10% -> 25% Effect of Intelligence, +15% -> 30% Effect of Perception. Your ability to see Mana is significantly enhanced. You will no longer experience any interference at all when attempting to observe phenomena involving mana, and will be able to see perfectly clearly.

You may choose one Perk of yours and upgrade it, provided it is from a research based class (this part of the Perk description will delete itself after you make your choice)

Scientific Discoveries (Rarity: N/A)

An Achievement Created by the ‘For Science!’ perk. It currently has one successful experiment catalogued. Upon reaching five experiments, this Achievement will receive a beneficial upgrade.

+20% class experience for all research related classes, +5% bonus to mental attribute growth

Alice grinned to herself as she read the details of her new upgrades. It had been quite a while since she had seen her [Explorer of Magic] class gain so much experience at once. She was nearly at the point of getting another Perk for the class, even if it might take a while to get the final level. She had also gotten another level in [Survivor] for some reason, although she wasn’t quite sure why, and had gotten a fair number of levels in [Scholar] and [Scientist].

Most importantly, {Seeker of Truth} had been upgraded again, and the experience bonus she got from the Achievement and increased from 200% to 400%. Her bonus experience from her biggest experience point boost had doubled in one sitting, which felt absolutely surreal to her. Her total Xp bonus to [Explorer of Magic] was sitting at around 605% now, with the combined bonuses from {Scientific Discoveries}, {Seeker of Truth}, {Bookworm}, {Seed Creator}, and {Baptized by Broken Mana}. She was willing to bet that was a big part of the reason she had gotten a whole three levels in [Explorer of Magic] at once was because of the massive upgrade to XP gain rate she had just gotten. The boost to [Explorer of Magic] also provided a few minor attribute boosts, which were always nice, and gave her the option to ‘upgrade’ one Perk of her choice. Alice had also gotten one experiment successfully finished, finally enabling her {For Science!} Perk. Alice wasn’t sure which of her three experiments the Perk had deemed ‘successfully concluded,’ but she had more time to experiment with the Perk and analyze it in the future. For now, the bonus to levelling speed was nice, if dwarfed by her other Achievement from this experiment.

Finally, both [Scholar] and [Scientist] had gone above level 50. She had three new Perks to choose, and Alice was more than happy to see both classes pick up a bunch of Levels.

Out of curiosity, Alice focused on the ‘Perk upgrade’ ability she had gotten from upgrading {Seeker of Truth}. When she focused on it, she saw a list of Perks pop up in front of her eyes, listing all of the Perks she had available from [Scientist], [Scholar], and [Explorer of Magic]. If she focused on any Perk, she could get a detailed explanation of what an ‘upgrade’ to the Perk would look like.

Hmm… upgrading {Expanding Comprehension} just boosts the amount of mana conversion ratio I can get per use of the Perk, which isn’t that great. The main reason I use the Perk is for the information I can get – the other effects are just bonuses, and not as important. Hmm… upgrading most of my Perks can give me something nice, but not too impressive. However, I’m also not sure what happens if I use an ‘upgraded’ Perk for Perk combination later. Do I keep the upgrade, or is it lost? Alice frowned, wondering if she should save the Perk upgrade for later to avoid losing it during a Perk combination, before she turned back to her available Perks.

Finally, she decided that saving it wasn’t ideal, mostly because she saw a useful-looking upgrade for one of her other Perks. Unlike most of her other Perks, Alice wasn’t sure if she would ever bother combining this Perk with another one, because its effects were just too critical to her current research, and the uncertain nature of Perk combination made her skeptical of losing it.

Broken Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher

You gain the ability to 'break' one magic seed every month (Now once every two weeks due to the influence of the {Seed Creator} Achievement) without harming the body of the target, allowing the target to switch out one magic seed for another.

(Note – can only break seeds of others with their consent.)

After eyeing the old text for one of the most critical parts of Alice’s experiments, she used her Perk upgrade to change the Perk.

Broken Seed (Upgraded)

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher, (Upgraded via {Truth Seeker} Achievement)

You gain the ability to 'break' one magic seed every week (Now once every four days due to the influence of the {Seed Creator} Achievement) without harming the body of the target, allowing the target to switch out one magic seed for another.

(Note – can only break seeds of others with their consent.)

The Perk upgrade drastically reduced the cooldown time for {Broken Seed}, allowing Alice to use it once every four days instead of once every two weeks. This was a massive upgrade, since Alice was more than tripling the frequency she could use the Perk. Given how messed up her attempts at creating a System seed had been, Alice suspected she would need far more time and effort to create a working ‘System Seed’ than any other kind of magic seed she had created so far. Only being able to practice once every two weeks would have slowed down her experiments to a crawl, which was far from ideal.

This ‘Perk upgrade’ directly fixed this problem, and also let Alice have more leeway to experiment with breaking down class seeds without sacrificing too much time. Alice grinned, thinking of new experiments she could run if she had more leeway in using {Broken Seed}. For example, if Alice got a class, deleted it, and then acquired the class again, what would happen? Would she return to the same level she previously had, or would she restart from level one? What about Perks acquired from the class? If Alice had a secondary class at level 10 and then deleted the Perk, what would happen to the Perk? Alice wanted to know how it all worked out, and she could definitely afford to screw around with her [Student] class a bit. The Perks from the [Student] class didn’t matter much to her, and although she hadn’t reached level 10 in her [Student] class yet she already knew the Perks from the class were rather unimpressive. It was perfect experimental fodder after she broke down her fisherwoman class, since Alice had a very easy time reacquiring and levelling up the class. The biggest thing Alice had to pay attention to was which experiment chain had higher priority. She wanted to both experiment with making System seeds, and also see how the Perk interacted with secondary classes, and both required {Broken Seed} to do anything. However, with three and a half uses every two weeks instead of one, she would be able to learn much more.

After that, Alice quickly ran through her other Perk options, before making three more selections.

Super Speed Reading

Requirements: Scholar level 45 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

While reading any form of written text, you can read and process information ten times faster than before. Your comprehension abilities are also greatly enhanced while reading (note - this bonus only applies to things you are reading. If you are reading and doing something else at the same time, only reading gets this comprehension bonus).

Alice took {Super Speed Reading} because she spent so much time reading every day, and yet there were still hundreds, or even thousands of reports, books, and pieces of information left in the academy library that she had no hope of accessing within the next few months, or even within the next few years. The Library collected more books and rotated out old books semi-frequently, keeping only the most well known and useful older books around, and Alice found the idea of reading through books much more quickly appealing. With this Perk, Alice could probably finish a smaller experiment report within a few minutes of reading, and might be able to finish even a longer book within thirty or forty minutes. That reading speed was absolutely phenomenal, and Alice felt it was worth spending a Perk slot on it.

Delve into the Arcane

Requirements: Scholar level 50 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher, some sort of Perk which gives you the ability to learn information, rarity eight or higher Achievement related to Magic and Research

If you have spent at least an hour learning about magic within the past 24 hours, your mana regeneration rate is increased by 100% (This multiplier takes effect AFTER accounting for all other Perks you have that multiplies mana regeneration, working multiplicatively instead of additively).

When Alice saw this Perk, she took it almost immediately. Her current mana regeneration rate was 2.5% of her maximum capacity ever hour, meaning she needed 40 hours to completely recharge. This put an upper limit on the amount of enchanting she could do every day, and also meant that she needed to carefully manage the amount of mana she spent during classes if she wanted to remain economically stable.

This Perk would just double her mana regeneration to 5%, and would boost both her economic stability and her ability to train and enchant things. Considering how much time and energy she spent on learning about magic, Alice was pretty sure this Perk would have been active for almost every second of time she had been in this world since the moment she had unlocked her first magic seed. The difficulty of keeping this Perk active was trivial for her, and the benefits were definitely sizeable.

Finally, Alice grabbed her level 50 Scientist Perk.

The Science of mana deprivation

Requirements: Scientist level 50 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Must have extensively experimented with mana and lack of mana and its effects on other creatures and/or oneself, Magic 150 or higher, Pure mana seed (or similar seed) present.

You may use your mana tendrils to interfere with mana, allowing you to create manaless fields at will given enough time or otherwise allowing you to prevent mana from interfering with your experiments.

Note 1: The farther away the mana is, the more difficult and mentally draining it will be to activate this Perk. It is advised you use this on areas near you.

Note 2: Please remember that interfering with mana controlled by other people will be far more mentally taxing than manipulating the same amount of mana would be if it were uncontrolled.

Alice had been pretty surprised when she had seen this Perk, mostly because it seemed so… unusual by System standards. As far as Alice could tell… this Perk did a few things for her. First, it made setting up a manaless field much easier, saving her a lot of labor, enchanting materials, and time if she wanted to do an experiment without mana getting in the way. This was a minor effect, but one that Alice welcomed, since it would finally let her run experiments outside of Cecilia’s workshop.

However, much more importantly, as far as Alice could tell, this would let her prevent other Mages from using mana if she could get one of her mana tendrils in contact with theirs. This provided a very situational but very powerful antimagic ability for her, giving her a completely unexpected combat ability boost from a class she had never expected to provide her with combat options.

And, most interesting of all, Alice wondered if this could prevent the activation of Perks. As far as Alice could tell, most Perks worked by utilizing System mana to do stuff. Normally, people couldn’t interfere with System mana even if they had this Perk, because they wouldn’t be able to see it in the first place. However, Alice could see System mana perfectly clearly, and had long gotten used to cornering System mana with her own even when it tried to escape. If that was the case… maybe she could just outright prevent Perks from working? She had no idea if it would work or not, but it was a very interesting idea that Alice found herself eager to try.

Alice couldn’t stop grinning to herself as she analyzed all of her gains from the experiments she had done, before she walked out of the hallway. She started humming a tune from Earth to herself, since she was feeling especially cheerful.

As she passed by Cecilia, Cecilia noticed her grinning and humming to herself.

“Productive experiment today?” Asked the other girl, without looking up from her enchantment.

“Very,” said Alice, grinning. “I don’t have a solution for Boris’s problem yet, but I think I’m on the way to getting one. Or at least I got a big clue about how everything works behind the scenes, and I can take it in really interesting directions. I just need a bit more time, and I can figure out how all of this fits together.”

Cecilia nodded, smiling faintly at Alice’s joy. “Just make sure you pay attention. The Society is getting even crazier recently, and I don’t know why, but they’re making the recent problems with the System even more dangerous. Figuring out what’s going on is hard enough without those guys also stirring up trouble. If you stick out too much, they might come after you regardless of the consequences, especially if it looks like you would be able to help them with their research.”

“Hopefully that won’t happen, but I’m starting to wonder if whatever is going wrong with the System is an even bigger danger than the Society. If the System breaks down… what happens?”

“If the System stopped working entirely? I… have no idea,” said Cecilia, frowning. “Given how much it seems to help out behind the scenes, a world without the System… is probably one without humans in it? If everyone suddenly lost all of their levels and Perks, that’s what I imagine would happen. But the fact that we kept our Perks, Levels, and Attributes even when we cut ourselves off from the System in previous experiments probably means that even if the System collapsed tomorrow, we wouldn’t lose what we’ve already acquired. However, when I think of children born in the future, I can’t imagine many of them surviving…” Cecilia frowned, sinking into thought.

Alice sighed, shaking her head. “I’ll do my best to stay out of danger, but I’m starting to think there’s no way to stay safe no matter what. In the end, I might need to brave the Society’s attention or stand to the side and watch as whatever is going wrong unfolds.”

Cecilia’s frown grew deeper, before she also sighed. “I’ll start training up my combat classes a bit more, in case we’re forced into a dead end and something happens. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but… if something really does go horribly wrong, I’ll be there for you, okay?” Cecilia shook her head. “But do your best to make sure it doesn’t come to that. I’m only a little over level 50, and my primary classes are [Enchanter] and [Merchant]. Neither of those are very handy in a fight, and while I do have some self-protection enchantments on me, I would rather not test their effectiveness on some combat-oriented level 70 come to kidnap you in the middle of the night or something.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Alice, grinning mirthlessly at Cecilia. At the same time, she decided that she needed to finish rebuilding her second generation of self-protection enchantments sooner rather than later. She also hoped she wouldn’t ever tangle with the Society of Starry Eyes. But with the way things were unfolding now, Alice wasn’t sure if that was possible anymore.

A note from acaswell

Shameless Plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 90

After Alice finished dealing with all of her upgrades, she visited Boris for the week. Now that she had a more extensive list of ideas and guesses about class seeds, Alice took this visit as an opportunity to observe Boris in greater detail, to see if she could verify any of her guesses about the nature of class seeds. She had already observed that Boris had a huge amount of mana in his body compared to the amount of time he had been working on levelling up, but now that she had more information, perhaps she could learn something new.

Unfortunately, this idea ended up as a dead end. Alice didn’t manage to discover too much or confirm any of her guesses after the visit. However, she did discover that the class seed in Boris’s body wasn’t absorbing any mana, unlike the seed she had seen in her vision. This puzzled Alice, but considering how much she didn’t know about class seeds right now, it wasn’t too surprising that she had missing information right now. Alice couldn’t help but wonder if Boris’s condition would get better the moment he turned six. Perhaps the moment he turned six and turned the right age for a normal status screen, the class seed in his body would instantly eat up all of the extra mana in his body and he would return to normalcy? Or perhaps nothing would happen, or the class seed would start absorbing mana and slowly ‘digest’ the excess mana in Boris’s body bit by bit? Alice wasn’t quite sure, and she didn’t dare to mess with anything right now due to her fear of harming Boris in the process. At the very least, ever since Alice had encouraged Natasha to prevent Boris from farming, his condition hadn’t gotten any worse, so Alice considered that a minor victory for now. Next weekend she could hopefully bring over Professor Feliza and get Boris an enchantment to shut off access to mana in his surroundings, which would work as another countermeasure to prevent Boris’s condition from deteriorating further.

Alice left Natasha’s house in a poor mood. She still didn’t know enough about how class seeds worked to solve the root problem, so she could only sigh, remind Natasha not to let Boris farm or work in the fields, and return to Metsel for the night. On the way out of the village, she couldn’t help but notice that the number of [Guards] around Natasha and Boris had drastically decreased compared to a month ago. There was still one extra [Guard] sticking around Natasha’s village, but considering how many different directions Illvaria’s manpower was getting pulled now, the [Guards] obviously couldn’t afford to devote more people towards an attack that showed no signs of materializing. Alice was starting to think her guess was unfounded – the Society of Starry Eyes might have stumbled across Boris as a result of blind luck, and maybe have just been kidnapping children at random in hopes of getting lucky instead of having some way to actively search for him.

The following day, Alice returned to her magic classes and prepared to learn more about monster biology, self-defense, and attend an extremely exciting, fascinating, and valuable lecture about morals. But before she could get settled in and talk with Samantha for the day before switching back to talking with Luka, Erkki, Laila, and Arsi, she realized that Samantha wasn’t present in the classroom.

Samantha usually arrived to class fairly early.

Alice started to get a bad feeling.

“Do you know where Samantha is?” She asked her four friends in the class.

Luka simply shrugged, and Erkki frowned for a moment before he shook his head. Laila lifted her head towards Alice for a moment, before she yawned and responded with a lazy “I don’t know who that is.”

Arsi gave Alice the most useful response. He turned towards her and then frowned for a moment, before nodding to himself. “I’ve heard one of her friends from an earlier class I share mention that Samantha was sick today. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but I did hear her say that the girl is sick enough for her family to hire an [Organic Mage] to take a look at her. She should be healthy by tomorrow, I guess, assuming Samantha’s family hires a good [Organic Mage].” Arsi shrugged. “If you wait until Wednesday you can probably see her again.”

Alice’s bad feeling intensified as she wondered whether an [Organic Mage] could even find Samantha’s weird and broken kinetic seed. The best thing the healer might be able to accomplish was healing some of Samantha’s symptoms, unless the [Organic Mage] had a very surprising set of Perks and Achievements.

“Do you know where Samantha lives? I’m sure you know that she and I have been talking recently when I have extra time, so I want to go wish her well. Besides, I’ve recently been learning bits and pieces about organic magic, and maybe I can sit by the side and learn something useful,” said Alice. The effort she had been putting in for the past week came in useful, as Arsi simply nodded at her statement. Alice was now known to enjoy speaking with Samantha, and so Arsi didn’t think there was anything unusual about Alice wanting to visit her friend.

“I don’t know anything specifically where she lives. You could probably ask one of her friends for more detailed information. If you’re lucky, she might even be heading there after her classes for the day are finished in order to check up on Samantha. If she is, you can probably just tag along. And even if she doesn’t plan to make a visit, she should know where Samantha lives, so you can still get directions from her.”

“Is that so? I’ll have to ask her later, then. Who should I look for?”

“Look for the girl named Taylie. She has black hair and blue eyes, and she’s a little taller than you. But she walks with a slightly hunched posture, so in practice your height is about the same as hers. She’s a bit more on the nervous side, has slightly below average [Charisma], doesn’t really like people too much, and her mage emblem is made out of copper. She shouldn’t be too hard to identify,” said Arsi, before adding a few description about Taylie’s schedule. “She finishes her classes for the day the same time this class ends, and she doesn’t really stick around the after class. She heads straight out of the building the moment she can leave. I imagine you’ll probably have to rush and catch her by the door if you want to meet with her today. If that doesn’t work, you can always just wait until Wednesday, although you’ll miss the chance to observe a healer with a full certificate in action.”

Alice thanked Arsi for sharing this information with her. Class started right afterwards, so she did her best to turn her attention to class, but had a hard time paying attention. Her thoughts kept turning back to Samantha’s situation. She had been hesitating on what she should do for a while, and Cecilia had also advised her not to put herself in too much danger, and had implied that Alice should look after herself first, even if it meant abandoning Samantha and letting things play out. Alice had originally felt that Cecilia’s words made sense. She would help where she could, but she would look out for herself first.

However, now that Samantha’s condition was getting worse, Alice found that her thoughts were a mess. Could she really just coldly watch on as someone she enjoyed talking with get sick and possibly die, just because she was afraid of the Society of Starry Eyes? Alice wasn’t even sure if the Society would notice Alice treating a slightly weird illness, and she was pretty sure the root cause couldn’t be treated by anyone but her. Alice also felt a little guilty, because she knew for sure that if the person in danger wasn’t Samantha, but was someone like Cecilia, Alice wouldn’t have hesitated at all. Cecilia was her closest friend in this world, and if Cecilia had been the one in danger she would have helped Cecilia first and figured out the consequences later. Even if she wasn’t as close with Samantha, letting her die just didn’t feel right.

Alice shook her head. She decided that she would definitely visit Samantha today, and she would figure out what she wanted to do after that. If need be, she would run back to the academy and try to drag over professor Feliza to ‘help’ her heal Samantha’s illness, especially if the other girl seemed like she was on the verge of death. After a moment, Alice grinned to herself. There was a much easier solution here. Professor Feliza was a well known healer, so if Professor Feliza did a ‘check up’ on Samantha after the [Organic Mage] left and ‘taught’ Alice during the process, Alice could probably heal the problem without arousing Samantha’s curiosity. So long as Samantha was unconscious, she wouldn’t know who broke down her messed up seed, and Professor Feliza probably had more resources and ability to deal with the Society if they came knocking. Alice felt that she could probably convince professor Feliza help her out, given the woman’s strict moral lines and hatred for the Society, and in the best case scenario Samantha had a good chance of keeping her mouth shut and avoiding future problems entirely. She would need to get Professor Feliza’s help, and would need to expose the fact that she could see magic seeds to Professor Feliza, but having a known healer and member of the faculty helping her keep things quiet and helping her from the sidelines would be a huge help for the future. And knowing that Magic Seeds could be formed imperfectly and cause harm to their user would probably help a lot of other Mages and healers in the country to at least start looking in the right direction for medical treatments when it came to weird illnesses like Samantha’s. Best of all, it would be quite normal of Professor Feliza got an Achievement dedicated to helping cure malformed magic seeds if she made the problem public, which would give Alice an excuse to heal other people as long as she was with Professor Feliza. As long as the woman was willing to help her, Alice would be able to open up a route to learning more about the current situation while also setting up ways for other people to start investigating the root problems encountered by the System recently.

All Alice needed to do was go to Samantha’s house to confirm the situation first, then head back to the academy, ask for Professor Feliza’s help, and then put her plan into action.

Now that she had a plan, Alice found it easier to concentrate on Introductory Monster Biology again. After class ended, Alice immediately headed for the class Arsi had mentioned, nearly sprinting down the halls to make sure she wasn’t late. A few moments after arriving, Alice spotted Taylie. Alice grinned. She hadn’t missed her chance to check on Samantha today.

She waited until Taylie had moved a bit farther away from the crowd, and watched as Taylie began walking towards the stairs. Then, Alice took a deep breath to gather her courage before she stepped in front of Taylie.

“Are you Taylie?”

“Yes, I am. Who might you be?” Taylie shuffled nervously as she eyed Alice, taking a small step back as she started to frown.

“I’m Alice, an acquaintance of Samantha’s. I heard she didn’t show up to class today?”

Taylie stopped frowning and relaxed slightly, nodding at Alice. “Ah, so that’s where I’d heard your name before. Samantha mentioned you last Friday while I was talking with her. She was feeling pretty sick this morning when I went to talk to her, and mentioned her family was going to hire an [Organic Mage] to treat her. Since it got bad enough to hire a healer, I was planning on visiting her later to see if she’s recovering well.”

“Could I tag along? I’ve been getting along with Samantha for the past week, and while I don’t know her as well as you do I would like to at least check up on her,” said Alice. “I have a few healing enchantments I can lend to Samantha if it would help, and I don’t want to just sit around while someone I know gets sick.”

“You’re surprisingly nice,” said Taylie, and her shoulders relaxed a little bit. “I don’t mind if you tag along.”

The two set off from the magic university and began walking through Metsel. The two spoke little as they wandered through the streets. Soon, the two began to approach the slums area, which caused Alice to feel both surprised and jumpy. She started paying more attention to the information her Perks were feeding her and scanning everything in her surroundings more carefully, in case something happened. Luckily, the two didn’t actually reach the slums before they reached the area Samantha lived.

“That one is her house,” said Taylie, breaking the silence and pointing out a smaller wooden building off to the side of the street.

Alice quickly realized that Samantha’s family wasn’t very wealthy, which somewhat surprised her. Samantha had mentioned wanting to get into Enchanting instead of Organic Magic, and so she had assumed that Samantha had a fair amount of gold to burn on the learning process. After all, learning Enchanting implied failing quite a bit before succeeding, and without a fairly unusual magic seed it was hard to find a market for low level enchantments because higher level [Enchanters] would take away most sales. Alice had gotten a bit lucky because she had started learning in Cyra, where the competition was low and supplies from the North were inconsistent, but Samantha lived in the capital, one of the areas with the densest mage population in Illvaria.

Then, Alice wondered if perhaps the reason Samantha wanted to get into enchanting was because of the recent price spike for self-defense enchantments, before shaking her head. If Samantha wasn’t already well off financially, just starting to learn enchantments might be cripplingly difficult if she didn’t have a plan. However, that was a matter for Samantha and her family to work out unless Samantha asked her for advice.

As Alice mused over Samantha’s financial situation and future as an [Enchanter], the two approached Samantha’s house, she felt {Sense Hostility} suddenly trigger.

Alice’s thinking ground to a halt as she focused all of her attention on the area around her. {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision} kicked into overdrive and expanded her vision in all directions, letting her see behind her and to the sides of her in black and white. At the same time, Alice mentally locked on to several objects in the area she could grab with her mana tendrils in a hurry if she needed to.

A moment later, a handsome man in his early twenties walked out of Samantha’s house. He looked to be a little above level 75, and he had a well developed organic magic seed. At the same time, Alice realized that the man was covered in a strange rainbow mana formation she didn’t recognize, and that she felt a strange sense of relaxation as she looked at the man, as well as a sense of mild drowsiness. If she weren’t careful, she felt that she might even begin nodding off soon, and trying to concentrate on her surroundings became increasingly difficult as she felt relaxed and lethargic. Alarm bells started ringing in her head. Something was wrong with this man.

“Good evening,” said the [Organic Mage], giving them a friendly nod as he walked closer. Alice noticed that his gaze settled on the two for a moment, as if he was trying to make a decision, before he took a step closer to them. The alarm bells in Alice’s head grew louder. “May I ask what you’re doing on this fine day?” At the same time, he stretched out his hand towards Taylie’s, as if asking for a handshake. Taylie frowned sluggishly, as if she could also tell that something wasn’t quite right, but she reached out her hand to shake the man’s anyway.

“We’re here to visit our friend,” said Taylie, giving the man a sleepy nod. Alice got a better idea of what was happening as she saw a jolt of rainbow mana reach out of the man’s hand and into Taylie’s arm during the handshake. Taylie’s smile grew more relaxed and lethargic after a few seconds, and without any further explanation or focus, Taylie veered away from the man and kept walking towards Samantha’s house.

At the same time, the [Organic Mage] extended his hand towards Alice for a handshake. Alice started panicking. Should she shake the man’s hand, or immediately open hostilities? The man hadn’t attacked Taylie as she walked by, so he seemed to be uninterested in killing her. If that was the case, Alice might have a better opportunity to open a fight with a surprise attack…

Like a wooden puppet, she extended her hand towards the [Organic Mage] as she started praying that her next idea would work. Out of the corner of her eye, she watched a burst of rainbow mana get injected into her body.

Then, Alice used {Extended Organics} to create a small, needle-sized mana tendril inside of her wrist. {The Science of Mana Deprivation} activated, and the burst of rainbow mana was quickly isolated from the rest of her body, tying up one of her mana tendrils but preventing her from falling asleep.

“I wish you the best of luck checking up on your friend, then,” said the man, giving them an more amiable and warm smile as he walked past Alice, completely ignoring her. Alice did her best to mimic Taylie, veering slightly to the side and sleepily walking towards Samantha’s house.{Sense Hostility} stopped activating, and right after Alice passed by the man, she immediately used {Extended Organics} to create three mana tendrils a few inches away from the man, targeting the front of his clothing. Before he had time to react, Alice used kinetic magic to turn the buttons on his clothes into weapons and shot them directly towards the man’s heart.

The three buttons tore through the man’s skin, but Alice could tell that she hadn’t managed to kill him. He turned around as his flesh regrew, wriggling around in meat tendrils as Perks activated inside of his body. The man’s facial features contorted, before his face melted like putty as twisted as he snarled at her. All of a sudden, the man’s facial features were completely different, and Alice immediately realized the man had somehow used Organic magic to change his own facial features.

“Society attack!” Yelled Alice at the top of her lungs, hoping to call over some [Guards] to help.

The man snarled at her, and then reached down, ripped a cobblestone out of the street with his hands, and threw it at her.

{Adrenaline Rush} activated, and Alice’s perception of time was warped as the world slowed to a crawl. She reached out one tendril of mana to stop the cobblestone flying towards her while simultaneously activating her bracelet and preparing one more cobblestone to use as a projectile. However, when she tried to stop the cobblestone flying towards her, she realized to her shock that the force behind the cobblestone was somehow resistant to her attempts at stopping it. Forced to abandon her plan of counterattacking, Alice instead tried to duck away from the incoming projectile. She quickly realized that also couldn’t get out of the way in time, so she cancelled her other mana tendrils before reforming them with {Extended Organics}. Then, she used her free mana tendrils to grab herself by the clothes and throw herself out of the way.

She barely escaped having her head crushed like a grape as the cobblestone tore through the air, slamming into the wall of a nearby house and tearing a massive hole in the wall. Alice felt her heart beating faster as she imagined what would have happened if she hadn’t gotten out of the way in time, and grew even more afraid of the Society member who was attacking her.

Luckily, the Society member didn’t follow up on his attack. Since he was in the middle of the city and [Guards] might come any minute, he instead strengthened his legs and began running from the scene at full speed. Alice didn’t even concentrate on getting up or healing the bruises from crashing heavily into the ground, as she began firing cobblestones, her consumable bracelet, and random pieces of the surroundings at him. She managed to clip him with a few stones, and almost managed to slice his leg off with a flying piece of roof tile, but the man’s regenerative powers were high enough that he just regrew his flesh and kept fleeing at top speed. Alice chased after him until for a few seconds, until {Adrenaline Rush} ended and she realized she couldn’t stop him from fleeing. Soon, he disappeared into the distance.

Alice swore, staring at the decimated street and giving herself a quick check over. Luckily, it didn’t seem like she had any serious injuries – just some scrapes and bruises from throwing herself around like a rag doll, but those were easy enough to heal.

She turned back to the scene of the brief fight, and noticed Taylie had made it inside of Samantha’s house before collapsing and falling asleep, having managed to completely ignore the brief fight. Since Alice had no ability to chase after the suspected Society member, she cursed again and walked back into Samantha’s house to check on Taylie. Luckily, the girl wasn’t terribly injured. Inside of the house were also an older man and a woman, along with a young girl, all sleeping comfortably on a bed together. If it weren’t for the rainbow mana in their bodies, along with the fact the couple and their daughter had somehow managed to sleep through a wall being demolished a few seconds ago, Alice might have thought that they had simply fallen asleep.

However, Alice felt that something was missing here. This was Samantha’s house, after all. Where was Samantha?

It only took her a few moments to confirm her ominous premonition.

Samantha wasn’t in the house.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 91

Alice felt waves of panic cycle through her thoughts as she checked through Samantha’s house again, hoping to find Samantha in a spot she had missed. However, in her heart, Alice already knew she wasn’t going to find her. A heavy feeling of dread weighed down on her as she searched Samantha’s house again and again, before the realization that Samantha was gone finally settled into her mind like the weight of a millstone.

Dazed, she walked out of Samantha’s house and sat down in front of the door. A sense of fear and melancholy appeared as she thought about the fact that Samantha’s safety was now completely impossible to guarantee. After Samantha was kidnapped by the Society, Alice didn’t know what would happen to her – nor did Alice have any ability to interfere at all. Even if Samantha was sliced into pieces by the Society as an experiment, Alice had no way to help her now.

In fact, the Society didn’t need to do anything to kill Samantha. Samantha’s new Kinetic Seed had something seriously wrong with it, and Samantha was getting increasingly ill as time passed. If Samantha wasn’t given an effective treatment in time, the symptoms would probably become fatal. And Alice was the only person that could treat Samantha, at least as far as she knew.

The odds of Samantha surviving felt dishearteningly low when Alice seriously considered the situation. Alice felt a burst of doubt and worry. Had her hesitation in treating Samantha caused this? Was Samantha specifically targeted because of her strange illness? Or had the Society already made up its mind to kidnap a Mage, and Samantha had simply been unlucky? Alice felt a wave of doubts as she wondered whether she had moved too slowly, causing Samantha to get hurt as a result…

Alice closed her eyes, shaking her head as she tried to clear away her guilty thoughts. To the best of her knowledge, the danger represented by the Society hadn’t been significant enough to reach Samantha. For the Society to kidnap a Mage in broad daylight was a massive escalation in their conflict with Illvaria, and one that was sure to net a massive retaliation from the Illvarian crown. Alice had no way of knowing that the Society would be willing to risk so much, and she had been doing her best to set up a way to help Samantha while keeping herself safe. She had actively been using her connections with her [Teacher] to keep her abilities hidden while still allowing he to help people when needed. If the Society hadn’t kidnapped Samantha today, Alice’s would have probably deflected any possible problems towards Professor Feliza, as long as the woman was willing to help out. If today hadn’t happened, Alice felt that she would have been able to save Samantha without risk to herself.

But now, things were changed. Alice didn’t even know if Samantha was targeted because the Society knew something about her magic seeds, or if Samantha was just targeted because she was a Mage and seemed to be vulnerable. She sighed to herself, ignoring her System notifications as her thoughts churned and she tried to understand what she needed to do next.

Before she finished sorting out her thoughts, a [Guard] appeared. The [Guard] was a woman who looked to be in her early thirties, and looked to be around level 45 or 50. She was a person with no outstanding characteristics, but Alice still stood up to greet her anyway, pushing down all of her chaotic thoughts and emotions to focus on the [Guard].

“Excuse me miss, a few minutes ago I and a colleague heard someone yell that a Society member had been spotted. May I ask if that was you?” asked the [Guard], ignoring the caved-in building nearby.

“I … yes. You see – I…” Alice took a deep breath, forcing herself to calm down and wishing {Rhetorical Flourish} worked in this case, because she really needed a Perk to help her straighten out her words right now. Alice struggled to put her words together, failed a second time, and finally managed to eke out a coherent explanation on her third attempt. She quickly recounted the situation to the [Guard].

The [Guard] took a closer look at Alice, and out of the corner of her eyes, Alice saw the [Guard’s] gaze linger on Alice’s mage emblem, and then the [Guard’s] posture straightened out quite a bit.

“I’m sorry, you said that an acquaintance of yours was kidnapped? Lady Mage, do you mean to say that a normal acquaintance was kidnapped, or… was a Mage was just kidnapped?”

Even though most of Alice’s attention was still focused on Samantha’s disappearance, she couldn’t help but notice the [Guard’s] change in posture, as well as the fact that the [Guard] was now referring to her as ‘Lady Mage’ instead of ‘Miss.’ She realized with a start that the [Guard] hadn’t noticed she was a Mage at first. She frowned for a moment, before deciding to emphasize the situation as much as possible for Samantha’s sake. If the [Guards] knew that a Mage was the one that had been kidnapped, it was obvious that they would put more emphasis on the case compared to a random tramp getting kidnapped. Alice seriously doubted the [Guards] would be able to track down and rescue Samantha either way, but having more people working on the case and more resources devoted to it would at least improve Samantha’s chances.

“Yes, my friend is named Samantha, an acquaintance from my Magic University. She’s also a Mage. We occasionally chatted before class. I’m quite shocked to see the Society brazen enough to kidnap someone in broad daylight, especially a Mage of high standing.”

Saying Samantha’s standing was high was definitely pushing it a bit, but Mages were legally considered quasi-nobles in Illvaria. Even if Samantha’s family was poor, she still had a higher social and legal status to protect her. For now, Alice was just hoping that the [Guard] would call over more high-level people to deal with Samantha’s kidnapping, even if it requires stretching the truth a bit.

“Just so that I know what I’m dealing with, can you give me any clues about the man’s fighting style? Any estimates for his physical Stats, physical characteristics, Perks or Achievements he used?”

“He was pretty strong. I’m not sure about his physical stats, but I imagine his [Endurance] was at least over 200 after stat effectiveness was factored in. His speed was pretty high, so probably at least above 150 [Dexterity]? I have multiple classes above level 50, and I almost managed to take off one of his legs with a roof tile, but he dodged or ignored most of my attacks even when I threw everything I could at him. I think if he had actually turned around to fight me, I might not have survived, but luckily he was more focused on escaping,” said Alice. Then, as she had more time to process the fight itself, sudden chills lanced their way down her spine. It finally occurred to her just how close she had been to dying during the fight. If the Society member hadn’t decided the threat of [Guards] was more important than fighting her, she might have died during the fight.

The Guard’s eyes widened, and she gave Alice a hesitant glance before she frowned. Then, she gave a self-deprecatory laugh. “If even a Mage with multiple classes above 50 couldn’t stop the guy from running, there’s nothing I could do without a bunch of my colleagues. Let’s wait for the others to come – the [Guard] I was patrolling with went to notify the [Guard] house and get more people to close off this area. When they come, I still doubt we’ll have enough manpower to deal with a trained combat Mage who’s probably above level 65, and might be even higher in level.” The [Guard] shook her head, before sighing.

“Is there anyone in the [Guards] or armed forces of Illvaria you know and you would like me to contact, Lady Mage? If there is, I can let them know about this situation for you. If you have any contacts with high level people, the odds of your friend getting out of this alive are probably much higher, although the higher ups will definitely respond to a Mage getting kidnapped either way.”

Alice only needed to think for a moment to think of someone who might be helpful.

“If he’s available, please contact [Knight] Arin,” said Alice. She felt that [Knight] Arin was strong enough to help in this situation, and would hopefully be interested in the fact a Mage had been kidnapped. Alice hadn’t spoken with him much over the past month, but she felt it was worth contacting him over this.

“I will see if he is available,” said the [Guard] before giving Alice a respectful nod. “Is there anything else about the encounter you remember? What about the person’s physical description?”

“The man originally looked like a fairly handsome [Organic Mage], but after the fight started, his face changed a fair amount. I don’t know if his real face is the one I saw, but it’s obvious he has some sort of Perk to help him change his facial features around. However, at the very least, the face I saw…” Alice quickly began describing the man’s physical characteristics, before and after the fight started, while the [Guard] nodded from time to time.

“Thank you, Lady Mage. For now, I’ll keep an eye on our surroundings in case something else happens. If any of the family members wake up, let me know so I can get the relevant information from them,” said the [Guard]. “I’ll get more detailed questions and information when my colleagues arrive, but this should be good enough for now.” Alice nodded, and the [Guard] carefully moved to a location that gave her a better view, leaving Alice alone with her thoughts again.

Once the [Guard] was gone, Alice sank back into her thoughts, before she came to a decision.

She had felt for a long time that hiding from the Society of Starry Eyes was the right thing to do. They were a powerful organization that lay in the shadows and had the ability to make even a medium sized kingdom like Illvaria feel a headache when trying to clear them out. They had an unknown number of combatants, scattered research bases, no ethical compass that they abided by, and had a powerful organization network. Even now, Alice feared them.

However, her research was starting to hit dead ends. She couldn’t investigate the nature of class seeds past a certain point without testing her theories on other people, and trying to use her Perks on other people without revealing what she was doing was… ethically dubious at best. At the same time, even if Alice wasn’t someone who made as many friends or socialized as much as other people, she still hoped that the people she was acquainted with and her friends would be safe and happy. Whatever was going wrong with the System recently very clearly jeopardized that, and the Society’s actions also jeopardized that.

Most importantly, the Society was going ballistic now. Alice wasn’t sure how much the Society knew, and she wasn’t sure if the Society had caught on to the collapse of the System. However, about a month and a half ago, the Society was still relatively constrained in its actions. It didn’t dare to kidnap people who were ‘too important’ and limited its kidnappings to tramps and people who were easy to miss the disappearance of. Now, they had gone as far as kidnapping a Mage in broad daylight. Even if she did nothing, since the Society was targeting Mages right now, she might still get attacked out of nowhere even if she seemed completely unremarkable. In other words, even pretending to be average wasn’t safe anymore.

And if that was the case, maybe it was better if she stopped hiding all of her abilities to such a great degree. She still wouldn’t reveal the fact that she was an {Outworlder} – after all, Illa had strongly hinted that any mentions of this might make Alice a serious target of the Society. And Alice had no idea what the Church’s stance towards researching the System was, because she had never dared to touch on the subject for fear of kicking a hornet’s nest. However, Alice felt she could at least reveal one of her more unique abilities.

Specifically, Alice decided that she would reveal the ability to see and interact with magic seeds and Mage cores. Experimenting on the System itself was bizarre and outlandish by this world’s reckoning, so Alice felt the need to remain cautious about her true research goals, just in case they were perceived negatively and led to her being persecuted by the church or something. On the other hand, the ability to understand Mage Cores was under no such stigma. Plenty of [Scholars] and [Organic Mages] had tried to understand how Mage Cores worked in the past, and nobody had ever stepped up to condemn them for their research. If anything, most Mages seemed to think it was a shame that they hadn’t succeeded. This indicated that this world had no particular fear of Mages exploring how mana and mage cores worked, as long as they didn’t take their research to extreme levels by harming innocent people in the process. Alice managing to succeed at such a young age would explain her high levels in her Classes, and would also explain many of her weird and unique abilities. It would also cause the country to value her quite a bit more. This had a reasonable chance of putting her into the eyes of the Society, but given how much importance the Illvarian crown was placing on the conflict with the Society, Alice felt that the Crown wouldn’t just leave her exposed to attacks by the Society if she demonstrated useful abilities.

And Alice definitely had a few promising research avenues she could talk about. Being able to see what was happening inside of a Mage Core indicated Alice might find a way to make mana baptisms safer and more successful in the future, something no nation would overlook. Furthermore, Alice could demonstrate the ability to ‘delete’ magic seeds that were messed up – which should be increasingly relevant if her suspicions about the System starting to glitch out were correct. Both of these abilities should be enough to make the Crown value her highly and protect her against potential Society attacks.

Of course, this probably wouldn’t be a long term solution. Alice didn’t want to live life like a caged bird, always under the protection of people who were stronger than her and afraid of stepping outside because the Society would be waiting. However, Alice’s Achievements were excellent, and her leveling speed was far higher than most people’s. As long as the Crown protected her for long enough, Alice was confident that she could simply outlevel most assassination and kidnapping attempts. Even if combat wasn’t her strength, it was hard for anyone to win a one on one fight with an Immortal. If Alice managed to become an Immortal, or even just a really high level person, she would still be able to win most fights just with raw stats and Perks.

Alice took a deep breath, and then let it out. If she really decided to go through with this, she would possibly be racing against time. She would need to hope that she hit a high enough level and gain the ability to protect herself before the Society either made a big move, or the Crown stopped prioritizing her protection. However, it was also one of the only ways Alice would be genuinely free to help people who had malformed seeds, and openly learn as much as possible to fix whatever was going wrong with the System.

It would be risky…

But doing nothing was also risky. Alice didn’t think this was a crisis where she could just sit around and hope things blew over. If that was the case, she would rather take control of her fate with her own hands instead of hoping things turned out for the best.

With her mind made up, Alice finally looked at all of her System level up notifications, ignoring the minor Stat increases for now.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 51 -> 53, Explorer of Magic 59 -> 63, Kinetic Manabinder 28 -> 31

Alice had two new Perks. She noticed that with the amount of Achievements she now had boosting her levelling speed, the class that was most influenced by her Achievements, [Explorer of Magic], was no longer levelling at the speed of a snail crawling through molasses. It was levelling at about the same speed it had been when the class was below level 50, even.

Alice opened the Perks screen for Kinetic Manabinder first, and quickly grabbed a Perk that seemed related to combat over enchanting. Even though Alice felt Enchanting was better for her economic situation, if she was really planning on putting herself in the open she needed a little more combat power.

Reflection

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 30 or higher, Magic 150 or higher

Three times per day, you can directly change the direction an object is travelling in without changing the amount of momentum it has. To activate this Perk, one of your mana tendrils must first be touching the object. This Perk does not cost mana to activate.

During the last fight, Alice had noticed that she lacked the ability to fully stop an object with enough momentum behind it. This Perk provided the ability to directly reverse the force behind a throw object, and also gave Alice the ability to make the trajectories of some of her projectiles extremely weird and unpredictable so long as they remained in range of {Extended Organics}. It wasn’t a perfect solution to her lacking combat abilities, but it was the best thing she expected to get from a level 30 Perk.

Then, Alice looked over her choices for [Explorer of Magic]. When she looked over the Perk list, Alice noticed something curious – the descriptions she got for when she ‘combined’ a few Perks was somewhat different from the descriptions for combined Perks she had seen when she was at level 55. The descriptions for some of her combined Perk choices had changed, either because Alice wanted more combat ability right now, or simply as a result of reaching a higher level this time. Alice wasn’t sure which, but she made a mental note that the ‘results’ of combining Perks seemed to change sometimes and that she should keep an eye out for more information In the future.

Then, she looked over the two new Perks she could take at level 60. Neither seemed particularly appealing – the first one offered her a new seed slot, which Alice didn’t need right now, and the other Perk choice would give any of her other Magic-related classes a bonus 100% to levelling speed. That wasn’t bad, but the fact that the Perk wouldn’t apply to [Explorer of Magic] made it considerably less useful.

Finally, Alice settled on combining Perks again.

Combat Spellcaster

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 15 or higher, Magic 50 or higher

Living Creatures resist your mana less effectively

Improved Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 20 or higher

Allows you to improve one magic seed's mana conversion ratio by 10%. This is only effective on magic seeds below 200% mana conversion ratio.

Alice decided to sacrifice these two Perks, because neither of them offered her anything particularly useful anymore. Combat Spellcaster had been useful when she was still living in the woods, because it helped her deal with spidercrabs before they lunged at her and bit something vital. However, at this point, Spidercrabs weren’t a threat anymore, and Alice could just plow through groups of them using random sticks and rocks from her surroundings. The Perk wasn’t particularly useful against bigger creatures either, since even after the Perk reduced their mana resistance, it was still high enough to make doing something like ripping them in half with mana or tearing apart their organs highly impractical. These days, the Perk served little use. Improved Seed had been used to increase her Kinetic Magic seed, and also wasn’t a very big bonus at this point. Her Kinetic Seed was at 146% mana conversion ratio, and her [Magic] stat was much higher than it had been at the time. The bonus from this Perk also wasn’t very useful anymore.

Perk 1: Combat Spellcaster + Perk 2: Improved Seed = ??????

????: You may or may not lose the 10% bonus to your Kinetic Seed’s mana conversion ratio. All kinetic mana from your magic seed will gain two unique properties. First, it will become harder for other mages to interact with objects that have recently been ‘touched’ by your kinetic mana, and second, objects recently ‘touched’ by your kinetic mana will gain some sort of detrimental effect for creatures who are wounded by your projectiles. This detrimental effect’s exact details are hard to predict.

Would you like to combine these two Perks?

Alice quickly hit confirm.

Combat Seed (Tier 2 Perk, level 60 Explorer of Magic) (Level 15 Explorer of magic Perk + Level 20 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Combat Spellcaster + Improved Seed sacrificed to create this Perk.

You may attach a small extra layer of mana to any object you use your kinetic seed to manipulate. This extra layer of mana has the ability to ‘shred’ other forms of mana it comes into contact with, completely nullifying any attempts to heal wounds or interfere with objects your mana is stuck to until the mana is removed. If an object thrown using this seed ends up embedded in another person, it will fracture into pieces of shrapnel inside of their body if it is possible for the object to do so. These pieces of shrapnel will retain your layer of mana-shredding kinetic mana until another Mage removes it.

Note: Other Mages may remove this extra layer of mana using their own mana, even without specialized Perks. However, doing so will be mentally draining and require careful use of Mana. It will be difficult to do quickly unless they are much stronger than you.

After Alice took these two Perks, she felt that she was much closer to being combat ready. She was still a researcher at heart, and would still probably lose against someone who much higher level than she was. However, she felt… closer to being able to protect herself against the new level of offense she was practically inviting the Society to use against her. In particular, with access to {Combat Seed} she might have been able to at least slow down the guy who had kidnapped Samantha earlier, or even kill him if he didn't have any other surprises in his sleeves. And even if Alice was putting herself in more danger, she didn’t regret her decision. She didn’t want to just stand to the side and hope things turned out for the best. Even if it was more dangerous, she wanted to explore the secrets of this world and help her friends survive whatever was going wrong with the System these days. If taking a little bit of a bigger risk than before was the price for that…

Alice was prepared to pay it. She was a cautious person by nature, and she had no interest in fighting when she could spend that time doing research instead. But if push came to shove, she wouldn’t run away from it if she would be in danger no matter what she did.

After another few minutes, to Alice’s surprise and delight, [Knight] Arin actually came to the scene of Samantha’s kidnapping. Alice took a deep breath, and let it out again to finish calming her nerves.

It was time to make some serious plans for her future, both to see if there was anything she could do to rescue Samantha and to see what kind of protection the Crown might be willing to offer if she exposed her ability to see how Mage Cores worked.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 92

[Knight] Arin looked at Alice with a bit of confusion, giving her a sideways glance as he took in the sight of the partially ruined street around him. Alice also took a look at her surroundings, wincing a bit as she took in the aftermath of the fight. Cobblestones were missing left and right from the street, chunks of house and roof tile had been ripped away and used as ammunition, and one of the nearby houses had partially collapsed after the Society Mage had hurled a cobblestone through its wall. She hadn’t taken the time to look around after speaking with the previous [Guard], but now that she took a close look at the scene, it looked like a minor disaster had passed through the area.

After a moment, Arin turned and greeted Alice with a nod. “It is a pleasure to see you again, Lady Alice. Although the circumstances are quite… something. This street has certainly seen better days, though I’m glad to see you look quite healthy.”

Alice winced again, before she decided to simply nod and not say anything. [Knight] Arin quickly moved on from the topic.

“First, I’ve been told that you had an encounter with a member of the Society? Tell me what happened.”

Alice quickly recounted the day so far to [Knight] Arin again, summarizing her experiences in learning that her classmate was ill, before discussing why she had decided to come to Samantha’s house and check up on the girl. [Knight] Arin nodded along to Alice’s story, also calling the [Guard] over from time to time to confirm Alice’s statements and verify that the details of her previous and current story matched up. Alice didn’t mention her ability to see magic seeds yet, since she wanted to first get a better idea what [Knight] Arin’s current stance towards her was and make sure nothing felt ‘off’. Therefore, she provided the information she had given to the [Guard] earlier, without any revelations about Samantha’s messed up magic seed.

“Have Samantha’s family members woken up yet?” Asked [Arin]. “Also, you say that the Mage’s face suddenly changed after you started the fight?”

“Yes, his face changed after the fight started, probably indicating some sort of shapeshifting Perk. Samantha’s family hasn’t woken up yet.”

Arin nodded. “In that case, I’ll need to ask them some questions once they wake up, but we can wait for that. There are a few Perks I know of where trying to wake up someone placed in an unnatural sleep can cause major harm to the sleeping person, usually used by [Assassins] to silence information about them if they get discovered partway through a job. Besides, I don’t have any tracking abilities, and we still have another thirty minutes or so before the [Tracking Specialist] I know comes to help.” Alice nodded, relieved that Arin had mentioned a [Tracking Specialist]. Calling over Arin really had made it much easier to get people needed for the job in a timely manner. Then, as Alice shuffled nervously, trying to think of how to broach the topic of magic seeds, Arin turned towards her, and paused for a moment, as if falling into thought. Then, he gave her a reassuring smile.

“You seem nervous. Is there something you want to talk about?”

Alice nodded. “I wish to speak with you about a few things that I have not mentioned before. Previously, I had felt that by pretending to have no interesting abilities, the Society would ignore me and I could grow and experiment in peace, but after their actions today I have realized that even being average isn’t a guarantee that I won’t be targeted anymore, if they targeted Samantha randomly and not as part of a targeted attack. So I want to instead talk about some things I’m researching, and see if the Crown has any interest in helping or protecting me during my research. I would love more resources, as well as some protection against possible Society attacks while I grow and do experiments. Are you able to help me with that?”

Arin frowned “Kind of. I know almost nothing about research and academic topics. However, I do recall you mentioning a rather unique ability last time I saw you, which was the ability to detect Mages easily. Is this related to that abilty? If so, while I may not be able to directly get you in touch with research related resources, I can still provide some form of protection if you’re willing to work under me. Being able to see Mages in advance would make it much easier to find Society [Infiltrators], assuming they use the front gates and don’t climb the city walls or something.”

Alice nodded. “Is there a way to keep our conversation private? Just in case a Society [Spy] is nearby or something.”

Arin frowned for a moment, before he beckoned to the [Guard] who had spoken with Alice earlier.

“Do you have any Perks that can help us have a private conversation?”

The [Guard] nodded, and a bubble of rainbow mana fizzed into existence around Alice and Arin. The [Guard] retreated to the sides again, keeping an eye on the area, as Alice began to speak again.

“Let me be blunt. My ability to see who is or is not a Mage is an extension of a much different ability. That is the ability to see inside of a Mage core, and understand some of what’s going on inside of them. This ability can be applied in a very wide field of research, including but not limited to the study of Mage biology itself, the nature of mana, and the study of how to make Mana baptisms safer and more successful. Since magic seeds are located inside of a mage core, my ability to identify Mages and what kind of magic seed they possess is just the logical extension of this ability. Given my lack of resources, it’s pretty hard for me to pursue some of those research topics in great detail right now, since some of the Perks I rely on while studying my favored topics of research take some time to cool down. However, Perks are starting to be only one of the many limiting factors I’m working with, and I’m also getting a bit more worried about the Society attacking me. In short, I want protection against Society attacks and resources to keep pursuing my research in an ethical fashion. Can you help me with this?”

[Knight] Arin’s eyes widened, as he looked at Alice. For a few moments, he simply stared at her, before he closed his jaw. “The ability to see inside of a Mage core?” [Knight] Arin’s eyes twitched as he seemed to imagine something, before turning back to her. “No wonder you didn’t want to say anything. If it’s just sensing who’s a Mage and who isn’t, or even if you can see their specific magic seeds, that sounds like some sort of weird Achievement-based ability a [Guard] might get. The Society might find you annoying, but since you’re part of a magic academy and have a schedule, and you can only be in one place at a time, I doubt the Society would really care about your presence at all. You wouldn’t be worth specifically targeting, whether they wanted revenge against you or to kidnap you. But being able to look inside of a Mage Core and see how it works is such a unique and critical ability for magic research that the Society would absolutely target you if they learned about it. Because as long as they can make you tell the truth and report what you see, just sticking you in a room with some of their experiments and making you watch would tell them a lot.”

Arin shook his head, before sighing.

“You mentioned earlier that you were fairly high level for your age? I can see why now. The Achievement that you got for starting to unravel the secrets behind Mage biology must have at least rarity eight, if not nine or ten. You must be getting a huge experience bonus from it, too… and it’s probably also easier to pick up other weird Achievements get new abilities as well. Someone opening up the field for research would be able to rake in levels and Achievements at an unbelievable rate. As long as you don’t slack off, even reaching Immortality might be possible.” Arin nodded. “I need to rethink my plans a little. I don’t want you working under me to find Society spies anymore. That would be such a massive waste of your potential that it’s not even funny. Even as a non-Mage, I know how important your research could be if you succeed.” Arin turned towards her. “I probably shouldn’t say this as a loyal servant of the Crown, but if you make this information known to the Crown they will probably pressure you to research how to make mana baptisms safer and more successful. Any hope of making mana baptisms safer could put Illvaria into a golden age that might allow us to finally get some payback against the Sigmusi Colonia for the war several decades ago. It might even let us kick the Sigmusi off the continent entirely, if things went really well. If you have me pass on this information to some of the people who can do something with it, you’re going to face a lot of pressure afterwards if you don’t research the topics. I’m willing to pretend I didn’t hear anything today if that’s not a price you’re willing to pay. This is probably your last chance to reconsider.”

Alice spent a few moments thinking about it, making sure to give her decision the weight of thought it deserved. Then, she smiled at Arin.

“I’m more than happy to work with the crown in making safer mana baptisms, as long as some conditions are met. I want to stay safe, keep my friends safe, and keep learning about the nature of this world. As far as I can tell, with the Society escalating their actions in Illvaria by the day, this is the best way to do that.”

Arin nodded thoughtfully. “In that case, I’ll see what I can do. Someone will hopefully get in touch with you within a few days. In the meantime, you can leave. The [Tracker] will probably take a day or two to track down the Society member, and I have no clue when Samantha’s family members will wake up. You don’t need to be here anymore.”

Alice nodded. “Thank you again for coming over to help me even though we have only met once before. I really appreciate it, and thank you for working to help Samantha as well. Even though I got to know her because she’s relevant to my research, I don’t want anything bad to happen to her. Keep me updated and let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help find her and keep her safe.”

Arin nodded and smiled at her.

“No problem.”

* * *

One day later, a [Messenger] from the [Guard] station came to pick Alice up the moment she finished working with Ezrien’s team, before she even had time to get through her classes for the day. Alice immediately realized this [Messenger] was quite a bit higher in level than most people she had met. This [Messenger] was probably at least level 80 or 90, and seemed to be in his late fifties. Even though he probably wouldn’t reach Immortality before dying of old age, his level was quite impressive compared to most people she had met in this world.

“Lady Alice?” Said the [Messenger].

“Yes?”

“I’m taking you to see someone important. I bear no hostile intentions towards you, and don’t expect that to change in the future. Is now a good time?”

“Yes, now works,” said Alice. Would this be the [Messenger] Arin warned her to keep an eye out for?

“Please come with me.” Rainbow mana surged out of the [Messenger’s] body, and quickly began working its way into Alice’s body, as well as the surrounding area. Suddenly, Alice felt that the every step she took was much lighter, and she covered more distance with every single movement than before. Having already seen a similar Perk used during the hunting trip last month, Alice quickly adapted to the Perk and began moving along with the [Messenger] to head to the [Guard] station.

When they arrived, Alice saw a few of the [Guards] she recognized from other visits to the station give her respectful nods, before she was ushered into a room by the side.

Inside of it was the strongest Mage Alice had ever seen. He was well above the level 80 or 90 [Messenger], and had seven Magic seeds in his body. The two strongest ones were a Kinetic and an Organic seed, both of which were packed with several times the amount of mana Alice’s seeds had. After that, he had one electromagnetic and one thermal magic seed as the second largest seeds in his body, and the three remaining seeds appeared to be one dimensional magic seed and two unknown seeds, one red and one bright yellow.

“Are you Lady Alice?” Asked the man, giving her a friendly smile. His face was abnormally handsome, well beyond what a regular person’s was, and his movements were graceful and much faster than a Mage would usually accomplish. As Alice observed the mana density, magic seeds, and incredibly high attributes of this man, she started to form a suspicion about the identity of the person in front of her.

“Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Sir Mage.”

“You can call me Ethan. I’m the Immortal of Spells and Seeds,” he said, giving her a friendly wink.

Alice’s suspicions were confirmed. The man sitting in front of her was the second Immortal she had seen since coming to this world.

“I’m told that you can see inside Mage Cores?” said Ethan.

“Yes.”

“What Magic Seeds do I have? Ah, I should have asked, are there any prerequisites for your ability to work? Do you need physical contact or something?” Ethan reached out his hand towards her, as if to let her touch his wrist if she needed to.

“I just need to use my eyes to look at someone’s mage core. So I can’t use Perks that extend my vision in weird ways. Inside of you, I can see a total of seven magic seeds. The two biggest ones are kinetic and organic, followed by electromagnetic and thermal. Then there’s one dimensional seed and two that I can’t identify.”

The man gave her a much more interested look, his eyes nearly boring through her.

“Fascinating. May I ask how you acquired that ability? Is it a Perk or an Achievement?”

“Achievement. I… did a few experiments that went really well, and got the ability to see inside of Mage cores afterwards. I got some other bonuses too, like class levelling speed, and a few combat related ones I’m not willing to talk about.”

“Sensible.” The Immortal stuck out his hand for a handshake this time, and after a moment of hesitation, Alice shook his hand.

“Now, I’m told that you’re willing to work with the crown for the sake of research, and to put your ability to use? And that you wish for some things in exchange?”

“Yes,” said Alice. “I’m willing to put my ability and research to work to learn how to make safer mana baptisms, since that links directly to a few other areas of interest for me. However, I also want to get resources to research those other topics, even if they aren’t quite as directly useful to the country as that. Specifically, I would like to have access to people with malfunctioning or broken magic seeds, so that I can try to learn more about their condition and treat them…”

“That can certainly be arranged. Most people who enjoy research have a few pet projects they like to work on, after all. The exact resources might be a bit more hit or miss, and I won’t help you with any immoral research – even if your ability is quite valuable, an ethical bottom line still needs to be observed. But anything that isn’t morally unjustifiable will probably be fine. Now, what do you mean when you say there are people with broken or malfunctioning magic seeds?”

Alice frowned. “One of the other reasons I’m willing to talk about my ability to see magic seeds is because of Samantha. Are you familiar with her kidnapping?”

Ethan nodded. “I read through Arin’s report, so I’m familiar with some of the basics of the case. The Society is truly going crazy recently. It is most baffling.”

“You see, I’ve been looking into magic seeds and how they work for a long time.” Ethan nodded.

“The problem is that Samantha’s magic seed which she formed recently seemed… broken. I noticed it last week, when I was coming into class and saw that she had a new seed that seemed really weird. I started talking to her because I wanted to get a better idea of what was going on, and maybe see if I could figure out if it was harmful or not, and if it was harmful, how to fix it. But she started to get more and more sick as time passed, and so I was planning on trying to find a way to help heal her, since I have a few Achievement-related abilities I’ve used on myself multiple times while experimenting with the nature of magic seeds. But right as her illness was reaching a critical mass and I was setting up a way to heal Samantha without drawing Society attention, Samantha got kidnapped.”

Ethan frowned as well, before looking around. “Do you think the Society noticed the same thing, and that’s why they kidnapped Samantha? How easy is it to notice Samantha’s unusual seed with your Achievement?”

“I’m not sure if they noticed, but I could tell within a few seconds of looking at her. They might have targeted her because they noticed something weird about her seed, or they might have just targeted her because they wanted to experiment on a Mage and she was easy to target. I don’t know.”

Ethan nodded. “Recently, the Society has been willing to take much bigger risks than before. I have been wondering why their behavior has changed for a while now. If the Society has also noticed something weird about magic seeds recently, it might explain why they’re willing to take such huge risks. But there could be other reasons behind their actions. I’ll tell the [Guards] to keep an eye out and we’ll re-evaluate their behavior when we have more information. Do you have any other requests or conditions you need in exchange for working on research with me?”

Alice thought about her current living conditions, her friends, her hopes, and all of her current circumstances, before she decided on a few other conditions she would want.

“I’d really like it if Samantha could be found as quickly as possible, and I’d like high level people to help out wherever possible with the search. Would it be possible to up the level of the [Tracker] and other participants in this conflict a little bit?” Ethan thought for a moment, before nodding.

“I have a few tier 2 class Mages that are my [Students]. Even if they’re barely over level 100, and most of them are pretty old and won’t make it to Immortality, I can still get them to help out if it comes to a fight. As for the tracking itself… I’ll see what I can do. I can probably put together something good.”

Alice frowned, before realizing she had good way to raise the value of ‘rescuing Samantha’ in Ethan’s eyes. “Actually, Samantha is one of the only people I’ve seen with an incredibly weird mana seed, and it seems almost like it partially succeeded in being formed and partially failed. I’ve been looking into cases like these, and while I’m not 100% sure if it’s related to mana baptisms, I think I could probably get some valuable insight into how mana and magic seeds work in general from helping Samantha recover and learning more about how she formed such a messed up seed. She’s pretty valuable for research, so rescuing her might improve my study of mana baptisms?”

Ethan cracked a grin as he heard Alice’s out of the box reasoning for rescuing her friend, before he nodded. “I’ll make extra sure to pay attention to this matter when we’re done talking. Anything else?”

Alice thought for a moment longer. “I’d like to talk with one of my other friends a little more first, but if the Society starts attaching more importance to me, do you think they would target my friends and acquaintances?”

Ethan thought for a moment. “It’s possible? Your friends might get attacked, or might not, but there is no harm in taking precautions in advance. Who do you have in mind that might need protecting?”

“A friend of my named Cecilia…” Alice described Cecilia in a bit more detail.

Ethan nodded. “It shouldn’t be too hard to at least get a few level 75’s to protect her if you can demonstrate some value to the crown. I can get a few people I know to protect her for a while until then, to give you a chance to prove yourself. Anything else?”

“Funds and resources?”

“Given your ability to potentially improve mana baptisms, the crown will practically shove those down your throat, especially if you can produce any results at all. You probably don’t even need to request them. If you stand a good chance of making safer baptisms, the Crown will cram resources into your lab until the door explodes. As for your personal pay… you don’t need to worry about that either. If you succeed in your research you’ll probably be rewarded with more gold than you can plausibly spend in a century, and during your research I’ll make sure you get enough money to live comfortably on. You can work out specific numbers with my [Assisstant] later.”

“Hmm…” Alice frowned for a moment, before she remembered something. “Umm… would it be possible to get a permit for researching dimensional magic?”

Ethan frowned and gave her a much more measured and cautious look. “That one… might be a tough sell. After the Tragedy of Allenheim, most countries are still pretty wary of dimensional mana experimentation. I mean, there is a process for getting a permit to study Dimensional Magic, but it’s a major pain to get ahold of. Getting a permit issued requires a majority vote from the representatives of the Mage estate, approval from a high ranking member of the Crown AND noble estate, and the Immortal estate has the ability to veto any grant of a dimensional study permit if any of Illvaria’s six Immortals think that you’re likely to cause a serious problem with dimensional mana. It’s pretty dangerous stuff, after all. I could personally promise not to offer a veto, and I can swing over a noble and crown estate member, but while I have good relations with the other Immortals of Illvaria I don’t know if I could convince all of them not to veto you. And the same goes for the Mage estate vote – I have a fair amount of influence in that estate, obviously, but there are different factions in the Mage estate and I might struggle to get a majority vote. So it might work out, but don’t hold your breath.”

“How many people in the country actually have a dimensional research permit?”

“Just me, right now.”

Alice frowned. “It would make me happy if I can get a permit for it.”

“If you really find a way to make mana baptisms safer, your request would probably be looked pretty favorably upon. Other Mages would look at your reputation for getting things done and think that you stood a reasonable chance of finally creating safe dimensional travel, and that would give you a level of influence you wouldn’t otherwise have. Otherwise, it’ll probably be a tough sell.”

Alice sighed, but nodded. It wasn’t exactly what she wanted, but it was better than nothing.

“What’s expected of me in this agreement?”

“Well, first thing’s first, you’ll be working under me. In other words, I’ll be your direct superior, and you’ll be seeing me pretty often.” Ethan treated her to another cheerful smile. “I’ll expect you to check in with me about your research once a week, and I would frankly prefer it if you did more important experiments with me watching as well. You’re now valuable enough that you can’t accidentally die in a random experiment if you mess up, so you need to pay attention to your safety as another expectation.” Alice felt one of her eyelids twitch, and wondered if using herself as a lab rat for her strange System-related experiments counted as ‘paying attention to her safety.’ She had {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} and used {Safety Analysis} before her experiments, so it was fine, right?

“Apart from that, I’d like to get to know you a little better as well. I think it’s important for us to know each other if we’re going to be spending a lot of time together, after all. And I would also like to get a fair amount of information about your actual progress in understanding mana baptisms, so that I can understand your experiments. If we’re lucky, maybe I’ll have ideas to improve them or solve problems you face, but even if I’m useless I still need to make sure you’re spending resources in the right places and making progress. So I would expect you to spend a certain extra amount of time with me, observing my experiments, socializing, and otherwise interacting with my social circle. This will be beneficial to you as well, since even as an Immortal I can’t get access to every resource in the country. You’ll need to develop some of your own connections and contacts as time passes, and I will introduce you to some potential avenues of resources. Of course, what you do with those opportunities will be up to you. I’ll give you more details when you’re a bit more ready though, so you won’t need to think about interacting with others for a while.”

“Meeting once a week makes sense, but squeezing it into my schedule is a little difficult,” said Alice, frowning. “I guess I could cut enchanting out of my schedule, but it would stop me from levelling two of my Classes, which I don’t really like…”

“What does your schedule look like?”

“Well, during the weekdays, I start out by working with Ezrien’s team to fix the problems with the Kinetic Plates they are trying to make. Then I eat lunch, go to the library, then go to class. Then I return home, eat dinner, work on enchantments, and then pass out for the night. On weekends, my Perks come off cooldown, so I usually mess with those, check up on Boris, work on more detailed enchantments, and on Saturdays I also play board games with my friends for a few hours. The people participating changes each week, but Cecilia at least is pretty consistent…”

Ethan’s eyes twitched as he listened to Alice talk.

“Are you a workaholic? Actually, how many sleep reduction Perks do you have?”

“I only have {Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement} from the Scholar Class. Why?”

“I have a new demand for you. Take a day off sometime this week. If you crack from stress and pressure you won’t be discovering much of anything. Do you have… any way to free up a little bit more of your schedule? If not, I’m going to force you to cut something out of your schedule, because this just sounds impossible to balance if you try to add new obligations to your time.”

“Ezrien’s team is getting close to finished with their project, which means that I might be done working with them after that? Theoretically I’m supposed to help them for a year, according to the contract we signed, but I’m not sure what they’re planning on doing after they finish the kinetic plates. I probably need to ask…”

“After working under me, you’re going to have plenty of money. If you need to you can pay for breaking the contract fees with them. Though, honestly, if you tell them you’re working on a project for the Crown and working directly with me to get it finished, they should be pretty forgiving about you needing more time. I’ll personally show up to their research lab and let them know if need be. You need to free up some time so that you can meet with me a few times a week without cutting sleep out of your schedule, and then you need to schedule more than two hours a week of break time. If you really want to you can see through the end of whatever project you’re working on with them, but after that you need to have a less ridiculous schedule. Understood?”

“Understood,” said Alice, resisting the urge to flinch.

Ethan smiled at her again, the sternness fading from his voice. “Good. Now, I hope we have a pleasant time working together. I’ll get someone to start trailing you to keep you safe from the background, just in case the Society is somehow already aware of your existence. I’ll see you again on… Sunday? You can bring me up to date on what you’ve observed regarding magic seeds and baptisms then, and hopefully by then we’ll have found your friend.” Ethan nodded at her before gesturing towards the door, and Alice took that as her cue to leave. As she walked back towards her inn, she couldn’t help but think about how interesting life was sometimes. From what Ethan had said to her, and the way he had treated her, if he was only planning on seeing through her research on magic he had no specific need to introduce her to resource channels and introduce her to other important people. In a sense, Alice almost felt like Ethan was treating her like an apprentice.

It felt strange, but it also wasn’t a bad feeling. Being apprentice to an Immortal was an excellent position to have in society, and Alice had come out of the negotiation with most of the things she wanted. She even had a chance at getting a dimensional research permit now or in the future, even if the odds weren’t great. She wasn’t sure if it would lead to anything, but now that she had finally made up her mind and decided to confront the danger of the Society of Starry Eyes, her steps felt lighter than before. She was no longer forced to worry about each of her actions, trying to calculate how much attention this would bring her or how to escape the notice of the Society. She could openly help people she wanted to help, work on her projects with adequate resources and funding, and she even had a someone to help her along the way. It was a decision that felt nerve wracking, and forced her to face more danger than she had ever previously faced on this world, but…

It also felt like she was standing up for herself and her dreams a little more. And psychologically, that was worth a lot to her.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 93

The following day, the school’s more gossip-prone students were finally starting to spread word about Samantha’s disappearance. Samantha had been missing since Monday, and it was Wednesday now. Even though there hadn’t been any public announcements similar to the ones after the hunting trip, Samantha’s disappearance wasn’t a private matter. Several members of the Crown estate and the Mage estate were furious, and both political factions had begun rallying manpower together to put the fear of the System in the Society. After a day and a half, due to the efforts of more well-connected [Students], everyone was becoming increasingly aware of the fact that the Society had kidnapped a Mage in the middle of Metsel, and her whereabouts and safety were completely unknown. Even if Samantha didn’t have major connections with anyone, most of the [Nobles] and Mages in the country had been brought to the sudden realization that it wasn’t just helpless tramps getting abducted anymore. This time, it was a relatively unimportant Mage, but next time, it might be one of their children, or even a [Noble] or fully grown and trained Mage that disappeared. Thus, plenty of Mages who had retired from the battlefield were pulling together under various factions, preparing to punish the Society for their actions while [Nobles] started complaining about the Crown for not properly securing the city while they raised the patrols and security measures of their houses and villas.

When it came to [Students] spreading information about Samantha’s kidnapping, there were two other things Alice noticed that were quite important, at least to her. The first thing was that most people had already started to give up on Samantha. She had been missing for a day and a half now, and most people were starting to assume the worst, and were preparing to avenge her and punish the Society. This, obviously, was only partially what Alice hoped for, and idea that Samantha might already be lost reaffirmed her decision to get some other high level people involved. Frankly, most people weren’t worried about Samantha herself – they were only worried about what the implications of her being kidnapped were, and how it applied to them. Alice still hoped that Samantha would come out of this incident alive, even if the possibility of Samantha’s survival was slim, so having a group of high level people dedicated to getting Samantha out alive at least raised the odds of a happy outcome for this incident.

The final thing that interested Alice was that any mention of her participation in the incident was gone, and even the better informed [Students] had no knowledge of her presence during Samantha’s kidnapping. Nobody stopped by to ask her for more details about the incident, and nobody even seemed to be aware that she had been asking about Samantha’s health the day that Samantha had disappeared. The only person who displayed any awareness of Alice’s involvement in the incident was Arsi, who she had directly consulted on Monday. But when Alice saw him again, Arsi had simply winked at her and then pretended he didn’t know anything.

Alice quickly realized that Ethan, her new… boss, had done something behind the scenes to stop people from talking about her presence. Which wasn’t that difficult, now that Alice thought about it. The only people who really knew that Alice had been involved in Samantha’s disappearance were Arsi, Taylie, the [Guard], and [Knight] Arin. Arsi was someone who wasn’t too hard to convince to stay quiet – after all, Arsi was intelligent enough to know that Alice facing off twice against the Society and having partial success both times might put her in danger, and Arsi wasn’t the kind of person to put his friends in danger for no reason. The [Guard] and [Knight] both ranked well below Ethan, making it easy for him to keep them quiet. That left only Taylie as a potential leak. Alice didn’t know Taylie particularly well, but she doubted it would be hard to get her not to say anything if an Immortal was pressuring her into it. And even if some people learned of Alice’s presence in the incident, according to [Guard] reports and such she would probably be written off as an unimportant side character in the whole story if at all. Thus, reducing Alice’s sense of presence in the entire incident was surprisingly easy as long as one had connections and the desire to do it.

As Alice thought about the changes Metsel had experienced over the past few days, she couldn’t help but wonder how Illa was doing in all of this chaos, down in Cyra. If the Society was increasing its activity even in Metsel, the capital of Illvaria, was it worse or better in the South? Alice wasn’t sure, but she hoped that her friends and acquaintances like Milo and Illa were doing well. If she had time later, she decided it wouldn’t be a bad idea to send a letter to the South and see if she could get any news.

After Alice finished her classes for the day, she started heading towards her inn room, preparing to do some enchanting. However, less than two streets away from her magic academy, she noticed a high level person had suddenly appeared from behind her, stalking her from a few feet away. She frowned, trying to pretend she hadn’t noticed anything as she took another step forward. Meanwhile, she used her mana tendrils to grab cobblestones and various objects in her surroundings. A moment later, the stalker spoke to her.

“The fact you noticed me right away is pretty good, Lady Alice,” said the [Messenger], stepping out of the shadows and giving her a respectful nod. Alice realized that she wasn’t being stalked by the Society, as she had first assumed. Instead, Ethan’s [Messenger] had come to find her. “However, your reactions need a little bit more work. If you notice someone is preparing to ambush you, it’s good that you pretended not to notice anything while searching for a way to turn the tables. However, your first reaction when you saw me was to pause for a fraction of a second. This isn’t a huge reaction, but it’s a dead giveaway to anyone paying close attention to you. It’s fine if they’re busy with other things or distracted, or if they dismiss you as a nonthreat. But Honored Immortal Ethan has told me you might be targeted heavily by the Society in the future. That means they’ll be paying very close attention to you, and your instinctive pause might be a dead giveaway. You should make sure you train yourself a little more, in order to make your reactions look more natural. Perhaps look into getting the {Acting} Skill – it’s quite helpful for situations like these, and also helps with interacting with [Nobles] if you ever feel the need to do so. The requirements to access the skill are a bit annoying, but it’s not too bad. But anyway,” said the [Messenger], giving her a more relaxed smile now. “My employer requests that you join him. The research base that kidnapped your friend has been found.”

“Really?” Alice felt a surge of excitement. “Is she all right? Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” said the Messenger. “She hasn’t been rescued yet, and the base hasn’t been raided yet either. We only found it an hour and a half ago. That’s why Ethan wants you to come.”

Alice felt a bit surprised by Ethan’s efficiency, but also pleased. The faster they found Samantha, the better the odds of her survival. She followed behind the [Messenger] as he used his Perk to increase their walking speed. They quickly arrived at an inconspicuous house a few streets away from the [Guard] station.

“Lady Alice, it is good that you have come,” said Ethan, greeting her with a nod.

“Thank you, Honored Immortal Ethan,” said Alice.

Ethan turned to the [Messenger] and nodded. “How was her reaction to being shadowed?”

“Not terrible, but not great. She noticed me, but a high level [Assassin] would notice that she found out and make preparations. However, she’s not a lost cause either.”

“Thank you. You can leave now,” said Ethan, and the [Messenger] took a few steps back before suddenly flashing with rainbow mana and suddenly speeding up, before quickly departing from the area. Alice turned back towards Ethan and gave him an inquisitive look.

“Your [Messenger] told me that Samantha was found?”

“More accurately, we tracked down the base of the [Flesh Trader] who kidnapped her in the first place. While there is some possibility that she was moved away using a different Perk that can store prisoners, odds are pretty good that she is still there,” said Ethan. Then, he turned to her and gave her a polite, happy smile. “Now, I have another question for you. Do you have any combat related classes?”

“Kind of?” Alice wondered if [Survivor] counted as a combat-related class. [Kinetic Manabinder] also sort of gave her combat skills, although the class was unquestionably focused more on enchantments. However, it was also… kind of a combat class. And [Scholar] and [Explorer of Magic] also gave her a few random combat boosting Perks, even if the classes definitely weren’t focused in that direction.

“What do you mean by kind of?” asked Ethan.

“I have a few classes that sometimes give me combat related Perks, but are fundamentally geared towards other concepts. However, the combat abilities they do give me are still decent, even if they aren’t the focus of the class,” said Alice.

“Hmm… Is that so? Show me. Defend yourself.” Ethan took a step towards her, and suddenly, from out of his body, twenty mana tendrils launched themselves towards the floorboards, before twenty wooden planks suddenly flew straight towards her body.

Desperately, she used her mana tendrils to start deflecting the floorboards sailing towards her head and stomach. She used {Extended Organics} to materialize and dematerialize her mana tendrils at will, grappling with the twenty objects as she tried to deflect the floorboards. Some of them went flying in random directions, and some of them were fired back towards Ethan. Once the smaller floorboards were dealt with, Alice found the three biggest objects and used {Reflection}, instantly sending them straight back towards Ethan with no pause or concentration needed to redirect them. Alice also used {Combat Seed} to attach an extra layer of her mana to these three objects, making it harder for Ethan to stop them.

“Not bad, Lady Alice,” said Ethan, giving her a courteous nod and smiling at her.

Then, another twenty mana tendrils popped out of his body, bringing his total up to forty mana tendrils.

Alice’s eyes barely had time to widen before her sloppy countervolley of floorboards was neutralized in midair. Only the three objects Alice used {Combat Seed} on kept moving for another quarter of a second, before another three tendrils attached themselves to each object and shredded apart her extra layer of mana like tissue paper. Then, Ethan sent all of the objects right back towards her, with another twenty floorboards added on for good measure.

Since {Adrenaline Rush} was still on cooldown from her fight with the Society Mage two days ago, there were too many objects for her to defend against now. She began dodging backwards, hoping to avoid some objects from the wave of attacks with her physical abilities instead, but this time the objects flashed with rainbow mana. Then, they accelerated in midair and began tracking her, as if they had turned into guided missiles. Alice’s attempts to dodge the floorboards failed miserably, and she hurriedly began repositioning her mana tendrils to fend off the wave of attacks.

Sluggishly, she tried deflecting a few more objects, but there were simply too many to stop now, and Alice only had four mana tendrils against forty objects. A fraction of a second before the first object would have torn a fist-sized hole through her brain, all of the objects flashed with rainbow mana again, and then stopped dead in their tracks. They clattered to the ground, before Ethan picked them up with his tendrils and shoved them back into the floor of the house.

“Hmm… it looks like you’re very used to a Perk that is on cooldown right now. {Deadly Crisis}, perhaps? Hmm… it could also be another Perk with similar effects… {Adrenaline Rush} or {Accelerated Perception} could also be one of your Perks, or some variant of them… Hmm…” Ethan took a few steps closer to Alice, as if he was looking at a student who had just scored well on a test, before giving her a grin.

“I’m not going to lie, I was expecting less when you said you didn’t have a dedicated combat class. Based on the way you fight, you’re very used to having boosted reflexes from some kind of Perk that you don’t have active right now. Perhaps it’s on cooldown? In any case, you seem overly reliant on it. However, even with that flaw, and with your limited access to combat related Perks, you’re not a bad fighter for your level. With the Perk active, maybe you can even be considered top tier for however long it stays active. However, this has also created some major flaws in your fighting style. You’re too used to deciding fights quickly and efficiently – you aren’t good at dealing with a prolonged encounter. Once any temporary Perk ends, you lose a lot of your combat ability, and while it’s only natural to be weaker afterwards, you shouldn’t be so used to fighting with a temporary Perk that you can’t function without it.”

“May I ask what the point of this assessment was?” asked Alice, still reeling from the sudden near death experience.

“I needed to get a feel for how good you are at fighting, Lady Alice,” said Ethan, still giving her a pleasant smile. “Fundamentally, there are always going to be situations where a [Hidden Bodyguard] can’t protect you from the Society, and while I’m doing my best to tamp down on the spread of information regarding your entanglement with the Society, I doubt it will hold forever. Sooner or later, the Society will learn that I’m paying special attention to you, and they will make a variety of guesses about what that means. I have some ideas for solving this problem, but… well, in any case, you may eventually come under threat of Society attack, and your bodyguard won’t always be able to keep you safe. The combatant you fought with last Monday also escaped, meaning the Society will also be receiving a report that you’re surprisingly dangerous from him. In that case, the best thing to do is ensure you’re able to defend yourself. I was trying to figure out where you sit on the combat spectrum so that I can figure out what targeted training needs to be applied,” said Ethan, giving her a strange, slightly sadistic grin. Alice got a strange feeling in her stomach.

“So I’ve decided that, in addition to being protected from the shadows, you also need to learn how to fight better. Your weird Perk that added a layer of magic coating to the objects threw me for a loop, and if I had been a Mage around your level, there’s a good chance it might have just killed me on the spot. Whatever Perk is letting you freely move your mana tendrils around gives you a reaction speed most combat Mages won’t have, even if it only works when close to your body. For your level you can be considered a decent combatant. But there’s a lot more that could be done,” said Ethan. “As a potential future Immortal, you’re going to need to be more well-rounded than this if you don’t want to get assassinated. So I’m going to run you through some targeted training. And I don’t mean basic combat exercises, or just throwing objects at you and making you dodge them. That’s fine for normal Mages, since they will mostly fight in the back of an army and will pick up better combat experience when they actually join the army. And if they don’t join the army, odds are pretty good they won’t need more than basic self defense skills anyway. But you don’t have that luxury anymore.”

Alice started to get a bad feeling about where this was going. Ethan smiled at her, and the grin tugging at his lips started to remind her of a Cheshire cat.

“No, you’re going to learn to fight by actually fighting. Some Immortals have died to level 80 or 90 [Assassins] in the past, however rare it is, and it’s always quite an embarrassing way to go.”

Alice noticed that Ethan wasn’t referring to her as a Mage, but as a potential Immortal. At the same time, a few vague comments she remembered Allira making about Illa drifted through her thoughts.

“A decade ago, Illa was considered to be one of the people most likely to join our little community of Immortals, so I spent some time getting to know her.” This was a remark that Alice remembered Allira making when she had been back in Cyra. Alice hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but suddenly, she felt that she was being given a similar treatment. Not only was an Immortal relevant to her field of expertise personally looking over her experiments and helping her develop a way to make mana baptisms safer, he was also explicitly pushing her to see how Immortals worked behind the scenes, as well as develop well-rounded combat skills. After all, if Ethan was only interested in pushing her to finish her research project as fast as possible, there was no reason for him to encourage her to learn more about combat, or encourage her to develop more resource channels that she would be able to use with or without his help. This wasn’t really the treatment a researcher with potential would get – it was closer to training for how to operate as an Immortal in Illvaria.

Alice was so immersed in her thoughts that she missed a few words from Ethan, until she snapped back to reality and heard the tail end of his words.

“-why I’ve decided that you’re going to personally rescue your friend. You need some more practice in a real fight, especially without using your more limited, reaction-boosting Perks. Do you already have the {Murderer} Achievement? If not, you will be getting it today. Also, do you have any remaining limited-use Perks? If you do, tell me so that I can help you get rid of them for the day. I want you to fight without them this time.”

Alice was stunned, before taking a glance at her Status Screen.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 110 -> 113(123%)

Perception: 133 -> 135 (183%)

Dexterity: 111 -> 115(125%)

Intelligence: 165 -> 167 (148%)

Endurance: 125 -> 127 (119%)

Willpower: 145 -> 147 (107%)

Charisma: 129(107%)

Magic: 150 -> 159( 123%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 50 -> 53

Explorer of Magic: 55 -> 63

Scholar: 40 -> 51

Scientist: 43 -> 52

Kinetic Manabinder: 23 -> 31

Careful Enchanter: 13 -> 20

Evolved Classes: 2

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 25

Secondary Classes: 2

Fisherwoman: 3

Student: 2 -> 7

Perks:

Survivor Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Sense Hostility (Survivor 35)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Adrenaline Rush (Survivor 45)

Extended Organics (Survivor 50)

Explorer of Magic Perks:

Magic Proficiency (Explorer of Magic 5)

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)

Broken Seed (Upgraded) (Explorer of Magic 35)

Mana Construct Modelling (Explorer of Magic 45)

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 55)

Combat Seed (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 60)

Scholar Perks:

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement (Scholar 10)

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Scholar of Magic (Scholar level 35)

Lesser Organic Vision (Scholar 40)

Super speed reading (Scholar 45)

Delve into the Arcane (Scholar 50)

Scientist Perks:

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Timer (Scientist level 15)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)

Researcher's Speed (Scientist 40)

For Science! (Scientist 45)

The Science of Mana Deprivation (Scientist 50)

Kinetic Mage Perks:

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision (Kinetic Manabinder 15)

Overclock (Kinetic Manabinder 20)

Kinetic Enchanting (Kinetic Manabinder 25)

Reflection (Kinetic Manabinder 30)

Enchanter Perks:

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Speed Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 25)

Repurposing (Careful Enchanter level 5)

Blueprint (Careful Enchanter level 10)

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed (Careful Enchanter level 15)

Pride of a Craftswoman (Careful Enchanter 20)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 100

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 7

Russian (Language Proficiency): 1

Basic Mathematics: 122

Intermediate Mathematics: 78

Advanced Mathematics: 18

Basic Human Biology: 33 -> 35

Mana-biology: 0 -> 2

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 66 -> 68

Mana Control: 48 -> 50

Mana Precision: 48 -> 50

Kinetic Force: 45 -> 47

Projectile Awareness : 25 -> 29

Divided Attention: 27 -> 31

Basic Enchanting: 24 -> 29

Broken Mana Purification: 15 -> 18

Mana Filtering: 17 -> 22

Seed Formation: 12 -> 16

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Dodge: 25 -> 28

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 21

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Magic Seed: 5/6

(unused seed has 15% conversion rat. Max)

(Note to self: The electromagnetic magic seed is {Degraded Seed Slot}. For that seed, Perks = no, Achievements = yes).

Kinetic Seed (145%) -> 146%

Organic Seed (25%) -> 34% (3% from expanding Comp.)

Pure mana Seed (21%) -> 36% (8% from Expanding Comp.)

Healing mana seed (23%) -> 25%

Electromagnetic Seed (15%)

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (III -> IV) (Rarity: 9 -> 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

Careful Enchanter (Rarity N/A)

Capable Enchanter (Rarity: 5)

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

Scientific Discoviers (I) (Rarity N/A)

“I don’t have anything left that’s useful for combat besides a healing Perk.”

“Keep that one ready. I want you to learn from this experience, not die because of it. We’re going to rescue your friend, or her corpse, in three hours. You are going to join us. Don’t worry about enchanting for the night – you need to work more on protecting your own neck first, and I’ll be giving you your first payment this weekend. You won’t need to worry about money anymore. Instead, you are going to be on the front lines during this rescue operation, fighting for your life and developing the skills you need to avoid dying in an ambush in the future. Don’t worry – I’ll be near you the whole time to save you if you screw up badly enough. And your [Hidden Bodyguard] will also be following along, as per usual. But don’t count on our aid, either – both of us will be hidden, and you must do your best to fight without our aid.” Ethan chuckled a bit at Alice’s confused expression, before she slowly thought through Ethan’s proposal… no, Ethan’s demands would be a more accurate term.

Alice felt a strange mixture of fear and concern after she worked through her thoughts. She knew that these skills would probably be useful in the future, now that she was hoping to out-develop the Society’s ability to harm her. However, she was also nervous. She was going to be facing high level combatants in an open fight soon. The other party wouldn’t be fleeing for their lives, the way the [Flesh Trader] who had kidnapped Samantha had been, and also wouldn’t be overwhelmed by high level combatants on her side, the way they had been in most of her previous combat encounters with other humans. Instead, she would be fighting them in their home territory. At the same time, this was a legitimately useful way to train. Alice wouldn’t always be able to fight under the umbrella of other high level people, and the small test against Ethan had shown her just how terrifying an Immortal Mage could be. If Alice wanted to stay alive and free in the future, she needed to develop her combat skills a bit more heavily, and this was a good way to do so. If Alice wanted to become someone able to defend herself against most unexpected scenarios, she needed to make sure she could at least match most other combatants of her own level.

Mixed in with her nerves about how well she would do during the fight, however, was a different fear. She was afraid of what she might find in the research base. For some reason, the Society had gone crazy recently, and wasn’t afraid to kick over a hornet’s nest to conduct research as fast as possible. Alice didn’t know why that was the case, but she might find the answer in this base. And on a more personal note, Alice had spent the last two days wondering if Samantha was still alive. In three hours, she would have her answer. For better or for worse.

A note from acaswell

For 3 dollars you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Note - I am probably getting sick, and may need to delay chapters for a while.

I’m probably sick. Throat is starting to hurt, I’m starting to get a headache and feel dizzy, and I’ve started coughing a little bit in the last hour or two. I’m hoping I’m just imagining things, but a few other family members got Covid recently and it looks like one of them passed it on to me. It’s pretty hard to focus on writing right now, and my headache really isn’t helping anything, I might need to put off story updates for a bit for for a bit if the symptoms get any worse, and they seem to be growing notably more irritating and noticeable by the hour. I’ll try keep writing until it gets to a level that feels hard to handle, and hopefully the half-finished Budding Scientist chapter for this week won’t get delayed, but I make no promises. Hopefully it’s not Covid, but the odds seem low for that. I’ll try my best, but I make no promises.

Chapter 94

The next hour was spent tensely waiting with Ethan, as more people slowly trickled into the house. A few of them paid attention to the ruined floorboards or the signs of a recent fight, and gave Ethan a slightly confused look before shrugging and ignoring the damage. Apparently, while they were curious, they didn’t care enough to ask.

Meanwhile, Alice took careful note of the levels and magic seeds of the newcomers. She was very curious to know how influential an Immortal was, and what kind of power Ethan could exert over Illvaria’s military and other influential people. While the people who came to this meeting wouldn’t be a perfect indicator of Ethan’s influence, it would still give Alice some extra clues about how Immortals worked behind the scenes.

The first three people to come to the house after Alice entered together, as a group. They were all non-Mages, and seemed to be moderately high level [Soldiers] of some sort. Alice estimated their level to be around sixty or seventy, and were in their late thirties or early forties. Each of them gave her a curious glance, before shrugging and turning towards Ethan.

“Honored Immortal Ethan,” one of them said, giving him a respectful nod.

“Ah, it is good to see you, Orith. I was under the impression you were with my father in the North?” said Ethan. Alice was a bit surprised to hear Ethan mention his family. She didn’t know much about Ethan’s family, since she and Ethan didn’t know each other very well yet, but she was suddenly curious. In her impression, most Immortals should be decades old at least, and possibly centuries old. Was Ethan’s family still alive? If Ethan was really centuries old, was his father an Immortal as well? Alice made a mental note to ask Ethan later, when she got to know Ethan better.

“I was, but your father heard that the Society has been ramping up their activity recently. He sent me and some of the men under my command back south to help deal with it. I just got here yesterday. I have also been informed that they kidnapped a Mage this time?” Said Orith, frowning. “If that is the case, they are truly intent on ramping up their conflict with Illvaria. If they dare to kidnap a Mage, they might even attack Nobility or the royal family in the future. Since that’s the case, I’m glad that my men and I returned in time to assist you.”

Alice realized that these people weren’t [Soldiers], as she had first assumed. Instead, they were probably military leaders or higher ups, and each of them probably had troops under their command or some sort of high rank. Although she had no idea how many troops each person had under their command, it was obvious that this group of three men didn’t just represent themselves, but a significant number of people who weren’t present in the room right now.

Ethan dismissed the man with a nod, and the three [Soldiers] stopped talking with Ethan and found a place to sit down at the edge of the room. A few moments later, they began talking with each other again, this time about much less serious topics. As far as Alice could make out, they seemed to be debating what supplies for the Northern forts would look like this winter, a topic which Alice knew almost nothing about. Apart from the fact that Illvaria had a Nomad problem to the north and the Sun Knight guarded the border, Alice didn’t really know much about the regions north of Metsel.

As Alice listened in to the conversation and tried to pick out new information about the North, another group of people walked in. This group was comprised of five elderly Mages. Alice was rather impressed by their levels when she observed them – each of them was probably above level ninety, and each of them had either a kinetic or organic seed, sometimes in addition to a few other magic seeds. Most of them also looked quite old, with physical ages approaching sixty at minimum. Even though Alice didn’t think they would reach Immortality before dying of old age, it was still quite impressive to see several Mages above level 90 gathered under Ethan’s command.

“[Teacher] Ethan,” said the five of them, greeting Ethan with nearly perfect synchronization. Their tone was much more casual than that of the military people who had entered earlier, and Alice could even detect hints of friendliness from their words and relaxed facial expressions. Clearly, they were well acquainted with Ethan, and didn’t feel the need to address him as ‘Honored Immortal,’ or even as ‘Sir Mage.’

“It is good to see the five of you. Take a seat,” said Ethan, gesturing towards the area Alice was sitting in as he gave them fond smiles. Seeing how high level the Mages were, and Ethan’s invitation for them to sit near her, Alice wondered if Ethan often tried to teach potential Mage Immortals. If Ethan had five older [Students] and was also teaching Alice, it meant that Ethan didn’t pick Alice as an apprentice Immortal on a whim.

The five elderly Mages took seats around Alice, before giving her looks filled with undisguised curiosity.

“Nice to meet you, little Lady. Oh, you’re a Mage,” said the oldest Mage as she eyed Alice’s mage emblem. The Mage was an elderly lady who looked to be about seventy. “Who might you be?”

Alice was vaguely reminded of her grandmother on Earth, and felt herself relax a little bit as she took in the elderly Mage’s smile. “I’m Alice. Nice to meet you.”

“I’m Sujia,” said the elderly lady, reaching out her hand for a handshake. “Why are you here? Are you Ethan’s new project?”

“Project?” asked Alice, who was caught off guard.

“Ethan’s new Immortal project,” said the elderly lady, cackling as she grinned at Alice. “The five of us were also people who Ethan hoped would reach Immortality, once upon a time, so he offered to teach us when we were much younger. We worked hard to level up, grow, and improve,” said the woman, her tone turning nostalgic as her smile grew wider. “Those were the days. These old bones probably won’t last to Immortality, even if I got most of the way there. I doubt a young Lady Mage like you is in charge of any significant number of troops, although do forgive me if I’m wrong. You probably aren’t incredibly high level, either, since you don’t move with the grace of someone who has survived lots of battles and lived to tell the tale. Your [Dexterity] is pretty good even for a normal adult, but rather lacking compared to top tier fighters. So I figure the only other reason you can be here is that Ethan is teaching you and hoping you’ll reach Immortality, as his latest project. Am I right?”

Alice didn’t see any way to hide this information, and if Ethan was having her attend this meeting he probably wasn’t trying to keep her totally hidden from the spotlight. Therefore, she nodded.

“That’s right, I just became Ethan’s apprentice a few days ago. I’m still trying to get my head around things right now.”

The old lady smiled at her. “Make sure to work hard and improve, then. I tried my hardest, but I won’t get there. But I have no regrets with how I lived my life, and the almighty System surely approves of my struggles and hard work as well. No shame in failing if you live your life the best you can, but it’s best to make sure you do your best, eh?” she said, grinning even more widely at Alice. Then, the old woman frowned. “You’re not dating anyone, are you?”

Alice suddenly felt like the conversation had taken a very strange turn. “I’m… I’m not. Why?”

The old lady smiled at her again. “Good, good. It’s good that you aren’t wasting your time on boys right now. Or girls, if that’s your preference. Either way, you should focus on training. Romance isn’t that important, and there’s always time to worry about that after you reach Immortality. So don’t worry about it until then, all right?”

“O… kay?” Alice was incredibly baffled by the sudden change of topics in the conversation. Even though she wasn’t really that interested in romance, she was quite confused about why the elderly Sujia had suddenly changed the conversation topic in such an abrupt manner.

One of the other Mages chuckled and looked at Alice in a much less strange manner. “Don’t mind Sujia, she’s just a bit miffed by Illa, even after all these years. Illa had an even better chance at reaching Immortality than we did… and then she just threw it away to marry her sweetheart.” The man sighed. “I don’t agree with her decision, and it really feels like a huge waste of the System’s gifts… but if she’s happy, it’s her right to be happy how she chooses to. Even if I don’t understand her choice at all.” The old man sighed.

Alice finally realized why Sujia had seemed so interested in the topic of her (nonexistent) romantic life. Even if the sudden conversation change still made Alice feel a bit odd, she also felt a bit amused by how much of an impact Illa’s departure from the Immortal scene seemed to have left on these people. Perhaps Illa had been another one of Ethan’s projects, and that’s why these five elderly Mages seemed so upset about Illa’s actions?

“Was Illa Ethan’s last ‘project’?” Asked Alice.

“No, but since Illa worked under Ethan’s father for quite a while, the two knew each other quite well,” said Sujia. “Ethan did have some hand in her military training, even though Illa spent most of her time learning under regular [Teachers] at a Magic Academy and only started interacting with Ethan after she joined the army.”

“Ethan’s father?” Alice finally started putting two and two together. Ethan was an Immortal, but his father was still alive, and Illa had worked under his father for a while. Ethan’s father had sent the first group of [Soldiers] who attended this meeting down from the North, and the Sun Knight was known to guard the Northern border of Illvaria during the part of the year the nomads were most active…

“Ethan’s father is the Sun Knight,” said Sujia. “Didn’t you know?”

“Is… is that so?” Alice had already started guessing what Ethan’s family situation looked like when Sujia had mentioned Illa’s training the military, but she was still shocked to have her guess confirmed. She took a few moments to process the fact that Ethan wasn’t just an Immortal – he was also the son of the most famous Immortal in Illvaria. Then, she nodded, doing her best to process the information and file it away without letting it rattle her. “Is he… I mean…” Alice had a hard time vocalizing her next question, as she realized she was suddenly much closer to meeting another of Illvaria’s Immortals than she had realized. Then, finally, she managed to push forward with her thoughts. “Is Ethan on good terms with his father? I mean, I just… I’ve heard a lot about the Sun Knight, and so I’m curious, and…”

Sujia, however, revealed a small, sorrowful expression, and Alice noticed a small bubble of rainbow mana cut off the group from the rest of the room.

“It looks like you really didn’t know about Ethan’s family. It isn’t really a secret, so I’m a bit surprised. However, if you’re Ethan’s newest project and you don’t know, there are a few things to keep in mind about his family. [Teacher] Ethan is on very good terms with his family – they love each other very much, as far as I have ever witnessed, and they have very close bonds with each other. Every year they make sure to spend a month or two together. However, Ethan isn’t an only child. Or, more accurately, he had several siblings. None of them reached Immortality, and so every single one besides Ethan died of old age. Being the child of an Immortal means that you have a lot of access to resources other people don’t – the best teachers, knowledge about how to get some Perks that aren’t recorded by the Church of the System, the influence of your parents… but even so, the odds of reaching Immortality are incredibly low. In Illvaria, we have a population of over a million people. And in all of the time this country has existed, only six Immortals have been produced, and Ethan and his father are two of them. This is incredibly unusual among most Immortals throughout the world, because the odds of reaching Immortality even with those bonuses are so low. His siblings are a sore subject, so don’t mention it with him or his father, if you see them. Or Ethan’s stepmother,” said Sujia, with a serious expression. “It’s less of a serious subject with her, because she’s a rather warm person, but it’s still not nice to poke other people’s wounds. Also, his senses are quite good, so if you don’t have a Perk like mine that prevents casual eavesdropping, he can probably hear you if you’re nearby. So don’t gossip about it with other people unless you know he’s somewhere far away, all right?”

Alice nodded, wondering how many of Ethan’s siblings had perished of old age before and after Ethan was born. Alice made a mental note not to mention the topic to Ethan, or the Sun Knight if she ended up ever meeting him.

After that, the five Mages and Alice began discussing more casual topics as other small time military leaders trickled into the room. Many of the topics the Mages spoke of were about more harmless topics, like Sujia’s bad habits when the five had been learning from Ethan, or one of the more embarrassing stories of Ethan’s misinterpretation of an article regarding kinetic enchantments from a hundred years ago. Ethan was a very battle-oriented Mage, and didn’t have a high level of specialization in Enchantments at the time, so his misinterpretation had caused a minor lab explosion. Ethan had shrugged it off with his Perks and high Stats, but he had done the experiment in the same building he usually taught the five of them in, so when they had come to class the next day they had found a rather embarrassing crater where they usually listened to Ethan’s lectures. Ethan had since improved his knowledge of the subject, but Alice was amused to see that, like Allira, Ethan also had a human side to him, for all of the extra centuries and power he had compared to most people.

As the group conversed, more people trickled into the room and greeted Ethan before settling into other groups to talk.

As the various small-time military leaders trickled into the base, Alice grew increasingly curious about how many people Ethan could actually command. It was clear that Ethan didn’t intend to treat her as some massive secret, even though he had hidden her participation in the fight against the Society member who kidnapped Samantha just a few days ago. Alice was a bit puzzled by this, but decided to wait and see what Ethan was planning.

The people who entered the house were very curious about Alice, as well. Many of them gave her curious glances from the corners of their eyes from time to time. Ethan, however, didn’t address Alice’s presence, instead simply leaving her to chat with his five [Students] on the sidelines.

Finally, after another half hour Ethan stopped talking to individuals who showed up and made his way to the front of the room. He turned to Alice and gestured towards her, inviting her to stand next to him. Uncertainly, Alice also made her way through the crowd towards Ethan’s position. The crowd of chatting [Captains] and assorted military leaders quieted down after Alice reached Ethan’s position and he raised his hand in the air.

“All right, now that everyone is here, there are a few things I want to address,” said Ethan, his voice amplified to reach the entire room via some sort of Perk. “First and foremost, this is Alice,” he said gesturing towards Alice. “She is my newest apprentice, and she stands a good chance of reaching Immortality if she continues to work hard. She has some specialization in combat, and has had the skill needed to acquire some pretty decent Achievements related to fighting. I intend to raise her for a while, and see if she can become Illvaria’s Seventh Immortal within a few decades. Now, as I’ve already told many of you, I intend to raid the Society today and have located one of their bases. I intend for my apprentice to join the fight and get some more combat experience, as well as hopefully a few levels and Achievements under her belt to help prop her up. She will be fighting with some restrictions, since I’ve forced her to use some Perks in advance, but she should still be able to make a decent showing of herself, especially compared to others in her age group. Are there any questions or objections?”

Nobody said anything, while Alice finally realized what Ethan was planning. It would be impossible to hide the fact that Ethan had a new person tagging along with him for an extended period of time, so Ethan instead decided to pretend she was a combat Mage. Since Ethan apparently had a habit of trying to raise Immortal Mages, nobody would look too closely at her as long as she could adequately mimic a combat specialist. And if Alice had an open reason to tag along with Ethan, any of her more unique abilities could be hidden as ‘Honored Immortal doing impressive, hard to understand stuff.’ This would make Ethan the target of potential [Assassins] and [Spies] instead of Alice, and Ethan was obviously much more well equipped to deal with any potential danger than she was. At the same time, it would give Alice a good reason to be near Ethan constantly. It wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty good, and should buy Alice quite a bit of time as long as nothing went wrong. By the time the Society realized something was wrong, Alice would have hopefully reached a high enough level to fend off [Assassins] and [Spies] without any need for assistance.

As Alice mused to herself, Ethan smiled and lightly clapped his hands together. “Good. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s start talking about the base we found. Through the tracking of Samantha, the young Mage who was recently kidnapped, we found a Society base near Metsel. It was hidden through the use of a large-scale optical illusion enchantment, and is out of the way of the main roads and near a smaller river. There should be around seventy or eighty Mages inside the base, based on the recount of the [Tracker]. We have about three hundred troops represented in this room, along with five high level Mages and a smaller number of average-level Mages scattered across various units. I will also be participating, but I intend to mostly take care of my new Apprentice, so while I will step in where needed, you should also take into account that my presence will be minimized this fight. I think it would be best if the [Special Guards] attack from the south, appearing behind this river bank…” Ethan gestured for Alice to sit down as he began to detail how he wanted each group of [Soldiers] and [Guards] to move during the attack at the base. Occasionally, a military leader would raise a question or make a suggestion for how to improve Ethan’s plan, some of which he added into his planning and some of which he rejected. After several minutes of discussion, the group left the out of the way house and began fetching a variety of [Soldiers], [Guards], and a few lower level Mages, before several Perks were used.

The group speedily left the city, where a few [Messengers] and [Scouts] who were travelling with the group used their Perks to speed up the group’s march. Alice was thankful the group was walking, because she had no idea how to ride a horse.

Eventually, the group arrived outside of the area indicated on the map. It was an area Alice would never have paid attention to if she wasn’t already aware there was something here – the Society had clearly used some sort of mix of enchantments to make the mana in this area look as natural as possible, disguising it from various types of Mana vision, and then disguised it from regular eyes as well. Alice swallowed nervously, looking at the dome of inconspicuous air she had seen on Ethan’s map. She knew that on the inside of that dome, the Society of Starry Eyes had set up a place to carry out their experiments. There, she would learn the fate of Samantha and any other victims of the Society.

As Alice mentally prepared herself, the dome of inconspicuous air suddenly fizzled, turning into a spray of jagged colors of mana before the illusion collapsed entirely. Then, a wave of giant boulders suddenly appeared in midair, flying towards the group of [Soldiers] and three elderly Mages Alice was standing near.

The Society knew they were here, and they were prepared to defend their base against the attackers.

A note from acaswell

Illness was starting to really go down as of Tuesday or Wednesday? My throat is still a little sore, and my headache is still technically here, but if my sickness maxed out at a pain level of 10, I’m probably down to like a 1 right now. I can pretty much function normally again, so chapters resume… 1 day behind my usual weekly schedule. By next week we should be back to normal, but this week I ended up a day behind because I was still fighting off the last vestiges of Covid and trying to get everything set up the way I wanted it to be set up story-wise. It was a bit messy, and I had to post on Saturday instead of Friday, but when you get sick sometimes things happen, okay?

For those a bit more curious about what my past week and a half looked like

Day 1-2: I pretty much passed out the entire day, almost immediately after I posted my note last week. I would occasionally wake up to deal with bodily needs, like drinking water and stuff, but I was unconscious for at least 18 hours out of 24.

Day 3: The super fatigue started to go away, and my throat got sore and I started coughing a lot more.

Day 4 -5? 6?: My sore throat got REALLY bad. I felt like I was swallowing broken glass anytime I swallowed for any reason. I ended up taking Ibuprofen to keep functioning, which was… unfortunate. I don’t usually need painkillers just to drink water…

After day 5, the sore throat started to get noticeably less bad, although it was still pretty bad on day six. As of now, the pain is mostly gone, and I’d say like 90% of the pain from swallowing has disappeared. I can drink tea and water freely again, no painkillers necessary. Which is, you know, great. XD I think I should be fine by next week, as long as nothing unexpected happens. But at least as of right now I can write and it’s not too big of a deal. So hopefully things just improve until the illness goes away completely.

I would also like to let you know in advance that I intend to take the last week or two of December off for an actual vacation. I figure letting people know a month in advance is fair. I haven’t exactly decided which two weeks I’m taking off, but I know for sure I want to take the week of Christmas/new years off, and then either the week leading up to that week or the week afterwards. Two weeks of time away from the story is a good time period to clear my head a bit, make sure I’m still happy with the overall plotline of the story, make revisions, and also spend time with friends/family. Right now I’m vaguely thinking I want to make the final chapter of the year December 23rd, but if I end up changing it to December 16th and then just pick the story back up in the first week of January instead of the second week, don’t be too surprised. Either way I’m taking 2 weeks off this year for a vacation, and one of them is the week of Christmas/New Years. I’ll update you on further details… probably next month?

Chapter 95

The boulders sailed through the air, before gravity dragged them towards the Illvarian troops around Alice. Alice waited until the boulders were within range of her tendrils before she reached out to stop them. She nearly dropped one of the two boulders near her, because they were much heavier than she had been prepared to handle. Luckily, she still managed to stop it before it crushed the nearby troops. The other Illvarian Mages did the same, protecting the [Soldiers] around them before they threw the boulders back in the direction they had come from. Most quickly dropped to the ground or flew in random directions, but it still damaged the concealment enchantment even more.

Alice was surprised by how much slower her responses and actions felt without the boost from {Adrenaline Rush}, and how much harder it was to stop massive, heavy objects when she had less time to process how much mana she needed to influence things. The boulders the Society had used also looked and felt like catapult ammunition, instead of the hand-sized stones and beads Alice normally saw in fights. These factors made it much harder for Alice to respond to changes on the battlefield, because she was very unused to this kind of fight. She wished that she still had access to {Reflection}, since it would have made stopping the boulders and even counterattacking with them trivially easy. However, even without her limited-use Perks available, she had still managed to protect the nearby troops from the first wave of Society attacks.

Meanwhile, the nearby [Soldiers] began quickly grouping up around the Kinetic Mages of Illvaria, actively making sure that all of the [Soldiers] were within range of someone’s mana tendrils. Average level soldiers had a hard time dealing with massive missiles, so they would need to either get close enough to the enemy troops that their Mages became afraid of friendly fire, until they were closer or until the other side ran out of mana to start truly deciding the course of the fight. However, that didn’t completely stop the non-Mages from helping. Several of the [Archers] unslung their bows, before nocking their arrows. Some of the [Archers] shone with rainbow mana, before they released a coordinated volley of arrows into the half-broken enchantment hiding the Society base.

The enchantment hiding the Society base was already on the brink of collapse after the Society and then the Illvarian Mages had thrown a bunch of boulders through it. With the hail of Perk-boosted arrows peppering its edges, it finally collapsed completely. The jagged bits of random colored mana in the air disappeared, and for the first time Alice got a good look at the base they were attacking.

It was a squat, stone building, around the size of Alice’s magic academy. Similar to Alice’s Magic Academy, it had a variety of strange enchantments sprinkled through the building, boosting its durability and adding other special functions Alice couldn’t make out. Behind the building was a river, cutting off any easy access to part of the building, while the trees inside of the enchantment had been cleared out to make it a killing field for good [Kinetic Mages]. A small moat had been dug around the Society base as well, ensuring that troops would need to cross a moat or river no matter which direction they approached from. The roof of the building was shaped like the top of a castle, giving the Society Mages on the roof a good angle to rain projectiles on the [Soldiers] below, and also gave them cover to duck behind in case of return fire. On top of the wall, fifteen Mages stood next to a pile of large round stones, ready to hurl more missiles at the Illvarian army.

On the ground in front of the castle, another fifty or so Mages stood, these ones holding swords, spears, bows, and shields. Unlike the Mages on the castle wall, they were close enough for Alice to see some of their Magic seeds. And without fail, every single Society Mage on the ground had access to an Organic Magic seed. Alice could already tell that these [Organic Mages] would be a terrifying melee unit if they were proficient in weapons.

The first volley of arrows shot by the Illvarians weren’t aimed very well due to the previously limited visibility, so they ended up hitting nothing. However, they had served their purpose and broken down the rest of the concealing enchantments surrounding the base.

With the enemy finally revealed, the [Soldiers] holding bows quickly reloaded and fired a second volley of arrows at the [Organic Mages] on the ground. A hail of arrows zipped through the air, before several of the arrows turned rainbow and sped up. A few of the arrows, instead of speeding up, simply disappeared from Alice’s physical and mana-based sight. Their rainbow-colored silhouettes were still easy for her to spot, but to most people the arrows would have simply seemed to vanish in midair. A final portion of the arrows began zig-zagging in midair, making their trajectories strange and hard to predict or interfere with using kinetic magic.

Since the Society [Kinetic Mages] were focused on offense and weren’t positioned to protect their [Organic Mages], the Society members on the ground were on their own for defense. The ones holding shields raised their shields towards the skies, and some of the higher level ones flashed with rainbow mana. As if they were drawn to magnets, most of the arrows in midair slowed down as their trajectories changed, before they all flew directly into the rainbow Society shields and bounced off. Luckily, a few of the invisible and zigzagging arrows ignored the shield-related Perks and struck their targets. However, it didn’t seem like any of the injuries were fatal, so the Society Members quickly healed away the various injuries from the arrow volley.

Alice also realized something interesting – many of the Society Mages on the ground didn’t seem to have Perks supporting their combat abilities at all, at least so far. After a few moments of thought, Alice realized that many Society members were fundamentally researchers, not combatants. While Magic still gave them a massive advantage over regular people, and the Society obviously had combat-trained Mages, some of the Mages on the ground didn’t seem very threatening. Even with the help of their Magic, their Levels were quite average, and some of them didn’t hold their weapons with much proficiency or move with the fluid grace those with high [Dexterity] and battle experience naturally had.

Furthermore, the Society’s troop placement was also rather questionable. Their [Kinetic Mages] were placed near ammunition, but they weren’t close enough to their ground troops to protect them, and Alice also questioned whether having the Society Organic Mages line up in front of their research base was really the best tactical decision. Although she was a novice at military strategy, she felt it might have been better if they had hidden inside of the base and ambushed Illvarians as they went inside, or just stuck their entire army on the roof and collapsed the entrance to the building at some point in the fight. While the Society might have their reasons for arranging their troops the way they did, Alice felt it was more likely they didn’t have a [Commander] who knew what he was doing.

The Society Mages on top of the wall launched another volley of boulders, and Alice and the other Illvarian [Kinetic Mages] struggled to keep the boulders away from the [Soldiers] who didn’t react quickly enough. Alice tried to find an opportunity to counterattack the Society [Kinetic Mages], but she was having a hard time even handling the boulders thrown her way. There were maybe nine or ten Illvarian [Kinetic Mages] fighting against fifteen Society [Kinetic Mages]. If Elder Sujia and the other two Mages in Alice’s group weren’t much higher level than average, they wouldn’t have even been able to keep the [Soldiers] on their side safe. Besides, even if Alice sneaked in a few projectiles, the Society Mages would just stop them in midair and send them back to her. Since Illvaria’s side was barely holding on, it wasn’t the right time to start counterattacking.

Meanwhile, Sepplo, the [Commander] Ethan had put in charge of the Illvarian troops, frowned as he analyzed the situation.

“It’s a shame we didn’t catch them by surprise,” he said with a soft sigh.

“Given how many people we left Metsel with, it isn’t surprising that the enemy learned we were advancing towards this base,” said Elder Sujia, with a sigh. “Still, it’s indeed a shame.”

“Their ranged abilities are better than ours. I’m surprised they scrounged together so many [Kinetic Mages]. Most Society members are [Organic Mages], or some mix of weird seeds. Since they have the advantage in ranged warfare, there’s nothing we can do about it. If we keep fighting a ranged battle we’ll be at a disadvantage,” said the [Commander] with a shrug. He seemed to be chatting with elder Sujia, and his voice was soft enough that Alice had a hard time making out his words even though she was fairly close to him. “Do you have any ideas how to deal with the moat? We can’t get a proper melee battle started if we can’t reach them, and I don’t like our odds if we can’t force the Society to fight a melee battle instead of a ranged one.”

Elder Sujia frowned, before she looked at one of the boulders and fell into thought. Then, she nodded.

“I have an idea. It’ll be a bit messy, but it should at least help us get across. But we’ll need to be careful.”

“Good enough for me. Advance!” said the [Commander], increasing his volume with a Perk this time.

The [Soldiers] began pushing forward, and Alice moved along with them. She made sure to keep herself in the middle of the nearby [Soldiers], so she could respond to any missiles aimed at them. Then, out of the corner of her eye she suddenly saw a flash of purple.

If Alice had been under the effects of {Adrenaline Rush} she might have managed to block it in time. However, since Ethan had forced her to spend her Perks before the mission, she felt a sudden wave of helplessness as she watched a tragedy about to unfold. From thin air, dimensional mana spewed out of a newly made portal. A sword tip suddenly flickered into existence out of thin air, aiming directly for the [Commander]’s eye.

Before Alice could react, the [Commander] flashed with rainbow mana, before he swung his sword faster than her eyes could track. The sword tip reaching towards his eye was suddenly batted away, and then the [Commander] stabbed through the portal.

Alice saw an [Organic Mage] who was glowing purple in the distance suddenly scream, a massive injury appearing on his neck as he slammed his portal closed. It wasn’t a lethal blow, but it was a major injury. As the Society Mage started healing himself, Alice decided to remove the threat of dimensional mana from the battlefield. A dimensional Mage could tear apart the Illvarian group of [Soldiers] if the Mage had enough mana to flood the area with broken mana, and mana baptisms were impossible to heal once they started. She quickly ‘borrowed’ four arrows from a nearby [Archer] and flung them at the Society Mage. One of the arrows nailed him in the eye, and another one slammed into his stomach. The other two missed entirely, but it didn’t matter. He stopped screaming and dropped to the ground, never to move again.

Meanwhile, Elder Sujia immediately purified the dimensional mana that had leaked out of the portal, preventing the [Commander] and nearby soldiers from undergoing sudden mana baptisms.

However, a Society Mage noticed the fact that Alice was preoccupied. He immediately dropped the boulder he had been preparing to hurl, and instead broke part of the wall he was standing on into a spray of smaller stone shards. Then, he flung razor sharp stone fragments directly at Alice. The shards of stone flashed rainbow before speeding up, making it hard for Alice to track their speed and exact location.

Alice used {Extended Organics} to reposition her tendrils, and managed to catch most of the dangerous stone shards. However, she missed two of them, and was forced to activate her necklace enchantment. The remaining stone shards simply halted in midair, before dropping to the ground, but Alice didn’t get hurt by the stone shards after removing the dimensional Mage. Seeing that she was no longer distracted, the [Kinetic Mage] who had tried to kill her didn’t bother targeting her any longer.

Instead, the Society threw another wave of boulders at the Illvarians.

Alice quickly prepared to block the next wave of attacks. However, this time, Elder Sujia’s twelve mana tendrils suddenly tripled, becoming thirty six magic tendrils. The twenty four new tendrils looked different from regular magic tendrils. They were made partially out of rainbow mana, instead of the more ‘normal’ color of mana tendril Alice was used to. These mana tendrils also extended much farther than a few meters away, allowing Elder Sujia to stop all of the boulders in midair well before they got near the Illvarian army. For the moment, the Society Mages paused, looking at elder Sujia’s and her terrifying Perk.

Then, like a giant slamming things into the ground in a fit of rage, Elder Sujia flung all of the boulders towards the ground, aiming directly at the moat that stopped the Illvarian melee troops from accessing the Society’s base. The Kinetic Mages of the Society tried to intercept the boulders in midair, but they were too far away to easily touch the boulders, and Sujia’s rainbow tendrils let Sujia channel way more mana per second into the boulders than a regular mana tendril. She successfully fought off the influence of the Society Mages for a few seconds as she firmly slammed the boulders into the moat and ground them into the dirt, forming an unsteady but usable bridge for the troops.

Then, Elder Sujia immediately grabbed some of the other boulders the Society had thrown at the Illvarians earlier. Most of them hadn’t been thrown back at the Society, because the Illvarian Mages had been pressured enough that they couldn’t find time to counterattack. However, Elder Sujia was no longer playing by the rules, and it was clear that she wanted some payback for earlier. With sudden speed and dramatically improved aim, she hurled the boulders at the [Organic Mages] on the ground.

The Society Mages on the ground, seeing the boulders flying towards them, scrambled out of the way, but even with their physical Attribute bonuses boosted by Organic mana, some of them didn’t move fast enough. Four Society Organic Mages became paste. The boulders had been slammed into the ground with such intensity that they bounced away, flying forward for another few dozen meters before the [Kinetic Mages] of the Society got the boulders back under control. One of the ‘corpses’ healed his injuries before getting right back up and retreating, but the other three remained very dead.

The Society retreated away from the now useless moat, wary of Elder Sujia’s strange mana tendrils, while Elder Sujia rushed towards the front of Ethan’s army and used whatever she could to bombard the Society. Arrows, rocks, anything that was nearby became a missile heading towards the [Organic Mages] on the ground, while the [Kinetic Mages] of the Society tried to defend their allies despite the range limitations of their mana tendrils. Alice and the other Illvarian [Kinetic Mages] took advantage of the situation, adding on to Elder Sujia’s torrent of missiles, and for nearly ten seconds the Society’s members could only flee in terror as Illvaria’s Mages tore holes in their ranks and took down the more vulnerable [Organic Mages]. Even though a wound wasn’t fatal unless it was a one hit kill, some Mages and [Archers] got in lucky hits here and there, and the [Organic Mages] were also forced to waste a lot of mana healing away their injuries. Finally, the Society’s [Organic Mages] got close enough to the research base that the [Kinetic Mages] could protect them, allowing the Society Mages to counter the Illvarian volley. But in the time Elder Sujia had rampaged unchecked, nearly a dozen Society Mages had died.

Then, Elder Sujia’s Perk ended. The partially-rainbow mana tendrils disappeared into thin air, leaving Sujia looking for more exhausted than before. The Society immediately began to counterattack, throwing a new wave of boulders and arrows at the Illvarian side. Two Illvarian [Archers] died when one of the boulders landed in an area that wasn’t protected well enough, and a few more were injured badly enough that they would need to see an [Organic Mage] or they would die soon.

The shields at the front of the Illvarian lines didn’t light up with rainbow mana this time. Alice realized the soldiers couldn’t use their Perk anymore, and tried to figure out whether she should stop the boulders or stop some of the arrows heading towards the [Soldiers] in the front lines. No matter which she chose, some of the [Soldiers] would die.

Before she finished deciding, Ethan, who was hiding near the back of the army and keeping an eye on both her and the fight, finally intervened. From a hidden point behind the Illvarian lines, forty mana tendrils snaked their way into the air, completely ignoring the range limitations most magic tendrils suffered from. Then, most of the arrows were halted in midair, allowing Alice and Ethan’s other disciples to freeze the boulders and prevent them from crushing the [Soldiers] nearby. However, even an Immortal couldn’t control every aspect of a battlefield. Another three [Soldiers] dropped at the edges of the army, where it was harder to protect them.

The Illvarian front lines finally crossed Sujia’s makeshift bridge and reformed ranks on the other side. Then, they pressed forward, braving the storm of flying arrows and random missiles until they caught up to the Society’s [Organic Mages]. The two sides engaged in a chaotic melee. Alice watched from near the back of the front lines as Perks from the [Commander] buffed Illvarian troops, Society Mages used their own Perks and magic seeds, and the Illvarian troops with shields formed a shield wall before stabbing Society Mages through the gaps in their shields. The Society [Organic Mages] were no ordinary humans though, and after temporarily boosting their own strength many times with their Perks and mana, they suddenly flung themselves forward, ripping apart chunks of the shield wall with their bare hands before attacking the soldiers behind with their weapons. Even if some of them were obviously untrained for combat, they could compensate for that with their incredible physical abilities and regeneration.

Several Illvarian [Soldiers] died, and Ethan was forced to increase the scale of his presence on the battlefield as the Society Mages punched through the front lines and began tearing apart the Illvarian [Soldiers]. Alice fought desperately to keep her corner of the battlefield under control, using clothes and projectiles to trip up, injure, or kill Society Members when she could get a good angle on them. However, Alice quickly realized that this type of battle was the one she struggled the most with. [Kinetic Mages] were combatants specialized in precise, surgical strikes using projectiles, or hurling massive objects at their enemies. This kind of chaotic melee, where indiscriminate massive objects would hit allies and where tracking who was friendly and who was hostile became difficult, was hard for Alice to seriously impact the battle. Her Perks from [Kinetic Manabinder] made it easy for her to sense movement around her and see in all directions, but she didn’t have any special method of figuring out who was Illvarian and who was from the Society unless she used her physical eyes to pick out the mana seeds in each person.

However, the [Soldiers] in this operation weren’t pushovers either. With a mix of Perks and better coordination, they quickly regrouped after the shield wall broke, before again protecting the Mages while forcing the Society members back. Some of them were killed, and many more were forced into retreating as they tried to heal their injuries. Finally, the Society front line detached from the Illvarian front line as they used their superior speed to retreat and regroup behind the protective fire of their [Kinetic Mages].

As the Society members were reorganizing and regrouping, some of the Society Mages on the roof of the building suddenly turned around.

Climbing onto the other side of the Society research base was the remaining third of Ethan’s army, led by Ethan’s two remaining disciples. Ethan, naturally, had felt that the Society members may try to flee if things turned poorly for them, and also felt that flanking the Society might be the most effective way to control the battlefield. Thus, from the very beginning, the group Alice was part of was meant to serve as a distraction while the other troops got into position. The Society research base was now surrounded.

A note from acaswell

An announcement – Recently, I’ve started posting a second story on Royalroad, Patreon, and Scribblehub. It is called Markets and Multiverses. It would make me happy if you check it out! But, you know, only if you want to. Otherwise you don’t have to. I understand the story is pretty different from Budding Scientist, and not everyone will be interested. But anyway.

Here’s the story synopsis:

When Miria died, she didn’t stay dead.

After her death, she found herself in a strange city called the ‘Market,’ a city in the Multiverse that once allowed certain souls to retain their memories and permanently increase their abilities between lives. Once, the Market housed a community of Transmigrators that spanned the entire multiverse, occupying the top seat of power among those who could travel between dimensions.

At least, that’s how it worked before the inhabitants were slaughtered and the Market was razed to the ground. Now, the Market is a wasteland of spells, technology, and liches. In order to survive in a multiverse filled with magic and interdimensional travelers, Miria and her friends need to make use of the tools left by the old Market, find the other factions who travel between dimensions, and explore the myriad worlds if they don’t wish to meet the same fate.

(End of Blurb).

The story is going to have a pretty different focus from Budding Scientist. It’s a bit closer to a ‘traditional’ LitRPG in a lot of respects. While Alice tends to use Perks as means to explore the System, and focuses heavily on learning more about the world around her, the protagonist of Markets and Multiverses is a bit more friendship and adventure focused. So the story will be less about breaking down the System and figuring out how it works, and more about adventuring through the multiverse, getting stronger, and interdimensional diplomacy and warfare (eventually). Think of it as being closer to the parts of Budding Scientist that are focused on the Society and Illvarian Society, without any of the research-related bits and with a heavier focus on the more prominent side characters, I guess? It’s up to you if that sounds more or less interesting than Budding Scientist, and whether you’re interested in trying it out. But if it sounds interesting, take a look at it and leave a good rating or review, okay? :D Or wait until there’s a bit more to the story. There are only two chapters up now, but I’ll be adding at least five a week until my vacation.

For those of you wondering, this new story will NOT affect the release schedule for Budding Scientist. Budding Scientist will continue to post one chapter a week as usual. I might delay the edits to early chapters of Budding Scientist I've been doing each week until things settle down a bit, but adding new chapters to the story will not be affected in any way. Except for my vacation starting at the end of next month, as already noted in a few other author’s notes.  I’ve decided that will be starting on December 23rd, which is the day I will post the final Budding Scientist chapter of the year. So expect a chapter as normal on that day, followed by two weeks of silence. I hope you enjoy the new story, at least if it sounds interesting to you, and if you’re interested make sure to check it out! There’s a link to first chapter of the story below for whichever website you feel like reading it on.

Scribblehub Link:

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/626709-markets-and-multiverses/chapter/626717/

Royalroad Link:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/61244/markets-and-multiverses/chapter/1048495/chapter-1-a-death-in-london

(And of course you can read the story, along with an extra heap of chapters, on Patreon too. Just saying XD).

Shameless plug – you can read three chapters ahead (For Budding Scientist) on Patreon!

Chapter 96

The Society members who had survived the first engagement with Illvarian troops gritted their teeth, looking at the troops that had crept up behind them as they tried to assess their current situation. After the chaotic melee with the Illvarian front lines, as well as the losses from the ranged battle earlier, perhaps twenty of the original sixty five Society Mages had died, and several more were sporting injuries that were in the process of healing. The Society’s [Organic Mages] looked tired, and the [Kinetic Mages] looked like they were starting to run out of mana. The Illvarian soldiers were more tired, since most of them relied on Perks instead of Magic, but they had sustained far fewer casualties than the Society. Only seven or eight [Soldiers] had died, and with the high [Endurance] most [Soldiers] had they were still able to push on if the fight continued. While Alice didn’t let her guard down, she started to realize that the outcome of the battle was a foregone conclusion. The Society Mages were better individual fighters due to their Magic, but they had no competent commander and much less battle experience, and now that they were starting to run out of mana their only major advantage would soon disappear.

The Society Mages seemed to realize the same thing. They looked behind them, at the detachment of Illvarian troops flanking them from the rear, and then back at the troops led by Ethan. Alice could see some of them beginning to despair, growing frantic and desperate as they realized they were surrounded and had no way to win the fight.

Then, the [Kinetic Mages] from the Society jumped off the side of the roof, before trying to use their kinetic mana to push themselves up in midair and soften the pull of gravity. The [Kinetic Mages] landed on the grass, with several of them breaking bones on impact as they mismanaged their Kinetic Magic. However, the [Organic Mages] quickly healed them, and apart from the [Kinetic Mage] who landed poorly and died, the others were back in fighting shape within moments.

Alice started to get a bad feeling as she saw the Society rally for a last, desperate struggle. Then, the [Kinetic Mages] quickly folded themselves into the [Organic Mages] on the ground, and yelled something Alice couldn’t make out.

As one, the remaining Society Mages arrayed themselves into a desperate, ragged formation and began charging straight towards the flank where Alice was located.

“Fuck! They’re making a break for it!” Yelled one of the nearby [Soldiers], as everyone rallied around the nearby Mages for one last struggle. Alice quickly examined what mana reserves she had left, before realizing she had maybe 20% of her mana remaining. It wasn’t much, but it should see her through the rest of the fight. She grabbed some nearby arrows and peppered the Society with another round of attacks, followed by the other [Archers] and [Kinetic Mages] near her.

Unlike before, the Society’s [Kinetic Mages] were positioned to defend their [Organic Mages] this time. They halted the spray of arrows, before returning a volley that Alice and the others were hard pressed to stop. Luckily, Ethan intervened again, and stopped the rest of the volley before it could kill more Illvarian troops. Ethan followed up by throwing another round of boulders at the Society, along with a massive spray of arrows, downing several Society Mages before they reached the Illvarian flank.

Then, the Society met the [Soldiers] again, cutting down [Soldiers] as they tried to find a way out. Alice grabbed arrows, pebbles, globs of dirt, and anything she could get ahold of as she threw everything she had left at the Society. Ethan flew above the battlefield like a miniature god, giving himself a full view of the battlefield as he began fully participating in the battle. He quickly began establishing aerial dominance, raining down waves of arrows, pebbles, and boulders on any Society Mage that lost focus on him. Two of the remaining Society [Kinetic Mages], in their desperation, launched a projectile attack on Ethan, which he easily halted in midair, before the Mages were torn down by fragments of stone. Meanwhile, the remaining Society Mages found themselves halted by the Illvarian front line. They madly tried to punch through the shield wall again, but with most of their mana drained they didn’t tear through the shield wall the way they had earlier. As the other groups of Illvarian troops closed in on them, their struggles began more and more desperate, and more and more Society Mages fell.

Finally, when half of the would-be escapees had fallen, the Society Mages realized that there was no escape. One of the [Organic Mages] threw down her weapons, raised her hands above her head, and knelt on the ground. The Illvarian [Soldiers] near her didn’t totally lose their wariness, since a Mage was always a threat if they had mana, but they didn’t kill her on the spot. Instead, the [Soldiers] surrounded her, warily eying her while waiting for someone else to deal with her. Seeing that one Society member had surrendered and lived, the other Society Members rapidly began to surrender, throwing down their weapons one after another. Alice heaved a mental sigh of relief, as she checked her mana seeds and realized she only had a few Mariums of kinetic mana left. If the Society had kept fighting, Alice would have probably become dead weight in less than a minute.

Ethan, unlike Alice, was nowhere near out of mana. He strode to the first Society Mage who had surrendered with a relaxed and confident gait. He called for one of his apprentices, before speaking loudly enough for the Illvarian [Soldiers] and surviving Society Mages to easily hear him.

“Cut out their Mage Cores, then heal them up. We’ll take them back to Metsel where we can run them through the court system.”

After the [Organic Mage] acknowledge Ethan’s words, he took a dagger from a nearby [Soldier], and, while the entire Illvarian army remained tense and kept their weapons at the ready, he began slicing out one Mage Core after another. The Society Mages quivered and shuddered, sometimes twisting in pain and screaming as their Mage Cores were removed, but after hearing they might have a chance to survive in the court system and seeing they had no way to survive if they fought back, they allowed their Mage cores to be cut out. After the Society Mages had their Mage cores cut out, they were tied up and placed under guard.

Alice breathed a small sigh of relief once she saw the last Society member’s Mage core removed. The amount of pressure she had been under during this battle had been massive, and during the fight she had directly been responsible for keeping a dozen men alive. Even if Ethan probably would have corrected her mistakes, Alice had done her best to make sure she didn’t need Ethan’s help. She looked over the Illvarian troops again, taking a last look at the final casualty count. She could see that eleven Illvarian [Soldiers] had died during this battle, mostly during the two melee engagements. Several more had been seriously injured, but the Illvarian [Organic Mages] were nowhere near as drained of mana as the [Kinetic Mages] and thus had promptly healed their injures. Alice sighed, thinking about the troops that had died.

Even though Ethan and his Apprentices had made it possible for an army of non-Mages to fight a large number of Mages, the battlefield was filled with unpredictable Perks, skillsets, and strategies. The fact that eleven [Soldiers] had died was a reminder that, for all of their power and influence, an Immortal wasn’t a god. They were dozens of times stronger than an ordinary troop, and could swing small battles in their favor with their presence – but they couldn’t completely control a battle, and they also couldn’t completely prevent their side from sustaining casualties. If Alice succeeded in becoming an Immortal, she would need to keep this lesson firmly in her mind at all times.

After the Society Members were dealt with, Ethan walked up to Alice and gave her a grin. “Well done, kid. You survived. And you didn’t rely on just your limited use Perks – you managed to keep your group of [Soldiers] alive with only your baseline abilities as a [Kinetic Mage]. I admit, I thought I would need to intervene much more in your area, but you did well. Is this your first time in a battle?”

Alice nodded. “There was one time in Cyra where I joined Illa’s expedition to a broken mana zone, and some people from the Sigmusi Colonia ambushed us. But that was much smaller in scale. This is my first time being in a battle of this size.”

He listened to Alice’s words for a few moments, sinking into thought, before he turned back towards her . “There are some parts you could have done better, but I don’t think now is the time to go over them. We’ll go over more specific details in a few days, when we finish dealing with this base and you’ve had a few days to cool off and relax. What I want you to do for now is focus on what you think you did well and what you did poorly during the battle, since doing some self reflection before I share my thoughts tends to be more helpful. But even though I have some criticisms, you did well, and I don’t want you to get the impression you didn’t. The point where you got rid of the dimensional Mage on the other side of the battlefield also displayed decent battlefield awareness, since you got rid of the biggest threat and survived the counterattack. It wasn’t perfect, but I’m pleasantly surprised by your performance this time.” Then, Ethan gave her another friendly grin before leaving her with her thoughts.

Alice fell silent, as she thought back to people screaming and dying mere minutes ago, as well as the lack of control she had felt when the front lines of both sides collided and both sides started to mix together. The difficulty of hitting enemies without hitting friendly [Soldiers] had been beyond her expectations, and if someone tried to assassinate her in public she would face a similar problem while trying to keep bystanders from getting hurt. She also realized that, for all of her perception-based Perks and boosts to her reaction speed, she didn’t have a good enough ability to distinguish potential threats in her surroundings. She had always felt that her perception was good enough, because she could always track people around her with {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision}, but while {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision} let her see in all directions, she could only observe mana with her physical eyes, meaning she still had a partial blind spot in other directions. Furthermore, the fact that she only had four mana tendrils was a major weakness. After seeing both Ethan and Elder Sujia, Alice realized that the number of tendrils a Kinetic Mage could control at once was a major factor in their ability to fight and win a battle. Having only four at her level was starting to feel rather low, and if she had six or eight she would have much better control over her surroundings.

Meanwhile, Ethan began reorganizing the rest of the troops, assigned [Organic Mages] to double check for injured Illvarians, and otherwise reorganized the Illvarian [Soldiers] as needed.

By the time Alice was done thinking, Ethan had organized most of the troops outside of the base and dealt with the most urgent organizational and medical issues of the Illvarian army. Finally, he turned to her and nodded again.

“All right, now it’s time for part two.”

“Part two?”

“There should have been 70 to 80 Mages here, and I only count around sixty five from the frontal battle. The other five to fifteen might have escaped if we missed something, or they might still be in the base. We’re going to take smaller squads of higher level troops and sweep through the insides of the base. And, with any luck, we’ll also find your friend – or what remains of her, if she’s dead.”

Alice frowned, thinking about her dwindling mana reserves, before Ethan grinned at her. “You’ve already gotten a lot of what I wanted you to learn out of this experience, so just stick next to me for the rest of it. I doubt your mana reserves are high at this point, right? You’ll still get something out of observing how I deal with potential threats, even if it won’t be anywhere near as useful as experiencing it yourself, but you don’t seem like you have the mental or physical stamina to keep fighting right now.”

Alice nodded. With that, Ethan quickly selected a few of the higher level [Soldiers], the two apprentices who had flanked the Society and thus hadn’t spent much mana, and a few [Archers] with specialized Perks before leading the group towards the Society base.

“Remember, there should still be at least a few Society members kicking around inside, looking over experiments that can’t be left unattended or guarding [Test Subjects],” said Ethan, speaking to the [Soldiers] instead of Alice this time. “There’s a small chance they might have escaped if we missed something, but odds are pretty high that they’re still there. They’ll probably surrender once they realize we’ve dealt with the majority of the members outside, but there’s a chance they’ll put up a last, desperate struggle against being captured or killed. Stick together and don’t let your guard down, or you might die here.” The [Soldiers] and Ethan’s apprentices nodded. Alice tried to think over why Ethan emphasized being careful so much. Alice was more than a little surprised to see how cautious Ethan was suddenly being, despite the fact that he was an Immortal. Perhaps this level of caution was required in order to survive to Immortality in the first place? Alice frowned, wondering if Ethan was trying to emphasize the fact that Immortals could still become vulnerable if they were overconfident and weren’t paying attention.

As Alice mused over questions of Immortals, the group stopped just outside the entrance to the Society base. The [Archers] with specialized Perks went first, scouting for traps, Society members, prisoners, or anything else of interest. They quickly returned, reporting that the first few hallways were clear, and so the group entered the Society base.

Alice’s first impression of the inner halls of the Society base was symmetry. Every single stone in the hallway was orderly, every single slat of wood making up the floor was even in length, and every single enchantment in the hallways that provided light was exactly symmetrical on both sides of the walkway. It was as if someone with OCD had gone completely nuts while poring over every single detail of the building. The enchantments providing light were even paired with each other, ensuring that if one went out, the light it was linked to would also go out. It was the most pointlessly impressive enchantment Alice had seen so far.

However, the things fueling the enchantments were… disturbing. Alice was very used to using monster cores as enchanting materials these days, and hardly even registered the fact that they were technically organs of other creatures at this point. However, Alice was very sure that the power sources in this building weren’t monster cores at all. They looked decidedly more… human.

Ethan frowned in disgust as he saw them, before he spoke.

“Mage Cores,” he said.

“Mage cores? All of them?” Alice asked. She had thought the enchantment supplies looked decidedly human, but she had no idea how the Society could have acquired so many Mage Cores.

“It’s highly illegal to use Mage cores as an enchanting material in Illvaria,” said Ethan. “After all, the country is trying its hardest to encourage Mages to migrate here, and most Mages are pretty uncomfortable with the knowledge that behind their heart is another enchanting material. Since most Mages don’t like it, and it also encourages criminals to hunt Mages where they can, Illvaria bans any experimentation or use of Mage cores as an enchanting material. In fact, most governments ban the use of Mage cores as an enchanting material, because the potential gains from this field of research don’t outweigh the downside of pissing off most of the Mages inside of the country. Of course, the Society has no such limitation on their experiments, since their entire organization is founded on illegal experimentation.”

Then, Ethan pointed to one group of Mage cores, redirecting her attention to it. “It’s a disgusting way of fueling enchantments, but the Society does have a sort of twisted rationale to their actions. If you look at the cores there, many of them look very similar, don’t they?”

Alice didn’t want to look more closely at the cores, but since Ethan wanted her to analyze them, she unwillingly redirected her gaze towards the enchanting materials.

“Human cores, like monster cores, run out of mana after a while. In order for a mage core to provide mana, the human mage it’s taken from must first have a sufficient amount of mana stored in their magic seeds. However, if a human is kept sedated and has their mage core continuously cut out and regrown, they can keep providing mage cores once every day or two. An [Organic Mage] may not be able to help someone survive a mana baptism, but once someone has grown a Mage core once, all they need is an infusion of Organic Mana and the right Perks help to regrow their Core. The Society makes full use of this to exploit captive Mages, apparently."

Alice felt a strange sense of morbid curiosity surface, as she examined the Mage cores in the building. It was gross and made her uncomfortable, but in a horrifying sort of way it was also an incredibly creative solution to the problem of enchanting material shortages.

“If that’s the case, can a similar method be used to harm monster cores?”

“Sort of? Monsters die almost the moment you cut their core out of their body, unlike human Mages. However, while monsters clearly rely much more on their cores than humans do, you can still sort of get around this problem by rearing monsters. Some people have tried to set up farms where they rear monsters, in order to ‘harvest’ their cores when the monster finishes maturing and reproducing. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that most monsters have magic abilities of some sort, and only a few species like spidercrabs have no real ability to threaten people. If one doesn’t have a good way to keep the monsters in the farm from breaking out and killing and eating the owner, as well as nearby [Farmers] and such, monster farms tend to end up going catastrophically wrong sooner or later. But a few farms dedicated to farming monsters have found some limited form of success. It’s dangerous and needs to be dealt with properly, but as a field of economic growth, it does have some potential. It’s too risky to just let people set up monster farms without regulation and permits, but I have hopes for the field developing sometime within the next century or two.” Ethan shrugged. “But others aren’t quite as interested in the field as I am, and cite the potential risks in expanding monster farms throughout the country.”

Having said his piece, the team continued to make their way through empty room after empty room in the base. With the [Archers] scouting the way, the main group didn’t need to be too cautious of their surroundings, even though a certain level of tension remained as they scouted room after room of records. Ethan immediately grabbed any form of writing the group came across, before sticking into a storage Perk and moving on. Luckily, the group hadn’t found any of the actual experimentation rooms or remaining Society Mages yet, and the Society hadn’t set up any traps inside of the building, so the danger level remained low throughout the group’s exploration.

Finally, after checking several rooms, one of the [Archers] called out to the others.

“We found a prisoner.”

Alice and Ethan waited for the [Archers] to ensure there were no traps in the area, before they stepped into a room.

There, Alice finally found Samantha. Thankfully, she was still alive. However, while she was still alive, that was the only positive thing about her condition.

Sitting next to Samantha on a table were two Mage Cores, both of which seemed to contain the same broken kinetic seed Samantha had formed. One of them still had chunks of spine attached to it, probably from when the core had been ripped out of Samantha’s body. The table she was tied to had bloodstains and human waste on parts of it, but nobody had bothered cleaning it up, leaving Samantha laying sedated on the table. Her body currently didn’t seem to have a Mage core inside of it, and while there wasn’t other evidence of Samantha being abused or tortured, she looked rather thin and dehydrated. Alice shuddered as she took in the scene, before she slowly calmed herself down. At the very least, no matter what she had been through, Samantha was still alive.

A note from acaswell

An announcement – Last week, I started posting a second story on Royalroad, Patreon, and Scribblehub. It is called Markets and Multiverses. It would make me happy if you check it out! It’s up to 9 chapters on public release now! And if you do enjoy either of my stories, maybe leave a good rating or review for them? it helps both stories (though, for Markets and Multiverses it's notably more important, since the story is quite new)

Here’s the story synopsis:

When Miria died, she didn’t stay dead.

After her death, she found herself in a strange city called the ‘Market,’ a city in the Multiverse that once allowed certain souls to retain their memories and permanently increase their abilities between lives. Once, the Market housed a community of Transmigrators that spanned the entire multiverse, occupying the top seat of power among those who could travel between dimensions.

At least, that’s how it worked before the inhabitants were slaughtered and the Market was razed to the ground. Now, the Market is a wasteland of spells, technology, and liches. In order to survive in a multiverse filled with magic and interdimensional travelers, Miria and her friends need to make use of the tools left by the old Market, explore the multiverse, find the other factions who travel between dimensions, and explore the myriad worlds if they don’t wish to meet the same fate.

(End of Blurb).

I hope you enjoy the new story, at least if it sounds interesting to you, and if you’re interested make sure to check it out! There’s a link to first chapter of the story below for whichever website you feel like reading it on.

Scribblehub Link:

https://www.scribblehub.com/read/626709-markets-and-multiverses/chapter/626717/

Royalroad Link:

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/61244/markets-and-multiverses/chapter/1048495/chapter-1-a-death-in-london

(And of course you can read the story, along with an extra heap of chapters, on Patreon too. Just saying XD).

Shameless plug – you can read three chapters ahead (For Budding Scientist) on Patreon!

Chapter 97

After the group found Samantha, Ethan wasted no time in turning back towards Alice.

“Is this your friend?”

Alice nodded. Ethan grinned at her.

“Well, in that case, congratulations. At the very least, we aren’t rescuing a corpse, the way I feared we might be. She doesn’t look like she’s in the best condition, but she’s still alive. Mental and physical trauma can be healed, with time and help, but once someone is dead there’s no way to fix it. So I can honestly say I’m very happy with this outcome.” Ethan took a look at Samantha again, before sighing. “I admit, it does look like she’s had a pretty rough time of it. With any luck she might have been unconscious during all of this, but we won’t know until she wakes up. But at least she’s alive.”

Alice felt a grin tug at her lips as she nodded. Even though Samantha had doubtlessly been through a lot in the past few days, the fact that she was still alive meant recovery was possible. In this world, if there was a class like [Psychiatrist], healing mental trauma would probably be much easier than back on Earth. As long as Alice’s plan to break Samantha’s kinetic seed worked out, Samantha should be able to get her life back on track even after this horrible run-in with the Society.

While the [Archers] kept an eye on the group’s surroundings, Ethan quickly walked over to Samantha and began inspecting her injuries. After that, he used organic seed to heal Samantha’s more egregious injuries. Alice used {Lesser Organic Vision} to watch as Samantha’s mage core grew back. Strands of flesh quickly sprung out of Samantha’s internal organs and wriggled their way into the spot where Samantha’s Mage core was supposed to be, rebuilding the Mage core the Society had cut out as Ethan’s magic tried to make Samantha’s body whole again.

Samantha’s healing treatment seemed to be going well. Her damaged skin and the various sores and cuts on her body began to heal up, and the girl was clearly recovering from the physical injuries she had suffered over the past few days. However, once Samantha’s Mage core was mostly restored, Samantha’s body immediately stopped getting better, and instead began to rapidly deteriorate. Her strange kinetic seed reappeared inside of her body as her mage core finished regenerating, and the process of healing suddenly seemed to reverse completely. Within moments, Samantha’s body began to grow weaker, and even while unconscious Samantha began coughing and shivering. Ethan frowned, then glanced at Alice, who also frowned as she observed Samantha’s body. Ethan turned to Alice again and shook his head.

“How odd. And interesting,” he said. “I’ll have to put fully healing her on hold. Sorry that I can’t fully heal her right now,” he said, giving Alice a regretful frown. At the same time, a tendril of Ethan’s organic mana wormed its way behind Samantha’s heart and destroyed the Mage core he had just regenerated. Within moments, the strange symptoms of illness that had begun spreading through Samantha’s body quickly disappeared, and her condition rapidly improved again.

“It’s not a big deal,” said Alice. “We can look at her more closely after we finish clearing out the Society base,” said Alice. She could tell that as long as Samantha’s Mage core remained missing, her body seemed to be in decent shape after Ethan’s healing. While Samantha definitely needed medical treatment, it wasn’t urgent. Ethan turned to one of the [Archers].

“There seems to be something wrong with her Mage core. I can’t figure out what it is, and I’ll take a closer look at her later. Take her out of this place and get her to a healer so they can double check my work, but make sure to tell them not to fix her Mage core for now. I’ll treat her later, and maybe I can teach my new apprentice a bit about some of the more interesting interactions between healing and organic mana. Even if she’s mostly battle oriented, it never hurts to know a bit more about healing too, right?” Ethan gave the [Archer] a friendly grin before handing the [Archer] in question Samantha. The [Archer] nodded, before heading back out of the base through the path the group had already taken.

After that, Ethan turned back to Alice, and a rainbow Perk shimmered into existence around the two of them.

“Do you have any thoughts on what the Society was doing to her?” He asked, looking at the two Samantha Mage Cores visible on the table nearby. “Honestly, if you hadn’t given me the hint that her Mage Core had a problem during our first conversation, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out why her condition deteriorated just now. I might have accidentally killed her while trying to heal her. The problems Samantha is experiencing are very unique...”

Alice nodded. She was a bit surprised that Ethan had such a hard time finding the problems with Samantha’s mage core, but without the ability to see magic seeds and Alice’s extensive familiarity with weird and broken magic seeds, it would indeed be hard to find out why Samantha was sick. If anything, she was more surprised by the fact that the Society of Starry Eyes had tracked down Samantha and seemed to be heading in the right direction with their research. “I expect that the Society explicitly targeted Samantha, after seeing all of this. They were probably interested in whatever error cropped up while Samantha was forming her Magic seed, and found the opportunity to kidnap her and study the anomaly,” said Alice, wincing as she looked at Samantha’s Mage cores on the table and imagined what it must have felt like to have them cut out. “I wasn’t sure before, but I can see both of her mage cores have the same weird magic seed problem Samantha originally did, and I can’t think of any other reason why they would so specifically target Samantha and continuously cut out her mage core to study. I’m not sure how they found out that she has a malformed magic seed, but it’s obvious that they were targeting her specifically because of her abnormality.”

Ethan frowned. “Perhaps they’re aware of what a malformed magic seed looks like from other cases, and kidnapped Samantha after learning of her condition? That would indicate that they’ve seen other cases, and have at least a good guess what they’re looking at…” He sighed, shaking his head. “I’ll look through the documents we’ve seized after we return to Metsel. Hopefully they’ll shed more light on what the Society was doing here.” Then, he seemed to focus on Samantha’s plight again, as he turned back to Samantha’s Mage cores on the table.

“Do you have a plan to help her? I can absolutely just leave her with no Mage Core and it seems like that’ll keep her sickness from cropping back up, but it would also mean the end of her future as a Mage. Since her family wasn’t exactly wealthy even with a Mage, they would be pretty hard hit financially, but I can definitely help you cover the issue if you have no ideas…”

Alice shook her head. “I’ve mentioned before that I had the ability to see inside of Mage Cores, but I have a few other weird abilities that come from my Perks and Achievements. One should help fix Samantha’s issue, and also remove any interest the Society might have towards her. I’ll need her permission, though, and I’ll also want your help covering it up.”

“That’s fine. We’ll talk later, once we finish dealing with the rest of the Society base,” said Ethan.

After that, the group continued wandering through the Society base. They found another Society member guarding a larger set of prisoners, this one comprised of a dozen children who were locked up in a room. Ethan almost immediately killed the Society member, before the group rescued the kids. Luckily, the Illvarian army seemed to have gotten there before anything happened to this group of children, so the ones in this room were relatively unscathed so far. After that, the group continued sweeping through the base, rescuing prisoners where they found them, administering first aid where needed, grabbing documents when available, and dealing with the last couple Society members in the base. A few of the Society members weren’t accounted for no matter where the group looked, leading Ethan to believe that they had either hidden themselves very well or had somehow escaped the encirclement of Ethan’s troops and Apprentices. It was unfortunate that a few of them escaped, but there was ultimately nothing that could be done about it. Apart from the groups of people the group rescued, there were also some prisoners who were dead, either having been torn apart or experienced some level of organ failure as a result of the experiments they had been subjected to. The number of corpses and the skeletons of former prisoners in the base numbered a horrifying amount as the group moved from room to room, and Alice also saw some mid-progress experiments she would never forget. Some of the victims of those experiments were still able to be rescued, and some… weren’t.

When they finished sweeping through the base, another hour or two had passed. Ethan quickly regrouped with the rest of the small army outside of the base, which had turned into something of a makeshift medical camp as the Illvarian forces tried to treat and accommodate the people who had been recovered from the Society base and were still alive. Ethan nodded to the [Commander] who had led most of the fight, and a rainbow Perk sprang into existence around the two before they started talking again. A few minutes later, the Perk disappeared, and Alice could hear the two speaking again.

“I’ll do as you say, Honored Immortal,” said the [Commander] with a nod.

“Good. Keep me updated on progress if you find anything new later on,” said Ethan, before nodding. The [Commander] kept around thirty troops as they began to look over the base again. The remainder of the [Soldiers] formed around Ethan, before the group began to regroup around Ethan instead.

With the prisoners rescued, the Society members captured or killed, and Ethan having swiped almost all of the research documents, the group headed back towards Metsel.

* * *

During the walk back to Metsel, Alice finally dealt with all of the System notifications she had been ignoring during the fight and the walk through the Society base.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder 31 -> 38, Survivor 53 -> 54, Explorer of Magic 63 -> 66

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Dexterity 115 -> 116, Perception 135 -> 136, Magic 159 -> 161

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Kinetic Manipulation 68 -> 69, Mana control 50 -> 51, Mana Precision 50 -> 51, Kinetic Force 47 -> 49, Projectile Awareness 29 -> 32, Divided Attention 31 -> 33, Dodge 28 -> 29

Alice took note of her level ups first, especially the two new Perk slots she had gained. However, in addition to her simple level up notifications, there was a rather more interesting notification also waiting for her.

You have gained an achievement!

Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

As a talented combat-specialized Mage who is apprenticed to Ethan, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds, you participated in one of the battles between Illvaria and the Society of Starry Eyes, and played a notable role in securing victory for your side. Even if you didn’t distinguish yourself as an MVP of the battle, you performed above and beyond what would be expected of you for your age group. Illvaria is watching you!

+30 Class Experience to your ‘primary’ Magic-related class (Explorer of Magic), +15% Class Experience to all Kinetic Magic related classes. The effect of the {Divided Attention} Skill is increased by approximately 50%.

Alice nodded, taking a few moments to look over the Achievement. She was happy to receive a new Achievement, because no matter how minor the bonuses were, a new Achievement didn’t cost her any Perk slots. However, the description for this Achievement was… unusual. Specifically, the Achievement referred to her as a ‘talented combat-specialized Mage, which seemed blatantly incorrect. Even if Alice was getting better at fighting, she was a researcher first and foremost, with combat being more of an afterthought based on her real world circumstances and the danger the Society potentially posed to her. She was nowhere close to being ‘combat specialized.’ For the Achievement to describe her as combat-specialized seemed… a little strange. Alice sighed, before shaking her head and dismissing the Achievement. Even if the Achievement’s word choice seemed to take Ethan’s marketing of Alice’s abilities a bit more seriously than Alice expected, at the end of the day it didn’t seem to matter. Alice filed away the oddity of this Achievement description for later, when she had more ideas to put together, and then focused on the actual benefits of the Achievement.

Levelling speed was pretty self-explanatory, but boosting the effect of the {Divided Attention} skill was a rather interesting effect. {Divided Attention} was a Skill Illa had originally advised Alice to pick up, since it gave Mages a much easier time picking up Perks that gave them more mana tendrils, and could even directly give a Mage another magic tendril if they reached a high enough level with the skill.

Previously, Alice hadn’t really been paying careful attention to her abilities after the battle, since she had practically no mana left anyway, but now that she had recovered a little bit during the march back to Metsel…

Alice tried dividing her mana tendrils out, and realized with some surprise that she could, just barely, control five mana tendrils at once instead of four now. Her control over her final mana tendril was rather tenuous, and it was nowhere near as flexible as her ‘main’ four mana tendrils. However, boosting the effect of her {Divided Attention} Skill had definitely given her the ability to control one more mana tendril than before. She might need a few more points in the Skill before she fully gained control of her new tendril, but it was still a free magic tendril.

Alice grinned to herself, before looking at her two new Perk slots.

She didn’t end up thinking too much after looking over her choices for [Kinetic Manabinder]. She had gained one new mana tendril, but the course of the fight with the Society had shown Alice just how much more flexibility and power a Kinetic Mage with more mana tendrils had. As far as she could tell, her two biggest weaknesses were the inability to deal with tightly packed mixes of friendly and hostile people, and lack of mana tendrils. Since she saw a perk that let her address one of those problems, Alice snapped it up without thinking much.

Kinetic Tendrils

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder class level 35 or greater, Magic Stat 150 or higher, Intelligence Stat 150 or higher

Increase the number of mana tendrils you can control by 2

The amount of Mana Tendrils Alice could control suddenly increased from four to seven in the aftermath of a single battle. Even if her control over her final mana tendril was shaky, she could control six of her mana tendrils extremely fluidly and effectively, which would make her far more effective against other powerful combatants or large quantities of combatants in the future. Alice grinned to herself. Even if the Perk wasn’t particularly ‘exciting,’ sometimes the best upgrades were simple ones. And nearly doubling the number of mana tendrils she could control in the aftermath of a single battle dramatically increased her baseline combat abilities.

Then, Alice turned to the Perk from her [Explorer of Magic] Class. Unlike her first Perk choice, this one was much more complicated, because she also needed to figure out whether she wanted a new Perk or whether she wanted to combine some of her older Perks to make them into something new.

Eventually, after looking over the new Perk options for level 65, Alice settled on another Perk combination, because it seemed more valuable than the new options available to her. She spent some time fiddling with menus and trying to figure out what she needed, before she combined {Magic Proficiency} and {Mana Construct Modelling}. She hoped that the combination of the two Perks might help her make a System Magic seed, since her first attempt at making a System magic seed had gone wrong in such strange ways that she wasn’t sure what all of the problems were yet.

Mana Construct Modelling

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 45 or higher, Unique Achievement related to the Exploration of the System

Allows you to temporarily 'break down' a complex mana construct into its constituent parts by creating a mental model of the construct in question. This will also inform you of all of the kinds of mana present in the mana construct in question. This is an extremely accurate MODEL which exists only in your thoughts. It will react to Perk analysis and projected mana manipulation accurately, but does not exist outside of your imagination.

Magic proficiency

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 5 or higher

Grants a greater level of intuitive control over your mana and its effects on the world around you, along with improved understanding of manipulating magic in general.

Magic Proficiency had become nearly wholly useless to Alice – it had originally been a very helpful training crutch, one that she had needed to adapt to using and manipulating Magic during her time in this world. However, by now Alice had spent several months training her Magic and using it almost every day. She no longer needed the small amount of help the Perk provided her, so she had no qualms at all about sacrificing the Perk.

{Mana Construct Modelling} was a Perk Alice was slightly more hesitant to throw away, since it was still sometimes useful for helping her research new Enchantments and helping her figure out how strange and complicated mana constructs worked. However, the usefulness of the Perk was also starting to drop off, and the amount of help the Perk could provide was getting lower and lower as Alice got more and more in-depth while researching strange and obscure topics. Since that was the case, Alice hoped combining the two might provide her with a more helpful combination of the traits of both Perks, hopefully letting her take another step towards creating a working System magic seed.

Intuitive Magic Modelling (Tier 2 Perk, level 65 Explorer of Magic) (Level 5 Explorer of Magic Perk + Level 45 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Magic Proficiency + Mana Construct Modeling sacrificed to create this Perk.

Note: Because this Perk will drastically alter the way you perceive the world, you must take a few hours of time to ‘update’ your perception. Until you activate this Perk and update your senses, the Perk will do nothing. It is strongly recommended you start this process before you go to sleep, as trying to process your changing senses while awake will be highly unpleasant and will seriously impact your sense of balance.

You intuitively mentally ‘model’ any form of mana within ten meters of you, whether they are complex mana constructs, forms of mana, or enchantments. You will intuitively know what kinds of mana they are made of and have an intuitive understanding of some of the simpler components of anything you model. In short, this will give you some level of understanding of what an enchantment or mana construct is, how it works, and what it does, although it won’t feed you information beyond a certain level of complexity.

After Alice saw her upgraded Perk, she felt she had probably made the right decision. She wouldn’t know until tomorrow, since she planned to ‘update’ her senses tonight, but being able to understand the composition of all nearby enchantments, as well as intuitively understanding how simple parts of enchantments worked would make learning new enchantments much easier. She wasn’t entirely sure whether this Perk would be helpful in making a System magic seed, since she couldn’t use the Perk yet, but she retained at least some hope that the Perk would be useful for more than just enchantment analysis. Of course, she still needed to actually update her senses, so she shelved her thoughts about her new Perk and resolved to investigate it more thoroughly tomorrow.

Once Alice was done dealing with her Perks, she caught up with Ethan, and after Ethan put up a Perk to deal with eavesdroppers Alice quickly discussed her plans and ideas for how to fix Samantha’s problem, and what Alice was hoping Ethan would help her with. Ethan agreed, and with a rudimentary plan for healing Samantha in place Alice felt a weight fall off of her shoulders.

When the group arrived in Metsel, most of the [Soldiers] dispersed, returning to their original squads, dealing with administrative work, or otherwise finding a place to drink themselves into oblivion or chase [Barmaids] or [Waiters]. Some groups of [Soldiers] instead got the less enjoyable task of escorting the captured Society members to prison, where they would await trial. Meanwhile, Ethan brought Alice and the unconscious Samantha back to a small mansion in the inner circle of the city. Alice assumed this was either Ethan’s house or a research base he owned, but because she was focused on Samantha she didn’t spend much time paying attention to her surroundings. The most important thing she noticed about Ethan’s property was that it was mostly uninhabited – there were a few [Maids] keeping the place clean, but the small mansion was very quiet overall.

Upon entering the house, Ethan laid Samantha down on a cot in one of the rooms. Then, Ethan placed a hand on Samantha’s head, and rainbow mana colored his eyes as he investigated Samantha. Unlike the rushed healing job at the Society Base, this time Ethan was very careful, the Perk he was using poking through Samantha’s body as Ethan tried to get an idea what was wrong with her. Finally, he turned back towards Alice.

“Even with much slower and more detailed Perks, I can’t see her magic seeds or figure out what’s wrong at all. If I hadn’t seen it myself, I would have thought she just needed her magic core healed up, and I wouldn’t have any idea that she had other problems on top of that. I must admit, I find myself increasingly curious what kind of information you can see with your specialized Achievements and Perks, Lady Alice,” said Ethan, his eyes aglow with curiosity. Finally, he sighed. “Is there anything we should do before waking her up? She might freak out or panic if we try to put her asleep after this, so if there are any medical procedures you think would help your treatment plan, let me know so I can do them now. I can’t help you much with this treatment, sadly, although since you’ve already picked up an apprentice healing license and I’m supervising you there won’t be any legal issues even if you fail to heal her. But apart from that, I can’t help here.”

Alice shook her head. “I don’t need anything from you, medically speaking. I can directly solve the problem, I just need the patient to consent to my actions first.”

“I don’t detect any problematic Perks that will backfire if I wake her up now. Are you sure you’re ready for her to be awake?”

Alice nodded.

Ethan placed his index finger on Samantha’s forehead before he sent a jolt of organic mana towards Samantha’s brain. Within a few moments, Samantha’s eyelids began to flutter. Alice took a deep breath, feeding her ideas into {Safety Analysis} one final time as she prepared to heal her friend.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Also, on Patreon we just hit chapter 100. Triple digits! Wooooo. I thought it was neat anyway. Ahem.

Chapter 98

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” After Ethan’s Organic mana made its way into her brain, Samantha jerked awake with a scream. Alice took a step backwards as Samantha wildly thrashed around, and for a moment Alice was afraid that Samantha would fling herself off of the cot Ethan had placed her on and hurt herself. As Alice tried to figure out how to calm Samantha down, Samantha leapt off the cot and charged towards the door at top speed.

Ethan’s body lit up with rainbow mana, before a Perk enveloped the room. Suddenly, Alice felt an extraordinary sense of calm settle inside of her thoughts. It didn’t make her feel sleepy, or dull any of her mental faculties – however, it removed most of her emotions from her thoughts, allowing her to think calmly and clearly. Alice felt very strange after Ethan’s Perk was used – she could see how useful it was, but she also wasn’t sure if she liked having her emotions suddenly cut out of her thoughts like this. Even if she loved being able to think clearly, this felt oddly detached from the experience of being human. After a few moments of thought, Alice used {The Science of Mana Deprivation} to cut off Ethan’s Perk, isolating herself from the strange emotionless state.

Samantha’s reaction was far more noticeable than Alice’s mild discomfort. Her incredible panic disappeared completely, replaced with near total calmness in the span of a second. Her frantic flight quickly wound down, as she took another good look at Ethan and Alice. Then, she stopped moving, instead opting to eye both of them warily.

Influenced by Ethan’s calming Perk, Samantha’s eyes contained a trace of clarity and sanity again. However, Alice realized that Ethan’s Perk didn’t cut off emotions quite as cleanly as she had assumed. Samantha was clearly at least somewhat lucid again, but she still incredibly jittery, even after seeing Alice and realizing that her circumstances had changed. Her eyes were still wide and filled with panic, and although she had calmed down a bit, she still looked like she might spring into motion and flee again at any moment. However, as she looked at Alice, she finally managed to croak out a word.

“Alice?” She asked. Her voice had taken on a soft, pleading tone now, in stark contrast to the terror from earlier. Samantha sounded as if she didn’t quite believe in Alice’s existence.

Alice did her best to give Samantha a reassuring smile. “You’re safe now. We rescued you from the Society – you’re back in Metsel, in a property owned by my new mentor.”

Samantha’s eyes widened, as she seemed to realize she wasn’t dreaming. She reached out with one of her arms, before patting herself on the back. She shivered, before she started frantically clawing at her back, pressing her fingers against a certain spot near her spine over and over again. Then, with a manic fervor akin to someone drowning, she clawed at her heart.

“Is it… is it really over?” Samantha finally asked.

“It’s really over. You’re safe now, and we’ll make sure the Society can’t hurt you again,” said Ethan, giving Samantha a gentle smile. Unlike Alice, his words were reinforced by a Perk, but Samantha seemed to find Alice’s words and presence more reassuring than Ethan’s. She turned back to Alice.

“Am I really back in Metsel?”

Alice nodded. “You’re really back.”

Samantha shivered a bit more, but her fear was still heavily reduced by Ethan’s Perk, preventing her from falling into another full-blown panic attack. “Did you – how did you… I mean, what happened?”

“A lot happened in the past few days,” said Alice. “For one, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds has taken an interest in your wellbeing, which is a big part of the reason you were successfully rescued. A small army was put together to rescue you, as well as to deliver a heavy blow to the Society and inflict heavy damage on them. We succeeded in storming the Society base, where we rescued all of the prisoners in the base, including you, and dealt with all of the Society members we could find. It has been a few hours since then, and Honored Immortal and I just woke you up,” said Alice.

“Is… is that so,” said Samantha, still faintly trembling and jerking around from time to time, but finally starting to relax. She closed her eyes for a moment, before she suddenly snapped to attention. “Honored Immortal?” Samantha’s eyes widened as she gave Ethan another look.

Alice nodded again. “I would like to introduce you to my new mentor, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds. He helped me rescue you from the Society base, and was largely responsible for putting together the small army that made the rescue possible.”

Samantha finally stopped rubbing her spine and checking it for injuries, and then tried her best to perform a very clumsy, half-baked curtsy.

“Thank you for saving my life, honored Immortal,” she said. “I apologize for not recognizing you earlier – I’ve heard a lot of stories, but I don’t know what Immortals look like.” She paused for a moment, before glancing at Alice. “And… congratulations to you.”

Ethan simply nodded at her, maintaining his relaxed and reassuring smile. Now that Samantha had more time to process the situation, and had realized she was in the presence of an Immortal, she seemed to have calmed down much more. The traces of panic in her eyes started to completely fade away, and she no longer looked ready to bolt for the door the moment she saw an opportunity. After a few more moments, she calmed down enough to walk back towards the cot Ethan had originally placed her own. She sat down on the cot, and then took several deep breaths, slowly working to calm herself down more and more. Neither Alice nor Ethan interrupted her while Samantha slowly worked through what she had seen and experienced in the past few days, as well as the fact that she was suddenly free again. Then, finally, she opened her eyes and looked at Ethan again.

“Thank you for your assistance, Honored Immortal. I think I am able to react calmly, even without the calming Perk now. Would you be willing to remove it from me?”

Ethan thought about Samantha’s request for a moment, before he nodded. Alice noticed the rainbow mana in the room quickly disperse. She stopped using {The Science of Mana Deprivation}, and then carefully observed Samantha to see if anything went wrong.

Samantha’s hand started trembling after Ethan’s Perk disappeared. Alice began readying herself to stop Samantha if she made another charge for the door, but after a few moments of trembling and shivering, Samantha started to calm down again. After a few minutes, Samantha finally had her actions back under control. Then, she started to speak again.

“Why isn’t – ah. I don’t mean to be ungrateful, and I really, really want to thank you for saving me. But why is my Mage core still gone? Do you not have a way to regrow it, or is it a matter of medical expenses, or… I can definitely borrow some money if you want payment or something, but I just don’t understand…” Samantha trailed off, her expression and phrasing increasingly awkward as she tried to figure out how to phrase her question in a way that didn’t sound like she was questioning an Immortal. Ethan didn’t seem to particularly care, possibly because he was treating her as a patient right now, but Samantha certainly seemed unsure how to handle the situation.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Alice, turning to Ethan. If she wanted to permanently treat Samantha, she would need to use her ability to destroy magic seeds, but this ability would definitely hint to the Society that something was wrong with Alice’s Perks. Even though the Perk was completely useless in combat, Alice was incredibly afraid to expose it, since it hinted at Alice getting some rather unusual Achievements behind the scenes. But she also needed permission for it to work, meaning Samantha would at least need to understand what was about to happen and then consciously consent to it. Ethan, seeing Alice hesitate, took over the conversation, following the general ideas the two had discussed while walking back to Metsel.

“One of the reasons the Society targeted you is because there are a few rather interesting abnormalities in your Mage Core. We haven’t gone over their research documents fully yet, but we have a pretty good guess why they targeted you in the first place,” said Ethan, completely neglecting to mention the fact that they hadn’t read the Society research documents at all yet. As long as he implied that the reason they knew about Samantha’s abnormalities was because of the Society’s research documents, Samantha would have far fewer questions, and Ethan’s statements would still pass a lie detection Perk as long as he didn’t explicitly lie. “Now, I have the ability to access a rather interesting and unique mixture of Perks and Achievements. Combined, these can remove the abnormality in your mage core permanently. This should prevent the Society from becoming interested in you after this. But we also need patient consent, or the Achievement just flat out won’t work,” said Ethan. “Adding on to this, were you getting increasingly sick for the week or so before the Society kidnapped you?”

Samantha nodded, before Ethan continued. “The abnormality in your mage core is the cause of that illness, and if the abnormality isn’t removed, it will continue to grow worse until you eventually die. For this reason, I think removing it would be the most beneficial course of action for you, both for the sake of your safety now and in the future. Of course, you can also simply refuse to have your mage core regenerated, or you could also try another solution if you feel that you would rather try something else. While I strongly advise you to consent to having your kinetic magic seed removed, it’s still ultimately your choice. What would you like to do?”

Samantha fell deep into thought for a few moments, before she frowned. “The reason I was getting sick was because of my Mage Core?”

“Well, not directly…” Ethan frowned, and Alice took over. She was the one who had been studying Mana, the System, and abnormalities in the most detail, so she had a much better understanding of the issues at hand than Ethan right now. Even if it was a little bit awkward for Alice to interject here as Ethan’s apprentice, Alice felt that it was important to give Samantha a clear understanding of the benefits and costs she would be paying by accepting Alice’s Perk usage.

“So, the most specific reason you were getting sick is actually because of your magic seed,” said Alice. “You made some sort of mistake while forming your kinetic magic seed, and as a result, it has caused you to become more and more ill over time. The Society seems to have targeted you because of this. Recently, they’ve been attracted to all sorts of abnormalities that are appearing, and since you had a problematic and easily noticed abnormality in your body, the Society explicitly targeted you in order to learn more. The idea of the Perk in question is to remove the problematic magic seed from your mage core, allowing you to either form your kinetic magic seed again, or form a different seed entirely, if that’s what you would prefer. Either way, without the messed up kinetic seed inside of your body, you should not only be free from the illness that has plagued you for the past week and a half, but also be free from further interference from the Society… hopefully,” Said Alice. She wasn’t entirely sure how the Society would react to Samantha suddenly losing all of her previous signs of being ill, but after they confirmed that Samantha no longer had a broken kinetic seed, they would hopefully leave her alone and redirect their attention towards Ethan, the apparent cause of Samantha’s recovery.

Samantha frowned.

“Why would I have a broken Kinetic Seed, though? I just made my kinetic seed the same way I’ve been told to form magic seeds. For that matter, I made it basically the same way I made my original organic seed. What caused my kinetic seed to come out broken?”

Alice frowned, trying to figure out whether there was any way she could broach the topic without discussing System mana and the mechanics behind the ‘god’ of one of the two major religions on this planet. After a moment, she sighed, and shook her head. She had no good way to explain why Samantha’s ‘normal’ process of forming a magic seed had gone so horribly wrong, at least not without putting herself in danger.

“Perhaps the Society knows. We haven’t finished looking through their documents yet, so it will be interesting to see their thoughts on the matter,” said Alice, avoiding directly answering the question.

Samantha, however, was falling even more deeply into thought. “I really can’t think of a single thing I did while forming my kinetic seed that would have led to a weird outcome. I mean, I did have a few Perks invested into my Organic seed, and I definitely wasn’t planning on working with a kinetic seed until I started running into walls while messing with my organic seed, but I still don’t really understand why I would have a malformed kinetic seed. It’s really weird…” Now that Samantha’s fear had started to disappear, her tendency to ramble was reasserting itself.

Alice tuned the girl out, trying to figure out a good way to convince the girl to accept the usage of the {Broken Seed} Perk, before turning to Ethan for help.

Ethan, catching her glance, turned to Samantha, and cleared his throat. Even Samantha’s chatterbox tendencies disappeared when faced with an Immortal, leaving her awkwardly sitting on the cot and realizing she had started going off on a tangent.

“While we may not know the exact reason you formed a strange Kinetic Seed, Lady Samantha, it is still a fact that you seem to have one such broken seed. Would you be willing to consent to a Perk breaking down the flawed seed? It would be best if you were unconscious during the process, but since we need consent for the Perk to work, we woke you up first. Are you willing to lose your kinetic seed?”

Samantha only hesitated for a moment, before she furiously nodded.

“If it can erase the Society from my life, and doing this will make me no longer sick, I can lose my kinetic seed. Will it be dangerous if I reform it afterwards?”

“It shouldn’t be, but we aren’t entirely sure yet, so it’s up to you if you want to risk forming another kinetic seed,” said Alice.

Ethan smiled at Samantha, redirecting her attention to him. “Good. Now that we’ve obtained your consent, I’m going to put you back to sleep. Just stay calm. When you wake up, you’ll be safe, and all of this will hopefully be behind you…” Samantha laid down on the cot, taking a moment to get comfortable, before Ethan placed his finger on her forehead. A burst of Organic Mana made its way to her brain, and five seconds later Samantha was asleep. Then, Ethan quickly used a combination of Perks and organic mana to regrow Samantha’s mage core. With her mage core regrown, and her broken kinetic seed back inside of her body, Samantha’s complexion began to rapidly get worse and worse, as signs of her previous illness flooded back into her body.

“It’s your turn, Lady Alice,” said Ethan.

Alice quickly stepped up to Samantha and activated {Broken Seed}. Since Samantha had given Ethan and Alice permission to break down her Kinetic Seed, {Broken Seed} didn’t encounter any problems. Rainbow mana surged out of Alice’s body, before it wormed its way into Samantha’s mana core and shattered her kinetic seed. The signs of Samantha’s illness, which had been spreading throughout her body, rapidly disappeared again.

“How interesting,” said Ethan, watching as Samantha’s body regained its former vitality and shrugged off its sickly complexion. “I can’t see magic seeds at all, but I can still see the effects of adding or removing a broken magic seed so easily. And yet, I can’t figure out what’s happening behind the scenes at all.”

He turned towards Alice, before giving her a nod. “Well done. Even if I don’t have the ability to see what’s happening, this is still quite fascinating. I can see her getting better, even if I don’t have the ability to observe the cause.” he trailed off, before giving Samantha another glance. “Do you want to be around when I wake her up again?”

Alice frowned, thinking for a moment, before she shrugged. “I think it’s best if I’m not in the room when she wakes up. The fact that I’ve managed to apprentice myself to an Immortal should be surprising for her, but not a cause for her or anyone else to raise eyebrows. People who are familiar with me already know that I have a couple high rarity Achievements, and that I’ve done a few interesting things with research. I even published a research paper through my magic academy’s library, so people might think I caught your attention with that, and although it does slightly clash with my current image of a battle specialist, my display during the fight at the Society base should make people think I’m at least reasonably battle-oriented. However, if I’m seen as being too actively involved in the healing process, the Society might catch on to the fact that something is wrong with me, since there are already a few points of oddity they could pick up on. Even if that might still happen eventually, it’s best that it happens as late as possible, so I have as much time to grow as possible.”

Ethan nodded. “Well reasoned! I was worried you might want to stick around and show off, and I was prepared to give you a lecture if you asked to stick around. At least you’ve got your head screwed on properly. Since Samantha knows you’ve become an apprentice of mine, go shuffle some papers around in one of the other rooms – I’ll crack the door open so that Samantha can catch a glimpse of you doing all of the boring and mundane work I’m ‘too busy and important to deal with.’ It’ll make it look like you’ve been dealing with paperwork since shortly after I healed her, and it should also cause Samantha to dismiss your presence in this incident. If all goes well, Samantha won’t suspect a thing. I’ll wake her up in a few minutes and get one of the [Maids] to escort her out of the building, and I’ll make sure she catches a glimpse of you working hard on her way out.”

“Thank you for your assistance, Honored Immortal,” said Alice, taking a stack of documents they had taken from the Society Base. Ethan pointed out a room for Alice to occupy, before he ‘set the scene’ by cracking the door open with a mana tendril. Alice quickly pulled over a chair from the corner of the room, before she started shuffling through the Society documents they had taken from the base.

Alice began seriously reading through the documents. Even though a large part of the reason she was going through the documents was to fool Samantha, Alice was genuinely curious to know what the Society had been learning about and researching. With the help of {Super Speed Reading}, Alice was able to process the documents at an incredible speed, allowing her to read and analyze information far more quickly than before.

However, as Alice read through the documents, she began to frown.

The documents she was reading through were a great deal more concerning than she had thought they would be. After reading through the notes she had procured from the Society group she had fought during the hunting expedition, Alice had been prepared for a wide variety of things. Horrifying human experiments, for example, or records of all sorts of other atrocities. Perhaps records of modifying and selling slaves to the Sigmusi Empire. However, what she found inside of the documents was rather different.

It was a record of various phenomena the Society of Starry Eyes was concerned about. It detailed three separate types of occurrence, and requested that any operatives take whatever measures they could to find out more about them.

First, the phenomenon of children below the age of six acquiring classes for unknown reasons well before the time they should have access to the System.

Second, the increasingly frequent occurrence of people forming broken magic seeds, leading to illness and eventual death, along with all sorts of other bizarre medical and magical health problems.

And third, the thirteen recent cases of random outbursts of dimensional broken mana. Most of them had occurred away from human civilization, making them relatively unknown so far, but Alice quickly noticed that the Society was extremely meticulous about cataloguing each and every instance of broken dimensional mana suddenly flooding an area. And the outbursts of dimensional mana were getting increasingly frequent. The Society’s first records indicated that the dimensional mana outbreaks had mostly occurred in areas with higher mana density, but as time passed, they were starting to become both more frequent, and appear in lower and lower mana densities.

Alice felt a prickling suspicion when she looked over the Society’s records of dimensional mana outbreaks. A flood of strange dimensional mana sounded a lot like what she had experienced when she had been dragged into this world. And even though she didn’t know exactly what these occurrences meant, by looking at the Society’s documents, and then combining it with her own experiences and investigations, Alice was becoming increasingly aware of one fact.

Something was going very, very wrong in this world behind the scenes. And it was getting worse by the month.

A note from acaswell

My mother had a surgery today. Nothing serious, but it went well, which is nice. Random life updates.

Reminder to those who haven’t read my earlier Author’s Notes, or just forgot – I’ll be going on vacation for 2 weeks starting AFTER the chapter release on Friday next week. So next week’s chapter will release as normal, and then no chapters for 2 weeks.

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Chapter 99

As Alice continued to look through the Society’s documents, she found more and more records of strange medical cases popping up recently. The Society’s later documents did include some of the things Alice was expecting – namely, records of horrifying experiments, kidnappings, and people’s agonizing deaths after being kidnapped and used as experimental subjects. However, the documents also detailed, more than anything else, the Society’s attempts to figure out if there was a pattern to what the Society called ‘dimensional floods.’ They had recently spent a great deal of time documenting and analyzing every single outbreak they were aware of, trying to catalogue each one and cross-reference them against maps, times, and mana densities in order to find out when and how they occurred.

Alice also realized that the Society was terrified of this phenomenon. If anything, the Society seemed to place dimensional floods at a higher level of importance than even the preservation of their research bases and personnel. Their study of dimensional floods was reaching a point where it was genuinely harmful to the Society to obsess over it so much. They were forcing uninterested and unspecialized personnel into looking into this matter, even when it was directly detrimental to the Society. Since many of the Mages who joined the Society from around the world did so primarily to have an easy method to gain Levels and easy money, at the cost of their morals, this was causing the Society to face internal problems. However, the higher ups of the Society didn’t care, and kept pushing their way through as they gathered as much information as they could about dimensional floods.

Alice’s understanding of the inner workings of the Society wasn’t very good, so she couldn’t figure out why they were behaving the way they did. She shrugged, and put aside the Society’s documents regarding their long term objectives after reading through all of them. Her lack of understanding didn’t change the parts that interested her, at least.

Namely, dimensional floods. A dimensional flood sounded… remarkably similar to the sudden teleportation that had dragged her to this world. While Alice hadn’t been able to see mana when she first came to this world, when she had gone back to investigate the area with Illa later, it had basically been an ocean of purple mana. While Alice hadn’t seen any of these ‘dimensional floods’ firsthand, they certainly sounded like another teleportation point between this world and her original world. Alice wondered if any other people like her, who had been dragged to this dimension, or if she was still alone. When she had first arrived, Illa had confirmed that she had never heard of an {Outworlder}. However, if random dimensional gates were starting to pop up left and right, it was possible that other people from Earth might get dumped into this world sooner or later.

However, dimensional mana floods suddenly appearing out of nowhere was also awful news for most residents of this world. Mana baptisms were huge threats to people’s lives, and an entire area suddenly being flooded with dimensional mana that most people couldn’t see or protect themselves from was even more dangerous than an invisible volcano suddenly erupting in the middle of town. Most people wouldn’t even realize what was happening unless there was a Mage nearby to warn them of the danger.

Alice felt that she needed to get a dimensional seed as soon as possible, so that she could get a better understanding of these dimensional floods. Previously, getting a permit to study dimensional mana had been a huge hurdle for her, but with dimensional floods becoming increasingly common the Illvarian government may become less strict about dimensional mana studies.

Alice made a mental note to mention this to Ethan later, since he would know how to add the proper ‘spin’ to Alice’s hopes of getting a dimensional magic permit, and then turned her attention back to the other Society documents.

Alice continued to parse through the documents as minutes passed by. As she continued to browse through the documents, however, Alice got a sudden, seemingly random System notification.

You have gained an achievement!

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7)

You have cured a medical condition which few, if any, people know how to treat. You have made an extraordinary contribution to the medical world!

+30% Mana Conversion Ratio for your Healing and Organic Magic seeds. Class experience to {Organic Mage} class is increased by 100%. Growth of the [Magic] Stat is increased by 50%. When using Magic, you can ignore a moderate amount of mana resistance.

Alice frowned. Why had the System taken so long to give her this Achievement? When she hadn’t gotten an Achievement for healing Samantha earlier, she had simply assumed she wasn’t going to get a reward and moved on. However, the fact the System had given her the Achievement several minutes late felt very odd to her.

She frowned, thinking back to the behavior of the System over the past few months. Recently, there had been a lot of problems with the way the System interacted with the world. The assistance the System usually provided to people forming their magic seeds was occasionally breaking down behind the scenes, for one thing. Alice had also noticed Boris getting access to his Status Screen far in advance, and the Society had noted down several other cases of children like Boris appearing throughout the world. Since the System was experiencing strange problems left and right, Alice wasn’t sure if the strange delay between her curing Samantha and her receiving a new Achievement was another manifestation of the System’s increasing problems. Even the Society hadn’t noted anything odd about Achievements yet. Was this due to the problem with Achievements being recent? Alternately, the strange delay could be some sort of hint about the true nature of Achievements, similar to how the odd way Class Seeds absorbed mana seemed to be a hint about how Class Seeds actually worked.

Unfortunately, Achievements were probably the part of the System Alice understood the least out of all of the components of her Status Screen. She was starting to get a rough idea how some parts of ‘Classes’ worked, and she had a good understanding of Attributes. However, her understanding of Achievements was still rather weak.

A few seconds later, another popup appeared. This one, at least, was considerably less oddly timed.

You have unlocked the class Student of Organic Magic as a result of having an Organic magic seed at 40% mana conversion or higher, having at least a rudimentary understanding of organic manipulation, and having trained under an [Organic Mage] for at least 5 hours. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

You do not have any primary class slots available. Class automatically added to secondary classes.

Alice felt the urge to grin as she got another useful secondary class. Even though secondary classes weren’t particularly powerful, having more never hurt. And {Organic Mage} actually had a few Perks she might find useful in the future. In particular, she was aware that the class had Perks that could allow one to see things about other people’s bodies, as well as improving methods of healing people with organic mana. The {Lesser Organic Vision} she had picked up from her [Scholar] class already gave her some useful organic vision, but it never hurt to have more options.

After dealing with her oddly timed System notifications, Alice heard Samantha slowly walking through Ethan’s mansion, guided by a [Maid]. She ignored the sound as the pair passed by the room Alice was sorting files in, and soon enough, the [Maid] and Samantha continued past her, before exiting the mansion.

Ethan walked into the room where Alice was sorting documents a few minutes later.

“I admit, I wasn’t sure if you would actually sort through the documents. You don’t have to if you don’t want to, you know. I have a few Perks that make reading very easy for me,” said Ethan, absently picking up a few of the documents Alice had set aside for him to look at. “I do, however, appreciate the help.”

“I’m also interested in seeing what the Society is up to,” said Alice. “After all, I keep running into them recently.”

“Fair enough,” said Ethan, thumbing through the documents in his hands. “Oh, how strange…” Ethan began speeding up his reading, before he began frowning and flipping through more and more pages of documents. Finally, he turned back towards Alice. “This is… concerning. I see why you set those particular documents aside. I’m beginning to get a better grasp of why the Society is acting so crazy recently. I don’t understand all of the logic behind their actions, but I have a better idea why...” Ethan finally sighed, before falling silent. Apparently, whatever he was seeing concerned him enough that he wasn’t even willing to comment on what he was reading anymore. Instead, he simply focused on flipping through the Society’s documents as quickly as he could.

With the help of {Super Speed Reading}, after an hour Alice was over halfway through the entire stack of documents, even though it probably would have taken her at least a day to read the same amount of words back on Earth. Then, Ethan set down his documents and stood up. Alice eyed the pile of paper in front of him, and realized that he had finished reading everything. Alice remembered an issue she had wanted to bring up with Ethan before he left, so she quickly memorized the part of the document she had been reading before she spoke to Ethan.

“Do you think you could use these documents to prop up my request for a dimensional magic seed permit?” Asked Alice. “I know you originally said it would be really hard, and it might be easier if I produced some results with my research, but…” Alice gestured towards the documents the two had found in the Society base, especially those discussing dimensional floods. “I am beginning to think there are some rather urgent problems cropping up recently, and if Illvaria doesn’t start studying dimensional magic on a larger scale than now, it might be left very vulnerable to catastrophes in the future.”

Ethan paused, frowning as he eyed the documents again. He gave Alice a rueful chuckle, before shrugging. “Maybe? It’s worth a shot, at least. I’ll see what I can do. But I make no promises.” Alice nodded. It was as good as she was likely to get. After that, Ethan left the room, and Alice continued scanning through Society documents.

Alice, for her part, began putting the documents back in order after she finished reading through everything. She wasn’t sure if Ethan still needed the documents, so she decided to leave them in his mansion instead of shoving them into her storage Perk. As she stepped out of the door, she was surprised to encounter a [Maid] standing just outside of the door, who greeted her with a curtsy.

“Lady Alice,” said the [Maid]. “Honored Immortal Ethan has instructed me to wait until you finished reading. He has advised you to sleep in this mansion for the night, if you don’t have a pressing reason to leave. The Society isn’t likely to launch an attack against you in the city, but after Lady Samantha was kidnapped, we can never be entirely sure what their actions will be. Thus, Honored Immortal Ethan felt it was best to keep you nearby, so that he could personally protect you in the case of your [Hidden Bodyguard] failing. Few are foolish enough to pick a fight with a combat-oriented Immortal, so you will be safer here.” The [Maid] paused. “However, he also instructed me to inform you that staying in this mansion is optional. You are free to do whatever you feel is best, he is simply offering his recommendation.”

Alice thought about Ethan’s suggestion for a moment, before she shrugged. While she and Ethan had done their best to cover up any of Alice’s more notable research-related abilities, there were plenty of smaller holes in Ethan’s story about her being a ‘combat oriented’ Mage. It would probably take some investigation before the Society realized Alice’s real focus, but it would probably happen sooner or later. If that was the case, it didn’t hurt to start taking precautions now.

She had nothing in particular that she needed to return to her Inn room for – after all, {Sample Collection} allowed her to store most of her stuff inside of her Perk, meaning she didn’t store very much in her room. Her room was just a place to sleep for the night.

“That sounds good to me,” said Alice, after a few moments of thought. “Does Honored Immortal have a room prepared for me?”

“Yes. Please follow me,” said the [Maid]. Alice was quickly led to a luxurious room, where the [Maid] gave her a late dinner. Alice quickly ate, before activating {Intuitive Mana Modelling} so that her senses would finally finish upgrading. Then, she went to sleep.

* * *

When Alice woke up the next day, her perception of the entire world felt completely different from before. It was as if previously she had only been seeing the world in black and white, and suddenly her vision was upgraded to full color vision. She could now sense every single speck of mana in her surroundings, no matter how minute, and could get a sense for what kind of mana they were. It was like the vision {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision} granted her, which had allowed her to see in all directions, but it was dozens of times more detailed and useful. Alice was sure that if anyone stepped within ten meters of her, she would know. And with the help of her other Achievements and Perks, she would be able to guess their level, whether or not they were Mage, and would even potentially know what kind of focus their classes had. This Perk gave Alice a level of observation that most weaker Stealth Perks would have a hard time working around. She now had a level of protection against [Assassins] and any would-be kidnappers that she had never possessed before, meaning that the Perk was already an incredibly valuable addition to her Status Screen. Since Alice was now more sensitive to mana than ever before, and had plenty of Perks boosting her ability to observe things other people couldn’t see, Alice should be able to shut off most attacks as long as she reacted quickly enough. Combined with {The Science of Mana Deprivation}, Alice would even be able to cut off Perks other people tried to use against her, which was a fascinating thought.

However, {Intuitive Mana Modelling} didn’t just make Alice functionally immune to most lower level Stealth Perks and most covert attacks. It made it far easier for Alice to understand enchantments in her surroundings, just as she had hoped it would. It didn’t make it possible for her to replicate a new enchantment the first time she saw it, or anything quite that exaggerated – however, if Alice was studying a new enchantment and trying to replicate it, she could probably learn the new enchantment in half the time it would have previously taken her. The Perk’s information wasn’t quite as detailed as she would have liked, but it was still certainly helpful.

But those two upgrades paled in comparison to a third, more important use for her Perk. Alice was able to view System mana in her surroundings with far greater clarity than she had ever been able to before. However, the way the Perk fed her information about System mana made it hard Alice to sort out what she was seeing – it was like trying to look at the sun, and describe a couple individual rays of sunlight. There was too much information to process at once. Alice frowned, trying to figure out what her new Perk was telling her. If there was one thing she was quickly realizing, it was that System mana was much more complex than she had previously imagined.

“Lady Alice, here is your breakfast,” said a [Maid], breaking Alice out of her thoughts as she set down a tray of food.

Alice gave the tray of food the [Maid] had set on the table a single glance, then began shoveling whatever food was in front of her into her mouth. These foods all disappeared into her stomach, with Alice completely missing the efforts a level 90 chef had put into the meal as she tried to figure out what System mana was.

Finally, as Alice started to wrap her head around the flood of information, she realized something. Something she never would have considered, and probably never would have noticed if she hadn’t already spent months studying the System and the way it interacted with other types of mana.

The System mana that she saw in her surroundings wasn’t a type of mana. Or, perhaps more accurately, it wasn’t one type of mana. Kinetic mana, organic mana, etc. were all pure kinds of mana. If Alice were to compare mana types to vegetables, pure kinds of mana were sort of like potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables. They were all distinctly different from each other, and all had very distinctive flavors and textures. This made it difficult to mistake one for the other.

However, System mana was completely different from these other, simpler forms of mana. This was because System mana wasn’t actually a type of mana at all – it was a compound mana, made of several other kinds of mana all woven together. If other forms of mana were like vegetables, System mana was like a vegetable salad. It didn’t include literally every other kind of mana Alice had ever seen, but it included a lot.

Alice finally realized why her first attempt at forming a System magic seed had failed so utterly, and why it hadn’t even been the right color. From the very beginning, she had been going about creating a System magic seed in the wrong way. She needed a different process to create a System magic seed. Instead of just focusing on what she knew about the System, pulling in mana, and then compressing all of that information and mana together into a magic seed, Alice needed to grab several other kinds of mana before compressing them all together into a System magic seed. However, Alice couldn’t help but wonder how in the world System mana had actually come to exist in the first place. Alice had already had similar thoughts in the past, but she really couldn’t help but feel that System mana wasn’t terribly… natural. All of the other kinds of mana she had observed were ‘pure’ kinds of mana. And yet, System mana was like a hybrid of several other kinds of mana working together. Alice couldn’t identify all of the types of mana combined to make System mana yet, but she seriously doubted that System mana had just… sprung into existence somehow.

She sighed, rubbing her temples as she tried to get a better grasp of the smaller components of System mana. Even though the information she was receiving right now gave her a mild headache, she finally knew where her first System magic seed had gone wrong. As Alice pondered this information, she also had the niggling feeling that the System mana in her surroundings… reminded her of something. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what, but she had the strangest sense that the System mana in her environment had a sort of pattern to it, once that she had seen before. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was looking at, or what it meant.

Alice sighed, shaking her head. At the very least, her new Perk was far more useful than she had imagined it would be. It had given her a new layer of protection, boosted her ability to make money with enchanting, and most importantly of all, had given her new insights on the System. That, at least, was worth celebrating.

A note from acaswell

I’ve mentioned this (at least) once before, but I will be on vacation for the next two weeks. So no chapters during that time! I’ll return after that with the next chapter of the story. Thus, the next chapter of Budding Scientist will be released on January 13th, assuming I don’t get hit by a car or struck  by lightning during my vacation.

See you next year, and have a lovely holiday season, regardless of which holiday(s) you celebrate (and if you celebrate none, I hope you have a lovely few weeks anyway :D ).

Shameless plug – For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 100

In total, Alice spent another hour trying to untangle what types of mana actually went into System mana. Since the idea of a ‘compound’ mana was so new to her, she felt that breaking down System mana into smaller chunks was a good way to start. She still wanted to create a System magic seed, after all, even if it would be quite a bit more complicated than she had originally expected.

She was able to figure out Organic mana and Pure mana pretty quickly, since she was familiar with both kinds of mana. Considering the fact that one of the bigger functions of the System seemed to be helping people convert muscle mass into mana step by step, Alice wasn’t particularly surprised by the fact that these two kinds of mana were part of System mana. However, seeing them literally work as part of System mana also confused her. Plenty of things made by the System, such as class seeds, used System mana, and organic mana and pure mana. Since organic mana and pure mana were already part of System mana, why were they included again as separate components in so many mana constructs made by the System? Alice frowned, feeling that something was weird here. Perhaps System mana lost some properties one could obtain from a ‘pure’ variant of mana, as a result of mixing together so many different components at once? Or perhaps there was some other reason?

Alice had no idea. For now, she added it to her list of unanswered questions.

Apart from that, after an hour of poking at System mana, Alice finally discovered a brand new kind of mana. A kind of mana she would have never, ever discovered the existence of, not because its existence was hidden, but because it seemed so utterly useless in any other context that nobody would ever bother forming a magic seed for it.

Alice realized that one of the easier mana types to identify within System mana was math mana. Which, honestly, shouldn’t have surprised Alice as much as it did. After all, when she had done her initial research into mana seeds and kinds of mana, all those months ago back in Cyra, she had learned that there were even kinds of mana such as hope mana. Even though such magic seeds were considered worthless, if even emotions could be turned into magic seeds, it made perfect sense for math magic seeds and mana to exist as well. However, the very idea of math mana existing just felt so bizarre to Alice that she never would have thought about it before.

However, when Alice looked at her Status Screen, it seemed surprisingly reasonable that math mana existed. After all, the neat numbers on her Status Screen didn’t come from nowhere. Alice wasn’t entirely sure how the System made Status Screens work behind the scenes, but math mana certainly answered a few questions, such as how all of her abilities were evaluated and displayed in numerical form.

Alice ran out of time after screwing around with System mana for an hour, and had to rush to make it to Ezrien’s research team on time. The team was getting very close to finishing their research on kinetic plates, and they nearly had a working prototype of a kinetic plate that was cheaper and less time consuming to use than the cost of hiring a kinetic Mage. Since that was exactly what their team had been hired to do, this meant Alice would be done working with this team soon. At that thought, she couldn’t help but feel a little nostalgic at the thought of all the hours she had spent here. Ezrien had sponsored her entry into a magic academy in her early days in Metsel, back when she was barely scraping by economically and desperately needed access to the library of a magic academy to continue her research. Theoretically, the contract she had signed with him stated that she was supposed to work for him for about a year, rather than the four or five months she had worked with the team, but Ezrien had informed her that she was free to go the moment they finished making the prototype of the kinetic plates. Since she had contributed a fair amount of her time to this research project, it was a joy to see it coming to life, even though it was also bittersweet to know that she would be ending her time with this team soon.

However, Ethan had also demanded that she free up some time in her schedule for relaxation purposes after she had told him what her schedule looked like. Ultimately, freeing up her mornings was probably for the best, since it would give her some time each day where she wasn’t obligated to work on other things. Besides, Ezrien and Anna would sometimes pop in for board game night, so it wasn’t like this was the last time she would see them. They just wouldn’t be working together anymore. However, it still left a bittersweet taste in Alice’s mouth to know that her time with Ezrien’s team was coming to an end.

After that, Alice went to classes for the day. Most of her classmates didn’t seem to know about her newfound apprenticeship to an Immortal, although that would likely change as word spread. Alice was willing to bet that most [Students] would know by next week. However, Alice felt that her friends, at least, deserved a little bit more of an explanation, so she pulled them aside and gave them a quick update on the raid on the Society base, Ethan’s claim that she was a combat Mage, and Samantha’s rescue. Since her friends would know that any claim she was a combat – oriented Mage was complete nonsense, Alice also asked them to pretend she was a combat mage for as long as possible. All of them agreed, and the discussion quickly changed into a round of congratulations. Nobody in the group had ever become the apprentice of an Immortal before, and so they offered Alice a round of congratulations for becoming one of the more well connected people in the country. Being the apprentice of an Immortal showcased just how hard one had worked to gain Achievements and improve their potential, and Alice becoming Ethan’s apprentice showed just how rare and valuable her hard work up until now had truly been.

The only one of Alice’s friends from school who was missing from the meeting was Samantha. Samantha didn’t show up to school that day, understandably enough, but Alice was relieved to hear from other [Students] that she had made it back home safely and was resting up. Nobody seemed entirely sure of the details yet, but most people seemed hopeful that she would return to school soon. Alice made a mental note to visit Samantha the following day, when she was done with her classes.

After Alice finished her classes for the day, she was ambushed by professor Feliza.

“Alice! I meant to get back to you on Monday, but after Samantha got kidnapped, things got pretty hectic for a while. Since I’ve heard you were acquaintances with the girl, I felt it was a bad time to talk to you, so I originally intended to delay things for a few weeks. However, now that Samantha is back, I wanted to follow up on our discussion from last week.”

Alice frowned, before recalling what Professor Feliza was referring to. With all that had happened in the past few days, the things that happened last week felt as if they had happened months ago.

However, originally, Professor Feliza had promised to take a look at Alice’s research paper, and also expressed some interest in Boris’s situation. Professor Feliza had also stated that she was willing to try running a manaless room experiment on herself the previous weekend. Afterwards, she had requested that Alice show up in her office sometime soon so that they could discuss the results.

It was now Friday, and Alice hadn’t shown up to Professor Feliza’s office. At the very least, the woman didn’t seem mad that Alice had been preoccupied with other matters. It wasn’t every week that an acquaintance was kidnapped by the Society, and the woman seemed unsurprised by Alice’s absence.

“How did the manaless room experiment go?” asked Alice, a hint of nerves creeping into her voice. Alice was fairly certain she already knew the answer, but having her results tested again by an actual academic authority set her nerves on edge in a way that was hard to describe.

“Your paper was correct. After sitting in a manaless room, one will start to experience a reduction in their Stats, and a mild reduction in the power of their Perks as well. I have a few Perks which are easier to quantify from my [Organic Mage] Class, and I’ve determined that each Perk I had access to seems to lose about the same amount of power that your stats do. So, if a Perk normally gives you, say, a 10% boost to your stats when you meet its activation conditions, and you suffer a 20% reduction to your stats from mana deprivation, the Perk will only increase your stats by 8%. I recall you mentioning in your paper that you had a hard time testing the actual effects of mana deprivation on Perks, so I made extra sure to evaluate that. Now, it is possible that [Organic Mage] has some sort of unique reaction to mana deprivation, so it would be best to test how mana deprivation interacts with other Perks and Classes. However, it seems reasonable to assume that they are probably affected by mana deprivation the same way.” Professor Feliza gave Alice an interested grin.

Alice also felt herself relax a little. Even though she had known Professor Feliza should get the same results she had, it was a relief to hear it said out loud.

“Since I’ve tested your conclusions, I’m also willing to go with you to see Boris. I assume that was what you were trying to lead into, when discussing this topic last week?”

“Yes, I was originally hoping you could oversee my treatment of Boris. I intend to make an enchantment that cuts him off from mana in his surroundings, and attempt to treat his strange illness that way. It won’t work long term, obviously, because surviving without ever coming into contact with mana is… impractical. But at least for now it will stop him from getting worse, I think. But I also don’t want to get into legal trouble, so I need a more experienced healer watching over me. And having experienced [Organic Mage] watching over my treatment in case something goes wrong is never a bad idea, just in case. {Safety Analysis} claims that this should be safe, but a backup plan never hurts,” said Alice.

Professor Feliza nodded, smiling faintly. “I’m more than happy to oversee your treatment of Boris, and I’m glad you’re taking as many precautions as you’re able to. Do you have a time set aside already?”

“I usually visit him every weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday. Would two days from now work for you?”

Professor Feliza frowned for a moment, pursing her lips in thought, before she nodded. “I should be free that day. Where shall I meet you?”

The two worked out a few details about where and what time to meet, before Professor Feliza departed.

As Alice watched Professor Feliza leave, she wondered if she should inform Ethan about her plans for the weekend. Now that he was her mentor, and was supposed to oversee Alice’s research into magic seeds, it seemed relevant to inform him about her plans, at least. In fact, having Immortal Ethan also look over Alice’s conclusions about manaless rooms and her attempts to cure Boris might help him give Alice a new perspective on some of her thoughts and conclusions. Since he was in charge of keeping her safe, and was also her mentor, it seemed relevant to let him know. She decided that she would update him that night, once she went back to his mansion.

* * *

That night, after Alice gave Cecilia an update on Samantha’s situation, and then delivered a quick message to one of Ethan’s [Maids] at his mansion, she finally followed up on one of her other ideas from the past week. Since she had money now, Alice could finally afford to send a few letters back to Cyra. There were a few people she felt deserved some word from her, and who she wouldn’t mind keeping in contact with.

After a few moments of thought, she started her first letter.

Dear Milo,

How have you been?

Alice paused, tapping her pen against her cheek as she tried to think of what else to say. On Earth, she didn’t need to obsess over each word she sent in a text message to one of her friends. However, letters in this world were quite formal, making it harder for her to come up with ideas for each sentence.

I’ve been enjoying my time at the capital now. I’ve gone through a great deal of unusual events, some of which I can discuss and some of which are of a more unusual nature. The first, and perhaps most important part, is that I successfully found a sponsor and got into a magic academy. Illa’s connections really helped. The library of the academy is massive, and was of great help to some of my earlier research.

Alice frowned, wondering if there was a possibility of her mail getting intercepted by the Society. While the odds seemed low, it might be best not to mention her research in a letter that she was sending to her acquaintances in Cyra. After a few moments of thought, she scribbled out the word ‘research’ and replaced it with ‘studies.’ Then, she continued.

After that, my classmates and I got caught up in an incident where we fought a small group of Society members.

Alice felt that she wasn’t doing the incident anywhere near the justice it deserved. The most important aspect of that fight, besides the studies about Broken Mana baptisms she had received from the corpse of a society member, had been centered around Boris. She had also seen a [Scout] die of a broken mana baptism at that time. However, since she was trying to avoid mentioning anything too sensitive in her note, she couldn’t discuss many of her discoveries, just in case the mail did get intercepted, which seriously limited what she could discuss about the incident.

Alice frowned, wondering how she should continue the letter. Finally, she put her pen back to the paper.

I have also made a few new friends over the course of my studies. They are an interesting bunch, but I enjoy spending time talking with them before class. I have also started creating board games, which I enjoy playing with Cecilia, along with some other acquaintances such as the Mage who sponsored my first year in the Magic academy. Board games, if you aren’t familiar with them, are kind of like the games [Gamblers] play, but more elaborate, and without any money involved. If I see you again in the future, I would love to play one with you and a few other people.

However, all of the more interesting tidbits of life I’ve discussed so far pale in comparison to the incident I experienced earlier this week. An acquaintance of mine was kidnapped by the Society of Starry Eyes, which resulted in a huge mess. You may have even heard of it as far South as Cyra, although I’m not sure if news has spread that far yet. By the time you receive this letter, I imagine some people may have heard of it, at least. The resulting aftermath was complicated, but by the end of it, I have become the apprentice of Honored Immortal Ethan, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds. The way this came about was rather unexpected for me, but due to my high rarity Achievements and work ethic, he seems to see a certain amount of potential in me. I hope that I can live up to his expectations as a combat Mage.

Of course, Milo knew full well that Alice wasn’t particularly talented at combat. She got by using her Perks and Skills, but frankly, Alice didn’t have the natural mindset a truly talented combatant did. However, while Milo wasn’t the brightest man on the planet, he wasn’t a fool either. He would probably realize from this letter that he shouldn’t go around blabbing about Alice’s true interests, at least, after receiving this letter. Admittedly, Alice hadn’t thought about that fact at all until now, and had originally just been planning to send a letter to someone who had helped her out when she was in Cyra. Unexpectedly, sending Milo a letter was useful for helping her keep her façade as a combat mage going for a little longer.

I’m also starting to reach a higher level of financial stability due to my work as an [Enchanter] recently. It is the reason I can afford to send this letter to you.

I’ve never been great at writing letters, but I wanted to thank you for the help you gave me in Cyra, and tell you what I’ve been up to recently. I hope you’re also doing well. If you can, send me back a letter, or at least update Illa if you want to say anything to me. I’m also sending her a similar letter.

Thank you,

Alice

P.S. keep an eye out for any weird floods of dimensional mana. The Society seems to be investigating outbreaks of dimensional mana that have been suddenly appearing across the world recently. If you see one, let me know – I can probably inform my teacher in advance, and that will hopefully allow us to react in time to minimize the damage.

After giving her letter another scan, Alice folded it up and sealed it. After that, Alice wrote a similar letter to Illa as well. While the content differed somewhat, and also included a special note thanking Illa for the help she and her husband had given Alice in finding a sponsor when she was new to Metsel and much weaker.

Even though many of the steps Illa had taken to help Alice also had clear benefits for Illa herself, the help Illa had given her was undeniable. Alice wasn’t an ungrateful person. Giving Illa a heads up about the Society’s hunt for dimensional mana would probably give the woman some idea what to look out for, and would also let Illa know she needed to clamp down extra hard on any mention of Alice’s strange arrival in this world, as well as the giant outbreak of dimensional mana the expedition had investigated near Cyra. Alice didn’t know if Illa could shut off the news of the incident, now that it had happened so long ago, and Alice also had no idea whether that would actually be an effective solution to removing the Society’s interest in the area. However, Illa was a smart woman. She would know how to keep herself and her town protected as long as she knew enough information.

When Alice thought about her origins as an {Outworlder}, she wondered if she should tell Immortal Ethan about her history. Since he was working hard to protect her, it seemed relevant to inform him about this potential danger. However, it also didn’t seem prudent to tell one of her most dangerous secrets to someone she had only known for a week, even if he was one of Illvaria’s Immortals and seemed to have worked for Alice’s best interests so far. After a few moments of hesitation, Alice added a final line to her letter to Illa.

P.S. how well do you know Immortal Ethan?

Alice wasn’t good at scheming, but she felt that Illa was someone who could read between the lines and realize that Alice was looking for information on Immortal Ethan. Since Illa knew that Alice was an {Outworlder}, Illa could probably sneak some advice into her letter if she sent anything back to Alice. And unlike Milo, Illa could definitely financially well off, and so she could afford to send Alice a return letter.

After sealing both letters, Alice went to a [Messenger’s] guild and hired a relatively high-Level [Messenger] to deliver her letters to Cyra for her. It cost nearly a full gold sun to hire the man’s services, which would have been a ruinously expensive price earlier. However, Alice wanted to minimize the odds of the Society reading through her mail as much as possible, even if she had removed any dangerous information from her letters. That required paying for a significantly higher Level [Messenger] than her messages would have otherwise required, but it was worth it.

After sending letters to her closest acquaintances in Cyra, Alice grinned to herself. She spent the rest of the day thinking about finally fixing Boris’s problem this coming Sunday, and preparing the materials she would need to enchant a ring that would keep mana way from the kid for now.

A note from acaswell

I return! Or, well, I've kind of been here for a while, but first new Budding Scientist chapter of the year!I had a lovely break. One of my friends very strongly recommended that I try a game called Hades recently. Apparently, it’s rather well known, and I’m just out of the loop… but I did finally try the game! It was a lot of fun. So I spent a few days just sitting in discord calls with my friend while dying over and over again. Apart from that, I drank large quantities of tea, read some books, and gave my kitty some attention (she very much approved), and spent time with family and friends. It was enjoyable. Still coughing very slightly… usually less than ten times per day now. Annoying but largely unimportant, I guess? Meh.

I hope you guys also had a lovely holiday season!

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Chapter 101

The rest of the day passed quickly. After treating herself to a nice meal and then enchanting for a few hours, Alice returned to Ethan’s mansion for the night and slept. The following day was a normal Saturday – she played board games with Cecilia and her schoolmates, spent some time putting together an enchanted ring that would ‘expel’ pure mana from its surroundings for Boris, and then finally went to talk to Ethan again. Since Ethan had told her he would pay her that day, Alice felt it was a good opportunity to talk about her experiments. One of Ethan’s original requirements when she became his apprentice was that she needed to inform him about what she was trying test, and make sure that he understood what she was doing. While Boris wasn’t exactly linked to Alice’s attempts to improve mana baptisms, Ethan might feel upset if she didn’t inform him about her attempts to treat the boy.

When Alice went to Ethan’s mansion and requested a meeting with Ethan, the [Head Maid] quickly guided her to the study. Inside, Ethan was sitting at a desk and reading through some documents.

“Lady Alice,” said Ethan, taking a moment to nod at her after he heard her footsteps. Then, he turned his attention back to the document in front of him. Alice waited patiently as he scanned through the paper. Finally, he frowned, pulled out a new piece of paper, and scribbled a few words on it before folding it up and setting it to the side. Finished, he turned his full attention to her. “Thank you for your patience. I was just dealing with a few urgent letters. I take it you’re here for your first payment? I do recall mentioning it would be today, but if you just wish to collect your allowance for the month, you can simply speak with the [Head Maid] or my [Assistant]. They’ve already been given the instructions on what to give you. Or did you have something else to discuss?”

Alice spent a few moments wondering why Ethan referred to her payment for the month as her allowance, before deciding the term was actually oddly appropriate right now. Then, she shook her head and focused on the reason she was here. “There is something I wanted to tell you about, Honored Immortal. Tomorrow, one of my professors from the magic academy and I will be going to a village located around Metsel, in order to treat a child with a rather strange illness. It isn’t directly related to my mana baptism research, but I felt it was a good idea to let you know, in case you’re interested in the subject. If you wish to, you can come with us, but if you aren’t free or aren’t interested in the topic, don’t feel obligated to come.”

Ethan frowned. “You’re looking into another strange illness? Is the illness similar to Samantha’s strangely malformed kinetic seed?” Alice shook her head.

“No, Honored Immortal.”

“You said the village was near Metsel, right? What specifically is the illness?”

“Well, the short answer is that the child I’m trying to treat, Boris, has activated his status screen two years early, and it’s causing him to behave… very oddly. He seems to have picked up a class such as [Farmer] or [Laborer], and is going completely mad trying to work and gain more levels. He no longer speaks to his mother, and seems more and more unrecognizable by the day,” said Alice. Rather than a human being, the more she and Natasha observed Boris, the more Boris resembled a robot stuck in a loop. The boy still occasionally demonstrated signs of sentience, but they were becoming increasingly faint.

Ethan nodded thoughtfully. “The Society documents we recovered mentioned three oddities the Society is paying attention to. Specifically, dimensional mana floods, messed up magic seeds, and children unlocking their status screens too early. The Society is paying the least attention to the last type of incident, and devoting most of their resources to investigating dimensional floods. However, they’re devoting a fair amount of resources and manpower to all three oddities. And their test results seem the most strange when looking into the final kind of incident. How did you come across this boy?”

Alice nodded. “I originally ran into him when I was doing the hunting training with my academy a few months ago. My group set out to hunt a pack of monsters. When we arrived near the hunting ground, instead of monsters, we ran into a group of Society members, carrying several younger children they had kidnapped. We defeated the Society members with the help of [Knight] Arin, before rescuing the children. After Boris was returned to his mother, I learned that he had opened his Status Screen before it should have been possible. I asked the [Guards] to keep an eye on Boris, since the Society would probably come after him again if they knew he was one of the children they were looking to investigate further. I also occasionally checked up on him myself, to make sure he was still safe. Thus far, the Society doesn’t seem to be aware of his existence – however, even without the interference of the Society, his behaviors getting weirder and weirder.”

Ethan nodded. “All right. While not directly connected to the study of mana baptisms, this is also a matter of importance for Illvaria. What do you have in mind in order to cure him? The Society’s documents all detail the strange behavior of children who unlock their Status Screens early, but I’m honestly at a loss for what the problem is, or how to cure it. Do you have any solutions?”

“I’ve been thinking that the best way to cure him is… well, my method of curing his will sound incredibly strange if you don’t have some background information first. Have you read my research paper? I published it through my magic academy, and the information in that paper is very relevant to my treatment plan.”

Ethan nodded. “Since you are my newest apprentice, I’ve had one of my men look through most of your public activities. I’ve already read through your research paper.” Ethan gave her a grin, while Alice felt her heart freeze. If Ethan had looked into her past already, did he know that she suddenly popped into existence about a year ago? It would probably be hard to hide the fact that she had no past before encountering Cyra, at least… Alice didn’t think it was a terrible idea to let Ethan know she was an {Outworlder}, but she wanted to see Illa’s return letter first, just in case.

Heedless of Alice’s inner turmoil, Ethan kept speaking. “You know, I am starting to see why you managed to get such a high rarity Achievement at such a young age. Although it seems very simple to check whether or not people actually need Mana to keep surviving, it has remained as ‘common knowledge’ for centuries that mana is simply a requirement of life. The idea that we should test the idea is… well, much like someone proposing that we should check whether air is necessary for life, I suppose. And the fact that one’s Endurance drops when short on mana does indicate it can potentially be lethal, if one is already weak or ill. I imagine this is part of what propagated the belief mana is crucial for life in the first place…” Ethan trailed off.

“In any case, your research paper is fascinating, and I’ve been quite curious to run a test of my own later. But I digress. Yes, I’m familiar with your research paper.”

Alice heaved a sigh of relief when Ethan didn’t push the topic of her past any further. Before he could think further about the topic, Alice tried to bring his attention back to Boris.

“I have been thinking about what all of the recent incidents have in common. Malformed magic seeds and dimensional floods are both major incidents mana-related problems going horribly wrong. And I’ve been thinking that, coupled with the strange question of Status Screens unlocking too early, perhaps the three are related? I haven’t published a second research paper yet, but I have noticed that the higher someone’s Attributes get, the more mana seems to be concentrated in their body, and the more mana their body seems to absorb per day. Since mana is going haywire for some reason, and Stats and mana seemed linked together, I was thinking that cutting Boris off from mana would improve his condition. Or, at the very least, cutting him off from mana may stop his condition from worsening. {Safety Analysis} claims that I won’t inflict any harm upon him with this method, and I believe my research paper backs up the idea that cutting of a child from mana wouldn’t harm him, at least. Professor Feliza has also double-checked my research paper, and she didn’t suffer any major harm from cutting herself off from mana.”

Ethan nodded thoughtfully.

“Interesting. I do feel that you’re grasping at straws regarding your treatment plan, but with a child’s safety on the line it isn’t a bad thing to try out unusual treatment methods if you don’t know where to start. Be careful with trusting Perks like {Safety Analysis} too much, though – while such Perks are useful, they can sometimes miss forms of mild but long-lasting harm, and have some other oversights. Combining several different Perks that behave similarly to {Safety Analysis} can drastically improve the effectiveness of the Perk, but it’s best to keep in mind that there will always be a few oddities in what Perks consider ‘harm.’ But the level of harm inflicted by your treatment shouldn’t be severe, at the very least, and the Society’s research on the matter makes me think it’s best to take action sooner rather than later. I’d be glad to join you and observe as you attempt to heal Boris.” said Ethan, giving Alice a faint grin. “Let me know when you’re about to depart tomorrow.” Alice nodded. Ethan paused for a moment, turning towards Alice. “Was that all you wished to speak to me about?”

Alice thought for a moment, before nodding. “Yes, Honored Immortal. My treatment of Boris was the main reason I wanted to see you personally. Everything else I wanted to discuss can be handled by the [Head Maid]. Ah, actually – if it’s possible, would you be able to let me know if there are other cases of Mages with Broken Seeds that you become aware of? It doesn’t seem like a common problem in Illvaria right now, as far as I know, but if we make knowledge about broken magic seeds public, it would help a lot of Mages realize they have strange symptoms that need treatment. And as long as we use the same strategy we used to treat Samantha, I could also help people who get sick…”

Ethan’s grin became much wider. “I intended to make public the knowledge of broken magic seeds, so that other Mages would hopefully find ways to treat the problem that don’t require such specific Achievements and Perks. I’m glad that you’re offering to treat sick Mages – I’ll give orders to redirect any ill Mages in our area towards you. How often can you heal someone with a broken magic seed? Is there any cooldown time, or other costs associated with using the Perk?”

“I can only break down a magic seed once every four days.”

Ethan nodded. “Good to know.” He paused, thinking for a moment.

“You know, I actually have a few things I wanted to discuss with you as well, now that you’re already here. I was planning on giving you another few weeks to settle down before we get into the details of your mana baptism experiments, but I might as well get ready in advance. Regarding your research materials for the next few months, do you need me to prepare anything in particular? Letting me know in advance would make it easier to prepare any materials you need.”

Alice frowned, thinking. What did she need in order to study mana baptisms?

She winced. Her next request could sound pretty bad, if Ethan took it the wrong way. However, Alice was reasonably sure that some lie detection Perks would clear her name if her request was misinterpreted.

“I’d like to observe the process of people going through a mana baptism a few times, if possible. But I obviously don’t want unwilling participants – I know there are a lot of people who undergo mana baptisms because they’re desperate, and want to improve their life. While it may… sound quite bad, perhaps we could compensate people to undergo their mana baptism tests in a controlled environment while I observe? As compared to undergoing their baptisms on their own, out in the wilds or in the places people usually undergo baptisms? I am willing to take whatever lie detection tests are needed to ensure my motives are pure, and I know my request sounds bad, but…”

Ethan frowned, giving her a careful gaze. Alice resisted the urge to wince again.

Ethan slowly nodded. “I can see if there are any people willing to take up your offer to undergo a mana baptism in front of you, so that you may observe them. This can probably get by an ethics committee, but before I proceed any further – if under a lie detection perk, can you honestly say that you have no better way to gather data, that you have no intention of persuading people to undergo a baptism if they otherwise wouldn’t have, and that you have not influenced the success rate of the participants in a negative way?” Ethan paused. “It isn’t a crime to think about doing research in an unethical way – to be honest, I would be more surprised if there are any Mages above level 70 who haven’t thought about doing unethical research once or twice. It’s such an easy path to acquire better Levels and Achievements with the same amount of effort that anyone interested in Immortality might have their thoughts wander in that direction. Your request isn’t exactly the biggest red flag I’ve seen, but it’s definitely on the dodgier side of requests, and I can guarantee an ethics committee would take a second look at your proposal if they saw it. If you can’t confidently make those claims under lie-detection Perks, it would be best if you dropped this line of thought now.”

Alice nodded. “I can firmly state that I’ll pass the lie-detection test you mentioned without any problems.” Alice said. Ethan thought about it for a moment, before he relaxed. Alice also thought for a moment, before adding a new condition to her request.

“Though, you did mention something I didn’t originally think of, which is the question of whether I’m pushing people to undergo mana baptisms when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so. I’d like it if you had a few people with lie detection Perks ensure that any participants in my request would have gone through a mana baptism either way, and then ensure that the money goes to their next of kin, if they fail. I don’t want to persuade people to undergo mana baptisms when they otherwise wouldn’t have done so. I only want a good way to observe mana baptisms that would have happened with or without my interference.”

Ethan nodded. “If you’re confident in making those statements under lie detection tests, we can proceed. I’ll make the arrangements. And the fact that you’re stepping up to help Mages who have gotten ill from forming bad magic seeds will also help you a lot. It would be best if that wasn’t revealed, because the Society might take an interest in you afterwards, but if your request comes up in front of an ethics committee knowing that you’re putting yourself at risk to help Mages get well again would make you look much, much better.

“The second topic I’ll deal with is your payment for the month. I originally intended to leave it to the [Head Maid], but since you’re already here I may as well get it over with.” He handed Alice a small bag of coins. “Take it as allowance, as well as a way to ensure that you’re free from financial hardship. If you spend all of your time trying to earn money, it’ll be difficult for you to focus on more important research projects. You can still work on making Enchantments if you wish to, but making new and unique enchantments is far better for earning levels than creating large quantities of the same enchantment most of the time. So this should be useful for you, regardless of whether you want to keep enchanting things or not.”

“Thank you, honored Immortal,” said Alice, taking a peek inside of the bag.

Inside of the bag were four golden crowns. In other words, 20 golden suns. Alice suddenly felt very strange.

She had scrabbled to put together a small amount of money over the past few months, and had worked her butt off to take advantage of the improved price of enchantments and make popular enchanted items to sell. And all together she had barely put together seven golden suns using her skills as an [Enchanter] and hours upon hours of hard work. She had even felt proud of how much she had saved up, since seven golden suns was a huge amount of money for a regular family.

And for one month’s pay, for a research project she hadn’t even really started yet, Immortal Ethan had simply tossed over three times the amount of money she had scraped together over three months of hard work. And he had hinted in previous conversations that if she produced results, she would get much greater quantities of resources and money. Alice sighed, before shaking her head and tossing the coin pouch into her storage Perk. Rather than being frustrated at how little her previous efforts had meant, she decided to just be grateful that she had an excess of funding now.

Ethan thought for a moment, before shrugging. “I mentioned this earlier, but I did also want to take a look at the results of your research paper in more detail. I’m quite curious, you see. I’ve set up a manaless room, and I intend to sit inside of it for a bit later today. Are you interested in going over it with me? I would be curious to hear your thoughts on the matter, as the first one to have done this experiment.”

Alice resisted the urge to start grinning madly.

As far as Alice could tell, Immortals seemed to be people who were made out of mana. The process of acquiring Stats and levels seemed to eventually replace most of the regular flesh of the human body with some sort of new version of flesh and bones, constructed entirely out of mana. She had wondered for quite a while how this process worked, and how Immortals differed from other humans when it came to their interactions with mana. What would happen if Ethan walked into a manaless room for an extended period of time?

Alice quickly ran a check through {Safety Analysis}, and as far as she could tell, the experiment wasn’t dangerous for Immortal Ethan.

“I would be glad to watch,” said Alice. “I’ve never seen what happens if an Immortal steps into a manaless room before.”

A note from acaswell

Shameless Plug - you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Chapter 102

Immortal Ethan already had a manaless room set up in his mansion, so the experiment only took a few minutes to set up. After Immortal Ethan finished his preparations, he stepped into the manaless room while Alice watched. Alice activated her {Timer} Perk to get as accurate of a measurement of time’s passage as possible, and kept her eyes trained on Ethan as closely as she could. Every single Perk she had which boosted her perception of the world was activated as she tried to glean every speck of information she could from this experiment. It wasn’t every day that an Immortal volunteered themselves to be part of an experiment, and Alice didn’t intend to miss this chance. After all, she doubted it would be easy to get an Immortal to help her with random experiments unless she became an Immortal. This might literally be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Once Immortal Ethan stepped into the manaless room, Alice observed carefully. Initially, Ethan’s body didn’t react strangely at all. It just looked like any other person stepping into a manaless room. The System mana around him didn’t react to Ethan, but that was nothing unusual. Ethan started out by lifting a few sacks of weights – apparently, he intended to evaluate the decrease in his physical strength over time. Alice was more than slightly amused to see how ridiculously heavy the weight sacks were – even though Ethan was almost entirely focused on magic, he had still slowly gained other Stats over the course of his long life. The amount of weight he was picking up could probably rival the weight a level 70 [Knight] used during training, despite the fact that Ethan was obviously highly specialized in Mage Classes.

The amount of weight that Ethan could carry at decreased at about the same rate other people’s Stats decreased. According to Alice’s estimation, Ethan seemed to be losing about 2% of his Stats per minute, which about matched up with Alice’s previous results. So far, nothing particularly unusual was happening, at least as far as Alice could tell. Alice frowned, wondering if Immortals would have no unusual interactions with a manaless room at all. She wasn’t sure what she had been expecting, but she had thought something different would happen, at least. So far, Ethan had lost some Stats and his Perks had gotten a bit weaker – but that was it.

That changed at around the fifteen minute mark. Normally, after fifteen minutes in a manaless room, people’s Stats would stop dropping, and would start to stabilize. People would keep 70% of their Stats, lose 30%, and then nothing new would happen until they left the room.

However, after fifteen minutes, Ethan’s Stats didn’t stop decreasing. They just kept dropping. After 20 minutes, Immortal Ethan’s Stats had dropped by 40%, and still showed no sign of stopping yet.

Alice tried feeding the current situation into {Safety Analysis}, just to make sure this situation wasn’t dangerous. Ethan had just warned her about how the Perk had small, subtle flaws in how it analyzed information, but he had also said that it was at least somewhat reliable. The fact that Ethan’s Stats were still dropping was starting to make Alice feel a little worried. If someone’s Endurance got too low, it was very easy for them to get sick or hurt, as long as they were exposed to even a minor problem. Ethan’s Stats were still probably monstrous compared to hers, but if they kept dropping at 2% a minute, he would hit dangerously low numbers sooner or later. Was this really a good idea?

At 25 minutes, his Stats had dropped 50%, and Alice’s uneasiness was climbing higher and higher. {Safety Analysis} still wasn’t finding anything wrong with the experiment, but Alice was half tempted to tell Ethan to stop. However, Ethan was an Immortal, and he didn’t seem to feel there was a problem with the experiment yet. This made Alice wonder if she was overreacting.

As Alice was wondering whether she should say something or just keep observing, Immortal Ethan’s expression changed. His previous expression of curiosity had warped into a full-blown frown as he eyed the manaless room around him. At the same time, Alice noticed something very odd.

Normally, when a person sat inside of a manaless room, their class seeds would grow dimmer as time passed. Alice assumed this was because their class seeds were receiving less and less fuel, and the fact that people’s Perks got weaker as time passed seemed to back up this theory. Brighter class fractals meant stronger Perks and Classes, while dimmer class fractals meant weaker Perks. However, once Ethan had stood in the manaless room for more than 25 minutes, parts of the mana in his body just seemed to shut off. If previously they had resembled bright suns in Ethan’s body, now they resembled dim moons, instead. Ethan frowned, eyeing his surroundings, and began walking towards the door. However, he seemed hesitant, as if wondering if he should actually leave or whether he should stay in the room.

Another two minutes ticked by. In that time, Alice noticed the mana in his body had stopped changing. He no longer seemed to be losing Stats, and his body had stabilized. However, the dim patches of his body remained dim. Alice had no idea what that meant, but it was obvious some parts of his body were experiencing major weakness as a result of the experiment.

Finally, after two more minutes passed, Ethan decided he was done. Nothing had changed in the past five minutes anyway, so Alice doubted anything would happen even if he stayed longer in the room, but Ethan had also started to look distinctly uncomfortable. Once he walked out of the room, the dim patches of mana in his body quickly lit up again, and he seemed to breathe a sigh of relief as he scanned the manaless room with curiosity.

“Interesting,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. For a few moments, Alice could only stare at him in curiosity. What had happened after 25 minutes?

Ethan looked at her for a few moments, as if thinking, before nodding his head. “Very odd.”

Finally, Alice wasn’t able to bear it any longer. “What happened?”

Ethan fell into thought for a few moments, before he gave her a more curious look.

“Well, a few things happened. First of all, my Stats went down quite a bit more than a regular person’s Stats do, at least according to your sample information so far. Most people’s Stats stabilize after 15 minutes, but mine just kept dropping. And instead of keeping 70% of my Stats and Perks, I was still losing more Stats after 25 minutes in. I was down to about 50% of my power, which is the weakest I’ve felt in… decades. It was very uncomfortable. After 25 minutes, I seemed to stop losing Stats after that point, so if I assume the difference is my Immortality, Immortals probably stabilize at 50% of their Stats instead of 70%.”

Alice nodded. So far, she wasn’t terribly surprised. Alice had always suspected that one of the reasons she lost less Stats than natives of this world when placed in a manaless room was because she had gained a lot of her Stats while on Earth, rather than with the help of the System and its mana manipulation. This seemed to support her theory, which was nice, but wasn’t particularly surprising. However, some of Ethan’s body suddenly switching off like a light powering down had caught her much more off-guard.

“Near the end of the experiment, after 25 minutes, your expression suddenly changed a lot. Why was that?” Alice asked, after hesitating for a moment. She couldn’t force Ethan to talk about it if he didn’t want to, but she was hoping he would share what happened with her. Ethan looked at her, and for a moment seemed to visibly hesitate, before he sighed.

“My second life was disabled. For a moment, it felt like I had suffered a lethal attack or something, and so I felt a moment of panic before I realized I hadn’t actually been attacked. It hasn’t happened to me often, of course, but I have suffered a fatal injury a few times, especially right after I reached Immortality and got overconfident in my abilities.” Ethan scratched his head. “Part of the way I teach my apprentices now is based off of some of my more embarrassing near-death experiences. If I wasn’t a little luckier, I probably would have died after becoming an Immortal… which is embarrassing, but definitely happens sometimes. Immortals are much harder to kill than regular people, but realizing you’re in Immortal is a huge confidence booster. Some new Immortals charge into much more dangerous situations the moment they become an Immortal, which leads to them dying right after reaching Immortality. Immortals are much stronger than regular people, but nobody is invincible.”

Alice noticed a phrase she had never come into contact with before. “What’s a ‘second life?’”

Ethan frowned, looking at her with curiosity. “You don’t know?”

Alice shook her head.

“Really? How did you manage to get this far in life without learning – ah, do you just not know much about the characteristics of Immortals?” Ethan seemed to think for a moment as he examined her. Alice hesitated for a moment, before nodding.

“I’m really not sure what a second life is. All I know about Immortals is that they’re people who have stopped aging, since they reached a really high level.”

“That’s correct, but I think you’re missing a rather important piece of information, despite it being quite well known.” Immortal Ethan said. He seemed to pause for a moment, before sighing. “Normally, people never share details about their Combat-oriented Perks and Achievements. In fact, if I ever catch you trying to tell someone about your combat Perks and Achievements, I don’t know what I’ll do, but neither of us will be happy at the end of it. Since you’ve accepted becoming my apprentice, you had better believe that I’ll punish you if you do something stupid like that. However, second lives are common knowledge, so I’ve quite surprised you aren’t aware of it already.”

Alice suddenly felt a bit embarrassed. Apparently, ‘second lives’ were well known topics when discussing Immortals. And as an {Outsider}, she simply had no awareness of the topic at all, which was surprisingly frustrating for her.

Ethan, seeing her embarrassment, cleared his throat.

“In order to become an Immortal, you need to level up lots, right? Generally speaking, you become an Immortal somewhere between level 100, where you evolve your class, and level 25 of your Tier 2 Class. The exact level varies a bit from person to person, since things like Rarity of your Achievements, how high your Stats are, and so on also seem to play a role in things like aging speed. However, people generally hit Immortality somewhere within that level range. Have you ever wondered why people know exactly when they became an Immortal, though? After all, once you only age one year per five or six decades, it’s pretty hard to notice your age changing. Many people might think that they’ve become an Immortal already, only to realize they’re a few levels off a century or two after the fact.”

“That’s… something I haven’t considered in detail before,” said Alice, after a few moments.

“Simply put, you don’t have to stand around guessing whether you’ve stopped aging completely or whether you only age one year every fifty. The moment you stop aging completely, you get an Achievement for it. This Achievement also has a lot of other components to it, including your ‘title’ as an Immortal. For example, most people know me as the Immortal of Spells and Seeds – and that’s because after getting my Achievement for reaching Immortality, my Achievement referred to me as ‘the Immortal of Spells and Seeds.’ Most Immortals take their Achievement and use it as their official title, although it sometimes gets shortened. My father, for example, is known as the ‘Sun Knight,’ but his actual title given from his Achievement is “The Valiant Knight of Glittering Sunlight. That’s a bit of a mouthful, so people shortened it to ‘Sun Knight.’ In short, all Immortals have an Achievement given to them by the System, announcing exactly when they have permanently stopped aging, and giving them a title to use in the future.”

“All right. How does this tie in to a ‘second life?’ “

“Everyone’s Immortality Achievement is different, and gives completely different bonuses. However, every single Immortal, no matter what they’re known for, has one common trait besides the fact that they don’t age anymore. That’s the ability to ‘revive’ once per week from lethal damage. This is usually referred to as a ‘second life.’ It’s not applicable 100% of the time – if your brain is destroyed, you are permanently dead. The rest of your body doesn’t matter much, and you can even regrow a new body if you get beheaded. However, if your brain is destroyed or damaged beyond repair, the Perk won’t work.

“Of course, this is a lot less powerful than you might think. If you’re in a situation where someone managed to kill you once, they can often do it again while you’re recovering from your injuries. The Perk isn’t instant- it takes about two seconds to work. And this trait isn’t exactly secret. Almost everyone knows about Immortals being able to regenerate once per week, which is why I assumed you were familiar with this already. Immortals don’t die every day, but it still happens often enough during wars on the Central Continent that this trait is well known and documented. And an [Assassin] aiming to kill an Immortal will just aim straight for the brain. So it’s not that useful in practice.”

“I see,” Said Alice, finally understanding what had happened. Ethan had suddenly left the manaless room because his ‘second life’ had deactivated.

“Is your Second Life activated again right now?”

Ethan nodded. “If it had been ‘used up’ for the week I wouldn’t have mentioned it to you. I don’t mind helping you with experiments and gathering information, but there’s no way I would compromise my safety if I was actually placed in more danger for the rest of the week. I would have waited until the Achievement was reactivated to tell you what happened. The only reason I’m willing to tell you this much is because there’s no way I’m trying this experiment again. It was like the Achievement was temporarily turned off, but the moment I was exposed to mana, my second life was back.”

Alice nodded. However, she wondered why had Ethan’s Achievement deactivated after 25 minutes. When she had tried her manaless room experiments with other people, Stats and Perks had both been temporarily weakened, but this was the first time she had heard of an Achievement actually being ‘turned off.’

“Were your other Achievements still working? Or was it just your Immortality-related Achievement that got turned off?”

Ethan frowned, as if he were trying to think.

“None of my other Achievements were totally turned off, I think. Only my ‘second life’ granted by my Immortality was completely turned off – everything else was weakened, but still worked.”

Alice fell deeper into thought. If every Immortal had the ‘second life’ ability, and the Achievement had turned itself off once Ethan was deprived of mana for more than 25 minutes, perhaps the ability to revive once per week was simply a property of having a body made out of pure mana? That was her best guess for now, at least. The knowledge that Immortals would still immediately die if their brain was destroyed was also interesting. It made Alice wonder if the System was afraid of totally removing the ‘human’ parts of an Immortal’s brain for some reason.

Alice filed the results of the experiment away in her mind. Perhaps in the future she would have a better idea what was happening behind the scenes. For now, Alice decided to keep this experiment in mind as she collected more information about the System, Achievements, and how everything worked behind the scenes.

* * *

The next day, before Alice met with professor Feliza and set off to meet Boris, she took a few hours to stop by Samantha’s house and check up on the girl. Now that Samantha had some time to relax and see her family and closer friends after being kidnapped by the Society, Alice felt it was a good time to see how the girl’s recovery was going, and to see if Samantha needed anything. Even if Alice wasn’t as close to Samantha as she was with some of her other friends, she felt obligated to check up on the girl and see if she had any other lingering issues Alice could help with. Since Alice could see some problems other Mages weren’t able to, she thought it was best if she didn’t only rely on the words of other [Students] to see how Samantha was doing.

“Alice! I’ve been meaning to talk to you,” said Samantha, when she saw Alice knocking on her door. “I really wanted to thank you for saving me from the Society. I don’t remember if I did so the first time I saw you – things were a little chaotic at the time, and I wasn’t exactly in my best state of mind, either. Most of what happened after I woke up in Honored Immortal’s mansion is a huge blur. But I bet a lot of the reason an Immortal was willing to personally save me was because you became his apprentice. I won’t ask about the details, and I don’t know if you’re trying to hide that fact, or if you’re going to announce it later, but… thank you. Really. You’ve done a lot for me.” Samantha gave Alice a huge grin, and Alice noticed that Samantha’s smile was brighter than before. The eye bags and signs of stress on Samantha’s face hadn’t disappeared, but they had certainly started to fade. It seemed that she was doing well.

“Don’t worry about it – I’m just glad things worked out, honestly,” said Alice. It wouldn’t have been surprising if Samantha had died after being kidnapped by the Society, but fortunately, things had turned out all right. “How are things working out for you now? Is there anything I can help you with? Or have you noticed any strange health abnormalities or problems? If you have, let me know – I can inform Honored Immortal and see if he can give me any ideas or information, or even a follow-up examination if needed. Don’t be afraid to let me know,” said Alice, scanning Samantha carefully with all of her observation-related Perks. She didn’t notice anything particularly unusual so far – Samantha hadn’t replaced her destroyed kinetic seed with anything yet, but she otherwise looked like a normal average-level young Mage. But there was always a chance she could miss something.

“I haven’t noticed anything odd after being rescued. My mental state is also recovering well. Immortal Ethan got me in contact with a pretty good [Psychologist] – he’s level 80, if you can believe it. Not someone whose services my family could afford under normal circumstances, but Honored Immortal was kind enough to pay for it. I wish there was something I could do in exchange for his help, as well, but… he’s an Immortal,” said Samantha, before giggling. “It’s not exactly like he’s lacking anything I can give him. I wonder if Immortal Ethan even needs anything in the first place… I’ve never thought about what an immortal’s life is like, because it always seemed so far away…” Samantha began to ramble about Immortals, which quickly changed into a recount of some of her favorite bedtime stories about the Sun Knight.

Alice often found the girl’s digressions difficult to deal with, but for once, she found Samantha’s rambling to be comforting. A lot of the mental scars from being kidnapped by the Society seemed to be shrinking by the day, and Alice was relieved to see the girl recovering well. When Alice looked at Samantha, she found herself glad that she had helped save her from the Society. Alice’s role may have only been to set things in motion, but ultimately, she had made someone’s life far better as a result of her actions, and felt glad that she had tried so hard to make things right for Samantha.

She spent a few hours just chatting with Samantha, checking up on various things in her life and seeing how she was doing. Samantha’s family was relieved to have her back alive and well, and were more than happy to see Alice as well. Alice was politely pressured into having a home cooked meal and was showered with thanks, while Samantha rambled about her meetings with her [Psychologist], mundane speculations about enchantments, and Samantha’s hopes of returning to school life soon.

It was a pleasant morning.

Afterwards, Alice met up with Professor Feliza and Immortal Ethan. Shortly afterwards, they departed for Boris’s village.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read three chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Chapter 103

When they arrived at Boris’s house, Natasha warmly greeted Alice, giving her an enthusiastic smile. She also gave Professor Feliza and Immortal Ethan a respectful nod when she saw their Mage emblems, although the two of them got far less enthusiastic greetings than Alice. Alice was more than slightly amused to see that she had been given more respect and attention than an Immortal. However, she also didn’t want Natasha to get in trouble, even if neither Ethan nor Feliza were likely to care about Natasha’s lack of information, so Alice cleared her throat.

“Natasha, thank you for entrusting the treatment of Boris to me. These are two teachers of mine who have helped me greatly. This is Lady Feliza, who teaches Organic Magic. She has a healing license, and so she’s overseeing my treatment of Boris. In fact, she’s the reason I can do this without being worried that I’ll make a mistake and harm Boris, as well as the reason I can do this without getting into legal trouble.” Natasha gave Lady Feliza a much more warm smile after Alice’s introduction.

“Thank you very much for your help, Lady Feliza. Boris and I appreciate your help, and thank you for coming all of this way just to oversee the treatment of my son. It means a lot to me. Really.”

Professor Feliza gave Natasha a light nod.

“It’s no trouble. Boris’s case is unique, and it’s best to learn as much as I can about new and troublesome diseases, in case they become widespread in the future. While I don’t think Boris’s circumstances are likely to be replicated often in the future, helping the people is what a healer should do,” said Professor Feliza.

With Professor Feliza’s introduction finished, Alice turned towards Ethan.

“And this is Honored Immortal Ethan. I got into some… rather chaotic circumstances recently, since the Society of Starry Eyes kidnapped a friend of mine. He’s here to help me with the treatment as well.”

Natasha’s eyes bugged out when she heard Alice mention Immortal Ethan, and she gave Ethan a huge double take, before giving him a very nervous, very deep bow.

“It’s… it’s an honor to see honored Immortal. I…” Natasha looked incredibly out of place, and Alice felt a sudden desire to laugh.

Immortal Ethan didn’t bother restraining a chuckle. “I am not terribly concerned about manners and formalities, Natasha. I simply found that some of Alice’s research interesting, and Boris seems to be at least tangentially related to some of it. In addition, I’ve been more and more concerned about the actions of the Society recently, and since Boris was kidnapped by them in the past, I’m investigating some of their actions more closely. You don’t need to be overly mindful of my presence; just pretend I’m not here.”

Natasha gaped at Immortal Ethan, like a fish out of water, before she finally managed to get some of her bearings in the conversation.

“I… I see, honored Immortal. And… ah… Lady Alice is your apprentice? When…”

“Less than a week ago,” said Alice. “It was quite sudden.”

Natasha’s eyes bugged out even further, before she visibly stopped. She took a few calming deep breaths, and Alice swore that she saw Ethan’s lips curl into a mischievous grin out of the corner of her eyes. Then, after a few moments, his smile vanished, and Natasha looked at Ethan again. The woman finally seemed to recover her bearings, before she managed to squeak out a more coherent sentence.

“Thank you for coming all of this way to look after my son, honored Immortal. Your presence means a lot to Boris and I, and...” Natasha trailed off, and even though she looked more composed than before, Alice could tell the woman was floundering for words.

Ethan gave Natasha a light nod. “I am simply looking after my apprentice. Now, you say your son is ill?” With a topic to latch on to, Natasha recovered.

“Yes, honored Immortal. My son is behaving very strangely, ever since he was kidnapped by the Society, and Lady Alice has hinted that she might have a way to help treat him, or at least slow down how quickly his mind seems to be crumbling. He seems to be a little better this week, but… maybe I’m just imagining things. I don’t know. I’m very hopeful that Lady Alice’s treatment will be effective.”

Boris had gotten a little better this week? Alice was suddenly very interested.

Alice took that as her que to start speaking again. “So, Natasha, about Boris. I’ve been working on an enchantment that I think should halt the progression of Boris’s oddity, as long as he keeps wearing it. With this, even if Boris decides to work in the fields or something, his condition shouldn’t worsen.” Alice paused for a moment. She hadn’t really filled Natasha in on the nature of Boris’s problem, since she was worried it would put her own safety at risk. However, telling Natasha nothing might make it less likely for the woman to help Boris keep his enchanted ring on, and Alice felt she could at least share some information without any problems. She hesitated for a moment, before she continued speaking.

“It seems like Boris’s primary problem is due to absorbing too much mana, coupled with a lot of other environmental factors…” Like unlocking his Status Screen too early, thought Alice. “So this ring is created to regulate how much mana Boris absorbs. It isn’t a perfect solution, since I’m not sure how to remove the excess mana in his body, but it makes it much easier to stop his condition from getting worse. The ring is relatively durable, and as long as Boris wears it you should be able to fuel it with basic spidercrab cores or other low level monster cores. It’ll only last a year or so if you use totally incompatible cores, but I hope to have a more permanent solution available by then. This is just a stopgap measure to keep Boris’s condition from getting worse. Can we see Boris, so that I can do some final checks and give him the ring?”

Natasha nodded gratefully.

After that, Alice and her teachers were quickly shown to the room Boris was currently staying in.

When the three saw Boris, Professor Feliza and Ethan frowned.

The mana inside of Boris’s body was even more odd than it had been the last time Alice had seen him. When Alice had first seen Boris, he had two different conflicting System fractals inside of his body, which had made him look incredibly odd in her eyes. The next time Alice had seen him, the mana in his body had seemingly spiraled out of control. Merely five days after Alice had rescued Boris from the Society, he had somehow acquired as much mana as an average level 15, which was truly ridiculous for five days of farmwork, and the mana in his body had been rather oddly colored.

After that, the mana in Boris’s body had continued to grow denser, and the Boris’s behavior had become increasingly odd and... unresponsive. He had stopped reacting to his environment, and eventually started looking more like a bugged NPC in a video game than a real person. Once Alice had advised Natasha to keep Boris from farming, the amount of mana in Boris’s body hadn’t grown very much anymore. However, if the mana in most people’s body was like a carefully structured building, slowly layered brick by brick to create a useful structure inside of their body, Boris’s mana was more like a virus that had taken over his body.

However, in the week since Alice had last seen him, the mana in Boris’s body had changed again.

Now, the amount of mana in Boris’s body had decreased, in the past week, if only by a very mild amount. Alice had never seen this happen before. She frowned, using {Advanced Mana Measurement} to confirm the amount of mana inside of Boris’s body.

Compared to the last time she had seen him a week ago, the number of Mariums of mana inside of Boris’s body had decreased by about 1%. Which was a very, very minor change. However, the fact that the mana in Boris’s body was decreasing at all was odd. Alice had assumed she would need to manually interact with the mana in Boris’s body if she wanted it to decrease, and she hadn’t been sure if that was the correct solution or not. However, without Alice needing to lift a finger, the mana in his body was decreasing on its own for some reason.

Ethan and Feliza, however, were frowning for a different reason.

“Why is there so much mana in his body? And why does it look so… wrong?” said Professor Feliza. “It’s very uncomfortable, seeing it for myself.”

Ethan didn’t share his thoughts, but Alice suspected he was thinking about the Society’s research logs.

However, Alice didn’t remember the Society’s records mentioning any of the kidnapped children showing a decrease in mana over time. Most of the results of the Society’s experiments had simply documented the increasingly odd and apathetic actions of the children in their experiments. While Alice was willing to attribute part of that to the lack of focus and interest the Society had been giving to the odd children experiments recently, Boris’s situation was still strange.

After a few more minutes of observation, Alice also noticed something she hadn’t immediately noticed before.

Boris’s class seed was brighter than before. It was still a bit weak and messy, but it was more structured and stable than it had been last time she had seen Boris. And unlike before, it seemed to be absorbing mana from Boris’s body. It was doing so at a ridiculously slow rate, but it was, indeed, absorbing mana now, unlike the last time Alice had seen Boris’s class seed.

Alice fell into thought.

Based on what she had seen with {Expanding Comprehension} when she had learned that Classes and magic Seeds were based on the same thing, she had observed that Class Seeds started out much less… active than magic seeds, but they constantly absorbed mana. Specifically, they all absorbed mana related to whatever Class they were based on. [Farmer] Class Seeds absorbed [Farmer] mana, [Fishermen] class seeds absorbed [Fishermen] mana, and so on. Meanwhile, Magic Seeds didn’t seem to naturally absorb mana from their surroundings.

Alice slowly inspected Boris’s body with {Organic Vision}, and her new Perk {Intuitive Mana Modelling} helped her inspect the mana inside of Boris’s body. In particular, {Intuitive Mana Modelling} made it dozens of times easier for her to learn something she hadn’t noticed before.

After closer examination, Alice realized all of the built-up mana in Boris’s body seemed to be [Farmer] mana, and as time passed, his class seed was now slowly sucking it up. It was moving at a glacial pace, but it was absorbing mana now. Was this what the ‘natural process’ of absorption looked like for a Class Seed?

Boris’s class seed seemed to, at least partially, be working now. What had caused it to change? And had it caused Boris’s condition to improve, or get worse? If the reduction of the uncontrolled mana in Boris’s body resulted in his condition improving…

That would have massive implications for Alice’s future treatment plans, as well as her understanding of Class Seeds. If Boris got better as a result of the uncontrolled mana in his body decreasing, it would confirm the idea that [Farmer] mana in Boris’s body was somehow harmful to its host. And if the [Farmer] mana was naturally harmful, that would imply that Class Seeds were explicitly created to absorb this ‘harmful mana’ and turn it into something useful, which would give Alice a huge window into how the System worked. Alice had wondered for a long time why the System rewarded people for taking actions related to its Class. A [Fishermen] getting levels for fishing made sense on the surface, but when one thought about a Magic seed related to ‘fishing magic’ getting bigger because its owner fished a lot, the idea became much more strange. Furthermore, Alice had wondered why, if the System was benevolent, why did it restrict people’s levels so much? Wouldn’t it be better to just give people a bunch of levels for free, to make their lives easier?

However, if the [Fishermen] class seed only absorbed [Fishermen] mana, which was created when somebody went fishing, things started to make a little more sense.

Alice took a deep breath, before she calmed herself down. First, she needed to assess whether Boris had actually gotten better this week, as Natasha claimed. She hadn’t even confirmed Boris’s condition yet.

“Hey Boris. It’s me again. How are you?” Asked Alice, leaning a little closer to the child. As usual, Boris no didn’t give her any vocal response. However, there was something unusual this time.

Boris, who often stared blankly at the wall or tried to farm, blinked a few times in response, before tilting his head vaguely in Alice’s direction. In previous visits, he would have usually just ignored her completely. Even if she waved his hand in front of his face, or checked him for any sort of response, he would just stare blankly at the wall or try to farm. He didn’t really react to other stimuli anymore. Now, there was a response, even if it wasn’t very strong.

She tried shuffling a little to the left, and while Boris’s eyes didn’t quite track her properly, he did seem to at least sort of follow her movement.

Was he getting better? Alice started to feel excited. This was a huge hint about the nature of the System. She had no idea why Boris’s Class Seed was starting to do its job, and she would need to observe Boris more closely in the future, but she was pretty sure she was on the right track with her earlier train of thought.

No wonder breaking Boris’s class seed would have harmed him, according to {Safety Analysis}, thought Alice. If Class Seeds acted as some kind of… purifiers, which worked to absorb harmful mana and convert it into something useful, than breaking Boris’s class seed with {Broken Seed} would have been like snatching the antidote out of Boris’s body while he was dying of poison. Some of her previously confusing results suddenly made a lot more sense.

Though, it did make Alice wonder why removing her own class seeds wouldn’t be harmful. She hadn’t gotten around to breaking down a class seed of her own yet, since she had used her {Broken Seed} Perk to remove Samantha’s corrupted magic seed and the Perk wasn’t off cooldown yet, but {Safety Analysis} didn’t seem to have a problem with her removing her [Fisherwoman] class at all. If her [Fisherwoman] Class was working to purify mana in her body, wouldn’t removing it be a huge issue? Or was it not a problem because it had already done its job?

Alice frowned, before shrugging. She was beginning to narrow down the bits of information about Classes she still didn’t understand, at least. Previously, there had just been too much she didn’t know. But now, she had a pretty good idea what mechanics lay behind Class Seeds in general. Even if Alice couldn’t replicate the actions of the System yet, because there were too many System fractals that altered and purified mana in ways she didn’t understand, she was pretty sure she knew the general idea behind how a Class Seed worked. Even if she was missing some smaller details, she was pretty sure she was on the right track.

After falling into thought for a few minutes, Alice finally recovered. She gave Boris her mana-blocking ring. However, her thoughts were even more focused on Boris’s strangely recovered Class Seed now.

Why did Boris’s class seed not do what it was supposed to until now? If Alice’s speculation was correct, Class Seeds purified and absorbed harmful mana before turning them into something useful. Boris’s class seed was now absorbing mana from his body, but last week, it had just sat there, doing nothing. And now, the rate of mana absorption was awful. If everyone else’s class seeds absorbed mana in seconds, Boris’s class seeds would take months to do the exact same thing. If Alice’s assumptions were correct, the best way to help Boris recover would be to make his class seed speed up. But Alice had no idea how to do that. And Alice still didn’t know why the System locked the Status Screen until people turned six years old, either. Why did it matter so much whether Boris was six years old or not?

Even though Alice had gotten a massive clue about the nature of Class Seeds, there were still a lot of questions left unanswered. Alice frowned for a moment, before she smiled to herself. At the very least, she had more information now.

Professor Feliza and Ethan also observed Boris after he put on the ring. Naturally, nothing happened. Since Boris hadn’t been interacting with the mana around his body before he put on Alice’s mana blocking ring, stopping him from interacting with mana wouldn’t do much immediately. To be honest, this might be a process of observing Boris for a few weeks, rather than ‘treating’ him in a single day.

However, Professor Feliza was more than happy to start analyzing Boris’s condition on her own, now that Alice had given him the ring. Boris didn’t seem to be conscious enough to consent to Professor Feliza’s Perks, which caused her to waste a lot of extra mana while she threw Perks and tendrils of Organic Mana at him, but she seemed more than happy to do everything in her power to see what she could learn about Boris. Immortal Ethan seemed more interested in observing Professor Feliza right now, so Alice started to think about what came next.

If her earlier speculation was correct, than the right way to treat Boris was to make his Class Seed absorb mana faster. But she had no idea how to do that. She didn’t even know why Boris’s Class Seed had barely done anything up until now, and had suddenly started working at a snail’s pace sometime during the last week. She frowned.

Meanwhile, Ethan turned towards her.

“I can see that you spent a while thinking about the ring, as well as Boris’s condition. While Professor Feliza is the one officially overseeing your actions here, do you care to explain what you’re thinking about? It might help me understand what’s happening here, and perhaps think of better ways to help cure this child. I can see that he’s in some sort of… strange stupor. One that he does not seem capable of coming out of.”

Professor Feliza nodded. “I’m also quite curious, Lady Alice. Do you have any current ideas for follow-up treatment? I am fine with checking in on Boris multiple times over the next few months, and I’ve gotten a fair amount of initial information to compare future treatments with. But I want to know if you have any follow up goals.”

Alice frowned. “Right now, I have some ideas, but I’m not sure how to go about making them a reality. Well… hmm… First of all, you can see how much mana is built up in his body, right?”

Professor Feliza nodded.

“I suspect that the best way to treat Boris is to decrease the mana in his body somehow.” Or, more accurately, get his class seed to do its job. “But I don’t know how to do that, especially without possibly harming him,” said Alice.

Professor Feliza frowned. “I have to admit, that’s not something I have familiarity with. I have no idea how you would even start a treatment to drain mana from a patient’s body without harming them. Perhaps using a pure mana seed? Hmm… but the mana would be bonded to his body, meaning you would also need organic magic, and probably a few specific Perks if you want to avoid breaking something… hmm…” both Professor Feliza and Immortal Ethan frowned.

Immortal Ethan seemed even more baffled than Professor Feliza.

“This is… truly a rather odd case,” he said. “I admit, if you want to remove the mana from someone’s body without harming them, I’m not sure... Actually…Hmm. Let me ask a few people I know. Someone else might have a way to drain mana without harming someone.”

Alice nodded. “It would be good to have that information on hand, for possible future treatment, but right now Boris’s body seems to be flushing the mana out of his body on its own. I’m not exactly sure why it suddenly started doing so over the past week, since I can assure you this wasn’t happening before, but his body has started to fix its excessive mana problem. I want to talk to Natasha again, and then I want to observe Boris for a few more weeks to see if his condition starts improving. If the amount of mana in his body keeps decreasing, and Boris gets better all of a sudden, I will at least know that my earlier hypothesis was correct. We might be able to use this as a basis for treating other children with Boris’s problem, if we can find them before the Society does.”

Professor Feliza and Immortal Ethan nodded. It seemed that both of them were content to let Alice take the lead right now.

And so, the three of them headed back towards Natasha to see what had changed in the past week.

However, when they questioned Natasha, the woman claimed that nothing at all had happened. Boris had sat in his room, ignoring his surroundings, and hadn’t moved very much in the past week. Natasha was still feeding him and helping him do basic day to day stuff, since Boris had become nearly comatose, and she had no idea what could have been different in the past week.

Alice was left frustrated, wondering how Boris’s class could be encouraged to work faster, and wondering why his Class Seed had suddenly just… started working, when it clearly hadn’t been doing much up until now. If she could figure out why Boris’s Class seed had started working, she would have a viable treatment, not just for Boris, but for any other children with the same problem.

The three spent a few hours slowly going back over the past week, according to Natasha’s memories, as they tried to figure out what had changed. However, there was nothing at all.

Alice was left frustrated when she realized that the most important puzzle piece behind Class Seeds was still missing. She returned to Metsel in a very strange mood, as she tried to figure out whether she was happy that she had new clues and Boris seemed to get better, or sad that she was still missing important pieces of information on how everything fit together. At the very least, she got a few levels out of the ordeal.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 66 -> 68, Scholar: 51 -> 53, Scientist 52 -> 53

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon

Chapter 104

Five days passed by. During that time, Alice spent a lot of time thinking about Boris and his Class Seed. By using what she had already learned from previous experiments, Alice eventually came to a few new guesses about how broken mana worked.

Alice remembered that when she had done a few other tests with the System, she had learned that she couldn’t level up when mana wasn’t present in her environment. If she stepped into a manaless room and then exercised or did an experiment, she wouldn’t gain any Attributes or Levels in related classes.

From this, Alice realized that mana wasn’t being created by people like [Farmers] when they farmed. Instead, they were probably breaking the mana they came into contact with. In other words, when someone farmed, the mana they were close to would probably become [Farmer] broken mana, get absorbed by their body, and then their class seed would absorb it from their body and turn it into Levels and Perks. This had a lot of implications that she needed to sit down and think about, but it did allow Alice to expand her thinking in a new direction.

For a long time, people talked about how quickly dimensional mana could spread, and about how a huge amount of mana in the air around any portal would rapidly break. Alice had originally had no clue why this might be true, but if a [Farmer] could break normal mana and turn it into [Farmer] mana, just by touching mana while farming… what if dimensional portals did the same thing? Right now, Alice assumed that mana would be converted from pure mana into broken mana if it came into contact with a certain ‘concept,’ such as farming. There were obviously some restrictions on this; after all, fires didn’t leave ‘fire’ broken mana everywhere, and plants also didn’t create ‘plant’ broken mana when they came into contact with mana. Alice wasn’t sure why this was the case yet.

But the idea that pure mana was so easily influenced by its surroundings was an interesting one, and if every single chunk of mana that flowed through a portal became dimensional broken mana just by coming into contact with a portal, it would explain why any use of dimensional mana quickly flooded an area with broken dimensional mana. The mana in the air was always moving, and so any portal from one place to another would have small amounts of mana passing through it every second.

She wasn’t sure why some people became ‘contagious’ afterwards, polluting their environment with more broken mana after being ‘baptized’ by dimensional broken mana, but she did think she was on the right track for learning more about broken and dimensional mana. While she hadn’t had time to set up a specific experiment to test her assumptions yet, she was getting all sorts of ideas she wanted to analyze in further detail.

Unfortunately, while Alice had gotten some useful information out of Boris’s situation, she was still completely clueless about why Boris’s class seed was partially working when it previously hadn’t. Even though Alice had learned all sorts of interesting tidbits that could help fuel research about the nature of mana, she had no idea how to actually speed up Boris’s recovery. She racked her brain, running back over Natasha’s recount of the past week, but no matter what she thought about, there just didn’t seem to be anything that could have caused Boris’s class seed to change. And, more importantly, Alice had no idea how to help it work faster, or help the Class Seeds of other afflicted start working. This caused Alice no small amount of frustration.

To work off some stress and raise her Levels a bit, Alice took some time to update her enchanted items. She had been meaning to swap out her enchantments ever since she picked up the {Kinetic Enchanting} Perk, which allowed her to permanently increase the number of instructions an enchanting material could ‘remember’ by one. Most of her enchanted items currently only had one or two instructions right now, and given her increasing skill as an [Enchanter], and the increasingly dangerous threats she might face in the future, Alice decided it was time to improve her items. The extra power her enchantments could give her in an emergency situation might save her life one day. Since Ethan was giving her enough money that she no longer cared about her income, Alice decided to splurge on some materials to make her upgrades even bigger.

Alice’s bracelet was the first object she updated. Previously, Alice’s bracelet of stone beads had simply had beads that would turn into makeshift bullets when being thrown, and Alice had eventually added in an Organic component to further attack the flesh of people who got injured by the beads. However, now that Alice had a little bit more funding and better Perks, she decided to swap out the enchanting material entirely, replacing it with a kind of metal that was already able to hold three instructions on its own: one organic, one kinetic, and one pure-mana based instruction. Then Alice tried layering a few different instructions together to explicitly counter what she had faced during the fight to rescue Samantha.

First, she made the objects fire themselves like bullets upon activation towards a specific target. This hadn’t changed from her original bracelet at all. Then, she added in the instruction to make it hard to heal or manipulate flesh within several centimeters of a metal bead after it hit something. Since many of the Society members were Organic Mages, shutting down or weakening their healing abilities seemed like a good idea, even if the natural magic resistance all creatures possessed would weaken the effect of this enchantment instruction by a large amount. Finally, she added in a layer of pure magic to the beads, in order to make them try to mimic the patterns of mana around them. Alice wasn’t sure if this idea would actually help or not, but she felt that it should make it a bit harder for Mages to track the objects using most forms of mana related vision. Some Perks, such as Alice’s {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision}, would still be able to track the beads easily. However, there were plenty of Perks that relied on mana and mana-related ideas to track objects, and with Alice’s most recent addition to her projectile beads, she would be able to counter those Perks in the future.

With the extra instruction slot granted by {Kinetic Enchanting}, Alice also made the beads explode like shattered glass when they hit something, making them into shrapnel-based enchanted bullets that avoided some detection by Mages and made it hard to heal wounds caused by them. It was an effective counter to lower level Society Mages, although Alice suspected the use of her enchantments would decrease significantly against higher Level combatants. However, even against high Level combatants, wave after wave of beads had a decent chance of killing them if they made a mistake.

Since Alice was happy with her new bracelet, she made a {Blueprint} out of it and made six more copies. Then, she stuck them into {Sample Collection} for future use. After that, she made a necklace that detected and repelled objects that moved too quickly towards her as well. The detection part of the enchantment was rather tricky to figure out, but the Perk Alice got after making her new bead bracelets helped out a lot.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 68 -> 69, Careful Enchanter: 20 -> 27, Kinetic Manabinder 38 -> 41, Student 7 -> 8, Student of Organic Magic 1 -> 3

Speed Analysis

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 40, Intelligence 150 or Greater, Perception 100 or Greater, Great amount of time spent trying to manipulate object speeds using Enchantments

You may attach an addition ‘sensing’ function to any Enchantments you make. This allows you to make objects sense how quickly or slowly an object is moving, and use this to trigger other, more conditional components of your enchantment.

Alice decided to pick this Perk up because trying to get an enchantment to properly ‘sense’ its surroundings was often a major pain in the neck. Alice’s first version of her ‘safety necklace’ had only been able to stop ‘all’ objects in her surroundings, and worked only when Alice turned it on. While that wasn’t bad, it also meant that Alice needed to first sense an attack before she could respond to it. And while {Adrenaline Rush} being activated would certainly tell her that something bad was about to happen, she didn’t want to be at the mercy of a Perk that could easily be on cooldown during a crisis. {Speed Analysis} let her attach an extra condition to her necklace, letting it react to objects flying towards her at high speeds even if {Adrenaline Rush} wasn’t around to warn her in advance.

The other Perk Alice picked up that week was {Enchanter’s Armory}.

Enchanter’s Armory

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 25 or greater, Use enchanted objects in battle semi-frequently

Any enchanted items you use while in battle will have their enchantments enhanced.

Alice took this Perk in order to improve her enchantments, especially the bead-bracelets she used. The biggest problem she was worried about was whether additional enchantments on each bead would do their job properly after hitting an enemy. After all, living creatures resisted external mana, and so [Organic Mages] might be able to ignore Alice’s attempts to ruin their healing abilities, and her mana-camouflage might not be good enough to fool people’s senses. After some testing, {Enchanter’s Armory} seemed to solve the camouflage problem, although Alice had no ethical way of testing the influence the Perk had on her Organic Enchantment.

While Alice’s enchantments were progressing well and her research on Boris’s situation was stalled out, her time at her magic academy had become much more… interesting.

Most of the [Students] in school originally hadn’t been aware of Alice’s existence. As word began to spread that Immortal Ethan had taken an apprentice, more and more [Students] began to glance at Alice out of the corners of their eyes and pay attention to her. Alice didn’t pay very much attention to them, since she had always been rather socially oblivious, but she was surprised to see {Sense Hostility} activate a few times while she was in school. Alice assumed some people were jealous of her status as an apprentice of an Immortal.

Luckily, the jealous people weren’t very common. People had better sense than to pick a fight with an Immortal’s apprentice, even if they were jealous. Luka and Erkki, Alice’s two friendly classmates with the highest status, also stood up for her in the background, letting people know that Alice had always been a rather talented and high Level Mage with an interest in… combat. And a side hobby of doing research. With her friends sticking up for her and helping her smooth out her reputation, most people were content to go back to ignoring her. After all, regardless of whether Alice was an Immortal’s apprentice or not, most people still had better things to do than obsess over her lifestyle and status. Whether she was a nobody or an Immortal’s apprentice, it wouldn’t help people level up faster or learn more, and so most [Students] didn’t care. But there were definitely more eyes on her than before, and her [Teachers] in particular paid a little more attention to her than before.

Of course, this was with the exception of Professor Feliza, who had already learned Alice was Ethan’s newest apprentice last weekend, and didn’t seem to care very much. During the week, Alice kept in contact with Professor Feliza. With Professor Feliza, she continuously discussed what the [Teacher] knew about mana. Sadly, professor Feliza didn’t know much that would help Alice treat Boris. Since Alice had massive advantages in observing with mana, due to her ability to see System mana, she had already overtaken the average understanding a Mage had towards mana in this world by a huge margin. Professor Feliza had no idea how to remove mana from inside of a body at all, much less how to do so without harming the patient, because nobody had ever needed a treatment for mana saturation before. Which meant Alice was completely on her own.

Alice had already expected that, but it was more than a little frustrating to see that there were seemingly no resources she could tap into to look for ideas. Alice’s understanding of the internal structure of Class Seeds was still rather weak, and finding ways to interact with and manipulate Class Seeds was difficult for her.

Even the academy’s library didn’t have anything in particular that Alice could use for this situation. The only upside seemed to be the fact that Boris’s condition was getting better on his own, meaning that at the very least Boris would probably be fine. But the Society had recorded a few dozen children who had also unlocked their Status Screens early. And unlike Boris, they hadn’t started getting better. Alice still hoped to develop a solution for their illness so that Ethan could apply it to any children the Illvarian government found with the same problems. But right now, she had no idea how to fix anything.

That Friday, after class, Alice received a response letter from Illa, and another letter from Milo. She was more than a little bit surprised to see a response letter only a week after she sent a letter all the way to Cyra, especially considering the fact that there weren’t many roads to the frontier towns yet. The easiest way to get to and from the southernmost towns under construction was still by boat, but Alice remembered it taking a week or so to travel from Cyra to Metsel when she had come north. High level [Messengers] managing to get to and from Cyra in half that time while travelling backwoods areas, while dodging monsters and [Bandits] the whole way was quite impressive.

After returning to Ethan’s mansion for the night, Alice opened the letter and began carefully reading its contents.

Lady Alice,

I am glad to know that you are doing well in the North. My husband and his company stated that they had some difficulty finding a sponsor for you, but still managed to get one that was willing to pay for your entry into a Magical Academy under some work-related conditions. I’m glad that things worked out for you on that front.

I can also see that you have gone far above and beyond any level of connection my husband’s business network may have granted you. To be an apprentice of one of Illvaria’s six surviving Immortals is a feat few people have achieved. I would like to claim that I had a hand in your success, but at this point, I do wonder if you wouldn’t have reached the same heights with or without my help. Congratulations to you, and I’m glad to see that you are doing so well for yourself.

My acquaintanceship with Immortal Ethan goes back to my days in the army. I served on the northern border under Immortal Ethan’s father, and the Sun Knight spent a good amount of time and effort providing me with the materials and training I needed to succeed. I would not have reached the Level I have reached today without his assistance, and I am grateful for his help.

I have interacted less with his Immortal son, but I have still spent some time with him. I have known him to have a somewhat… odd personality. He is sometimes frustrating to work with because his personality can come off as abrasive, especially in certain situations. However, while he can come across the wrong way, I have known him to be very… enthusiastic about the idea of another Immortal showing up in Illvaria.

Alice was highly amused to see Illa, of all people, referring to someone as sometimes abrasive. While Alice didn’t mind Illa’s blunt, pragmatic personality, she was willing to bet it had also irritated plenty of people Illa had worked with in the past.

One of the things you should keep in mind is that most Immortals are lonely. An Immortal is still, at the end of the day, a human. They love their family, laugh with their friends, and cry when their loved ones get hurt. This is why many Immortals are afraid to interact with non-Immortals too frequently; they fear growing close to them because they are afraid of the day their friends will leave them, never to return because they, like many others, failed to reach Immortality before old age took them.

The Sun Knight, for example, grieved for nearly three decades when his first wife died of old age, or so the legends go. Afterwards, he refused to even entertain the idea of remarrying until his current wife approached him. Since she was also an Immortal, he was more willing to entertain the idea of a relationship, and eventually they got married.

They then had several children, most of whom died of old age.

Doll, the Immortal of Steel and Fabric, is an even better example of Immortal loneliness. She refuses to even see non-Immortals for fear of getting attached to them unless they are effectively guaranteed to become Immortals, meaning that they must have proven they have access to a Tier 2 Class and still be relatively young.

The point that I am trying to make is that Ethan is no exception to the concept of Immortal loneliness. In fact, he might be the Immortal who is most influenced by it, since he grew up with parents half-convinced he would die of old age like his siblings. He managed to beat the odds and become an Immortal, but… being the child of two Immortals means that he grew up with a very different view of life and death than most people. And he also had a very unique social status while growing up, making it even harder for him to connect with other people. This is the reason he continuously takes in apprentices and tries to raise them to Immortality, although he has yet to succeed.

If Ethan thinks that you have a good chance of reaching Immortality, he is likely to prioritize your safety and growth over almost everything else. The more you convince him that you have a good chance of reaching Immortality, the more trustworthy he will be with all of your secrets, needs, and wants. The more he feels that you won’t make it, and the more he worries you will die of old age and fail to reach Immortality, the less trustworthy he will become. While I do not think of him as the kind of person who would harm one of his subordinates or acquaintances, either through malice or recklessness, your matters will certainly weigh less heavily on his heart if he thinks you will die in a few decades either way. He is more concerned with making friends who will be around for a few centuries than with friends who will disappear in the blink of an eye.

Considering your age and what I’ve heard of your achievements, you should be very safe.

It has been a delight hearing from you, and I hope to hear from you again in the near future.

Sincerely,

Illa Weissarus

Milo’s letter was much less concentrated on Immortals and Ethan than Illa’s letter, since Alice hadn’t asked him for any information on the subject. His letter was mostly a collection of ramblings about life in southern Illvaria, talking about things such as the increased flow of trade and money in the south, the completion of Illa’s dock, and a pretty [Barmaid] that Milo had begun courting. Alice read over his letter as a pleasant distraction, catching up with Milo’s life before she turned her attention back to the information given to her by Illa.

She had been debating whether to fully trust Ethan for a while now, and while Illa hadn’t said she could trust Ethan unconditionally with her secrets, Alice was happy to have Illa’s thoughts on the psychology of Immortals in this world. And, perhaps more importantly, while there were some conditions attached to Alice’s trust of Ethan, based on Illa’s words it would probably make Alice safer if she told Ethan about her past as an {Outworlder} than if she tried to keep things hidden. Alice felt that her odds of reaching Immortality were quite good; she was much higher level than most people her age, and while her experience multipliers still needed some work before they reached the levels needed for Immortality, Alice was definitely getting closer and closer as time passed. And so, that Friday night, Alice found herself once again outside of Ethan’s study, preparing to talk about the most dangerous part of her past.

A note from acaswell

Author’s Note: The thing I mentioned that I need to be done with by Feb. 15th is eating up a bit more time and mental energy than expected. Next week’s chapter might be delayed a bit, depending on what happens, or might be shorter than usual. Well, the Patreon chapter, which I guess public readers won’t see for another couple weeks… but anyway. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, I apologize in advance. After next week we should be back to a normal schedule.

Shameless plug – for $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 105

Alice knocked on the door to Ethan’s study, trying to quell the thrill of nervousness that ran down her spine as she thought about revealing her status as an {Outworlder}. However, since she had made up her mind, she would follow her intentions through.

“Yes?” asked Ethan. “You can come in.”

Alice opened to the door to Ethan’s study and walked in. As usual, there was a small mountain of paperwork in front of Ethan, as well as a few letters laying in front of him. Ethan gave Alice a nod, then gestured for her to wait a moment he finished scanning a letter in front of him. Several seconds later, he folded the piece of paper and placed it in the corner of his desk, before he turned back towards her and gave her a friendly grin.

“It’s rare to see you come to my study. Is there something you wanted to discuss?”

“I’ve decided that I want to speak with you about something,” said Alice, pushing aside her hesitation.

“Oh?” Ethan raised an eyebrow.

Alice took a deep breath, feeling her nerves and anxiety reach a peak, before she let out her breath.

“I’m not from Luliv. I was born on a planet called Earth, and I was dumped here while I was asleep. I think it might be related to the dimensional floods the Society of Starry Eyes has been recording recently, though I’m not 100% sure that’s the case.”

Immortal Ethan paused, his eyes widening in surprise, before he took a closer look at Alice and frowned.

“Is that so? I… ah, so that’s what it was. I knew there were a lot of weird parts about your past, so I was trying to figure out what was wrong.” Ethan chuckled. “I was originally hung up on the fact that none of my agents could find a trace of you before you showed up in Cyra last year. And Illa was quite reluctant to say anything, although she did say your past wasn’t harmful to the country or myself. I thought perhaps you had grown up in the wilderness or something, which would also explain why you seemed to have no past, but your Classes and Perks are just not built for wilderness survival.” Ethan thoughtfully nodded. “I guess this information does finally resolve all of my questions.” Then, Ethan suddenly towards Alice, and then frowned at her. “It’s good that you waited a while to tell me this, but shouldn’t you have waited longer to verify my intentions and what kind of person I am? It would be very difficult for me to discover the truth about your past without your help, and logically speaking, I’m someone who could pose a threat to you,” said Ethan, his frown beginning to deepen.

“If you decided to just take a huge risk without verifying more information about me as a person, I’ll be angry. I’m a Mage with a permit to study dimensional magic, and I have a much higher social position than you do. If I sent you on a ‘training mission’ for a while, people probably wouldn’t question it. I have no intention of doing so, but you had no way of knowing that beforehand, and I’m probably the person best situation in all of Illvaria to make you disappear. Why did you tell me information that might put you in danger?”

Alice felt more than a little amused by the thought of Ethan being upset that she had shared more information with him. However, in light of Illa’s discussion about Immortal loneliness, a lot of Ethan’s actions made more sense. He wasn’t just thinking about doing the ‘bare minimum’ to get Alice to Immortality, or to create an asset to Illvaria. Instead, he seemed to be trying to ensure that Alice would survive as long as humanly possible even after she became an Immortal; in other words, while a lot of his words seemed to reprimand her, he was also lecturing her on ways to help her survive in the long term.

“I didn’t share this information on a whim,” said Alice, wondering if she should discuss how much information she received from Illa via letter. After a few moments, she decided that Immortal Ethan probably wouldn’t be angry that Alice had asked for information about him, and would probably approve of her actions.

“I first asked Illa what her impression of you was. I thought that she would understand what I wanted to know from that question, since she’s aware of my… situation.” Out of the corner of her eye, Alice saw Ethan’s eye start twitching for a few moments. She pretended not to see it. “After I got information from Illa regarding you, I decided that telling you about my history as an {Outworlder} would increase my safety, since you’re more likely to help me than harm me, based on the information currently available to me. Besides, the Society is in a good place to put together how weird my past is, once they gather enough information, and while I don’t think they know, it’s entirely possible they’ll figure it out in the future. Since that’s true, informing you in advance is one of the better ways to improve my safety and help prepare against a possible fight with the Society. The longer I can put it off, the safer I’ll be.”

Ethan’s frown slowly eased, before he gave Alice a more curious look.

“I’m glad you at least put a reasonable amount of thought and assessment into it first. Hmm… Another world, huh…” Ethan drifted off as he looked more closely at Alice. “What was your home world like?” Unlike before, he no longer sounded critical of Alice’s choices. He just seemed curious.

Alice frowned for a moment, before she shrugged. She didn’t mind talking about Earth. She wasn’t used to talking about it with people besides Cecilia, and Illa when she had lived in Cyra, but it wasn’t a terrible idea to talk about home.

“The world I lived in was one where there was no such thing as mana or magic. There was also no such thing as the System.” Ethan’s eyes widened in shock as Alice spoke. “Instead, there was an awful lot of… You know, I’m not quite sure how to describe what a machine is,” said Alice. When she tried to use her Illvarian Language skill to translate it, the result she got was ‘extraordinary metal contraption enchantment which is not an enchantment,’ which was… hard to explain. Thus, Alice ended up using the English word for ‘machine’ instead.

“Sorry, back up a moment, there was no System at home?” Said Ethan, staring at her.

“Yeah. Why?”

“So you got to this point in less than a year?” Said Ethan, his voice climbing at least an octave.

“Yeah. I got a small bonus to levelling speed from {Outworlder}, but I also have a pretty weird perspective on how mana and biology should work, and I’ve gotten a lot of Achievements and stuff from trying to figure out how much of my original worldview is correct and how much of it is wrong. I also have a pretty good work ethic…”

Ethan’s eyes widened in surprised for a few more moments, before he cleared his throat, and his facial muscles relaxed. His voice returned to its regular volume.

“I’m sorry. Continue. What is a machine?” he said, as if he was trying to change the subject. Alice continued with her original explanation.

“It’s kind of like an enchantment, but made out of metal, and without any magic involved… I guess?” Alice frowned. There was a reason her language skill had given her a garbled mess. Explaining machinery was hard to a world reliant on Magic and Perks. When she had spoken with Illa, she had mostly talked about political and economic systems that existed within her former country, as well as what she knew of other countries. She hadn’t gotten into the specific, day to day mundanities of life on Earth, and so she hadn’t really figured out how to broach the topic of machines, either. She had spoken with Cecilia about their existence, but by this point Cecilia knew enough about Earth that Alice didn’t really need to work hard to introduce concepts from home to her. Especially due to Alice’s use of her {Shared Memory} Perk, Alice had been able to directly show Cecilia snippets of her memories of Earth.

“An enchantment made of metal, but without mana?” Ethan looked completely baffled as he stared at Alice. Even {Rhetorical Flourish} couldn’t save her when she was having such a hard time explaining an idea in Illvarian.

“Umm… All right, so in my world, there was no magic or mana, right?”

“I understand so far. I would have found the idea of life without any mana to be totally impossible a few weeks ago, but after my experience in the manaless room, I have a better idea how that might work. In fact, now that I think about it, the whole reason you suspected that mana wasn’t necessary for life was probably because there was no mana on your former world, yes? Given your background, it’s a really easy experiment to think of once you start familiarizing yourself with the scholarly studies of this world. But anyway, your former world had no magic.”

“Well, since we had no magic, we also had no enchantments, right?”

“Right, right. Hmm… since I suppose you had no access to the System, you didn’t even have System Enchantments, yes?”

Alice nodded. “No magic or enchantments at all.”

Ethan frowned, as if suddenly realizing something.

“If you had no Mages or access to Perks, How did you deal with monst-ah. No mana. I’ve just gotten used to the idea of mana deprivation not being lethal, but monsters still die without mana. And since there was no mana, there were no monsters to deal with either. But if you don’t have access to the System, you can’t get stronger either. If you don’t have the ability to Level up, or increase your Stats, how do you improve? Was everyone on your former planet just… really weak?”

Alice felt her eye twitch this time.

“Yes. Everyone on my former planet was really weak. That’s not the point here. The point is that we had no mana and no magic, but that doesn’t mean we had no way to create interesting or powerful objects. Since we had no mana, we instead used very, very clever bits of machinery, chemical reactions, and so on to create our own version of enchanted items. They took a long time to develop, and needed lots of trial and error before they were made, but the people of my home planet eventually made a lot of unique and interesting objects, even without Magic. And they’re much easier to mass-produce, since we don’t need specific Perks or Mages to make everything.”

Ethan looked thoughtful. “Like what? If you don’t have mana, what can you create that resembles an enchantment?”

“Do you want to see? I have {Shared Memory}, so I can just directly share images and memories of my home with you, if you’re interested. I’m not sure how to even start explaining how some of the things from home worked, and showing you would be much easier.”

Ethan thought for a moment, before he nodded. “You can show me.”

Alice reached out a hand, before she made contact with Ethan’s arm. After that, she used {Shared Memory}, before she decided to show Ethan an image of a car. It was easy to use as a comparison point, since horses and carriages were everywhere on this planet, and so Ethan should be able to quickly figure out what it was and what its purpose was.

As Alice showed Ethan images of cars, she also replayed a few of her own memories of riding around in a car, as well as the speeds a car could reach on a highway. Embedded within the memory were chunks of other information; such as the highway network Alice’s previous world had constructed to service cars, and the size cities could reach in her previous life.

At the end of Alice’s introductory memory montage on the nature of cars, Ethan quietly removed his arm, before nodding thoughtfully.

“Interesting. I’ve never seen anything like these… cars, were they called? Your memories didn’t include much talking, but I think I heard that term thrown around a few times.”

Alice was rather surprised for a moment, because Ethan hadn’t spoken in Illvarian when he used the term ‘car.’ He had spoken in English. It was a language Alice didn’t really hear spoken in this world, and it felt like it had been years since she last spoke in her native language. She had gotten used to speaking Illvarian, but hearing someone talk in English felt strangely nostalgic.

Heedless of Alice’s sudden nostalgia, Ethan continued speaking, a mixture of wonder and curiosity evident on his face.

“I’m quite surprised. Despite having no access to magic or Perks, cars do seem quite a bit better than horses or a carriage, unless they’re boosted by several Perks. I mean, if an Immortal threw a bunch of Perks together to boost the speed of a horse, they could still outrun a car quite easily. However, the majority of the country simply doesn’t have access to that level of Perk. Even if cars are inferior to the upper limit a Perk can reach, your memories don’t make it seem like cars are rare. If every single person in Illvaria used cars, instead of horses or their feet, I imagine news and goods would flow much more quickly around the country. Fascinating.” Immortal Ethan nodded. “So are cars the ‘machines’ you were referring to?”

“It’s an example of a machine that we created at home, yes. There are a lot more machines than just cars, but most of them are harder to describe. My homeland focused a lot on making these sorts of metal contraptions, in order to compensate for all of the things we lacked since we didn’t have access to Perks and Enchantments. In the process, our machines reached a point where they probably match someone with Perks at level 80 or 90. Though, admittedly, that also varies a lot from one category of machine to another. While we had machines that helped us with medicine at home, for example, there’s no way we could just help someone regrow a limb in a few minutes back on Earth. I would say the medical treatments of this world are probably superior to those on Earth, even though this world’s understanding of what’s actually happening at a microscopic level is much worse,” said Alice. When she had first arrived in this world, she had thought the treatments of this world were only on par with Earth’s, but after seeing people routinely regrow limbs and instantly heal lethal injuries, she had been forced to revise her opinion. “It’s actually pretty interesting to see how some things are much worse here on Luliv, but there are also some categories of technology and medicine that are oddly superior. But cars are the kind of thing I would see all the time at home.”

Ethan nodded thoughtfully, before his eyes darted back towards the mountain of paperwork on his desk. “Since you appear to have put a decent amount of thought into whether or not to tell me about your status as an {Outworlder}, and even went as far as contacting Illa and verifying information about me beforehand, I’ll acknowledge the planning and thought that went into this. Thank you for being willing to share this information. I will also tell you that if the Society learns of this, they will probably hound you to the ends of the planet, so I very highly recommend you not tell anyone else, no matter what.” Alice thought guiltily of Cecilia, before deciding not to mention it. She trusted Cecilia not to reveal her status as an {Outworlder}, and she wanted to continue trusting her friends. “I’ll do my best to help create a ‘fake past’ for you as well. Something a little obscure, so it would make sense that it didn’t come to light, but something that can be found after a little bit of digging. Hmm… perhaps you could be an escaped Sigmusi slave? It would be a little difficult to interfere with any records the Sigmusi have, since relations between Illvaria and the Sigmusi are practically only a step away from war, but I can probably slip a [Spy] or two over the border to meddle with some documents. If it’s obscure enough, it might work as a method of covering up your past for a while longer… If you worked to learn Sigmusi, it might help as well. Up to you, though, since this ruse will also fall apart sooner or later. It’s just a question of buying time.” Ethan trailed off for a moment, before nodding to himself. He turned towards Alice. “Rest assured that I will do my best to keep you safe for as long as you remain my apprentice, and I will take appropriate steps to deal with this information. But also keep in mind that the Society will probably come for you sooner or later. Before that happens, you should strive to level up and grow stronger as quickly as possible, or your future might be very bleak.”

Alice nodded. She had always been aware of the looming threat of the Society; otherwise, she wouldn’t work so hard to grow. Ethan’s eyes darted towards his pile of paperwork once more, and Alice took that as a cue she should leave. She gave Immortal Ethan a respectful nod, and after a few parting words, she left Ethan’s study.

* * *

The next day was Saturday, which meant that it was board game day. As usual, Alice went to Cecilia’s workshop, where Cecilia was already setting up a table in one of the rooms and pulling over chairs. Since everyone had gotten tired of the previous board game Alice had recently made another popular board game from home, this one titled ‘Terraforming the Western Continent.’ The original board game was based on terraforming and colonizing Mars, but since Alice figured it probably wouldn’t make much sense to the people of this planet, she had made a few changes to the game to make sure everything made more sense to the inhabitants of Luliv. Instead of terraforming a planet, for example, Alice found the best map of the Western Continent she could find (it was very, very dubious), filled in the blanks with geography she thought probably made sense, and then made the game instead focused on colonizing the Western Continent. Some game mechanics also got slightly changed or reworked, as well. For example, instead of raising Oxygen levels, players of the game worked to lower monster population in the area, and instead of managing the temperature of the planet, people instead worked to manage the mana level of the area by using enchantments that lowered or raised the quantity of mana and broken mana in the region. It wasn’t exactly a perfect rendition of the original game, but Alice felt it worked well enough, and the gameplay made much more sense to the inhabitants of this world, according to Cecilia. Which was what mattered to her.

Like every other morning Alice ran a board game group, it didn’t take long for a few other people to show up. Ezrien’s team of researchers sometimes came to board game day, and sometimes they didn’t, and this week it seemed like they weren’t planning to show up. Erkki, Arsi, and Laila came, while Luka was apparently dealing with some sort of party his noble family wanted him to host. Alice figured nobody else was coming, and so she started explaining the rules of the new game, as well as the general background of it. However, partway through her explanation, there was another knock at the door of Cecilia’s workshop.

“I got it,” said Cecilia, frowning. These days, Cecilia was doing well enough financially that she closed the store on Saturday mornings so that she could enjoy herself playing board games with everyone else. However, sometimes customers ignored the ‘closed’ sign and request new enchantments anyway. Alice shrugged, and resumed her explanation of the new board game, before she heard something crash into the ground a few moments later.

Wondering if the Society had come for her, Alice prepared for a fight as she opened the door, only to be surprised in a different way.

Cecilia had knocked over a small crate of enchanting supplies. And standing at the door was Immortal Ethan, who gave Alice and Cecilia curious glances.

“Excuse me, but I heard my apprentice runs something called a ‘board game night’ every Saturday here? Despite this clearly not being night? Do you have an extra seat?” Asked Ethan.

A note from acaswell

AHAHA I fell behind schedule this week by quite a bit due to my February 15th deadline. But the five weeks of death have ended. I have survived. Huzzah!

Chapter 107 and 108 are a little shorter than regular chapters. Just a warning in advance.

Shameless plug – On Patreon, you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3!

Chapter 106

Alice stared at Immortal Ethan, who had shown up to her morning board game session, and tried not to feel awkward. After her conversation with Immortal Ethan yesterday, she had realized that Ethan was more interested in her than before. Alice suspected it was because Ethan learned that she had reached her current level in a year, rather than sixteen and a half years. Reaching level 68 in a Class before turning seventeen was really impressive by this world’s standards, since most people reached somewhere between level 40 and 60 in their primary class by the time they reached retirement. But doing the same thing in less than a year was several times more difficult.

However, with an Immortal showing up to her board game night, Alice realized that she had underestimated just how much Ethan valued her levelling speed. He wasn’t just impressed by her levelling speed; he had now crashed the time she usually spent relaxing with her friends for reasons she didn’t quite understand.

She eyed Erkki, Arsi, and Laila, who had frozen like frogs being eyed like a snake the moment Immortal Ethan had entered the room, and surpressed a sigh. Cecilia was a little better, since Alice had updated her on being an apprentice of Ethan earlier, and Cecilia was used to weird stuff happening around Alice. However, even Cecilia seemed nervous when standing in front of one of the most influential people in Illvaria. Alice had let most of her acquaintances know the board game nights were open for anyone she knew, as long as they felt like showing up. However, she had never expected a literal Immortal to show up on a day like this, since she expected Immortals to be off doing more important things.

“So how do we play?” Asked Ethan, seemingly completely unaffected by the tense atmosphere.

Alice cleared her throat. “Ah… well, this is a game called ‘Terraforming the Western Continent.’ It’s set someday in the distant future, when really powerful Mages and [Enchanters] are working to settle the Western Continent, using extraordinary enchantments and Artifacts to drive back the monsters, control the massive quantity of mana present in the region, and turn it into a habitable place for humans to live.” Alice said, trying to settle the tense atmosphere. If Erkki, Laila, and Luka kept gaping at Ethan, Alice would probably die of stress.

Ethan nodded thoughtfully. “Is that so?” He said, looking over Alice’s board curiously. “I don’t think that a desert could exist on that spot. They usually form near mountains. They sometimes form for other reasons, but one definitely doesn’t belong on that spot.” Alice blushed. She hadn’t noticed that mistake. She saw Cecilia stifle a small chuckle, some of the other girl’s tension leaving as an Immortal poked fun at Alice’s game board. Then, Alice cleared her throat again. Even if she was stressed out by the tense atmosphere, having the flaws in her game board pointed out wasn’t the way she had hoped to remove the tension.

“I was trying to create an interesting game board. Since there aren’t any good maps of the western continent available, I made most of it up myself. I may have made a few small errors,” said Alice, hoping Ethan wouldn’t look too closely at the rest of the game board.

Ethan shrugged, giving her a more relaxed grin, as Alice went back to explaining the rules. By the end of it, she wasn’t sure how much information Erkki, Arsi, and Laila had retained. They were still paying much more attention to Ethan than the board itself. However, Alice didn’t want to re-explain the rules, so she hoped they would probably pick it up after a game or two. Honestly, she had only been able to play the original board game twice while back on Earth, and so she wasn’t entirely familiar with the rules yet. She just hoped that she was remembering how to play properly.

After that, the board game began.

Turns passed as the group tried to get back to a ‘normal’ board game session, but Alice noticed everyone but her was afraid to mess with Ethan. Even though Terraforming the Western Continent was a game built around sabotaging each other’s work, almost as much as it was built around actually terraforming the Western Continent and building civilization there, having an actual Immortal sitting at the game board meant that most people were afraid to target him. Laila, who was uncharacteristically prim and conscious of her image, eventually managed to make some awkward small talk with Immortal Ethan during the game session, which got Erkki and Arsi to open up a little bit to Ethan during the game session as well. However, everyone was unusually on edge for the first half of the game, and nobody was willing to sabotage Ethan’s projects due to his Status in real life. This led Ethan to an easy victory during the first game.

The second game was a little less tense. After having an Immortal sit around the table and play Terraforming the Western Continent for a few hours, the others finally started to warm up to Immortal Ethan. Arsi was very happy to talk with Ethan once he got more used to the Immortal’s presence, possibly because Ethan knew a lot about Magic, and Arsi seemed to look up to the man. Erkki, instead, seemed more afraid of messing up and causing Ethan to form a bad impression of him; thus, he refrained from actively participating in the conversation. Laila, for her part, remained uncharacteristically energetic, staying as prim and proper as possible. She was the most unnatural of the three, although part of that was just because Alice knew how much Laila usually enjoyed relaxing and taking things easy. Seeing her try to look energetic and proper just felt wrong.

All in all, the board game session was a fair bit more strained and less relaxed than usual, but by the end of the second game, everyone but Laila had at least started to calm down. Since they were running low on time, Alice decided to end the session there.

At the end of the board game session, Erkki, Arsi, and Laila left the building as if they were fleeing for their lives, which made Alice feel more than slightly amused. Cecilia, however, couldn’t leave, because this was her shop.

After a few moments of hesitation, Cecilia gave Ethan a small, respectful bow. “Honored Immortal,” she said, and Alice could practically feel the desire to be somewhere else radiating off of her friend.

Ethan gave Cecilia a small smile, before nodding at Alice as well. “Is this your friend?” He asked. “I recall hiring a [Hidden Bodyguard] for her as well…” Cecilia seemed a bit surprised at that, before she glanced at Alice and seemed to realize why it was relevant.

Alice nodded in response to Ethan’s question. “This is my friend Cecilia, yes. She knows almost everything about me, even from before I joined Illvarian society,” said Alice.

Ethan frowned, before giving Cecilia a closer look. “Is that so?” He asked. “In that case, it is a pleasure to meet you as well, Lady Cecilia. Lady Alice has spoken of you.”

“It’s an honor to meet honored Immortal,” said Cecilia, even though she had already said that earlier today. Alice realized her friend was being unnaturally stiff, and resisted the urge to chuckle.

“Out of curiosity, is this board game from your former home?” Asked Ethan, turning back towards Alice.

“Kind of. I modified it a lot. The game is originally about colonizing a planet near my home world using machinery. But since there isn’t any real usage of electricity in this world, and machines are a pretty foreign concept, I swapped out all of the mentions of electronics with enchantments, magic, and so on. And the western continent obviously didn’t exist back at home, either. But the original game I pulled the rules from did indeed originate from Earth,” said Alice.

“Planets, huh,” said Ethan thoughtfully. “On Luliv, the study of the stars isn’t very advanced, although there are still some [Scholars] who speak of the planets and stars of the sky. I wonder how different they are compared to your home dimension…”

“I figure they’re… probably similar, although the planets of this dimension are a fair bit more filled with mana,” said Alice, shrugging. “I mean, the planet is still a sphere, right?”

Ethan nodded. “It is a very well known fact that the planet is a sphere, yes. While it is very difficult to sail around the world, due to the high mana density of most parts of the planet beyond the central continent, numerous Perks and a few legendary historical voyages have verified this fact. It isn’t exactly a relevant fact in day to day life, but the planet is certainly round. Though I can’t help but wonder if the planets here and in your home dimension really are the same. You mentioned the idea of colonizing a planet, and I can’t help but wonder if the people of Luliv will eventually reach the same level of technology as your home world. I’ve never even heard of someone who thought about colonizing a nearby planet here; the very notion sounds incredibly strange to me. Yet, in the board game we played today, it’s treated almost as if it’s common sense to want to reach out to other planets.”

Alice nodded. “At home, we were starting to run out of space on our original planet. Since we have machines, and there aren’t any monsters to stop human expansion, we ended up taking over most of the planet. Human life improved by a great deal, and most corners of the world were incredibly well mapped out and explored. Although, a rather different set of problems arose from machinery and the endless march of progress, some of which humans on my home world have yet to solve.” Alice shrugged. “I imagine we’ll fix the problems caused by our rapid expansion eventually, but it’ll take a lot more time and research.”

Ethan nodded thoughtfully. “I hadn’t thought much of any problems that might arise from having so many powerful machines and so many weak people. I suppose if something like a car goes out of control, it could hurt the passengers, whereas on luliv, most riders are stronger than the horses they ride and so it’s not really an issue.” Ethan shrugged. “Anyway, I had actually come today with a different purpose. I wanted to speak with Lady Cecilia, although I did get somewhat distracted by the fascinating board game.”

“What do you need from me, Honored Immortal?” Asked Cecilia, doing her best to give Ethan a respectful, if nervous, nod.

“May I ask what level you are in your primary class?” He said. Alice’s eyes widened. It seemed that now that Ethan’s interest in Alice was heightened, he was also interested in investigating her friends, especially Cecilia.

“I’m getting close to 60 in my main class. Being around Alice lets me form all sorts of weird Achievements that boost my levelling speed, so I’m making pretty good time now, even if it’s nothing as ridiculous as her levelling speed. Why do you ask?” said Cecilia.

Ethan frowned, before nodding. “Level 60 by the time you’re physically 16… were you born a Mage?”

Cecilia nodded.

“So you were born with the slowed aging speed of a Mage… In that case, somewhere closer to 18 or 19 years old chronologically? You’re a little slow, but not bad…” Ethan nodded. “Have you considered any ways to level up faster, Lady Cecilia?

Cecilia frowned. “I’m mostly getting Achievements by helping Alice with her research, honestly. She has a lot of interesting bits of research she’s working on, and while I can’t help her with all of her projects, I can help with some of them. Those give me access to better Achievements, which boost my levelling speed, granting me better Perks, which make it easier for me to help out in more experiments…”

Ethan shook his head. “That’s not a bad pace for a regular person, but Alice has a really good chance of reaching immortality. And, at least right now, I don’t think your odds are great. Normally, I wouldn’t worry about it, but especially if you know about Alice’s past, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea for me to invest in your levelling speed as well.” He paused. “Would you be interested in receiving some help in the future? I won’t take you as an apprentice of mine, because I don’t think you have the potential to justify it right now. But on account of you being Alice’s friend, I wouldn’t mind giving you some assistance, especially if you need things like materials and resources. Your shop location, for example, isn’t in the best position. If you had a more central location, you would have more customer traffic, which would help you level [Merchant] more. Along with [Enchanter], [Merchant] is your primary class, right?”

Cecilia frowned, giving Ethan a closer look. There was a mixture of emotions on her face as she processed Ethan’s offer. Excitement. Confusion. Worry.

“Why are you so invested in my levelling speed?”

Ethan frowned, before sighing. “I’ve just seen too many promising people fail to reach Immortality, especially because they didn’t want to leave their friends or lovers behind.” Ethan’s eye twitched, and Alice wondered if Ethan was also pissed off about Illa dropping her chances of becoming an Immortal to get married. It seemed like most Immortals and near-immortals were upset with Illa for precisely that reason, which made her feel more than a little amused. If she were living in Medieval Europe, high class members of society would be angry if a woman tried to step out of her role in society and become someone important, like a [Scholar] or a queen. Here, people would be angry for exactly the opposite reason. They felt she had potential, and were pissed off that she had abandoned it to marry someone who had little chance of reaching Immortality.

Cecilia sighed. “I want to work towards Immortality on my own. Don’t get me wrong – I wouldn’t mind becoming an Immortal, and I love working with my friend,” she said, nodding in Alice’s direction. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Alice reaches Immortality sooner or later. But I don’t want things to just be handed to me, either. I want to reach Immortality with my own hard work, if I do reach Immortality. And if I don’t, then… I guess that’s just what happens. It might be a foolish point of pride, but I want my actions to be mine alone,” she said.

Ethan frowned, before he nodded. “I suppose you are free to do as you wish, [Enchanter] Cecilia. Let me know if you change your mind.” After that, he turned towards Alice. “By the way, there was one other thing I wanted to inform you of. The first volunteer for your mana baptism observations has come. After some thought, I have let the Ethics Committee for Metsel know of your experiment in advance, so that they may observe the screening process for your experiment, as well as the experiment itself. I think it will be much safer for you if you remain in close contact with them during your experiment, just to make sure you don’t accidentally end up getting into conflict with them. Normally, it would be hard to get a few members of the committee to observe an experiment, but I have a little pull with them.” He grinned. “You’ll probably need to answer a few questions under lie-detection Perks, but you should be fine. They’re ready tonight or tomorrow night. Just let me know when you want to start.”

With that, he left.

The moment Ethan left, Cecilia whirled towards Alice and frowned at her. She seemed to hesitate for a moment, before she sighed.

“You told him?” asked Cecilia. “I mean, he’s an Immortal, and I’ve grown up hearing stories about him and the Sun Knight, but even so… I’ve been questioning a lot of things recently. And while everything I’ve heard about Immortal Ethan is good, telling him about your past still seems risky. Are you sure it was the right move?”

Alice nodded. “He’s the primary defense I have against the Society of Starry Eyes. Doesn’t it make sense to give him as much information as possible, to make it harder for the Society to pick up my real past and attack me for it? The fact that I have no past before the age of 15 in this world is already very strange. If the Society looks a bit into my past, and realizes I popped up near a giant chunk of broken dimensional mana a year ago, they might put everything together. Especially since the Society is actively researching dimensional magic and recording various broken mana floods throughout the world. It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if they eventually put everything together and start coming after me. If he knows more about my past, he can make it harder for people to track down the relevant information. And creating multiple ‘potential’ pasts for me also isn’t a bad idea, honestly. If there are a lot of people I could be, as long as there isn’t a definite record claiming I’m one particular person, it could also give the Society a headache if they investigate my past. Ethan mentioned trying to create a past making it look like I’m an escaped Slave of the Sigmusi Empire, and if I have a bunch of different ‘possible’ identities it could give the Society a massive headache if they try to investigate me. I think that’s Immortal Ethan’s idea; even if it won’t hold up long-term, we just need to buy time for me to level up and get stronger. Making things as confusing as possible until then makes sense.”

Cecilia frowned, but finally, nodded. “I suppose. Just make sure he’s really trustworthy.”

“To the best of my knowledge, he’s fine. I asked Illa about him through a letter, and according to the information she provided, he should generally be acting in my best interests, so long as I’m still on track to becoming an Immortal.”

Cecilia frowned. “Why only if you’re on track to becoming an Immortal? Why does that matter so much?”

“Immortal loneliness. Apparently, most Immortals are afraid of getting attached to people who might die in a few decades.”

Cecilia paused, as if she hadn’t considered that before, and then nodded. “I suppose. If you did your research before telling him about your past, I guess it’s not that big of a deal. But be careful. Even though Ethan is trustworthy, the more people that know about your secret, the more dangerous things could be for you in the future.”

Alice nodded. “I’m being as careful as I can, Cecilia. I just need to keep working hard and improving myself as best I can and stay safe until then. Immortal Ethan is the best chance I have of getting through all of this.”

Cecilia finally seemed at ease with Alice’s decision, so she changed the topic back towards the board game Alice had created for the day. Finally, after spending a few hours relaxing and chatting, Alice also left Cecilia’s workshop. She had an observation experiment to do.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – On Patreon, you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3!

Chapter 107

After Alice returned to Ethan’s mansion, she let him know that she wanted to do her mana baptism observations now. Ethan stopped what he was doing, wrote a few letters, and gave them to his servants, before excusing himself. This left Alice alone with her thoughts.

Alice figured she could get her first round of observations underway, and then later today she could use {Broken Magic Seed} and {Expanding Comprehension} to investigate more about System magic seeds.

On some level, she found it a little grim that she knew the man she was going to observe today would likely die, and she was already making plans for how to cope with it and move on with her day.

At the same time, since the person was going to undergo a baptism either way, there wasn’t much Alice could do about it. Sure, if the reason this person was going through a mana baptism was poverty, she could save him from the risk of a baptism by giving him a bunch of money. That might remove his motivation for undergoing a baptism and possibly save his life. However, she couldn’t do the same for however many hundreds of people went for a baptism in Illvaria every year. And while Alice’s salary from Ethan was quite high, Alice certainly couldn’t support all of the impoverished people of Illvaria by herself. The best way for her to make a real impact on people’s lives would be to find a way to make mana baptisms safer.

And even though Alice knew this on an intellectual level, she still felt quite bad about the observations she was about to do. Finding a way to make mana baptisms safer would benefit the entire country, and probably the entire human race if the innovation spread. But Alice would still need to watch a man fight for his life first. And he would probably die afterwards.

Alice wondered how many members of the Society felt the same way about their own experiments. Some members of the Society were clearly in it for themselves, but Alice was beginning to wonder if their leadership had a different goal in mind. She seriously doubted the average member of the Society cared about anything besides the massive Levels and economic advantages human experimentation and expedited research breakthroughs could give them; the behavior of the few Society members she had met persuaded her of that fact well enough. However, based on the strange behavior of some of the higher ups that they had found recorded in Society documents, such as the leadership’s increasingly urgent demands that the Society of Starry Eyes investigate dimensional floods, Alice wondered if the leadership of the Society might work for their own twisted version of the greater good. At least in their minds, they might be sacrificing their own morals for the sake of humanity, ignoring their own conscience to do what they thought was right.

And in some sense, at least, the experiment Alice would do today was a step in the same direction.

Which was a terrible feeling.

She swallowed, and pushed that thought away. The difference was that she asked for consent first in her experiment, and had members of the ethics committee here to make sure her experiment today was justified. While this experiment may have some superficial similarities with the way the Society members acted, it was also vastly different from kidnapping a four year old and trying to see if they died or not in a wildly unsafe experiment. Or kidnapping someone like Samantha and ripping out her organs over and over again to investigate what made them unique.

Alice wasn’t even forcing the man to undergo a mana baptism; he was free to change his mind at any time and walk away. She was only paying him to change the spot where he went through his baptism. But despite her logical mind pointing out all of the differences between her actions and those of the Society, a certain uneasy feeling remained in her gut.

As Alice stewed in her thoughts, a group of three people knocked on the door to Ethan’s manor. Alice swallowed a hint of nervousness as she heard the sound, and realized that she was finally about to come face to face with some members of the Ethics Committee. After a few moments, a [Maid] opened the door to reveal three people. They walked in, before giving Immortal Ethan respectful greetings, and then giving Alice a more perfunctory one.

One of them was a middle aged lady, who looked fairly attractive despite her aging appearance. Alice wondered how high her [Charisma] was, but didn’t think much further about the subject. The middle-aged Mage also seemed to be the lowest level member of the group; she was decidedly average in level.

Apart from the middle-aged woman, there was an old man who looked to be at least 60 years old. He wore a pair of spectacles that shone with rainbow mana, making Alice wonder what the spectacles actually did. Based on the flow of rainbow mana, Alice was vaguely guessing that they boosted perception, or perhaps gave the man access to a few vision-related Perks. He was around level 60 or 65, based on Alice’s estimation, and had an amiable grin on his face as he greeted both her and Ethan. He seemed to be the most obviously friendly member of the group. However, something about his smile made Alice think that he wasn’t genuinely glad to see her or Ethan; he was simply trying to be polite and appear amiable.

The final woman was the highest level of the three, probably somewhere in her low-eighties. She was also the youngest of the three, and appeared to be somewhere in her late thirties. Her [Charisma] was barely over 100. Given her age and Level, combined with her low [Charisma], Alice assumed she didn’t like socializing much. The woman had a distinct frown on her face as she looked at Alice and Ethan, and for a moment, Alice wondered if she had done something to offend the woman. Unlike the other two Mages, the younger Mage also had a clipboard with her, and was carefully inspecting a few sheets of paper as she walked into the room.

After the other two Mages finished greeting Ezrien, the youngest female Mage finally looked up from her papers, before she frowned at both Alice and Ethan. She gave Ethan a shallow respectful nod, before finally speaking.

“I understand you’re the one responsible for this experiment today?” She asked. Alice was surprised that the youngest Mage, and the one with the lowest [Charisma], was the first one to speak. Perhaps she had more authority in this group, due to her higher Level?

Alice saw rainbow mana surge into the woman’s eyes, and realized the female Mage was probably using a lie-detection Perk on her.

“Yes, I am, Lady…” Alice trailed off. She didn’t know the name of any of the three.

“I am Lady Etria,” she said, frowning. Her tone was cold and clipped; not quite disapproving, but certainly not approving, either. Alice was a little surprised by how neutral her tone sounded. Even though Lady Etria had been frowning at her and Ethan the whole time so far, she didn’t actually sound hostile when she spoke. She just seemed distant and businesslike.

“Since you’re the one who initiated this experiment, I need you to read these statements out loud, if you please,” said Lady Etria.

She handed Alice a very long list of Statements.

Alice scanned over it, taking a look at the many, many, many Statements on the list, before she glanced at the other two Mages who were standing in the hallway. All three of them now had rainbow mana around their eyes, clearly ready to truth-check any statements she made while reading through the statements.

Alice nodded. It was her first time seeing members of the Ethics Committee of Metsel, but she was more than a little curious about how cold and professional they seemed. The two older Mages didn’t even bother introducing themselves before getting right to business. And they didn’t seem to care about Ethan’s presence at all. While they were here due to Ethan’s influence, they clearly wouldn’t let even an Immortal get in the way of their job. Alice actually felt a bit better about her experiment now; seeing how rigorous the Ethics Committee was, and how little attention they paid to Immortal Ethan, Alice seriously doubted they would let the experiment go through if they felt it was wrong, even if Immortal Ethan was backing her up.

“I am not coercing any participants in this experiment in any way, shape, or form to participate in this experiment. I have no intention of forcing anyone to participate in this experiment in the future, and have no intention of violating any moral boundaries with my research. The participant in today’s observation experiment was, to the best of my knowledge, already going to undergo a mana baptism on his own, with or without my intervention, and the only thing I changed was the place in which he was going to do so…”

On and on the list went. Alice spent nearly three full minutes reading through list of statements, until finally, she reached the end of the piece of paper.

And then, on a hunch, Alice turned it over, only to find a second list of statements, just as long as the first one. Alice read through the second list of statements under the watchful eyes of the Ethics Committee members who had come specifically to oversee her experiment.

When Alice finally finished reading all of them, the two older Mages relaxed. The younger Mage retained her cold and clipped tone, but she at least stopped explicitly frowning at Alice and Ethan.

“Very well then. We may proceed.”

Alice nodded, and looked at Ethan, who simply gestured towards a nearby [Maid]. Seeing the group was finished with the first set of lie detection statements, the [Maid] quickly led the way to another room.

Inside, Alice could see the room that Ethan had set up for her experiment. A specific region of the room was isolated from the rest of the room by a few enchantments, which kept mana inside of the enchanted area. Nearby, a few other enchantments were set up to flood the region with mana the moment they were activated, and after analyzing the Enchantments for a few moments, Alice realized that they would quickly make the mana density of the enchanted area high enough to trigger a baptism within a few minutes.

And sitting inside of this region of the room was a teenager, perhaps seventeen years old. He only had one hand; his right hand was completely missing from the wrist down. Alice was more than slightly surprised to see someone with such a crippling injury; she had grown used to the wonders of Organic Magic, and for an [Organic Mage], healing a debilitating injury like a missing arm wasn’t too difficult. However, after a moment, Alice realized why the boy was missing an arm. [Organic Mages] were expensive. And based on the boy’s demeanor and attire, Alice assumed he had come from the slums. He was likely unable to afford treatment.

The teenager was looking at the room with large, nervous eyes, as a nearby [Psychiatrist] spoke with him in what might be his final moments. Alice assumed Ethan had hired the [Psychiatrist] before the experiment began, as a way to make sure the boy was really determined to go through with this experiment, and also as a way to calm him down if need be. She mentally kicked herself for not thinking of something similar. Luckily, Ethan had done it for her this time.

Alice took another deep breath as she looked at the boy. She just hoped she wasn’t about to witness him fail his baptism and die, even though there was a 96% chance that was exactly what was going to happen.

“We have finished questioning Lady Alice about this experiment, and found no problems. We must also ask the one who is about to undergo the baptism a series of questions, to ensure no foul play is at hand. Are you prepared to answer our questions?” asked the older male Mage, turning his attention to the teenage boy. “Please bear in mind that we will be checking all of your statements for lies.”

The teenager looked at Ethan, and then at Alice and the other three Mages. He shuffled anxiously for a few moments, before he gritted his teeth and nodded. “Please feel free to ask me as many questions as you like, Sir Mage. My little brother is counting on me, so I’m willing to do whatever I need to for him.”

Following that, the Mages started to run the teenager through a list of questions. The list was nearly as extensive as the one Alice had been forced to read, and covered almost every situation imaginable. It included questions such as whether the teenager was being forced or coerced into the situation, as well as more open ended questions such as what specific motivation had led the teenager to join the experiment. Even questions like his name, background, and what kinds of work he had tried to do before joining this experiment were included. Alice learned a wide variety of facts about the teenage boy in the short period of time the Ethics Committee questioned him.

His name was Tavi. He had a younger brother who didn’t have enough food to eat, and had even acquired the {Malnourished} Achievement recently. He had lost his arm in an accident while working at a [Butcher]’s shop, which had led to a huge downward spiral for both him and his younger brother. The two of them no longer had parents, since they had been lost in a monster attack several years ago.

Alice tried not to think too much about the fact that Tavi might die soon.

After several minutes of questions and answers, the Mages finally finished asking the teenager questions. Since the answers were to their satisfaction, Alice swallowed another great, big gulp of nervousness. The more she knew about Tavi, the more she hoped he would live through his baptism. She hesitated, wondering if she should just ask Ethan to give Tavi some money for his brother and send the boy away. Watching him die would leave a sour taste in her mouth. But after a few moments, Alice steeled her heart.

The experiment could begin. And now that the time had come, Alice wasn’t sure if she was ready for this at all. But if she wanted to learn how to make mana baptisms safer, she needed information. And this was the most ethical way she could think of to learn more, even if it didn’t feel great.

“Is everything ready?” Asked Ethan, turning to Alice. “Do you need any last minute modifications?” Alice shook her head. She prepared to use {Lesser Organic Vision} in conjunction with her various mana-sight related abilities, and turned to the teenage boy.

“Are you completely sure you’re willing to do this?” Asked Alice. “This is your last chance to back out. If you change your mind right now, you can still leave. Nobody will have a problem with you just walking out the door and forgetting about all of this.”

The teenage boy’s voice shook for a moment, but he still croaked out his answer.

“I am. Start it please, Lady Mage.”

“If you’re really sure, we’ll hit the switch and start your baptism. You’ll have a 96% chance of dying afterwards, and nothing I do will be able to save you from that point onwards. Are you absolutely sure you’re willing go through with this?”

“Yes, Lady Mage. Please start.”

Alice hesitated one final time, before she nodded, and a [Maid] activated the enchantments on the boy’s half of the room. Mana started flooding the area near the teenage boy, rapidly flooding the area and filling it with mana.

For better or for worse, Alice’s mana observation experiment had begun.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – for $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 108

Marium after Marium of pure mana was dumped into the area where Tavi was laying down and waiting for the baptism to start. Since humans had the highest survival rate for mana baptisms when exposed to pure mana, every shred of broken mana in the area was kept away from the section of the room the teenager was in, to maximize his survival odds as much as possible. Meanwhile, Alice found herself hoping once more that the teenager would live through this. She didn’t want to watch another human die.

Mana started to flood into the teenager’s body as Alice observed the process. Rainbow fractals started to build up around the teenager’s body, refining and converting the mana from its atmospheric form to one a little easier for his body to use.

Since Alice had already gotten permission from the teenager before the observation process started, {Lesser Organic Vision} didn’t have any usage issues. She used the Perk by spending small amounts of Organic Mana to look inside the teenager’s body as his mana baptism began. Much like the first time Alice had observed a mana baptism in progress, the mana entering the teenager’s body began to head towards the teenager’s brain and heart.

The first thing Alice noticed this time was the fact that the difference between using broken mana and normal mana in a baptism was very easy to observe. Even if Alice hadn’t been doing her absolute best to learn what she could from her observations, she would have immediately realized that there was a huge difference. The broken mana baptism Alice had seen the [Scout] go through during the hunting trip had been incredibly violent, because the dimensional broken mana the [Scout] had used for his baptism had destroyed most flesh it had come into contact with. The System had tried to keep the [Scout]’s body from collapsing under the onslaught of mana, and had tried to use Organic Mana to keep the [Scout]’s body from ripping itself apart. This time, the System seemed as if it were struggling far less while trying to keep Tavi’s body intact.

When a mana baptism occurred as a result of pure mana, the baptism mana clearly harmed the patient far less as mana made its way through Tavi’s body and towards his heart and brain. If the dimensional broken mana had nearly resembled pressurized acid ripping through the [Scout]’s body, pure mana was more like pressurized water. It was still violent and damaging, but with fewer immediately harmful aftereffects.

Now that Alice had {Lesser Organic Vision} and could properly see inside of Tavi’s body, she was able to observe something she hadn’t noticed during the [Scout]’s baptism. The pure mana making its way through Tavi’s body wasn’t just passing by; it was more accurate to say that it was fusing with the flesh of the teenager. The first time she had observed a mana baptism in progress, she had assumed that the mana itself was the reason the [Scout] had started dying during the baptism while the System worked to control everything and keep the [Scout] alive.

Now, Alice realized that the truth was a little more nuanced.

Mages had higher mana concentrations in their body, and aged more slowly than other people. And Alice was starting to realize that this wasn’t just because of their Mage core. Instead, as mana wound through the teenager’s body, Alice confirmed that flesh was being created as Tavi’s body and the System processed atmospheric mana.

During Alice’s earlier experiments, she had realized that during the regular process of gaining Attributes, small bits of mana would be absorbed into the body, which then improved things like muscles, eyeballs, and other parts of the body. If one gained Strength, their muscle fibers would integrate some atmospheric mana, for example.

Becoming a Mage and creating a Mage core required that one undergo a similar process… but instead of slowly absorbing little bits of atmospheric mana after being processed by the System, the entire process seemed to take place in the course of a minute or two. Alice had no clue why muscle fibers and nerves were even being created by the atmospheric mana; becoming a Mage didn’t improve one’s physique at all. Since it didn’t improve one’s physique, why was the atmospheric mana bothering to create muscle fibers? Since Alice had concluded that magic muscle fibers were better than regular ones, how could a Mage’s body contain so much more mana-created flesh without getting any better?

She frowned, mulling over this question as she observed Tavi’s baptism in further detail.

This issue was more than just academic. Tavi’s body had no clue what to do with the newly created flesh, since it was continuously appearing inside of Tavi’s body with no real control or precision. The flesh being created was often placed in a terrible spot. It was either situated incorrectly, pinching off nerves the teenager needed to use his arms and legs, or cut off blood vessels Tavi’s body needed to keep functioning. Worst of all were the chunks of flesh that tried to grow inside of the boy’s bones and ligaments. As mana was refined by the System and then processed by the boy’s body, the flesh created from mana continuously showed up in incredibly pointless and inconvenient spots.

This was where System mana came in. It wasn’t just corralling the mana in the boy’s body and putting it where it needed to be; it was also helping the teenager’s body cope with all of the problems being created by the newly-made flesh. It rearranged flesh and organs, shifting them around so that the newly made flesh didn’t cut off blood vessels and ligaments that needed to keep working.

Of course, the place where mana-created flesh was most prominent was exactly where Alice had assumed it would be; just behind the heart. It hadn’t quite occurred to Alice until now, but in hindsight, since Immortals were basically walking clumps of mana, the System was obviously quite familiar with helping humans turn ambient mana into solid flesh. And the most common kind of mana-created flesh was the mage core itself. As mana poured into the boy’s body, the System redirected it towards the boy’s heart and shifted organs and nerves out of the way, before the mana turned directly into flesh.

This was the hidden half of what Alice had wanted to see during the [Scout]’s baptism, all those months ago. She found herself glad she had taken {Lesser Organic Vision}, since she had missed all of this detail last time. The information that the human body and the System were turning chunks of atmospheric mana into random, poorly placed lumps of flesh before organizing it AFTER creation felt like a potentially fixable problem. Alice wasn’t quite sure what the process of fixing this part of a mana baptism would look like, but she suspected it was a potentially viable way to make baptisms safer. She mentally filed that idea away, to examine with {Safety Analysis} later.

Meanwhile, Alice began carefully observing more of the System fractals as she watched, getting as much information as she could about each one so that she could potentially copy it later. Her {Photographic Memory} would let her memorize exactly what she saw, even if she wouldn’t be able to perfectly understand or use it until she formed a proper System seed. She was also more than slightly intrigued by the fact that she could now see some of the components of System mana taking part in the mana baptism. Math mana was being used to measure parts of the boy’s body, before feeding information back into the composite mass of System mana and telling it what it needed to do. Organic mana that was part of composite System mana was being used to command proper organic mana around the boy’s body, and was also being used to analyze and gather information about what the ‘correct’ placement of things like muscle tissue and organs was.

As far as Alice could tell, the reason System mana was a kind of composite seemed to be because it made various kinds of mana able to ‘sense’ information collected by other kinds of mana. Normally, magic itself wasn’t particularly… intelligent. Organic mana enchantments, for example, were more likely to harm a user instead of helping them, which was why healing mana enchantments were more popular, even though they were less effective and wasted much more mana. However, by combining a bunch of different kinds of mana into one, Alice began to suspect the System was somehow working around this problem, or at least drastically reducing its impact.

Now that she knew what to look for, she could see math mana, pure mana, organic mana, and various other kinds of mana woven together into System fractals as they commanded other kinds of mana to do their bidding, trying to keep Tavi’s heart from collapsing as a new organ took shape in his body.

Minutes ticked by, as Alice slowly began to grin.

Unlike the [Scout] she had witnessed, where his body seemed to spin further and further out of control as she helplessly watched, the boy’s body was beginning to stabilize. The System mana, along with the pure and organic mana it commanded, worked like a well oiled machine, analyzing every speck of mana-flesh and normal flesh in Tavi’s body and helping to adjust where everything was. The random chunks of muscle fibers were shifted around in Tavi’s body, quickly ripped out of bones and ligaments and stitched back into the muscles they were meant to be part of. Nerves were removed and replaced, as thin strings of mana-flesh started to link together Tavi’s mana core and his brain, and replace other seemingly random parts of his body.

Meanwhile, his Mage core was successfully forming behind his heart, as his blood vessels and nerves were moved out of the way with the help of System mana, before the whole mess was quickly fused back together.

Then, most interestingly enough, the mana-flesh created during the process was all linked to Tavi’s newly created Mage core. As each chunk of muscle fiber, nerves, and flesh were linked up with the new Mage core, they lit up, glowing with mana as Tavi’s body started to adjust to its new change and finalize its shape and abilities. The Mage core flashed several times with rainbow and pure mana, before its near-blinding glow started to fade away, replaced with the ordinary, dull light of a Mage core with no seeds in it. Another few strings of mana-flesh and nerves linked the system up with Tavi’s brain, creating a few different clusters of nerves, before Tavi’s brain also flashed with rainbow mana a few times. Finally, the rainbow and pure mana surrounding Tavi started to disappear. Alice grinned.

Despite her worst fears, Tavi’s mana baptism had been successful. She wouldn’t need to watch him fail and die. He didn’t seem ready to get back to his feet yet, and Alice intended to let him rest for a few minutes, because she also remembered how horrifyingly painful her baptism had been. However, he had unquestionably succeeded.

Alice took a moment to think about what a successful baptism looked like behind the scenes. She had observed as the System shifted around chunks of mana flesh in someone’s body, moving chunks of flesh and muscle around, keeping the patient alive the whole time, before stitching everything back together. However, Alice also couldn’t help but think back to the strangest part of the process she had witnessed. Towards the end of Tavi’s baptism, the Mage core and Tavi’s brain had been linked up with all of the new additions to Tavi’s body, before flashing several times with different kinds of mana. Alice couldn’t help but suspect that was the most important part of the whole process. Whatever had happened in that time had made all of the other, seemingly random chunks of Tavi’s muscles, nerves, and flesh that had been replaced by mana flesh light up and stop actively working against the rest of his body. Alice wondered if fixing the strange placement of Tavi’s random chunks of mana-grown flesh would matter when it came to the success rate of mana baptisms, or whether the success or failure was mostly linked to the final part of the baptism. She just didn’t know enough yet.

But she had much more food for thought now, at least.

System mana began to trickle into Alice’s body, but she ignored it for now. She could look at her notifications later.

“I’m glad to see another new Mage join Illvaria,” said the oldest Mage from the ethics committee. “It isn’t common for people to live through their baptisms, but it’s always happy to see someone succeed.”

The youngest ethics committee member nodded. She didn’t say anything, but Alice could still see a trace of a smile lingering around her lips. Perhaps she wasn’t as averse to talking with people as she appeared to be, despite her cold demeanor. The middle aged Mage was the most outwardly excited, grinning happily as she looked at the newly baptized Mage.

The enchantment flooding the area with pure mana was turned off, and a few minutes were given for the mana to clear out. Then, a [Maid] stepped over to Tavi, before gently waking him up and helping him back to his feet.

Tavi, after climbing back to his feet, groaned a little as he shivered and rubbed at his limbs.

“That was awful,” he said, shuddering. “The worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my entire life. Even losing my arm wasn’t so bad,” he said. “At least that was over quickly.”

“You made it,” said Alice, giving him a grin. “I’m glad you did. I was prepared for people to die while I watched them, but I’m glad you got through, at least.” It would have been a shame if Tavi wasn’t able to survive his baptism.

Alice, Ethan, and the members of the Ethics committee chatted with Tavi for a few minutes longer, congratulating him and asking about his plans. Tavi mentioned that he was planning on joining a magic academy and had originally planned to go into the military later. However, since Ethan’s payment for the experiment was rather generous, Tavi intended to think about it for a while first. He was undecided on whether he wanted to find a Mage to learn the basics from, before doing something like construction, or whether he wanted to join an academy and aim higher.

The committee members gave Tavi a few tips for what he should do if he was looking for an apprenticeship, and also gave him a very brief rundown on the four magic academies of Metsel and their specialties, before eventually, Tavi and the other committee members left. Once again, it was just Alice and Ethan in the room.

Alice took a curious glance at Ethan, wondering what he had thought of the whole experiment. She knew that her Achievements, especially {Truth Seeker}, gave her the ability to see details of System mana and related interactions that normal people couldn’t. She suddenly found herself curious to know what a mana baptism looked like from the perspective of someone without vision-related Achievements.

“Did you get anything interesting out of the observation process?” Asked Alice.

Ethan shook his head. “I just saw mana flow into his body, before it seemed to disappear. Then, chunks of his flesh started wriggling around sometimes, and the mana in his body got more and more dense for a while. Then, his Mage core formed, and mana stopped flowing into his body a while later.” He turned towards Alice. “Did you get anything useful?”

Alice nodded. “I have a lot to think about. I’ll write a more formal report later, so that you can look over it. Give me a bit to think over what I saw.”

Ethan nodded, and Alice decided to finally look over her System notifications.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Chapter 109

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 69 -> 71, Student of Organic Magic 3 -> 11, Scholar: 53 -> 54, Scientist 53 -> 55

Scientific Discoveries (Rarity: N/A)

An Achievement Created by the ‘For Science!’ perk. It currently has one -> Two successful experiments catalogued. Upon reaching five experiments, this Achievement will receive a beneficial upgrade.

+20% -> 40% class experience for all research related classes, +5% -> 10% bonus to mental attribute growth

Alice looked over the first of her System notifications, and then grinned. Technically, Alice hadn’t actually done an experiment. She had only started the process for learning how to make mana baptisms safer. So she was quite happy with the number of levels she had gotten for a simple observation experiment. Three new Perks wasn’t bad at all.

Though, she did find the fact that this observation experiment counted as a successful experiment for the ‘For Science’ Perk to be quite strange.

She went back to examining her other improvements. Perhaps because the experiment was heavily related to how the human body worked, she had gained a large number of levels in {Student of Organic Magic}, and a fair amount of levels in a few relevant Skills as well.

With some amusement, Alice also realized that this was the first time she had ever gotten a Perk from a secondary Class. {Student} was creeping closer to level 10 as time passed, but the Class just didn’t gain levels very quickly. By contrast, since {Student of Organic Magic} had a huge number of high Rarity Achievements boosting its growth speed, even after its growth was dropped to 20% of its normal growth value it still grew faster than most people’s main Classes did. Which was more than slightly ridiculous, but Alice was glad that she had more Perks to mess with. Sadly, she would only get a level 5 Perk from the Class, even though it had reached level 10. But any Perk was better than no Perk. However, she decided to focus on {Explorer of Magic} first. It was her highest level class, after all.

She looked over her older Perks, hesitating as she considered her options for her new Perk.

Should she combine some Perks or get a new Perk? She had four Perks that she could still combine with each other to make new Perks, but Alice was unwilling to touch the {Broken Seed} Perk. That Perk was just way too critical to her studies and experiments, and losing it might cripple her ability to experiment with System mana in the future. Therefore, she could only mess with {Enhanced Regeneration}, {Seeds of Magic}, and {Three Seeds}. {Seeds of Magic} was basically just a generic Mana Conversion Ratio enhancement, which she had used on her Kinetic Mana Seed back when she was still struggling to survive. {Three Seeds} gave her three seed slots which was quite useful. Alice was chronically short of seed slots, so upgrading {Three Seeds} might not be a bad idea if she could find something to combine it with. {Enhanced Regeneration} boosted her mana regeneration rate, which wasn’t really critical for anything. It had originally been incredibly useful, since Stats grew from using them, and so regenerating mana faster meant that she could practice Magic more, thus boosting her Magic Stat and increasing how much magic she could do per day. However, Alice’s mana pool was already fairly high now, so the Perk was much less important than it had been in the past.

She frowned, wondering if any combination of the three Perks gave her anything she actually needed or wanted.

The list of outcomes for combining Perks HAD refreshed again, now that she had reached a new level threshold, and that meant that each Perk combination gave a slightly different outcome than before. But they were still at least somewhat based on which Perks she was combining, and Alice just wasn’t seeing how any of the combined results would actually help her.

Alice sighed, before turning her attention to new Perk choices. It had been a while since she gotten something completely new from her [Explorer of Magic] class. Perhaps it was time to get a new Perk? Alice could always combine it with another Perk at level 75. {Three Seeds} being combined with another Perk that increased her magic seed count might not be a bad idea. Right now, Alice didn’t have another Perk from the [Explorer of Magic] class that gave her more magic seeds, so she could just pick one up and then combine it next time. She started looking through her new Perk options. After scanning her new options, she found a rather appealing choice.

Seedy Ambitions

Requirements: Explorer of Magic Class at level 70 or Greater, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, At least 5 Magic Seeds, At least 3 Perks related to studying and interacting with Magic seeds

With enough study, you can create an inferior magic seed for ANY subject of study you are interacting with. This requires you to have a strong understanding of the subject, and only one seed can be created this way per month.

These inferior seeds will NOT count towards your magic seed limit. Inferior Seeds are limited to 25% Mana Conversion ratio. They cannot be upgraded via Achievements, but other Perks may interact with them.

{Seedy Ambitions} was much better than her other two options for new Perks, both of which were instead focused on upgrading the seeds she currently had.

The ability to create one new magic seed a month that wasn’t confined to her seed limits gave Alice a few new and interesting options for future experiments. For example, given what she had learned about Classes and Magic Seeds recently, Alice absently wondered if she could create a magic seed that was actually a class. If Magic Seeds and Classes were the same thing, what would happen if she created a [Fishermen] Magic seed? How would it compare to her [Fishermen] class?

Of course, only one seed a month wasn’t particularly impressive. For most Mages, that might completely change how they thought about their Seeds, but given how many Magic Seeds Alice cycled through a month, adding one new magic seed a month had surprisingly little impact. Alice figured that combining the Perk with {Three Seeds} might triple the speed she generated new Seeds, or something like that, which would make it pretty useful by level 75. While she might be misunderstanding how Perk combination worked, she thought it was a reasonable assumption for how the two Perks would combine together. And if she turned out to be wrong, she would at least learn a little more about how the System worked behind the scenes.

Of course, Alice was also still interested in seeing what happened if she used {Broken Seed} on a Class, and maybe seeing what happened if she made a [Fisherman] Magic seed and then broke it. There were simply too many unusual experiments she wanted to try, but most of them required that she have even more leeway to experiment with weird seeds and have more open seed slots. {Seedy Ambitions}, and whatever she got after combining it with another Perk at level 75, would hopefully help with that.

After that, Alice looked at her [Organic Mage] Perk next. Since this would only be a level 5 Perk, Alice wasn’t expecting much. She spent a few minutes looking over her options, before making another choice.

Improved Organic Manipulation

Requirements: Organic Mage level 5 or greater

Unless you are explicitly trying to cause harm, while using Organic Magic to heal a patient you are less likely to make mistakes that will harm the patient in question.

After giving herself a very minor papercut and testing the result, Alice confirmed that the improvement was rather minor. It helped, certainly, but she still didn’t trust herself to heal any truly dangerous injuries without causing a lot of long-term harm. Alice would probably need to pick up a better Perk that did the same thing in the future. Maybe it would turn into something useful if she combined it with another Perk someday? Alice shrugged. Her first Perk from a secondary class was rather… underwhelming.

Alice then turned her attention to her [Scientist] Class. What was still useful? What could be cut with little cost? What was kind of useful, but needed a bit of an upgrade?

After some hesitation, Alice eventually decided to combine {Researcher’s Speed} and {Timer}. After looking over her perks list, and the results for combining Perks, Alice was pretty sure that combining the two Perks would improve upon both Perks in a very interesting way. {Researcher’s Speed}, in particular, was somewhat helpful, but as Alice’s Stats and other Classes improved, she was already starting to be able to do things faster and more effectively. The original reason Alice had taken {Researcher’s Speed} was because she didn’t have enough hours in a day, and being able to think, process, and analyze information faster had boosted the speed she could do research. But Alice was also becoming less stretched for time after Ethan had helped solve some of her financial problems. She no longer needed to make every single Marium of mana turn into money and scrape out every second she could for her experiments. With that in mind, Perks devoted to saving time or maximizing the use of time seemed less important now.

And {Timer}, well… not many of Alice’s experiments had been related to specific timing recently. Sure, knowing exactly how many seconds passed as Alice tried and failed to form a weird magic System wasn’t bad information to have, but… in all honesty, the Perk’s relevance had been slowly fading away for quite a while. Not to mention, these days Alice could actually afford a clock if she needed to keep track of time. They were expensive, since they required a lot of enchantments to become accurate, but with how much Ethan was paying her, Alice didn’t need to use Perks to compensate for her poverty anymore.

Thus, Alice took one final, hesitant look at the two Perks she was about to sacrifice, and then started the combination process.

Researcher’s Speed

Requirements: Scientist level 40 or greater

When you are working on an experiment, the pace at which you think, process information, and work will increase by a significant amount, allowing you to conduct experiments notably faster than before.

Timer

Requirements: Scientist level 15 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

You may always tell what time it is down to the hundredth of a second. You may also attach a 'timer' to a specific object or area and measure the amount of time it takes for one condition of your choice to be met. (For example, you may attach a 'timer' to a rock before throwing it off of a building and set the start and stop conditions to 'touching no physical objects' and ' hitting the ground,' giving you the exact number of seconds that it takes for the rock to fall). Timers cost a small amount of mana to create (payable from any seed) and cannot last longer than 2 hours.

Speed Experimentation (Tier 2 Perk, Level 55 Scientist) (Level 15 Scientist Perk + Level 40 Scientist Perk)

Perk Costs: Timer + Researcher’s Speed sacrificed to create this Perk

While doing an experiment, you may force time to pass more quickly for yourself and all variables related to the experiment. These variables MUST be contained with an area no greater than 10 meters by 10 meters by 5 meters. (note: If used upon another living being above a certain level of intelligence, permission must be obtained first).

This will place a significant amount of strain on your mind, and will also require some amount of mana to keep going (mana can be paid from any kind of magic seed, though the more related to time said magic seed is, the less broken mana will be produced, and the more efficient the conversion).

After forming the Perk, Alice realized that she had gotten a very different Perk than she had expected to get. And it was absolutely amazing.

She had a freaking time manipulation Perk now.

It was a very limited time manipulation Perk, and had all sorts of conditions required to function. But she had just gotten a freaking time manipulation Perk. No matter how limited, specific, or difficult it was to activate the Perk, she could now manipulate time. She had no idea how much she could speed up the passage of time, but she could apparently speed it up now.

Absently, Alice wondered what counted as an ‘Experiment’ for the purposes of the Perk. If she was in a battle, could she decide that she was ‘experimenting’ with how fast an object moved if she applied a certain amount of kinetic mana to it? If she was in the middle of trying to form a system seed, did that count as an experiment?

There were a lot of possibilities, but no matter what, Alice was excited. It wasn’t every day that one gained the ability to manipulate time itself.

Especially since it implied that time manipulation was possible using normal magic as well. The System still worked on the basic principles that the rest of reality worked off of, which meant that anything the System did was theoretically possible, even if the System didn’t exist. In other words, time manipulation was a possibility for magic.

Alice frowned. She could have sworn that she had tried to form a Magic Seed from Earth physics that was related to time, back when she had still been living in Cyra and had nearly melted herself. It took a moment for her Memory-related Perks to bring the memory back to her, but she was pretty sure forming a spacetime seed had failed. What did a ‘successful’ time-related magic seed look like here?

Alice turned towards Ethan, her eyes alight with curiosity.

“Ethan! Are there time magic seeds? Or anything that related to the manipulation of time?”

Ethan stared with a baffled expression, before he nodded. “They are terribly inefficient, and not very powerful. But they do exist. I believe most estimates claim that they lose around 70% of their mana as broken mana, which means it’s ridiculously wasteful. It’s also not like you can travel backwards in time with them, although I know many fictional stories written for entertainment involve travelling back into the past to make up for a regret or somesuch.” Ethan shrugged. “Sadly, this isn’t possible. Though I suspect such stories have led many a hopeful Mage into forming a time magic seed. But for reasons nobody seems to quite understand, time can only ever pass forward, not backwards. I don’t recommend you waste a seed slot on time manipulation, if that’s what you were considering.”

Alice shook her head. “I was just wondering. The description for one of my new Perks made me think about it, but I wasn’t considering spending a seed slot on it.” Unless it seemed interesting, thought Alice.

Then, she turned her attention back to her Status Screen. For the first time in a while, she opened up her full Status Screen, to see what changes had happened in the past few weeks.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 113 -> 115 (122%)

Perception: 135 -> 137 (165%)

Dexterity: 115 -> 118 (124%)

Intelligence: 167 (128%)

Endurance: 127 -> 130 (121%)

Willpower: 147 -> 148 (108%)

Charisma: 129 -> 130 (107%)

Magic: 159 -> 161 (122%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 53 -> 54

Explorer of Magic: 63 -> 71

Scholar: 51 -> 54

Scientist: 52 -> 55

Kinetic Manabinder: 31 -> 41

Careful Enchanter: 20 -> 27

Evolved Classes: 2

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 25

Secondary Classes: 2

Fisherwoman: 3

Student: 7 -> 8

Student of Organic Magic: 1 -> 11

Perks:

Survivor Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Sixth Sense (Survivor 25)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Sense Hostility (Survivor 35)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Adrenaline Rush (Survivor 45)

Extended Organics (Survivor 50)

Explorer of Magic Perks:

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Three Seeds (Explorer of Magic 30)

Broken Seed (Upgraded) (Explorer of Magic 35)

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 55)

Combat Seed (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 60)

Intuitive Magic Modelling (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 65)

Seedy Ambitions (Explorer of Magic 70)

Scholar Perks:

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement (Scholar 10)

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Scholar of Magic (Scholar level 35)

Lesser Organic Vision (Scholar 40)

Super speed reading (Scholar 45)

Delve into the Arcane (Scholar 50)

Scientist Perks:

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)

For Science! (Scientist 45)

The Science of Mana Deprivation (Scientist 50)

Speed Experimentation (Tier 2) (Scientist 55)

Kinetic Mage Perks:

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision (Kinetic Manabinder 15)

Overclock (Kinetic Manabinder 20)

Kinetic Enchanting (Kinetic Manabinder 25)

Reflection (Kinetic Manabinder 30)

Kinetic Tendrils (Kinetic Manabinder 35)

Speed Analysis (Kinetic Manabinder 40)

Enchanter Perks:

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Speed Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 25)

Repurposing (Careful Enchanter level 5)

Blueprint (Careful Enchanter level 10)

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed (Careful Enchanter level 15)

Pride of a Craftswoman (Careful Enchanter 20)

Enchanter's Armory (Careful Enchanter 25)

Organic Mage Perks:

Improved Organic Manipulation (Organic Mage 5)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 100

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 7

Russian (Language Proficiency): 1

Basic Mathematics: 122 -> 123

Intermediate Mathematics: 78 -> 79

Advanced Mathematics: 18 -> 19

Basic Human Biology: 33 -> 38

Mana-biology: 2 -> 11

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 68 -> 70

Mana Control: 50 -> 52

Mana Precision: 50 -> 53

Kinetic Force: 47 -> 51

Projectile Awareness : 29 -> 32

Divided Attention: 31 -> 34

Basic Enchanting: 29 -> 31

Broken Mana Purification: 18

Mana Filtering: 22 -> 24

Seed Formation: 16 -> 19

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Dodge: 28 -> 31

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 21 -> 22

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Magic Seed: 5/6

(unused seed has 15% conversion rat. Max)

(Note to self: The electromagnetic magic seed is {Degraded Seed Slot}. For that seed, Perks = no, Achievements = yes).

(Final Slot is one where Alice keeps trying and failing to make a System Seed)

Kinetic Seed (145%) -> 147%

Organic Seed (25%) -> 68% (6% from expanding Comp.)

Pure mana Seed (21%) -> 36% (8% from Expanding Comp.)

Healing mana seed (23%) -> 55%

Electromagnetic Seed (15%)

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (III -> IV) (Rarity: 9 -> 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

Careful Enchanter (Rarity N/A)

Capable Enchanter (Rarity: 5)

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

Scientific Discoviers (I -> II) (Rarity N/A)

Immortal's Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7)

Her improvements had been pretty good over the past few weeks. She felt more than a little happy with her gains. She decided that the first thing she wanted to do was test out how {Speed Experimentation} worked. She hadn’t ever seen a temporal manipulation Perk before, and she was very interested in seeing how it worked. At the same time, she wanted to test how limited the Perk actually was. It was both incredibly useful for making sure that she could perform experiments as quickly as possible, and also potentially useful in battle. She also had a few Perks that had come off of cooldown that she wanted to use, now that she had time. {Expanding Comprehension} was ready to use, and {Broken Seed} had been off of cooldown for a few days already. She also wanted to try using {Seedy Ambitions} and see if she could make a Math mana seed; if she wanted to form a System seed, she would probably need to combine several kinds of mana together, and while Alice didn’t think she needed to have a magic seed for every mana type during the formation process, they would probably help.

Alice turned back towards Ethan, who was giving her a curious look, before frowning to herself as she thought over Tavi’s observation experiment one last time. While she had gained a fair amount of information on how the System tried to help people during their mana baptisms, she still had a lot of questions left unresolved. She wasn’t even sure if her ideas on how to make them safer were correct, and testing some of them seemed… unethical. Alice felt a slight headache.

She couldn’t help but wonder if there was some sort of Perk combination that could solve this problem. Perhaps a way to simulate experimental results without actually performing an experiment?

On the other hand, if such a Perk was easy to access, the Society of Starry Eyes probably wouldn’t exist. Alice sighed, before frowning. At the end of the day, there were always more things she was missing, and always more pieces of information she wished she had. At least she had {Safety Analysis} to help figure out when something was a bad idea. She could use that to make some informed guesses about which of her ideas she could test without hurting someone else, and develop a more informed course of action based on that information.

Alice thanked Ethan for helping her set up the experiment, before promising Ethan she would write a more proper report on what she had learned from the experiment later, after she had some more time to think.

Then, Alice made her way to her room in Ethan’s mansion and began preparing to experiment with time manipulation.

A note from acaswell

Just realized it has been a while since I last showed Alice’s Status Screen.

Good thing I checked this chapter. I apparently forgot to apply Alice’s Legendary Healer Achievement to the relevant Seeds, but while I was checking over her Status Screen I realized the numbers didn’t qualify her for the Student Organic Mage Class. I spent a while trying to figure out how she had taken a class without meeting the class requirements, before I realized the seed numbers were wrong and went back to check. Took me a while to figure out why her numbers were weird. RIP.

Bit of a System heavy chapter. But we had a lot of fairly System-light chapters before this one, so I figure it’s fine.

I also posted this chapter for the wrong story before realizing I messed up. I'm very, very glad I have a habit of clicking around a little bit after posting a chapter to make sure I didn't mess up every time I add a chapter to either story. I always worry that I'll accidentally skip a chapter or something, so after posting I triple-check numbers and stuff. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why the story suddenly jumped from chapter 55 to chapter 109, before I figured out the issue. XD.

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Chapter 110

Alice looked over her new Perks, as well as {Expanding Comprehension} and {Broken Seed}, before she grinned to herself. Both Perks were off of their cooldown, so she had four Perks to use before she went to sleep for the day.

First, she decided to test what she could define as an ‘experiment’ for the purposes of {Speed Experimentation}. Time manipulation was far too exciting not to try out immediately, after all.

Alice spent a few moments thinking about the best way to test out her new Perk. After some thinking, she settled on an idea, before asking one of the [Butlers] to bring her two clocks. She set them up right next to each other, on a desk in her room.

Both displayed the exact same time: 7:07 PM. She observed them for a few minutes, just to make sure they were ticking through their seconds at the same speed, and after about two minutes of observation, she nodded to herself. They were synchronized.

Then, Alice tried reaching for her new Perk. A moment later, she felt it activate, targeting one of the two clocks. The other one was left alone as a control.

Alice felt an instinctive realization that she needed to pay mana of some sort to make the Perk work, so she connected her Kinetic seed to the Perk.

Alice felt mana quickly drain out of her, flowing out of her kinetic seed and towards her brain, where her [Scientist] Class seed was located.

Then, a moment later, a cloud of thick rainbow mana condensed around Alice, and simultaneously wrapped itself around the clock. Alice saw a great deal of mana slide out of her body, and then, a new color of mana Alice wasn’t familiar with suddenly started to materialize in the air around her and the clock. Alice quickly realized that it was Time mana.

Apparently, Time mana was a sort of mixed grey, black, and white color.

Alice felt the Perk finally activate, and time sped up for Alice and the clock she was testing.

The clock that Alice was testing, as well as Alice’s perception of time, started to accelerate by about 50%. For every second 1.5 seconds that Alice and the test clock experienced, the clock she was using as a control only recorded 1 second passing. Alice tried pushing the Perk a little bit, to see if she could improve how much the Perk accelerated time, but quickly realized that the Perk couldn’t accelerate time any more than that.

In other words, the Perk could speed up time by 50% at its maximum. However, Alice was now pretty sure that her Perk was, indeed, manipulating time.

She was actually able to manipulate time!

However, at the back of her head, Alice was also calculating how useful this Perk actually was. Manipulating time was exciting, and Alice couldn’t deny that the idea of temporal manipulation appealed to her on a certain level just because of how fascinating she found the idea of speeding up and slowing down time.

However, the mana consumption for this Perk was awful. It was chewing through nearly 0.3% of Alice’s Kinetic mana reserves per second. Alice’s Magic Stat was at 161, and she had a Stat effectiveness of 122%, meaning she effectively had a Magic Stat of 196. Combined with her Mana Conversion Ratio of 147% for her Kinetic Seed, she had about 289 Mariums of mana stored in her Kinetic Mana seed when it was completely full.

To lose nearly 0.3% of her Seed’s reserves per second meant that the Perk was eating around 1 Marium of mana per second. Which was, frankly, ridiculous. It was an incredibly high amount of mana to pay for what effectively amounted to a 50% increase to [Dexterity].

Alice hesitated for a moment, before she shook her head. The Perk was doing quite a bit more than just boosting her [Dexterity] by 50%. It sped up objects, as well as her thinking and her ability to observe and understand the world around her. This meant that she was able to do much more with the Perk, if she got clever about how she used it. She just needed to figure out a practical application for the Perk. She absently drummed one of her fingers against the table, thinking over the experiment and what she had seen of her Perk so far, and thinking about practical ways to apply the Perk.

Now that Alice had seen time mana for the first time, Alice had been able to confirm that System mana did not include Time mana in its composition. Despite that fact, the System was somehow generating it when she used her new Perk.

At least for now, Alice assumed it was related to mana filtering. The System seemed especially good at commanding and manipulating mana, as well as filtering it and changing its composition a little bit. Alice wondered if her Class Seed was just somehow directly converting her kinetic mana to time mana on the fly whenever she activated her Perk.

Alice sighed. Currently, she could only keep the Perk going for about five minutes before emptying her kinetic mana reserves. That was assuming her Kinetic seed was full, and that she didn’t spend the mana on other stuff. Her kinetic magic seed was her largest magic seed, which meant that her other seeds would struggle even more with the mana costs related to her new Perk.

In other words, Alice could make 7.5 minutes pass for whatever she was trying to observe while she would only need to wait 5 minutes for the results, which was certainly a small boost in speed. However, the fact that it only saved her 2.5 minutes for an entire 38-or so hours of mana regeneration felt rather lackluster. Alice wouldn’t really be saving very much time, bringing the usefulness of the Perk into question if she was using it for science. Of course, Alice could also use her mana reserves from other magic seeds. But that didn’t solve the fundamental issue of using the Perk for experiments, which was that it just didn’t do enough per Marium, and Alice simply didn’t have enough mana to fuel the Perk.

However, after a few moments of thinking, Alice reconsidered the way she was trying to use the Perk. Even if the Perk was only somewhat useful for scientific experimentation, its applications in combat couldbe amazing. Saving two and a half minutes during a scientific experiment was rather mediocre, but saving two and a half minutes during a fight could determine her life or death. One of the most surprisingly powerful Perks Alice had ever taken was the {Adrenaline Rush} Perk from [Survivor], which effectively let her enter a state of superspeed for a couple seconds whenever it was activated. When Alice combined that Perk with the incredible control a [Kinetic Mage] could exert on their, {Adrenaline Rush} went from ‘not bad’ to ‘utterly and completely broken.’ The combat style of a [Kinetic Mage] just synergized incredibly well with drastically enhanced mental speed and processing power.

If {Speed Experimentation} could be used in combat, Alice was willing to bet that its effects would stack on top of {Adrenaline Rush}, and it would be able to work as a kind of… weaker {Adrenaline Rush} with a much longer activation time. Not to mention, it could allow Alice to randomly speed up objects she was tossing at her enemies in midair. If she sped up an object in midair, without touching it with a mana tendril, enemies would probably be taken off guard, which could screw up the attempts of an opposing [Kinetic Mage] to interfere with her actions. When she looked at it that way, it was a rather mediocre Perk for speeding up Science experiments, but it was an incredibly powerful Perk if she used it during a fight.

IF she could get it to work in combat, at least. Alice pulled a coin out of {Sample Collection}, tossed it forward with her kinetic magic, and then tried speeding it up with her Perk.

Alice’s Perception, as well as the speed of the coin, suddenly accelerated by 50% compared to the rest of the room. A fraction of a second later, the coin bounced off of the floor before coming to a halt. Alice hadn’t given it very much kinetic mana, for fear of damaging the room.

Alice nodded to herself. At the very least, it was clearly possible to use the Perk in combat if she fulfilled the right conditions. She would need to ask Ethan for advice about how to incorporate this into her fighting style later.

Since Alice had finally found a good way to use the Perk, she started experimenting with different magic seeds, trying to figure out which one cost the least to keep the Perk active.

After some testing, Alice settled on using her Pure Mana seed to activate {Speed Experimentation} when she wanted to make the Perk function. Pure mana had never been particularly relevant during fights, since it was more of a scholarly/enchanting oriented field of study, but it only cost around 0.7 Mariums per second to activate the Perk using pure mana. Since Alice had about 70 Mariums of pure mana, she could activate {Speed Experimentation} for 100 seconds before her pure mana seed ran out of fuel. That was enough time for most fights to end.

Of course, after Alice got her initial burst of experimentation out of the way and she was trying to get more used to activating the Perk in the middle of an imagined combat scenario, the Perk’s activation started to become a little bit harder to control, and would randomly shut off sometimes. As far as Alice could tell, if she was ‘training’ and not ‘actively experimenting’ with the Perk, it stopped wanting to work properly. Alice frowned. The Perk kept working if she genuinely believed she was ‘testing’ something, but she needed to continuously believe that she was testing something or the Perk shut off. She would need to practice telling herself that flinging different objects at enemies was a form of testing her Perk out later on. Something else to consult Ethan about, but Alice felt the results would be well worth it once she got more experienced with the Perk.

Alice shrugged, before turning her attention to her other three Perks she meant to use today. Now that Alice had started thinking about time seeds, Alice was curious to know if she could form a Time magic seed.

She seriously doubted there was a reason to keep a Time Magic seed around long term, since it probably wouldn’t further her study of System mana, and Ethan had already noted it was a rather useless magic seed. But now that Alice knew that it existed, and could compare her time-related Perk to a magic seed, she was curious to see if System magic was significantly more efficient than the ‘terrible’ Time Magic seeds formed by Mages. Besides, even if she needed to remove the seed later on, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

It only took four days for {Broken Seed} to be ready for use again, which wasn’t a very long time at all. And she was also quite curious about what a normal time magic seed looked like.

Alice spent a few minutes forming a Time Magic seed with her currently unused seed slot, before setting it aside for now. She would need to wait a few hours for the Seed’s mana to fill up and she had enough mana to do some testing.

After that, Alice turned her attention to {Seedy Ambitions}. She could use the Perk once a month, and she might as well test the seed for the first time while she waited for her time seed to generate some mana. Alice hadn’t identified very many of the kinds of mana tied into System mana, but she had still identified a few new ones while she had examined System mana. Math mana, Organic Mana, and pure mana had been some of the first she had identified, but through careful observation with {Intuitive Mana Modelling} over the past week, Alice had managed to figure out a few more of the relevant mana types. She didn’t know exactly what they were, but Alice thought she had figured out what one of the unidentified mana colors was, and what it did. For now, she had decided to call this new form of mana ‘display mana,’ because she thought it was related to how the System showed people System Messages.

Alice wanted to form a magic seed based on this mana, to test out what it actually did, and to make forming a System magic seed easier. After confirming her plan and double checking with {Safety Analysis}, Alice began to focus on her new Perk, while at the same time focusing on her assumptions about how ‘Display’ Mana worked. She felt {Seedy Ambitions} start to activate.

A few minutes later, Alice had formed another new seed. Unlike usual, Alice didn’t manage to form the magic seed at its maximum mana conversion ratio. Alice didn’t know if it was due to some sort of penalty the Perk imposed on her seed formation process, due to her lack of intimate understanding of display mana, or whether the low mana conversion was due to some other problem. However, she still managed to form her new Display mana seed at 11% mana conversion ratio. Which was fine, honestly. She wanted to experiment with the seed and to eventually use it to help her form a System magic seed. The actual conversion ratio of her display mana seed was rather unimportant.

Then, Alice… waited. Neither of her new magic seeds had enough mana to test things with, so she needed to wait a few hours for them to fill up.

Alice used Expanding Comprehension on her Pure Magic seed while she waited, taking an hour or two to go through the odd vision-trip induced by using the Perk. The seed’s conversion ratio increased by 4% during her vision trip, but she didn’t learn anything useful this time.

By the time she had finished, her seeds had finally filled up enough that she could test some new forms of magic.

First, Alice ran a quick test on how her Time magic seed interacted with her new Perk. With time mana, the cost was further reduced to 0.5 Mariums per second. However, Alice felt that was a little bit too situation of a reason to form a time magic seed, since she wanted to focus on forming System magic seeds right now. Perhaps in the future, when she had more activations of {Seedy Ambitions} behind her, she might form a time magic seed again, but for now she had other uses for her magic seed slots.

Next, Alice started experimenting with time mana itself. Alice created a mana tendril, creating a connection between her display mana seed and her stomach, before funneling a small amount of mana out of her seed.

Nothing happened.

Alice frowned, before realizing she might have made a mistake in what she connected her magic seed to.

Alice instead connected her mana tendril to her eyes and funneled a small amount of mana through her tendril. Once again, nothing happened. Then, as a third test, Alice tried connecting the seed directly to her brain, although this time Alice used {Safety Analysis} again, to make sure she wasn’t about to turn herself into a vegetable or something. After ensuring it was safe, Alice poured a little more mana into her brain.

A completely blank blue screen appeared in front of her eyes, just like when she received a System notification. Alice grinned. Her assumptions about what ‘display mana’ did were correct. Then, she focused for a few moments. As she messed with her new seed, a completely different System notification was created.

Hello World!

Alice grinned. She was nowhere close to replicating the actual feats of the System, and how it worked behind the Scenes. But she had definitely figured out how the System created notifications.

She tried experimenting with a few new System messages, just to play with what she had figured out.

You have rolled a 20! Critical Hit! You deal double damage!

Nobody Expects the Spanish System notification! Our primary weapon is surprise!

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 54 -> 54

There were two oddities Alice noticed, when she was creating her nonsensical System notifications.

First, Alice noticed that for some reason, if she tried to reference information about her actual Status Screen, she couldn’t input false information. She had tried to make her nonsensical ‘System’ messages claim that she had reached level 100 in [Survivor], just to mess around, but for whatever reason, she was completely unable to do so. There was nothing stopping her from making stupid jokes or totally random System messages, but whenever she tried to reference her Status Screen, no matter what she meant to add, any false information related to her Status Screen was immediately removed and replaced with the correct information. She could change how that message was displayed, and even change the System message itself. She could change the ‘you have leveled up!’ part of the notification to ‘you haven’t leveled up’ or make the System notification say ‘I like waffles,’ or any other message she wanted to add. However, any actual numbers she referenced in the System message would be correct, no matter what she tried to do.

Second, Alice realized after a while that all of her System notifications were in Illvarian. Which, up until this point, had never happened.

All of her System notifications usually appeared in English. Alice had both Language Skills at 100, so having her System messages in one specific language didn’t really matter to her. However, the System had, at least thus far, stuck to the language she knew best, which was obviously the one she had spent fifteen years of her life speaking. Now, however, the System messages were in Illvarian.

In fact, now that Alice thought about it, the way System Messages worked was still quite odd. When Alice first arrived in this world, the System hadn’t known enough about the English language to correctly name her Language Skill anything logical. It had just appeared as a glitch sign until the System finally renamed it {English (Language Proficiency)} a few days after her arrival. The same thing had happened when Alice got the {Russian (Language Proficiency)} Skill. However, despite the System not knowing what the English Language was, all of her System messages had still somehow appeared in English from the moment she arrived in this world.

Alice suspected this might be related to some of the other mana types inherently woven into System mana. Perhaps this kind of mana mana was somehow preventing her from displaying incorrect information in a System message, and perhaps it also somehow directly fed her information in a way she could understand. Or something. Alice would have to try experimenting with more components of System mana in the future, to see if she could figure out how System messages actually translated themselves for users of the System. But at least for now, no matter what she tried, she couldn’t add in completely false information to a made-up System message, and any System message she made up didn’t seem to have the same… self-translating property normal System messages had. The System would display messages she made in whatever language she concentrated on using, but it wouldn’t translate itself based on whatever language the user understood best.

Still, Alice was delighted to confirm that she had figured out most of an entire, fully functioning part of how the System worked.

By the time Alice finished messing around with System messages, her Time magic seed was ready to use. She quickly fixed the clock that she had messed up during her earlier experiment, before she tried using Time magic on one of the two clocks.

Unlike when Alice used a Perk, when Alice used a time magic seed, the broken mana production was atrocious, just like Ethan had said it would be. Alice estimated that she was losing around 80% of the mana she tried to invest into manipulating time as broken mana, which was a far cry from the 3-4% she currently lost when using kinetic mana, or the 6% she lost when using organic mana. For every one Marium of mana she sank into the clock to make it speed up, another four Mariums were turned into waste product.

At least the clock did speed up, despite the massive waste of mana. However, it was nowhere near as significant as a 50% increase in speed this time. It was closer to a 15% increase.

Alice winced. She could definitely see why the Time Magic seed had been considered useless by Ethan. If she was devoting a mana tendril to getting a mild, 15% speed boost, she might as well just use that mana tendril to fling more objects at an enemy instead. The magic seed just didn’t seem very practical.

Alice frowned for a moment, before she reset the two clocks again and tried something else. This time, she tried slowing one of the clocks down. Ethan had said travelling backwards in time was possible, but maybe slowing time down was viable?

True to her suspicion, the clock did, indeed, slow down a little bit when she used time mana on it. For every 10 seconds one clock counted, the clock Alice was slowing down only counted nine and a half. Which wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was certainly interesting.

A few seconds later, Alice ran out of mana. She frowned, inspecting her magic seed, before snorting.

There was definitely a reason people didn’t form time magic seeds. Then, Alice shrugged, before deleting the magic seed with {Broken Seed}. It had been an interesting seed to mess with, even if it wasn’t particularly useful, and it had only cost her four days of waiting before she could try forming a new magic seed. This time, she would try forming a class seed.

Content that she had learned a huge amount of new information today, and happy that she hadn’t needed to watch someone die, Alice drifted off to sleep.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 71 -> 72

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug - For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Chapter 111

Ethan, Immortal of Spells and Seeds, finished writing a letter. He frowned, using {Examine Paperwork} to make sure that he was happy with the letter’s contents, before he handed it to his [Combat Butler]. “Give this to the Ethics Committee, along with my personal thanks for sending three committee members to oversee my apprentice’s experiment. It made starting the process much easier,” he said. The [Combat Butler] nodded at Ethan, before quickly exiting the room and leaving Ethan alone again.

Ethan took a look at the next document he was supposed to deal with and began looking it over. It was a report on how the extended public fear of the Society of Starry Eyes was continuing to cause a shortage of enchanting materials, even with the increasing influx of enchanting materials from the south. At the end of the report was a second, attached proposal, discussing potential plans on how to mitigate the impact on [Students] learning to enchant.

The proposal specifically suggested importing more materials from Illvaria’s eastern neighbors, essentially borrowing some of the crown’s funds to subsidize the education of [Students] by providing cheaper materials for them to practice with. Ethan noted that the proposal didn’t actually address when the subsidy would end, implying that even if the material shortage was fixed, the crown would still be subsidizing enchanting students out of its own pocket. He wondered who had sent the proposal, and chuckled when he saw the names of the headmasters for two of the four magic academies stamped on the bottom of the form. It was a small political ploy kneaded into a legitimately useful proposal. If the crown was responsible for subsidizing part of the cost for enchanting materials for all [Students] in the future, the schools would likely find ways to encourage more [Students] into enchanting classes in the near future, which would also give the two schools with better enchanting courses a little more political weight in the future.

Of course, while a time limit needed to be added to the proposal, Ethan didn’t think the actual idea was bad. Illvaria’s enchanting materials shortage wasn’t dire yet, but it would certainly become a major inconvenience if left unaddressed for too long. Ethan copied down the more useful parts of the proposal and set them aside, to be brought up next time he spoke with the representative of the Royal Estate. So long as it was reasonable, the crown was usually happy to improve the conditions for Mages and students of Magic within the country; the best way to encourage Mages to immigrate to Illvaria was to make sure the standards of living were excellent for Mages, after all.

Setting the letter aside, Ethan’s thoughts started to turn towards his newest apprentice.

Alice was… very odd.

When [Knight] Arin had first brought word of her to Ethan’s subordinate, and word had been passed along to him, he had fairly low expectations. If someone could truly find a way to make mana baptisms safer or more frequent, they would almost certainly become an Immortal. However, for thousands of years, people had tried and failed to make mana baptisms safer, easier, and more successful. And so far, nobody had ever succeeded.

So Ethan hadn’t really thought that the girl Arin had recommended would have any success. He had still decided to meet her, since there was always a chance, but he hadn’t really had high hopes.

He had been happy to realize that Alice actually had a chance to succeed where so many others had failed. He still wasn’t sure if Alice would actually find a way to improve mana baptisms, but investing in a real possibility of success was a worthwhile use of his funds.

And even though he wasn’t sure if Alice’s research on mana baptisms would succeed, he felt that her odds of reaching Immortality were excellent.

He had already thought her odds were good before he had learned that she was from another dimension. A sixteen year old level 60-ish wasn’t very common. There were maybe twenty people in the country who had reached Alice’s level at the same age as her.

Naturally, most of those twenty people wouldn’t reach Immortality. The problem with Immortality was that it was simply too difficult to clear the last hurdles. In particular, between level 75 and 100, levelling usually slowed to a crawl, unless one had a lot of good Achievements boosting their progress.

However, while Alice hadn’t cleared the biggest hurdle yet, she had apparently pushed through 60 or more levels in less than a year. That was something even Ethan found unbelievable. Both of his parents were Immortals, and had taught him how to level up quickly and gain decent Achievements from the moment he was old enough to walk. It had still taken him fifteen years to reach level 75, and his parents had thrown a massive celebration when they realized one of their children might actually make it to Immortality and they wouldn’t be burying another one of their children within a hundred years.

Ethan felt himself grinning as he thought of another Immortal being born. The thing he dreaded the most was the sinking sensation he got when he realized another apprentice wasn’t going to make it to Immortality. That, for all of his hope and hard work, another set of [Students] he had grown close to were going to pass away of old age, and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.

While he was less attached to his apprentices than his parents were to his long-dead brothers and sisters, Ethan sometimes wondered if they had felt the same way every time one of their children turned forty or fifty, and his parents realized that their child was about to die and they couldn’t do a thing to stop it.

But right now, Ethan was glad he had stuck with his plan of taking talented children under his wing, even if Alice’s Immortality wasn’t set in stone yet. He had felt lost after Sujia and her fellow apprentices had started to grow too old, and he had realized that they had also failed to reach Immortality in time. But this time, there was a real chance.

A very good chance.

Ethan knew that Alice hadn’t actually become an Immortal yet. But he could hope that this time, his apprentice would make it.

* * *

You have been summoned by Alice, great explorer of the System, [Scientist] of legend and greatest Mage of all time. You may know kneel in the presence of a future Immortal and amazing [Scientist]. And you should also give Alice, great explorer of the System and amazing [Scientist], a great title worthy of her station. Henceforth, you must only refer to her as ‘Alice the Great.’ So sayeth the System.

Cecilia raised an eyebrow, looking at the absolutely ridiculous System notification she had just received, before she turned towards her friend. As she turned towards Alice, the completely ridiculous System notification that had appeared in front of her changed again.

Also, Alice will bribe you with amazing Achievements to refer to her as ‘Alice the Great.’ Go forth, and earn titles!

“All right, what the heck am I looking at?” asked Cecilia, resisting the urge to snort as she waved away the ‘System’ notifications. “How did you do that? This clearly isn’t a legitimate System notification. No way would the System ever send this kind of notification.” Cecilia frowned, looking at Alice’s mana tendril that was connected to her head, trying to figure out what kind of mana Alice was using to create fake System messages.

Alice started cackling like a lunatic. “I figured out a bit of it! Not a very complex part of the System, but I can now send System notifications! I cracked a little piece of the puzzle!”

Cecilia frowned, poking at the made-up System notification. Her hand passed directly through it, just as if it was a normal System notification.

“Isn’t it amazing?” asked Alice, while Cecilia resisted the urge to roll her eyes at Alice’s behavior.

For a ‘future Immortal,’ Alice is sometimes quite undignified, Cecilia thought to herself with a snort. Then, she found herself grinning a little bit.

Cecilia had to admit that it was actually pretty cool that Alice had finally figured out how to replicate part of the System. Even if sending people random ‘System’ notifications wasn’t really that impressive, it was proof that Alice was getting better and better at manipulating mana, and was also getting closer to the way the System worked behind the scenes.

“How does it actually work?” Asked Cecilia. “And can other people see you using this kind of mana?”

Alice frowned. “I’m… actually not sure. Since the System seems to block people from noticing the presence of System mana, I imagine it would also stop people from noticing the presence of Display mana, which is what I’m using to create fake System notifications. However, I have no idea how that works if I’m the one creating Display mana, instead of the System. Since I’m not part of the System, if I create System mana, would the System block people from noticing my mana usage? I’ve been thinking about that recently.” Cecilia frowned thoughtfully. For a moment, she wished that she had a way to turn off {On the Shoulders of Giants}, one of the Achievements she had gotten for helping Alice with her experiments. The ability to see more of the types of mana the System usually obfuscated was helpful, even if only let her observe things like the interactions between muscles and pure mana and didn’t let Cecilia see System mana for herself. However, while the Perk was incredibly useful, it also made it very hard to figure out what regular Mages saw without any of the ‘vision-boosting’ Achievements Alice and Cecilia had access to.

However, another part of Alice’s words also surprised her.

“So the System isn’t using light mana, or anything like that?” asked Cecilia. So far, she had assumed that System notifications were built around some other type of mana. Cecilia had previously suspected that Status Screens and System notifications were just floating blobs of light. Since the System had already clearly shown that it was capable of blocking people from noticing System mana, it didn’t seem like much of a stretch to assume that it could also stop people from noticing everyone else’s Status Screen and System notifications. To hear that it was a completely different kind of mana made Cecilia wonder why the System went through all of the trouble, instead of using a simpler solution. Although, perhaps the System’s method of operation was truly the best way to create System notifications. The two still didn’t know enough about how the System worked to judge how effectively it used its mana, after all.

“There’s no light mana involved at all, apparently,” said Alice. “I still haven’t figured out how to make System messages automatically translate themselves for the viewer though. Or whatever it is System notifications do. I’m still not sure how I could read my first couple notifications without the System knowing what English was, and before I was able to read any of the languages present in this world. So I guess I need to figure out that before I can really call my exploration of System notifications complete. But I want to work more on class seeds first.”

Cecilia nodded.

“What does mimicking a System notification actually look like from your perspective?” She asked.

“Are you all right with me using {Shared Memory}? It’s much easier to just show what the process looks like.”

“Go for it,” said Cecilia as she extended a hand towards Alice. Alice quickly took her hand, and Cecilia felt Alice’s Perk activate, pulling her into the past.

Cecilia watched through Alice’s eyes as her friend slowly worked her way through the construction of a new Display Mana seed, by using her… newly acquired Level 70 [Explorer of Magic] Perk. She was pretty sure Alice would have edited that part out, if she had been paying more attention. But Alice had probably been too excited to notice. Cecilia couldn’t help but sigh as she saw her friend clearly display a Perk she had unlocked by reaching level 70.

When Alice had first arrived on this planet, she had been fifteen. And she had been level 0. Alice had vividly described how difficult her first steps on this world had been, and the number of times she had nearly starved to death or froze to death during her first few months here when she was alone in the wilderness with nothing but her pajamas and the System to keep her alive.

Sometimes, she found it unbelievable that the other girl had managed to come so far in such little time. A little pang of jealousy bubbled up in her chest before she squashed it. It was hard not to be at least a little jealous of someone who grew so quickly. Alice had even managed to attract the attention of an Immortal recently. Each and every Immortal was someone that kids in Illvaria grew up hearing stories about and admiring; it was hard for Cecilia not to have strangely mixed feelings, now that her friend was an apprentice to one of them.

Cecilia shook herself out of her strange mood as Alice started talking again, excitedly talking about what she had discovered, and how she was planning on investigating the nature of Class seeds as soon as her {Broken Seed} Perk finished its cooldown. Cecilia listened, with a mixture of interest and a certain feeling of being distracted, as Alice started talking about how she wanted to see what happened if she formed a class seed using a magic seed slot, and how she wanted to see what happened if she broke a class seed down using {Broken Seed} as well.

She’s going to pull even further ahead once she succeeds, thought Cecilia, knowing that Alice would eventually succeed. The girl was very stubborn, and once she put her mind to something, she had a habit of making it reality sooner or later. Cecilia glanced at her own Status Screen.

Her [Merchant] Class had reached level 57 recently, and [Kinetic Mage] had reached level 64. Her [Enchanter] class was coming along nicely too, and had recently broken past 60.

A lot of the reason for Cecilia’s recent growth was because of Alice’s help. By participating in Alice’s experiments and thinking, Cecilia usually got a couple low-rarity Achievements here and there, which helped her magic-related classes level quite a bit faster. However, as she listened to her friend talk about her plans for her next set of experiments, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she was falling behind. Cecilia sighed, wondering if she had been wrong to refuse Ethan’s help in levelling up faster. At the very least, if she wanted to keep up with Alice, she should use every resource available to her, right? She hesitated, but decided to give it a little more thought.

* * *

The next four days passed quickly, as Alice returned to classes at the magic academy. She spent a lot of time running over her notes about what had happened during her observation of the mana baptism. She also continuously played her memories back over and over again, hoping to discover new insights each time, and also had Cecilia run over her memories with her to see if she had missed something. Alice still wasn’t sure if any of her ideas about fixing mana baptisms would actually work, and didn’t have an ethical way to test them, but tossing ideas back and forth with Cecilia at least helped her brainstorm new ideas and review what she had seen.

Apart from that, Alice made preparations for forming her first class seeds as magic seeds, and tried to speculate about what would happen if she broke a Secondary Class seed. {Safety Analysis} had already assured her that breaking her [Fisherwoman] class seed would be safe, and Alice was hoping that it might give her some clues about how to cure children like Boris. Apart from that, Alice wanted to see if forming a Class Seed using a magic seed slot was possible, since that might prove to be another useful avenue of study for helping kids like Boris.

Thus, she scoured the academy library for whatever information she could find, learning as much as she could about the nature of magic seeds and Classes. Unfortunately, while there was a great deal of speculation about the nature of magic seeds, proper information on the subject was hard to come by, and it was very hard to find out more information about Classes besides the basic information available in the Church of the System’s records.

Finally, on the fourth day, Alice hesitated in Ethan’s manor. There were so many different experiments she could do, and trying to choose one specific experiment was causing her to hesitate as she went over possible experiments that would give her useful information.

Eventually, she opted to try destroying her [Fisherwoman] seed first. Alice had always been curious to know just how different a Class seed was from a magic seed. This was a chance to analyze the differences between the two in more detail, before she tried forming a class seed as if it were a magic seed.

[Fisherwoman] was a class that Alice had no particular use for, and she was more than happy to lose it. She didn’t really like fishing, and now that she had no real difficulty meeting her survival needs, she had no intention of ever fishing again.

Alice did one last check with {Safety Analysis}, to make sure she wasn’t about to accidentally kill herself or something. Then, she used {Broken Seed} on her Secondary Class, [Fisherwoman], while using {Lesser Organic Vision} to keep an eye on her body in case something changed.

Her Class fractal for the [Fisherwoman] class simply… collapsed. For a brief moment, Alice saw [Fisherwoman] mana start to draft around her body, as if it had been trapped inside of a container that Alice had destroyed.

And then… the mana simply fell out of her body. As if it had never existed in the first place. Alice had been half-expecting the mana to immediately regather inside of her body, perhaps accompanied by a new System notification that she had gained the [Fisherwoman] class, but instead, all of the fisherwoman mana inside of her body just didn’t seem interested in her anymore. After a few minutes, the mana simply drifted off into her surroundings, becoming effectively impossible to pick out amongst the rainbow mana of the System all around her.

Alice examined her body, curious to see if she could find any evidence of the [Fisherwoman] mana existing in the first place, but came up surprisingly empty-handed. It was as if she had simply never possessed the class to begin with.

Alice wondered what that said about the nature of classes and class-related mana in general. From Boris, Alice had realized that Classes worked as some kind of mana purifier. Based on the results of shattering her Fisherwoman class seed, Alice assumed that once a class seed absorbed the mana inside of it, the mana inside of it was no longer ‘attracted’ to her. Or perhaps it simply wasn’t harmful after the System sucked it into a class seed? Or something?

She would need to think more about this, but she had new information to work with, at least.

Before Alice had time to ponder more about what she had discovered, however, someone knocked loudly on her door.

Alice quickly made sure that she was presentable, before calling out towards the door. “You can enter!”

To her surprise, Ethan opened the door a moment later. “Lady Alice. I wouldn’t normally call you for this kind of situation, but there is an emergency.”

Alice frowned. An emergency sounded bad. “What happened?”

“Do you recall the dimensional floods that the Society has been investigating recently?”

Alice nodded.

“Just half a day’s ride away from Metsel, a dimensional flood been spotted. Many of the villagers got started undergoing broken mana baptisms before people realized what was happening and evacuated. Your… unique perspective on dimensions might give us a better idea what’s happening behind the scenes.” Ethan paused. “And, more importantly, there might still be some people who haven’t died yet. I don’t know how far along your studies on Mana Baptisms are, but if you have any ideas how to help them improve their odds…” Ethan shifted uneasily. “Don’t feel bad if you can’t. But are you willing to come with me and take a look at the area?”

Alice only thought about it for a second before she nodded. She was happy to help people where she could, and she might learn more about a possible way home, as well as getting the chance to observe more mana baptisms in progress.

“I’ll go.”

A note from acaswell

Author’s Note: Recently, I’ve been thinking about how I name stories and write synopses. I realized something.

I should have named this story Alice in Numberland. I’m actually really, really sad I didn’t think of that until now. I mean, I even named the main character Alice because I was explicitly thinking of Alice in Wonderland. Why didn’t I notice that potential pun until now? Such a huge missed opportunity. I’m sad.

Oh well. Anyway.

Slight revisions to chapter 110, where Alice is messing with {Speedy Experimentation} the Perk. She now tests her time magic seed with it (cost is 0.5 Mariums per second). Now that I’m a bit less swamped I’ve been skimming through comments for Budding Scientist and realized I forgot to add that interaction to the story.

Alice still won’t be forming a time magic seed to minimize costs, since most fights will probably end before her pure mana seed is tapped out, but when she has more uses of {Seedy Ambitions} behind her maybe she’ll do something with that. Or after its Perk combination.

We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s all.

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 112

After Alice agreed to go, Ethan quickly smiled at her, before nodding.

“I’m glad to hear it. Get ready then. I sent word to a few other Mages, especially those who have some extra resistance or complete immunity to broken mana poisoning. The ones that accept my request should be here in half an hour or so. We’ll also be taking some [Guards] along; while I hope that the Society of Starry Eyes hasn’t reached the point where they can openly attack an Illvarian village in broad daylight, not taking countermeasures would just be silly. Some of them have Perks to protect them from mana poisoning, but some of them don’t, since most don’t bother with the Perks for it. Of course, I’m also here, and my specialty is definitely combat. So we should be able to run over smaller groups of the Society as long as they don’t have an overwhelming advantage in numbers. Just be careful.”

“All right. Thank you for the information,” said Alice. Ethan gave her a quick nod, before departing, presumably to make other arrangements. Alice spent a few minutes tossing on all of her enchanted items, just in case they ended up being needed, and also took the time to make sure her clothes were presentable. Then, she met up with Ethan near the front of the manor.

Ethan was sitting just outside of the house, and he wasn’t alone. There was a group of around twenty [Guards], most of whom were between level 60 and 65, and another two [Organic Mages], both around level 75. Finally, rounding out the group was Elder Sujia, who gave Alice a friendly grin. Alice smiled back at the elderly Mage, before Ethan addressed the [Guards] and Mages.

“Thank all of you for coming on short notice,” said Ethan. “I contacted you almost immediately after I got word of the dimensional mana flood, and I’m glad that you were able to come so quickly. People might be dying right now, so we don’t have much time to waste. You should have all of the details I do already, but to quickly re-iterate; a random flood of dimensional broken mana has suddenly appeared in a village near the capital. While I have some suspicions why this happened, we are going there to confirm, as well as to treat any injuries we can. We are also bringing along my apprentice, to get her some combat experience and some on-site experience as a healer. I have also recently been investigating ways to treat mana baptisms, and while I have no idea if any of my ideas will work, some of them might be worth trying. That’s everything we know. Let’s get moving.”

The other people in the group nodded, and Ethan quickly led the group to a stable.

Alice had a bad feeling. Somehow, she had always gotten caught up in her research, and had never actually found time to pick up any skill in riding horses. In other words, if the group was riding to the village, she might have a lot of issues sticking with the group, because she had zero confidence in being able to steer a horse or stay on top of one at a gallop. She also couldn’t outrun a horse yet, and while she knew some [Kinetic Mages] could fly using their clothes, Alice didn’t really have the skill to keep herself balanced in midair. She was more likely to break her neck than properly fly.

In other words, transportation might be a huge problem here.

Seeing Alice freeze, Elder Sujia laughed.

“Have you never learned to ride, Lady Alice?” Asked Elder Sujia, as she looked through the horses. It seemed that all of the [Guards] and Mages who were coming with the group all had some experience with horses, unlike her.

Alice shook her head. “I haven’t. I…” Alice winced, suddenly wishing that she had spent more time outdoors. It wasn’t a particularly common thought for her, but at least right now she was definitely regretting her actions a little.

The painful truth was that Alice had simply never bothered picking up the {Riding} skill. She had been more interested in research, and hadn’t bothered devoting time to things she didn’t find interesting. That was the reason why, despite having Ethan as a sponsor for several months now, access to financial resources that she couldn’t make full use of, and connections that would beggar the imagination of most people, Alice hadn’t actually made use of any of that time to pick up skills like {Riding}. She simply hadn’t feel a need to do so, and since it didn’t interest her she had never thought much about it.

Elder Sujia chuckled again. “Don’t worry about it, dear. I myself was never one for horses either. I used to think that if I was going to learn how to {Ride}, I might as well just learn to fly instead.” Elder Sujia snorted. “I was a fool. Flying is way too hard on your mana to use unless it’s an emergency. Flying from one town to the next is something only an Immortal has the mana for. And sadly, I didn’t get that far.” Elder Sujia sighed, softly, before her expression brightened up again and she gave Alice a grin.

Then, Elder Sujia beckoned towards Alice. “Come, ride with me instead. We don’t have much time to waste, but I’ve since learned from the foolhardiness of my youth. I’m a fair hand at {Riding} now, and you don’t look like you weigh much. Since I’m also quite light, we should be able to ride a horse without burdening it. I’ll help you sit properly and steer the horse for us.”

Alice nodded. “Thank you, Lady Sujia. I appreciate the help.”

Elder Sujia grinned. “Just make sure you actually work on levelling up the {Riding} Skill or something travel-related after this. It doesn’t really matter long term, if you actually reach Immortality, but, well…” Elder Sujia grinned. “You aren’t there yet. Even if you do end up reaching Immortality and ditching horses in the future, it’s not a terrible idea to learn to {Ride} now. [Scouts] won’t always be available to give you access to good marching Perks, and unless I’m completely mistaken, you’re probably still years away from completely reaching Immortality, right?”

Alice nodded thankfully, feeling more than a bit embarrassed by her sudden reliance on Elder Sujia. She decided she would make some time to learn about horses when this trip ended.

Then, Elder Sujia hopped on the horse she had chosen, and after settling down, she extended a hand to Alice. Alice quickly grabbed elder Sujia’s hand, and was surprised by how firm the woman’s grip was. Old age clearly hadn’t taken elder Sujia’s physical [Strength] quite yet.

Elder Sujia quickly seated Alice just in front of her, keeping one of her bony hands on Alice’s shoulder to help her keep her posture steady.

“The first thing to keep in mind when riding a horse is your Stats,” said Elder Sujia. “If your [Endurance] is too low, you need to pay careful attention to how you sit on a saddle, or you might get saddle-sores and crippling muscle cramps, and need to heal yourself. Right now, we can’t afford to waste any organic or healing mana, since Ethan could only find two people who have both broken mana immunity and healing abilities on short notice. If your [Endurance] is below around 100 or so, after multipliers, you should sit like this, while if it’s between 100 and 150, you can start to ignore some of that posture. Your body will compensate for some of the more minor saddle sores and other issues. If it’s above 150, you can start to ignore a lot more of the proper posture for riding a horse…” Elder Sujia took the minutes that the other Mages and [Guards] used to pick out and saddle up their horses to give Alice some quick tips on how to sit on a horse so that she could avoid hurting either herself or the horse. There was a surprising amount of variety to Elder Sujia’s instructions, giving Alice ways to compensate for different levels of [Dexterity], [Strength], and [Endurance]. While Alice couldn’t perfectly match her ‘correct’ riding posture after only a few minutes, she at least had a rough idea what she was supposed to be doing, which was better than being completely clueless. She knew that she would need to work on it as the group travelled.

With Alice’s permission, Alice also felt Elder Sujia use her kinetic mana to move Alice’s clothes around from time to time during the quick lesson, quietly prodding some of Alice’s limbs into the correct posture whenever she messed up. Finally, Elder Sujia nodded. “It’ll probably still be a little painful ride until you get the {Riding} skill, but it shouldn’t be that bad. As long as you can tough it out for a bit, maybe you’ll even pick up a point of [Endurance] if you’re lucky.” Elder Sujia grinned. “If you really can’t handle the saddle sores and pain, you can use a little healing mana on yourself. But try to avoid it if you don’t need it. And remember,” said Elder Sujia. “Even if you mess up while healing a person during our time in the village, that’s okay. Most of these people are going to die with or without your intervention. Do your absolute best and make sure that you can pass a test from the ethics committee, but don’t feel bad if you fail to save them. I know you have at least some access to healing, since you’re here, but everyone makes mistakes. Don’t beat yourself up too hard while you’re learning. It’s Ethan’s job to make sure you don’t mess up right now, so just blame him if you make a mistake!” Elder Sujia said cheerfully.

Bizarrely enough, after Elder Sujia’s words Alice felt a ludicrously inappropriate urge to laugh. Her words were ridiculously irresponsible, but at the same time, had a sort of carefree tone that helped Alice calm down. At the same time, she wondered if Elder Sujia had guessed that Ethan might not be being entirely truthful about Alice’s specialty as a ‘combat’ Mage. If there was anyone who could pick out an Immortal lying, it was likely his apprentices who had been with him for several decades.

Not that Alice intended to fail if she had any choice in the matter. She had no idea if she could successfully interfere with a baptism right now, but she wanted to at least try her best to keep villagers safe if they were hurt. Of course, the biggest problem with curing a mana baptism was that any mana she threw in would probably get absorbed by the mana baptism, and would probably harm the patient. She had a couple guesses about ways that might help a baptism, but Alice felt worried that all of her ideas would fail.

She just hoped she could actually help the situation, and didn’t just make the whole situation worse. If Alice tried to help and accidentally killed someone, she didn’t know if she would be able to forgive herself.

Such were her thoughts as the group saddled up and started riding to the village.

* * *

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Riding 1-> 7

Alice groaned as they had nearly reached their destination, resisting her urge to wobble off the horse and face-plant into the ground. Her legs and back felt like they had been beaten with a metal bat. Her Stats helped, but they didn’t solve the problem entirely. When she had acquired the {Riding} Skill, it had improved her posture and made the problem much less severe… but it hadn’t solved the problem entirely.

Alice resisted the urge to throw {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} at her aching body, or perhaps use one of her healing rings to fix herself up. While most injuries in the village were unlikely to be treatable with regular magic, if the Society had attacked there would be a huge amount of use for healing and organic mana here, and she needed to be sparing with her mana usage until she knew more.

The only relief was that the constant motion of the horse was finally coming to an end. Elder Sujia carefully helped Alice off of her horse as the village came in view, and one of the [Guards] quickly started tethering the horses. At the same time, other [Guards] got into position and drew weapons, in case an attack came.

Luckily, no Society Members popped out of the woods and attacked them. Oddly enough, no villagers did either.

“Be wary,” said Ethan, frowning. Alice saw dozens of magic tendrils snake out of his body, preparing for any dangers that might appear, and at the same time, rainbow mana shot into his eyes as he started looking around. His frown deepened.

A few of the other [Guards] increased their wariness, scanning their surroundings more cautiously than before.

Slowly, the group began advancing towards the village.

When the group arrived, Alice was surprised by how orderly everything seemed. It looked like once the villagers had realized the problem, they had started a rather organized flight from the village. There were well-defined areas of tramped down grass and mud where groups of people had gathered together, before they had started waiting for Mages to come and fix the problem. It even looked like they had started to set up campfires and crude tents, to make sure that they had supplies while they waited.

Alice thought about it for a moment, before wondering if Illvaria had some sort of emergency drill that people were familiar with if broken mana became a problem, perhaps similar to the way fire drills were common on Earth. She had never participated in a broken mana drill here, but it didn’t seem like an unreasonable drill to pound into people’s skulls here.

Of course, these areas were now completely devoid of villagers. Even though the villagers had clearly been here at some point within the past twenty-four hours, they were now suspiciously missing. Alice’s grip on her enchanted items tightened, and she saw many [Guards] tighten their hands on their own weapons. Something was wrong here, and she didn’t like it.

Finally, the group got close enough to the village that Alice could see the buildings and mana more clearly.

The western side of the village had a much heavier concentration of purple broken mana. She assumed that was where the largest number of villager baptisms had come from.

The eastern side of the village was much less heavily covered by broken dimensional mana. Alice suspected that some parts of the area hadn’t even hit the mana density required to start a mana baptism; this was likely where the people that had sent for help had come from.

In the sky, Alice could see the real problem. It looked very similar to the place where Alice had first arrived in this world. Giant purple clouds of mana rolled through the area, like a purple fog bank had descended upon the village and choked the life out of the inhabitants.

Plonked directly in the center of town, Alice saw a random chunk of road just… laying in the middle of the village. It was clearly from Earth. There was a completely demolished car laying off to the side of the road. While it was hard to see from this distance, Alice thought she could even see a few blood smears a little distance away from the totally destroyed car. She couldn’t tell what the car had crashed into; perhaps it had run into something just before getting teleported here, or perhaps it had been crushed as a result of dimensional travel. She had no clue.

Alice could also see that something was horribly wrong with the village. She could see some monsters already starting to take over the village, much like they had when the Cyran expedition had investigated Alice’s arrival point.

It wasn’t like bows and basic {Archery} skills were rarein this world. A village usually had at least a few people with weapons laying around, just in case a medium-sized monster started bothering the village. And even if the village was currently covered in broken mana, after the Mages cleared out the region, the townsfolk would surely want to move back into their village. Why was nobody shooting down the spidercrabs and other small monsters that had come to eat the broken mana in the region?

The answer was increasingly obvious, even if Alice had no idea what to make of it.

As far as Ethan’s group could tell, all of the villagers in the area had simply vanished into thin air. The driver of the ruined car was also nowhere to be seen.

The group was alone.

A note from acaswell

I may or may not have jury duty next week. If I do, I might need to cancel next week’s chapter. It does SEEM like I’m already excused, but there’s a small chance I’m misreading something. I’ll double check next week.

But if you don’t see a chapter next week, that’s why.

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Chapter 113

Alice uneasily glanced around, trying to pick out any potential threats. There was probably nobody else in Illvaria who had quite the same quantity of Perks and Achievements enhancing her vision and ability to perceive mana, and she fully intended to make use of that. If the Society, in particular, had attacked this village and spirited away the villagers, Alice should be able to find signs of it.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t make out a thing. Part of the issue was because the region was simply incredibly chaotic already. There was so much dimensional mana in the area that it was flooding out a lot of her mana-related vision. Coupled with the ever-present rainbow color of the System mana in her surroundings, trying to pick out any nearby oddities in the mana was difficult. However, Alice didn’t give up, continuously looking around and hoping she could pull out a miracle to tell people where the villagers had gone.

In the background, she heard a few of the [Guards] shuffle around as they scanned the area. However, apart from occasional twitching sound of a spidercrab shuffling around (or getting shot by a [Guard]), there were no other signs that people were still nearby. Even though the villagers had clearly evacuated their village and started trying to get people separated and treated, there was no indicator that they were still here. And there was no sign of whatever had moved them away, either.

Alice felt her uneasiness grow with every passing moment.

Where were the villagers? This had been one of the few times Alice would be able to try to improve the process of a mana baptism without wondering whether she should turn herself over to the ethics committee for a serious investigation.

And now, the whole village was just gone. There were no villagers to treat, no monsters to fight, and no Society members to interrogate. It was like the village was a ghost town.

“Where is everyone? And what in the world is that strange metal… thing?” said Elder Sujia, drawing Alice’s attention out of her thoughts. “Do you think the strange metal object in the middle of the village had something to do with the disappearance of the villagers?”

Alice felt a sudden, incredibly inappropriate urge to laugh. She was almost completely certain that the ‘strange metal thing’ was a car that had just experienced a pretty bad crash. For Elder Sujia to question whether it had somehow been involved in the disappearance of the villagers simply felt absurd. It wasn’t enough to completely alleviate the tension, but Alice felt her increasing anxiety and nervousness start to bleed away as she pondered how to explain that cars weren’t able to make villagers mysteriously disappear.

Ethan eyed the car wreck with a critical eye as well. He frowned, looking at it, before his eyes widened. He turned back towards Alice. “Lady Alice, please come here for a moment.”

Alice quickly shuffled over to Ethan’s position. A moment later, a rainbow bubble flickered into existence around Ethan, as Ethan’s anti-eavesdropping Perk was activated. They could now talk without being overheard by others.

“I’m not sure if I’m mistaken, but… doesn’t that metal thing look kind of like one of the metal carriages from your home world? The ones that can move by themselves? I believe they were called cars? This one looks quite different, of course, since all of the ones you showed me in your memories were intact. But the resemblance is still very strong, even if I’m not 100% sure they’re the same.”

Alice nodded. “It’s almost certainly a car from my home dimension. Cars usually look like this if they collide with something while moving. In fact, the people who make them have explicitly designed them to crumple like this on a high speed impact. It reduces the force of the impact as much as possible for the passengers, thus giving any unfortunate drivers as high a chance of surviving as possible.” Alice gave the random chunk of street that had teleported into the middle of the village a dubious glance. “At home, our streets look like this as well. So whatever brought this car over likely dragged over a chunk of random street, too.” Alice squinted at the car and random chunk of road, but they were too far away for her to make out any details beyond the basics. “I can’t tell if the driver of the car was brought over, though. And I can’t tell what it collided with, either. It doesn’t look like it hit any of the nearby buildings, so I assume it collided with something before getting teleported to Luliv. But whatever the car collided with doesn’t appear to have been teleported over with the car, which leaves me more than slightly confused. I have no idea what teleported over here and what was left on Earth.”

Alice looked over the dimensional flood site again, before frowning.

“Actually, now that I think about it, it’s also quite possible that the villagers were teleported to Earth. I have no idea how dimensional floods work, but it seems like a distinct possibility that they work both ways. I just don’t know enough to say.”

Ethan thought for a moment, before he nodded. “That’s a good point, and one I hadn’t considered before. I’ve never really delved into the study of dimensions, so I wouldn’t really know where to look for information on this topic.” Ethan sighed. “The restrictions placed on the study of dimensions really makes this situation quite frustrating to handle. If only we had a few experts in dimensional mana in the country that I could ask for opinions…”

Ethan squinted at the car, examining it even more carefully as he seemed to search for clues. “At the very least, we know that the car is from your world, though?”

“It’s almost certainly from my home world, yes. Unless the Society has managed to reverse-engineer the machinery from my home world in the last month or two.” Alice paused. “Which, is technically possible, especially since Perks can sometimes accomplish pretty ridiculous things. But I find it pretty unlikely.”

“Do you have any guesses or ideas that might help us figure out if the villagers here have been teleported to Earth sometime after they reported the dimensional flood here? I know that you still don’t have a permit for forming a dimensional seed, and you haven’t really had much chance to study it, but since you’re from another dimension, you’re still one of the leading experts on dimensional mana right now. Sadly.”

Alice shook her head. “I’m not seeing any direct evidence of the village being teleported to my home, at least. But I wouldn’t know what to look for either. Hmm…” Alice trailed off into thought, giving the village another careful look.

“I can think of two possibilities for why this village is empty. First, right after some chunk of my home planet was dropped into this world, all of the people here were teleported back home, dumping them on Earth, as I already mentioned before. I’m not seeing any evidence that it happened, but I also don’t know where I would look for evidence. So it might have happened.

“The other likely option is that the Society has come. I find that option more likely, just because we already know the Society is interested in dimensional floods, and is investigating them even though it is explicitly harming their organization as a whole. Although I’d like to think that they wouldn’t be able to attack a village in broad daylight and spirit away the inhabitants… the Society has proven rather abnormally strong before. It’s hard to guess what those lunatics are up to.”

Ethan nodded thoughtfully.

“Your thoughts mostly match mine. Though, now that you’ve brought up the possibility of the people teleporting from this world back to Earth, I realized that there is another possibility I failed to originally consider. It is rather unlikely, but it would be silly not to consider every possibility until we get more information. Perhaps a monster that we’re unfamiliar with attacked this area and ate all of the villagers before fleeing. Of course, an incredibly powerful monster that had left the mana wastes would basically instantly be on the verge of dying due to mana deprivation. Which would send the monster onto a desperate rampage as it tore through the countryside and tried to gather enough mana to keep itself alive, meaning it would destroy dozens of villages before being put down or dying of mana deprivation. While incredibly rare, it has happened twice in the past three hundred years.” Ethan shrugged. “So it’s probably not the cause here, but we can still at least think about it. If it’s some sort of unknown monster specialized in dimensional magic it could still be behind the incident, even if it’s unlikely to be the cause.” Ethan sighed. “Are you sure you don’t have any ideas for testing whether this area was teleported to Earth?”

“Unfortunately, I really don’t know where to start. I still don’t have a dimensional seed, after all.”

Ethan sighed again, before nodding. “I suppose I should have seen that coming. On the bright side, now that this has happened I should be able to finally get your request for a dimensional seed permit through. If random dimensional fissures are going to kill random chunks of the country and teleport who-knows what into our world, I seriously doubt that dimensional study restrictions will still be incredibly restrictive and stringent in a week or two. I can probably push through your application even faster than I originally expected to in the wake of this incident. But that doesn’t help us now.”

Alice felt a twinge of regret at that thought. The Illvarian bureaucracy, much like bureaucracies at home, was adept at dragging its feet when the occasion arose, and she still didn’t have a license to form a dimensional seed. At the very least, it seemed that her struggles with dimensional seed formation would finally be over after this. But the price of her finally getting permission to study dimensional magic simply felt far too high, if an entire village had disappeared into thin air first.

She took a moment to roll the thought around in her head, before she banished it, and tried to cheer herself up by thinking that she might be able to go home someday, now that she could finally start researching dimensional mana. And the people in the village might still be fine. Even if she seriously doubted it, she could be wrong.

And if she managed to get home, she would truly have a huge variety of benefits she could take with her. Based on what Alice knew about living in areas with no mana, she would be seriously weakened if she lost access to the mana of this world; but all of her Perks should still work if she returned home, and she strongly suspected that she would retain her Immortality if she managed to become an Immortal before returning. She would need to be extra careful about polluting the environment with broken mana if she returned back to Earth, but Alice found herself briefly imagining returning home to see her parents and friends again. Or better yet, perhaps there would be some way to continuously hop back and forth, never fully abandoning either world as she spent some time with her parents and friends. And she would also get to stay in touch with Cecilia, Ethan, and her classmates from her magic academy. She wasn’t sure if that would actually be possible, but it was a nice dream, at least.

Then Alice shook her head. Now wasn’t the time to be fantasizing about the future. Right now they needed to figure out where the villagers had gone, and rescue them if possible.

“Since I have no way to check if these people were teleported to my world, or whether the Society just managed to make it look like the villagers disappeared into thin air, we probably need [Guards] or someone with scouting Perks to check the area. If they find tracks of the Society, or evidence they were here, we can assume the people here were kidnapped by the Society and brought to one of their bases. On the other hand, if there are no tracks or clues, we hope that they got teleported to my world and they’re safe?” Alice shrugged. “It’s my best idea anyway.”

Ethan nodded. “If they teleported to your world, it’s the best we can do. I know of no way to cross from one world to another.” He frowned, as if deep in thought. “If they did enter your world, would they be safe?”

Alice thought for a moment. “Probably? Actually…” Alice paled. “The diseases they brought with them might wipe out my world. That’s a terrifying thought. When the Europeans landed on the new world, small pox wiped out most of the native people who lived there. I have no clue what the heck has developed on this world, since I’m basically immune to disease now, but I seriously doubt my planet is equipped to deal with it. Maybe the diseases of this world die without enough mana? Kind of like monsters?” Alice shuddered. If this world’s diseases didn’t work that way, Alice really hoped that the people of this world hadn’t managed to accidentally arrive on Earth. The consequences for her home world might be catastrophic if that happened.

Alice closed her eyes and breathed in and out, trying to shake off the image of a horrifying, magically enhanced plague ravaging her home world and causing her friends and family to die horrific deaths as their eyes bled and mage cores failed to form inside of their bodies, or some other equally deadly outcome. The doctors of Earth certainly weren’t equipped to handle magically-enhanced diseases, and Alice desperately hoped they wouldn’t have to try. If Alice ever returned home, she would need to find a way to address any diseases she might bring over from Luliv. Perhaps there was something she could do with organic mana?

Meanwhile, Ethan had begun barking orders at the [Guards], particularly the three who actually had scouting Perks. It seemed that the rest of the group didn’t have any Perks that would be in any way helpful for tracking down the missing villagers, and so they were left to essentially twiddle their thumbs and keep Alice safe. Theoretically, they were also there to keep Ethan safe, but if push came to shove Alice seriously doubted they would be protecting Ethan if something went wrong.

The three [Guards] quickly broke off from the rest of the group, accompanied by a few more combat oriented [Guards], and began searching the surrounding area. Alice noticed rainbow Perks start to fly around as [Guards] with a few tracking Perks used whatever Perks they had available to them, and tried to find the missing villagers.

It took less than three hours for the [Guards] to throw up their hands in defeat. Apparently, they had no way to track down the missing villagers at all. Their Perks were too low level, or whatever had spirited the villagers away was simply too different from what their Perks were able to track down. Or they had been teleported to Earth, leaving nothing for the [Guards] to track. Alice was beginning to lean towards the final possibility, just because the sheer variety of Perks the [Guards] used made it seem like they would have found something if the Society had dragged the village away. On the other hand, it was also hard to guess what Perks the Society might have had access to if their higher-level members had participated in an attack against the villagers. The problem was that the group simply lacked too much information, and nobody here had the right skill set to find out more.

“Can I take a closer look at the wrecked car?” She asked Ethan, after a few moments. Alice was getting frustrated by the fact that she didn’t know much about what had happened here, and if she went to inspect the car, she could at least find out something. She wanted to do something useful with her time.

“Sure. If you’re lucky, maybe you can find a friend from home to chat with,” said Ethan, giving her a forced grin.

Alice knew the odds of that were incredibly low. As far as either of them could tell, the village was deserted, and there were no traces of any other would-be {Outworlders}. However, even if the odds were bordering on nonexistent, the idea that maybe someone from home had arrived, and was just… somehow hiding in the area did lift her spirits a little bit. If Alice could actually have someone from home to speak with, somebody who understood her difficulties in adapting to this world…

Alice would be willing to pay almost anything for that. Having someone from home to speak with would be downright heavenly for her. She doubted it would ever happen, but it would be almost as good as being able to actually go home and see her parents again.

Alice sighed, and began making her way towards the village itself. A few of the [Guards] with broken mana resistance Perks began following her, standing just a few meters behind her so that they didn’t intrude on her footsteps, but remained close enough to defend her in case of a surprise attack.

It only took her a few minutes of walking to reach the chunk of Earth-street and the ruined car. Alice took a few more moments to inspect the car itself.

Alice had never been a car person, so she didn’t know much about car makes, and models, and whatnot. However, she was at least able to recognize that the car had, at one point, been from Earth, and looked like one of the cars she would have frequently passed by on the street. It had a black paint job.

There was also a great deal of blood on the inside of the car. Alice took that to mean that the driver had probably suffered serious injuries, although she wasn’t sure whether this happened before they got teleported to this dimension, or afterwards.

The front of the car had been seriously compressed after it had crashed into something, but Alice could, just barely, access the glove compartment. She managed to get it open with some kinetic magic, and then floated the contents out of the compartment to look them over.

Inside, she found a packet of tissues, a screwdriver, and a pair of gloves. Alice had no clue why the owner of the vehicle had felt the need to carry a screwdriver in their car.

The gloves were bright pink, which made Alice suspect that the car belonged to a girl. While some guys wore bright pink clothes, they tended to be in the minority. However, there were no other signs of the car owner in the front of the car. The back seat of the car proved rather empty.

The trunk of the car, however, proved a bit more interesting. Inside of it, Alice found a load of fresh groceries from earth. There were potatoes, carrots, garlic, and a few other vegetables that Alice could easily find on Luliv. However, there were also a few other snacks that Alice hadn’t seen in ages. Chips, cookies, and most interesting of all, a tub of partially melted ice cream, which Alice took a curious look at.

For the first time in ages, Alice activated {Foraging}, out of morbid curiosity to see if it was still edible. Interestingly enough, it was safe to eat. Alice suspected any potential bacteria or germs had been killed off after being exposed to mana, and nothing from this world had managed to get into the ice cream… yet.

Alice requisitioned all of the groceries as ‘investigation materials,’ and then started inspecting the crash site.

She carefully started inspecting the crash site, wishing that she had the Perks to tell her what had happened here. Sadly, she was clueless. As best she could guess from the groceries in the back of the car, the driver had been going home after buying some groceries, crashed into something, and then their car had been teleported to Luliv. Alice had no idea if the driver had ever been teleported to this world, or if they had been teleported to Luliv and then teleported back to Earth, or what. Once again, she ran into a brick wall and just didn’t know enough to make any inferences or learn more.

A few minutes later, she returned to Ethan’s side, carrying her bag of groceries from Earth.

“You have a thermal seed, right?” Asked Alice.

Ethan turned to her, confused. “Yes. Why?”

“Freeze this, please,” said Alice, holding out the tub of ice cream. She hadn’t eaten ice cream in a year, and while she didn’t want to disrupt proceedings, since she wasn’t going to be learning more anytime soon, she might as well preserve the… evidence for later. She felt a little guilty about stealing ice cream from someone who had gotten in a car crash and had unknown whereabouts, but there also wasn’t much she could do about it. And Alice hadn’t eaten ice cream in almost a year.

Ethan gave the tub of ice cream a dubious glance, but still obliged her, drastically lowering the temperature of the frozen treat.

Alice stuck it in her storage Perk, to deal with later. After that, Alice and Ethan sat by the edge of the village, twiddling their thumbs while the [Guards] with scouting Perks investigated their surroundings. Eventually, the first one returned.

“We can’t find any traces of the Society, honored Immortal,” said the [Guard.] “Whatever happened here, we’re either not high enough level to track down the culprits, or something else happened to them.”

Ethan sighed in resignation, before he nodded. “Get a couple of the [Guards] with movement speed Perks or Perks to boost their horses, and then get them to ride to Metsel and bring me some better [Scouts] or [Guards] with investigation Perks. The rest of us will set up camp here, to prevent any potential interference with the investigation,” he said. Then, he turned towards Alice. “In the meantime, since we aren’t going to be able to learn much from this dimensional broken mana, help me start cleaning this area up. We should make sure the [Scouts] and [Guards] with investigation and tracking Perks can move around without going through a baptism. After that, we’ll need to set up in this area and wait for new helpers to arrive.”

Alice winced. It looked like she would be camping in the wilderness for a while.

A note from acaswell

For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Chapter 114

The next few hours were spent in a strange mixture of tension and boredom. Nobody quite knew where the villagers had gone, and nobody really had a good way to find out, either. Which meant that the group was stuck in a place with unknown dangers possibly lurking nearby.

However, it was difficult to remain tense and ready for an unknown danger to appear for hours on end, especially when nothing happened during that time period. While a few of the [Guards] appeared to be using some sort of Perk that kept their boredom at bay, most people began to slowly simmer down. It was becoming obvious that whatever problems existed in this area, the group was unlikely to run into it in the near future.

Finally, the two [Organic Mages] got to work at removing chunks of broken mana. Alice noticed, with some interest, that a few smaller spidercrabs that crept into the area and started slurping away at the mana cloud were ignored instead of being instantly exterminated, as long as they didn’t get too close to the group. The spidercrabs seemed more than content to simply gnaw away at the cloud of broken mana, and the Mages seemed to welcome the unintentional help in cleaning up the area.

Alice decided to help out, since she was one of the five Mages in the group and had nothing better to do with her time. While she could hold her own in a fight, she felt it was better to reduce the workload on the other Mages now so that they could help if an actual problem came up. However, the people in the area really didn’t have a job right now besides looking out for the Society or other enemies in the area. Ethan and elder Sujia acknowledged the work Alice and the other two Mages were putting in to clearing out the area, but opted to remain with the [Guards] in case a new threat materialized.

However, Alice and the [Organic Mages] found themselves bored as well. Cleaning out huge clouds of broken mana was neither dangerous nor particularly mentally taxing, especially since all of the Mages here were immune to broken mana poisoning. The only real benefit Alice got out of the cleaning session was a couple points in the {Broken Mana Purification} Skill, bringing her from 24 to 28 in the Skill. Which was… better than nothing, but not a very exciting or useful upgrade.

Finally, after hours of mind-numbing repetition, the group finished cleaning up for the day, wiped out the spidercrabs in the area, and settled down to rest for the night. The cloud of broken mana was noticeably smaller than it had been when Alice and the two [Organic Mages] had started cleaning up, but it would probably take a few days to finish purifying the area, especially if they didn’t have any more Mages to help out.

Alice settled down to rest for the night, but her thoughts raced as she laid down to rest. The idea that a human from home might have been here, even if Alice couldn’t figure out where they had gone, made it nearly impossible to rest now that she didn’t have to worry about cleaning up Broken Mana.

Hesitantly, Alice took the tub of ice cream out of her storage Perk, and then took a spoon out as well and began eating. If she were still at home, she would have properly gotten a bowl out first, and perhaps added a few extras to her ice cream. She had personally been a fan of chocolate syrup on top of her ice cream, although she sometimes added other things to change the flavor.

The food reminded her of home. As Alice stuck another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, Alice felt the strangest mixture of excitement, again. She had spent the longest time thinking that she was alone on this planet, and that she would never see another person from home unless she found a way to return to Earth. And even though she didn’t know what had happened to the other {Outworlder}, if there were two people from Earth on this planet, that was a good indicator that there might be more.

Then, Alice’s hopes started to dim.

No matter what had happened to the other {Outworlder}, she probably wouldn’t be able to meet the one that had arrived here in the ruined car.

If they had been kidnapped by the Society, they were probably being subjected to experiments that may or may not leave them dead or insane afterwards.

If they had teleported back to Earth, Alice obviously wouldn’t be able to talk to them.

If they had been eaten by a monster, there was no way Alice knew of to resurrect them in this world. Even Immortals couldn’t return from the dead if their brain was destroyed, much less a random civilian from Earth.

And Alice couldn’t think of any other reason the car owner, along with all of the villagers here, could have vanished.

Alice angrily shoved another spoonful of ice cream into her mouth, before she started to feel full and stuffed the ice cream back into {Sample Collection}. Then, unable to keep her thoughts from wandering in depressed circles, she got out of her tent and decided to be a little productive. Since she couldn’t sleep, she might as well gather new information about her experiments.

Alice decided to continue some leftovers from her previous experiment. Before Ethan had dragged her over to this village to observe the nonexistent villagers of this area, she had been experimenting with how classes and magic seeds worked. Now that she had the opportunity, Alice had a follow-up experiment she had meant to do concerning how deleted classes worked. Thus, Alice started preparing to fish.

In her previous experiment, she had tried deleting her [Fisherwoman] secondary class seed, because she had been curious to know what would happen if she deleted a seed. And now, Alice was trying to reform it, because she was curious to know what happened if she reformed a class seed that had been deleted.

Alice made use of the nearby trees and quickly shaved a couple of wooden tree branches into wooden spears using her kinetic magic. Then, Alice quickly moved to the nearby river, giving the [Guard] a quick wave to let him know she was doing a bit of fishing and that he didn’t need to sound the alarm.

The [Guard] seemed more than slightly baffled by the fact that she had started randomly fishing in the middle of the night, but after confirming her identity, the [Guard] simply went back to his patrol while muttering something about eccentric Mages.

Alice pointedly ignored him.

Half an hour later, Alice had successfully speared a few more fish using her kinetic magic and her wooden spears. They would be welcome additions to the camp’s rations, but that wasn’t Alice’s focus right now.

After her second fish she had caught, Alice got her first relevant System notification.

You have unlocked the class Fisherwoman as a result of catching several fish through your own efforts, as well as having access to the Fishing skill. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

You do not have any primary class slots available. Class automatically added to secondary classes.

Up to that point, things had worked fairly similarly to the way Alice had expected they would work. She had regained the Class, but only after catching a couple fish on her own. Alice did notice, with some interest, that [Fisherwoman] mana built up inside of her body before she actually regained the [Fisherwoman] class. In other words, the [Fisherwoman] mana that the System used to create a class seed existed before the Class actually formed.

Alice was glad to see that this observation matched up with her theory that the System used Classes to keep control of dangerous mana. There was still a lot of detail that she didn’t understand yet, but she was getting very useful information for future experiments.

Now that Alice knew to look out for it, she could also, just barely, catch glimpses of mana rushing towards her body and turning into a {Fisherwoman} magic seed inside of her flesh. Once she caught the second fish, her body seemed to go through a tipping point in the amount of mana she had stored, and then a class seed was created a few moments later, as the System organized all of the mana she had collected up to this point and rebuilt it into a coherent Class seed.

The Class started out at level 1, as if she had never possessed the class before. Combined with Alice repeatedly spamming {Safety Analysis} to a frankly ridiculous extent, Alice was at least reasonably certain that there was nothing going wrong with her body, although, considering Ethan’s warning about how such Perks may overlook more minor problems, Alice did decide to ask Ethan to have an [Organic Mage] start giving her a regular checkup later. It didn’t seem like a bad idea to have a trained healer examine her health every month or two, since Alice often used herself as a test subject for her experiments.

Then Alice returned to fishing.

It was upon catching the third fish that more interesting things started happening.

The mana in the air surrounding her turned into [Fisherwoman] mana, before rushing into her body, but Alice realized after a moment that the quantity seemed far too high for only catching one fish. The System notification that she gained a few moments later reinforced this idea.

You have leveled up!

Fisherman: 1 -> 3, Explorer of Magic 72 -> 73

There was no way Alice had gotten three levels in {Fisherwoman] from catching one fish. Even if it was a primary class, that would have been a bit of a stretch, and {Fisherwoman} was a secondary class.

Alice was extremely happy with the results of this experiment.

First of all, she had discovered that the System, or whatever mechanics of mana the System used to function, ‘remembered’ her previous level to some extent, even after she had removed her {Fisherwoman} class seed.

Alice thought back to one of her earlier experiments, where she had discovered that if she was enclosed in a manaless room, she wouldn’t level up, and would only start gaining levels once she exposed herself to mana again. When doing this experiment, Alice had gained levels for the experiments she had performed in the manaless room.

The {Fisherwoman} experiment result seemed to complement the findings from the manaless room experiment, confirming that mana or the System ‘remembered’ her actions in some way.

Of course, Alice wasn’t quite sure why this was the case. However, it was abundantly clear that even if she didn’t understand the mechanics behind it, it was true. Alice wondered whether this ‘memory’ of her previous actions was tied to the nature of mana itself, or whether it was tied to the System. Sadly, she had no way to figure out which was the case right now.

However, this meant that Classes would never be truly ‘lost.’ Even if they were deleted, once one gathered more mana of the relevant type, the System would help set up the correct class seed again. Alice absently wondered what would happen if she deleted her [Fisherwoman] Class again, and then gained a bunch of fisherwoman mana without access to the System. Would she end up with a problem similar to Boris’s issues?

She suspected she would, although Alice couldn’t confirm her idea. This was because {Safety Analysis} informed her in no uncertain terms that this experiment was a terrible idea.

Luckily, the knowledge that the experiment would harm her made her hypothesis seem even more likely, even though Alice had no way to test it. While there were other reasons an experiment like that could harm her, Alice still suspected that she was on the right track when she assumed that Boris was a prime example of the System not interfering enough with class acquisition and broken mana.

With some of her energy worked out, and with a few new tidbits of interesting data gathered, Alice finally went to sleep for the night, leaving behind a confused [Guard].

* * *

When the camp arose the next day, it was to a spike of flurried activity.

It started relatively simply.

One of the [Guards] found a trail of nearly-invisible footprints, about three quarters of an hour away from the camp. With the aid of some decent Perks and a higher than average [Perception] Stat, that was a reasonable distance to see the group’s camp from, which meant that someone had possibly spied on their camp in the middle of the night.

This trail of footprints raised some eyebrows among the older mages of the camp, especially since it was impossible for most lower-level Perks to pick out the footprints at all. This meant that a rather high-level Perk had been used to hide them.

A civilian of some sort passing near the village wouldn’t have been too unusual; after all, [Hunters] and [Messengers] sometimes passed by villages as they journeyed from one town to the next. Travel in this world wasn’t rare, and some people without specialized Perks might need to stop by in one town or another to figure out where they were or buy some goods and a room for the night during their travels. However, a person wandering near their camp, avoiding the gaze of the [Guards], and using a high-level Perk that disguised their footprints … was quite a bit more suspicious.

This was why, even though the [Guards] who had left to get reinforcements had yet to return, Alice found herself sitting in the middle of a debate.

“I personally think chasing after the footprints would be prudent,” said Elder Sujia. “If it’s a regular [Messenger] or a civilian with some sort of specialized Perk set or something, we can simply question them and then release them. However, if it’s truly a member of the Society of Starry Eyes, we can figure out where they took the villagers.”

“It’s not a certainty that the Society took the villagers away,” noted one of the two [Organic Mages] who had come with the group. “Not to mention, if it’s actually a member of the Society, there’s no way we would be able to take on a base of them with only these numbers. Even with Honored Immortal by our side, the Society is a group comprised entirely of Mages, and due to their research on unethical magic, they tend to be higher leveled than an Illvarian mage of the same age. We only have five mages with us right now, and even if one of them is an Honored Immortal, and two of them are his apprentices, trying to fight the Society with our current group seems foolhardy.

“This could also be a trap. Honored Immortal attacked a Society base and razed it to the ground recently. While the Society isn’t generally prone to revenge, honored Immortal is certainly an obstruction to their future plans, which could be reason for them to prepare a trap to kill him. If there was any time to kill a combat-oriented Immortal, doing so near an isolated area, while they are separated from the rest of his [Guards] and the other Immortals is certainly the time to do so. Killing an Immortal is difficult, but far from impossible, especially if our enemy is willing to throw enough lives at it.”

Ethan simply nodded thoughtfully at the [Organic Mage]’s words. Elder Sujia, however, didn’t seem persuaded.

“I don’t think we should be so afraid of the Society that it cripples us, either. If we miss this opportunity to get information, we might not get another one. After all, if the set of footprints truly belongs to a member of the Society, they will surely erase their trail once they realize a lower level member of their organization may have alerted us. This means that we’ll be going on a wild goose chase later on. And if the Society wanted to lead us into a trap, wouldn’t they make the footprints easier to spot? There is only one [Guard] among us who can even track the footprints, and only by a very slim margin. A little less [Perception], or a slightly different Perk, and he would probably be as blind as the rest of us. It seems ridiculous to assume that the Society could have such detailed information on the Stats and Perks of our group. After all, even military leaders don’t have access to all of the knowledge about combat perks their [Soldiers] possess; they usually only have rough ideas. The Society knowing more about Illvarian troops than the Illvarian government seems quite far fetched.”

The [Organic Mage] seemed to consider Elder Sujia’s words, before he finally nodded.

“That’s a good point. In that case, this is unlikely to be a trap from the Society, unless the [Guard] is a [Spy]. However, even if this isn’t a deliberate trap, we truly don’t have the numbers to fight a Society Base right now.” He paused, and seemed to consider something. “Actually, Honored Immortal, how many Society Mages do you think you would be able to fight in a full-blown confrontation? I admit, I’m not sure how strong an Immortal actually is, so if you can fight an entire base by yourself, this argument may be rather pointless…”

Ethan paused, lost in thought for a moment. “It depends on the average level of the Society members in question. At the very least, several dozen, but probably less than a hundred, due to the fact that the Society Members are all Mages. If there are less than a fifty enemies, I could probably fight them by myself and win, although it would be close, and it would depend on how powerful their stronger members were. However, if there are more than fifty enemies, I would struggle to win against them on my own. I brought a large, well-trained group of [Soldiers] with me when I attacked the previous society base, and we had the element of surprise on our side. This group… is not built to fight a base by itself. Lady Sujia is an excellent combatant, of course, and Lady Alice is also a reasonably competent fighter, despite her young age. However, the [Guards] we have with us are inferior to [Soldiers] at attacking a fortified position, since their Perks go in a very different direction, and you two aren’t exactly known for your combat prowess either,” said Ethan, giving the two [Organic Mages] a nod. “Which means that any fight would be potentially winnable, but risky, depending on what’s waiting for us,” said Ethan, grimacing.

Elder Sujia and the two [Organic Mages] who were arguing considered Ethan’s words.

“Do you have a suggestion, Honored Immortal? Should we pursue the tracks, or should we remain cautious and wait for reinforcements?” asked the [Organic Mage]. Despite how vehemently he had been arguing against pursuing the footprints just a few moments ago, he seemed more than willing to listen to Ethan’s input on the matter.

Ethan was staring at the forest, giving it a hard look as he seemed to ponder the decision.

The Mages who had been arguing stopped speaking, waiting for Ethan’s input.

Ethan seemed to think for a few more moments… before his eyes lit up. Then, he turned to Alice and gave her a grin.

“What do you think we should do, Lady Alice?” He said. “Give me reasons that you can think of both for and against pursuing the potential enemy.” Based on the way Ethan was grinning, Alice quickly realized that this was another of Ethan’s tests. He had already made a decision, and now he was trying to get her to think about the situation critically as well. Alice doubted anything she said here would change their course of action; it was just to let Ethan understand how she thought in more detail, and help her correct any problems if he found any.

“I would say… wait for reinforcements?” Said Alice, feeling a wave of uncertainty at her answer. This time, Ethan’s test was much harder than usual.

“If the Society is scouting out our area… that means they don’t know what happened here either, right? If they don’t know what happened here either, that means that they probably didn’t abduct the villagers. And if the Society didn’t abduct these villagers, that means that we probably can’t save the villagers even if we attack their base. We would be rushing into a potentially dangerous fight for no reason. Right?” Alice asked. Then, she began doubting her own answer. “Wait, but the Society has probably kidnapped people from other villages, even if they haven’t kidnapped this particular set of villagers. They might also have more information on the dimensional floods, and information is something we desperately need right now. Especially since we know that the Society has an interest in dimensional floods. It’s highly likely that they would have more information than before, since they’ve probably been studying dimensional floods and would have naturally collected more data than the first base we raided. Even if the Society members here aren’t directly relevant to the current situation, they’re still likely to have useful information for us. But the lack of knowledge about our enemy is also very dangerous…” Alice felt her thinking start to spin in circles, and began to feel frustrated. After a few moments, she sighed.

“I suppose long term, letting this opportunity slip away is a bad decision. It’ll probably take another half a day for reinforcements to arrive for us, but in that time, the Society, if those tracks truly belong to a Society member, would likely clean up their tracks, and quite possibly lay an ambush for us. Worse, the ‘reinforcements’ we sent for are based on the idea that we would need some specific, specialized Perks. That means they’re unlikely to bring a large enough military force to seriously bolster our combat abilities. With that in mind, I guess we should probably pursue the tracks.”

Ethan chuckled. “You seem unhappy about it?”

Alice nodded.

“Good. Being afraid to fight an enemy might seem cowardly to you, but humans are afraid of things for a reason. Cowardly people live longer. Not everyone is equipped to lead armies into battle again and again and live to tell the tale, and being able to recognize your strengths and weaknesses is an important ability. However, in this case, it’s also important to recognize when a risk is worth taking, even if you’re afraid. Decisiveness is just as important as caution.” Ethan’s grin turned a little more gentle. “Your reasoning was solid, and even if you’re afraid, you came to the same conclusion I did, after some consideration. Be proud of that. I’m also a little nervous. Pre-battle jitters and all that,” Ethan said, although Alice found it hard to imagine Ethan having pre-battle jitters.

Ethan turned to the other Mages and [Guards]. “We will follow the set of tracks. However, I want the [Guards] with decent tracking Perks in front, and we will be cautious in our approach. Even if it’s unlikely, there are still probably ways that someone could set up a trap for me, and we need to be cautious of any unexpected surprises. But we will at least examine the footprints and scout ahead, to see if we’ve stumbled across a winnable fight,” said Ethan.

The other Mages and [Guards] seemed to feel the weight of a potential upcoming fight press down on them, and their postures became heavier and more solemn. They nodded, and moved to begin packing up the camp.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Chapter 115

Once the decision to pursue the unusual footprints was made, the group rapidly started packing up the camp. The group left a few notes, written in some sort of military code, placed in semi-hidden spots throughout the place they had camped so that if the reinforcements from Metsel reached the camp before they returned, they would know what direction to go in order to meet up with the group.

The messages themselves were liberally coated in rainbow mana, making Alice wonder how exactly the coded messaged worked. Languages were exceptionally easy to learn due to the influence of the System and this world’s language skills, so there must be something backing up the coded messages to make it hard for others to just… learn whatever it said after a few days of trial and error. She found herself vaguely curious about how the Perks for the coded messages actually worked, but eventually put the question aside. She had more pressing concerns.

Alice took a final look at the group of [Guards] and Mages, trying to harden her resolve for the potential fight to come. She had only been in large-scale combat a few times in this world, and now that the moment was approaching again, Alice was having a hard time calming down the jitters in her body. She took a few deep breaths to steady her nerves. Her brain, fully set on throwing out whatever distraction she could think of, suddenly latched on to another idea.

Alice suddenly remembered that Ethan had hired a [Hidden Guard] for her as part of the deal she had made with him that led to her becoming Ethan’s apprentice. Was he still around? Alice wasn’t really sure whether he would be or not; after all, Alice was currently with Ethan himself, and having an Immortal who was mostly oriented towards combat was a pretty strong guarantee for her safety. However, Alice kind of hoped the [Hidden Guard] was still nearby, and Alice just hadn’t noticed them somehow. That would mean their group had at least one more hidden combatant, which would make her feel marginally safer.

As the group packed up the camp, Alice made her way to Ethan, and quickly pulled him aside. Ethan quickly tossed out his anti-eavesdropping Perk.

“Ethan. Is my [Hidden Guard] still around?”

Ethan gave her a mildly surprised look, as if wondering why Alice had suddenly brought this up.

“Yes, he’s mixed into the group of [Guards]. I thought there was some chance that we would run into an attack from the Society on this excursion, although I didn’t think we would be potentially attacking a base like this. If I had realized we might be attacking a Society base, I would have brought more [Soldiers],” said Ethan drily. “Let this be a lesson to you for when you become an Immortal; even Immortals can make miscalculations. So never let your guard down, or you might not live to regret it. I got a little overconfident this time.” Ethan seemed more exasperated than truly worried, but after a few moments, he heaved out an exasperated sigh.

“Anyway, I digress. Your [Hidden Guard] is still nearby, just in case we get into a confrontation with some more powerful members of the Society. You’re the apprentice with the best chance of reaching Immortality I’ve had in the past hundred years, and you’re mostly research oriented so there’s no need to focus on getting you good combat Achievements. Originally, I thought that you might be exposed to serious danger while I was fighting and distracted. I’m glad I insisted he come along. Why do you ask?”

Alice winced. “I was hoping I hadn’t seen him yet. Having an extra high level [Hidden Guard] along with us would make the fight feel less intimidating.”

Ethan chuckled. “I’ve learned for this kind of thing that no matter how many layers of security you bring with you, pre-battle jitters will never quite leave you.”

“I suppose. It’s still unfortunate we’re only working with 20 [Guards] and 5 Mages, though.”

Ethan simply gave Alice a sage nod. “This is a little risky, yes. So don’t get complacent or cocky. You have a [Hidden Guard] watching out for you, but he’s only level 80 or so, and he’s not a mage. Keep your own safety in mind first and foremost, and remember that your final and best line of defense against death is your own judgement and abilities. Trust in them if something seems off. Okay?”

“Thank you for telling me,” said Alice, doing her best to internalize Ethan’s words.

After that, Ethan dismissed whatever Perk he was using to prevent eavesdropping. Alice started wondering if it was worth picking up a Perk for lie detection and a Perk for preventing eavesdropping on her own. While they weren’t Perks that most people bothered picking up in their day to day lives, given the kind of life Alice was currently leading, it seemed that she often had use for both kinds of Perks. Perhaps at some point in the future she should pick them up?

[Scholar] seemed reasonably likely to have access to such Perks, since the class had some focus on the dissemination and proliferation of information, both from and to the user.

While Alice mulled over future Perks she might want, she returned to the camp, and finished packing up her tent, and stuffed it into her storage Perk.

Then, the group set off, following the footprints the perceptive [Guard] had found.

* * *

It took the group five hours to follow the footprints back to their source. A large part of the reason it took so long was that the group needed to send out [Guards] with more scouting-oriented Perks and wait for them to return every so often. Ethan was more worried about walking into a trap than he was about losing the potential lead. Which, Alice supposed, was Ethan taking his own advice about being cautious instead of reckless. Even though he didn’t seem too worried that the group would get ambushed by a larger and stronger force, he was still taking every reasonable precaution he could to make sure the group stayed safe.

Despite the consistent delays and slow travel pace, the group still eventually caught up to the source of the footprints. However, the group didn’t run into the multilayered concealment enchantment and hidden base of sociopathic Mages Alice had been expecting.

Instead, Alice saw a normal-looking village.

A normal-looking village that wasn’t marked on any map Alice knew of. Alice took a quick look at the [Guards] and other Mages, just to see if they had reacted to the village, and they seemed just as confused as she was.

At first glance, the residents of the village appeared to be simple [Villagers]. There were around sixty people turning wood into construction materials, farming, weaving, and doing things normal [Villagers] would do. The crop fields of the village appeared to be pretty normal, as far as Alice could see, and the clothes were nothing special.

Which was the entire problem. The ‘villagers’ were way too high level. Normal villagers would usually sit somewhere between level 40 and 60, with most people sitting near the middle of that range. After all, getting past level 50 without some good Achievements was quite difficult, and people occasionally changed Classes partway through life as they realized their Class didn’t fit them or they needed to change careers.

The camp of ‘villagers’ in front of them probably had an average level of 70. Which was about ten levels higher, on average, than the [Guards] Ethan had brought with them.

What kind of village was made of level 70’s? That was completely ridiculous. Not to mention, past level 50 Perks started getting wild. They did all sorts of bizarre and unusual things that benefitted one’s Class, depending on what Perks were combined. However, all of them made people much, much better at what they did.

Then, Alice frowned as she squinted at the villagers. She realized she was incorrect about something.

These people were definitely higher level than average: they were probably around level 60 or so. However, there was something else that was weird about the mana in their bodies.

They were flooded with unusual kinds of mana. For example, the ones farming looked like they had a [Farmer] mana infestation, and the ones hunting looked like they had a [Hunter] mana infestation. It was very light, but it… vaguely reminded her of Boris. The way he was infested with [Farmer] mana, and it had caused him to be obsessed with farming.

Alice frowned. Even taking into account their strange mana infestations, there was something very weird about this village.

Why did the crops and clothes of this village look so normal? If these people were level 60 [Farmers], the crops should have been doing something miraculous. The crops of this village instead looked almost like crops from Earth. Which made no sense at all, given how big of an influence Perks played on this world’s agriculture. Even without the strange mana infestations in their bodies, this village was incredibly weird.

None of the ‘villagers’ were Mages, either. Which implied that they weren’t members of the Society. Alice frowned. Was this some sort of strange experimental village from the Society of Starry Eyes? She could see them doing something weird to villagers and then setting up some sort of ‘testing ground.’ But if this village was an experiment site for the Society, why weren’t there any Mages nearby? If the villagers were being used as test subjects and nobody was guarding them, the villagers should flee the area.

The more Alice thought about it, the less sense the situation made. What in the world was happening?

Alice shook her head, trying to sort out her thoughts. In any case, the village needed to be investigated more thoroughly. Something was clearly wrong here. In fact, a lot of things were wrong here.

Ethan leaned closer to Alice and tossed out his eavesdropping Perk.

“What do their magic seeds look like? Are there any we need to be wary of? How precise is your ability to detect magic seeds in the first place?”

Alice swallowed her uneasiness. “I don’t see any magic seeds.”

“None?”

“None. And this village is even weirder.” Alice quickly explained all of the oddities she had noticed with the village.

Ethan paused, seeming just as confused by Alice’s statements as Alice felt. He fell into thought, giving the village a more wary and appraising look. “Are there any ways your ability to detect magic seeds could be fooled?”

Alice tried to think about what her Perk was doing on a more fundamental level.

“If they have some sort of stealth Perk that makes me subconsciously overlook their magic seeds, that might or might not be able to fool me. But it would probably need to be pretty specific, which seems awfully strange of a Perk choice unless they know exactly how my Achievements and Perks work. I find it unlikely, but not impossible. A specialized piece of enchanted equipment might also be able to do the same thing,” said Alice. “I’m not really sure if it would work, but maybe if they have a specific enough counter. That being said, the idea that this entire village has people with perks or equipment specifically targeting my abilities seems kind of ridiculous.”

Ethan grimaced. “You would be surprised. I hear that the entire Sigmusi Colonia’s army is required to take a specific Perk around level 10 or 15, specifically to screw with Allira’s sound-illusion Perk. Because if they don’t take that Perk, anytime Allira showed up to a battlefield they end up stuck in an illusion while the Illvarian troops blast them down, and if they cover their ears to block her singing, their hands are tied up and they can’t hear their commander’s orders. This is the real power of an Immortal; we never decisively swing an entire war in our favor, but every single Immortal can create incredibly annoying logistical issues that an army HAS to solve. The Sigmusi Colonia, and some of our eastern neighbors, have taken similar countermeasures against some of my father’s more offensively oriented Perks, and even some of MY Perks that are more directly focused on messing with enemies.” Ethan shrugged. “Though, the bright side of mostly being a kinetic and organic mage is that there’s not much they can do against my best abilities. A defensive perk or piece of equipment doesn’t help much if I just throw boulders at everyone and tear them to pieces with my bare hands.” Ethan sighed. “But you’re right. This village is very odd. Even I don’t know quite what to make of it.”

Alice thought over Ethan’s description of the Sigmusi Colonia taking specific countermeasures against Allira. “Am I well known enough that the Society would start actively researching and countering my Perks like this?” asked Alice, finding the idea more than slightly ridiculous.

“Well, you have clashed with them… what is it, three times now?”

Alice realized that Ethan was right. She had actually fought directly with the Society a surprising number of times now. She had stopped them from kidnapping Boris, tried (and failed) to stop them from kidnapping Samantha, and then had successfully rescued Samantha from a Society base along with Ethan’s army. Not to mention, it was becoming more and more well known that Ethan had taken another apprentice. When Alice thought about it like that, it made perfect sense that the Society was starting to pay attention to her. Even if she wasn’t anywhere near the most important person in the capital, she wasn’t just a random nobody anymore. Which was a strange realization.

She wasn’t quite sure how they could have figured out how her Perks and Achievements worked and taken countermeasures against her, but… if they had read her paper that was published in her magic academy, perhaps they had inferred some of how her perception worked, and then taken countermeasures?

It seemed a bit far-fetched to Alice, but then again, Perks could accomplish truly ridiculous things if they were specialized enough. She wasn’t willing to completely rule out the idea, at least.

Alice started scanning the area even more carefully, trying to figure out if there was some sort of deliberate trickery happening in the village. Instead, she noticed yet another oddity. “There’s no broken mana nearby,” said Alice, after another few moments of observation. The more she looked at the village, the weirder it got. It clearly wasn’t normal, since the villager levels made no sense, but it also didn’t have any telltale signs of being a Mage base either.

Ethan also frowned. “Indeed, that makes it seem even less likely this is a Society base of some sort. Even if they’re routinely cleaning up the broken mana nearby, we should still see a little bit hanging around as long as they aren’t literally cleaning it every second of the day.”

He turned towards the two [Guards] with more scouting-related Perks while dropping his eavesdropping Perk again.

“Do you detect anything unusual about this clearing? For example, an underground facility, or another set of people nearby?”

The [Guards] started scanning the area once more, and Alice saw rainbow mana flood their eyes for a moment, before they started to look confused.

“Nothing, Honored Immortal,” said one of the [Guards], looking completely bewildered. “How about you?” he asked, turning to the other [Guard].

“No. I don’t see a single thing,” he said. “Perhaps our Perks aren’t good enough, or our [Perception] isn’t high enough? After all, we aren’t really [Scouts]. We just have a few Perks that lean in that direction.”

“Hmm…” said Ethan, frowning. He turned back towards Alice, and his anti-eavesdropping Perk reappeared.

“What about levels? You mentioned they have unusual mana in their bodies, but what about their potential combat ability? How dangerous would this situation be if it blows up in our face?”

“Their levels are pretty high for random villagers. Even though they’re doing a bunch of things villagers would logically do… there’s no way there’s a random village filled with purely level 60’s laying around in Illvaria. That’s completely ridiculous. Something is wrong here.” Alice frowned, taking an even closer look at the village. “Not to mention, there are no children in this village. Which I just noticed.”

Ethan carefully observed the village again, as if he was trying to pry into the secrets of the village with his eyes, and sighed.

“I really do wish I had brought a few more dedicated [Scouts] with us,” he said, frowning.

Then, he gestured towards one of the nearby ‘villagers,’ who was a bit more isolated from the rest of the group, and sighed.

“We’ll grab one person and question them under some decent lie-detection Perks to see if we can figure out what’s happening here. If they aren’t hostile to us, and aren’t related to the Society, we’ll ignore the area, as long as it isn’t a threat or something illegal. But this village seriously strikes me as being off,” said Ethan, shaking his head. “Be ready for a fight to break out.”

“As you wish, Honored Immortal,” said one of the higher level [Guards]. Everyone started readying their weapons and Perks, although they didn’t point them at the villagers yet. It wouldn’t do to seem too hostile, in case the villagers weren’t actually enemies.

Then, two of the [Guards] began making their way towards the nearby villager in question. One of them, who looked a little nervous, reached for a small dagger, nearly hidden behind his belt, and then pulled it out.

Alice didn’t know what alerted the fake villager. One moment, the two [Guards] were creeping towards the ‘villager,’ intent on questioning him and potentially letting him go. The next moment, without a single indication of something going wrong, the fake villager whirled towards the [Guards].

The villager’s shifty eyes darted towards the [Guards], then spun towards the rest of their group. His eyes locked on to Ethan for a moment, and Alice saw panic flash through the man’s face.

“@#*$ @#%*#$ @#@@!!@#@!$ %#@#$#!” He yelled, in a language Alice didn’t recognize.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Verinthian Language Proficiency 0 -> 1

The villagers gave the group stunned looks, as if they hadn’t noticed the [Soldiers] and the Immortal creeping up on them. Then, they looked at each other, and Alice swore that they were even more surprised to see each other farming in the village. The expression of pure confusion morphed into terror as they looked more closely at Ethan.

“Immortal! @#$ ^@#$# @#%**” yelled one of the ‘villagers.’

And then, all hell broke loose.

The fake villagers took one look in their direction, and Alice saw bursts of rainbow mana slide into their eyes. Then, almost without exception, bursts of rainbow mana surrounded their bodies and… the ground?

Alice realized that her original assumption was correct. These people weren’t mages at all.

The fake villagers activated a bunch of Perks to boost their speed as they fled the clearing, and at the same time, bursts of smoke, haze, and other vision-blocking Perks suddenly sprang into existence in the clearing.

Some of the splotches of rainbow mana ran to the edge of the clearing, and then stopped for some reason, while other fake villagers seemed to start speeding up.

Then Alice saw dozens of objects suddenly rip through the air towards the fleeing ‘villagers,’ and realized Ethan had taken action. Forty magic tendrils were quickly ripping into Ethan’s surroundings, plucking anything that seemed weapon-like and hurling it at their enemies.

Alice realized now wasn’t the time to sit around gaping, and joined the fight. She grabbed tree branches, clods of dirt, and pebbles, and hurled them as hard as she could at the fleeing fake villagers. She did her best to aim for legs, since those could be regenerated, but she saw one pebble rip through a man’s lower body, nearly ripping apart his spine as he tried to flee.

Another two villagers, both female this time, dropped to the ground as Alice’s missiles crushed their knees, disabling their movement. However, the fake villagers continued trying to crawl away.

Unlike Alice, Ethan had no problems seeing through the haze of smoke, and also had no problems hitting fleeing fake villagers exactly where he wanted to hit them. Several of the strange villagers lost legs or parts of their stomach, but he didn’t come anywhere near as close to accidentally killing a fleeing fake villager as Alice did.

Elder Sujia seemed to only have a rough idea where the fleeing villagers were, but that didn’t stop her from attacking. However, her attacks lacked the precision a [Kinetic Mage] needed in order to make their attacks effective. She accidentally killed two of the fake villagers, and missed several of the other ones, although she still disabled a few pretty quickly as well.

However, the fake villagers weren’t completely on the receiving end of the group’s attacks. Once it started to become clear that escaping would be nearly impossible as long as Alice, Sujia, and Ethan were bringing down escaping villagers, the fake villagers pulled out some completely ordinary looking pebbles. Alice was confused, right up until the six threw the pebbles at Alice.

And, just like if they were thrown by a [Kinetic Mage], the pebbles suddenly picked up ridiculous amounts of velocity in midair as rainbow mana burst out from the rocky missiles. They were moving at speeds well beyond what was needed to kill a regular human being.

The six pebbles sailed through the air, ripping straight towards Alice.

Why target me? She wondered, swearing to herself as {Adrenaline Rush} activated.

Taking advantage of the drastically slowed down time, Alice quickly reached out with her kinetic tendrils, making contact with all six of the pebbles. Three were hit with {Reflection}, immediately returning the ridiculously fast pebbles towards the throwers. The other three took a bit longer to seize control of, but Alice quickly stopped them in their tracks, before flinging them back at the attacking villagers.

Alice followed the strange pebbles up with a volley of tree branches and stones, to make sure the people who had thrown the dangerous pebbles at her didn’t have any working limbs to threaten her with.

Four of the fake villagers who had been throwing things at her went down, while the other two managed to dodge out of the way using an unidentified Perk.

Alice looked around, and saw that Ethan had used some sort of Perk that gave him access to another hundred magic tendrils, a truly ridiculous number that pushed his total tendrils up to one hundred and forty. A couple magic tendrils were boosting his body, allowing him to quickly charge through the smoke and haze and hunt down any fake villagers who were trying to flee. He seemed especially enraged by the ones that had tried to shoot down Alice, and a few moments after Alice had downed some of her attackers, a spray of pebble fragments killed the entire group. Then, Ethan quickly started using projectiles to surgically remove people’s legs, stopping their attempts at flight.

The smoke and haze Perks started to clear up, and Alice finally figured out why some of the people had stopped fleeing.

Standing in the middle of the woods, completely disguised from her regular eyesight, were some utterly and completely inconspicuous trees. If she hadn’t been able to see the rainbow-colored blobs of mana surrounding each tree, or the class seeds inside of each tree, she would have probably overlooked them completely.

Some kind of disguise-related Perk? Alice finally had a proper idea who the fake villagers were.

There weren’t many Classes that gave access to weird disguises, and the ability to suddenly and nearly instantly disguise oneself as a tree, combined with the strange village and surrounding context, made Alice guess that the fake villagers were spies of some sort.

Alice quickly pointed out the ‘trees’ that hadn’t been taken down by anyone yet, and used a few more sprays of projectiles to down any of the fake trees that tried to make a break for it. A few moments later, the [Spies] had all been captured or killed.

The threat seemed to be dealt with. Alice took a look at the prisoners they had captured, and sighed.

It was time figure out who the heck these people were.

Hopefully.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Chapter 116

“So who are these guys?” asked one of the [Guards], looking over the prisoners with curious eyes.

Alice frowned, before looking at Ethan to see if he had answers. It was increasingly obvious that the people they had found weren’t from the Society. But the major oddities in the village, the strange [Farmer] mana clinging to their bodies that reminded her of Boris, and the random village of level 60’s in the middle of the country… all of these made Alice feel confused as she tried to figure out what in the world was going on.

At the very least, the group had benefitted from the fact that this wasn’t a base of Society Mages. If it had been ruled by the Society, the [Guards] and Mages of Illvaria might have struggled to win the battle against a group of Mages. However, the situation was still incredibly strange, and Alice wasn’t sure what to make of everything. Hopefully Ethan could figure something out.

Ethan started inspecting the prisoners more carefully, eyeing them as his eyes occasionally flashed with rainbow mana.

However, before Ethan was even halfway through his inspection, Alice saw one of the prisoners start glowing with rainbow mana.

Huh? Alice frowned, and immediately reached for her enchanted items and her Perks.

“He’s activating some kind of Perk,” she called out, just in case Ethan was caught unprepared.

The prisoner’s skin started turning green. For a moment, Alice thought that the man was just using some sort of green-colored mana, before she realized that the man’s skin was actually turning green.

Then, the man exploded like an overripe tomato caught in a hydraulic press, spattering all over the surroundings in a horrific mess of green and red liquid.

Alice gasped in shock, barely managing to activate {Speed Experimentation} in time to avoid getting caught up in the disgusting mess of oddly colored liquids. Which was exceptionally lucky, since she had already used {Adrenaline Rush} earlier in the fight.

She tried for a brief moment to deflect the red and green… remains back towards the corpse of the man who had self-destructed, but quickly realized she didn’t have enough magic tendrils. Before she could proceed any further, her [Hidden Guard] reached out, grabbed her by the wrist, and dragged her out of the way at a speed Alice could barely process, even with the 50% speed boost from her Perk.

Ethan, who reacted even more quickly than Alice, flung himself out of the way of the explosion by controlling his clothes, and also dragged all of the nearby [Guards] out of the way using their armor. Alice sucked in an uneasy breath, shivering as she looked at the ruined corpse of the person, who may or may not be a [Spy] or might be something else entirely. {Foraging} informed her in no uncertain terms that the man’s blood was now incredibly poisonous, and Alice was glad that nobody had touched the green and red blood spattered everywhere.

But that thankfulness turned into fear when Alice realized the man wasn’t alone. Another next prisoner started glowing with rainbow mana. Alice nearly lost control of her mana tendrils for a moment, but the time given to her by {Speed Experimentation} gave her extra time to recover. She activated {The Science of Mana Deprivation}, and then created a manaless field inside of the man’s body, trying to prevent him from blowing himself up with his Perk.

The moment Alice’s mana tendril entered his body, she felt like she had slammed her mana tendril into a brick wall. The man’s body desperately resisted Alice’s attempts to interfere with the mana inside of his body. However, despite the massive amount of resistance she was trying to push through, Alice still managed to slow down the rainbow mana. She quickly threw the rest of her mana tendrils into the task of keeping the fake villager alive, and with some struggle, she managed to keep him from blowing himself up.

The man’s skin, which had started to turn a sickly shade of green, started returning to a normal color palette as the man’s eyes widened in shock. He thrashed and struggled for a moment, and Alice saw the [Hunter] mana infestation in his body start to flash with its own strange colors, and then the man flopped over like a dead fish. Alice noticed another burst of rainbow mana try to appear around his wrists, but just like his other Perk, it was shut down by Alice’s Perk. And since the [Spy]’s movement was restricted, and he couldn’t see where Alice’s mana tendrils were, his attempts to escape failed. Alice heaved a sigh of relief.

And then realized that all of the prisoners were now glowing with rainbow mana. Some of them had their strange mana infestations light up, while some others seemed to only be activating Perks.

Alice realized that she couldn’t stop all of the prisoners from dying. She quickly maneuvered the man she had kept alive out of the way, tossing him out of the line of fire from the other exploding prisoners as she maneuvered both of them behind a tree. Her [Hidden Guard] moved along with her. Seeing Alice flee, Ethan and Sujia seemed to realize what was about to happen, and quickly moved the other [Guards] and [Organic Mages] out of the way before the other prisoners finished blowing themselves up.

Waves of sickening popping sounds resounded through the area, before silence returned. Alice felt nauseous. She peeked out from behind the tree she was hiding behind, and saw a giant mess of red and green. The corpses on the ground were nearly impossible to identify: if Alice hadn’t seen them seconds ago, she wouldn’t have even been able to tell if the corpses on the ground were human or not.

Alice shuddered in horror for a moment, looking at the ruined and mangled corpses of the other prisoners, who had destroyed themselves, and then spent a few minutes calming down her breathing.

Ethan looked at Alice’s magic tendrils, which had clearly played a role in keeping the final prisoner alive, and gave Alice a look of unabashed curiosity. Unlike Alice, he didn’t seem affected by the grotesque scenery.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” he said, giving Alice a more relaxed grin, before his face warped into one of concern. “Well done. Did you get hit by anything? You look pale,” he said, glaring at Alice’s [Hidden Guard] for a moment.

Alice shook her head, and did her best to give Ethan a shaky grin. “Just… very nausea-inducing,” said Alice, grimacing as she tried not to look at the corpses.

“Ah. Fair enough,” said Ethan, giving the [Hidden Guard] a sheepish grin. The [Hidden Guard] simply gave Ethan a nod and then went back to the scanning their surroundings.

Once Alice’s breathing was back under control, she scanned her System notifications to take her mind off of the… mess less than fifty meters away from her.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic 73 -> 74, Scientist 55 -> 56

“I didn’t manage to prevent the others from killing themselves, but I managed to keep this one alive,” said Alice. “I don’t know for sure what’s happening with these people, but I hope you can figure it out.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Ethan, giving her a nod. “I know a good [Psychiatrist] who can try to extract some details from him, and see what in the world is going on with this village. Apart from that, I’ll have some [Guards] search the area, although I’m not going to let you look over the things we find until a more specialized set of investigators looks everything over. Just in case something is poisoned or dangerous.

“But you can feel good about yourself. Even if this must be a pretty stressful situation for you, you managed to keep a prisoner alive, didn’t get hurt, and even tried to keep others safe. Good job, apprentice. Your levels are getting higher by the day, and your reactions are excellent even when facing unfamiliar situations.”

Ethan gave her a satisfied nod, and then dragged the remaining prisoner over to him, ensuring that he wouldn’t harm Alice even if he managed to self-destruct. Then, he gave the [Guards] a quick scan. “Did anyone get touched by any of the green liquid that came out of their bodies when they self-destructed?” He asked.

The [Guards] started giving themselves careful examinations, one after another, before shaking their heads.

“Nobody got hit, Honored Immortal,” said one of the [Guards].

“Good. If anyone starts to feel strange, or notices anything out of place within their own body, let me know immediately so that I or one of the [Organic Mages] can look you over. I don’t want anyone dying today if I can help it.”

After that, Ethan turned towards Alice, and Alice stifled a groan. She was starting to get very familiar with the expression on Ethan’s face, and knew that this was about to turn into a test.

“Now that things seem safe, question time. Who do you think these people are?”

Alice resisted the urge to sigh. “I honestly don’t know. There’s way too much that makes no sense here. Most likely, I imagine they’re [Spies]. But I have no idea why they set up a village here, or why the person who supposedly investigated our camp didn’t tell everyone to pack up and leave once they noticed our camp. There are several things that just don’t make sense here. But I did notice that several of them disguised themselves as trees through the use of some Perk, and they seem to have committed suicide once we discovered them.” said Alice with a shrug. “Or they were killed from afar by someone else’s Perk, or the weird mana in their bodies killed them. I don’t know what exactly caused them to explode. I got a language skill for the Verinthian Language during the fight, so I imagine they’re from whatever country or region speaks Verinthian? Maybe that information is useful somehow, but I have no clue what to make of everything.”

Ethan nodded. “Honestly, this situation is very strange. Being able to admit you don’t know something is also an important skill for an Immortal.” He frowned. “Though, it’s also best if you make sure it only happens with other people who are in control of making decisions. Appearing uncertain around the rank and file [Soldiers] and [Guards] is important. Make sure to keep that in mind in the future.”

Alice nodded.

Ethan sighed. “We’ll see what we can figure out. They could be [Spies]: Several of their actions and Perks seem to line up with that theory. But there are just too many unusual aspects of this situation. I do know that I want to get us out of here before something bad happens.” Ethan frowned. “I also do want to point out that language skills usually don’t mean much. Languages are very easy to learn with the help of the System, after all.”

Alice frowned. “I suppose. So the language skill is a red herring?”

Ethan shrugged. “Who knows? That’s what investigations are for.”

Alice sighed, wondering what all of this meant. The strange mana infestations, the weird behavior of the villagers, the potential fact that they were [Spies] and the possibility that they were something else entirely…

She just wasn’t sure what to make of this.

However, Ethan seemed to be in a hurry now. The [Guards] quickly raided the houses of the fake villagers, grabbing whatever they could, before elder Sujia stuffed them all into her storage Perk. Then, the group hurried away from the strange village.

* * *

The group began making their way back to Metsel soon afterwards. Since the camp of [Spies] wasn’t related to the Society, and the group hadn’t spotted any other obvious leads on the missing villagers, they looped back to the village, where the [Guards] with specialized investigation Perks had finally arrived. According to them, the [Villagers] had literally vanished into thin air.

Alice was pretty sure this meant the villagers had teleported to Earth, and Ethan seemed to share her opinion, even if he wasn’t discarding other possibilities yet. She couldn’t help but feel a little amused by the idea of a bunch of fantasy-land [Villagers] with pseudo-magical powers suddenly getting plopped onto Earth, although the idea was as concerning as it was amusing. However, she did find a surprising upside in the idea of a bunch of Illvarians showing up on Earth as well. They could hint to Alice’s parents that she might still be alive and well.

She had always worried that her parents would spend months or years wondering if she had died or been kidnapped or something, and since Alice had no way to contact her family, she had known that they would simply have to live with their questions unless she found a way to return to Earth or send a message home. However, with a bunch of people with Classes and magic suddenly showing up, it might not be too hard for her parents to make the connection between this world and Alice’s disappearance. Alice felt that she was probably grasping at straws, but she couldn’t help but hope that her parents would realize that Alice was probably fine if they saw the Illvarian villagers show up on Earth.

Assuming they didn’t all die of broken mana baptisms from their accidental trip to another planet, of course.

Alice felt a strange mixture of hope and fear at her thoughts as they returned to Ethan’s manor. Ethan himself didn’t directly return as the group dispersed in Metsel, since he first placed the prisoner somewhere else, and then left to follow up on the investigation of the missing villagers. Since Alice wasn’t directly involved in questioning the prisoner, and was exhausted after the journey, she quickly fell asleep.

* * *

The next few days passed in a blur. Alice didn’t have anything to do with the questioning of the [Spy], and nothing new had been discovered concerning the missing villagers, she spent her time attending classes and waiting for news. Alice did start training up her riding skills, because she didn’t want to get caught up in another awkward situation where elder Sujia needed to help her ride a horse. Ethan quickly found a cavalry instructor to help Alice learn to ride, and {Riding} reached level 15 by the time Saturday came. After that, Alice took a day off to play board games with her friends.

When Alice returned, and was preparing to finally try forming a class seed in a magic seed slot, Ethan interrupted her by knocking on her door.

“I have a few things to discuss with you,” said Ethan, grinning at her after Alice popped open the door. “First of all, you finally have an official license to form a dimensional seed and study it. I know you have a lot of other things you’re also focusing on, so don’t feel like you need to form it immediately. However, you should still put this near the top of your priority list. After all, Illvaria seems to be facing a crisis related to dimensional mana now, and while a wave of dimensional licenses is probably going to be issued within the next month, you have a lot of excellent Perks and Achievements that make studying this kind of information easier for you. If you figure out how to prevent giant cracks in reality from spewing out broken mana everywhere and killing innocent people, that would really be quite helpful. I myself am going to be resuming some of my research into dimensional mana, which I largely abandoned a few centuries ago. You’re welcome to join me whenever you have time, and I would really appreciate your help.”

Alice nodded. “I’m more than happy to study dimensional mana on my own, or with you. It’s my only chance to return home someday, and while I do still want to spend some time focusing on other research projects as well, I absolutely intend to make time for it now that I can finally study it without getting chased down by the [Guards]. Even though I’m starting to feel like I belong to this world as well… at the absolute minimum, I want my parents to know that I’m safe, and I want to be able to see them from time to time.” Alice still ultimately wanted to return home, but with how many people and how many things she would be leaving behind in this world, she wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to stay on Earth forever, either.

Ethan gave Alice a strangely hopeful look for a moment. “I’ll be honest. I hope you stay. I’ve been trying for so long to get someone to reach Immortality. It would be a huge shame if you reached Immortality, and then left Illvaria forever.” He sighed. “But if you do, I would understand. After all, this isn’t your world to begin with. But at least think about it, all right?”

Alice nodded. She would think about it, and make a decision if it actually became relevant. Since she had no way to travel back to Earth right now, it was currently theoretical, but she felt that she could find a way back home if she tried hard enough. She just needed to learn more.

“What are the other things you mentioned bringing?”

“Two other things. First, an update on the fake villager we captured.”

“Oh? Are they from Verinthia?” Alice asked, curious.

“We don’t know. But we’re pretty sure he has, at the very least, the [Spy] class. He also seems to speak the Sigumusi language fluently, and babbles to himself in that language quite often,” said Ethan, frowning. “He also seems to be… not in his right mind. He takes very strange actions frequently, miming controlling a bow and shooting at invisible prey. His actions confuse the [Psychologist] greatly, since the [Psychologist] believes that he shouldn’t be crazy, and yet he’s acting very oddly. The stuff we took from the village is still being investigated, but we’ve found some half-made maps of our country. But all of the writing on the maps is at least a week old. The fake villagers seem to have been making the maps, before they just… stopped for some reason.” Ethan’s frown deepened. “The situation is unusual, so some fairly high level [Investigators] are being escorted to the village with large groups of [Guards] to see if they can make sense of everything. But we will need more time to make sense of everything.”

Alice sighed. Her head hurt when she thought about the unusual village. Ethan, seeing Alice’s frustration, moved on to the final topic.

“That brings me to the final topic I wanted to discuss. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, you are possibly the most promising potential Immortal I’ve had the joy of teaching in the past few centuries. That also means that I want you to learn a little bit about the political side of being an Immortal, and how to create and manage your own network of resources, contacts, and people. You don’t have to go crazy with it, but you should know how to at least play the political game well enough that it doesn’t come back to bite you. Most Immortals keep tabs on the most important political figures from one decade to the next so that we can either stick our noses into Illvarian politics, or avoid them like the plague. But whether you choose to meddle in politics or steer clear of them, you still need an information network, and it’s much easier to learn how to manage an information network if I start teaching you earlier. Not to mention, there are some people I want you to meet who can help you acquire some resources related to research which, frankly, I don’t have access to on my own. I can leverage my social network to acquire them for you, but if you get to know them yourself, it’ll be less difficult to get things for you in the future. Such as your dimensional license.”

“Which means?” Asked Alice, who was getting an increasingly bad feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“There is a tea party being held by the second Princess next week. She has invited every Immortal in Illvaria, and while most will decline, my mother is attending, as are a few of the people I want to introduce you to. It’s a good place to get some perspective on how the political game works without getting thrown into the deep end. I want you to attend it with me. You need to learn these skills sooner or later, and this seems like a good time to guide you through some of the basics and introduce you to some people.”

Alice groaned. Not very loudly, but she was fairly certain Ethan would pick it up with his ridiculously high Stats.

“Do I have to?” Asked Alice, grimacing.

“You don’t have to, but it would be a good idea. And it’s not going to be that bad,” said Ethan, grinning at her. “Besides, you get to meet my mother, and she’s quite lovely. And you an also speak with the second princess. She’s a bit of an oddball, but she’s a fairly easygoing person as well. In addition, you can probably grab a couple boosts to levelling speed from my mother, in particular. She is one of the Immortals of Illvaria with the greatest variety of things she’s proficient in, since my mother spends a lot of time raising her secondary classes instead of focusing on her main class. She got frustrated by the slow levelling speed, and instead managed to get a bunch of Achievements that make her Secondary Classes almost as good as a main class, and so she’s proficient in a huge variety of things. And some of those can give you a few levelling speed boosts, similar to the [Teacher] Class. Stacking them together would be helpful for you, even if most of them only last for a week or two. The tea party is taking place in two weeks.”

Alice paused thinking over Ethan’s suggestion that she go to the tea party, before she sighed.

“Fine,” she said.

Ethan grinned.

A note from acaswell

Reminder: I will be gone between the 4th and 11th next month to deal with some family stuff. No chapter that week.

Shameless plug: For $3 you can read 3 chapters ahead on patreon!

Side note: I nearly closed RR without posting the chapter correctly by accident lol. I forgot to add a chapter title, and Royalroad really doesn't like when I try to do that. XD

Chapter 117

After Ethan finished talking with Alice and arranging details about the tea party, including things she needed like proper clothing and {Etiquette} teachers, he left. Alice was left alone with her thoughts again.

She frowned, thinking about the ‘tea party’ Ethan wanted her to attend. She had agreed to it, because having new resource channels and levelling boosts would absolutely be helpful. However, she didn’t actually have any suitable clothing for a tea party with two Immortals and a member of the royal family. Nor did she have any real understanding of what etiquette looked like in Illvaria. Which meant that the potential advantages of attending the tea party also had some very significant annoyances that came with it.

On the bright side, she had about two weeks to prepare. Given how much the System accelerated learning, that was a reasonable amount of time to pick up the skills she needed, even if they would be somewhat low in level. However, Alice still felt nervous. She sighed.

Then, she redirected her attention back to her experiment. She needed somewhere to focus her nervous energy and take her mind off of things for a while. Besides, she still wanted to see if she could create a class seed in a magic seed slot, and since she had two weeks, she wanted to see if she could reach level 75 in [Explorer of Magic] before the tea party. Even if she wasn’t going to brag about her level to anyone, it would certainly feel reassuring to have another Perk from her highest level Class available to her.

Therefore, Alice started working on her experiment again.

Since Alice’s {Broken Seed} Perk was off cooldown, she could finally try forming a class seed inside of a magic seed slot. {Safety Analysis} informed her that what she was about to do was… reasonably safe, if not entirely safe. Which was good enough that she was willing to go through with the experiment.

Alice started wondering what class seed she should copy for her experiment. She had a lot of class seeds she had seen over the course of her time in Luliv, and Alice wondered if there was any benefits or drawbacks to using one specific seed for her experiment.

Eventually, she decided to copy her [Explorer of Magic] class. It was the class seed Alice had the most familiarity with, since it was her highest level class, and so it seemed like a reasonable choice for the experiment. Alice didn’t think it would really matter which class seed she tried out in this case, so she decided to take the path of least resistance.

Then, Alice focused on her empty magic seed slot, and started working on forming a class seed.

The formation process started relatively normally. Alice drew in mana, focused on the idea of what an [Explorer of Magic] was, and compressed her ideas into a magic seed. Since Alice had a great deal of familiarity with what an [Explorer of Magic] did to level up, she had a reasonably good understanding of the Class as a whole. Forming the magic seed wasn’t very difficult.

As the magic seed started to condense, Alice carefully observed it with one of her mental divisions. As Alice watched, the System mana in her surroundings erupted, trying to help her form her Class seed. Alice noticed that, once again, she had a strong feeling that she had seen something similar to the System fractals before. It was much more complex in the hands of the System, but Alice was sure that there was something very familiar about some of the fractals she was seeing in her surroundings. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was seeing, yet. It was an incredibly frustrating feeling, since it felt like the answer to an annoying question was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t quite remember what she was going to say.

Alice frowned, but a few moments later, her attention was dragged away by the needs of her Class seed. Since she still couldn’t figure out why the mana fractals the System was using seemed so oddly similar to something else, she would try not to think about it. Sometimes, distracting yourself from a problem was the best way to get new perspective on it and find a solution.

After that, Alice noticed that the System mana seemed… confused.

Which made sense. Alice was trying to make the System do something it didn’t seem designed to do. It wasn’t strange at all that the System wasn’t quite sure how to react. Luckily, Alice’s experiments in forming magic seeds without System interference or assistance helped her a great deal here. Since the System wasn’t quite sure what to do, Alice simply pushed through the issue she was encountering on her own, using her pure magic seed to help filter and manipulate the mana in her surroundings to help smooth out the process of forming an unusual magic seed. At the same time, Alice made heavy use of {Speed Experimentation} to make sure she had time to react to new problems as they cropped up, and made sure she was ready to activate {Broken Seed} the moment she felt something was wrong. Safety was the most important part of this experiment, after all.

After several minutes of fumbling around with mana, to Alice’s surprise, she realized that she was actually succeeding. She had expected to fail this time. She had considered this experiment to be a practice run that she would need to repeat several times before she got this experiment right. However, it appeared that all of her other experiments and hard work had prepared her for this attempt better than she had thought they would.

Alice grinned.

And that’s when everything went horribly wrong.

As the magic seed snapped into place, taking on the twisted form of a half-baked Class seed, Alice felt a sudden barrage of information assault her mind.

She felt a cascade of images tear through her very being, trying to pour into her thoughts and set them alight like oil poured on a bonfire.

Explorers of Magic explore magic, and the very core of what makes an explorer of magic exist is their desire to explore and learn. Knowledge is what matters. I need to explore magic. I… NEED TO EXPLORE MAGIC. Alice’s thoughts expanded beyond what a human’s mind could possibly encompass, filled with an all-consuming drive to explore, learn, and experiment with information about magic. It consumed all that made her human, all that made her Alice, and all else besides the crushing, overwhelming need to learn and investigate at the cost of all else. Even if she starved to death, Alice couldn’t be bothered to stop pursuing the knowledge that eluded her. Not even for the fraction of a second it would take to eat, or sleep, or drink.

At the same time, her body started to tremble, and Alice started shaking as if she were in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The need to explore magic was so overwhelming that her body simply couldn’t handle it, and it was almost literally collapsing out of the foreign need that was overwhelming her mind. Alice had always loved exploring magic and learning how it worked since the moment she had discovered its existence. But now, the desire to explore magic was so different from her own thoughts that it was as if her personality was being replaced as she watched.

At the same time, Alice felt a certain… connection with the world around her. One that she had never felt before.

She could feel the expectations of a little boy, dozens of miles away, as he thought about the Mages his mother had told him about. According to his mother, mages explored the deepest secrets of mana and the world around them, searching for truth, and Alice could tell that at this very moment, he was thinking about what being a Mage meant. She could feel his admiration towards Mages as they were depicted in stories, and a faint desire to one day join their ranks.

She felt the expectations of a girl who had first formed her magic seed, and was venturing out towards Metsel. Her father had told her about the magic academies of the capital, and she had resolved herself to join the military in exchange for an education. However, deep in her heart, she wondered about the true nature of magic, thinking about the mana that every Mage in the world used to fuel their spellcasting. Even though her career path was focused on fight, at heart, she longed to focus on research and unravel the mysteries of mana.

She felt the weight of Ethan’s thoughts on the exploration of magic, dozens of times more clearly than she felt the expectations of others. Ethan believed that anyone who wished to pursue the nature of magic and find the deepest truths of the world and of Mages would be an eccentric oddball, someone who loved studying magic and learning about the world around them almost as much as they loved living.

However, Ethan’s thoughts had also begun to twist recently. More and more… Ethan’s image of an [Explorer of Magic] resembled Alice herself. Even though Ethan didn’t know her specific class name, whenever he thought of what an [Explorer of Magic] looked like, he subconsciously thought of Alice.

She could feel the thoughts of a long-dead Mage from centuries ago, pondering the nature of magic as he sought to discover why Mages had magic cores in their bodies and normal humans didn’t. Surely, with his brilliant mind, he would be successful in learning what made Mages different from other people…

In a split second, Alice felt the thoughts and expectations of hundreds of thousands of people pressing down on her mind like a billion ton mountain, flattening her under their weight. She felt every single human being’s thoughts on what exploring mana meant. Every single person who was alive right now. Every single person in the past who had ever thought on the subject. All of their thoughts and feelings on exploring magic were tangled together into a giant ball of ideas and feelings that was tearing into Alice’s very being.

Before Alice’s all-consuming need to explore magic and experiment could truly devour her sense of self, the System mana around her seemed to realize what had happened. Like an angry swarm of bees, the System mana descended upon Alice’s mage core, wrapping itself around the magic-seed version of [Explorer of Magic] and disentangling it from her being. It didn’t shatter the magic seed: instead, it was more like it unraveled the connection between the magic seed and who Alice as a person was, leaving only the mechanical components of the magic seed behind.

Alice’s desperate, overwhelming need to experiment with magic quickly faded away, and the memory of who she was, her humanity, started inserting itself back into her brain. Like a soothing painkiller, washing away the maddening chaos of connections, emotions, thoughts, and needs, Alice felt herself start to return from the state of mindless need to explore magic.

Warning! Violations of Free Will are not permitted by the System. Core violation detected.

Error code:

01000110 01100001 01110101 01101100 01110100 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110010 01101001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00100000 01000101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 00100001 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01000011 01101100 01100001 01110011 01110011 00100001 00100000 01000110 01101001 01111000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 01110011 00101110 00101110 00101110 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100001

She shuddered as the strange set of impulses drained away. Alice hadn’t been able to understand why Boris had farmed so frantically before now.

However, Alice had a sneaking suspicion that she had just experienced something similar to what Boris had been dealing with all this time. She took a few moments to just take deep breaths, trying to understand what had just happened.

{Safety Analysis} had claimed that the experiment was largely safe. However, her sense of self had very nearly been destroyed during the experiment. How in the world was that safe? Alice felt the urge to scream and punch her pillow well up inside of her, as terror started to leak out of the fragmented thoughts left behind after the experiment. She took a few deep breaths, before she managed to calm down again.

A few moments later, she realized why the experiment was ‘safe.’

She had done the experiment while in contact with the System. And the System, apparently did not allow violations of free will to occur. In fact, after Alice’s odd [Explorer of Magic] Magic seed had been created, the System had responded in the most aggressive fashion Alice had ever seen. While the System had always been fast in responding to problems, the System this time had practically rushed into her body and actively scrubbed out every single connection between her mind and the problematic seed.

While the risk of losing herself had theoretically been present, it had been almost wholly negated by the presence of the System.

In other words, even though the experiment would have been mind-numbingly dangerous without the System, given the way Alice had conducted the experiment it was almost completely safe. While there was some room for errors to occur, as long as Alice was in contact with the System, the experiment she had just done was seriously unlikely to actually harm her.

Alice shivered again, and decided to take a few minutes to lay on her bed and just relax. Even if the experiment had been quite safe, it had done serious damage to her nerves. The feeling of losing who she was as the identity of an [Explorer of Magic] devoured her thoughts and personality had been… terrifying.

Finally, her nerves were steady enough that she could really think about what she had learned.

What exactly had happened, and what did it mean?

For a moment during the experiment, Alice had felt as if her very identity and sense of self was being overwritten by the desire to explore magic. As if everything that she was, every facet of her identity, was simply being replaced with one all-consuming trait. Alice was able to feel that this was very different from her own, natural curiosity: this was a fundamentally foreign set of ideas and emotions that had existed in her thoughts for a short period of time before getting cut out of her mind, leaving her own personality again.

Interestingly, identity of an [Explorer of Magic] hadn’t been created by Alice’s thoughts. Instead, the image of what an [Explorer of Magic] was… had been defined by random people who Alice had just barely been able to feel during the experiment. As far as she could tell, those ‘random people’ included every human being who had ever lived on Luliv, although the influence of human beings who had been dead for hundreds of years felt much fainter.

Alice once again thought of Boris, who obsessively tried to farm and didn’t speak much anymore.

For whatever reason, the System seemed to struggle when interacting with people below the age of six. Without the System’s help, if Boris was exposed to the same mind-numbing crush of the whole world’s definition of a [Farmer]…

It was no wonder Boris stopped talking with his mother, stopped playing like a normal child, and started trying to farm nonstop.

In fact, if Alice thought of mana and magic as being related to ideas and concepts, perhaps it made sense that children below a certain age had a harder time adapting to mana and keeping their sense of self intact while interacting with it. They weren’t old enough to have a strongly established sense of self yet, which might make it harder for them to shrug off the minor mental effects mana seemed to have on its users.

Or Alice could be mistaken on how the System worked to keep people’s personality from being influenced by their Class. Frankly, she wasn’t sure. The fact that Alice was able to distinctly separate the ‘unnatural’ impulse to explore magic made her feel a bit relieved, because she was able to easily distinguish who she was from the mind-numbing pressure of everyone else’s ideas. However, the sheer weight of everyone else’s ideas had nearly crushed her.

Suddenly, Alice thought of something else.

She frowned, and then pulled up two of the Achievements present in her Status Screen.

Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

As a talented combat-specialized Mage who is apprenticed to Ethan, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds, you participated in one of the battles between Illvaria and the Society of Starry Eyes, and played a notable role in securing victory for your side. Even if you didn’t distinguish yourself as an MVP of the battle, you performed above and beyond what would be expected of you for your age group. Illvaria is watching you!

+30 Class Experience to your ‘primary’ Magic-related class (Explorer of Magic), +15% Class Experience to all Kinetic Magic related classes. The effect of the {Divided Attention} Skill is increased by approximately 50%.

The Achievement {Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society} had been the Achievement Alice had gotten after rescuing Samantha. Alice hadn’t thought too much about the Achievement afterwards, since the bonuses were rather average compared to some of her other Achievements. It gave her an extra magic tendril, which was quite nice, but it wasn’t a very important Achievement overall.

However, she remembered thinking that the description of the Achievement was a little odd. The Achievement specified that she was a combat specialized Mage, even though anyone who knew Alice knew that she was mostly research focused. However, many of the people who had participated in the battle didn’t know that. As far as the average [Soldier] knew, Alice was a combat-specialized Mage who was apprenticed to Ethan because of her promising fighting skills.

The Achievement description didn’t reflect Alice’s actual skill set; instead, it reflected what the [Guards] and [Soldiers] thought of Alice.

The other Achievement Alice pulled up was the {Murderer} Achievement.

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

You have slain another human being.

Effect of Strength, Dexterity, and Perception increased by 1%. Classes with some relationship to fighting other humans gain experience 15% faster.

When she had fought against an ambush from the Sigmusi Colonia and won, she had gained an Achievement called {Murderer}. Even though she had clearly been acting in self defense.

Why was the Achievement titled ‘murderer,’ rather than soldier or something else?

Alice suspected that it was because people’s perception of anyone who killed another human being got tangled up with the Perk title, meaning that anyone who got the Achievement ended up with the {Murderer} achievement, regardless of whether they were acting in self defense, or as a soldier defending their country, or as a serial killer.

The hints that Achievements were influenced by people’s perception had been present all the way back as far as Alice’s first fight with another human in this world, and she had never fully picked up on those hints until now.

How much of the System was actually influenced by the perception of people in the world? In fact, what if the System itself was influenced by the perception of humans living in the world? Perhaps the Church of the System wasn’t as natural of a religion as Alice thought it was. If whoever or whatever had created the church was aware of the effect perception had on parts of the System…

Then cultivating an image of the System as a generous and benevolent god was a pretty good way to avoid any negative influences people’s perception might have on the System. Alice had no idea if that was actually intentional or not, but it was at least plausible.

Alice sighed. There were just too many possibilities and new things she needed to explore. And she doubted she had even thought of all of the implications of this discover; it just fed so neatly into everything related to the System that she needed to rethink how several things worked. Immortals. Classes. Achievements. Skills. Almost every part of the System might work a little differently than she had first thought they did, because the perception of others apparently influenced how the System as a whole worked.

However, at the very least, Alice intended to wait a while before trying another experiment like this one. Even if it was safe, her nerves might collapse if she tried this again in the near future. But deep in her heart, Alice knew that she would need to investigate this more in the future. The implications of this experiment were just too far-reaching, and she definitely needed to understand how people’s perception impacted the System if she wanted to understand how everything worked together.

But for now, Alice laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She needed some more time to finish adjusting after the terror of nearly losing her sense of self.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 74 -> 75, Scientist 56 -> 58, Scholar 54 -> 55, Survivor 54 -> 55

A note from acaswell

I made a discord server. You’re free to join it if you like, but you can also not do so, obviously. You do whatever makes you happy. Here’s a link if you’re interested.

https://discord.gg/5f5EAtSzy7

I was originally planning to wait another week, since I had a pretty bad headache and mild fever on Tuesday. But I’ve felt fine ever since then, so meh. It still gets announced this week. Behold!

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 118

Alice spent some time relaxing after her previous experiment. She got a few pastries from the kitchen, and then spent a few hours laying in bed with some light reading. Ethan had a few historical records laying around, which were written in a style somewhat similar to the fairytales from Alice’s previous world. Since the writers had focused on making it entertaining to read, the books read surprisingly similarly to an adventure story, especially since basic history in this world included great warriors and powerful monsters as a matter of course.

The exceptional reading speed she had acquired as a result of her {Super Speed Reading} Perk ensured that she finished reading each book within an hour, something which Alice had mixed feelings about. While she usually liked the convenience the Perk provided, finishing a story she was reading for entertainment after only an hour felt oddly dissatisfying.

Finally, after a few hours of reading and relaxing, Alice felt ready to tackle her System notifications and Perks.

The first thing Alice noticed was that during the aftermath of her pervious experiment, she had actually missed a System notification for the {For Science!} Achievement tiering up. It had gained another tier, meaning Alice had acquired another 20% levelling speed for research classes and 5% growth speed for her mental attributes.

Which was a rather small increase, but it certainly didn’t hurt. The Achievement claimed that it would gain some sort of notable boost at Tier V, and Alice was now more than halfway there. She was looking forward to seeing how the Achievement improved.

In addition to her Achievement tier, she had gained enough levels for three new Perks. One Perk from [Explorer of Magic], one from [Scientist], and one from [Survivor]. However, Alice couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed by how few levels she had gained in [Explorer of Magic]. She had only gained one level from an experiment that, while theoretically perfectly safe, had been more than slightly terrifying.

Alice sighed. The low number of levels she had received as a result of the experiment was a problem new to her, but most people experienced a similar problem the moment they hit level 50. The levelling speed penalty that increased every 25 levels was incredibly harsh. Alice had basically escaped the influence of the levelling penalty entirely while between level 50 and level 75, due to her exceptional Achievements and high experience multipliers, but now Alice was facing the same problem as everyone else, albeit at a much higher level.

The levels between 75 and 100 were generally considered the biggest obstacle to most aspiring Immortals. After the class evolution at level 100, one generally aged slowly enough that their levelling speed didn’t matter too much, as long as they weren’t already really old by the time they reached the level 100 class evolution. Even if one levelled up at a glacial pace, since they didn’t get older very fast, it didn’t matter very much as long as they kept working hard. However, between level 75 and 100, people were usually still aging at a noticeable speed, and were simultaneously fighting against major levelling speed penalties.

And now Alice had joined the ranks of people stuck at level 75. She felt that if she wanted to keep levelling up quickly, she really needed to get a few more Achievements or Perks to boost her XP multiplier by a bit.

Before picking Perks, Alice took a moment to count up her total levelling speed bonus for [Explorer of Magic], her highest level Class.

She was getting 400% levelling speed bonus from {Seeker of Truth}, her best Achievement. Another 30% from {Baptized by Broken Mana}, 10% from {Bookworm}, 10% from the class evolution bonus from {Kinetic Manabinder}, 125% from {Seed Creator}, since [Explorer of Magic] was both a magic related Class and a research-related Class. Finally, she was getting a 30% bonus from {Immortal’s Disciple at the Battle Against the Society} and 60% from {Scientific Discoveries}. Apart from that, Alice had some scattered Perks that made her more productive, but nothing else directly influenced her xp gain. In total, that meant she had a 665% bonus to her levelling speed for [Explorer of Magic].

Most Immortals had a levelling speed bonus of around 1,000% or 1,100% by the time they hit Immortality, because that was what was needed to push through the barrier between level 75 and level 100. And now, Alice was going to stare that giant gap in levels in the face and wish she had another 400% levelling speed.

Alice winced at the thought. At least she was at level 75 quite a bit earlier than most people. That meant that she had a lot more time to rack up another few good Achievements to boost her growth speed. While aging speed varied quite a bit from person to person, she knew that past level 75, aging would usually drop to less than half of the normal aging rate.

In other words, Alice was probably aging less than six months for every year that passed now. Which was a strange thought, since Alice was still only physically sixteen. If one discounted the effect of slowed aging, Alice was less than half a year away from her seventeenth birthday. And she was already aging much slower than a regular human being. For a moment, Alice was struck by the bizarre notion that if she reached Immortality tomorrow, she would be stuck as a teenager for all eternity, which was a rather unpleasant thought. Alice would prefer to reach her early twenties before she stopped aging. Being stuck at age 16 forever sounded awful.

Alice shook her head to clear her thoughts. She hadn’t even reached the class evolution at level 100 yet. It was still an open question whether or not she would reach Immortality at all, and if she did reach Immortality it would still require a lot of hard work and effort. However, thinking about Immortality and her System notifications had calmed her down enough that she felt she could think properly again. Which meant that she had decisions to make.

Alice started scanning her new Perk options.

First of all, Alice checked the potential Perk combinations and new Perks for [Explorer of Magic]. She was probably going to end up combining her level 70 Perk with {Three Seeds}, as she had planned at level 70, but it was worth double checking the new Perks she had available first just in case she saw something amazing.

There was a Perk that gave Alice six new seed slots, which she found somewhat appealing, but not valuable enough to actually pick up since {Seedy Ambitions} already covered her long-term magic seed needs, and another Perk option that gave her improved insights and a 100% boost to levelling speed for research classes if she had successfully concluded a magic experiment within the past year. Alice felt that the second Perk was just an inferior version of {For Science!}, and didn’t really appeal to her very much. She needed boosts to her levelling speed, but a 100% boost just couldn’t keep up with her needs at all. It was also overly specific and hard to keep activated long term.

Alice swapped to the Perk combination menu, and then checked the results of combining {Three Seeds} and {Seedy Ambitions}. Alice grinned to herself. She hadn’t been 100% accurate when guessing what would happen when she combined the two Perks, but she had been close. It was definitely worth combining the two to improve her long term growth. She took one final look at the two Perks she was about to sacrifice.

Three Seeds

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 30 or higher, Perception 100 or Greater, Magic 100 or Greater

You may form 3 more magic seeds, with a maximum mana conversion ratio of 10% each

Seedy Ambitions

Requirements: Explorer of Magic Class at level 70 or Greater, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, At least 5 Magic Seeds, At least 3 Perks related to studying and interacting with Magic seeds

With enough study, you can create an inferior magic seed for ANY subject of study you are interacting with. This requires you to have a strong understanding of the subject, and only one seed can be created this way per month.

These inferior seeds will NOT count towards your magic seed limit. Inferior Seeds are limited to 25% Mana Conversion ratio. They cannot be upgraded via Achievements, but other Perks may interact with them.

Then, she paused. Alice suddenly noticed an issue.

It seemed that currently, Alice had six magic seeds in total. If she combined Three Seeds with another Perk, what exactly would happen if she suddenly had more seeds than her maximum magic seed limit?

Alice had to admit, she had forgotten about this problem when she had been planning to combine {Seedy Ambitions} and {Three Seeds}. Her maximum number of magic seeds would decrease below the number of magic seeds she currently had if the new combined Perk didn’t give her any new magic seed slots.

Alice had no idea what happened if she had more magic seeds than she could theoretically hold. Alice had neglected to research what the result of this problem would be, but she doubted she was the only person to come across this particular issue. After all, since Perk combination existed and plenty of people had used it, it was inevitable that someone else had stumbled across this issue in the past.

She quickly left her room and headed to Ethan’s library, before searching for any information he had on the topic. Luckily, Ethan had prominently placed several books related to research and mage related classes at the front of his library, in a spot where Alice could easily see and reach them.

Alice was pretty sure Ethan had put them there explicitly for her use. He definitely wasn’t worried about levelling up his Mage classes very much, after all, but Alice certainly needed to have references available from time to time.

After rifling through some books. Alice learned that the magic seeds she had gained from the Perk would deactivate. The moment she got some new magic seed slots, she would be able to ‘connect’ her old magic seeds to her new slots, although if the new Perk had different restrictions or maximum mana conversion ratios, the mana conversion ratio of her magic seeds might decrease as a result.

Since Alice had {Scholar of Magic} and {Expanding Comprehension} to boost her mana conversion ratio, she wasn’t very worried about losing a little bit of her mana conversion ratio. She could just raise it again using her Perks. She wasn’t quite sure when she would get some new magic seed slots, but with how often she got new options for magic seed slots from [Explorer of Magic], she doubted it would be an issue for long.

Thus, after a few final moments of hesitation, Alice finished combining her Perks.

Seeds of Ambition

Perk Costs: Three Seeds + Seedy Ambitions sacrificed to create this Perk.

Two times a month, you can create an inferior magic seed with a maximum mana conversion ratio of 30%.

The seed creation rules from {Seedy Ambitions} are applied to this Perk. However, Achievements may now apply to the Inferior magic seeds as they would to other magic seeds.

After Alice sacrificed her {Three Seeds} Perk, Alice felt her maximum number of magic seeds decrease from six to three. The three magic seeds that occupied the magic seed slots created by {Three Seeds} suddenly turned themselves off, as if they were entering a state of hibernation.

Suddenly, Alice no longer had access to pure mana, healing mana, or organic mana. And Alice’s one Perk from [Organic Mage] had also turned itself off, since one of the requirements for the [Organic Mage] Class was to have a 40% mana conversion ratio organic seed, and Alice no longer met that Class requirement. More troublingly, Alice lost {Lesser Organic Vision} from the [Scholar] Class, since that Perk also required her to have access to an organic magic seed.

She could still tell that she had six magic seeds, even though she only had three working right now. It was a very strange feeling.

Since Alice knew this was coming, she only spent a few seconds acknowledging that she had temporarily lost access to some magic seeds before moving on.

The Perk {Seeds of Ambition} was not on cooldown, meaning she could immediately use it. In fact, Alice sensed that she could turn her previous magic seeds into lesser magic seeds. She immediately reactivated her pure mana seed and her organic mana seed. She didn’t need healing mana right now, since it had mostly been used to generate money, and Alice was no longer worried about her finances. She would still reactivate it next month, so that she could level her enchanting classes if she got a new idea for an enchanted item, but she relied on her other two magic seeds much more right now. In particular,{Lesser Organic Vision} was critical for some experiments, and pure mana was fundamentally similar to what the System did in some respects, so Alice was unwilling to wait a month to regain access to it.

Alice was quite happy with the overall result of her Perk combination. Doubling the amount of magic seeds she could create per month would drastically improve the speed she made progress towards forming a System seed. It was worth temporarily losing access to her healing magic seed.

Then, Alice moved on to her [Scholar] Perk.

It was Alice’s first time combining [Scholar] Perks, so after double checking her newly available Perks, Alice started carefully tossing one Perk after another into the Perk combination System menu, trying to get a feel for what would make a good combination with what. A few Perks, such as {Rhetorical Flourish}, were only occasionally useful, and Alice would be more than happy to combine them with something else just to get a more useful Perk. However, it was hard to make a final decision on what she wanted to combine. There were just too many different Perk combinations that had potentially useful results.

Eventually, however, Alice settled on a rather unusual combination of Perks, because she felt that it would provide her with the best growth boost, even if it wouldn’t directly resolve her levelling speed problems.

Alice decided to combine {Super Speed Reading} and {Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement}.

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement

Requirements: Scholar level 10 or higher, Endurance 75 or greater

Your body needs 10% less sleep every day, and your sleeping habits will be better optimized for the amount of sleep your body is able to function with.

Lesser reduced sleep requirement was surprisingly useful, even now. It removed about an hour of sleep from the time Alice needed each night in order to function. Plenty of Alice’s research was restricted by other cooldowns or supply problems. Despite that fact, Alice was still very happy with having an extra hour every day to work on projects or relax. It was a Perk that didn’t seem to do much, but Alice found it quite useful.

However, even though the perk was still useful, Alice still eventually decided to sacrifice it, because the combined Perk she could create with it felt very useful to her.

Super Speed Reading

Requirements: Scholar level 45 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

While reading any form of written text, you can read and process information ten times faster than before. Your comprehension abilities are also greatly enhanced while reading (note - this bonus only applies to things you are reading. If you are reading and doing something else at the same time, only reading gets this comprehension bonus).

{Super Speed Reading} was the other Perk she decided to sacrifice, even though it was also a fairly useful perk. It allowed Alice to quickly absorb and understand information contained inside of books. She used it several times a day to parse information she needed in the library of the magic academy, and more recently, Ethan’s library. While a lot of Alice’s research was in new territory that hadn’t been explored by other people, there was plenty of previous experiments that had been conducted by natives of this world that Alice found useful to study as a method of improving her understanding of the System and the way mana and magic worked. Losing this Perk would definitely sting, even if it wasn’t vital to her growth.

However, the combined Perk was very appealing to Alice.

Sleep Reading

Perk Costs: Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement + Super Speed Reading

Any time you are asleep, so long as you are close to or touching a book and have permission to read it from the owner of that book, you may read it inside of your dreams. This will not affect your sleep, meaning you will still fully rest after a night of sleeping, and all of the speed and comprehension bonuses offered previously offered by {Super Speed Reading} will still apply while you are asleep.

Note: Any books stored inside of any storage Perks you have are considered to be touching you at all times for the purposes of this Perk.

Normally, Alice might have hesitated to create this Perk. After all, she needed to be in contact with a lot of books at once to properly take advantage of this Perk. Books were quite expensive, and unless Alice had a lot of books, the Perk wouldn’t be very useful.

Luckily, she was the apprentice of an Immortal now.

After creating the Perk, Alice quickly wrote a message and had one of the [Servants] carry it to Ethan for her. Twenty minutes later, one crate after another of books arrived in Alice’s room, each one packed with a variety of useful books on geography, history, biology, and magic. There were also several case studies and records of specific experiments that had been done on magic seeds and mana baptisms. Ethan also wrote a message to her, letting her know that one of the servants would go check the local bookstores in the capital and get a copy of any other books she might find useful or interesting.

Ethan didn’t seem fazed at all by the fact that he was probably dumping dozens of gold crowns into helping Alice make her Perk stronger. All she had needed to say was that she had recently acquired a Perk that required lots of books related to her field of study. Ethan hadn’t asked for any further details, and had immediately sent her everything he felt would be useful.

Sometimes, it was really quite nice to be an Immortal’s apprentice.

After that, Alice started focusing on her final Perk.

It had been a long time since she last got a new Perk in [Survivor]. She didn’t gain levels in the class very quickly, after all. However, a couple of the Perks in the Class were very useful. {Adrenaline Rush}, for example, remained one of Alice’s most reliable combat Perks, and {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} was Alice’s go-to Perk for if she got hurt or an experiment went wrong.

However, there were also plenty of Perks that Alice only found somewhat useful, or didn’t use very often at all.

After messing with several Perk options, Alice eventually combined {Sixth Sense} and {Sense Hostility}.

Sense hostility

Requirements: Survivor level 35 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

Whenever any being gazes upon you with hostile intentions, you will sense it, as well as sense the direction of the entity in question and its power relative to you. If said being is significantly stronger than you, or is too far away, locating them may be impossible. Improves the effect of the {Perception} attribute by 20%. Enhanced by your Perception attribute.

Sixth Sense

Requirements: Survivor level 25 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Magic greater than 0

You gain some ability to intuitively sense the mana around you with a sort of ‘sixth sense,’ with particular focus placed on the fluctuations of mana that only monsters emit into their surroundings

Both of these Perks were still somewhat useful to Alice. {Sense Hostility} occasionally provided Alice with a warning sign if someone was watching her with hostile intentions, and {Sixth Sense} provided her with information about nearby monsters so that she could avoid fights when she was in the wilderness.

However, these days, Alice didn’t fear most monsters. She was good enough at fighting that she could deal with most weaker monsters, and so the Perk had lost a great deal of its usefulness. And while losing {Sense Hostility} would sting quite a bit, Alice was guessing that the Perk wouldn’t be able to keep up with the level of anyone sent to harm her anymore. After all, Alice was now a ‘combat-specialized’ mage training under an Immortal. Anyone sent to harm her would probably have Perks to counter things like {Sense Hostility}, meaning that Alice needed to upgrade the Perk or accept that it was no longer useful.

Combining the two Perks would hopefully fix this problem.

Enhanced Senses

Perk Costs: Sixth Sense + Sense Hostility

Your [Perception] Stat effectiveness is enhanced by 30%.

You intuitively sense the mana in your surroundings, both human and monstrous, and are able to pick up any information that you would normally have access to. This is effective within a range of a few hundred meters.

If any creature has sensed you nearby and has hostile intentions towards you, you will immediately be able to sense it, and will also get a very rough idea of how strong that creature is in comparison to you.

If a creature you have already sensed initiates an attack against you and this Perk has not activated within the past day, for 10 seconds you will gain enhanced knowledge of that creature’s attack and position, and will gain a 20% boost to Dexterity and Perception.

The effectiveness of this Perk is significantly increased with your Perception stat

The sensing ability of both Perks she had used as fodder had been significantly enhanced, and Alice had gotten an extra 30% Perception effectiveness on top of that. In addition, Alice had gained another Perk effect that somewhat resembled {Adrenaline Rush}, which made it easier for her to survive any unexpected ambushes or problems. Alice had very little lasting power in a fight, since she could burn through her mana very quickly and several of her Perks could only be activated once a day. However, with the increasing strength of Alice’s life-saving Perks, it was much easier for Alice to escape any situation that put her in danger.

After looking over her final Perk combination, Alice nodded to herself. She had finished dealing with her System notifications, at least for now. Since she hadn’t gotten any Achievements that would boost her levelling speed recently, she decided to ask Ethan if there were any good Achievements she should aim for that might not be recorded by the Church of the System, and that she should also pay another visit to the local branch of the church to consult their records of various Achievements. She had already scanned it a few times to try to find something that was both useful and easy to get, but hadn’t found anything that she felt fit her needs. However, Alice was holding on to the vague hope that she had simply missed something and would find it if she checked again.

As Alice thought of talking to Ethan about Achievements, Alice frowned.

Now that her System notifications were dealt with, she needed to actually start preparing for the tea party. She made a mental note to herself to ask about her {Etiquette} teacher when she spoke with Ethan later. And to get a few books on Etiquette as well, so that she could read up on the subject while she was asleep. Even though she wasn’t entirely looking forward to the event, she would do her best to fit in and make the event useful to her. She just hoped she didn’t make a fool of herself when the tea party actually came.

A note from acaswell

Reminder: I’ll be gone for about a week near the beginning of next month.

Also, I have a Discord server now!

https://discord.gg/5f5EAtSzy7

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Chapter 119

Alice spent the time she was asleep reading through Ethan’s exceptionally detailed library, trying to absorb as much knowledge as she possibly could. Since she now had an extra eight hours a day to just read and relax, she didn’t worry too much about only reading information relevant to her research. Instead, she was more than happy to read through everything that interested her, no matter how relevant or irrelevant it was to her current research projects. She spent a little more time learning about geography, before transitioning to reading a few stories dedicated entirely to entertainment, before studying a few books about biology and physics.

Despite her lack of focus on one topic in particular, Alice still gained a lot of information from her dream-dive into various topics of study. Her memory-enhancing Perks, as well as the comprehension boost granted by her reading Perk and the minor boost given by {Bookworm} gave her a massive leg up on how effective her reading time was. Sooner or later, Alice was confident that she could use all of this information to learn new things about the world around her.

Of course, Alice also took some time to read up on {Etiquette}, now that she had an additional eight hours a day to read while she was asleep. She learned a great deal of useful tidbits of information, such as how the seating order for a tea party worked, and what the proper title for various kinds of nobility in Illvaria was.

Generally speaking, during a tea party, Guests arrived and interacted with each other before the event officially began. Then, the host would sit everyone down, and have servants serve tea to the guests from the highest-ranked noble to the lowest ranked noble. While tea and various snacks were being served, the host or one of the other nobles associated with the host would bring up a light topic of conversation. This minor topic was still usually at least tangentially related to the ‘main’ topic of the tea party, which would be discussed once everyone had their tea and had settled in.

The topic of a tea party could be nearly anything an Illvarian [Noble] found important. Perhaps they would discuss monster incursions in the south, or perhaps they would discuss how to mitigate the effects of a drought on a certain region. Or perhaps they might discuss recent noble fashion.

After that, the host would declare the end to the most formal part of the tea party, and then the guests would be given leave to join the more… noble ball-esque part of the gathering. During this phase, there would be dancing, various conversations in the background, and so on. After some hours of dancing, conversing, and making or breaking alliances, the tea party would gradually dissolve, before the guests retired.

Despite carrying the name ‘tea party,’ something Alice associated with a much lighter social interaction, Illvaria apparently took its tea parties very seriously. It was still less formal than a full-on ball, but it was still very structured and formalized.

Alice also learned that her position in all of this would be… interesting.

She had always known that Illvaria favored Mages a great deal, as a method of encouraging Mage immigration. Mages in a tea party tended to occupy a very weird place where, rather than their ‘rank’ being determined by their proper noble rank, they were instead served tea based on a number of other factors. Mages had a great deal of social mobility based on their Achievements and Level, more so than any other social class. While Alice had never made her level public, most people with some knowledge of the relationship between mana and levels, as well as familiarity with Alice’s published paper, could probably infer that she was fairly high level. That would normally put her at around the equivalent of a somewhat poor Baron, unless Alice made it known that she was at level 75 in one of her classes. If she made that piece of information available, she would probably be treated as someone equivalent to a weak viscount instead.

However, ever since Alice had become the apprentice of Ethan, her status had become a little more complicated. Alice being an apprentice of an Immortal, as well as her young age, meant that she would be perceived as having a high chance to proceed further in her lifetime. After all, there weren’t may level 75’s that weren’t physically 17 yet. This meant that Alice might have a standing more akin to a proper, relatively influential count, a full rank above a regular viscount. And this was despite the fact that Alice had no land, little wealth, and basically no political connections besides Ethan.

Which was incredibly strange for her to think about. In a strange, theoretical way, Alice was actually somewhat influential in Illvarian politics, despite knowing almost nothing about Illvarian politics.

And, of course, since Alice had no idea what she needed to prepare for, the realization that nobles might actually want to talk to her sent Alice into a mad frenzy of reading. She tried her best to learn everything she could about the local political climate of Illvaria, just in case she was asked about the subject. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself in public, after all.

Since the push to resettle the south was the biggest current issue, Alice ended up focusing on that.

The push to resettle the south was mostly a directive from the current [King] of Illvaria, since, according to him, now was a golden opportunity to strengthen Illvaria. Since the nomads of the north weren’t raiding Illvaria very frequently, it was the perfect time to invest manpower and resources into strengthening Illvaria for the future.

However, many [Nobles] criticized the [King]’s push to resettle the south, claiming that they were rash. Illvaria’s knowledge of why the nomads weren’t raiding Illvaria was patchy, and resettling the south was leaving Illvaria dangerous overextended. If the Sigmusi Colonia or one of Illvaria’s neighbors attacked Illvaria while the country was trying to resettle the south, the country wouldn’t have the manpower to deal with it.

These criticisms had increased dramatically after the Sigmusi Colonia started its espionage war in the southern territories which had nearly killed Alice during her time in the south. The Sigmusi Colonia’s understanding of Illvarian internal politics was clearly excellent: they had launched raids and put pressure on Illvaria to exactly the level needed to stir up internal discontent, without uniting the country against them. There were plenty of [Nobles] who still supported the recolonization effort, but it was a much more divisive topic than it had been two years ago.

This was likely to be the main topic of the tea party Ethan had suggested Alice attend. The [Nobles] criticizing the [King] had increased their criticism as the reclamation of the south encountered new obstacles, with some suggesting the [King] was more worried about trying to gain Immortality than focusing on the best interests of the country.

The second princess, who was hosting the tea party, was likely trying to rally more support for the southern recolonization effort from some of the more neutral [Nobles].

The Immortal Estate was mostly in favor of the recolonization effort. Ethan, in particular, stood to benefit from the recolonization of the south, since the more enchanting materials were available in the country, the stronger the position of [Enchanters], and thus Mages in general, would be in Illvaria politics. And since Ethan was an Immortal Mage, that would naturally strengthen his position by a moderate amount.

As Ethan’s apprentice, Alice would be expected to support Ethan’s position on the recolonization effort, though she also wouldn’t actually be involved in any decisions related to the recolonization effort.

Luckily, Alice’s night of slogging through books on {Etiquette}and diving into the nitty-gritty of Illvarian internal politics gave her a much better understanding of why the tea party was being held, and how she was expected to act during the tea party. And when she woke up, she had acquired the {Etiquette} skill and levelled it up to level nine. Which wasn’t bad for a single night of work.

Alice spent the next two weeks attending classes at her magic academy, as usual. This brought her [Student] Class to level 9, which was a nice, if minor, change. She was only 1 level away from a new Perk.

In addition, Alice’s nights spent reading about various academic subjects, as well as her time in school, caused {Scholar of Magic} to continuously activate, boosting her various magic seeds to new levels as a result of her hard work.

Through Perk Usage, you have improved a Seed!

Organic Seed (68% -> 74%), Kinetic Seed (147% -> 151%), Pure Mana Seed (36% -> 44%)

The usage of Alice’s new Perk had drastically increased the efficiency of {Scholar of Magic}. Even Alice’s kinetic magic seed, which previously hadn’t benefitted very much from the effects of {Scholar of Magic}, started to show visible improvement as a result of her dramatically increased reading time. Which was a benefit Alice hadn’t originally thought of when creating the Perk, but it was a benefit she certainly appreciated once she noticed it.

There were also two new additions to her schedule.

First, Alice needed to learn under an {Etiquette} teacher every day after class. Her {Etiquette} teacher was a delightful old man who had an easy grin and a cheerful attitude. His name was Carlisle.

Carlisle was an absolute delight to learn from, and almost managed to make the incredibly dull topic of {Etiquette} interesting.

Almost.

Her teacher spent a day or two going over a variety of things Alice needed to pay attention to and that were hard to learn from a book. For example, Alice learned the proper methods of addressing various nobles, how to sit down, how to walk, how to hold a teacup, which fork to use when, and about a dozen other minor things that Alice needed to take note of. She was also given a set of paintings and a list of names that she was told to memorize before the event, as well as a few quick introductory notes to each person.

Carlisle seemed delighted that Alice had such an easy time remembering everything with the help of her Perks, and after three days, he deemed her theoretical knowledge passable enough that she could start practicing. After that, he started running mock tea parties with her every day, trying to get her used to properly attending a tea party.

Alice was more than a little amused by the fact that the man kept his cheerful grin and tone of voice during each practice scenario. With the old man’s help, at the end of two weeks Alice’s {Etiquette} Skill had risen to level 21 and she had also gained a point of [Charisma], bringing her total up to 131. Which was the fastest one of her Skills had ever increased. Ethan’s financial resources as an Immortal were no joke, and made getting access to a competent teacher far easier than ever before.

Apart from that, Alice spent her time reading her library of books anytime she fell asleep. With an extra six hours of highly efficient learning squeezed into every night, and an extra hour or two of relaxation reading, Alice was both more relaxed and levelling more quickly than ever before. She picked up another level in [Scholar], bringing her to level 56 just from reading every night.

The other thing Alice spent a week doing was getting a dress fitted for her. Which was surprisingly slow.

Alice had gotten rather used to seeing people do things at incredibly fast speeds in this world with the help of Perks. At higher levels, some people could even outpace modern technology.

And now, instead of a quick hour or two inside of a [Tailor] shop before walking out with a new set of clothes, Alice was forced to sit for a few hours every day a [Tailor] fussed over the details of her new dress.

Apparently, [Tailor] Perks could go in several directions. Generally speaking, however, they either emphasized speed or quality. Most [Tailors] usually took a mix of both, before grabbing a few System-enchantment related Perks at level 55 and above, if they ever reached those levels. However, dresses and suits made for [Nobles] tended to largely emphasize quality, making it much more of a pain in the neck to get clothes for a noble party than it was to get regular clothes.

Though, Alice had to admit, at the very least, she got to observe the [Tailor] using his Perk to create a System enchantment for her dress, which was something she found rather fascinating. As a finishing touch to the dress, the [Tailor] created a System enchantment that added to her [Charisma] and [Dexterity]. Being graceful was looked upon favorably in noble circles, and apparently Alice’s face was a little too plain for a normal [Noble] party, since most [Nobles] focused on [Charisma] as their primary stat.

[Charisma] was Alice’s third lowest stat, ahead of only [Strength] and [Dexterity]. It was a little higher than someone who had no Perks or training dedicated to the stat, but compared to a regular noble who spent years honing their [Charisma], Alice didn’t really blend in very well.

After a week, Alice finally had a decent dress for the event. And, grafted onto that dress, there was a System enchantment that boosted Alice’s [Charisma] by a solid 30 points and [Dexterity] by 10 points.

The rest of the time up to the tea party proceeded quickly. Alice didn’t find any opportunities to seriously explore mana baptisms that would qualify as ethical, beyond more opportunities to observe people who were already intent on going through a baptism. She observed each and every person who was willing to allow her to observe the process, getting another four observations in, but she still couldn’t quite put together a proper way to interfere with a mana baptism. The biggest issue was that Alice had confirmed that any kinds of mana placed near a mana baptism got sucked into it, adding to the baptism process. Alice suspected that she could somewhat circumvent this issue by using her pure mana seed to command the nearby mana to stop ‘eating’ her own mana. However, System mana seemed uniquely well situated to actively interfere with a mana baptism without contributing to the problem. And, more importantly, Alice couldn’t take a step forward without being reasonably certain she could make the process safer. Otherwise, there was no way any attempt to interfere with a mana baptism would make it through the ethics committee.

Since Alice didn’t have a System magic seed yet, the only way she could plausibly interfere with a mana baptism was using a pure mana seed. And due to the restrictions of the ethics committee, she wasn’t allowed to interfere until she was reasonably sure the person going through a mana baptism was already effectively dead if she was mostly guessing at the results of her potential interference. And that basically meant that Alice couldn’t do much when it came to advancing her attempts to improve mana baptisms.

As much as Alice appreciated the Ethics committee keeping her from taking a step towards becoming a person she would be uncomfortable with, she still found them somewhat annoying from time to time. Which, to be fair, meant that their existence was especially important for her. If Alice was going to delve deeper and deeper into the more gray areas of magical experimentation, having an outside party who could shut down any experiments that crossed the line was valuable.

Apart from that, Alice (very hesitantly) kept delving into the nature of Class-based magic seeds. Every single time she did, she got a set of cascading error messages from the System, as well as the mind-numbing feeling of nearly losing her sense of self. But since the System kept her safe, Alice was, just barely, able to work up the courage to try again each time. Alice did learn several things about her Classes and how they worked on a deeper level.

Alice had learned, for example, that [Survivor], as a class, didn’t necessarily care about whether she had truly survived ridiculously difficult odds out in the wilderness somewhere in order to earn her class levels. As long as she experienced something people perceived as dangerous, she would get the exact same XP reward.

For example, if Alice locked herself in a manaless room for an extended period of time, something which was considered unquestionably lethal by the overwhelming majority of the human populace right now, Alice would get XP for the [Survivor] class. Even if being in a manaless room did literally nothing to put her life in danger at all.

Suddenly, all of Alice’s seemingly random levels in the [Survivor] class whenever she completed an experiment made a lot more sense. Alice had always thought the timing of those levels was pretty weird, but she had never perfectly connected the dots before now.

After learning this tidbit, Alice immediately made her sleeping area completely manaless, and woke up to a nice chunk of [Survivor] XP every morning. She was definitely starting to notice the rewards drop off after two weeks of intentionally exploiting the massive loophole in the System, possibly because her paper about manaless rooms was starting to become more well known, but Alice had still gained another level in [Survivor] as a result of setting up some very simple enchantments near her bed.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 55 -> 56

Similarly, a [Farmer] gained XP by doing things people of this world thought of as being ‘farmer’ related. And, in turn, as one gained farmer mana, everyone’s perception of who and what a ‘farmer’ was would begin to twist that person’s personality, making them more and more tied to their identity as a farmer and rapidly stripping away their personality and free will until they became nothing more than a puppet to the common perception of farmers. Worse, these two processes would feed into each other, creating a positive feedback loop that would quickly replace a person’s free will and sense of self with someone who was nearly a mindless puppet to their own mana.

At least, that would be the case if the System didn’t intervene. The System stopped the entire process at the very beginning, by absorbing all of the relevant class-related mana. Thus, the class was fundamentally unable to exert any influence on a person’s personality, leaving a person with the [Farmer] entirely as themselves, plus a bunch of neat supernatural abilities derived from their class seed.

As a final test, Alice had confirmed that her magic seeds based on Classes did very little. At least as far as she could tell. Perhaps there was a way to manipulate a class-based magic seed to do interesting things, but as far as Alice could tell, anytime she tried to do something with, say, a [Farmer] magic seed, a whole lot of nothing happened, even when she tried speeding up the growth of crops and such. Alice suspected this was because she had almost nothing in common with regular farmers. Since her actions up to this point didn’t fit the identity of a ‘farmer,’ the magic seed associated with farming didn’t really work very well for her.

Or perhaps she was just using the magic seed incorrectly, or perhaps it just couldn’t do anything in the first place. Since her [Explorer of Magic] Class seed had encountered similar problems before she deleted it, Alice was beginning to suspect it was just a problem created by turning a class into a magic seed.

Finally, during the final few days up to the tea party, Alice had realized there was a rather interesting question she could consider in greater detail, now that she knew more about the mechanics behind mana and class seeds. She had noticed it while using {Expanding Comprehension} on her pure mana seed. Sometimes when she used the Perk, she only got a minor boost in mana conversion ratio, but the more useful part of the Perk was the fact that it sometimes gave her unique insights into the nature of how a certain kind of mana worked.

This time, in addition to a 3% boost to her pure mana seed, Alice was reminded of a partiulcarly interesting fact about Immortals.

A long time ago, when Alice had delved into the nature of pure mana seeds using the original form of {Expanding Comprehension}, she had seen an image of Immortals as clouds of mana that continuously transformed into themselves.

Alice hadn’t really known what to make of this the first time she saw it. However, now that she had some context for how magic and class seeds worked, she couldn’t help but wonder what this meant on a more fundamental level.

The System had clearly demonstrated on multiple occasions that it would safeguard free will. In fact, it seemed to be one of the highest priority directives in the System.

How did that translate to Immortals, who, by definition of their very existence, should basically be entirely controlled by other people’s perception of who they were? After all, even regular [Farmers] would be basically taken over by their mana, if a class seed didn’t get rid of the harmful mana for them. But an Immortal was just a solidified clump of magic flesh. How did they remain themselves?

Alice wasn’t sure, but she was fairly certain the fact that Immortals were continuously shifting, over and over again, into themselves was probably some part of how the mechanics behind Immortality actually worked in practice.

Not to mention, it also shed some light on a possible reason why all Immortals could regenerate their body once per day. Perhaps the fact that an Immortal was continuously turning into themselves every single second of the day also let them regenerate missing chunks of their body, so long as the core of their existence remained intact. Which, in this case, appeared to be their brain.

Unfortunately, Alice didn’t have enough data to figure out how everything worked behind the scenes yet. She decided to keep an eye on Ethan and ask him about it when she had a better idea what questions she should ask.

However, two weeks of analysis and preparation soon came to an end.

It was time to attend a tea party.

A note from acaswell

It was recently brought to my attention that in chapter 109, Alice’s {Scientific Discoveries} Achievement rank-up notification was displayed twice due to a line duplication error. This has been fixed.

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on Patreon!

Join my Discord

Reminder: I’ll be gone between the 4th and 11th next month.

Chapter 120

On Ethan’s suggestion, Alice and Ethan both took carriages to the palace on the day of the tea party in order to maintain some distance between them. Even though Alice was Ethan’s apprentice, she was also a prospective future Immortal in her own right, and so Ethan said that it was important to send that Alice was someone to be remembered on her own, instead of only because of her connection to Ethan.

Which, apparently, translated to Alice and Ethan taking different carriages. Alice’s {Etiquette} instructor had told her that she should spend some time with Ethan at the tea party, to show that they were on good terms, and some time on her own, but Alice hadn’t realized that she should start before they even arrived. She was glad Ethan was there to help her along with the political stuff, although Alice was also quickly realizing just how woefully inadequate her Skills and Classes were at dealing with social situations. She was starting to get used to having Perks and Skills help her navigate new and interesting situations, and not having any she could rely on felt a little strange to her now.

As the two carriages rode down the more well-paved streets of the Illvarian capital, Alice was amused to see a few other [Nobles] moving down the streets in a variety of ways, most of which she wouldn’t have expected [Nobles] to ever use.

Back home, when she had read stories or watched movies about [Nobles] in the middle ages, they had all arrived in fancy carriages, with each [Noble] working to outdo the next noble in terms of how fancy and lavish their carriage was. Alice and Ethan were both in carriages right now, and Alice had assumed everyone else would do the same.

However, there were a few [Nobles] Alice could see riding horses and heading in the same direction as the two of them. Somehow, their Perks and Skills were ensuring that they remained utterly spotless during the ride.

Which was probably the point, now that Alice thought about it. Considering how important people found levels in this world, showing off that one could stroll through filth and come out spotless was a method of flexing one’s Perks and Levels. And remaining spotless while standing in the middle of a cloud of dirt seemed like a very [Noble] Perk to have, considering how useless it was for almost every other profession Alice could think of.

The most extreme example of [Nobles] flexing their Perks was a [Noble] couple simply strolling towards the palace, which caused Alice to let out a few chuckles when she saw them. They were moving fairly quickly, and Alice guessed that they had decent [Dexterity] along with whatever Perks they had keeping them clean.

Seeing [Nobles] ride on horses and stroll through the city towards a tea party was surprisingly interesting, and Alice found herself far more entertained by the journey than she had expected.

Finally, after rolling down a few more streets and past a few other [Noble] carriages and travelers, the carriage came to a stop.

The [Coachman], who Alice realized was actually her [Hidden Bodyguard], knocked on the door, before opening it and helping her get down. Alice didn’t actually need his help: however, as she looked around, she realized that in the distance, she could also see a [Noble] getting helped down from the carriage by his own [Coachman]. Perhaps it was some sort of {Etiquette} that hadn’t been covered in her lessons?

Alice mentally shrugged, and allowed the [Hidden Bodyguard] to guide her out of the carriage.When he realized that Alice had identified him, he gave her a friendly wink before moving to the side, along with some of the other carriages who were parked outside.

Alice frowned, as she noticed that the mana around her [Hidden Guard] was acting oddly. She tried to get a closer look at it, but couldn’t quite see what was happening before it vanished. She squinted at the spot where the System mana had acted up, but it seemed completely normal now. She couldn’t figure anything else out. She sighed, and turned her attention back to the [Hidden Guard] pretending to be a [Coachman].

“If you need anything, let me know, Lady Mage,” he said, a small note of unchecked amusement present in his voice.

“I’ll be sure to do so,” said Alice, giving him a practiced ladylike nod. She didn’t think anything would happen in the middle of the palace, but knowing her [Hidden Bodyguard] was nearby was still comforting.

Then, Alice got her first look at the palace itself. She had never had a reason to venture this far towards the center of the city before, so it was her first time seeing where the royal family lived.

The palace itself was… big. It wasn’t quite as opulent as something like the palace of Versailles from Earth, but it was still a major feat of architecture. It was made of a stone that strongly resembled marble, with highlights made of turquoise stone and some kind of gold plating attached to the side. Alice was pretty sure that without whatever Architecture-related Perks were keeping the building intact, the whole building would have collapsed. Alice didn’t know very much about architecture, but she was still pretty sure that there were too many spires and domes present for the building to plausibly support its own weight.

However, the building did look incredibly impressive. The impossible architecture of this building really hammered in some of the more interesting aspects of what the people of this world could do when they had the right Perks.

However, Alice quickly lost interest in the architecture, because she instead latched on to a much more interesting part of the building. Even more fascinating than the building itself were the building’s enchantments. It also had so many enchantments attached to it that Alice had a hard time making out where one enchantment started and the next stopped. There were probably eleven or twelve different enchantments encoded into the building, all of excellent quality.

Alice wondered who had made the enchantments. The work looked kind of similar to an Immortal’s work, but as far as Alice knew, there weren’t any Immortals in Illvaria who specialized in enchantments. Ethan was more combat focused, and while he could throw together some basic enchantments, Alice was pretty sure he wasn’t good enough to make the enchantments in the palace. Perhaps she was underestimating what a team of dedicated [Enchanters] could do with the right resources and motivation?

The enchanting materials were also clearly top-notch. The materials Alice was used to working with could hold, at most, three or four instructions. And that was after she used {Kinetic Enchanting} to increase the maximum instructions of a material by one.

Admittedly, Alice had generally worked with budget materials when she relied on enchanting as a source of income, which meant her understanding of top-notch enchantments was a little more limited. But as far as she knew, even for a higher-grade [Enchanter], having a material that could hold 7 or 8 enchantments was still rather high-end. Whatever the palace was made of, it could hold far more enchantment instructions than even a normal high-grade material. Which spoke of the obscene amount of money that had probably been poured into securing materials for the palace’s construction. To build an entire building out of this ludicrously expensive material seemed completely insane to Alice.

As she looked at the impressive enchantments of the palace, Alice found herself thinking of something Cecilia had mentioned a long time ago, when the two of them had been sailing up the river to Metsel from Cyra. Something she hadn’t thought very much of recently, because it hadn’t been relevant to her at the time. However, since Alice’s status was quite a bit different from when she had first entered the city, she might actually have a chance to interact with this tidbit of information.

Somewhere in the palace, there was supposed to be an Artifact, one of the greatest feats of enchanting that existed in this world. Specifically, the Artifact was supposed to be responsible for controlling the flow of water in most of the rivers of southern Illvaria, turning a single river into a giant set of canals that were perfectly shaped for both irrigation and sailing trade boats upriver and downriver.

Alice had never seen an Artifact before. She had seen the other three kinds of enchantment, and could even create traditional and consumable enchantments on her own. And she was currently wearing a System enchantment, in the form of a dress the [Tailor] had made for her. But she had yet to see an actual Artifact.

She wondered if she could see it while she was in the palace, before deciding to ask Ethan later. Alice was much more focused on her experiments than on her enchantments, but that didn’t mean Alice intended to let her enchanting fall completely to the wayside in the future, even if it wasn’t her focus. Besides, observing an Artifact might give her some new inspiration on how the System or magic worked, which meant that she might get a lot out of observing an artifact. It could also turn out to be completely useless, of course, but Alice felt it was worth trying to see. She just didn’t know if Ethan could convince the royal family to let her see the Artifact.

As she found herself musing over the possibility of seeing an Artifact for the first time in her life, Alice walked towards the palace. The [Guards] near the entrance were more rigorous than she had expected. They had Alice read out a list of statements verifying her identity and lack of malicious intent towards the palace, the royal family, and so on, before finally allowing her to enter. To the side, Alice could see Ethan going through the exact same process.

Then, Alice and Ethan were allowed inside the palace.

The insides were just as decorated and soaked in Perks as the outsides. Alice was sure that most guests of the palace were supposed to ooh and ahh at the paintings and furniture placed around the palace, but Alice found herself drawn to the intriguing high-end architecture and Perk usage instead.

After all, most of the furniture, paintings, and so on weren’t anywhere near as magical. Alice could see some Perks attached to them, but since they looked quite normal, Alice guessed the Perks did things like make each piece of furniture sturdier or more comfortable.

“The enchantments in the palace walls are quite interesting, aren’t they?” Asked Ethan, seeing Alice’s wandering attention.

“They are. I don’t actually know what most of them are doing,” said Alice. “I can see a few of them are kinetic in nature, but it looks like nothing I’ve seen before.”

“There are some Perks explicitly woven into the enchantments to make it harder to figure out what each enchantment is doing,” said Ethan. “It’s supposed to make it harder for a would-be [Assassin] to hijack the palace’s enchantments. Or at least that’s my best guess about why those Perks are present. And I’m pretty sure at least a few of the enchantments in the palace are rigged to blast down anyone who tries to interfere with the enchantments. So don’t mess with them. I imagine that your speed boosting Perk would keep you alive, but we would both have a pretty bad time explaining what happened afterwards.”

Alice nodded, and made extra sure not to poke at any of the enchantments in the palace walls. Even though the Perks and enchantments present were really interesting. Then, she started scanning their surroundings again, trying to see if she could pick out the Artifact. Strangely enough, despite all of the time she had spent looking at the enchantments or architecture, she hadn’t spotted anything that was obviously unusual. She wasn’t quite sure what an Artifact looked like, but she had expected it to be obvious to her when she spotted it. However, there was nothing.

“What are you looking for?” Ethan asked, as Alice eyeballed a few more areas.

“The artifact that controls the rivers,” said Alice. “I want to see it, at least from a distance. I might learn something interesting from taking a look.”

“Ah,” said Ethan. “Look down. It’s quite a ways beneath the palace, actually.”

Alice looked down, and finally, at the edge of her eyesight, noticed a giant tapestry of especially interesting globs of mana, well below her feet. Given how much System mana was clogging up her eyesight, it was easy to miss, but once Alice knew where to look, she could finally see… something that looked like a giant multicolored wheel. At the edge of each part of the wheel was a giant pipeline of mana, which stretched far into the distance. It also grew fainter and harder to notice the further away from the wheel it got.

In a very strange way, it actually reminded Alice of a map of the sewers back on Earth.

“Yup, that’s it,” said Ethan, seeming to notice as her eyes fixated on the giant wheel of mana.

Alice nodded. It was a bit too far away to make out anything interesting, at least from this distance, but she still did her best to memorize everything she saw.

“Do you want to look at it later? I can probably convince a few people to let you take a look after the tea party,” said Ethan.

Alice immediately nodded. Ethan chuckled.

“All right, and… here we are,” said Ethan, before opening the door to another part of the palace.

The room Ethan and Alice had walked into was some sort of mixture of a ball room and a garden. On one side of the room was a variety of flowers, vines, and other greenery, all artfully arranged to give half of the room a certain overgrown garden-like image. Then, the influence of flowers and greenery gradually tapered off, leaving the area more and more like a ballroom, with two floors, and a wide open, flat area set up for dancing. On the second floor, there were resting areas set up where people could sit down and chat over cups of tea and snacks.

A small group of [Bards] and [Musicians] sat to the side on the first floor, absently tuning their instruments and preparing for their performance later. Despite half of the room looking like a garden and half of the room looking like a more traditional dance room, the two halves of the room were artfully blended together in order to create an image of cohesion.

Alice noticed that she and Ethan weren’t the first people to arrive.

Sitting at the table was a woman who looked… an awful lot like Ethan.

Alice recognized her from the list of [Nobles] and other important figures she had memorized. She was Ethan’s mother.

Much like the other Immortals Alice had spotted, she looked like a cloud of humanoid mana. However, unlike most Immortals Alice had met, the woman didn’t have five large class seeds, and then a small handful of scattered secondary class seeds. Instead, she had something like two dozen fairly large class seeds, and then one exceptionally large class seed. Her secondary classes were clearly smaller than her main class, but the difference was much harder to spot than usual.

Since Ethan had mentioned that his mother enjoyed working on her secondary Classes, Alice assumed that each Class she could see was a ‘project’ Ethan’s mother had spent a considerable amount of time working on. Most of the Class seeds she could see looked like they were probably around level sixty, and while Alice had no idea what most of the classes were, she could still appreciate the time and dedication Ethan’s mother must have devoted to levelling up her classes.

Alice glanced at Ethan again, and then glanced at the woman, before she felt a slightly amused grin pull at her lips.

Both of them looked like they were the same age. If she was on Earth, she was pretty sure she would have assumed they were siblings. Having a child that looked the same age as you must be… odd.

Alice spent a few moments musing over the oddities of Ethan’s family dynamic, and then continued examining the other people at the table.

Sitting at the head of the table was a woman with warm brown eyes and rich black hair. She was stunningly pretty, and looked to be in her early twenties. She was chatting with Ethan’s mother, and was currently laughing at something Ethan’s mother had said. She was a about average in level, perhaps around level 50 or 55. Alice identified her as the second princess, and the host of this tea party.

Finally, there were about a dozen people sitting near the back of the table. They varied wildly in age and level, but Alice was able to recognize over half of them as a result of her studies on the [Nobles] and {Etiquette} of Illvaria. Alice noticed two people near the back of the table who were talking with each other, and noticed that there were various bits of rainbow mana being fired at each other every single second. Some mana looked like a more normal lie-detection Perk, with both parties trying to figure out whether the other one was lying. Some other mana, oddly enough, looked like a string that connected the two men, and Alice had absolutely no clue what that particular chunk of system mana was doing. Alice wondered what Perks were being used. Perhaps they were using Perks related to analysis? Or Perks to help them poke holes in the other’s ideas? Alice lacked the context to make sense of whatever was happening over there, but she found the mana involved to be fascinating.

She glanced at Ethan curiously, waiting to see if he had any special reaction to any of the [Nobles] present.

Ethan, however, focused on his mother and the second [Princess]. He gave his mother a warm smile, and his mother pulled herself out of her conversation for a brief moment to give Ethan a warm smile back. Then, she nodded at Alice, and returned to her conversation with the second princess.

“I believe you should already be able to recognize her, but that’s my mother, Myra. And she is speaking with the second princess.” Ethan said. Alice noticed a small, fond smile on Ethan’s lips as he spoke of his mother, and a hint of pride as well. Clearly, Ethan’s family was quite close. Then, the grin on Ethan’s lips changed to one she recognized…

“Do you know the other people here?”

Alice suppressed a groan and nodded. “The two over there are a pair of counts who are in charge of the eastern border of Illvaria. Due to their geographical position, they have reasonably good access to trade with some of Illvaria’s more amicable neighbors, and so they’re reasonably wealthy. However, due to the fact that they run part of Illvaria’s border, they also need to fund a notably larger garrison than the average [Noble], meaning that, strangely enough, it basically balances out. But they’re still fairly influential,” said Alice, glancing at the two she had seen conversing at the back.

“Then, next to them is Baroness Helia, who has a fairly wealthy barony in the mid-eastern parts of Illvaria. A fair amount of paper is produced there, which means that she’s almost as influential as some [Counts] due to the amount of money her land produces. The woman she’s talking to…”

Alice started to run through her memories, listing out every [Noble] she recognized and a few interesting tidbits about their land and political position. Ethan nodded along as Alice spoke, occasionally taking a moment to interject if he felt that Alice had missed something important, but for the most part he was content to let Alice keep going.

Ethan grinned and nodded. “Well done. I’m surprised you learned so much, even if you missed some important details. I don’t recall all of those facts being part of your lessons, in fact. You did a decent job assimilating all of the knowledge available to you and turning it into a more coherent picture. Well done.”

Alice nodded. “I learned about it using one of my new Perks. It gives me a huge advantage in learning new information quickly and efficiently without cutting into my time for experiments and organizing information. It’s very helpful,” said Alice, thinking of {Dream Reading}. The Perk was doing wonders for her reading time and learning time available each day: previously, she had been able to spare a few hours per day for reading new information, but it had never felt like enough to catch up on all the things she wanted to know. Now, Alice even had an hour or two each day to spare reading for fun, and was still learning far more each week than ever before.

Ethan’s grin grew wider. “I’m glad all those books are getting put to good use, then.”

Ethan led her towards the head of the table, near where Ethan’s mother and the princess were sitting, and Alice swallowed down a hint of nervousness. This was the first time she had ever interacted with royalty.

In fact, barring her association with a few Immortals, this was the first time she would interact with the [Nobles] of this world. Alice did her best to school her expression into a normal one, hoping that she wasn’t frowning or grimacing.

Meanwhile, Ethan’s mother and the Princess seemed to have finished their conversation, and Ethan’s mother gave Alice and Ethan a more welcoming grin and nod, before patting one of the seats next to her.

Alice swallowed a nervous lump in her throat.

It was time to meet another of Illvaria’s Immortals, and the mother of her teacher.

A note from acaswell

Reminder: I’ll be gone next week. No chapters then.

Join my Discord!

Shameless plug! You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 121

“So, you’re Ethan’s newest project,” said Ethan’s mother, giving Alice a warm smile. Alice saw a variety of System Perks flood out of Ethan’s mother. They reached across her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her ears, and every orifice of the top half of her body. It seemed as if literally her entire body, and every sense, was being improved by several Perks at once. And the Perks didn’t only affect Ethan’s mother: they seemed to radiate into the air around her, like dozens of tiny little knots of mana.

The sight was honestly fascinating. Ethan’s mother had so many different Classes and Perks being activated at once that it was nearly impossible to track which was which. Each Perk was clearly much smaller and weaker than the Perks and Classes used by other Immortals, but the sheer quantity of Classes and Perks combined created a dizzying sight.

Alice quickly realized that even though Ethan’s mother had done things quite differently than a normal Immortal, there were massive benefits in addition to the obvious downsides of concentrating on many Classes instead of a few.

Ethan’s mother may not have the raw power and ability that someone focused on raising five Classes might have gained after spending a few centuries working on them. However, in exchange, Ethan’s mother had a lot of versatility. While Alice couldn’t pick out every Perk she was using, she could still figure out what a few of them were, just because she had seen them before. Ethan’s mother was detecting lies, making their conversation private, enhancing all five of her senses, doing something that let her gather a lot of information from all of Alice’s reactions and facial expressions, and scanning their surroundings for danger. And several Perks were layered on top of each other, boosting each other and feeding into each other in strange but fascinating ways.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Ethan’s mother probably had dozens of passive Perks activated as well. Even though her primary Class barely met the requirement for reaching Immortality, with so many passive and active Perks, Ethan’s mother wouldn’t have any weaknesses. It was an incredibly fascinating build that Alice had never heard of before, and she found herself curious to know what Perks and Achievements made the whole thing possible. Ethan’s mother clearly didn’t suffer from the same downsides other people did when raising secondary classes. All, or at least part, of the downsides of secondary Classes had been negated. Unfortunately, it was probably related to combat power, so asking Ethan’s mother about it would be rude, and Ethan’s mother probably wouldn’t answer any questions about it.

She found herself rather disappointed about that fact.

Then, Alice realized she was spacing out, and quickly tried to focus on the conversation again. She realized that Ethan’s mother was simply staring at her, waiting for a response.

“Yes, I’m Ethan’s apprentice. Alice. It’s a pleasure to meet you, honored Immortal Myra,” said Alice. At the side, Alice could see the second Princess, who Ethan’s mother had previously been talking with, stiffen a bit, and give Alice a more measured look, before nodding and giving Alice a friendly smile.

“I’d be pleased to get to know you later, Lady Alice,” said the second princess, before standing up and excusing herself. She gave Alice a very warm smile and extended a hand towards her, and Alice quickly shook it. “I should go, though. I know Immortals and their apprentices like to get to know each other without outside interference.” Then, the second [Princess] quickly got up from the table and made her way towards one of the flower bushes nearby.

“Thank you, dear. I’d love to continue our conversation later,” said Ethan’s mother as the second [Princess] departed. The second Princess turned towards Ethan’s mother for a moment, and shot her a slightly more mischievous grin, before she continued making her way towards the flowers. Then, Ethan’s mother turned towards Alice.

“It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance! I’m Ethan’s mother, Myra. You know, none of Ethan’s projects have made it to Immortality yet, but he seems especially optimistic about your odds. And I hear you’re a Mage! Being a Mage is a very big advantage when working towards Immortality, you know. Even though Mages only make up around 2-3% of the population, they make up over a fourth of the global Immortal population. Starting out with a 20% aging reduction is huge, and Mages just have opportunities that other people don’t have access to,” said Myra. “I’m glad to see Ethan is so optimistic about your chances! I haven’t seen him this excited anytime within the past… four rounds of disciples!”

“What makes you think Ethan is optimistic about my chances?” asked Alice.

Immortal Myra chuckled. “I’m his mother, and I have a pretty darn high level in a lot of Classes. Including [Psychologist]. I have a pretty easy time reading body language, and Ethan is very excited whenever he faces you. I usually see him with a little spring in his step whenever he starts teaching a new round of disciples, but it’s especially noticeable this time. So he must think your odds are excellent,” said Ethan’s mother, giving Alice an even more curious appraising look.

“To be honest, I think she might even reach Immortality with or without my help, mother,” said Ethan, finally deciding to interject into the conversation. “Some of her Achievements seem to be excellent, and while I haven’t figured out what they do, her levelling speed seems to be excellent. She pulls new abilities out fast enough that it makes my head spin sometimes.” Ethan had a rather fond smile on his lips as he spoke with his mother.

“Is that so? That’s promising. What level are you, child? Your highest level Class, I mean.”

Alice looked at Ethan, wondering if she should share this information, and Ethan nodded at her.

“Level 75.”

“And only physically sixteen or so?” Ethan’s mother whistled. “That’s pretty impressive. You’re making better time than even Allira did, and once she started levelling she took off like an arrow soaring through the skies. That girl still looks like she’s barely twenty,” said Ethan’s mother, grinning as she spoke of Allira.

“Is that so?” Asked Alice, suddenly curious. She hadn’t heard much about Allira’s rise to Immortality, beyond the fact that the Sigmusi were involved and that Allira had gained her levels during the previous war between the Sigmusi Colonia and the Shil Confederacy.

Ethan’s mother nodded. “Girl wasn’t anything special for the first seventeen years of her life or so. Just another [Bard] that sang for a few local inns for coin. But when the Sigmusi invasion reached her town...” Ethan’s mother winced. “She lived. And changed quite a bit as a result of what she lived through. But she’s a nice enough girl! Though, if she didn’t keep skipping out on our chats, she would be much better…” Ethan’s mother sighed, and shook her head. “The poor girl has really been through a lot. But I can wait as long as she needs before she’s willing to open up a little more.” Ethan’s mother seemed to almost be comforting herself when she said that, and Alice suddenly felt her image of Allira change a little bit. When she had met Allira in Cyra, the Immortal of Song and Shadow had seemed rather unusual. However, apart from her massive hatred of the Sigmusi, Allira had otherwise seemed friendly and approachable. However, while Alice was a little socially oblivious, she could read between the lines well enough to realize that Allira probably needed help from a proper [Psychologist] if she had really been through a bad enough set of experiences. Assistance with Myra seemed happy to offer, but Allira didn’t want to take her up on.

Ethan rolled his eyes, and for a moment, Alice found herself utterly bewildered as she saw Ethan acting… almost like a teenager, in some ways. Ethan rolling his eyes was something Alice had never seen before. She was far more used to him giving her annoying tests.

“Mother, I’m sure she would be more willing to talk with you if you didn’t keep trying to convince her to get married,” said Ethan dryly.

“She seems lonely! She spends so much time talking to other people, but she never connects with them during those conversations. I just think that she would be happier if she found a nice guy or girl and settled down for a few decades!” Ethan’s mother frowned. “I haven’t quite figured out whether she likes men or women yet. I’ll figure it out one of these days…” said Ethan’s mother, thoughtfully rubbing her chin.

“Ah, my apologies, dearie. I seem to have gotten distracted. I wanted to get to know you, not talk about Allira. Especially if you really are going to be joining our little group. After all, it’s been almost a century since we last had a new Immortal, and I think it would be just lovely if we had another one. So what do you specialize in? Ethan is going around claiming that you’re focused on combat, but all three of us know that’s total nonsense. The speed at which you gain new Perks is completely inconsistent with how many combat encounters you’ve had in the past three months, as far as I can tell, and that means combat isn’t your specialty. What’s your real focus, dear?”

Alice felt herself drawing a blank and Ethan’s mother continued speaking. She looked at Ethan again, and Ethan seemed to take that as his cue.

“She’s focused on research, mother. I would appreciate it if you could help me substantiate the little fiction that she’s focused on combat,” he said.

Ethan’s mother rubbed her chin. “Why is it so important? There’s nothing wrong with being focused on magical research, is there?” She gave Alice an even more curious glance, and then grinned. “Ah, I see. Do you have some sort of special Perk or Achievement? Something that would make the Society of Stars interested?”

Alice found herself slowly nodding. “Several things that the Society would be interested in. I’m quite afraid of them taking an interest in me.”

Ethan’s mother sighed. “Unfortunately, I doubt the Society is still fooled. I imagine that if they’re investigating young Alice at all, they’ll have already realized something is wrong. I’ll do what I can, but I expect this lie has already outlived its usefulness. And if they’re likely to take an interest in her, she needs to be able to defend herself sooner or later.” She paused for a moment, as another group of [Nobles] walked into the room and took seats near the back of the table, before giving them nods and then turning back to Alice. “Have you grown your self-defense abilities in the time Ethan’s lie has bought you? As an Immortal or prospective Immortal, it’s important to have some basic self-defense ability, and if the Society is truly likely to aim for you, it’s hard to predict when they’ll act. It’s important to be ready at all times, dearie.” For the first time, Alice saw the warm smile on the woman’s face fade away, replaced with something closer to a grimace. “While tragic, we’ve lost a prospective Immortal to the Society of Starry Eyes in the past. It’s uncommon, but it has happened. To stay safe, you need to be as competent as possible.”

Ethan thought it over, before sighing. “Should we expect a society attack soon, then? I had hoped we would have more time, since I can’t be near her all the time. And while I’ve assigned her a [Hidden Guard], against a dedicated Society attack, who knows what they might bring to the table.”

Ethan’s mother shrugged. “I doubt they would be brazen enough to attack the capital, but you should probably keep an eye out for her whenever you’re out of the city. Especially if she’s research focused.” She turned back towards Alice. “Ah, have you grabbed any combat-related Classes, dearie? If not, I could help you pick up a few useful ones. I’m not a Mage, but I know quite a bit about Perks and how some of Perks from different Classes can combine together. And I have quite a few Perks that can boost learning speed. A few of them come from pretty unique Perk combinations, so it’s hard to replicate them, meaning they won’t overlap with other learning boosts.”

“Is that so?” Asked Alice. She had been rather curious about Ethan’s mother’s Class combinations, but she couldn’t ask about any information related to combat abilities. However, if the other woman was offering…

Ethan’s mother grinned and nodded. “I have a few learning boosts from [Psychologist] and a few from [Nanny]. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to get those Classes to spit out levelling speed boosts, but I wanted them to boost levelling speed so badly that I found something to work with. I imagine you already have access to fairly good teacher boosts, so I won’t bother with any Perks from that Class. But would you like a couple boosts?”

Alice nodded, and Ethan did as well. “That’s part of why I brought her here, mother. I know how busy your schedule gets…”

“It’s no trouble at all, dear!” Said Ethan’s mother, before turning towards Alice.

Alice saw a few streams of rainbow mana pour out of Ethan’s mother, and then wrap around her. She didn’t receive any sort of System notification, but Alice was pretty sure the rainbow lights would boost her levelling speed for… a while.

Alice nodded.

“How long do they last, and how big is the effect?” Asked Alice.

“The two last about a month and a half, and they give a combined bonus of around 70%. That’s a 70% boost to combat and research Classes, as well as a few mana-related skills. I don’t have anything that overlaps with research beyond that. But your teacher should also be giving you a sizeable boost, and these Perks don’t conflict with any that a [Teacher] might have.” Ethan’s mother nodded, and Alice felt a surge of interest.

She had been thinking about her low experience multiplier just a few weeks ago, and now, Ethan’s mother had made up nearly a fifth of the experience boost she still needed to get back to levelling at a decent speed. Alice wasn’t necessarily as interested in reaching Immortality as she was in learning more about how the System worked, but she certainly wasn’t opposed to becoming an Immortal if she could get there. A 70% levelling speed boost may not quite make up for the massive growth penalty she faced past level 75, but at the very least, it would help a lot.

That being said, Alice still felt the proper solution was to get another Achievement or two working. She hadn’t gotten one from her previous experiment with Class seeds yet, since she hadn’t actually done anything with the information, but she was sure that with a little more thinking she could turn it into a good Achievement, or possibly boost {Seeker of Truth} again…

Oblivious to Alice’s thoughts, Ethan gave his mother a brief hug. It wasn’t quite ‘proper’ to do so in public, but since they were Immortals, they could get away with a lot. “Thank you, mother.”

“No problem, dearie,” said Ethan’s mother, returning his hug and giving him a smile.

Then, Ethan’s mother turned her attention back towards Alice.

“So, Ethan did mention that you went through a mana baptism, instead of being born a Mage. What’s the story on that? Were you born impoverished?” Immortal Myra frowned. “Not that there’s anything wrong with being born impoverished, mind you. What matters the most in life is what you make of your situation, not how lucky you were when you were born. I’m simply curious.”

“I went through a mana baptism by accident, Honored Immortal Myra.“

“Is that so? That must be quite a story. It’s pretty unusual to encounter a big enough clump of mana that you end up going through a mana baptism accidentally. Normally, if you’re out in the wilderness, you would get a map of all of the nearby mana clumps, right?” Ethan’s mother gave Alice a more curious look. “Did you used to be an [Adventurer] or something before becoming a Mage? And then perhaps get lost or chased around by monsters for a while?”

Alice shook her head, and then eyed Ethan again. On one hand, she had to admit, she was grateful that Ethan hadn’t revealed anything about her past without her permission.

On the other hand, Alice also really wasn’t sure what she could and couldn’t say here. Would telling Ethan’s mother about Earth be a good idea, or a bad one? If she tried to lie about her past, what should she say? Ethan’s mother almost certainly had a lie-detection Perk, and Alice seriously doubted she could carefully word her answer to skirt the Perk. Ethan’s mother had an exceptionally high [Charisma] score, even for an Immortal, which meant that she must enjoy socializing quite a bit. Alice seriously doubted that the woman would somehow miss Alice carefully wording her answers.

“Lady Alice has some rather unique circumstances, mother,” said Ethan. “For her safety, just assume that she didn’t exist before she arrived in Illvaria and underwent a mana baptism by mistake. That’s the best way to treat her past.”

“Is that so?” Asked Ethans mother, giving Alice an even more curious glance. “Well, if that’s the case, I won’t pry. But I am quite curious, dearie. When we get to know each other a bit better, maybe I can get some more of your story out of you. I’m very interested.” She sighed. “But I suppose that will have to wait until we get to know each other a little better.”

Alice actually felt surprisingly bad about the fact that she wasn’t telling Ethan’s mother more about herself. But now really didn’t seem like the time, even if they were surrounded by a Perk keeping their conversation private. On the other hand, Alice was happy to know that Ethan hadn’t told his mother about Alice’s circumstances. Even if it might have made this conversation easier for her, Ethan seemed perfectly happy to respect her desire for privacy until Alice was strong enough to face attacks from the Society of Starry Eyes head-on.

Then, Alice noticed that while the group had been talking, several more [Nobles] had trickled into the tea party. The room was quite nearly full, and the second [Princess] was already seated in her spot near the head of the table again. Even as Alice watched, a few final [Nobles] entered the room, and, based on the number of chairs in the room, Alice realized everyone was here.

Immortal Myra also realized the same thing, and gave Alice a final, friendly nod. “Let’s get to know each other more in the future, dearie. I’d love to learn more about you in the future!”

The final [Nobles] took their seats, and the second [Princess] cleared her throat and gave everyone who had come to the tea party a warm smile.

It was time for the proper tea party to start.

A note from acaswell

Join my Discord!

Shameless plug: Volume 2 is now finished on Patreon! You can read the last three chapters of this volume for 3 dollars on Patreon! :D

Chapter 122

The second [Princess] nodded at Alice and the other [Nobles], who stopped chatting amongst themselves. The [Nobles] who weren’t seated already quickly made their way towards their seats, and Alice saw a little flicker of rainbow mana activate near their ears. It seemed to somehow inform them that the tea party was starting?

A few [Servants] standing to the side waited a few moments for the [Nobles] to take their seats. Then, they quickly began pulling out various pots of tea and pastries, as well as other light snacks. The moment the last [Noble] sat down, the [Servants] began gently pouring cups of tea and offering guests food. The tea was maintained at the perfect temperature using Perks, and the miniature cakes, cookies, and other snacks all seemed as if they had just come out of the oven moments ago.

And at the same time, one of the [Counts], who Alice realized had spoken with the [Princess] just before the tea party started, was the one to raise the topic of conversation.

“Recently, I have been thinking about the prices of enchanting materials. In my county, there has been a notable increase in the price of various goods related to enchanting, despite the influx of materials as the southern recolonization effort progresses. This is because more Mages are learning how to enchant. More [Enchanters] are ultimately good for my territory, but training expenses are harming the new wave of [Enchanters]. So I want to build an enchantment-focused magic school. Subsidizing the costs new [Enchanters] face would help this growing industry along, even if it would cost some money right now.” the [Count] began to go into a long-winded discussion of his topic, such as where the academy might be established, the benefits of it, and so on. Alice was pretty sure that the topic would feed nicely into the main topic of the tea party, which was the recolonization effort of the south. However, she was also surprised by how detailed and specific the [Count’s] opening topic was. It was detailed enough to be a topic of discussion on its own, even if it wasn’t linked to a bigger topic.

Once he finished talking, a [Baroness] leapt into the conversation and began discussing the potential demerits of establishing a new magic academy, such as the increased drain on manpower. She argued that right now Illvaria was already short on manpower, it would be difficult to find good teachers for a new academy, and so establishing a new academy might do more harm than good. Then, a [Viscount] weighed in by stating the issue could likely be resolved by hiring retired Mages, though the expenses would likely increase even more.

The discussion went on. No direct resolution was reached about the initial conversation, although Alice was fairly certain those in favor of establishing a new magic academy would meet after the meeting and possibly work out an agreement of their own. However, as time passed, the topic started to veer more and more towards the recolonization effort as a whole. Alice was happy that she had properly understood the biggest focus of the tea party: she had been a little worried she might get it wrong, since she wasn’t very familiar with the political scene.

She found herself listening attentively to the meeting, even though she wasn’t familiar with all of the information the [Nobles] were tossing around during the discussion. She was still able to pick up a surprising amount of information about the current state of Illvaria from the conversation.

Mixed into the conversation were also a lot of odd tidbits of discussion, especially debate about the recolonization effort as a whole. Some [Nobles] who were present seemed on the fence about whether it was a good idea for the country as a whole to keep supporting the recolonization effort. One or two [Nobles] seemed staunchly against the recolonization effort, claiming it was too expensive to even maintain it at its current level. They instead advocated dialing it back a little bit, and only recolonizing the northernmost fringe of the old south. A few other [Nobles] seemed in favor of expanding the recolonization effort even further, due to the massive potential for enchanting material harvesting in the future.

She learned a lot more about the espionage war the Sigmusi Colonia had launched against Illvaria last spring, as well as some of the more detailed problems the recolonization effort was facing. Monster attacks disrupting supply chains, mismanaged cities that dragged down the reputation of the recolonization effort as a whole, and the ever-increasing need for money and manpower seemed to be like black holes. No matter how many resources Illvaria put into the effort, it was difficult to wholly meet the needs of the recolonization effort. The conversation went on and on, with [Nobles] weighing in on how some problems were more solvable than they seemed to be, or why some part of the recolonization effort was too expensive, and should be dialed back to free up resources.

The conversation continued for a few hours. Alice didn’t have much to say herself. On the topic of Illvaria’s future, she wasn’t in control of many resources, and she didn’t know enough to weigh in on the subject. Because of her lack of knowledge and power, Alice found herself unwilling to interject too much. However, she could also see why Ethan wanted her to attend this meeting. It was easy for Alice to make connections between the discussion she was seeing in front of her eyes, and all of the books she had read about the current state of Illvaria. Naturally, this meant that it would be much easier for Alice to integrate herself into future conversations, and if she ever had to weigh in on a decision related to Illvarian policy in the future, she would have a much better idea what might be a good or bad idea.

However, Alice was quite surprised when one of the [Nobles] at the table directly addressed her.

“What do you think about the recolonization effort, Lady Alice? I hear that you spent at least a few months in the south, and that you even got caught up in part of the Sigmusi espionage war behind the scenes. What are the biggest issues you faced during that time, and is it worth solving those issues for the entirety of the south?”

Alice was honestly surprised that the [Noble] asking her knew so much about her. It seemed that her past had been dug up by at least a few people after she had become Ethan’s apprentice. She could see why Ethan’s mother felt that the ruse of claiming Alice was a ‘combat’ Mage was becoming less relevant by the day. Considering how much she had focused on her research during her time in Cyra, anyone who seriously investigated her past probably knew she was much more specialized in research than fighting. And if the people here at the table knew it, the Society of Starry Eyes probably also knew it, if they had any interest in her at all. She did her best to maintain a polite [Noblewoman’s] smile, despite her spike of nervousness, and focused on the [Noble]’s question.

“I did, indeed, live in Cyra for a few months,” said Alice. “It’s a rather promising town run by Illa Weissaurus. It’s also where I underwent my mana baptism. I ran into a few pretty major key problems during my time there.

“Construction issues were one of the big issues. There aren’t enough [Kinetic Mages] to properly support the construction of new buildings. In addition, there are occasional undocumented bubbles of broken mana, which can create massive monster swarms. These can be rather risky for nearby towns to deal with, and the military power needed to fend them off can be draining for the settlements in the area. Finally, the Sigmusi, obviously, posed a major threat to the region during my time there. I was actually caught up in an assassination attempt aimed at Illa…” said Alice, as a memory came back to her.

A spear, rammed through her stomach. Bright pain…

Alice winced, rubbing at her stomach again. Due to the power of [Organic Mages], there wasn’t a scar left on her skin, but she was surprised by how vivid the memory of getting stabbed was.

“I nearly died during that assassination attempt.” Alice paused, thinking over the conversation, and her own experiences. “I would say most of the issues faced by the south could be dealt with if more Mages moved to the south, since they’re the strongest individual members of the military, and also very important for construction and healing in new towns and cities. Of course, [Soldiers] are also needed, but I would say the Mage shortage is the biggest real issue the south is facing right now. As for whether it’s worth solving those problems…” Alice paused, seriously considering whether it was worth it for Illvaria to throw more Mages at the south. “Solving those issues would probably require a heavy investment of manpower, and ways to tempt Mages into moving South. That might be difficult. Since the shortage of manpower in the north is already noticeable, especially given the actions of the Society recently, there might not be enough manpower to move to the South in the first place, unless we want to compromise the security of the north. At the very least, I don’t think expanding the recolonization effort further than it has already spread is a good idea.”

To her surprise, the [Noble] who had asked for her opinion seemed to really think about Alice’s words, before eventually nodding. “Thank you for your advice, Lady Alice.”

After that, the conversation pivoted away from her again. Alice was more than a little surprised to hear someone mention the kinetic plates that she had spent months designing with Ezrien as her Patron, before Ethan had taken her as an apprentice. While most [Nobles] seemed dubious about its practicality right now, it was briefly tossed around as a solution to the construction Mage shortage in the south, before a few [Nobles] decided to give it a trial run and see how useful it was.

If Alice was still associated with Ezrien’s research team, she probably would have been excited, but now she felt a little weird about how quickly her position in society had changed. She didn’t have long to consider it, though. After discussing Alice’s thoughts about the Mage shortage for a bit, the second [Princess] started to discuss more practical exchanges of benefits. She explicitly brought out a list of potential benefits that she could offer in exchange for increased support for the recolonization effort, such as tax breaks starting in five years, and crown assistance with various administrative and military issues. The group’s discussion as a whole seemed to be moving towards an agreement to keep the cities and towns that had already been established, but request that the king drop support for new cities and [Baron] titles sometime within the next two years.

In a way, Alice was actually a bit surprised by how openly [Nobles] in Illvaria talked about exchanging benefits and assistance with projects. Given the stories she had read on Earth, she had expected things to be a bit more… veiled. She had expected every word to have five meanings.

However, at least in this part of the discussion, people were quite open about what they wanted and what they were willing to offer the crown. The second [Princess] was more than happy to negotiate with them, and for the better part of half an hour, Alice almost felt like she was listening to [Merchants] haggle over prices, instead of listening to [Nobles] discuss the future of the biggest project of the country in the last seventy years.

After the conversation started to wind down to a close, the second [Princess] smiled happily. Almost two thirds of the [Nobles] who had come to the tea party had ultimately offered more support for the recolonization effort, and the second [Princess] was clearly pleased with the result.

Alice got a rather unexpected notification afterwards.

You have unlocked the class [Courtier] as a result of spending at least 20 hours learning about matters pertaining to [Noble] society, having an {Etiquette} Skill of at least 10, and attending a [Noble] event. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

You do not have any primary class slots available. Class automatically added to secondary classes.

Alice glanced at the System notification for a moment, before she shrugged.

Ultimately, she doubted she would get much use out of this Class. However, she was still happy to get it. After all, now that Alice knew the behind-the-scenes mechanics of how mana types related to Classes worked, Alice was happy to have as many Class seeds as she could possibly get her hands on. Even if Alice was pretty sure her [Willpower] would help her fend off any unwanted influence on her mind, the idea of mana warping who she was made her deeply uncomfortable. Every single Class Seed was another layer of defense against erosion of her personality, and Alice was more than happy to have as many defenses as she could in that regard. And maybe she would get a few useful Perks out of the Class someday, even if she kind of doubted it.

Then, still happy with the outcome of the tea and snacks part of the conversation, the second [Princess] declared that dancing and conversing could commence, ending the tea and conversation phase of the tea party.

Many of the [Nobles] took the opportunity to stand up and stretch their legs. Some guests moved to the side and started talking with each other, discussing various extra deals and more personal interactions. Ethan’s mother and Ethan also moved to the side to talk, with the second [Princess] accompanying them as they conversed about… something. Alice remembered that the second [Princess] had expressed interest in talking with her later, so she decided to introduce herself to a few other [Nobles] and check back on the second [Princess] later.

But before she could start moving, she was once again surprised when someone spoke to her.

“So you’re Lady Alice? Might I interest you in a dance?” asked a young man. Alice paused, swallowing a mouthful of mini-cake, before giving the young man an appraising look.

He is… [Count] Alrind’s third son, and will most likely become the [Count]’s heir, if nothing goes wrong. His name is Orin. He’s known to have a few pretty good Achievements and an above average levelling speed, and his oldest brother seems more interested in chasing women than becoming a proper heir. His second brother is mostly focused on learning to be a [Spearman], and has no interest in the title either. Alice managed to dredge up some basic information about the boy, and gave him a more curious look.

Like Alice, he was a teenager. He looked to be around eighteen years old. He also had a pretty decent Mage core, identifying him as a Mage. It was obvious he had put effort into his training, both as a Mage and a [Count]. Alice pegged his level at about fifty, which was pretty good for an average 18 year old.

Alice nodded, as she quietly hoped she didn’t trip over her feet later. Her {Etiquette} teacher had briefly shown her a few dances, but considering how much information Alice had already been trying to cram into her head in the past two weeks, she hadn’t had time to pick up a dedicated {Dancing} skill. She hoped her memory, and the small dancing boost {Etiquette} gave her, would be enough. “I would be honored.”

Orin quickly led her to the dance floor as the next song started. Alice dreaded the feeling of clumsily trying to follow the movements of the dance. She heard the first few musical notes start to drift throughout the hall, and felt a breath of relief as she realized it was one of the dances her {Etiquette} teacher had mimed for her.

The {Etiquette} skill began to feed Alice some basic information on how the next dance began. It was a slower song, and Alice realized that her dancing partner had been more considerate of her potentially low {Dancing} skill than she had thought. It was clearly a song meant to be easier to handle, with low enough skill requirements that an {Etiquette} skill would be able to keep up with the song without too much strain. Alice could also see that Orin’s Perks seemed to make it easy for him to guide her during the dance. It was subtle, but by placing his feet in certain positions, he was able to guide Alice through the dance, even though she only somewhat remembered the steps.

She was also surprised by how firm her feet were when she tried to move. When Alice had first arrived in this world, most of her physical Stats had been below 50. Now, most of her physical Stats were hovering around 120, and she had percentage multipliers kicking them up to around 150. She suddenly realized that it was hundreds of times easier to keep up with the rhythm of music than it had been back on Earth. Instead of desperately trying not to trip, Alice found herself quickly and easily settling into the rhythm of the music. It was almost like she had been learning to dance for several weeks now: even if there was still an obvious skill gap between herself and the high-level [Nobles], it wasn’t to the point where Alice was embarrassing herself.

“So you’re learning under Honored Immortal Ethan? What’s it like?” asked Orin, breaching the strange silence that had fallen over the two as Alice got lost in her thoughts. Alice was surprised to hear a trace of true curiosity in his tone.

“It’s… interesting. Honored Immortal Ethan has spent a fair amount of time trying to teach me what I would need to know if I successfully ascend to Immortality, and providing me with resources, should I need anything to enhance my learning speed or make the most of my Perks,” said Alice. “It is sometimes frustrating, to be forced to justify and explain every action I take, but I appreciate the amount of work Ethan is putting into ensuring that I make the best of each minute, and teaching me how to handle the consequences of my actions. If I become an Immortal, such skills will be invaluable”

Orin chuckled. “Honored Immortal Ethan would not put so much effort into ensuring you were ready for Immortality unless he felt that you were truly likely to reach it, Lady Alice. I’m sure that Honored Immortal works so hard to teach you because he sees great promise in you.”

Alice simply nodded, not quite sure whether Orin was simply flattering her or meant what he said. This was a little bit more of what she had been expecting from [Nobles], rather than the [Merchant]-like haggling earlier. Words that made her think twice, compliments that might or might not be empty, and words she needed consider carefully.

She smiled at the thought, a little amused by where her train of thought had taken her.

“I certainly hope to reach Immortality in the future. However, many people have struggled to reach Immortality in their lifetime, and plenty of them have failed before reaching their destination. I won’t be presumptuous and say that I’ll definitely reach it until I actually reach Immortality,” said Alice.

Orin considered her words for a moment, and then smiled. Alice wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but this smile seemed a little more genuine than some of the other practiced grins he had flashed at her during the dance. “Plenty of Ethan’s apprentices have failed to reach Immortality, but most of them still ended up as exceptionally high level Mages. And it sounds like he is putting a great deal of emphasis on your training. Your odds seem to be much better than you might think.” Then, he paused, as if searching for a conversation topic. “So what did you do before you were apprenticed to Immortal Ethan? Is it too presumptuous of me to ask? I’ve heard that you went through a mana baptism…”

Alice nodded. “I underwent a baptism mostly by accident, honestly. I ran into a clump of broken mana that was too dense for my body to handle, and I managed to walk out of it as a Mage. I was lucky.”

Orin winced. “I’ve heard the survival odds are much worse for broken mana baptisms. And that they’re much more painful.”

“Is that so?” asked Alice, genuinely curious. She had never heard that broken mana baptisms were more painful than regular baptisms. Then again, broken mana baptisms were a somewhat neglected field of study, since most people went through normal mana baptisms instead of broken mana baptisms.

After that, Orin started asking about more facets of Alice’s life. Putting all of her {Etiquette} to the test, Alice managed to deflect any questions about her life before Cyra, since directly lying might have tripped a lie-detection Perk, and talking about Earth was a poor decision. However, she was more than happy to chat about some of the more interesting things she had seen and experienced in Cyra, as well as her time at her Magic Academy. She was a little surprised to hear that Orin was also a student at a magic academy, although the academy he was attending was instead focused on the military.

After a few minutes of chatting, the song ended, and Alice was surprised to see that she had gained the {Dancing} skill and raised it to level 3. However, she grinned to herself.

She had survived her first personal conversation with a [Noble]. It seemed more like a simply case of someone trying to get to know her, likely due to her status as [Ethan]’s apprentice, but she was glad that she hadn’t completely botched the whole thing.

Perhaps attending this party wasn’t as bad as she had thought it would be.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – You can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon for $3! We just started Volume 3 over there!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 123

After Orin, several more [Nobles] came to dance with Alice. Most of them were male [Nobles] around her age, which made Alice a little uncertain whether any of them were trying to ‘get to know’ a future Immortal in a more intimate way than she was comfortable with. Alice wasn’t particularly interested in romance, so she had always been rather oblivious to it, both on Earth and on Luliv.

However, there were a few girls as well, and even an old lady came up to dance with her around seven dances in. All of them were happy to chat with Alice, asking her questions about her past, her abilities, her interests, and her hobbies. Alice deflected the more sensitive questions, but otherwise did her best to chat amiably with each dance partner. Eventually, Alice was relieved to realize that she had been overthinking things. In Illvaria, Alice was starting to get the distinct impression that ‘dancing’ was more of an excuse to lightly chat with the other party in a one on one setting with some musical accompaniment. It was a bit different from how {Dancing} was treated back on Earth, but was easy enough to adjust to, once Alice started picking up the cultural difference.

Of course, Alice was also a little annoyed that her {Etiquette} [Teacher] hadn’t mentioned the cultural differences between how dancing was treated here and how dancing was treated on Earth. This annoyance disappeared once Alice realized that her [Teacher] had absolutely no way of realizing how people regarded {Dancing} on Earth. After all, her {Etiquette} teacher had probably never heard of Earth.

Ethan might have been able to walk her through the cultural differences between her homeland and Illvaria, but it wasn’t a topic that had ever come up during a discussion between the two. After all, Alice didn’t really like {Dancing} much, and Ethan had also seemed rather indifferent to it. Thus, both of them seemed to have simply never discussed the cultural connotations of {Dancing}.

Alice ended up {Dancing} with several people and raising her {Dancing} skill to level 6, before she decided to check on the [Princess] again. Even if she didn’t make any lifetime friends, she had already showed that she was amenable to making friends with [Nobles] and made a few acquaintances. At the very least, they would probably be happy to share news and trade goods with Alice in the future, especially if she became an Immortal. Which was all that Alice was really hoping to get out of this tea party: a network she could tap into to get news and materials for experiments in the future.

When she returned to the tea-party table, she was pleased to see that the second [Princess] was now free to talk with her. Ethan and his mother were talking with a few other [Nobles] to the side. They were protected from eavesdropping by some sort of Perk, but Alice recognized the [Nobles] who were chatting. They were the ones who had been talking about building another magic academy. Apparently, Ethan and Ethan’s mother also had some sort of stake in the construction of a magic academy, and so they had been happy to join the discussion.

The second [Princess] gave Alice a friendly nod as Alice took her seat at the table again. “Lady Alice, I’m glad that you found time to return and have a conversation with me. I’ve heard much about you, especially from Ethan’s words. Have you enjoyed the music and {Dancing}?”

Alice hesitated, before simply nodding. Even if Alice did wish that there had been less {Dancing} at the tea party, it hadn’t been as bad as she had feared.

The second [Princess] smiled more deeply.

“I’m quite honored to see two and a half Immortals at my tea party,” said the second Princess, this time chuckling. “Even if you haven’t reached Immortality yet, if I’m to believe Ethan’s words, your ascension to Immortality is practically guaranteed. Three Immortals attending my tea party is… quite incredible,” said the second [Princess].

Alice realized the second [Princess] was trying hard to flatter her. Alice resisted the urge to frown. She wasn’t… used to people flattering her. It felt very odd. Alice also saw several chunks of rainbow mana appear near the second [Princess]’s eyes, and then saw several more chunks of rainbow mana appear around Alice’s own body.

She guessed that the second [Princess]’s Perks were probably meant to feed her lots of information about Alice. Perhaps they were like Cecilia’s [Merchant] Perks, except more socially focused. While Cecilia’s [Merchant] Perks gave her information about things like what a customer wanted to buy and how much money they were willing to pay, a [Princess] probably needed to detect how other people felt about her social and political positions, and things like that.

Alice hesitated for a moment, then used {The Science of Mana Deprivation} to cut off the Perks before they could interact with her. Even if she was fairly certain the [Princess] didn’t mean to harm her, Alice still felt that it was best to keep her cards as close to her chest as she could in social settings. Alice also felt that appearing more mysterious was probably good for her image as an Immortal in training. As far as she was aware, blocking Perks was basically unheard of. Since she was already known as a promising potential Immortal, it would be normal for her to have a few unique abilities. And she also didn’t know exactly what the [Princess]’s Perks were supposed to do. Even if Alice was pretty sure the System wouldn’t let anyone access mind-control, since the error messages she had seen recently outright stated they were banned, she still didn’t want unknown Perks interacting with her if she could avoid it.

The second [Princess]’s eyes widened slightly as Alice prevented her Perks from working, although Alice didn’t see any other cracks in the woman’s composure. However, considering how composed the [Princess] had been during the rest of the tea party, Alice could tell that she had startled her.

A few moments later, the second [Princess] recovered her composure. When she looked at Alice, there was a much greater level of interest than before. If previously, she had looked at Alice as if she was a somewhat interesting trade partner, now it almost looked like the [Princess] wanted to swallow Alice whole. The look that the second [Princess] was giving Alice made her a little uncomfortable.

“Ethan described you as a rather interesting disciple. I had thought that he was exaggerating. I see that he was, if anything, understating things.” The second [Princess]’s eyes glittered with interest. “Hmm… Ethan did state that you might eventually fix mana baptisms too, didn’t he? After he realized how silly it would be to keep claiming you’re combat-focused, anyway. I do wonder how you could… hmm…” The second [Princess] trailed off into thought as she stared at Alice, and her eyes lit up. “Oh, things will certainly be interesting in the future. If it isn’t too rude of me to ask, Lady Alice, may I ask you what level your primary class is? I don’t expect any further details, of course, but I simply find you fascinating.”

Alice thought about it for a moment, before deciding that it wasn’t a bad idea to answer the question honestly. There were probably other learning and levelling resources that the Illvarian crown had that she could make use of in the future, if she showed enough potential. She also doubted anyone in Illvaria would take hostile action against her, unless they were sure they wouldn’t get caught. The social network and political power of Immortals seemed firmly entrenched in Illvarian culture, and so outright opposing Alice was unlikely as long as she was under Ethan’s protection and didn’t get in the way of anyone else’s ambitions. With that in mind, showing that she had more value was more beneficial than problematic for her.

“I’m level 75 in my primary class,” said Alice. “I just reached that point a week or two ago.”

“Already? How old are you?” asked the second [Princess], seeming surprised by Alice’s statement.

“Physically, I’m sixteen,” said Alice. “Chronologically, I’ll turn seventeen in around four months, I think? I’ve lost track of months a bit, but my birthday is a bit after winter ends, and we’re just creeping up on winter now. I have no idea how close I am to physically turning seventeen, though. I’ve levelled up a lot in the past year.”

“Your chronological and physical age are the same?” asked the [Princess]. “I had assumed that you would have at least levelled up reasonably quickly, even before becoming a Mage.”

“I’ve found that my levelling speed has increased quite drastically since I became a Mage,” said Alice dryly. “Magic aligns well with my passions, and I find that being interested in what I do does wonders for my levelling speed.”

The [Princess] seemed to consider Alice’s words for a moment, before she nodded. “Indeed, that makes sense. Reaching Immortality requires a certain level of Achievements and a great deal of time and effort to reach the levels required. If one doesn’t derive joy from their actions, it would be much harder to invest that time and energy into the subject. Fair enough,” said the second [Princess]. “In a sense, that’s actually more impressive: you managed to reach level 75 in a Class within only a year or so of getting a mana baptism. I assume your primary class is magic related?”

Alice hesitated, and then opted not to say anything. There was a difference between showing that she had promise and showing people the best ways to deal with her if they had malicious intentions towards her. Discussing her Class composition crossed that line.

The second [Princess] nodded thoughtfully. “My apologies, that was probably too much to ask. Ethan’s last round of disciples was before I was born, so my curiosity got the better of me. I shouldn’t have asked.”

The second [Princess] paused for a moment, before taking a sip of tea, and a bite of mini-cake. Then, she frowned. “How is your research with mana baptisms going? I’ve heard that there have been hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, of attempts to help people survive mana baptisms in the past. [Organic Mages] have tried practically everything imaginable, from removing the mana in the environment from patients once their body seems overstressed, to using various mixtures of organic mana and healing mana to assist the body during the transformation, to strictly controlling the kinds of mana used during a mana baptism. None of them have succeeded. What’s different about your research? Are you producing any results?”

Alice was starting to feel a little edgy around the second [Princess]. She was pushing for details in a way none of the other people she had talked with during the dance had. Most of the other guests she had interacted with had been pretty happy to pull back in the conversation whenever Alice hinted that she was uncomfortable: they had been curious and friendly, but not pushy. The second [Princess] was definitely leaning a little bit more into the pushy side of things.

“Hmm… I’ve been investigating a lot about how a natural mana baptism works. I’ve discovered a lot of things that I don’t believe others were aware of, which are crucial to the process of undergoing a mana baptism. While some of the things I’ve found while observing mana baptisms have likely been known to others in the past, I intend to interact with them in more… meaningful ways. I also have some ideas about trying to prepare people in advance for mana baptisms, thus reducing the strain on the body. Although that idea is a little more sketchy,” said Alice, after thinking for a moment. Naturally, the most important aspect of Alice’s research into mana baptisms was figuring out what the System was doing and then improving it, but she couldn’t mention that part to the [Princess]. She still felt that exposing a hint that her research was going well and was likely to produce results was beneficial to her. However, she wanted to keep most of the details vague.

“Is that so? Hmm…” The second [Princess] thought for a while longer, before she turned to Alice. “Out of curiosity, Alice, what do you think of me?”

“Hmm?” Alice blanked out at the second [Princess]’s question. “What do you mean? I don’t understand your question.”

“What is your impression of me as a [Princess]? Especially in comparison to my siblings?” Asked the second [Princess].

Alice finally figured out what the second [Princess] was hinting at.

The second [Princess] was asking for Alice’s evaluation of where the second [Princess] stood in comparison to her siblings. Once she had the context, she realized the second [Princess] was… probably asking about Alice’s thoughts on supporting a bid for the throne. Or at least something of the sort. Alice wasn’t adept at political maneuvering, but once the second [Princess] mentioned her siblings, she figured out what the second [Princess] was hinting at.

Which left Alice feeling a little dumbfounded.

She could recite a few useful facts about everyone’s territory, and maybe a few details of their personal life, but if she were asked to write down everything she knew about a [Noble] or member of the royal family, she wouldn’t have been able to write more than a page or two for each person. There was only so much information she could cram into her head in a limited amount of time, even with {Sleep Reading} and perfect memory.

Being asked who she supported as the next ruler was… refreshing. And odd. Especially since the king was somewhere in his late forties, at least chronologically. He was probably physically younger, since his level wasn’t outstanding, but it wasn’t mediocre, either. It seemed a bit early to start squabbling over the throne. And Alice didn’t have a very strong opinion of who should be the next ruler of Illvaria, either. She considered herself largely a bystander right now.

Alice decided that being honest was probably for the best right now.

“I’ll admit, I’m not very interested in politics,” said Alice. “I don’t know much about you or your siblings beyond what my {Etiquette} teacher taught me. Based on the fact that you organized this tea party, I gather that you’re in favor of expanding the recolonization effort, which is about all I know. And in all honesty, I’m quite driven towards pursuing my interests. I don’t spend much time away from my research.”

“I see,” said the second [Princess], giving Alice a guarded, thoughtful look. Then, the second [Princess] sighed. “I suppose that makes sense, Lady Alice. My apologies. Perhaps I was too forward in asking for your opinion.”

Alice opted to nod.

A few moments later, Ethan slid into the chair near Alice. Alice glanced to the side, and saw that the discussion Ethan and his mother had been having with the other Illvarian [Nobles] had ended, and Ethan’s mother was now happily spinning around on the dance floor by herself. She was incredibly graceful, and Alice was pretty sure she could see a few [Dancer] Perks activating in the woman’s arms and abdominal muscles. A few moments later, Ethan’s mother was joined by another [Noblewoman], and the two happily began twirling around.

“Second [Princess],” said Ethan, giving the [Princess] a respectful nod and redirecting Alice’s attention back towards the conversation.

“Honored Immortal,” said the second [Princess]. “I was just discussing things with your apprentice.”

“Things?” asked Ethan, giving Alice a curious look.

“The second [Princess] was asking me about my thoughts on her,” said Alice.

Ethan’s eyes narrowed slightly, and he shook his head. “Second [Princess], I intend for my disciple to dip her toe into politics, so to speak, at this party. However, her primary focus is currently on reaching Immortality. I ask that you not bring this up with her until she is an Immortal. I don’t want her to get distracted too much. Learning to navigate politics is valuable because she will eventually need this skill, but it’s not her priority.”

The second [Princess] simply nodded, seeming a little absent-minded as she agreed.

“What about you, Honored Immortal? What do you think of me, in comparison to my siblings?”

“I think the [King] is quite young, and it’s too early to think about this,” said Ethan. “He’s wearing some armor made by Doll, and while it’s getting a bit old, it’s still an excellent piece of work. The [King] is around level 60, if I’m not mistaken, and he still has quite a long life ahead of him. And he’s protected enough that assassinating him would be quite difficult.”

The second [Princess] looked almost like a kid who had been caught eating cookies out of a cookie jar, and the expression felt so bizarrely out of place to Alice that she nearly laughed. Suddenly, the conversation she had with the [Princess] seemed less uncomfortable than before.

Ethan and the second [Princess] started talking about the recolonization effort, and Alice made some effort to occasionally interject into the conversation from time to time. She saw other [Nobles] look at her and give her friendly nods from time to time, which made Alice relax a little bit. Her job today was to make herself known, show that she was someone to be remembered in her own right, and show that she was well-regarded by Ethan. She was pretty sure she had accomplished all of those things. Considering how disinterested Alice was in politics, she felt that her debut in [Noble] society had gone quite well.

As Alice thought about the results of the night, Ethan and the second [Princess] finished their discussion.

Afterwards, the second [Princess] smiled, and stood up, before a few Perks activated, and carried her voice to the other [Guests].

“I thank all of you for coming tonight. I do appreciate the efforts all of you have made in coming here and chatting about the recolonization effort with me. I also hope that you’ve gained useful connections and made good connections with the other people here tonight. You are free to stay as long as you like and enjoy the tea, dances, and music, but I will be retiring for the rest of the night,” said the second [Princess], bringing an end to the ‘official’ part of the tea party.

Alice eyed Ethan, who simply scanned the other guests one final time, before he shrugged.

“I think it’s about time for us to go as well,” said Ethan. “You still wanted to see the Artifact, right? Let’s do that, and then head back to the manor.”

Alice nodded. It was time for the part of the day she had been looking forward to the most.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on patreon! Volume 2 is finished there, and we’re a bit into volume 3!

Chapter 124

Ethan started leading Alice back into the palace, leaving behind Ethan’s mother and some of the [Nobles] who wanted to continue socializing.

“My apologies for the second [Princess],” said Ethan, as the two stepped back into the palace. “I didn’t expect her to be so… enthusiastic.”

Alice didn’t know what to say, so she simply looked at Ethan, wondering if he would say anything more on the topic.

Ethan sighed. “She wasn’t a bad kid when she was younger, but she’s spent a lot of time trying to grow up in the shadow of her older sister, the first [Princess]. The first [Princess] is… well, she’s rather special. Some people speculate that she’s a higher level than the current [King], although I don’t know if that’s true or not. But she’s very likely to be the next [Queen

“The two [Princes] have pretty much moved on, and gave up on the throne completely. One of them is learning to be a [Swordsman], and learning under one of the trusted subordinates of my father. The other one is pretty interested in finances, so he’s learning under the [Minister of Finance].

“The second [Princess] is the only member of the royal family who hasn’t given up hope for the crown. But, the problem is that she’s not very promising compared to the first [Princess]. So she always seems a bit desperate to find ways to compete with her sister, but she doesn’t quite have the skill to follow through with them.

“Of course, the current [King] still gives the second [Princess] opportunities to learn and grow, by using things like the tea party we just attended. I personally suspect that he feels it’s important to maintain some competition between the two sisters. After all, if the first [Princess] knows that she could lose the crown, she’ll be more motivated to work hard. But at the same time, the second [Princess] is given notably worse opportunities, because she’s just so far behind and so much less talented. Since there were two Immortals at this tea party, I think she saw it as her big chance to finally get ahead.” Ethan sighed.

Alice started feeling a little bad for the second [Princess]. She hadn’t enjoyed being put on the spot, but being kept around just to motivate your older sister to work harder felt… a little sad, in a way.

“Well, you didn’t agree to help her with anything, so it’s not too big of a deal. And in the future, while I doubt most [Nobles] will be quite so brazen or quick about trying to get your support, I still think it’s a valuable lesson in looking at what [Nobles] want and thinking about how to deal with it. Whether you help them, or try to avoid them, or try to stop them from progressing, knowing how to think like a [Noble] is critical.”

Alice sighed, and nodded. The second [Princess] pressuring her hadn’t been pleasant, but it hadn’t been a big deal. Her {Etiquette} lessons hadn’t covered the situation of the royal family in much detail, instead opting to treat the entire family as a more cohesive political unit and focus on greater internal issues than the struggle for the crown. After all, the ‘struggle’ for the crown seemed to already be over…

Alice and Ethan fell into a comfortable silence as Ethan led her through the corridors of the palace.

The two of them quickly reached a few more well-guarded chunks of the palace. The [Guards] there simply nodded at them and let them proceed unhindered. Alice put aside thoughts of the second [Princess], and felt excitement build up as she walked down the corridors. She was going to see an artifact for the first time! Since she hadn’t seen one up close yet, she couldn’t help but imagine what the exact mechanics of an artifact were. Even if Alice wasn’t quite as devoted to her enchantments as to her research, she still liked enchanting.

Soon, the two came to a heavily guarded flight of stairs, before they started to proceed downwards. Several parts of the stairs were incredibly reinforced and narrow, and Alice could see various enchantments embedded in the walls that could launch objects at intruders, flash-fry them with electricity or heat, and even a few that could warp the flesh of any intruders using organic magic. Alice had never seen so many enchantments dedicated to killing people crammed together into such a small area.

After rows of deadly enchantments, high-level [Guards], and several [Warmages], the two finally reached the basement where the artifact itself was housed.

The closer Alice was to the artifact, the more she was aware of a cloud of concepts in the air around her. All of them seemed to be generated by the artifact in front of her.

Artifacts seemed to be quite a bit different than other enchantments. Traditional enchantments and consumable enchantments were both centered around giving instructions to items, and then using monster cores as batteries. System enchantments seemed to be built around using System mana to temporarily enhance the Stats of the user. However, Artifacts looked as if it had taken all of these ideas and developed them in a very different direction, along with a few things Alice had never previously associated with enchanting at all.

Alice felt her grin grow wider and wider as she realized that there was something very interesting to learn here.

Alice had recently spent several days ruminating on the nature of mana and magic seeds, as well as how they interacted with the human body, after her experiments on the nature of class seeds. She had been looking for ideas on where to take some of her future experiments.

The Artifact in front of her eyes wasn’t a set of instructions fed into some magical materials with a battery to power the whole thing, and nor was it a clump of system mana embedded in an object.

The Artifact’s ‘primary’ material seemed to be a set of artificial magic seeds. Alice had never seen a magic seed outside of someone’s body before. However, the way the artificial magic seed was constructed was somewhat reminiscent of a Class seed.

Alice suddenly realized that enchanting and her research might not be quite as separated from each other as she had first assumed. Right in front of her eyes was proof that enchantments could, at their core, create something akin to the Class seeds she had spent so many months researching.

This artifact had two major artificial magic seeds: one was related to water, and the other was related to dirt. This was probably how it managed and controlled the river system of southern Illvaria. Interestingly enough, the Artifact actually had several tendrils of magic that extended out of the room and into the distance. However, these tendrils were made partially of System mana, and the System-mana bits seemed to be responsible for relaying information both to and from the artifact. It seemed as if the Artifact used the artificial magic seeds to actually provide most of the core abilities of the Artifact, but used System mana as something like a code for the enchantment. It was a new and interesting method of using System mana in an enchantment, and seeing it gave Alice a few new directions to take her future experiments. There were a few other magic seeds as well, but they were much smaller, and seemed to be built to help the two primary magic seeds of the artifact do their job.

Just as Alice was eagerly scanning the Artifact in front of her eyes, something changed.

It was subtle, at first: something that Alice didn’t quite notice, since she was lost in her thoughts and her study of the artifact.

However, as the effects grew more and more obvious, Alice finally stopped, and then started gazing at her surroundings in shock.

For months now, Alice had grown increasingly used to the presence of System mana in her surroundings. She didn’t even register some of the minor fluctuations in System mana in her surroundings these days, since she had grown accustomed to the System doing things in the background every second of every day. However, Alice now sat fully at attention, watching her surroundings with growing horror.

The System mana was beginning to disappear from her surroundings. Slowly at first, but with increasing speed, bits and pieces of the System mana in the air around her began to flicker in and out of existence, like a lightbulb attached to a faulty wire.

A few minutes passed, as the System mana became increasingly erratic, before it snapped out of existence entirely.

* * *

Somewhere far to the North, an Immortal and a man made partially of metal deactivated a final set of traps, before they stepped into the final room in the facility they had been searching through. It had taken them months to work their way through the mazes of corridors of traps. Even more annoying, the Immortal had realized that he had accidentally let in some monsters at some point while he was breaking in. It wasn’t a big deal to him: after all, they weren’t a real threat to him, and he didn’t really rely on the enchantments inside this facility for anything anymore. He had basically learned how to survive on his own this point, so he wasn’t too worried about whether the facility collapsed tomorrow or not. However, the monsters that continuously tried to eat him as he and his servant travelled through the massive enchantment were truly beginning to annoy him.

Nonetheless, despite all of the hurdles and interruptions, he had made his way through the ridiculously extensive defenses of the facility. Now, he stood in an interesting room. One which, as far as he knew, nobody else in this world had ever laid eyes on.

Dimensional mana oozed in and out of the room, like a giant, beating purple heart. Hidden by layer upon layer of other types of mana, a giant tunnel of mana stretched out from the heart of the massive underground building. It almost seemed as if the tunnel of dimensional mana was a black hole, and inside of it was limitless mana. And all of it was concentrated in a very specific direction, almost like a tunnel.

The Immortal looked at the funnel of dimensional mana, his lips quirked into a strange grin as he studied the unique mana formation in front of his eyes.

The mana structure in front of him was truly fascinating. He could probably spend years studying it, and he would be able to learn all sorts of new things just by looking at it. For a moment, he was tempted to simply fall into a {Working Trance} for a few months or years and study the dimensional mana that lay in front of him.

Opportunities to study new and interesting things were rare these days.

Then, he sighed. If he could afford to spend years studying the funnel of dimensional mana, he would have loved to do so. However, he just didn’t have time. The funnel of dimensional mana needed to be cut off now. It was too dangerous to be left alone.

He reached into his storage Perk. He pulled out a pair of golden scissors.

The scissors shimmered with rainbow mana, and had dozens of artificial magic seeds intertwined into it. Even among Immortals who specialized in enchanting, this pair of scissors would have been considered a work of art. It was a legendary artifact that kingdoms might fight over. The Immortal felt a twinge of pride as he looked at his greatest creation, and then turned back to the funnel of dimensional mana. If it continued to exist, he would inevitably die. After all, he also lived on this world, and as strong as he was, there was no way he could possibly survive the aftermath of two dimensions colliding. If the two dimensions finished colliding, the planet he was currently standing on and that mysterious other planet would likely teleport directly into each other, killing all residents of both planets on the spot. While a few people might get lucky and survive the occurrence, he didn’t want to chance it.

Therefore, he had chosen a different route to survival. The most dangerous parts of his plan had been carried out, and he only had one final step to take.

The man nodded, eyed the funnel of dimensional mana, and then took one final look at the pair of golden scissors.

Then, he threaded his fingers through the golden scissors, making absolutely sure that his fingers were properly hooked through the loops in the metal. If his fingers weren’t properly placed, using the scissors might kill him.

Then, he gently extended the scissors towards the funnel of dimensional mana. He snapped the scissors shut.

The connection between two worlds suddenly collapsed. The two dimensions would still be ‘near’ each other for a while, meaning that dimensional floods and the like would still occasionally appear. However, the two dimensions were no longer drifting towards each other: instead, they were now drifting away from each other. In a strange way, the Immortal had saved the inhabitants of both dimensions from their impending death, even if it was for entirely selfish reasons.

And somewhere else, in a place that most people would have gone mad if they witnessed someone died.

A small price to pay for his own survival, at least in the eyes of the Immortal.

The Immortal smiled to himself.

“Done.” He said.

He glanced at the giant components of the massive enchantment that he had ruined, and then sighed. Now that there was no longer an impending threat of death looming over his head, he felt much more relaxed.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hang around and study this area for a while? He could probably fend off the waves of monsters easily enough, especially with the help of his assistant.

It was what the assistant had been designed to do, after all.

He looked at the monsters who were starting to breed in the facility, and wondered if he should try clearing them out.

And then, he shrugged.

“Not my problem,” he said. His entire purpose was already fulfilled.

Instead, he started happily investigating the incredibly complex enchantment in the room, completely uninterested in the consequences of his actions.

In the corner of the room, a destabilized funnel of dimensional mana grew smaller and smaller, as it withered away and collapsed.

* * *

In a base belonging to the Society of Starry Eyes, an Immortal heard several enchantments start rattling. Immediately, he put away the papers he was looking at and focused on the rattling instrument.

“Another dimensional flood?” He said to himself, frowning. However, the enchantment didn’t seem to be spitting out a location. Perhaps it wasn’t working correctly yet?

He had spent a great deal of time hiring a group of [Enchanters] through the Society’s connections in the Sigmusi Empire, but studies of dimensional mana were simply too rare these days. Thus, the instruments built to detect dimensional floods were prototypes, and very much prone to issues sometimes. However, he could have sworn that this model was fairly issue-free. At least so far, they hadn’t seemed to make the same errors previous models had made. He frowned trying to figure out what was happening.

After looking over the enchanted item, his confusion deepened. As far as he could tell, the instrument had faithfully recorded a massive change in the dimensional mana of this world. However, it couldn’t detect any specific location, and it also didn’t detect any dimensional floods.

He checked a few duplicates of the enchantment, to see if it was an issue with the instrument. But all of the other items gave the same reading.

Something very strange was happening. He left his study, and glanced at the two Mages tinkering with a few items in the next room.

“Esma,” he said, addressing the closest Mage. “Send a message to the other four heads of the Society, would you? Something very unusual is being picked up by the analysis devices. All of them are reacting as if a giant dimensional tunnel is about to rip open the world at any moment. However, there aren’t any locations. Something weird is happening. Tell them it’s urgent, and to come to my research room immediately.” As he said it, his heart tightened.

For decades, the Society of Starry Eyes had been founded for the explicit purpose of preventing the end of the world. In order to make sure that the world didn’t end, he had done horrible, horrible things. He had kidnapped innocent people and experimented on them. He had accepted criminals and psychopaths into the Society of Starry Eyes, all for the purpose of boosting the manpower of the organization. Every single step of the way, he had taken more and more extreme actions in order to make sure that the ultimate end of this world never happened.

For the first time, he had a worrying thought.

What if it wasn’t enough? He had no idea what to make of the dimensional reading he had just found, which might mean that, despite all of his efforts, he was about to fail.

What if, even after throwing away his morals, it still wasn’t enough to save the world?

He gritted his teeth. Now that word had been sent to the others who helped him run the organization, they would figure out a solution. Something had just happened, and he had no idea what it was or how to deal with it. But the five of them together would find a way.

He sighed, and returned to his office.

He picked up the sheaf of papers he had been looking at, and shook his head.

Inside, there was a list of anomalies that had been recorded in the last year.

The increasing amount of dimensional anomalies this year was listed. The increasing failure rate of mana baptisms was also listed, as well as the strange case of more and more children gaining access to their status screen early and then exhibiting all sorts of bizarre behavior. He hadn’t paid as much attention to the last issue, since the dimensional floods seemed far more pressing of a concern, but he had still made an effort to gather information about the subject.

Finally, there was a list of other [Scholars] and Mages who seemed to have been investigating topics relevant to the studies of the Society of Starry Eyes.

There were perhaps eighty people listed here. After all, the strange status screens and lower survival rates for mana baptisms was something that affected the future of every country. While some countries hadn’t quite realized the implications yet, plenty of countries in the world had already started to put together teams of researchers to investigate what was happening. People weren’t placing a huge emphasis on the topic yet, but they would probably place more and more focus on the situation once it became clear how dire it truly was.

Unfortunately, most of the researchers on the list were out of reach for the Society. Plenty of other nations made a habit of raiding Society bases and stealing the information within, but the Society had a hard time retaliating, since their greatest defense was being hard to find. Even though the Society sometimes took more visible actions, they only did so when something truly critical for their research appeared.

While the Society could certainly use most of the research notes the eighty or so researchers had made, none of them were vital enough to risk losing powerful subordinates in exchange. Things weren’t that desperate yet.

Probably.

The Immortal thought of the dimensional floods they had been seeing all year, as well as the strange readings all of his dimensional instruments had just picked up. Then, he gritted his teeth.

Perhaps he hadn’t been taking extreme enough actions recently. That was why he had been blindsided by the strange occurrence a few minutes ago. He needed to stop worrying so much about preserving his organization, and focus more on doing what needed to be done. Regardless of the cost, he was going to make sure that the world didn’t end.

He scanned the files again, looking through the names and information about the countries that the Society was most active in.

He started organizing the files by how easy it would be to steal research notes from each one, as well as how feasible it was to kidnap the researcher in question and force them to work for the Society.

Plenty of the researchers were hard or impossible to target. They were too strong to fight without a large squad of powerful fighters, or their location was hard to verify, or the Society simply didn’t have an active enough presence in the area where they lived to make kidnapping or stealing feasible. However, there were some potential targets that were more promising. Some researchers, for example, weren’t particularly strong on their own, but were instead protected by strong people. This was a much better potential target: after all, if the strong protector could be lured away or distracted, stealing the researcher and their notes would be surprisingly easy afterwards.

Normally, the Immortal wouldn’t have resorted to such measures. Kidnapping someone and forcing them to work for the Society was often difficult, and so unless they had a particularly exploitable weakness or weak morals, he wouldn’t bother trying to kidnap them. The payoff simply wasn’t worth the risk.

However, the strange dimensional reading made him truly afraid that all of his hard work and decisions for the past decades would be in vain.

If he didn’t take some risks, perhaps the world would end. Not in a decade, not in a century, not in some far-off future.

Perhaps this dimension would collide with the other dimension tomorrow, killing the residents of this world and ending any hope they had of saving the world.

Something had to be done. Even if it was risky and might backfire, he needed to move as soon as possible.

He found several potentially promising targets to steal from or kidnap, and then awaited the other powerful members of the Society of Starry Eyes.

Among the several targets whose files he had set aside, one of them was the picture of a sixteen-year old girl by the name of Alice Verianna.

A note from acaswell

And that’s the final chapter of Volume 2: The Society of Starry Eyes.

Yay!

Somehow both volumes are exactly 62 chapters long. Which is kind of amusing. I did not expect them to be exactly the same length, but this was the final plot point I wanted to hit for volume 2. So… they’re equal, I guess? Which is kind of neat.

Volume 3 starts next week. I would be highly amused if it was also exactly 62 chapters long, though I doubt it will line up so neatly, numbers-wise.

Join my Discord!

Shameless plug: You can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Chapter 125

Illa, retired [Warmage], leader of the town of Cyra, and former mentor of a certain budding [Scientist] named Alice, looked at the air around her and frowned.

{Detect Danger}, a Perk from her [Warmage] Class, was very quietly ringing an alarm in the back of her mind. It wasn’t the immediate alarm that let her know she was in danger this very second, but she still felt that something wrong was happening. And sooner or later, it would impact her.

However, she couldn’t quite put her finger on what was dangerous right now. Even though her Perk was letting her know that something had changed in the world around her, Illa couldn’t quite figure out what was different.

At first, she thought that another group of [Assassins] from the Sigmusi Colonia had come to kill her. While she had thought that most of the [Assassins] and [Spies] in southern Illvaria had been removed by Allira near the beginning of Spring, it was entirely possible that the Sigmusi Colonia had sent a new group of [Assassins] to deal with her. A level 75 or above combat-ready Mage leading one of the towns in the South was a great look for the crown, since it showed just how much potential the southern recolonization effort had for Illvaria as a whole. Naturally, the Sigmusi found her especially problematic because of that, and were more than happy to assassinate her anytime they found an opportunity to do so.

She immediately called one of her [Servants] to send a message to her [Guards], telling them to be wary of a new assassination attempt. If the Sigumusi was insistent on sending [Assassins] her way, she would simply exterminate them all as they came.

However, after sending the [Guards] with more specialized skill sets to investigate the town, they couldn’t find any signs of suspicious activity at all.

This sent Illa into an even deeper level of worry and confusion. It was possible that they simply hadn’t picked up any signs of the [Assassins], but even so, putting her [Guards] on alert should have lessened the feeling of danger her Perk was notifying her of. After all, it was much harder to assassinate somebody who was on guard, and in the middle of a well-fortified town full of [Guards] actively trying to weed out [Assassins]. Normally, the level of danger detected by her Perk should have weakened.

She started to think that perhaps she was on the wrong track.

If there weren’t any [Assassins] sent after her…perhaps a disaster was about to befall the town of Cyra? A monster swarm could prove just as disastrous if not carefully handled. However, none of the [Scouts] had picked up any unusual activity in the woods surrounding Illvaria.

Illa hesitated for a moment, before she decided to swap out some of her enchanted items. She took off most of her [Charisma] and socially-oriented enchanted items, and put on some combat items instead. It never hurt to be prepared. However, even that didn’t ease the constant twinge of anxiety sent by her Perk. No matter what Illa did, she couldn’t quite pinpoint what was different, and that was the most frightening thing about the situation. If she didn’t know what the threat was, she couldn’t take countermeasures against it.

Illa shuffled uneasily, and for some reason, her mind drifted towards the Mage that had passed through her town quite some time ago. She thought of the rather unusual girl named Alice, who had a slight obsession with scientific experiments and learning about the world around her. At the time, most of Alice’s experiments hadn’t seemed like anything too impressive, but with her out of the box thinking, and her experiences as an {Outworlder}, the girl had brought a refreshing and interesting perspective to her experiments.

As far as she knew, Alice had been taken in by the Immortal of Spells and Seeds, Ethan, as his latest apprentice a few months ago. Clearly, her experiments had come quite far, if an Immortal had taken an interest in them.

Even though Alice probably didn’t know what was making her feel worried today, her habits and instincts as a [Warmage] had kept her alive on the battlefield dozens of times before she retired. And right now, she felt as though perhaps the young woman she had sent to Metsel just before summer started would have an idea what was happening.

Illa looked at the town of Cyra again, and felt a stab of hesitation pull at her.

She didn’t like the idea of being away from her town for an extended period of time. However, the sense of uneasiness in her heart, and the prickling warnings of future danger from her Perk, simply wouldn’t go away. Was a subtle, potentially incorrect feeling and a vague notification from her Perk worth leaving her town behind? If she went to see Alice, she would need to journey to the capital. That meant she would be spending at least a week traveling to Metsel, and another week travelling back. And that was an absolute minimum estimate: she might be away from her town for as long as a month, if she had to take some sort of follow-up action after meeting with Alice. And Alice might not have any idea at all what was wrong. If Alice had no idea how to address the problem, and Illa wasted two weeks traveling to and from the capital, she might lose any chance to address the problem. Was journeying to the capital and seeing Alice on a hunch really a good decision?

Illa gritted her teeth. The years she had spent mired in politics and the years she had spent on a battlefield warred within her mind for a brief moment, before her instincts as a former [Soldier] won out.

Moving the moment she felt something was wrong was precisely what had kept her alive during her time in the military. Even if she had no concrete evidence that Alice knew what was happening and how to address it, Illa was prone to trusting her instincts. Since the bad feeling in her heart wouldn’t go away no matter what precautions she took, and her Perk was still notifying her that she was in a bit of danger, she needed to figure out why she felt uneasy. She just had to hope that her instincts were correct again. In the worst case scenario, she could still leverage some other avenues of information she had in the capital. Even if Alice had no idea what the problem was, she wouldn’t be completely wasting her time if she headed north.

Illa quickly summoned her [Combat Maid], and her old friend.

“Ellia, let the other Mages of the town know that I’m going north. I felt something weird a few hours ago, and no matter what I do, I can’t seem to shake off the warning signals from my Perk. I can’t figure out what the problem is, so I’m going to meet with some people and see if they have any more information for me. While I’m gone, I want you to take care of the town for me.” Illa handed Ellia her personal token. “I trust you more than anyone else. If it’s a problem you can’t manage, hire a [Messenger] to get in contact with me as fast as possible. For smaller problems, handle them as you see fit.”

“Me?”

Illa didn’t hesitate for a moment as she nodded, and gave her old friend a wry grin. “I trust you the most. I know you won’t let me down.” Illa’s grin deepened. “Besides, you can handle yourself well in a fight. If someone tries to assassinate you while I’m gone, they’ll get a rather unpleasant surprise.”

The [Combat Maid] frowned, hesitating for a moment, before she sighed. “I’ll do my best to hold down the fort, my lady. Come back safely, and make sure that your trip is fruitful.”

Illa nodded, and the two started to make more specific preparations for her departure.

* * *

“Alice? Can you tell me what’s wrong?” Alice heard Ethan call from outside of her door. Unlike usual, Ethan sounded a little bit… worried.

Ethan hadn’t had a flood of reports break down the doors of the mansion yet, but Alice knew that he had found that, in the last twenty four hours, not a single person in Illvaria who had tried to go through a mana baptism had lived. And while Alice had never explicitly talked in detail about her study of the System, she hadn’t put a huge amount of effort into hiding her research from Ethan, either. He probably knew something, and with the help of his social Perks, he could probably also tell just how worried Alice was.

After all, less than a day ago, the System itself had winked out of existence. The System, which, as far as Alice could tell, was responsible for keeping most of the humans on this planet alive. It did a huge variety of critical things, such as helping people survive mana baptisms, keeping their mind being eroded by mana, and giving people the strength to resist monsters.

“Not yet,” said Alice, frowning. She took another look at her Status Screen, the very thing she had been observing for the past day. Now that the System had suddenly disappeared, it would naturally make sense for her Status Screen to also encounter some kind of problem.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 115 -> 117 (122%)

Perception: 137 -> 139 (165%)

Dexterity: 115 -> 119 (124%)

Intelligence: 167 ->169 (128%)

Endurance: 130 -> 134 (121%)

Willpower: 148 -> 150 (108%)

Charisma: 130 -> 132 (107%)

Magic: 161 -> 164 (122%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 54 -> 56

Explorer of Magic: 71 -> 75

Scholar: 54 -> 55

Scientist: 55 -> 58

Kinetic Manabinder: 41

Careful Enchanter: 27

Evolved Classes: 2

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 25

Secondary Classes: 2

Fisherwoman: 3

Student: 8

Student of Organic Magic: 11

Courtier: 0 -> 1

Perks:

Survivor Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Adrenaline Rush (Survivor 45)

Extended Organics (Survivor 50)

Enhanced Senses (Tier 2) (Survivor 55)

Explorer of Magic Perks:

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Broken Seed (Upgraded) (Explorer of Magic 35)

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 55)

Combat Seed (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 60)

Intuitive Magic Modelling (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 65)

Seeds of Ambition (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 75)

Scholar Perks:

Enhanced Memory (Scholar 5)

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Scholar of Magic (Scholar level 35)

Lesser Organic Vision (Scholar 40)

Delve into the Arcane (Scholar 50)

Sleep Reading (Tier 2) (Scholar 55)

Scientist Perks:

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

Degraded Seed Slot (Scientist 35)

For Science! (Scientist 45)

The Science of Mana Deprivation (Scientist 50)

Speed Experimentation (Tier 2) (Scientist 55)

Kinetic Mage Perks:

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision (Kinetic Manabinder 15)

Overclock (Kinetic Manabinder 20)

Kinetic Enchanting (Kinetic Manabinder 25)

Reflection (Kinetic Manabinder 30)

Kinetic Tendrils (Kinetic Manabinder 35)

Speed Analysis (Kinetic Manabinder 40)

Enchanter Perks:

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Speed Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 25)

Repurposing (Careful Enchanter level 5)

Blueprint (Careful Enchanter level 10)

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed (Careful Enchanter level 15)

Pride of a Craftswoman (Careful Enchanter 20)

Enchanter's Armory (Careful Enchanter 25)

Organic Mage Perks:

Improved Organic Manipulation (Organic Mage 5)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 100

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 7

Russian (Language Proficiency): 1

Verinthian (Language Proficiency): 0 -> 1

Basic Mathematics: 123

Intermediate Mathematics: 79

Advanced Mathematics: 19

Basic Human Biology: 38

Mana-biology: 11

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 70

Mana Control: 52

Mana Precision: 53

Kinetic Force: 51

Projectile Awareness : 32

Divided Attention: 34

Basic Enchanting: 31

Broken Mana Purification: 18

Mana Filtering: 24

Seed Formation: 19

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Dodge: 31

Etiquette: 0 -> 21

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 22

Riding: 0 -> 15

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Dancing: 0 -> 6

Magic Seed: 3/3

Kinetic Seed (145%) -> 154%

Healing mana seed (23%) -> 55% (Deactivated - you may link this to a Perk if desired!)

Electromagnetic Seed (15%)

Lesser Magic Seeds

(Base Max 25%, Achievements now apply as usual)

Display Seed (11%)

Organic Seed (68%) -> 74% (6% Exp. Comp.)

Pure Mana Seed (36%) -> 44% (8% -> 12% Exp. Comp.)

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (IV) (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

Careful Enchanter (Rarity N/A)

Capable Enchanter (Rarity: 5)

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

Scientific Discoveries (II) -> (III) (Rarity N/A)

Immortal's Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7)

However, oddly enough, Alice’s Status Screen looked quite normal. If Alice ignored the fact that System mana in her surroundings had disappeared, she wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong at all. The System mana inside of her body seemed to be working just fine. Which was a relief. If Alice’s class seeds had just suddenly turned off, she doubted she would have still been Alice within twenty four hours of the System disappearing. Her Class mana probably would have erased her mind.

Alice thought about the moment she had seen the System blink out of existence, and couldn’t help but shiver.

Moments after Alice had seen the System mana in her environment disappear, she had simply sat there, frozen in fear.

The System had been getting weaker for months. It had been growing more and more glitchy, with numerous problems beginning to arise as the System got weaker and weaker for reasons she didn’t understand.

Alice had spent the last few months wondering if the System would collapse someday, as she saw more and more weird errors start to appear in the world around her.

That being said, knowing that something might happen in the distant future was very different from seeing it happen in front of her eyes. One minute, the System was still functioning as if it were any other day. The next moment, it was as if the System had simply… disappeared into thin air.

And less than twenty four hours ago, as Alice was examining an Artifact for the first time and trying to figure out what she could do with her studies of enchantments and the System… the System had shorted out, like a lightbulb with no electricity.

Alice had a hard time imagining what life even looked like in this world without the System. She wasn’t sure what all of the changes would be, now that the System was clearly collapsing. Since the System was so integral to life on this planet, it was hard to imagine what it would look like if the System was gone.

But Alice was quite sure that it would be very bad for this world.

In the day she had spent studying her Status Screen, she had started to notice a few peculiarities that hadn’t been there before. Normally, when she tried to examine System mana, the System was... less than cooperative. Even though System mana was present in a wide variety of things, from every single Class Seed in her body to her Status Screen, it actively avoided being caught in a small space, touched by other people’s mana, or studied in any way, shape, or form. The System seemed to be actively designed to prevent other people from interacting with it or learning about it.

And now, the usual System mana reaction to Alice’s attempts to catch it and study it were seriously lacking. The mana inside of her body no longer avoided her mana tendrils if she tried to poke it, or even if she tried to toss a little display mana at it. Interestingly enough, adding display mana to her class seeds now gave her weird, nonsensical strings of binary numbers, none of which she could make heads or tails of.

At the very least, the lack of reactiveness from System mana had made identifying the types of mana present inside of System mana much easier. Alice had found several new types of mana that she intended to form magic seeds for later. However, none of Alice’s discoveries after the System collapsed seemed to lead her towards the root problem: the collapse of the System and its mana. Now that there was no rainbow mana in Alice’s surroundings, the only System mana she could find was the System mana already present in her body. This made studying the System notably harder.

Alice looked at her door, and frowned again.

She had never spoken about her studies of the System: after all, she was afraid of stepping on the toes of this world’s religion. The Church of the System worshipped the System as its god: if Alice had publicly announced that she was studying the god of one of this world’s two major religions, she suspected that she would get burned at the stake the following week. As tolerant as this world’s religion seemed to be, Alice really didn’t want to see how far she could push things.

However, that had been her mindset before the System had disappeared into thin air. If nothing was done, Alice was pretty sure the human species on this planet would be pushed to the brink of extinction within a few decades. Kingdoms would collapse as every single child in the country found themselves twisted by the class-related mana they absorbed, their body unable to handle the increasingly dangerous mana they were absorbing with every single action they took. And the of the world Mages would experience all sorts of strange problems.

She took a deep breath, thinking about the possible consequences of her next action, and then shuddered a bit, before she took in a deep breath. She had already trusted Ethan with most of her other secrets, and the Immortal who had taken her as an apprentice had never betrayed her confidence. He was more than willing to help her keep secrets when she needed them to remain secret, and had extended a great deal of help and trust towards her.

Perhaps it was time to discuss the nature of the System with Ethan, even though Alice had only discussed the full nature of her research with Cecilia, her best friend, so far.

Alice took a deep breath, to steady her nerves, and stepped out of her room. If Ethan knew about the current situation, he would be able to help her work her way through the best following actions. Alice’s research wasn’t just a personal hobby anymore, or a potential fix to obscure problems that might appear someday in the far-off future. Now, even if Alice didn’t know the solution, she had exact knowledge of what had just happened, and at least some idea how incredibly bad the situation was.

In the coming days, allies might be necessary if Alice wanted to fix whatever had just gone horribly wrong. Alice didn’t know exactly why the System had broken, or how to fix it. But if human life was to continue to thrive on this planet, fixing or replacing the System was critical. And she might need help fixing or replacing the System.

Then, she opened the door and stepped outside, preparing to talk with Ethan about her studies of the most important religious entity in the country. Even if the topic of conversation might put her in a bit of danger, if she didn’t say anything, this entire world might suffer the consequences.

A note from acaswell

So, as some of you might have noticed, I accidentally forgot to post a chapter on RR for Budding Scientist yesterday…

This is because I posted it under my other story by accident. I wrote the chapter, edited everything, and posted it, and I thought ‘wooo, all right, I’m tired, time to go to sleep!’

And then, like a silly person, I accidentally posted it in the wrong story.

XD

Sorry for the delay in being able to read the chapter. I usually double-check the chapter after it’s uploaded, but I must have been too tired yesterday and forgot.

Shameless plug – you can read up to 3 chapters ahead on Patreon for $3!

Chapter 126

“Immortal Ethan, I would like to talk about my research,” said Alice, after stepping into the hallway and making sure there were no nearby [Servants]. “I feel that it will be extremely relevant in the coming days, which is why I am willing to talk about it. However, I would also like to keep it a secret – if the Society of Starry Eyes learns about my studies, I feel that they would stop at nothing to hunt me down. And honestly, while I’m not sure what the Church of the System’s stance on this is, I think it would be best to avoid treading on their toes. Just in case.”

Ethan paused for a moment, giving Alice a curious look. Then, he solemnly nodded. “I understand. I’ll respect your wish to keep this secret.” After saying that, a shield of rainbow mana flickered into existence around the two, preventing any eavesdropping that might otherwise happen. “I’ve set up my anti-eavesdropping Perk, so you can speak freely now.”

At the back of her mind, Alice noted how easily Ethan activated his Perk. Alice also hadn’t had any real issues running her Perks, despite the fact that the System had shut down. The System collapsing clearly hadn’t stopped people from using their Perks, or looking at their Status Screen, or given everyone some sort of obvious sign that something was terribly wrong. This was both a relief and concerning. If the entire framework of the System collapsed overnight, there would probably be nothing left that ANYONE could do to save this world. Everyone would rapidly lose control of the mana inside of their class seeds, get controlled by their class-related mana, and then go nuts.

Fortunately, things like Status Screens, Classes, and Perks didn’t seem to need any ‘connection’ to the System to keep working. Of course, there might be problems with Status Screens and Perks that Alice simply hadn’t noticed yet. She hadn’t had enough time to level up or get any new Perks or Achievements since the System had shut off, and while Alice suspected that levelling up would still be fine, she had no idea how Perk selection worked behind the scenes. It was certainly something that she needed to watch out for. Of course, Alice really hoped that levelling up and gaining new Perks still worked: if it was still possible to get new Perks and levels frequently, it would make figuring out how and why the System had collapsed, and how to fix it, much easier. However, if the System as a whole shutting down caused selecting new Perks to be problematic, or made it completely impossible to select new Perks, Alice would have a much harder time finding new tools to pick apart the System and how it worked.

However, while it was a good thing that not everything had collapsed, it also made it much harder for Alice to prove that something was horribly wrong. Alice really hoped that Ethan was willing to trust her, because if he wasn’t, this might quickly become a massive headache.

“As you already know, I’m fairly oriented towards research. Most of my Perks are related to research, I have quite a number of research classes, and most of my notable Achievements are related to research.”

“Indeed,” said Ethan, giving her a simple word of acknowledgement. He didn’t seem to feel a need to expand on Alice’s statement.

“Well, the biggest thing I’ve focused most of my time on is researching the System itself.”

“Why are you researching the System?” Ethan seemed baffled. “I never took you as an aspiring [Priest of the System]. I always figured you were most interested in being a Mage, and all of your research and actions so far seem to support this idea. Or is there some sort of connection I’m not seeing here?” Then, his eyes seemed to light up. “Wait, is this about that Boris boy? Now that I think about it, you often claimed to be researching mana itself, but you seemed oddly focused on Boris and his odd case of unlocking his Status Screen early. You also mentioned at the time that you had been looking into how mana and status screens interacted with each other… “ Ethan gave Alice a quizzical look. “So is your real focus of research the System itself, as in, its connection to mana? I see...” Ethan trailed off, looking a lot more thoughtful now. “If that’s the case… are mana and the System really intertwined enough to make it into an entire focus of research? Hmm…” Ethan seemed to enter a daze, before he nodded to himself. “Perhaps there’s even more to Boris’s unusual case than I was thinking at the time. What exactly is the connection between mana and the System?”

Alice shrugged. “Honestly, they’re way more intertwined than most people think. Do you recall what I mentioned about my previous world? The kind of environment that existed there?”

“You mentioned that there was no magic, and no System as well, yes? I… I seem to recall thinking that the people on your world must have been really fragile, although afterwards, we ended up talking about machinery and how they were similar to and different from enchantments.”

Alice nodded. “My point is, when I came to this world, I found magic and the System very interesting. So I spent a lot of my time researching both. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out what magic was, how it worked, how it could possibly exist, and rules it operated off of…”

Ethan seemed to realize what she was going to say, even before Alice finished speaking.

“And the other half of your time was devoted to figuring out what the System was, how it worked, how it could exist, and what rules it operated off of?” His face grew a little bit more troubled.

“I see. I’ve… never heard of anyone researching the System itself. I don’t think the church has an official stance on people researching the System itself. After all, nobody has really done it before. Sure, plenty of people have studied things like faster ways to level up, or how to optimize Perks more effectively, or what the exact trigger conditions are for some kinds of Achievements. There are dozens of things people have poured their time and effort into researching within the System. The church doesn’t frown upon that kind of research at all: in fact, they seem to regard it as a method of researching the divine will of the System, and actively encourage it. But as far as I know, the System itself has always just been assumed to be there…” Ethan frowned. “No, now that I think about it, the church holy text does mention that there was a time when the System didn’t exist in this world. They talk about how bad life was before the System came into being, to help the humans of the time. I just… never thought much about it before.” He nodded.

“Even if the Church of the System does still acknowledge there were times when the System wasn’t present, I believe it’s probably a good idea not to mention your research to the Church of the System. But why bring this up now, specifically?”

“I’m getting to why I’m bringing this up. First, I’d like to note that through my research, I got a bunch of Perks and Achievements that ended up being quite helpful. They let me see a lot more than other people. Then, those Perks let me make more discoveries, leading to getting MORE Achievements… and after a few rounds of this, I got the ability to see System mana itself.”

“System mana?” Ethan gave Alice a blank look. “The System has mana?” Ethan glanced at the space in front of him for a moment, seeming as if he was looking at his Status Screen, and then glanced at Alice again, with a confused and intrigued expression.

Alice nodded. “System mana. In all parts of the world, there is rainbow colored mana that exists. It seems to be the way that the System does everything, such as allowing us to get Classes, survive mana baptisms, et cetera. In short, System mana is the mana that this world’s humans are reliant on in order to survive.”

Ethan gave Alice a slightly more blank look. “So the church of the System is… a church worshipping a bunch of mana?” He paused, his expression simply growing more vacant as he looked at Alice, and then he shook his head.

“Does that mean that, at the end of the day, the Church of Mana and the Church of the System are both worshipping different forms of the same thing? What a strange idea.” The corners of Ethan’s lips rose, and Alice realized that he was actually grinning in amusement. “I wonder what would happen if they realized that, for all their centuries of arguing and conflicting with each other, both ultimately worship the same thing.” Then, Ethan sighed. “Well, I imagine they would probably just keep arguing. Once different groups of people dislike each other enough, even reality isn’t enough to stop them from believing the other side is comprised of people who are either crazy and irrational, or evil. Still, the idea that both churches are ultimately the same, and yet spent so much time defining a bunch of arbitrary distinctions between the two of them just to argue with each other, is quite amusing.”

“That’s not the important part either,” said Alice, swallowing nervously as she finally reached the main topic of conversation. “Yesterday, while I was investigating that artifact, the System mana that’s always present just… disappeared.”

“Disappeared? You mean to say that the mana of the System is gone now?” Ethan’s amused grin disappeared faster than an asteroid getting dragged into a black hole. “What does that mean?”

“A lot of problems,” said Alice. “At least, if my understanding of what the System is and what it does is correct. Do you mind if I use {Shared Memory} on you? It’s the Perk that I used before, when I was showing you memories of my home world. It lets me share memories of my past with people, as long as they’re willing to see it. In this case, I want to show you a few observations I’ve made about what System mana is and what it does. I think it’ll help provide some context on why I’m so worried.”

Ethan didn’t even hesitate before stretching out his arm towards Alice. “Go ahead.”

Alice quickly stretched out her hand towards Ethan’s wrist, and then activated the Perk {Shared Memory}.

Immediately, Alice brought to mind a few specific memories that she felt were worth sharing.

First, she showed Ethan an image of the System mana during a mana baptism. In the memory Alice showed, the System’s mana was trying to prevent the mana from destroying the nerves and arteries of a person, while a mana baptism formed a Mage Core behind the person’s heart. She had seen multiple people go through their mana baptism recently… and had even seen several people, such as the [Scout] that had led her classmates on their hunting mission, die horrible deaths while trying to survive their mana baptisms over the past few months. The scene of the System trying to help someone survive their mana baptism was one of the scenes Alice was the most familiar with, and one of the scenes she wished she had seen less of over the past few months.

After showing Ethan the image, Ethan pulled his arm back for a moment, giving the air around him an increasingly strange look.

“So the System is heavily involved in mana baptisms…” said Ethan. “I wasn’t aware there was so much happening behind the scenes of a mana baptism. Most attempts to nail down exactly what’s happening during a baptism, and why so many mana baptisms fail, haven’t been particularly successful.” Then, Ethan stopped scanning the air around him, and turned back towards Alice.

“In that case, I can see how studying the System and studying mana baptisms go hand in hand. I suppose the entire idea is to take what the System is doing and then… improve on it, I suppose?” He sounded interested in the idea. “I can also see why improving upon mana baptisms is so difficult. If even the System struggles with it, and most people can’t even see what the System is doing, then improving a mana baptism is incredibly difficult. Especially since most types of mana seem to get pulled into the mana baptism and become part of the problem, rather than helping the patient survive. I wonder why System mana doesn’t get dragged into the mana baptism…”

“Improving the System’s actions was my original idea, yes,” said Alice. “I feel that the System is very, very powerful – but it isn’t perfect. It makes mistakes from time to time, since it’s neither omniscient nor omnipotent. In fact, I’m not sure if the System is sentient or sapient at all. But the point is, I figured that maybe if I observed what the System was doing, I could improve and expand on what it was doing and maybe make the whole process easier.”

Ethan nodded. “I see. What else have you found?”

Alice quickly grabbed Ethan’s arm again, and began to take Ethan through another trip in her memories. She showed Ethan the way the System condensed a class seed, the way a class seed seemed to absorb problematic kinds of mana and convert it into levels and Perks, the way the System helped people for magic seeds, and the way the System helped filter mana for people who were increasing their stats. All of the strange but important functions of daily life that the System helped make possible. Along with those images, Alice also showed a few other more dangerous experiments she had performed on herself, such as the time she had tried forming a class seed incorrectly, and had nearly had her personality erased by mana before the System helped her get everything back under control.

Ethan remained quiet for most of the time Alice was using {Shared Memory}, only occasionally stopping to process what Alice had shown him. When he saw Alice’s memory of nearly having her personality erased, he winced and spent nearly a minute rubbing his temples before the two continued looking through Alice’s memories. Finally, Alice got to the most critical scene.

“This is what I saw while inspecting the Artifact in the palace yesterday,” said Alice, showing Ethan the image of the System mana disappearing like a lightbulb going out.

Ethan frowned.

“So, what does the System disappearing mean?”

“It means that, unless the System fixes itself, things are going to get very bad for the world. And very quickly. The System is responsible for a huge part of people’s survival rate in mana baptisms, for example, and without the System’s help, survival rates will plummet. I’m not sure what the odds of succeeding are without the help of the System, but they’re certainly lower. Creating new Magic seeds might also be dangerous now, since the System helps a lot with the formation of magic seeds.” Alice paused. “Actually, I have quite a bit of experience forming magic seeds without the help of the System, so it’s clearly possible to form them without the help of the System and without hurting yourself. But it’s very difficult, and very easy to mess up and hurt yourself. I experimented with it a lot before I got a magic seed correct. The only reason I was able to try out so many different things is because I had a few Perks to help me fix any problems that arose as a result of my testing.”

Ethan gave Alice a completely baffled look. “Why did you even try to form a magic seed without the System in the first place? I mean, it’s clearly useful now, but… I’m confused.”

“I want to create a magic seed based on System mana,” said Alice, grinning a bit. Despite how dire the circumstances were, she still felt a little bit of excitement when she thought about copying the System, creating a System magic seed, and getting to experience firsthand all of the incredibly intricate and important things the System did on a day to day basis. “The System is unwilling to let people make System magic seeds, and seems to actively block attempts to form that kind of seed. So I practiced forming seeds in areas without System mana a lot. At one point, I tried to form magic seeds and ended up nearly killing myself, so I ended up with a better understanding of how the System interacts with magic seeds.” Alice winced. Even now, the memory of nearly melting herself while trying to form magic seeds from earth remained a somewhat traumatic memory for her, even if time and continuous practice had blunted the edges of fear she felt when she recalled that memory.

Ethan sighed, and looked thoughtful. “So if the System itself is gone… I can see why you shared all of these memories with me. The System disappearing is catastrophic for the planet, in more ways than one. In that case, I have a few things I should start setting up now. When you treated Borris, you gave him an enchanted item that isolated him from the mana in his surroundings, right? Given what I just saw, I imagine it was to prevent him from obtaining more [Farmer] mana, thus crushing his personality. I should also let some people know that forming new magic seeds might be dangerous right now, and get them to spread this information. Would a copy of the enchanted item you gave Boris work for everyone, do you think?”

Alice paused, thinking about it. “I’m pretty sure that would help people in Boris’s situation, at least. It would be a good solution to children unlocking access to problematic mana types before they’re ready. Which, if I’m not mistaken, will probably start happening quite soon.” The System seemed to normally keep children from unlocking their status screens by maintaining a kind of ‘bubble’ around them. Now that the System was gone, children would probably be exposed to dangerous kinds of mana with no protection, meaning that a great deal of children would be in danger very soon, even if that danger would be rather slow-acting.

Ethan nodded. “I’ll have some of the [Enchanters] under me start mass-producing similar designs immediately, then. In the meantime, your research seems like it’ll be a vital aspect of figuring out how to untangle this mess. For now, don’t set foot outside of my manor without me – if the Society has any idea what you’ve been researching, they’ll probably up the level of offense against you by several notches. I always felt that the Society might be mildly interested in you, but I never thought that they would ever even consider throwing their entire Society at you to try to capture you. But if they saw your experiments…” Ethan shook his head. “I wouldn’t be surprised if every single living member of the Society moved to Illvaria and tried to siege down the capital just to get you, no matter how suicidal that might be. You’re now in greater danger of being kidnapped or assassinated than the royal family, possibly by several times. And while your combat abilities are above average, they’re definitely way behind what someone with dedicated combat classes would have. Do you understand?”

Alice nodded.

Ethan relaxed a little bit. “Good. I’m going to look into a few things as well. I’ll see if I can get any hints about whether the System collapsing is more nuanced in some regions of the world versus others. While it currently seems likely that the System has simply disappeared across the world, perhaps it only disappeared in some parts of the world, such as the capital city. If that’s the case, at least for now, we’ll have a solution to the System collapsing. Evacuating entire cities isn’t exactly cheap or easy, and if the System keeps getting worse, it’s far from a long term solution, but it might buy you some more time to research. We’ll figure out what other steps we need to take as necessary.” Ethan paused. “And if you need anything at all for your research, let me know immediately. If the System’s collapse is a worldwide event, your research might be the only thing that saves millions of lives, if things are as bad as you’re afraid they are. Actually, are there any other people that can assist you with your research?”

“Cecilia, my best friend. She’s the one that taught me enchanting, and she’s helped me with a lot of my experiments ever since I arrived in this world. She has some Achievements that help her see what’s going on, which makes her very helpful as well.”

Ethan nodded. “I’ll immediately send someone and get her to join us at the manor, then. It would be catastrophic if she were to be kidnapped or killed.”

Ethan dissolved the Perk isolating the two from their surroundings. After that, he seemed to hesitate for a moment, and turned back towards Alice, as if wondering if he should say something.

Before he could, however, a [Servant] moved into the hallway. Seeing Alice and Ethan talking, the [Servant] waited for a moment, but eventually frowned and moved closer to Ethan.

“Honored Immortal, an urgent report for you.”

He quickly handed Ethan a report, before scurrying away.

Ethan quickly opened the letter, before his frown deepened.

“It seems that your fears are correct,” he said, as he scanned the letter. “Five hours ago, a group of Mages appear to have injured themselves while forming their Magic seeds. It took a few hours for the symptoms to get bad enough to be noticeable, but the three of them are very sick now. And the [Organic Mages] they asked for help have absolutely no idea how to deal with it, so they passed the issue up to a more experienced group of [Organic Mages]. That group of [Organic Mages] also didn’t know how to deal with the problem, and so they passed the report up the chain of command until it reached me.”

He sighed, before turning towards Alice. “It might be a good idea to take a look. Since you’re the only one who can see System mana and investigate what’s going on, your presence would be… very helpful. Are you willing to come along?”

Alice nodded.

“Then let’s go.”

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug! You can read up to 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 127

The two quickly made their way out of Ethan’s manor, before heading towards the healer’s shop where the unfortunate Mages were located. Ethan led the way, and Alice followed behind. There were also a few [Guards] with relatively high levels tagging along, keeping alert gazes as they scouted the area and tried to keep a wary eye on any signs of the Society of Starry Eyes. Alice felt a little bit nervous as she walked through the streets.

Alice usually didn’t have [Guards] with her when she travelled inside of the capital, apart from her single [Hidden Guard]. When Ethan was travelling with her, he seemed to consider her safety already taken care of. However, this time, even though Ethan and her [Hidden Guard] were both here, Ethan still took ten high-level [Guards] with them. Alice had already known that her research would make her a valuable target for the Society of Starry Eyes, but she had underestimated how seriously Ethan took the matter.

Alice wondered if this was an indicator of what she should expect to deal with in the future.

Once again, Alice felt the pressure of the Society of Starry Eyes like a distant, billion ton asteroid. Even if she didn’t know when it would fall, or even if it would fall, she always had to be wary of it. Alice didn’t want to end up kidnapped or dead. And judging by how many [Guards] Ethan had taken along this time Ethan was now worried that even in the seemingly safe capital he might not be able to protect her on his own.

Alice wondered how long it would take for her to become strong enough to fight off the Society on her own. She practiced fighting a few times a week at her Magic Academy, and recently, she even sparred with Cecilia occasionally as a method of growing. However, even though she needed to work on her combat abilities, if she didn’t work on her research, her combat abilities would end up as a moot question, because everyone would die anyway. Alice also suspected that the insights she had gained into the true nature of artifacts might give her some critical clues about how to interact with the System in the future, meaning she couldn’t wholly ignore them either.

Alice sighed. There was too much to do, and she didn’t have enough time in a day.

Alice was distracted from her musings when she felt someone watching her. The Perk she had recently combined in her [Survivor] Class, {Enhanced Senses}, was quietly needling at her, letting her know that someone was looking at her.

And they didn’t have good intentions towards her. The feeling that they gave her was different from before she had combined her Perks, where she could only sense when someone was watching her and felt hostility towards her. Now, Alice could distinctly sense that the eyes felt greedy and careful, like the eyes of a thief looking at a painting they were planning to steal. She also felt her Perk feed her a little bit of information about how strong that person was, one of the handy boosts the Perk had gained after Alice acquired the Perk from combining two older Perks.

Alice shivered.

The pair of eyes watching her felt dangerous. They were obviously very high level. And they probably had a combat or assassination-focused class.

She found herself reaching for her magic tendrils, although she managed to restrain her urge a moment later.

“Ethan,” she whispered, feeling her anxiety spike more and more with each passing moment. “Someone is watching me.”

“I know, I can feel them,” whispered Ethan, as a rainbow shield of mana sprang up around them and blocked their conversation. “Try to relax, and don’t tip them off. I want to see if I can get a little information about who they are. If they’re from the Society, finding out how much they know about you and confirming whether or not they’re targeting you is crucial to figuring out how much danger you’re in. In the best case scenario, we might even be able to give them a pre-emptive blow. And if the person watching you isn’t part of the Society, I want to know why they’re following you. Just pretend they aren’t there.”

Alice relaxed a little bit. If Ethan knew about the enemy, and was monitoring them, then she shouldn’t be in danger right now.

However, seeing another person stalking her was a good reminder of something else.

Now that the System was collapsing, the Society of Starry Eyes had likely started to notice something was wrong. Alice didn’t know how much the Society knew, but the more time passed, the more obvious it would become that some part of the world had changed for the worse. Once the Society realized that, they would likely grow far more desperate to acquire information. Desperate people were more likely to take stupid risks, after all. And that wasn’t limited to just the Society. Alice would need to be more cautious than ever before.

Despite the fact that she was the disciple of an Immortal and travelling with one of the most magically powerful people in the country, there was already someone following her with bad intentions. And Alice suspected this problem would grow worse and not better over the next few weeks.

Ethan and the [Guards] all ignored the hostile watcher, and after a few minutes of walking, Alice felt the hostile eyes on her disappear. If anything, that made her feel more nervous. Had they noticed that she was aware of them, and a way to make their presence disappear? Had they gone back to report to their superiors? What if Ethan’s [Spies] didn’t figure out who they were and why they were? What if they brought back a large group of enemies?

Alice felt her nerves get tighter and tighter, and forced herself to take a deep breath and calm herself down a little bit.

She felt more tense than ever before. However, even on her own, Alice wasn’t defenseless. And right now, she was standing next to an Immortal and surrounded by high level [Guards]. It was hard to find a safer spot on the planet right now. She just needed to trust in her allies and her own skills, and avoid letting fear control her.

Alice straightened out her back, realizing for the first time that she had started to duck a little into the crowd of [Guards]. She did her best to ignore the disappearance of the enemy. There wasn’t much she could do but remain alert now.

Not long after the stalker disappeared, the group arrived at their destination. Alice did her best to put the hostile eyes out of her mind and started looking at the Mages who were ill.

To the side, there was an [Organic Mage], who had helpless expressions on his face as he looked at the patients, while two other [Organic Mages] kept their hands on two of the three injured Mages and pumped organic mana into their lungs. Alice noticed that the [Organic Mage] who wasn’t healing a patient had bone-deep exhaustion etched into his face. It was obvious that he had drained himself dry trying to heal the patients, and was almost out of stamina and mana now.

On the table, there were three wounded Mages. Two of them had malformed kinetic seeds in their bodies, and the third had a malformed organic magic seed in the middle of her body. All three of them looked incredibly ill: if Alice were back in her original world, she would have assumed that the three people in front of her were long-time patients of some sort of horrible illness. Their skin was as pale as a ghost, and their lips were bloodless. Two of them were coughing every so often, and occasionally reddish-pink goop dribbled out of their mouth.

Alice frowned.

When she had formed her own magic seeds without the help of the System, she had usually scrapped any malformed seeds she made less than an hour later. After all, her {Safety Analysis} Perk usually informed her in no uncertain terms that keeping the magic seed around would be dangerous. However, according to the information Ethan had received, the Mages had only formed their messed up magic seeds a few hours ago. Based on her understanding of the way magic seeds were created, it should have taken much longer for the three Mages to get sick. The only other case she could think of where a magic seed had been ‘malformed’ was Samantha, and it had taken her around a week to start really suffering symptoms of her malformed magic seed.

These three Mages had taken less than six hours. Was this a symptom of the System’s deterioration, or the result of some other factor?

Either way, the situation for the three injured Mages was dire. Alice only had a way to break one person’s faulty magic seed at a time, and then she would need to wait four days before she could break another malformed magic seed. She had no way to cure all three magic seeds today, and she had no idea how long the other two would last.

And in the future, more and more people might have similar problems. The System had broken down, and that meant that it would no longer help humans form magic seeds. Ethan had sent word to a few people, to ensure that Illvarians knew that forming Magic seeds was currently dangerous. This would reduce some of the damage.

However there was no way that news would reach every corner of Illvaria instantly. At least a few other Mages would form magic seeds before any news reached their town, completely unaware of the dangers they faced. When that time came, they would probably come down with similar symptoms to the Mages in front of her.

Alice frowned, and then moved closer to the nearest patient. The Mage wasn’t unconscious, although he seemed to be in a great deal of pain. He looked to be in his mid twenties, and around level sixty. Perhaps due to his high level, he looked to be in slightly better shape than the other two. Unlike his injured friends, he was still conscious, although he certainly looked like he wished he was unconscious.

He coughed violently every few seconds, and each racking cough sounded miserable. As Alice approached, he briefly focused on her, before another fit of coughs distracted him.

“Give me consent to use Perks and Achievements on you. I need them if I’m going to figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it,” said Alice.

The man coughed again, before he managed to squeeze out a single word. “Okay.”

The moment she had consent, Alice activated {Lesser Organic Vision}. In addition to {Lesser Organic Vision}, Alice also used her physical eyes to look at the man’s chest, where his mage core should be located. She wanted as much information as she could get ahold of.

Then, her frown became deeper.

The issues were indeed located in the man’s mage core, but they were different from what she had expected to see.

The man’s mage core, which all Mages condensed after being born or after surviving their mana baptism, was a mess. It looked like a chaotic whirlpool of kinetic mana, which swirled around his body like a chaotic mosaic of light.

This was creating a rather odd effect on the flesh surrounding the man’s mage core. The man’s malformed kinetic seed was clearly different from Samantha’s malformed kinetic seed.

The kinetic seed in the man’s mage core was applying kinetic force in completely random directions every few seconds. The one and only reason the man was still alive was because the core was tapping itself out of mana almost every second, meaning it had no time to build up a big enough push to accidentally crush the man’s internal organs. Trying to fully heal the man in his current state was useless. After all, even if one healed his injured organs and stitched everything back together, his failed magic seed would turn everything back into a mess within an hour or two. This made any healing attempts basically futile. Healing could stave off death for now, but couldn’t actually fix the problem.

There was another problem with what she was seeing, though. One that made her far more worried.

When Alice had tried forming a magic seed without the help of the System, she had messed up several times before she started succeeding. Through that process, every time she made a mistake, she would have fairly similar symptoms to the symptoms of the man in front of her. She would start to get sick, and then after a few hours she would start coughing and feeling like she was about to puke. That was usually about the point where Alice scrapped the seed: after all, while she was more than willing to use herself as an experimental subject, she didn’t enjoy pain. Once she confirmed that having a malformed magic seed was bad, she was happy to leave it at that.

However, she was pretty sure the man’s magic seed was malformed in a way that was different from the problems Alice had experienced when forming a magic seed without the System’s help. The man showed no signs of puking, and Alice was pretty sure her malformed magic seeds had never gone haywire and started attacking her body, either. The man’s symptoms were quite different from what she herself had experienced. And the man’s symptoms had also started to force his body into collapse much faster than Samantha’s malformed magic seed.

In other words, every single malformed magic seed might be subtly different. ‘Subtly different’ meant that, aside from Alice’s ability to destroy magic seeds, treating the malformed magic seeds ‘normally’ would require subtly different treatment plans. And Alice could only break one magic seed every four days.

And with a bunch of people all facing different medical issues that required a high level of expertise and knowledge to treat them, coupled with whatever else was going to happen in the next few days and weeks if the System didn’t come back…

Alice suspected that the Illvarian medical system would get overloaded in days.

Alice glanced at the other two ill Mages to see if she could confirm her suspicions.

Sure enough, the problems in their bodies were slightly different. The other man who had tried to form a kinetic seed seemed to have accidentally mixed his magic seed with a few other kinds of mana. Instead of a pure kinetic seed, the man had combined his seed with organic mana and pure mana. This had created an issue where his seed was trying to convert his body into the ‘concept’ of force. He was the only Mage that wasn’t coughing out blood, and this was because his lungs and heart looked like swiss cheese. If it weren’t for the fact that the people of this world had [Endurance] stats that made them stronger than most Olympic athletes at home, this man would have certainly died. In fact, even with his remarkable [Endurance], the fact that the man was still alive was a small miracle. He looked like he could die at any minute, and the [Organic Mages] in the room weren’t even trying to heal him anymore. Either his magic seed was blocking their healing somehow, or they had just given up on him.

Finally, the woman who had been trying to form an Organic seed also had her magic seed going out of control, similar to the first man. In this case, her lungs were slowly but steadily filling up with some sort of fleshy goop. Her magic seed kept creating more and more fleshy goop, and then adding it to her lungs over and over again. This caused the woman to frequently cough out the goop in her lungs.

Unfortunately, her lungs kept getting filled up. And equally unfortunately was the fact that her magic seed wasn’t acquiring the ‘fleshy goop’ from nowhere. It seemed to be ‘harvesting’ random bits of her body, especially near her shoulders and stomach. Several parts of her organs had already been chewed up by her magic seed and randomly added to her lungs, and at some point, part of her stomach lining had also been consumed, causing her stomach acid to start drippling into other parts of her body.

Alice glanced at her Perks, and thought of {Broken Seed} again. She could activate the Perk once every four days, meaning she could save one of the three patients.

What could she do for the other two?

The woman with an organic seed filling up her lungs would probably die soon. The [Organic Mages] treating her were running out of mana, and her death would be incredibly agonizing. Both men with kinetic magic seeds would also die horrific and painful deaths if she didn’t help them.

She had an easy way to treat one person, and then the other two would die.

Alice felt her brain churning and scrabbling for an idea, and desperately latched on to her pure and organic mana seeds. She was missing a lot of components of System mana. Over a dozen ‘ingredients’ were totally absent from her body. But the people in front of her had no time to waste.

“Can you save all three?” Ethan whispered, using his Perk to keep their conversation private.

Alice frowned. “I can save one easily. The other two might die.”

Ethan paused, and then nodded. “First of all, don’t feel guilty if you can’t save the other two. It looks like all three would die without your intervention, so no matter what happens, you don’t have to feel bad about the results. That being said, do you have any ideas at all that could save the other two?”

Alice hesitated. She had absolutely no certainty at all that her next idea would work, and she strongly suspected that she might fail miserably. Her odds of succeeding were probably several times lower than the odds of surviving a mana baptism.

But it was also obvious that this couldn’t continue. All three patients would not live more than a day after this. Her Perk cooldown was four days, meaning that if she didn’t try, two of the three patients would die today.

“I have an idea. I’m going to try ‘straightening out’ their magic seeds using my pure magic seed and my organic magic seed,” said Alice. “Or I’ll try copying whatever my Perk is doing to break their magic seeds. Both seem like they would help.”

Ethan nodded. “I know this will be hard for you, and you might not succeed. But good luck. Whether you try to fix their magic seeds, or copy what your Perk is doing… do your best.”

Alice nodded, and resolutely strode up to the man whose magic seed was the most deadly. The one who had mixed his kinetic seed with pure mana and organic mana. She laid her hands on top of his arm, and utilized {Broken Seed} to deal with his malformed magic seed. Luckily, it seemed that the man had given anyone trying to heal him blanket permission to mess with him before he passed out.

The magic seed shattered as Alice carefully watched what her Perk was doing, trying to figure out some way, any way to replicate it and help the other two patients before they died. Alice saw a few level-up notifications appear out of the corner of her eyes, but she blinked them away. She was happy to see that levelling up still worked, despite the lack of System infrastructure, but she had more work to do before she could figure out what was happening to the System in the background.

She stepped towards the man with a malformed kinetic magic seed, and felt her lips tighten into a grim line.

The easy part was over. It was time to see if she could perform a miracle.

A note from acaswell

I don’t seem to quite have room for the next part of this scene in this chapter. :(

Shameless plug - you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 128

Alice felt her knuckles tighten into fists, before she forced herself to unclench her hands. Then, she laid a finger on the dying man’s stomach. As she did, she tried her best to think of the man as a patient, rather than a real, living person.

Alice felt something prod at her emotions, and then clamp down on them like a steel vice. It took her a moment to realize what was happening. Ethan had activated his Perk, the same one he had used when they had rescued Samantha. It was slowly deadening her emotions, allowing her to focus on the task at hand. It also helped her divorce her emotions from the dying person in front of her. Right now her emotions would distract her, even though she would usually remove any Perk that influenced her emotions immediately. She turned towards Ethan.

“Tell me if you want me to turn it off,” he said. “But I think this would be helpful for you.”

Alice hesitated for a moment. “Keep it on,” she said.

Then, she turned back towards the patient.

The patient was something that she was trying to save, and she couldn’t let her shaky hands and her nerves get in the way of her treatment. So for now, she needed to think of the patient as a collection of things, instead of a person. The patient was a collection of moving organs, muscles, and mana. Not a breathing person with thoughts and feelings. In fact, a person was almost like a machine. Alice couldn’t help but think of her time spent working on robots, back when she had lived on Earth, and found a sort of comforting numbness in the thought.

The person in front of her was just a machine. A collection of moving parts. Right now, some of those parts were broken. She had to figure out what was wrong and fix it before the machine finished breaking down.

Just parts she needed to fix and nothing else.

Her mana tendrils drilled into the patient.

Then, Alice realized something.

Something that she should have realized earlier.

She thought about the way Mage Cores and mana inside of a body interacted with each other, and then about something else she had heard in the past.

Mages who have their mage cores cut out will lose the ability to use magic, but can survive, and even have their mage cores regrown in the future, fixing their magic abilities.

“Ethan, can you slice out the mage core behind his heart without accidentally nicking his heart?” asked Alice.

Ethan immediately took a decorative iron ornament from the corner of the room, and turned towards the [Organic Mage] who was originally in charge of healing the patients. “Do you mind if I break this?”

“Go ahead, Honored Immortal,” said the [Organic Mage].

Ethan immediately used kinetic magic to shave down the sides of the metal ornament, before it quickly turned into a knife. Then, Ethan quickly cut out the patient’s mage core.

The mage core, which contained the patient’s magic seeds, was immediately pulled out of the patient’s chest, thus removing any connection the patient had to magic.

It wasn’t perfect, but it should be good enough to at least save his life. Alice felt a mixture of guilt and hope start to build up in her chest, although Ethan’s Perk tamped the emotions down to nearly nothing.

Alice frowned.

Something was wrong.

Alice wasn’t sure whether the System did anything ‘extra’ to stabilize someone’s body if they lost a Mage core.

At the same time, Alice’s mind flashed back to the first successful Mana Baptism she had observed after getting all of her relevant sight-related Perks built.

As each chunk of muscle fiber, nerves, and flesh were linked up with the new Mage core, they lit up, glowing with mana as Tavi’s body started to adjust to its new change and finalize its shape and abilities. The Mage core flashed several times with rainbow and pure mana, before its near-blinding glow started to fade away, replaced with the ordinary, dull light of a Mage core with no seeds in it. Another few strings of mana-flesh and nerves linked the system up with Tavi’s brain, creating a few different clusters of nerves, before Tavi’s brain also flashed with rainbow mana a few times. Finally, the rainbow and pure mana surrounding Tavi started to disappear. Alice grinned.

Despite her worst fears, Tavi’s mana baptism had been successful.

Alice suddenly got a very bad feeling.

Did the Mage core do more than just regulate magic seeds? What if the way it linked up to all of the strange muscle fibers and mana-flesh was important?

True to Alice’s worst fears, several chunks of mana-flesh inside of the man’s body started to grow brighter and dimmer, seemingly at random.

Alice froze, wondering if something catastrophic was about to happen. She waited tensely, hoping that nothing went wrong, and at the same time, started jamming her magic tendrils into the patient’s body.

She had to control whatever was happening. She had no idea how, but she needed to stop this man from dying. Whatever was happening felt dangerous to her.

The patient’s eyes flicked open. He gasped in pain, and Alice started trying to use a mixture of organic mana and pure mana to soothe the trembling mana-flesh in the man’s arms, legs, and the rest of his body.

She noticed that only some patches of mana-flesh were reacting, and others weren’t. She couldn’t distinguish between the two types of mana flesh at all, but it was obvious there was a critical difference between then. The mana flesh that was going haywire was vomiting out huge amounts of mana, and then randomly sucking in mana a few seconds later – almost like it was expanding and contracting. It was almost like a horrific heartbeat, although it was far more terrifying because Alice had no idea what was going on.

Alice tried to use her mana tendrils to control the strange mana reactions of the man’s mana flesh, and noticed that, with some work, a few chunks of the mana flesh stopped reacting after a few moments.

Unfortunately, Alice had nowhere near enough magic tendrils or mana to fix every chunk of mana flesh in the man’s body.

Alice started to get desperate.

Clearly, there was some sort of System interaction that made the body counterbalance whatever happened when a mage core was cut out of the body. She had no idea whether it was a quick fix or a complicated solution: she had never noticed anything happen in the Society of Starry Eyes if their mage cores were cut out, which made the current issue all the more baffling. Was it something she had simply never noticed, or was it something incredibly tiny that happened inside of their body with System help? Was it a different issue entirely?

Alice desperately searched for a way to replicate whatever the System did when people lost their magic cores, but there was just too little she knew about the way the System handled issues like this, and too little time to experiment.

The man’s body spasmed again, and something inside of him broke.

Several of the chunks of reacting mana flesh stopped working, sending his body into a catastrophic string of failures. Blood started to clot in every chunk of mana flesh, and at the same time, the man’s entire body began to try to absorb huge amounts of mana for no discernible reason.

“Ethan! Help me stabilize the mana and mana-flesh in his body!” yelled Alice.

“Got it,” he said, and immediately plunged his mana tendrils into the patient’s body.

A moment later, Ethan turned a brilliant rainbow color for a moment, as he activated a Perk. And then, another 100 mana tendrils appeared and joined the previous forty.

Alice sent her own mana tendrils into the patient’s body, and began pumping small amounts of pure and organic mana into the problematic chunks of flesh. It was incredibly difficult, because the patient’s body actively resisted every ounce of external mana Alice tried to push inside of it. She had {Improved Organic Manipulation} to help her control her organic mana while she was healing a patient and avoid making errors when healing people. However, it wasn’t the same as a Perk like {Patient’s Consent}, which reduced how much mana resistance she encountered. Alice was paying a huge amount of mana for every Marium of mana that made its way into the right area.

While Alice had nowhere near enough mana tendrils and mana to stabilize the man’s mana flesh, Ethan had far more than he needed. Unfortunately, Ethan didn’t have a pure mana seed, meaning that Alice was still the one doing a huge chunk of the work. She began frantically running around with her pure mana seed, trying to help fix each chunk of flesh. However, even though Ethan was lacking one of the two critical kinds of mana to fix the problem, he at least managed to hold the man’s body together long enough for Alice to address several of the more important-looking chunks of mana flesh. Specifically, the ones near his heart, lungs, and brain. Alice quickly went from one chunk of mana flesh to the next, and began stabilizing it. She didn’t quite know what she was doing as she tried to heal him, so for now, every chunk of mana flesh was treated by putting some amount of ‘pressure’ on it, trying to stop each contraction from doing… anything. She wasn’t sure if that was the best idea, but it was her best guess about how to proceed.

Luckily, in conjunction with Ethan’s organic mana keeping the man’s body together it seemed to work.

The two of them quickly managed to stabilize the situation. It wasn’t perfect – even after each chunk of mana flesh ‘settled down’ it would still occasionally pulse erratically. And the man’s arms and legs were almost completely unaddressed, and still looked like they were violently collapsing. Alice had no idea whether the man would need his limbs regrown after this.

However, even after Alice ran out of mana and Ethan stopped desperately pumping Organic mana into the man’s body, his organs didn’t collapse. His arms and legs looked horrific, and there was obviously something wrong with his health. But he was alive.

Alice breathed a sigh of relief.

There were remaining problems in his body that Alice and Ethan had completely failed to address, because Alice had no idea what the System usually did when someone lost a Mage Core.

But despite all of the errors, the man was alive.

However, Alice was now almost completely out of pure mana.

She looked at the second patient, and felt panic start to build up.

She now knew that without exposure to the System, some sort of horrific reaction would take place in the rest of the body.

And she did not have enough mana to calm down all of the woman’s mana-flesh. She didn’t even have enough remaining mana to address the more important bits of mana flesh, like the woman’s heart, lungs, and brain.

She took a deep breath, and felt Ethan’s Perk start to kick in more strongly, tamping down her emotional response to possibly losing the second patient.

She wasn’t sure whether or not she could heal the second patient and keep her alive, but she needed to at least try her best. If she failed, the other patient in the room would die, and Alice wanted to at least try to save her.

Alice started using her mana sight to more carefully analyze what was going on inside of the woman’s body. She would need to try something different to heal the woman, because there was no way the woman would survive if Alice just patched up whatever mana-flesh she had the remaining mana for. Either her heart, brain, or lungs would fail, and unless the third patient had some rather special Perks or Achievements, those were very important organs that the body couldn’t do without for even a minute. {Intuitive Magic Modelling} was feeding Alice very basic information, helping her understand more and more of what was happening inside of the woman’s magic seed. However, Alice also hadn’t studied the flawed seeds she had produced inside of her own body in very much detail. After all, she usually destroyed them immediately. She wasn’t suicidal, and flawed magic seeds were dangerous. But even if she didn’t have as much experience as she wished she did, she was the only person here who could potentially treat the problem now.

She gritted her teeth, and tried to focus on what her Perk, {Broken Seed} had done to the first patient. She needed to do the same thing, but without the System helping her. And she barely had any pure mana left, meaning she needed to somehow fix the problems with the woman’s body using only her organic mana

She knew that it was possible to recreate what System mana did.

She took a deep breath, and tried to focus. She just needed to do it.

She plunged her mana tendrils into the final patient’s body.

She tried to poke at the malformed magic seed with her pure mana. If she could touch the malformed magic seed with her mana tendrils, her plan was to try to ‘unwind’ it using what little remained of her pure mana.

She didn’t really know what she was doing, but she felt that with pure mana, it might be possible to try to unravel a magic seed as if it were a knotted-up thread. Or at least, that was what she was hoping was the case, because she didn’t have any better ideas.

Her magic tendrils made their way towards the magic core, getting ready to start activating Alice’s pure mana.

And then they bounced off of the Mage Core, accomplishing absolutely nothing.

When she stuck her mana tendril into the woman’s mage core, it felt like she had hit a brick wall. The rest of the woman’s flesh had felt like very thick mud when she tried to push her mana tendrils through it: it was resisting her, but didn’t totally shut down the movement of her mana.

However, the mage core felt like a major barrier.

Alice resisted the urge to curse.

She didn’t have the mana to mess around and try to figure out a solution to this problem. In total, she had a maximum of 121 Mariums of organic mana and 72 Mariums of pure mana to work with. But that was her mana maximum: she had probably spent over fifty Mariums of pure mana trying to heal the first patient.

And just now, Alice had lost a big chunk of her organic mana just to push her mana tendrils close to the patient’s heart.

Alice grimaced, and then started probing the outside of the mana core again. She searched for a weak point in the barrier around the woman’s Mage Core, but couldn’t find one no matter how much she probed the outside. The woman’s mage core was like a hard plastic shell that wrapped itself tightly around her magic seeds. Alice couldn’t find a way in unless she just cracked the whole thing open. But doing that might have unintended consequences.

Alice knew that unravelling the mana shell around the mage core might be a bad idea. But she also didn’t know what else to do. If she couldn’t get into the mage core, she couldn’t fix the problem. So, after hesitating for a moment, Alice pushed her mana tendrils inside of the woman’s mage core, punching through the strange barrier around the mage core.

Around ten Mariums of pure mana vanished into thin air as she ripped apart the mana barrier. More Mariums drained away every single second she pushed her mana tendrils inside of the woman’s body. Mana leaked out of Alice like air rushing out of a punctured spaceship.

Alice felt her heart leap into her throat. This might kill the woman on the spot, or make the problem worse, but it was her best idea for what to do. She moved quickly, trying to take advantage of the moment the wrap around the woman’s mage core collapsed.

She immediately plunged her mana tendrils deeper into the mage core, preparing to rip apart the problematic magic seed and then try to use organic mana to repair… whatever she had just removed.

However, before she could even touch the magic seed, something strange happened. All of the mana in the woman’s body dimmed for a moment.

And then, the woman’s mage core started absorbing mana nonstop. Alice’s eyes widened as it started to look like the woman was going through another mana baptism.

Bad, bad, this is bad, thought Alice, starting to panic as she watched the woman’s body start randomly absorbing mana for reasons she didn’t understand. She used several mana tendrils to force the mana near the patient’s body away, in order to stop her from absorbing more mana. Even if Alice didn’t know why the patient was absorbing mana, she felt that it would be very dangerous if it continued.

One of Alice’s seven mana tendrils finally made contact with the magic seed she needed to remove. If she destroyed the magic seed, she could hopefully fix whatever else was happening with the help of her organic magic seed and pure magic seed. It was a slim hope, but Alice already felt woefully unprepared for the task of saving the final patient’s life. Maybe the reason the mage core was acting weird was because of the messed up magic seed?

At this point, Alice could only pray that was the case.

However, something… crunched when Alice tried to pull apart the magic seed. Alice wasn’t quite sure what she had messed up, but it was obvious something had gone wrong while trying to unravel the magic seed. Worse, the magic seed itself hadn’t wholly disappeared: instead, it now looked brittle, as if it were made of glass. Alice’s attempt to replicate her Perk had gone very wrong.

The woman’s body stopped trying to absorb mana. Then, all of her magic seeds suddenly went haywire. They started tossing around mana left and right, as if they were oceans in the middle of a storm.

Ethan immediately used a kinetic tendril to drag Alice out of the way, and then grabbed every single bulky object in the area and stuffed them into the air around the woman.

Alice’s eyes widened.

And then the woman’s body detonated like a bomb, sending her organs and limbs flying into Ethan’s hastily made barrier.

Alice gasped in shock, and after the sound ended, pried away Ethan’s shield using some kinetic mana.

Inside of Ethan’s shield were the remains of a corpse. There was absolutely no way to save the woman anymore. There was barely anything left of the woman. Just splattered blood and fragments of bone and flesh that had been sent flying in random directions.

Alice felt her hands start to shake.

Even though Alice had been trying to heal the woman, even though she had done what she felt was best, the woman had died. And it was undeniable that Alice’s attempted intervention had killed the woman faster, instead of healing her. She would have died in less than a day either way, but Alice still felt sick.

Alice felt numb horror start to wash over her. She felt Ethan’s Perk start to grow in intensity, but it wasn’t enough to fully remove her emotions.

“Process your emotions later,” said Ethan. “Remember, these two were dead if you didn’t help them. You were trying to resuscitate a corpse. There is no shame in failing. And you succeeded in saving one patient. Look back at the patient and try to see if there are any remaining problems, and try to devise a treatment plan for him. There are still a lot of things weird about his situation, and now that it’s impossible to stabilize the final patient, focus on the first two.” Alice nodded, and moved numbly back towards the patient she had healed by stitching together mana flesh.

She shuddered, and turned towards the man who was somewhat stable. His malformed kinetic seed was no longer jostling his bones and organs around, and he looked… at least sort of like a healthy person. There were still splotches of pale and damaged skin and tissue inside and outside of his body, but at the very least, he no longer appeared to be on the verge of death.

She started carefully inspecting the man using her Perks, before she sighed.

“I think that his muscles are going to be in a lot of pain, and it might be impossible for him to walk around. Keeping him unconscious is probably the best thing to do – I imagine he’s going to be in horrific pain if he’s awake.” She turned towards Ethan. “Can we come back tomorrow?”

Ethan nodded. “I was planning on it. We can try to stabilize him more and see if any other complications come up once you’re rested and have a little more mana to work with.”

Alice felt a small seed of horror as she looked at the woman’s body. She just… hadn’t had enough mana to stabilize her.

One of the two patients had died because she had had enough mana and hadn’t managed to find a better solution.

Alice felt a hint of bile rise up in her throat, before Ethan gently patted her head once.

“Take a deep breath and calm down,” said Ethan. “You kept one alive. You didn’t kill a person today – you saved a person’s life when they should have died, and you tried your hardest to save the other one. Take pride in that.”

Alice nodded, and felt a breath escape her lungs.

She still felt awful, but she had done what she could.

And a few moments later, mana began to swarm towards her body.

A note from acaswell

This is the first time I’ve tried something like this, but I copy-pasted the relevant paragraph from a previous chapter that Alice observed into this one, so that it was easier to compare what happened from one mana baptism to the next. I figured that would probably make it easier to observe what happens and compare it from one chapter to the next.

Not sure how ya’ll feel about that, but I thought it was an interesting idea. If people like it, maybe I’ll do it in the future, as long as I can easily find the original chapter and don’t just rely on my world notes to simulate interactions.

I was also originally thinking of doing Perk and Achievement assignment in this chapter, but, I realized on Thursday that I still needed to rebalance a few things. Now that the System is down, Perk assignment still kind of works, but it’s… different. And the way I had written the Perk assignment didn’t really reflect that, and it should have. So I took it out of the draft I sent to my beta reader. By next week I should be done rebalancing how some things work in volume 3.

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 129

Alice did her best to focus on her System messages. After all, she didn’t want to focus on the corpse of the woman who she had failed to treat, and Alice was also slightly worried that something would go horrendously wrong during the process of levelling up. Thus, with a bit of fear, Alice opened her System notifications, wondering if she would just find a line of glitch signs or something.

You have leveled up!

Scholar: 55 -> 56, Scientist 58 -> 60, Explorer of Magic 75 -> 76, Student of Organic Magic 11 -> 17

Alice felt a small breath of relief. It seemed that her Classes had still gained experience pretty normally. When she gained a level, she usually saw the System first filter all of the mana in her environment before it was absorbed by her magic seeds. This time, the System wasn’t around, so it couldn’t filer her mana. Despite the System’s absence, however, she had still gained levels after her class seeds processed the incoming mana.

Then, she frowned.

If she could gain levels with or without the System’s purification efforts, why did the System go through so much effort to purify mana right before people levelled up? What was the point? Alice started paying closer attention to her own body, as well as the mana inside of it, in hopes of finding an answer.

And as she watched mana slowly work its way through her body and towards her class fractals, {Intuitive Magic Modelling} started to let Alice know that the types of mana going through her body weren’t quite as pure as she had thought. There were essentially bits of other kinds of mana stuck to the original blobs of mana. Her [Scientist] mana, for example, had some chunks of [Scholar] mana attached to it, possibly because the image of a [Scholar] and a [Scientist] were probably close to each other in most people’s minds. Similarly, both chunks of mana had bits of the other kind of mana stuck to it. Instead of a pure blob of [Scientist] mana and a pure blob of [Scholar] mana, each blob of mana was around 80% of its ‘main’ mana type and 20% a different type entirely. Even though the majority of the mana was still correct, it was going to the wrong place. And there were a few other, smaller chunks of mana that Alice couldn’t identify that were also coming along for the ride.

Once the bits of scholar and scientist mana reached the class fractals in her brain, each class fractal absorbed most of the mana correctly, but the extra bits of mana that had been stuck together just… got stuck. It was kind of like seeing a giant piece of food get stuck in a drainpipe: it just sat there, unable to move forward or backward. The class fractal just didn’t know how to handle kinds of mana that weren’t aligned with itself at all, and so the mana was just stuck.

Furthermore, a few minutes after the chunks of extra mana got stuck, Alice felt a very, very subtle inclination to behave more like a [Scientist] and a [Scholar], as well as a subtle inclination to behave more like a… [Doctor]? Alice was pretty sure there was some [Doctor] mana mixed in, although it was hard to say for sure. It was an incredibly weak inclination, and Alice could easily squash it. But it was still very concerning, even if it was easy to handle right now.

Alice frowned, and tried to reach for her pure mana seeds, to see if she could somehow drag each bit of mana over to its ‘correct’ class fractal, but her head started pounding the moment she reached for her pure mana. She had used too much of it treating the patients, and she was totally out of pure mana now.

Alice winced, and shook her head, before moving on to her other System notifications. The external influence on her personality was incredibly minor, so she doubted it would be a problem to wait a few hours to recover some pure mana before she tried again. She didn’t think this problem was actually that hard to solve: she just needed to manually grab the mana that was in the wrong spot and then throw it at the correct class seed. For now, she ignored it and continued examining her System notifications.

Scientific Discoveries (Rarity: N/A) III -> IV

An Achievement Created by the ‘For Science!’ perk. It currently has one successful experiment catalogued. Upon reaching five experiments, this Achievement will receive a beneficial upgrade.

+20% class experience for all research related classes, +5% bonus to mental attribute growth (Per Tier of the Achievement)

Alice felt her relief get stronger as she noticed her {Scientific Discoveries} Achievement upgrade with no weird complications or issues. However, her relief was short lived. Moments later, Alice saw… a rather odd blob of mana. The way this chunk of mana started out was pretty similar to the way it looked whenever she gained a new Achievement.

At least, it looked similar to an Achievement at first. Unfortunately, it seemed that her new Achievement had gotten ‘stuck’ while trying to move through her body, and after a few minutes of movement, started instead bouncing off of her bones and muscles. It looked like a drunk squirrel trying and failing to scamper up a tree.

Alice frowned, wondering what was going on, and then, in a fit of inspiration, connected a mana tendril to the strange clumps of mana and started using display mana, to see if she could get access to any System notifications that she ‘should’ be able to see.

After all, as far as Alice could tell, Display mana would never actually let her ‘lie’ about what was part of her Status Screen. Even when Alice had deliberately tried to give herself ‘fake’ level up notifications, it had never worked. She had been able to make System messages that displayed the words ‘level up,’ but no matter what she tried, the System messages would end up showing her correct level. She frowned for a moment, and was able to remember what her best ‘fake level up’ notification had looked like.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 54 -> 54

In other words, if Alice used Display mana to look at the System notifications for her new, messed up Achievement, she should be able to get some idea what was going on.

It worked, and moments later, Alice started examining a rather unique set of System notifications.

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7) -> SD??SD@#$@ (This Achievement cannot be upgraded. Error!

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7) -> SD??SD@#$@ (This Achievement cannot be upgraded. Error!

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7) -> SD??SD@#$@ (This Achievement cannot be upgraded. Error!

Connecting to main server to find resolution for issue… failed. Connection cannot be established.

?@#%(#)@$@#()(@#$* @#$*# @#$@#($ @#( (!)%#(!@$#)*^T$_#@ @#_ (@#_$

Alice blinked at the increasingly bizarre System notification. Then she started to worry.

A moment later, the clump of mana started to sink into her muscles and bones.

Error resolved. (Rarity: 4)

Y0^ h@ve cu**d a mEEEEdic((((l c*(Sn which kn***# how to. Y((*U.

@#*$&# @#*$(&@#$ @#$*()@#$ @#)(*@#$(@# @#)(@#$*@

A new Achievement appeared on her Status Screen.

Its name was ‘Error resolved,’ and it was a rarity four Achievement. It had no text.

Alice wondered if her Status Screen had just permanently glitched out. She… wasn’t sure what to make of that. She had been hoping to get more information from using her Display mana, but instead, Alice felt very worried.

If her Achievement was glitched out… what happened?

Right as she was starting to seriously worry about what would happen next, Alice noticed that the Achievement {Error Resolved} was beginning to change again.

The mana in her body was still attached to her muscles and bones, but after a few minutes, it started to unattach itself and start moving back towards her mage core. And then, a few moments later, the System notification started to change again.

Creative Healer (Rarity: 4)

You have used multiple magic seeds to heal a patient, and have used magic seeds beyond the basic healing seeds, such @s your P*^e magic seed.

Organic Magic Seed Conversion RaTTTTio: +10%, Mana Capacity for ALL seeds +5%

While this was definitely better, Alice still felt worried when she saw the new version of her achievement.

The weird glitch words and spelling errors in the Achievement had significantly decreased, but they hadn’t disappeared entirely. And even more oddly, Alice could still see the Achievement hovering around in her body. It wasn’t… quite right. It didn’t look like other Achievements.

She shifted uneasily, and examined the Achievement more closely to see if she could figure out what was wrong with it. It looked almost right, but there was definitely something off about it. At the back of her mind, she kept hoping that the Achievement would keep modifying itself, until it became fully ‘safe’ and easy to understand. Even if it might waste an opportunity to learn more, Alice also didn’t like the idea of having uncontrolled glitchy mana inside of her body. However, it didn’t seem inclined to change any further.

Alice sighed, and then decided to look on the bright side. There were a few bits of the Achievement that looked a bit scrambled, but it didn’t look like the Achievement was totally ruined. As long as it didn’t influence her personality, Alice felt that she had plenty of tools to deal with weird System errors: out of all of the people on this planet, Alice was definitely one of the ones who could handle this problem most effectively. And since she still had {Moderate Tissue Regeneration}, she could probably handle at least some health issues pretty easily as long as they weren’t too severe. She just needed to stay calm, use her Perks to keep an eye on what was happening, and start fiddling with the broken mana in her brain and inside of her Achievement once her pure mana seed was ready again. After using {Safety Analysis} to make sure she wasn’t about to kill herself by accident, of course.

Alice tried to examine her magic seeds, doing her best to feel out whether there were any changes in them. After all, while her new Achievement claimed that she had just gained a 5% boost to her mana conversion ratio for all of her seeds, she had no idea whether the Achievement was working right now. And if she tried to access her new Achievement the ‘normal’ way, by simply opening her Status Screen and then focusing on her new Achievement, she still got a giant load of nothing showing up. There was obviously still something wrong with the new Achievement.

However, when Alice investigated her magic seeds, she realized that all of them had expanded slightly. Nowhere near the amount they were supposed to expand, but… Alice was still definitely seeing a 2-3% increase in the mana capacity of her magic seeds, and her organic mana seed had gotten around a 7% boost out of the 15% boost it was supposed to receive. She was missing about half of the benefits she was supposed to have gotten from her new Achievement, but right now Alice was just grateful that her messed up Achievement wasn’t warping her personality or causing her mage core to implode or something.

Alice felt her empty pure magic seed again, and sighed.

She couldn’t wait for her mana to recover so she could sort this mess out. It didn’t look like the situation was immediately dangerous, at least, so she had more time to think and examine things. However, she made a mental note to ask Ethan if the Church of the System was flooded with people wondering what the heck was going on with their glitch status screens and Perk notifications. She doubted Ethan had originally thought to check the Church of the System before she had discussed her study of the System with him, but now, Alice felt there was a good chance that the Church would have noticed something was up. The number of people in Illvaria who tried to make a new magic seed each day was quite small, but the number of people who picked a new Perk or got a new Achievement each day in Illvaria probably numbered in the hundreds or thousands. How the Church responded to the System collapsing would be a good indicator of whether working with them to quell the chaos when it started to really break loose was a good idea. And it would also help Alice keep an eye on what other problems people were encountering now that the System was down. Even though Alice had a good understanding of a lot of parts of the System, today had been a good reminder of the fact that she didn’t know everything that would happen once the System started to fall apart.

For example, the weirdly clumpy chunks of [Scholar] and [Scientist] mana that Alice had noticed earlier. Even though they hadn’t started negatively influencing her yet, Alice was very nervous about what would happen in the future, especially if other people were running into similar problems. She already knew that little chunks of unpurified class-related mana would warp their personality a bit, transforming them into a perfect model of whatever Class they had if they had too much mana that wasn’t controlled by their magic seeds. And in the process, they would lose almost any speck of individuality or sense of self. While it was highly unlikely that anyone but children would reach that point quickly, it was very important to keep an eye on.

She took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down as she thought of the future, and then tried to shake off her fear and worries.

She managed to calm herself down a little bit, and then decided to look at her Perk selections for reaching level 60 in [Scientist]. She had no idea what would happen if she tried to pick a Perk now that the System was down. Her first assumption was that Perk selection just wouldn’t work, but Alice wanted to make sure. But before messing with her Perk Selection at all, Alice ran a few checks with {Safety Analysis}. Now that the System wasn’t around to keep her safe if she messed up, Alice had to be extra careful with every single action she took.

Alice got a slightly fragmented response back. Messing with Perks apparently wasn’t completely safe, but it also wasn’t incredibly dangerous. It was just… mildly dangerous. Alice got the feeling that it was similar to sticking her hand on a hot stove: it would hurt, and she might burn herself – however, no matter what happened, it shouldn’t threaten her life or her sense of self. Alternately, perhaps it was possible that she could hurt herself, but there also ways she could get a new Perk without hurting herself at all. It was a bit hard to interpret what she was getting from her Perk, but Alice was pretty sure she could at least take a look without getting in danger.

Alice gritted her teeth, and decided to push on. If she wanted to fix the System and deal with whatever was happening to the world right now, she needed more Perks. The ones she had were good, but were wholly incapable of dealing with the situation in a timely manner. If her new Perks were just like her new Achievement, they would probably be weaker than they should be, and might leave behind some weird medical complications she would need to sort out later. However, the alternative was to keep working with only the tools she currently had available to her: and Alice suspected that was ultimately far more dangerous than taking a few calculated risks to get some more Perks. Society wasn’t falling apart yet, but with the System gone, it was only a matter of time before things got really bad.

True to Alice’s fears, her Perk selection screen looked far more messed up than before.

Perk Selection: ----- (missing entry)

?????????

Perk Selection: ----- (missing entry)

?????????

Perk Selection: ----- (missing entry)

?????????

Perk Selection: Combine Perks

(Add Perks here)

Alice looked at her messed up Perk selection in complete confusion.

What in the world was she supposed to make of this? This was just… nonsense. Her three available Perk selections were just question marks.

Alice waited, hoping that the words would rearrange themselves, the way her Achievement had. However, nothing happened.

Alice frowned, and then decided to try poking her messed up Status Screen with display mana and see if that clarified what her Perks were supposed to be.

To her surprise, they did. Somewhat.

Perk Selection: ----- Contact with main System lost. Loading from last previous record…

Perk_Name: Study_????

Requirements: HOsT meets requirements. Scientist level 60+

Grants better Study.

Increases Intelligence????.

Perk Selection: ----- Contact with main System lost. Loading from last previous record…

Perk_Name: Learn_Magic

Requirements: Host Meets Requirements: Achievement Requireemnt Meeet. Scentist level 60+

Better Learn Magic. Gooder sleep learn. Increase learning Intelligence by by by Number_amount.

Perk Selection: ----- Contact with main System lost. Loading from last previous record…

Perk_Name: Memory_Other

Requirements: Creative Shared Memory. Stat Requirement. Level Requireemnt. Scientist level 60+

Learn_from_other memories. No violation of core tenet.

Core Tenet _ Free/Will.

Perk Selection: Combine Perks

(Add Perks here)

Alice could definitely still get some idea what each new Perk did based on the current text, but there was obviously something messed up about how every Perk was displayed. Without Display Mana, Alice couldn’t make any sense of her Perks at all: they just looked like question marks, which gave her absolutely no useful information at all. However, even with Display mana, Alice was beginning to get the feeling that she was missing some sort of other component that the System used in conjunction with Display mana to make words… make more sense.

Alice distinctly remembered that the System had showed her a Status Screen entirely in English the moment she arrived on this world, after all. This was before the System even figured out what English was and created a language skill for it. However, when Alice used Display Mana, she could only show System messages that she wanted to display. While she couldn’t lie about any System components with Display mana, she could absolutely fiddle around with the language each message used. And most importantly, they did not automatically translate themselves for the reader if Alice used her display mana. Any System message Alice created was bound to whatever language she tried to make the message in – it wouldn’t be comprehensible to those not fluent in the language.

Which meant that whatever she was missing was rather important, since it seemed to somehow obviate language itself as a form of communication. Alice still wasn’t sure how that was even possible. Perhaps the System was directly translating concepts to people’s minds, or… something?

Alice wondered what other component she was missing, and resisted the urge to sigh.

At least for now, this would be good enough to make new Perk selections. She didn’t exactly have the precise numerical breakdown she was used to, but as long as she had some idea what her Perks did, that was at least good enough to make reasonably informed decisions, even if it was disappointing that she couldn’t get as many details as she was used to.

Alice looked her Perk combination options as well, and found that it had run into fewer problems. Which amused Alice quite a bit.

This was probably because even the System never seemed entirely certain what the result would be when combining Perks. Since it had always provided less information than just flat-out picking a new Perk, it lost less information.

Of course, her Perk combination options were still subject to the broken grammar and weird System notes that her Perk selection options had fallen prey to.

After a few minutes of thinking, Alice eventually decided to combine together two Perks. Two of the three new [Scientist] perks actually seemed somewhat appealing: Learn_Magic and Memory_Other were, as far as she could tell, Perks that would let her use her {Sleep-Reading} Perk to learn magic, and a Perk that would let her read other people’s memories and experience an enhanced learning effect. She probably needed the other person’s permission to use the Perk, but she was willing to bet Ethan would let her observe some memories of his own training: he seemed pretty committed to the idea of raising a new Immortal, and this was definitely something that would help her. And even if Ethan wasn’t willing to share his own memories, Alice doubted he would have a hard time finding a teacher who was willing to share their memories, if the pay was good enough.

Both Perks sounded incredibly useful. However, Alice had noticed a rather curious (and possibly critical) Perk that she could create by combining together two other Perks. It was an option that hadn’t existed in her Perk combinatinons at level 55, but even though the grammar was a bit broken, Alice was still pretty sure she knew what the Perk would do. So she combined the Perks.

The Science of mana deprivation

Requirements: Scientist level 50 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Must have extensively experimented with mana and lack of mana and its effects on other creatures and/or oneself, Magic 150 or higher, Pure mana seed (or similar seed) present.

You may use your mana tendrils to interfere with mana, allowing you to create manaless fields at will given enough time or otherwise allowing you to prevent mana from interfering with your experiments.

Note 1: The farther away the mana is, the more difficult and mentally draining it will be to activate this Perk. It is advised you use this on areas near you.

Note 2: Please remember that interfering with mana controlled by other people will be far more mentally taxing than manipulating the same amount of mana would be if it were uncontrolled.

Alice loved the Science of Mana Deprivation. It was a Perk that didn’t sound amazing, but the most powerful component of the Perk was the fact that it let her mess with other Perks and System mana. It could let Alice deflect or deactivate Perks that other people tried to use in her surroundings, assuming she had fast enough reflexes.

However, it also had several shortcomings right now. Most notably, it couldn’t interact with most kinds of mana besides Perks, because it required her to spend a fair amount of mental energy and pure mana to properly mess with other Perks, and it was very mentally exhausting to actually create things like manaless fields, despite that being the ‘main’ use of the Perk. Right now, Alice wanted a fast and easy way to turn off all kinds of mana: even if that mana was inside of other people. It would be the most effective way to treat problems like going nuts because one’s mana hadn’t been absorbed by a class seed. It would have also helped a lot when trying to treat the final patient earlier.

This was why she had decided to combine it with another Perk to get the result she wanted.

Degraded Seed Slot

Requirements: Scientist level 35 or higher, Explorer of Magic class available, Magic at 100 or greater, have all magic seed slots taken, use magic Seeds themselves as a source of experiments and inspiration for new advancements

You gain a magic seed slot with a maximum 5% mana conversion ratio. This magic seed cannot be boosted by other Perks and can never be combined with other Perks.

Frankly, Alice didn’t have much use for this Perk anymore. She generated two new magic seeds a month. And she had practiced creating magic seeds without the System. While this situation wasn’t the reason she had worked on learning to form seeds without the System, her practice was incredibly useful now, since she was probably one of the only people in the world who didn’t have to worry about dying after forming a new magic seed right now. In any case, a Perk giving her one low-quality magic seed was just not that important after she gained the {Seeds of Ambition} Perk.

Thus, Alice stuffed the two together and nervously watched as the System combined the two Perks, hoping it didn’t mess up and cause some sort of disaster.

Before hitting the ‘combine’ button, Alice did to do a final check with her {Safety Analysis} Perk, just to make sure she wasn’t about to screw herself over. Luckily, it seemed that she was safe. Alice activated the Perk combination.

Perk_Name: No_Mana

Perk Costs: Degraded Seed Slot + The Science of Mana Deprivation

You create a No_Magic magic seed. This magic seed can deactivate or potentially delete mana.

Warning: Without permission, it’s harder you modify____ seed another person.

Shortly after she combined the two Perks, Alice felt a new magic seed start to form inside of her mage core. This seed was the first magic seed she had ever had formed directly as a result of a Perk existing, instead of just having a magic seed slot granted to her. Instead of Alice needing to concentrate on a specific idea and then absorb mana to make a magic seed, this time, her two class fractals just took over the process entirely, dragging in mana and turning it into a specific concept. Which was probably why Alice could do this safely: the System was still doing the dangerous bits for her, even if the main frame of the System was down.

A few moments later, Alice had an entirely new magic seed. One that was, apparently, called a No_Magic magic seed. Alice suspected the name was slightly off, but as long as the magic seed itself worked, it would be fine.

Then, Alice tried poking herself in her [Student of Organic Magic] class seed and using a small wisp of her new magic seed.

To her delight, she felt the very small mental boost that she had barely been aware of… fall away for a moment. Alice wasn’t particularly aware of the effects of {Improved Organic Manipulation} most of the time, since the Perk was highly specific and not particularly strong. However, after Alice tested it out, she confirmed that her new No_Magic class seed could literally deactivate Classes. Which meant that it could probably also deactivate mage cores, and a bunch of other things if Alice needed to mess with them for a while.

Alice turned back to the second patient, who still had several patches of flesh that were currently going out of control, and then quickly used her new No_Magic seed after a few moments in order to deactivate some of the flesh writhing and pulsing like mad.

The man’s situation didn’t stabilize completely, but it at least improved a bit after Alice emptied out her new magic seed.

She checked its mana reserves, and after some estimation, realized it had around a 30% mana conversion ratio. Not amazing, but not terrible, either.

She grinned to herself. At the very least, she had a way to treat patients a little more effectively now. She could deactivate magic seeds that were going haywire, and possibly delete mana that wasn’t properly integrated with a class seed. She could finally treat Borris completely, instead of just giving him a ring to stave off the worsening of his illness. It was nowhere near enough to handle the problems caused by the collapse of the System, even in a country as small as Illvaria, but it was definitely a good start.

“Alice, are you done?” asked Ethan. “If so, we should go back for now.”

Alice nodded, and then gave the corpse of the woman she had failed to heal one last, sad glance.

If she had access to her new Perk before she had started treatment, she would have been able to keep the woman alive. But each patient had been worth about half of the levels she had gotten: she simply had no way to have made the timing work out.

She sighed, and then followed Ethan as the two of them left the healer’s office.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for 3 dollars on patreon!

Join my Discord!

Notice: a Discussion about KU and the story

A few things:

1. I’ve signed a publishing deal for Budding Scientist with Podium. I believe I mentioned in, like… February? March? Something like that? that I was working on something, and well, that was the edits for the next draft of the Volume 1 of Budding Scientist. I felt that it was important not to change it TOO much, but there were a bunch of smaller things that I felt should be changed, either for flow, consistency, or typo corrections.

2. Volume 1 of the story WILL be coming down from Patreon, RoyalRoad, and Scribblehub near the end of next week. This means the majority of the first 62 chapters will no longer be available on these platforms. I am allowed to leave up 20% of the story, I believe? I will double check that number later, but that probably means the first 13 chapters will stay, if I'm doing my math correctly. The rest will be removed.

Now, I also wanted to discuss WHY this is happening. I was originally trying VERY HARD to push for not taking down any part of the story until Volume 3 of Budding Scientist was finished, meaning the entire story would have been available on RR/Patreon/Scribblehub, before I took it down a month later, or something like that.

Ultimately, the publishing company agreed with me, but recently, they emailed me and basically said ‘this is a really bad idea. Are you sure?’ and we got into a discussion about it. I myself eventually changed my mind.

Why?

Simply put, it boils down to financial stability.

I LOVE writing. I spend about half an hour every night before I go to sleep just laying in bed, thinking about my stories and where I want them to go. I’ll imagine scenes that haven’t been written yet and adjust minute details in them, think about how a certain world should be structured, think about how some component of the world interacts with another, or how two characters should meet and interact with each other. Every time I take a shower, I usually spend several minutes soaking in hot water and thinking about stories I want to write, or stories that I’m currently writing and want to improve. I sometimes scrap these ideas (not every idea is a good one), but writing is a passion that I’ve had since I was in elementary school. And while second-grade me wasn’t that good at writing, their heart was in the write place (heh. Puns).

When I posted the first chapter of Budding Scientist, it was during the Covid pandemic. My father had just had a stroke, I was unemployed and depressed, my cat died sometime around when I started releasing chapters, and I needed something to get away from everything for a while. I was very insecure about my unemployment, I felt awful, and I needed to do something. So I turned back to my at the time somewhat abandoned hobby of writing, dusted off an earlier draft of a story called ‘Alice’s Disastrous Journey through an Isekai World’ (I was never that good at naming stories) that I had written, and started messing with it. I rebuilt Alice’s character, the worldbuilding, the System, and basically everything to turn it from an unrefined goop of ideas to a fully fleshed out story that was (hopefully) good, and renamed several times before I settled on ‘A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World.’ I went through a few drafts, fixing things here and there, and eventually, I ended up writing the draft of Budding Scientist you’re familiar with today.

I’m incredibly grateful that you guys give me the chance to write, my greatest passion, and I actually get paid for it. Which, honestly, is something second-grade me would have never imagined happening.

However, while I’m incredibly grateful, I’m also not quite financially stable right now. My writing is currently in a very weird place - I treat it as a full time job, but I don’t quite make enough to sustain myself writing. I am VERY VERY close - My payment from Patreon each month is almost enough for me to survive, but it’s just a little short each month. And it has remained that way for quite a while now.

When I was just writing Budding Scientist, it was closer to a hobby paycheck - which was fair, since I messed up a lot while setting up Patreon tiers and have never quite managed to catch up to the promise I made when I first set up my Patreon - I had originally intended to have 3 tiers for Budding Scientist chapters, much like I currently do for MaM. That never ended up happening, because I could never quite get ahead of my Budding Scientist chapter schedule, and reworking the tiers without adding new chapters for Patrons just didn’t seem fair to me. The original intention was to have 3 chapters for a $3 tier, 5 chapters for a $5 tier, and 10 chapters for a $10 Tier.

Anyway, Budding Scientist wasn’t paying bills, but I wanted to keep writing. I had started writing, and I wanted to keep doing it. So I expanded a little bit. I went from just writing Budding Scientist to writing Budding Scientist and Markets and Multiverses. I’d had the idea floating around in my head for a while, and it just needed a few rough drafts and some polish. I was also excited to write the story, so I wrote the first draft of a girl named Miria, and her journey through the Multiverse. I thought a lot about things I felt I had done poorly in Budding Scientist, and sought to expand my skill set and utilize my new skills. I got to writing, until eventually, the story reached its third draft and I started posting it.

With the addition of MaM, my income reached its current point - almost financially stable, but not quite there yet. But ever so close…

I still love writing very much. But I would also like to not worry about my finances every day, and wonder if pursuing my passion is a horrible, horrible mistake that will come back and bite me. I would also appreciate actually having financial stability, and the funds to not just survive from one month to the next. And financially speaking, what makes the most sense for me is to remove Volume 1 of the story from RR, Scribblehub, and Patreon, and transition to a model where I can hopefully actually earn a decent living from treating writing as a full time job within the KU unlimited program. I also considered cutting back on writing and abandoning my hobby/job as a whole, but I really, REALLY do not want to do that unless there is no other plausible option. Maybe I’m just being dumb and stubborn about this, but I don’t want to give up on writing if there’s any chance it can work out for me. My other option for reaching financial stability would be to start a third story, but trying to manage that, along with the 3 chapters a week from Markets and Multiverses and the 1 chapter a week from Budding Scientist, is proving to be difficult. And while I do have a new story idea that I’m super excited about writing, it’s still very much in its first draft phase. Markets and Multiverses almost a year in draft form before I started posting it, and I imagine the timeline for ‘Project 3’ will look similar. Maybe it'll be faster, since I learned a lot more about writing since I started writing MaM, but... it's hard to say right now. And I would be looking at remaining financially unstable for another year or so in hopes that Project 3 will eventually solve everything, which is…a dubious plan, at best.

And since I’m also editing older Budding Scientist chapters to prepare for volume 2 of the Kindle/Podium release, and writing both of my current stories, it’s just a bit hard to juggle. Project 3’s timeline might get delayed for that reason alone, making it even more dubious. Right now, I squeeze out time on weekends to work on project 3 (which I am not going to admit the existence of anywhere besides this post, just for the record. Outside of this post, Project 3 is sort of like Schrodinger’s cat - it may or may not exist, but I will admit nothing. After all, I might run into a problem that makes it hard to keep writing the story if I can’t figure out a solution for it, or something - right now, I’m trying to figure out how the second and third volumes of the story’s plot line connect to each other, and whether volume 2 of the story would need to be split into two volumes, and whether that would solve the plotline issue I’m currently running into, and a bunch of other stuff about worldbuilding details. Anyway.)

While taking time out of my weekends is viable while I’m super excited about the idea and really really happy to be worldbuilding and imagining and writing the story, the ‘super excited’ phase of writing a new story usually only lasts a few months. After that, I transition to a more ‘I am enjoying writing this story’ kind of state, where I’m still having fun, but usually no longer invested enough in it to chop out several hours of my free time consistently to work on it and build it more. And inconsistency is never a good recipe for writing. Frankly, going into the KU exclusive program with Budding Scientist is notably more likely to solve my financial issues - and it’s also something I can do right now (well, in a few weeks, but you get the idea.)

Which is why I’ve ultimately made up my mind to take down the first volume of Budding Scientist book 1 from RR, Patreon, and Scribblehub. It hurts me a bit to do, because I did want to have all 3 volumes up on said platforms before taking them down only once I was done with the webnovel draft of the story. But at the end of the day, this is what I think is best for me and my writing as a whole. Not being stressed out and worried about whether my writing is a mistake will do wonders for my mental health and stress levels. And stress levels have a big impact on how well and how much I write. When stress is too high, I have a much harder time doing fun things like bonus chapters or longer chapters consistently, since there are some days where I just feel frazzled and blehh. (Those are technical terms that I just made up).

So this is my ultimate decision. On the 24th of this month, I will be removing Volume 1 from this platform. And Volume 2 will also be removed whenever I finish going through the editing process for it - which is still several months away, but whenever I get to that point, that will be what happens. I wish I could have given you more forewarning, but there were some miscommunications that happened that shortened the notice and forewarning I could give you.

That being said, here’s a link to the pre-order for Volume 1 of the story, if any of you are interested. It would mean a lot to me if you pre-ordered it, but you do whatever makes the most sense to you. Currently, my publisher says that it will be 'released' on the 19th of September, unless something has changed and I didn't get an email about it yet. And it has also gone through a notable amount of edits compared to the webnovel version - I tried not to change TOO much, but I fixed a lot of typos, consistency issues (there were a lot of weird bits about how much one gold crown could buy), and flow issues. There will be an audiobook and an e-book available. A link to audiobook here

A Small Town in Southern Illvaria

Link to Ebook here

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

Thank you very much for reading this far, and thank you for allowing me to pursue my dream as an actual job instead of just a hobby I sometimes have time for.

~Acaswell

Chapter 130

Neither Alice nor Ethan said much on the way back to Ethan’s manor. The [Guards] also remained fairly silent, simply leaving Alice to stew in her thoughts.

Now that she wasn’t worrying about her new Perk, or the disappearance of the System, Alice spent a few moments thinking about the woman she had failed to save earlier.

Alice sighed, and for a moment, she almost wished for the comforting presence of Ethan’s emotion-deadening Perk. Then, Alice shook her head.

Trying to run from her emotions certainly wouldn’t make things better.

“Ethan? Do you think there’s anything I should have done better?” She asked.

Ethan paused for a moment, and the group of [Guards] and the two Mages simply stood there on the street near Ethan’s mansion. A burst of rainbow mana flickered into existence around Alice and Ethan, preventing others from eavesdropping.

“Alice,” he said, sighing. “A lot of [Organic Mages] and [Doctors] start to lose confidence when their first patient dies. It’s less common for patients to die in big cities, since there are more [Organic Mages], and thus there are more Perk setups available to deal with unique illnesses. But in smaller towns and villages, losing patients is something a lot of medical practitioners go through.

“It would have been better if the second patient hadn’t been treated in a way that left him in a great deal of pain and future medical complications, and it’s unfortunate that the third patient died, but… keep in mind, you only have an apprentice healer’s license right now. You’re… what, level 20 in [Organic Mage]?”

“Level 17,” said Alice. “And it’s a secondary Class.”

Ethan nodded. “So not even a real level 17. You’re basically a level 5 [Organic Mage], for most intents and purposes right now. You don’t even have a level 10 Perk from the Class yet. And despite being a level 5 [Organic Mage], you managed to save a patient’s life when I’m pretty sure almost nobody else could have saved him. You also healed the first Patient using a Perk or Achievement I’ve never even heard of, and that gives you access to unique tools for handling problems like this.

“I said this while you were actually healing the patients, but I’ll say it again. These people were dead without your intervention. You did everything you possibly could have, and you’ll be able to do better next time. The biggest issue you ran into was that you were low on mana for the final patient. You did extremely well given the limited resources and knowledge you had available at the time. And now, you’ve levelled up a bit more, and in the future you’ll continue to level up more. You aren’t even a real medical practitioner, and yet you still managed to save two people’s lives today. You’re doing a lot of good.” He gently reached down and patted Alice’s shoulder a few times. “Don’t worry too much about what happened. You lost a patient, but it was due to factors entirely out of your control, and you’ll keep saving people’s lives just by experimenting with the System and learning more about our current situation. Even though you might feel like a failure right now, you’re doing better than I did when I was learning organic magic.” Ethan gave her a gentle smile.

“Did you ever lose a patient?” asked Alice, despite herself.

Ethan paused, and for a moment, a dark grimace caused his lips to twist into an ugly frown. Then, he sighed.

“I did. When I was younger, I was very confident in myself. I was, to put it bluntly, arrogant. I was a young Mage, the child of two Immortals, and I was making excellent progress towards Immortality. I thought that I couldn’t do anything wrong, and that every action I took was a guaranteed success. I tried to treat a rather complicated issue when I was way too low level to handle it, and… well, I messed up,” he said. He shook his head. “I don’t want to say anything else about the issue, but it was a big wake up call for me. I slowed down a bit in levelling, and started thinking a lot more about how to improve as both a person and a healer after that. I admit that I also didn’t want to practice using my Organic Magic for almost an entire decade after the incident. Obviously, I can use my organic magic just fine now, but at the time, it felt like the sky was falling. It took me a long time to move past it.” He sighed. “Sometimes, I wonder if I still haven’t fully moved past it.” Then, he gave Alice another more relaxed grin.

“So you’re not alone. Even I’ve lost patients before. And while I lost mine because I thought I was arrogant, you lost yours because you didn’t have enough mana. So whatever you did, it’s still far better than the reason I lost my patient back when I was younger. All right?”

The rainbow mana in their surroundings disappeared after that, and the group started walking again. Alice thought about Ethan’s words.

The fact that Ethan had lost a patient as well made her feel oddly better. She was used to seeing Ethan as some sort of half-invincible person. Most Immortals that were old enough seemed to be nearly omniscient, at least within their respective Classes. The idea that Ethan, a Mage focused on combat magic and, to a lesser extent, things like organic magic…

It didn’t make everything fine, but it made her feel better, at least. Some of the pressure in her heart felt like it was dissolving, even if it wasn’t completely gone.

She wasn’t happy that the woman had died. She wasn’t happy that she had failed someone and that someone had died as a result.

But she also realized that she had no idea what she could have done differently. Perhaps if she had been smarter, and quicker on her feet, and made different choices during her Perk selections, there might have been a different outcome. But she had no way of knowing that what would kill this woman today would be lack of pure mana, and she had genuinely done her best to keep her alive.

The incident wasn’t entirely behind her, but she could at least push it behind her for now.

She would never forget the woman she had failed to save – later, she would ask Ethan to look up every single detail about the woman’s life, history, and who she had been. She wanted to know who the woman was, and who she could have been if she had lived today. Alice felt that it was the best way she could honor the woman’s death.

But she could at least function again.

A few minutes later, the group arrived at Ethan’s manor.

Even though Alice felt exhausted, she still needed to tell Ethan about what she had seen today. Since she had told Ethan everything about her experiments on the System, System mana, and how this world’s magic worked, she didn’t need to try to solve every single problem on her own.

Even though she wanted nothing more than to sink into her mattress, fall asleep, and forget the world for a few hours, she knew that those hours might be the difference between hundreds of people living or dying as the collapse of the System and its aftereffects progressed. Right now, as the effects of the System’s collapse slowly made themselves evident, she needed to make sure that the relevant people knew everything she could possibly discover if she wanted to mitigate the effects as much as possible. She groaned, but waited as the [Guards] started to disperse.

Then, Alice quickly shared all of her memories about what had happened during her Perk selection with Ethan, as well as her thoughts and assumptions about what everything meant.

She also requested that Ethan keep an eye on the Church of the System for her, as well as to look out for any reports of people behaving oddly after levelling up or seeing strange Perk and Achievement notifications.

And then Alice felt that her duty was done. She stumbled to her room, half-asleep by the time she got there, and collapsed onto her bed.

She was asleep before her head even hit the pillow.

* * *

Several hours passed. Alice used her {Sleep Reading} Perk to read a few lighthearted adventure stories she had laying around in her storage Perk. She also discovered, for the first time, that she had a little more control over her dreams than she thought she did. Since she was technically asleep and dreaming, it was easy to conjure up a cup of warm, soothing tea, for example, even though the Perk said absolutely nothing about anything other than reading. Alice could even imagine an entire, rather comfortable library while in her dreams, and then relax in a comforting environment for a while.

She felt that she might have missed a few other ways to exploit her {Sleep Reading} Perk, although she didn’t feel like thinking too much about new, innovative ways to use her Perks right now. That could wait a few days. For now, she simply did her best to relax and work through her emotions.

And then, as she was starting to properly put her emotions to rest, she was abruptly awoken by a massive burst of mana ripping through the world. She spent a few moments floundering between her dream and reality, before her mind finally caught up with the fact that something was terribly wrong.

She spent a few moments trying to figure out what had happened, before her eyes opened wide.

The mana in the world around her was in chaos.

The previously calm night air was now filled with distorted, jagged lines of rainbow mana. Alice was used to seeing rainbow mana exist in her surroundings: after all, the System was usually present everywhere, at all times.

However, right now, the System was broken. There hadn’t been any System mana in Alice’s surroundings for nearly 36 hours. Normally, Alice would have found the return of the System to be incredibly comforting. After all, if the System returned, a massive ticking time bomb in everyone’s Status Screen would be fixed. However, this System mana didn’t look anything like the System mana Alice was used to seeing.

This System mana that Alice saw right now looked more like someone had taken a giant bucket of System paint and then just dumped it onto the rest of the world. There were massive spikes of rainbow mana that stretched into the sky that looked so densely packed she could almost mistake them for real, physical objects. And there were also huge patches of air that were completely untouched by the rainbow mana in her surroundings. Instead of the even, organized chaos of the System that she was used to, the System looked like a giant patchwork quilt of mana.

As Alice was blinking in confusion, the uncontrolled spray of System mana started to peter out. The random patchwork quilt of mana simply fizzed out, vanishing almost as rapidly as it had appeared.

Alice, finally realizing that it must be some sort of aftereffect of the System collapsing, peeled her eyes wide open to memorize every single detail she could get her eyes on. She was having a hard time concentrating already, since she wasn’t fully over the effects of losing a patient yet. But she needed to seize the opportunity to grasp any information she could get her hands on. Her feelings could wait: the information she needed would not wait.

The rainbow vomit of mana lasted for about thirty more seconds. And as Alice watched the System mana slowly vanish from existence, she started to frown.

She had gotten this feeling a few other times before, when she had observed System mana. It was a strange sensation that she had started to pay less attention to once the System disappeared, but she was pretty sure the System mana in her surroundings reminded her of… something.

She couldn’t quite put her finger on what, and the moment Alice noticed that there was some sort of pattern or something in the System mana that seemed familiar.

Before she could finish working out what she had seen, the deluge of System finally disappeared.

Alice sighed.

Then, she checked her Status Screen.

The short-lived spurt of System mana had been rather unexpected. She had no idea what it meant, and she also wasn’t sure if it had changed anything. But if it had changed her Status Screen, either by making things worse or fixing things, she needed to know now. If all of the erroneously sorted mana and errors in her Status Screen had been fixed during the burst of rainbow mana, it would almost make up for the patient who had died earlier.

Or it might make things a hundred times worse. If the System’s weird burst of mana really patched up every single problem that had come from the System, Alice realized that her intervention might have killed the woman when doing nothing at all would have saved her.

Alice checked her Status Screen, trying not to pay attention to the fact that her hands had started shaking.

Her newest Perk still had a name that looked more like an error message than a real Perk name. The Perk description was still filled with grammatical issues.

Alice felt a burst of relief crash into her body, and realized, with horror, that right now she felt relieved that the System hadn’t been fixed.

Because if the System was fixed, she would have really killed an innocent person with her meddling.

She took a deep breath, and tried to stabilize her emotions. After a few moments, she succeeded in pushing her thoughts away.

She needed to focus on things she could do right now. Not what-if scenarios.

She needed something to distract her.

She decided to take her pure mana seed and try to sort out the clogged bits of mana that had been incorrectly sorted earlier. She still vividly remembered that there was a bit of [Scientist] mana stuck to her [Scholar] class seed, and a bit of [Scholar] mana stuck to her [Scientist] class seed. Not to mention several globs of totally different kinds of mana that had been thrown together while she was levelling up earlier.

That was something that she would need to fix sooner or later. And it would also take her mind off of her uncomfortable emotions.

Thus, after several checks using {Safety Analysis}, Alice tried to create a pair of ‘tweezers’ with her pure mana. She wanted to use her pure mana seed to pick up the clogged bits of mana, and then shove the mana into the correct magic seed.

It took several minutes of fiddling around to get it right, but eventually, Alice succeeded in picking up the chunks of [Scholar] mana that had tried to integrate with the wrong class seed. The biggest issue she ended up running into was that mana proved unexpectedly ‘slippery’ inside of her body. Every time she tried to grab the bits of disorganized mana, it ended up falling again. It was like trying to hold on to a greased pig: no matter what she did, it slipped out of range of her mana tendrils again. Even more frustrating was that the tactile senses provided by her mana tendrils were very vague, making the whole endeavor about ten times harder than it needed to be.

Eventually, Alice used all seven of her mana tendrils to create a kind of net, which she used to trap the disorganized mana. It took a great deal of time and concentration, and she accidentally dropped the disorganized bits of mana several times, but eventually, she succeeded in dragging the [Scholar] mana over to the correct seed.

There, she ran into another problem.

Much like a clogged drainpipe, now that Alice’s [Scholar] mana seed had a bunch of the wrong kind of mana stuck to it, it simply didn’t want to absorb the [Scholar] mana she had dragged over to it. Instead, the Class seed was insistently trying to suck up all of the nearby [Scientist] mana, and completely ignoring the mana it was supposed to eat.

Alice grimaced.

She had a hard time grabbing hold of one of the two chunks of misplaced mana. If she was supposed to grab both and move them at the same time, it was going to be several times more difficult.

Not to mention, her pure mana reserves were starting to run low.

Alice started to hurry up, because she was starting to get nervous. Every time she ‘dropped’ the chunk of displaced mana, it would get dragged back to the wrong seed, where the incorrect seed would continue to fruitlessly try to absorb it. If she messed up, she would have to start over again next time.

She resisted the urge to growl in frustration. She had felt bad and wanted to distract herself, but she might have ultimately ended up wasting several hours of pure mana without accomplishing anything if she couldn’t get rid of some of the excess mana in her body.

Alice split off three of her mana tendrils to keep the chunk of [Scholar] mana next to the [Scholar] seed, and then used the other four mana tendrils to try to grab the [Scientist] mana that was clogging up the seed. It took a few tries, and at one point, Alice was dangerously close to letting the [Scholar] mana slip and return to the [Scientist] seed. But after a particularly close call, she succeeded in nudging the [Scientist] mana out of the way and getting the [Scholar] mana to the correct seed.

The class seed greedily absorbed the correct kind of mana, and Alice let out a sigh of relief. Even though she was still in an awful mood, at least she had accomplished something worthwhile today.

You have leveled up!

Scholar: 56 -> 57

A few seconds later, before Alice could bring her [Scientist] mana over to the [Scientist] seed, Alice ran out of pure mana.

Instantly, the chunk of [Scientist] mana was dragged back towards her [Scholar] seed, where it once again got stuck. Most frustrating of all, Alice could still see multiple chunks of [Doctor] mana and a few other types still laying around in her body. They were much smaller in size, and they weren’t really a big problem yet, but Alice definitely felt that they would become an issue if she didn’t deal with them eventually. But she didn’t have a [Doctor] Class seed, meaning Alice had nowhere she could go to remove the [Doctor] mana from her body. And as she had already discovered while trying to move around the [Scholar] mana, anytime she wasn’t actively pushing mana away, it would fly right back to its starting position. Meaning she couldn’t just push it out of her body.

A few moments later, another few globs of mana from her surroundings started to flow towards her class seeds. Most of it was [Explorer of Magic] mana, which meant that at least there wouldn’t be any other problems after absorbing this mana.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic 76 -> 77

And then, a few new types of unidentified mana quickly made their way into her body, and Alice resisted the urge to curse.

Apparently, in addition to one level in [Explorer of Magic], Alice had gained some mana for [Pure Mana Manipulator], [Esoteric Mage], and some more misplaced [Scientist] mana. Some of which had promptly gotten stuck trying to enter her clogged-up [Scholar] magic seed, and some of which had gotten stuck trying to enter her [Explorer of Magic] seed. The amount of [Scientist] mana that made it to the correct seed didn’t even give her a new level.

Alice felt an increasingly large headache start to form near her forehead. She took a few more deep breaths, and tried to quell the increasingly high level of annoyance she was feeling. Annoyance was not a productive emotion, and she hated feeling it, but after everything else that had happened today, it was just so easy to be frustrated by small problems, even if she had the tools to resolve most of the issues she had run into after waking up. She took a final deep breath, and tried to focus on her new observations.

She had a much better idea of just how important some of the steps the System usually took when people levelled up were now, and had a budding theory to go along with her new observations.

Alice now suspected that any time anyone did any action that was related to a specific ‘idea,’ they would get a huge hodgepodge of different mana types. For example, if someone healed someone, they would get a bunch of different kinds of mana. [Organic Mage] mana, [Doctor] mana, and perhaps a few other similar kinds of mana, because those were the classes people associated with healing. Despite that fact, when the System was still around, most people didn’t have dozens, or hundreds of classes. It was pretty unusual for someone to have more than ten in total.

Why was this?

It was likely because the System converted various similar kinds of mana into one, specific kind of mana, thus concentrating people’s benefits for performing specific actions into a few categories they could make the most use of. There was probably some way to convert similar kinds of mana into each other, although there might be restrictions on the exact nature of these conversions.

This might also be why there were requirements for people to get new Classes: they acted as a way for the System to understand what people wanted to prioritize.

Of course, there were still some oddities with this theory. Alice had looked it up before, and knew for a fact that nobody had ever observed a decrease in levelling speed for their classes, even if they had several similar Classes. If somebody had twenty different research related classes and then made a new discovery, each class would level up just as quickly as if the person only had one research-related Class. However, Alice also knew that magic probably didn’t follow the law of conservation of energy, so maybe this observation was simply because conservation of energy didn’t always work in this context.

Either way, at least for now, she had to find a way to copy the System’s filtering ability. She had a huge amount of mana her Class seeds couldn’t absorb properly, and if she didn’t find a way to deal with it, it would cause huge issues for her mental stability sooner or later. Especially right now, when she already felt bad, she didn’t feel like trying to manage an increasingly strong desire to act like a [Doctor] or a [Scientist].

The biggest question was what kind of magic seed she needed to properly convert mana from one type to another. She spent several minutes tossing ideas around, trying to figure out what magic seed she could form with {Seeds of Ambition} once the Perk came off cooldown in about a week.

As she was lost in her thoughts, she heard a sudden crash in the distance. It was loud enough that it threw her out of her thoughts, and she immediately started scanning the place outside of her window.

What was that sound?

Moments later, Alice began to pick up an increasingly noticeable set of clanging and scratching sounds, as metal clashed against metal in the distance.

She frowned.

Something was very wrong.

She immediately started preparing her magic tendrils. The sound of metal ringing against metal could be the sound of some [Guards] training, but it was very late.

Suddenly, Alice thought of the hostile gaze that had been centered on her earlier that day, and a chill ran down her spine.

She wasn’t entirely sure if the manor was under attack yet. However, she suddenly felt as if the night was filled with hidden eyes, hungrily gazing at her from the distance.

She quickly moved away from her window and began heading towards the hallway.

Alice wasn’t terrible in a fight, but she wasn’t great either. If something bad was happening, the first thing she needed to do was find Ethan or her [Hidden Guard]. Preferably both.

As she was moving through the corridors, the sound of metal clashing against metal became increasingly obvious. Someone was attacking the manor, and they were getting closer by the second.

A note from acaswell

I made a really important announcement two days ago. You should go read that if you haven’t seen it already. Also, I did get the e-book link, for those interested in that and not the audiobook. That is linked below.

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

Something else interesting: for literally the first time ever, I am doing a shout-out to another story. This is entirely unprompted by them, but is mostly due to a string of rather absurd coincidences. I think it’s a funny story, so I’ll share it.

Yesterday, I felt rather tired. I effectively wrote an extra ‘chapter’ for Budding Scientist last Wednesday, when I wrote the announcement. It was a rather more emotionally draining process than the normal chapter-creating process – and I also put it together pretty quickly, basically within a few hours of finishing up emailing my publisher back and forth. So I wanted to unwind a bit. I gave myself permission to be a little less productive on some projects that don’t immediately impact you guys, and decided to unwind by bingeing a story with (several cups) of tea.

And right as I caught up to the current chapter of that story, the author of that story gave me a shout-out in the author's note for the most recent chapter. Which caught me totally off-guard. I usually sort of assume that most people don’t know I exist outside of the comments section for my own story, so to see a shout-out to my story in the author’s note of a chapter for a story I had been enjoying was pretty shocking. Even more so since while a few people have messaged me about shout-outs, it’s always been a rather ‘hey, I could shout out your story if you shout out mine’ sort of deal. And while I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, I refuse to shout-out a story I haven’t personally read and enjoyed. The story doesn’t have to be perfect, but I need to have enjoyed it enough to recommend it to other people.

The fact that I binged the story and caught up with 700-ish pages of words in one day is a pretty good indicator that I enjoyed the story, at least in my eyes. And they gave my story a shout out completely unprompted. So I figure fair is fair, and I’ll also give them a shout-out completely unprompted, since I did enjoy their story and I just find the coincidence factor incredibly amusing.

With all that said, if any of you want something to read, https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/65040/an-unborn-hero is a pretty amusing story. My TLDR: is that it’s about a girl who’s obsessed with magical girls trying to assemble a team of magical girls to beat up the demon king before even being born. The story is mostly a comedy, and it’s written quite well. I chuckled several times while reading the story. It’s just serious enough that the ‘main plotline’ doesn’t feel like it’s total nonsense or only played for kicks, which is a hard balance to strike. My own attempts at incorporating my humor into my writing never quite seem to go well, and I usually end up removing it from the story before any of you see it.

If that sounds amusing to you, go check it out. Or don’t. You do you, I guess. XD.

Also, shameless plug - you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 131

Alice felt her heart leap into her throat for a moment, before she started to calm down.

She still felt a little afraid because the manor was under attack, but her training started to kick in. Ethan had explicitly taken her with him when the Illvarian army had taken down the Society base several months ago, in order to train her awareness of battlefields and fighting. He had also consistently made her think about what to do if an [Assassin] came for her with his constant quizzes. Combined with the combat training from her classes at her magic academy, Alice had at least some idea what she needed to do right now.

She still wasn’t perfectly calm, but she could at least control her panic.

She continued running through the halls of Ethan’s manor in a controlled jog, heading towards Ethan’s study. Alice was decent at fighting now, but she was still a researcher first and foremost. Trying to protect herself against someone brazen enough to attack an Immortal’s manor was a terrible idea. Instead, she should be trying to meet up with Ethan or her [Hidden Guard] so that they could keep her safe.

And yet, despite her exceptional [Dexterity] stat that would put an Olympic athlete’s running speed to shame, it wasn’t fast enough.

As Alice was rounding a corner into another hallway, she stumbled upon two hostile Mages fighting with a [Guard].

One of them noticed her, and yelled something in a language Alice didn’t recognize.

The two had been conserving their mana during the fight with the [Guard], but the moment they saw Alice, they started flooding their bodies with organic mana. Moments later, their strength dramatically increased. One of them continued to attack the [Guard], trying to finish him off, while the other started charging towards her.

Organic Mages, thought Alice, grimacing.

Hostile [Organic Mages] attacking the manor immediately made her guess who the attackers were. There was one hostile organization that was famous for employing large numbers of [Organic Mages], and Alice and Ethan had destroyed one of their bases a few months ago.

A moment later, {Enhanced Senses} kicked in.

Time seemed to slow down a bit. It wasn’t quite as drastic as the boost from {Adrenaline Rush}, but Alice’s perception of where her enemies were and what they were doing also increased significantly. At the same time, Alice felt a certain awareness of the strength of her two enemies settle into her mind.

Neither attacker is purely combat focused. They’re still dangerous. I’ll have a hard time keeping up with them once I use up {Adrenaline Rush} and {Enhanced Senses}. I can fall back on {Speed Experimentation} to boost my speed a little further, but they can probably also boost their speed. I need to win this battle fast or things could get dangerous.

After Alice finished processing the information from {Enhanced Senses}, she quickly reached out towards everything in her surroundings and ripped up four floorboards with her mana tendrils. Then, she quickly used her remaining three mana tendrils to turn the floorboards into sharpened stakes by shaving off the ends.

Then, she fired the sharpened stakes at the [Organic Mage] charging towards her.

The man lit up with rainbow mana, and suddenly, his movements stopped looking like they were in slow motion.

He’s using a Perk similar to {Adrenaline Rush}, she realized.

The man sprouted three mana tendrils of his own, and channeled kinetic mana through them.

Before she could react, he ripped a painting off the wall, and then hurled it at Alice’s projectiles. He managed to knock two of the sharpened floorboards off-course, before he stopped the other two dead in their tracks with his kinetic magic.

And by the time he had finished stopping Alice’s first volley of projectiles, she had already prepared the next wave, using her enhanced speed.

The next four projectiles nearly ripped into the man’s chest, but rainbow mana surged through his body, and then he sped up again.

Alice felt {Adrenaline Rush} kick in as the man appeared right behind her. She couldn’t tell if the man had teleported or simply sped up well beyond her perception, but if {Adrenaline Rush} hadn’t kicked in, she wouldn’t have even processed the man’s disappearance before he attacked her.

Luckily, her ability to perceive her surroundings in all directions, as well as {Adrenaline Rush}, saved her. The man seemed to be trying to punch her in the back of the head, but under the influence of {Enhanced Senses} and {Adrenaline Rush}, he seemed to be moving in slow motion. Alice noticed that his fist was aglow with rainbow mana, indicating that if his fist connected with her, she would have a very bad day.

Fear flashed through her veins. Alice tossed a bit of display mana into {Speed Experimentation} to boost herself even further, by convincing herself that she was experimenting with how her new No_Magic seed worked in a fight.

Then, with the help of {Extended Organics}, one of her mana tendrils simply popped into existence behind her and drilled into the man’s arm. She activated her No_Magic seed.

The man’s body became slow and sluggish. Whatever Perk he had been using to speed up his physical body and perception of time had been shut down, at least temporarily. The rainbow Perk that had emanated from his fist and given Alice a crippling sense of danger disappeared. All of the organic mana that he had been using to boost his arm disappeared. In a fraction of a second, the man changed from a dangerous enemy who was about to kill her to a weak combatant fighting a Mage.

At the same time, Alice felt her No_Magic magic seed start to bleed mana at a ridiculous rate.

Alice’s new Perk could deactivate every kind of magic, even the magic inside of someone else’s body. But trying to push against the innate magic resistance of another person was also insanely mana inefficient. Every single second that she tried to keep the other mage from using his Perks and magic, mana flooded out of her magic seed like a collapsing dam.

Alice immediately dematerialized more of her mana tendrils, before they also appeared behind her. They quickly connected with the man’s sleeve, and Alice tried to use them to pick the mage up and slam him into the ground.

Instead of throwing the man around like a rag doll, his sleeve simply negated Alice’s attempts to manipulate it. It was clearly enchanted to prevent enemy Mages from using it.

Alice’s eyes widened in surprise, before she pulled her enchanted bead bracelet out of her storage Perk and activated the enchantment on it.

All of the beads on the bracelet propelled themselves into the man’s face, shredding apart his skin and muscles as he screamed in pain. However, she didn’t think any of her beads penetrated his skull. She had ripped apart one of his eyes and hurt him very badly, but she didn’t think she had inflicted a lethal blow on him.

Alice felt the man desperately try to activate some Organic Mana and heal himself, but Alice immediately dug her mana tendril deeper into his body. Her No_Magic mana reserves started to deplete even more quickly, but the man’s reactions quickly turned sluggish.

Alice felt a surge of relief course through her body.

She must have hit something more important than she had thought with her bracelet-beads.

At the same time, with her remaining six mana tendrils, she immediately started preparing another spray of sharpened floorboards. She wanted the [Organic Mage] to die as quickly as possible, before his friend got involved in the fight. Her No_Magic seed was already nearly out of mana, and the second Mage could still potentially kill her and the [Guard] if she wasn’t careful.

Before she could finish off the first Mage, she saw the other [Organic Mage] use a Perk to become much stronger. Then, he used his bare fist to punch through the [Guard’s] armor and hammer him in the head, knocking the [Guard] out and completely removing him from the fight. She resisted the urge to curse. Her floorboard volley wasn’t ready yet, but the other Mage definitely wouldn’t give her time to finish off his friend. And now the [Guard] she had been counting on to help her keep the second Mage occupied might be dead.

Not only had she failed to keep a patient alive yesterday, but a [Guard] might have just gotten killed protecting her.

At the same time, Alice felt {Adrenaline Rush} start to fade away, and the mana she had poured into {Speed Experimentation} also started to peter out. Her perception of time started to revert to normal, and the exceptional processing speed and bullet time that she had been taking advantage of started to disappear. Only {Enhanced Senses} was left.

Rainbow mana started to flow towards the fallen [Guard]’s head, and Alice felt a breath of relief in her stomach. The [Guard] was fine, and the Mage was much more worried about his friend than killing the [Guard]. But until the [Guard] finished healing with his Perk, Alice was on her own.

Alice focused on {Speed Experimentation}, and tossed in some organic mana. She wasn’t very proficient in using it in combat, and she needed to keep moving and thinking as quickly as possible if she didn’t want to die. {Speed Experimentation} clicked into place again.

As the second Mage surged towards her like a malevolent tide, Alice abandoned her attempts to finish off the first [Organic Mage], and sent her floorboard volley at him. The [Organic Mage] dodged out of the way with contemptuous ease, and a split second later, he was nearly touching her.

Then, the [Organic Mage]’s eyes widened in surprise as the floor underneath him flipped him into the air like a miniature catapult. Before he had time to react, Alice hurled him away from her.

Since the second Mage was gone for the moment, she turned her attention back to the first [Organic Mage]. He had taken advantage of her distraction and managed to flop away from her, temporarily breaking contact with her mana tendrils. This had given him a quick window to heal himself, free from the influence of her No_Magic mana. Alice took a step closer to him, and her man tendrils disappeared and reappeared before drilling inside of the man’s body again.

However, the man had managed to heal more than she had anticipated, and he didn’t intend to die without a fight.

Then Alice felt her world light up with pain as the man’s fist connected with her head, sending her reeling. If the man’s organic mana hadn’t been disabled, that punch might have knocked her out on the spot, or seriously injured her. Instead, it was painful, but largely irrelevant.

Since Alice had realized how useful it was to start sending pieces of terrain flying around, Alice ripped up the two floorboards under the man’s feet and tried to send him flying through the air, much like the first mage.

The man neatly sidestepped her attempt to send him flying using nothing but his raw physical abilities, and then tried to step in for another swing at her head.

Alice felt her No_Magic mana finally run out. Organic mana started to surge through the man’s body again, and Alice felt her stomach clench in fear.

Alice sent another spray of sharpened shrapnel into the [Organic Mage]’s skull, and saw something tear into his skull. The organic mana in his body tried to reach his brain and heal him, but the massive wooden spike inside of his skull prevented him from healing anything.

The first Mage nearly dead.

The [Guard] who had been nearly killed earlier stood up. The wound in his skull was completely healed from whatever Perk he had used earlier. He sprinted to Alice’s side and beheaded the dying [Organic Mage], ending any chance for the man to turn things around.

The two of them looked at the second [Organic Mage], who Alice had thrown into a wall earlier. The man grunted in pain, but pushed himself to his feet. He glared at Alice, as if he wanted to eat her alive- and then he started running away.

Alice quickly realized that he was out of organic mana. She had thought he was conserving mana earlier, but it was clear that the [Guard] had put up a better fight than she thought. The second Mage wasn’t in very good condition at all anymore.

A sharpened floorboard to the head ended any potential threat he still represented before he could escape.

Then, Alice sagged to the floor, feeling a mixture of fear and relief.

She had been forced to use almost all of her Perks and abilities, but she had won the fight. She had survived.

The two attackers had probably been level 60 or so in their primary Classes. They had not been slouches by any stretch of the imagination, and had clearly optimized at least some of their abilities for combat. If Alice was a little less prepared, she might have died or been kidnapped by the two enemy Mages. Based on the fact that they were trying to punch her instead of stab her, Alice suspected they had been trying to take her alive, although it was hard to say for sure. Either way, she was incredibly glad that she had managed to survive and keep herself safe, even if she was almost out of combat Perks that she could use today.

“Are you all right?” she asked the [Guard] a moment later, ignoring her level up notifications for now. She was running low on most kinds of mana, but she could still spare some organic mana to heal any injuries the [Guard] might have sustained during the fight. She also still had {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to heal herself later, if she needed it.

“I should be fine,” said the [Guard], grimacing. “My ribs hurt, and I think one might be cracked, but nothing too serious.”

“Don’t fight against my mana,” said Alice, grimacing. “I don’t have any Perks like {Patient’s Consent} yet, so I’m going to be spending a lot of mana on this.”

The [Guard] seemed to hesitate for a moment, before he nodded.

Alice quickly did her best to patch up the [Guard]’s cracked ribs. Her regular healing abilities still weren’t great, but patching up a cracked bone wasn’t beyond her abilities anymore, especially given how much time she had spent observing human bodies and System interactions recently. She didn’t manage to completely patch up the injury, since she was still afraid of causing some sort of strange permanent problem, but she could at least help the [Guard]’s body speed up the healing process a bit and make the cracked rib less of a hindrance.

“Thank you, Lady Alice,” said the [Guard] after she finished. “It isn’t a perfect job, but I can definitely feel that my ribs are less damaged now, at least. It’ll be easier to fight like this.”

The two quickly scanned the hallway a few more times, trying to see if any other enemies had crept up on them while they were recuperating. Luckily, it didn’t seem like any other Society Mages had found them.

“Lady Alice, are you looking for Honored Immortal Ethan? I believe that he would want you to find him as soon as possible,” said the [Guard] after a few moments. “I was originally trying to find your location to protect you, but I’m glad you found me instead.” The [Guard] chuckled grimly. “Although it’s a bit embarrassing that you needed to protect me, instead of the other way around.”

Alice nodded. “Don’t worry about it. Two Mages against a non-mage is a huge disadvantage. Do you know where Ethan is? We should meet up with him as fast as possible.”

“He is currently moving around in the area between the first floor and second floor of the building, last I knew. The attackers seemed surprised that Honored Immortal was still present in the manor, and he’s taking the opportunity to ambush the attackers.”

Alice immediately nodded, and decided to wait a while before heading over. If Ethan was caught up in the middle of a big fight, she might distract him if she went over right now. She had already burned through most of her best Perks during the fight, and rushing to the front lines would just be stupid. If Ethan was currently fighting the attackers by himself, it would be best to hunker down and wait for him to find her, instead of trying to find him.

The two of them quickly stepped into the nearest room and started barricading it, as well as preparing for any potential threats that might find the room they were hiding in and attack.

Luckily, nobody else came to attack them.

After a few minutes, a few more [Guards] appeared near the room. One of them was sporting a rather large hole in his guts, although he was still moving around just fine, and another one of them was Alice’s [Hidden Guard]. He was currently missing an arm, which made Alice wince a little bit. Even if regenerating limbs wasn’t too hard in this world, it was probably quite painful to lose a limb. And it also spoke to the strength of the people attacking the manor. Alice and the [Guard] had been luckier than she thought. If some of the stronger opponents had attacked them instead, Alice would probably have been at the mercy of the attackers.

Alice and the [Guard] let them in, and then re-barricaded the doors and continued to wait.

The [Guards] and Alice’s [Hidden Guard] grouped up around her in tense silence, keeping a wary eye on the two hallways leading into the room in order to keep Alice safe.

The sound of fighting in the manor started to die down as the minutes passed. Alice’s [Guards] never stopped being wary of their surroundings, but no other enemies found them. Half an hour later, Ethan walked into the room. His eyes immediately flicked towards Alice, and some of the tension bled away from his shoulders.

“Good, you’re still alive,” he said, immediately striding over to Alice. “Are you injured at all? I have a lot of organic mana left over.”

“I should be fine,” said Alice. “Just a few bruises.”

“Good, good. I’m glad you had the sense to leave your room – the attackers seem to have been targeting you in particular. They managed to get into it and ransack it, and a few of the attackers seemed rather high level. I didn’t even manage to kill all of them.” he said, shaking his head. “The person who was watching you earlier seems to have been some sort of decoy. They led my [Spies] to a hidden base that I thought was a Society base, but it seems to have been an elaborate ruse. It has been quite a while since someone outwitted me like this,” said Ethan, looking more than a little disturbed.

Then, he turned towards Alice’s [Hidden Guard] and the other few [Guards] who had been protecting Alice, before nodding at them. “All of you did very well in protecting my apprentice during the attack. I’ll personally heal your injuries in a moment, and I’ll give you a very generous bonus. Well done,” he said, extending a few mana tendrils towards the injured [Guards]. A few moments later, all of their injuries were simply wiped away by Ethan’s organic mana. The [Guards] looked much more relieved when all of their injuries were healed.

“Go help the other [Guards] check the manor for any hidden enemies. I’ll arrange for you bonuses later,” said Ethan.

The [Guards] dispersed. Now that the two of them were alone, Ethan frowned again. A rainbow Perk shimmered into existence, safeguarding their conversation. “This attack is very troubling. The attackers seemed to have been very focused on you. They either know something, or they’re desperate.” He sighed. “Either way, it’s not good that the attackers were willing to attack an Immortal’s Manor in the middle of the city.”

“Were the attackers from the Society?” Alice asked.

“Almost certainly. Every sign indicates that they were from the Society, although I will confirm it later.” Ethan shook his head.

Alice glanced at the splatters of blood in the hallway where she and the [Guard] had fought against the attacking Mages, and then nodded. She and Ethan both knew that the Society would go completely insane if they were aware of all of Alice’s research into the System. They would possibly literally toss all of their leadership, and a huge portion of their combat personnel, into kidnapping her if they knew everything Alice could do and everything she had researched. Her research was simply too important and valuable.

It wasn’t quite that bad yet. But the Society was definitely thought she knew something. And they were willing to lose a huge batch of combat-ready Mages just to steal her research notes.

“Did you have any research notes laying around in your room?”

“I have a good Memory Perk. I don’t usually write things down anymore,” said Alice. “I used to, when I first arrived in this world, but these days, I just don’t really see the point anymore. My memory is the best notebook I have available to me.”

Ethan nodded. “Good. So they won’t be able to steal any of your notes.”

The two fell silent, as both considered the implications of the attack tonight.

“The person who was spying on you earlier seems to have been some sort of trap,” said Ethan. “I sent a few [Spies] to track them down, and I also made it seem like I was leading the attack once I realized it was a trap. I wasn’t sure if they were targeting you or me, and I wanted to be sure.” He shook his head. “I thought they would send a few kidnappers after you, or maybe a dozen Mages at most. I had the [Guards] preparing to defend your room. They attacked with a few dozen Mages instead, and managed to punch through the [Guards]. I originally thought I had over prepared, and I even stayed away because I was worried they wouldn’t take action if I was too obviously present in the manor. I apologize for the fact that my actions put you in danger – you were never supposed to be in harm’s way tonight,” said Ethan. He looked truly upset for a moment, before he shuddered, and shook his head. “Considering their actions, the question of whether they’re targeting you is clear. The Society may not be aware of everything, but they’re now clearly and explicitly targeting you.”

Alice felt a wave of cold anxiety worm its way into her stomach, but at the same time, she felt a strange sense of… relief?

She was startled once she realized that she felt relieved. It was such a strange emotion to feel after confirming that the Society of Starry Eyes was definitely targeting her, and it took her a few moments to figure out why she felt relieved.

Since the moment she had learned about this world’s situation, she had been worried that the Society would target her. She had spent almost every single moment of her time in this world aware that if her research was known, or if the wrong people learned about her home planet, she would probably be targeted by the Society of Starry Eyes. Every single move she took was careful, and she was always, always afraid that someone would find out more than they should know.

And now it didn’t matter. During the tea party a few days ago, Ethan’s mother had said that it probably didn’t matter whether Ethan and Alice tried to cover up the fact that she was a researcher and not a combat Mage.

Alice could now definitely confirm that it was irrelevant. The Society was targeting her.

It was a terrifying situation, but at the same time, Alice didn’t have to be worried about whether the Society might target her anymore.

She now knew for a fact that they knew something. And they were coming.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – for 3 dollars, you can read 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Well, down goes Volume 1 for Budding Scientist. I have such weirdly mixed feelings about this… even though I’m hopeful things will be better in the future, I also feel nostalgic about the past, I suppose.

It is what it is?

But it was also kind of depressing. I just feel weird about it. Meh.

It also occurred to me that perhaps I should advertise my other story/stories a little more often than… about once a year, according to my memory. Which is a thought that PROBABLY should have been a bit more self-evident than it was, but meh.

If you somehow weren’t aware already, I write another story called Markets and Multiverses! It’s a serial reincarnation story about exploring the Multiverse by reincarnating over and over again, while managing vastly different magic systems that crop up from one world to the next, as well as the unique laws of reality that each dimension can form. And it’s also about hyper capitalistic wizards gone horribly, horribly wrong in the distant past. And friendship! The main character is big on her friends! In most serial transmigration novels, it’s hard to get attached to people besides the main character, because they sort of don’t really HAVE other permanent cast members. So I wanted a story that had a little bit more in terms of characters that you can get attached to, while still having all of the fun components of a serial transmigration novel.

If that sounds appealing to you, please try reading it! And if you enjoy it, maybe leave a good rating or review for it? O.o

Here’s a link to the Royalroad version of the story, although the story is available on every platform I post on. I personally just prefer the look of RR’s interface when I’m reading myself, so I tend to link to that website first XD.

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/61244/markets-and-multiverses-a-serial-transmigration

Join my Discord!

Chapter 132

Alice quickly dealt with her level-up notifications before she went to sleep.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 56 -> 58, Kinetic Manabinder 41 -> 42

Both her [Kinetic Manabinder] and [Survivor] Class seeds got clogged up after her level up notifications, meaning that if Alice wanted to level up again, she needed to unclog her [Survivor], [Kinetic Manabinder], [Explorer of Magic], [Scholar], and [Scientist] classes. In short, literally the only Main class seed she had that wasn’t currently clogged up was [Careful Enchanter]. Alice had no pure mana left over right now, and some of the types of mana stuck to her class seeds were Classes she didn’t have a seed for. Which mean that she would have to wait for a while to deal with the leftover chunks of [Survivor] mana stuck to her [Kinetic Manabinder] class and the [Kinetic Manabinder] mana stuck to her [Survivor] class seed. And then she would need to figure out how to deal with the various other kinds of mana that had gotten stuck to [Kinetic Manabinder], since there were apparently several subtypes of [Kinetic Mage] and Alice had just gotten access to several of them that she couldn’t use until they got converted to [Kinetic Manabinder]. She was probably missing at least one level in [Kinetic Manabinder], possibly two.

She sighed in frustration before she looked over her other System notifications.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Magic 164 -> 165, Endurance 134 -> 135

The point in Endurance must have come from when she got punched in the face by the [Organic Mage]. It had been a very minor injury, since her [Endurance] was pretty good by this world’s standards and unenhanced [Organic Mages] were basically just mediocre pugilists. Alice was very thankful for her high [Endurance] stat, despite how much muscle pain and cold, hungry nights she had endured to raise the stat to this point. It was more surprising that such a minor injury had actually managed to push her up a point in the attribute.

She also noticed that, unlike her class seeds, her attributes didn’t cause any noticeable clogging when they converted themselves into mana-flesh. However, her body seemed to have a harder time ‘digesting’ the new mana and turning it into mana-flesh. Alice suspected that she had probably gotten slightly less progress towards improving her attributes than she should have. It wouldn’t have been enough to boost her up another point in any of her attributes, but if she didn’t figure out how to deal with the issue, she would certainly notice the effects over time. It wasn’t a big deal, but Alice certainly still wanted to raise her stats as much as possible when she had the opportunity.

Alice felt the urge to rub her temples in annoyance.

She really needed to fix her class seeds and mana filtration somehow. She would look into it when {Seeds of Ambition}’s cooldown ended next week. There was probably some way to do it using just pure mana manipulation, but Alice wasn’t at that skill level yet, and there was probably a filtration magic seed that would solve her immediate needs until she got better at manipulating mana.

After finally looking over her System notifications, Alice spent some organic mana healing up the bruise on her face, and then went to sleep. There was nothing else she could do for the day, and she was exhausted after the Society attack.

The next day, Alice had a quick breakfast, before Ethan called her into his study. There, Ethan handed her a stack of reports.

Alice scanned one report after another, and started frowning. What she had read didn’t make sense to her.

Through the reports, Alice learned that the attack on Ethan’s manor wasn’t an isolated case. In fact, it wasn’t even close.

Several towns and cities that could get news to the capital quickly had sent reports of a Society attack on four other important researchers, three of which had been kidnapped in their sleep. The final Mage had managed to flee for his life in his nightclothes and made it to the [Guard], before they managed to just barely fend off his attackers. All four attacks were centered on other prominent research-based Mages in and around Metsel.

Alice had originally thought that the Society knew something about her research. She had assumed that perhaps they knew she was researching the System, or perhaps they knew that she was from Earth, and had explicitly launched an attack against her because of that.

However, while the Society clearly knew something if they were willing to devote several dozen Mages to attacking her, it was also clear that the Society hadn’t targeted her because they discovered just how important her research was. They weren’t targeting Alice individually at all: they were targeting every single Mage with good levels in researcher classes. They were looking for some sort of information, and they were desperate enough to find that information that they didn’t care what they risked in the process.

The Society launching attacks on almost a dozen Mages over the course of a night wasn’t just stupidly courageous. Illvaria had already been working to root out the Society of Starry Eyes and drive them out of the country, but the crown had never forgotten that its first priority was to further the recolonization effort of Southern Illvaria. Everything else had been treated as secondary. Not to mention, Society Bases were very hard to find, so unless the crown got lucky, it was usually pretty hard to retaliate against the Society of Starry Eyes on a large scale. It was difficult to attack a foe that couldn’t be located, after all.

However, if the Society of Starry Eyes attacked several different researchers in the country, the Illvarian crown might very well drop everything to exterminate the Society no matter the cost. Not only that, but organizing five different large, coordinated attacks against prominent researchers around Metsel had to have left behind some trails that competent [Spies] would be able to follow. Meaning that directly after this, the Society would probably lose at least a few of their hidden bases, and they would possibly lose several of them. The Society’s actions tonight had basically directly sacrificed several Society Mages and research bases to steal some research notes and kidnap some resaerchers.

Alice couldn’t fathom why the Society was taking such extreme actions. The Society was behaving as if it had no sense of self-preservation at all. And for an organization that had survived decades, this made no sense to Alice.

“What do you make of all of this?” asked Ethan, putting the reports back on his desk before turning to Alice. He seemed genuinely curious about what her opinion was, rather than as if he was testing her.

“Well… I doubt all of these people were secretly researching System mana,” said Alice. “The rarity of the Achievements I’ve gotten for studying System mana strongly imply that it’s unusual for Mages to study System mana. And the Society is clearly desperate to find out something. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have done something so harmful to themselves. What were these Mages studying? If we can figure that out, maybe we can figure out what the Society is so desperate to learn.”

“Hmm… Two of them had dimensional mana research licenses, and two others were focused on fairly exotic research on pure mana and how it interacts with other forms of mana.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully. “Both branches of research are somewhat in line with their interests. But I just can’t figure out why they’re so willing to pick a fight with the Illvarian Crown. If a real ‘war’ between Illvaria and the Society broke out, the Society might win, but it would be a pyrrhic victory. And the other nations of the Shil Confederacy would probably help Illvaria out. Right?” asked Alice, turning towards Ethan.

Ethan nodded. “The Shil Confederacy barely ever unites unless a massive external threat invades. However, I seriously doubt that the Shil Confederacy would ignore massive Society activity, especially if it looks like they’re directly challenging the authority and power of the Illvarian crown. Most of our ‘allies’ are happy to see us face some problems, but if those problems look like they might spread to their lands, they will help instead of taking delight in our suffering. And the Society going all out to launch suicidal attacks definitely qualifies as a weird and dangerous threat that might spread out of Illvaria. So I’m also baffled. The Society shouldn’t be behaving like this, but they are. I mean, I know that the System broke, because I’ve seen your memories. But after looking through the research we stole from the Society base, as well as my own information channels and other reports, I’m not convinced that the Society knows much about System mana. And if they don’t know anything about System mana, why are they panicking and going crazy?” Ethan shook his head. “Thus far, there aren’t any major signs of the cataclysmic results of the System breaking. There hasn’t been enough time for things to go horribly wrong yet, unless you know exactly what to look for. Right now, we’ve just had a few isolated cases of Mages forming seeds incorrectly and getting hurt because of that. But the Society is acting like a beehive that was lit on fire, and I don’t know why.”

The two stared at the stack of reports in silence, losing themselves in thought.

“The question is why they’re so desperate, I suppose,” said Alice. At the same time, she couldn’t help but think of the Society base that she and Ethan had attacked a few months ago.

During that battle, they had recovered a wide variety of research notes. One of the most odd types of research note that they had recovered was about the Society’s devotion to researching floods of dimensional mana.

The Society was mostly comprised of [Organic Mages] who wanted to do human experimentation. The Society had dimensional magic researchers, but they seemed to be a minority.

Despite that fact, the leaders of the Society of Starry Eyes had been forcing the members of the illegal Mage society to devote an absurd amount of resources to studying the strange floods of dimensional mana that had been appearing recently. It was a decision that was terrible for the long-term growth of the Society of Starry Eyes, much like the consecutive attacks on several prominent Illvarian Mages.

Perhaps something had gone wrong when it came to dimensional mana, as well? Alice hadn’t had time to form a dimensional mana seed yet, but she had a dimensional mana license now. Combined with the strange village disappearance that she and Ethan had investigated a few weeks ago, Alice started to wonder if something was going horribly wrong on the dimensional magic side of things.

Because on top of the System collapsing, of course there would be something catastrophic happening that involved dimensional mana.

Alice quickly outlined her thoughts to Ethan, who thought for a moment, and then nodded.

“It seems likely,” said Ethan with a sigh. “I’ll see if any of my [Spies] or anyone from the Crown Estate has found a lead to a Society base yet. If we can steal more of their research notes, we could probably learn more.” He shook his head, and then scanned over the reports of Society attacks again. Then, he frowned and turned back towards Alice. “That reminds me. We need to bring miss Cecilia to the manor now. Frankly, you’re too valuable, and the Society is clearly targeting you. I will also be tripling the [Guard] here, and finding a few more [Hidden Guards] for you and Cecilia. If the Society’s actions are this erratic, your safety needs to come before everything else.”

Alice paused. She didn’t like the idea of forcing her best friend in this world to come to the manor. Not to mention, Cecilia’s Classes were all devoted to making enchantments and selling products. If she wasn’t running a shop, her levelling speed would definitely suffer, which would make it harder for her to reach Immortality. Alice’s odds of reaching Immortality were pretty good. And if she became an Immortal, she definitely didn’t want her best friend to die of old age. It would be better if the two of them became Immortals together.

But at the same time, Cecilia needed to actually live in order to reach Immortality. And with the Society of Starry Eyes going completely nuts, there was no guarantee at all that Cecilia’s [Hidden Guard] would be enough to keep her safe.

Finally, she nodded.

“Bring her here,” said Alice.

Ethan quickly called over a few [Guards] and gave them orders to tell Cecilia that Alice and Ethan needed to see her immediately, and to bring her over. The [Guards] immediately left.

Then, the two simply waited. Alice felt bad for taking away Cecilia’s right to make decisions on her own, but she also didn’t want to find out that her friend was dead or had been kidnapped by the Society.

About an hour and a half later, the two [Guards] returned, along with Cecilia. The two [Guards] left almost immediately afterwards.

“Alice,” said Cecilia, nodding. “The [Guards] said you and your mentor needed to see me. And you missed board game night yesterday. What’s happening?”

Alice winced. She had forgotten about board game night with all the chaos going on. She sighed, and handed Cecilia the stack of reports she and Ethan had been reading through.

Cecilia started scanning the reports, and her face started to turn whiter and whiter as she read through each report of the Society’s actions.

“Uhh… this is…” Cecilia shuddered, before she glanced at Ethan. “This is quite scary. Am I here for protection?”

“Yes,” said Alice. “Ethan and I are worried that the Society may target you in order to target me, so the [Guards] brought you here. I know that having your freedom taken away won’t feel great, but…”

“Don’t worry, I get it,” said Cecilia. “After reading this, I’m not exactly enthusiastic about wandering around without a platoon of [Guards] either. I like being able to walk around and I value my freedom, but getting kidnapped and tortured definitely isn’t on my to-do list.”

Alice relaxed. She had been worried Cecilia would feel bad about the situation, but she seemed to be taking it in stride.

Then, Ethan looked at Cecilia. This time, Alice could see a hint of disapproval in his gaze.

“I’m glad that you’re willing to analyze the situation and make the best decision. Now…I hear that you knew about my apprentice’s research into the System?”

Cecilia’s gaze turned blank for a moment, and her eyes flicked towards Alice.

“You told him?”

Alice nodded. “We’ll talk about that in a bit. Some things have happened, and I haven’t had time to talk to you about it. This week has been… very chaotic. And terrifying.”

Cecilia turned back towards Ethan, and shivered under Ethan’s gaze. “Yes, honored Immortal, Alice has told me about her research, and I have participated in it,” she said. “Alice originally asked me for help with creating enchanted items when she was doing her research. Nowadays, she doesn’t really need my help as much as she used to, but we still talk about her research, and I occasionally help her.”

“Have you told anyone else about Alice’s research?” asked Ethan.

“I haven’t, honored Immortal. I would never betray my friend’s confidence like that, and Alice’s research might get her hunted down by the Society if they learn about it. There’s no way I would ever willingly leak that secret.”

Ethan gazed at Cecilia for a few moments, and then nodded. The disapproval in his eyes faded.

“That’s good to hear. I thought it was likely, but I needed to make sure.”

“But do you happen to know why the Society is going nuts right now?” asked Cecilia. She looked baffled as she pored over the reports of the attacks. “Their actions are… inconsistent with their own long-term survival. This doesn’t look like a crazy plan that will get their organization exceptional benefits if it succeeds… it looks more like the Society has just randomly decided to commit suicide for some reason. And I can’t figure out why.”

Alice paused, and then reached her hand out. “We don’t know for sure. As far as we can tell, the Society didn’t seem to know about System mana. But we could be wrong. Alternately, something has gone horribly wrong when it comes to dimensional mana, which we are currently unaware of. Regarding System mana, I want to use {Shared Memory} to show you something. Are you willing to let me use it on you?”

“Go ahead.”

Alice immediately touched Cecilia’s hand, and then shared the memory of the System and its mana collapsing into thin air.

Cecilia turned even paler than before.

“When did this happen?”

“About two days ago.”

“That’s… fuck. No wonder you said this week has been chaotic.” She paused. “So… the two reasons that the Society seems to have lost its mind are both horrible. Either the Society knows about System mana, meaning that they’re reasonably likely to discover your own research into the topic and then target you… or they have discovered some sort of horrifying secret about dimensional mana?” Cecilia shuddered.

“It certainly appears that way,” said Ethan. “Of course, even if our assumptions are wrong, the Society acting like a horde of lunatics is cause for concern.”

“At the very least, I doubt they discovered my research specifically,” said Alice. “Which is something. They’re probably just targeting me as a matter of course, since it’s not really that hard to figure out I’m a research focused Mage if one pays attention to the details. And if an Immortal is paying attention to my research, there’s obviously something special about it. Which is pretty much the only bright side about the current situation.”

Cecilia nodded, and then took a deep breath. She turned back towards Ethan. “What about Alice’s classmates? The ones that come to board game night every week? I mean, I imagine the Society would try to target me first, since I’m Alice’s closest friend that is actually targetable… but they could be targeted too.”

“I’ve instructed Alice’s magic academy to up their security quite a bit once I realized just how dangerous her research is,” said Ethan. “I will probably need to upgrade it a few more times, but I don’t know if the Society would be quite as keen to target the classmates Alice is close to. Since they seem to spend most of their time at school or at home, I intend to get the [Guard] more active in those areas.” Ethan paused, and then narrowed his eyes. “However, ultimately, while I intend to upscale the defenses in the city, defending alone will not protect everyone. The Society dared to attack an Immortal’s Manor in the middle of the city. They attacked my apprentice. There will be consequences,” Ethan said, his voice practically a low growl. Then, the ice-cold rage in his eyes dissipated. He turned back towards Cecilia, and adopted a somewhat gentle expression, as if the earlier suspicion towards Cecilia and anger towards the Society had been a lie.

Cecilia absorbed Ethan’s words for a moment, and then sighed softly. “I suppose that’s everything, then. Should I go and pack my things?”

“I’ll send a few [Guards] to grab everything for you, if you don’t mind. No sense in having you wander around the city right now. Even if the presence of the [Guard] will increase drastically within the next few days, for now, it could still be dangerous before the commands are given and work schedules adjusted.”

Cecilia nodded, and a few moments later, another [Guard] was sent to retrieve Cecilia’s things.

When the [Guard] returned, Alice quietly helped Cecilia move to a room right next to her new room – her old room had been abandoned, due to having been trashed during the Society attack and for having a window, which now seemed rather dangerous. The two of them were located basically down the hall from Ethan’s study, where he spent most of his time, and so that they could immediately find Ethan if the Society managed to attack the manor again.

Less than five hours later, another report came.

True to Alice’s suspicions, people were now flocking to Churches of the System and trying to figure out what the heck was wrong with their Status Screens. And while Ethan had given orders for [Enchanters] to start manufacturing as many anti-mana rings as possible, many, many children were unlocking their Status Screens far before they were supposed to, and more and more people were beginning to notice.

It had been three days since the System disappeared. And the first effects were finally starting to ripple through Illvarian Society.

The collapse of the System, and its effects, was now fully underway in Illvaria.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 133

Alice spent the next day skipping school and observing the Church of the System’s reaction to the increasingly noticeable crisis of the System’s disappearance. She also took the time to use pure mana and unclog what parts of her class seeds she could unclog, although it was a very frustrating and tiring process.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder 42 -> 44

Alice learned that nearly two levels of [Kinetic Manabinder] had been ‘stuck’ trying to integrate with the wrong class seeds, although none of her other classes levelled up this time. Which made Alice nervous about just how much worse people’s minds and Status Screens were going to get before the crisis was resolved. Alice at least had some tools to combat the issue of her Status Screen getting frozen and her class seeds failing to process the mana they needed to. Despite that fact, at least right now, Alice’s pure mana seed was frequently overtaxed dealing with minor issues she noticed cropping up in her class seeds. If she didn’t have {Lesser Organic Vision} and {Intuitive Magic Modelling}, Alice would have struggled to even maintain her own class seeds, since she would have had a hard time ‘looking’ at her brain and moving around chunks of mana as needed.

She was getting the feeling that the System’s collapse was going to be even more of a mess than she had imagined.

At the very least, Ethan’s subordinates and the [Enchanters] at the palace had been working to churn out as many rings of mana-blocking as they could reasonably make per day. The number of rings they could make at once was pitiful compared to the number Illvaria as a whole would need, since there were around a million inhabitants in the country, and pure mana seeds weren’t a very popular magic seed choice for most Mages. When Alice and Ethan had originally discussed the use of mana-blocking rings, they had assumed that it would only be needed for children below the age of six, to prevent them from absorbing mana they didn’t have a way to get rid of. Even creating enough rings for all of the children in the country would be practically impossible, although making as many rings as possible would at least help.

However, given what Alice had learned about Class Seeds getting clogged up after the System collapsed, it was obvious that Illvaria’s supply of mana-blocking rings was going to be so utterly and completely inadequate that it would barely make a dent in the pool of people who would need one. And even the people who managed to get ahold of a mana-blocking ring would stop levelling up, which would certainly make the ring less popular. People in this world highly valued gaining levels. Even if it was ultimately the best way to safeguard their mind from corrosion, there would certainly be some people who refused to wear mana-blocking rings because they wanted to keep gaining levels.

Alice felt an even greater headache coming on every single time she thought about the aftereffects of the collapse of the System.

She took a deep breath, and tried to calm down. At the very least, rings were being made. Even if supply would be nowhere near what was needed, it was better than nothing.

Alice also briefly wondered if she was being selfish, by continuing to level up and sort out her own mana instead of spending all of her time constructing anti-mana rings. Each anti-mana ring would be one more person who would be safe from the aftereffects of the System collapse, after all.

When she shared her concerns with Ethan, he flatly stated that the ‘best’ thing Alice could do with her time was to find a permanent solution to the problems caused by the System’s collapse. The rings were just a stopgap measure – ultimately, the main issue hadn’t been dealt with at all. Which, after some thought, Alice realized was probably a logical statement, even if it felt wrong to be wasting her pure mana levelling herself up and unclogging her class seeds, instead of just grabbing an antimagic enchantment ring and then churning out as many copies of the enchantment as she could manage.

However, Ethan’s argument was that if Alice got a few more Perks, that might allow her to fix the System, or find a way to make class seeds artificially and get them to filter mana on their own, or… something. Alice wasn’t really sure what a ‘permanent’ solution would look like yet, and it seemed that while Ethan had some ideas, he wasn’t sure what the best option was either. However, Ethan still made a good point. Every single Perk Alice got was an investment in fully solving the problem, instead of just treating a few of the symptoms. Alice couldn’t say she felt great about that, but she had to admit that it made sense.

Apart from waiting for more news about the Church of the System and unclogging her class seeds, Alice took the time to work on some enchanting. Even if it would clog up her seeds for her enchanting classes, Alice was mostly sure that she could fix the issue, even if she had no way to make the solution widespread right now. And she really needed to be using every possible moment she had to level up. For now, Alice just made a few mana-blocking rings with the pure mana she had left(while leaving a bit of mana to unclog her class seeds again), as well as making a few more offensive kinetic bracelets. Since the Society could attack her at any moment, she wanted to have as many disposable magic items on hand as possible.

You have leveled up!

Careful Enchanter: 27 -> 29

Finally, on Tuesday, as Alice ditched school for the second day in a row, reports started coming in, and Alice finally got an idea what the Church of the System was doing.

And after reading it, Alice felt… depressed.

There were several smaller churches dedicated to the System in Metsel. After all, the capital had over a hundred thousand people living in it. It would be almost impossible for one church to meet the needs of the entire populace. However, there was still one ‘main church’ that acted as ‘main church’ for all smaller System churches in Illvaria. Basically, all churches of the world fundamentally responded to the main headquarters of the Church of the System, but since that was located on the Central continent, it was rather impractical for nations like Illvaria to receive news from there in a timely manner.

So most countries had a smaller, local System headquarters that managed smaller, day to day administration, such as replacing heads of smaller churches when they died, recording new Immortals after reaching Immortality and becoming a saint of the church, and so on. And local headquarters were usually tied to the crown or the local nobles in some ludicrously tangle web of politics, which Alice was admittedly unfamiliar with. For now, it wasn’t that important.

What was important was that the local headquarters of the Church of the System seemed to have totally melted down in the wake of the ‘silence’ of the System.

The main [Priest of the System] had retreated to his quarters yesterday, in wake of the strange, garbled Perks and Status Screens that were starting to show up. He had not left his quarters since then. He had not issued any words of comfort to the believers of the System, or come up with any idea why the System had suddenly glitched out, or even told people to ‘have faith.’ Instead, as more and more people stopped by the Church of the System to ask what the heck was going on, the head of the Church of the System decided it was a good time to have a crisis of faith.

In other words, in the wake of bad news, the first person that should have stepped up to start controlling people’s anxiety and handling the situation had instead collapsed like a house of cards.

This was a very unpleasant surprise for Alice. For the most part, she had been rather pleased with how competent the people of this world were. Many of them frankly surpassed the people of Earth in work ethic, probably due to the fact that the System constantly gave them rewards for working hard and even dangled Immortality in front of them as the ‘ultimate’ reward for their efforts. Despite the lack of universal education and the scarcity of books, the people of this world were well informed and intelligent.

And unfortunately, the exceptional work ethic and competence many people of this world had was somehow missing in the head of the Church.

In the absence of the head of the Church of the System, the local [Priests of the System] had started going in very different directions when preaching to their people.

Some of the [Priests of the System] had been shaken by the [Leader of the Church of the System]’s collapse, and had followed suit, basically refusing to provide any sort of statements on the collapse of the System at all. They withdrew from public life and stopped functioning.

Some of them had instead stated that the collapse of the System was a ‘test of faith’ for the followers of the System. Some of them started demanding that they appease the System, although they didn’t seem to have any idea how to do that. Some of them started taking advantage of their position to put forth some truly bizarre ideas, such as the notion that the System was about to usher in a golden age of prosperity for those who remained true to the faith.

The exact responses from [Priests] in the second category were all over the place, and most contradicted each other.

Finally, some [Priests of the System] tried to sidestep the issue, or put it aside until they got more information. They didn’t state that this was a ‘test of faith,’ and they also didn’t melt down. Instead, based on the reports falling onto Ethan’s desk, they almost seemed to be… waiting for something. They focused on doing whatever they could to help the people that came to their churches. They continued to help form [Trade Agreements] between people, convert Primary Classes into secondary Classes and swap out Perks when desired, and otherwise perform the functions of a [Priest of the System]. In Alice’s eyes, it seemed like they were waiting for a more telltale sign about what was going on before they said anything.

The first two kinds of people, at least in Alice’s eyes, seemed hard to work with. People that melted down in a crisis were unreliable, and as much as Alice sympathized with their meltdowns when their ‘god’ suddenly spazzed out without warning, they simply weren’t what she needed if she wanted to corral the mess and get everything back under control. The second kind of [Priest of the System] also seemed hard to work with: people who just started making stuff up when things started going wrong seemed dangerous to her. Maybe Ethan could figure out a way to work with them, but Alice had no idea what to do with them.

The third group of people, however, seemed like logical targets for cooperation. In Alice’s eyes, they seemed like they were still working hard to improve people’s lives and help the people around them. In other words, they hadn’t abandoned the people of Illvaria completely. At the same time, they weren’t making bold and incorrect proclamations or melting down.

Thus, once the [Servants] of the manor finished sending Alice reports on behalf of Ethan, Alice decided it was time to start organizing. She moved to Ethan’s study, and then started by outlining what she had tried so far regarding System mana and Classes – especially the fact that she had been successful in swapping out which mana was absorbed by which seed, letting her at least partially resolve the issues caused by her Class mana going to the wrong Class seed. Now that several days had passed without anything going horribly wrong, Alice was pretty sure that there was nothing wrong with sliding around where each kind of mana ended up, which meant that it was safe to use on other people. After that, she let Ethan know that she wanted to meet with the [Priests of the System] she thought she could work with, if they were willing to see her.

“Are you sure?” asked Ethan. “Exposing your research into the System probably won’t be the end of the world, but… the Society will definitely target you even more if word gets out.”

Alice paused, hesitating for a moment, and then sighed. “If you tried to pass off my research as your own, would anyone even believe it?”

“I… suppose not. I’m known as an Immortal who specializes in combat, and while this isn’t completely accurate, it’s definitely what I’ve spent most of my time and Perks on. Sometimes I make a small discovery here and there, but I doubt anyone important would genuinely believe that a comprehensive analysis on a previously undiscovered kind of mana, which happens to be what the System runs on, was made by me. Since you’re here, people would pretty quickly figure out who was in charge of all the research.”

Alice nodded. “Then I’ve decided. The Society is coming for me either way – it’s just a question of how much importance they assign to me. Besides, I have a powerful and competent Immortal protecting me!” She said, trying to squeeze out a grin.

Ethan sighed. “I mean, I will do my best to protect you. But the attack on the manor a few days ago should show you that while I’m strong, I’m far from perfect, especially because I simply can’t be everywhere at once.”

Alice thought about it for a moment, and then sighed.

“While it’s impossible for you to perfectly protect me, I also don’t think sitting around and doing nothing is an option. The Society is coming for me either way, and a lot of Illvarian people are going to have their personality scrambled if I sit around and do nothing,” said Alice. “And that’s the best case scenario. I’ve spent a lot of time researching the System, but the ‘mana-clogging’ issue still caught me totally off guard. There are probably other health problems that will start cropping up that I will be totally unprepared to handle in the future.

“With that in mind, I’m not even sure if I have the tools to keep myself safe from the collapse of the System right now. Sure, I’ve handled most of the effects of the collapse so far. I can use pure mana to rearrange where my mana goes and protect myself from a lot of the buildup of the wrong kinds of mana, letting me level up with fewer problems. I can probably create a magic seed to purify the kinds of mana that I currently can’t absorb, too. However, any new unpredictable problem that shows up might incapacitate or kill me, along with anyone who could realistically help me. Just because they haven’t shown up yet doesn’t meant they won’t. Since I don’t know if new problems will appear, I need to have as many tools as possible to keep myself safe – and it looks like Perks are the best way to acquire those tools.” Alice shrugged. “And I can help other people, too. So I think that exposing my research might be the best way to move forward, even though it feels dangerous. Working with these [Priests of the System] is the lowest risk way I can think of to mitigate the impact of the collapse of the System. I’ve never actually seen how their Class demotion and Perk removal Perks work, but with any luck, it’ll prove an effective tool to combat the collapse of the System,” said Alice.

Ethan sighed, and then nodded. “Your words make sense, even though I’m still hesitant to expose you to the level of danger you’re proposing to put yourself in. But I also suppose that saving millions of people from the effects of the collapse of the System will likely be worth a few excellent Achievements,” he said, giving Alice a weak grin. “If you don’t get killed by the Society, this should probably single-handedly guarantee that you’ll become an Immortal. I suppose we can do it. Will Cecilia be helping you explain your research?”

Alice paused. She hadn’t thought of including Cecilia in her conversation with the [Priests]. “Should she come?” she asked.

Ethan shrugged. “The Society might not target her if she doesn’t publically help you. On the other hand, if Cecilia helps mitigate the impact of the collapse of the System, she would definitely get an excellent Achievement out of it. Right now, her odds of reaching Immortality are atrocious. I mean, she’s not bad for her age, but… If I were to quantify her odds of reaching Immortality, I would guess that she has maybe a 2% chance right now. And that’s including future help that I assume you will give her. As compared to you, where I would currently put your odds of reaching Immortality at something like 80%, if you don’t get killed or kidnapped by the Society first. And that’s before including any Achievements you would get out of this incident, if it works.”

“I understand. I don’t think I’m qualified to make decisions for Cecilia, though. She’s her own person, and she should decide whether she’s willing to bear the risks associated with trying to get good Achievements like this,” said Alice. “Being targeted by the Society is nothing to scoff at.”

“Fair enough,” said Ethan. “I’ll arrange a meeting with the [Priests] for tomorrow. Cecilia can come or not come as she prefers. And for now, I’ve sent your magic academy word that you’ll be taking a leave of absence for some ‘special training.’ Given the fact that the Society attacks aren’t too difficult to learn about, most of your [Teachers] will probably decide that you’re being placed under house arrest so that I can keep you safe until further notice,” said Ethan. “You can still attend classes if you want to, but I do suspect that this is going to take up most of your time in the future.”

Alice sighed, but nodded.

She had fought tooth and nail to get into a magic academy, but only got to spend most of one semester inside before moving on. In a way, it felt strange that something she worked so hard for would be placed on the sidelines so easily. On the other hand, it also represented her growth, and her larger and larger impact on the world. At the start of summer, she had been unimportant enough that she could barely get a sponsor to help her attend a magic academy. Now, she was arranging meetings with a third of the [Priests of the System] in Metsel, and was the apprentice of an Immortal.

Life was strange.

Alice shook her head, brushing her thoughts away, and started walking towards Cecilia’s room.

* * *

After knocking on the door, Cecilia opened it and gave Alice a quick glance.

“Come in,” she said.

Alice quickly entered the room, and looked at Cecilia. Alice tried her best to smile at her best friend in this world, and realize that her lips weren’t moving quite as fluidly as she wished they would.

She felt… nervous?

Very nervous.

Alice realized that she was very worried about how Cecilia would answer her question. On one hand, Alice was worried that Cecilia would die if she joined Alice in talking about researching the System. After all, the Society would definitely target Cecilia if it was known that she was involved in Alice’s research. And while Ethan was trying to protect Cecilia, Alice was very sure that Ethan would prioritize her over Cecilia if push came to shove. Ethan’s primary goal was to add a new Immortal to Illvaria’s ‘family’ of Immortals – and Cecilia was currently highly unlikely to join that family. While Ethan might feel some sadness if she died, it seemed to be mostly in relation to how it would affect Alice’s mental state.

On the other hand, Alice also didn’t want to see Cecilia get older and older and then pass away. Alice was growing more and more aware that her odds of reaching Immortality were excellent, if she could survive the Society of Starry Eyes. And if she reached Immortality and Cecilia didn’t, she would ultimately have to watch Cecilia die of old age sooner or later. No matter what Cecilia chose, it had a chance of backfiring horrifically.

She took a deep breathe, trying to push her erratic thoughts away, and then looked at Cecilia. She realized that after entering Cecilia’s room, she had simply stood there, lost in her thoughts, and snorted.

“Cecilia, how do you feel about going at least somewhat public about researching the System with me?”

Cecilia looked baffled, and stared at Alice.

Alice started explaining her reasoning to Cecilia.

“I think it’s a good chance to really reach towards Immortality,” said Alice. “It would give you an excellent Achievement, and it would also really help me to have someone there to back me up. I mean, you know me – I’m good at research, but my people skills are definitely on the weaker side. Having you there would help a lot,” she said.

Cecilia seemed to consider Alice’s words, mulling them over. Eventually, she sighed.

“All right. Let’s explain your research to the church members that it seems possible to work with,” she said.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug! You can read up to 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Buy the e-book of Budding Scientist Volume 1!

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

(Or the Audiobook)

A Small Town in Southern Illvaria

(Or both? ;) )

Chapter 134

Ethan, Alice, and Cecilia walked into the room filled with [Priests of the System] while Alice tried not to feel nervous.

There were forty-four total people assembled in the room Ethan had set aside for this meeting. Forty-one [Priests] of the System, plus Ethan, Cecilia, and Alice. Ethan had judged that this crowd was good enough for Alice to start testing things, sharing information, and feeling out how the [Priests of the System] might respond on a larger scale if she attempted to work with them.

Of course, Alice already knew about everyone who was going to participate in the meeting. Ethan had forced Alice to vet the list of people who were invited here, and made her explain why she needed to vet every person who was invited here as well.

It hadn’t taken her too long to realize that every single person who came into Ethan’s manor was a potential security risk. They could, at least theoretically, be [Assassins] from some neighboring nation, sent to remove Alice before she reached Immortality. They could also be informants for the Society of Starry Eyes: while the Society wasn’t known for their infiltration abilities, Alice doubted that they had no informants at all in Illvaria. Money could make some people do anything, after all.

As for [Assassins]… Alice hadn’t thought about that one quite as quickly as she had thought of the possibility of Society infiltrators. Ethan had given her a hint before she got the answer. Alice wasn’t sure how to feel about being a more and more plausible target for assassination. Now that it was starting to become obvious just how good her odds of reaching Immortality were, it seemed quite normal for other countries to try to kill her. Heck, the first thing she had come across in this world upon reaching civilization was news that the Sigmusi Colonia was orchestrating a war of assassinations and espionage against the Illvarian South while the area was cut off from easy reinforcements by snow. However, until the Society had attacked Ethan’s manor, the idea of being assassinated always seemed like a distant problem for future Alice to deal with. Now, she was very abruptly aware of the fact that she was a target now. In fact, if somebody wanted her dead, now was the best time to kill her, because in the future she would be higher level, which would naturally make her harder to kill.

Then, after Alice finished vetting the list of [Priests of the System] that she felt were fine to invite, Ethan had gone over her list and knocked out another twenty names, leaving forty-one [Priests of the System] who he felt were actually safe enough to invite. According to Ethan, those twenty people that Alice had missed were probably fine, but right now, Alice was weak in comparison to the threats arrayed against her, and thus needed be extra cautious. And Ethan backed up his statement by going over their recorded history and actions in great detail, making it clear exactly why he felt she should have known to exclude them.

Alice considered it a somewhat depressing lesson in how much more attention she needed to pay to her surroundings, until she was strong enough to shrug off most casual assassination attempts. But as always, she attentively listened to Ethan’s lesson on how to behave as a future Immortal and keep herself safe. Ethan wouldn’t always be nearby to protect her, and the sooner Alice started instinctively getting herself away from danger without Ethan’s prompting, the better her odds of surviving to reach Immortality.

Besides the somewhat depressing lesson on caution, Alice also felt very nervous. She had been in this world for almost a year now, and for most of that time, she had explicitly avoided sharing information with the Church of the System or other people about her most important research topic. Some part of her half-expected that they would react the same way people on Earth had reacted to ‘witches’ during the Middle Ages and try to burn her alive, or at least make her life difficult. That was unlikely to actually happen: after all, it would take monumental courage to start raising metaphorical pitchforks against the apprentice of an Immortal, especially when Ethan was very visibly standing at the front of the room with her. However, humans weren’t always rational – especially during times of fear and stress. And when the god of this planet suddenly stopped behaving as usual, it would be quite normal for [Priests of the System] to feel very stressed out and tense. Even if nobody present was likely to be able to actually physically harm Alice, revealing her research focus still felt very concerning.

Alice sighed, trying to push those thoughts away and focus on the task at hand again.

She stepped to the front of the room, along with Cecilia.

Upon looking at the [Priests], for a moment, Alice had the bizarre impression that she was holding a press conference, even though there weren’t any cameras or reporters present.

“Ahem,” said Alice, clearing her throat. She scanned the [Priests of the System] one more time, before she started talking.

“It’s nice to see you all, and thank you for coming here. I wanted to talk about the System. As many of you have noticed, the System is behaving… oddly, recently,” said Alice.

She saw a few [Priests of the System] nod or wince in the background.

One of the [Priests of the System] had a slightly more unusual reaction. Instead of wincing or nodding like the others, she gave Alice a dubious look before Alice could continue speaking. “No disrespect to the apprentice of an Honored Immortal, but… why are you giving this speech? I imagine you’re quite accomplished for your age, but I had heard that you were combat-specialized, and I also imagine that you’re probably only a bit better than a regular adult right now. You’re… what, seventeen? Most of Ethan’s apprentices over the years usually only hit a little over level 50 by your age. And while that’s pretty impressive, I don’t know if it’s really a good idea for you to be giving this speech.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at… Ethan?

Alice blinked in confusion. Why did the woman look so annoyed at Ethan? And why was she questioning Alice about this?

A few moments later, it clicked inside of her mind.

Ethan had a large group of Mages and researchers under his command. Ethan was also well-known for trying to propel new apprentices into Immortality, and had gone through several rounds of failed apprentices before eventually taking Alice as an apprentice. Doing impressive things would cause the System to give Alice good Achievements, many of which would likely boost her levelling speed. And while Achievements currently seemed a little bit garbled, ever since the System went down, it was still obvious that they worked, even if in a somewhat weakened form.

Alice wouldn’t be getting a particularly amazing Achievement if she led this meeting but hadn’t done all of the legwork behind it. However, it would still probably be a good enough Achievement to help her grow faster, especially when combined with whatever other Achievements the people here assumed she had. After all, Alice would need something impressive for Ethan to have accepted her as an apprentice in the first place.

This woman thought that Ethan had gotten a huge number of Mages and researchers to do all of the legwork, and then had Alice present it specifically to earn an Achievement even though, in her eyes, Alice was unqualified to lead the conference. She likely thought that Ethan was treating the collapse of the System as something of a joke or an opportunity to let Alice level up, instead of the horrifying disaster that it was. And since she was also likely a religious person, someone treating the malfunctions of her god as an opportunity to earn levels probably rubbed her in completely the wrong way.

Alice felt a strange urge to laugh bubble up in her chest for a moment. She and Ethan had talked about how obvious it would be to most people that research her that she was research focused. They had discussed how anyone who was paying attention would know that Alice was probably the brains behind Alice’s research, and Ethan was only tangentially related to her work.

The Society’s actions seemed to bear out their beliefs that it wasn’t really that hard to discover Alice’s real focus. However, that didn’t mean that everyone had extensively researched her before now. Alice found it a little amusing that the potential allies in this room were the last people to realize that Alice was almost entirely research-oriented instead of combat-oriented.

“If you’re asking about my qualifications, I’m already above level 75 in my primary class, which is research based, and I also have multiple Achievements that are rarity 7 which I have earned without Honored Immortal Ethan’s help. I have indeed gotten more resources and opportunities since becoming Honored Immortal Ethan’s apprentice, but I got many of my Achievements entirely on my own. And the research I am presenting today is almost entirely mine.” Alice paused, and glanced at Cecilia. “Though, I did have some help from a friend of mine, who is with me today.”

“Is that true?” asked the [Priest of the System], turning to Ethan for clarification. The woman’s eyes squinted in a very particular way, as if she was using a lie-detection Perk.

However, no rainbow mana flashed in her eyes, leaving Alice feeling even more amused. The woman was clearly bluffing her access to a lie-detection Perk. A few [Priests of the System] did have lie detection Perks being activated, but several more were just making very good ‘I’m detecting lies right now’ faces. Alice supposed it made sense - if people thought that you were using a lie detection Perk, it was almost as good as actually having the Perk – as long as no one called your bluff.

Ethan nodded. “All of her words are true,” he said, gesturing towards Cecilia and Alice. “My apprentice is a very talented researcher, and I doubt any other researchers or [Scholars] in Illvaria could lead this conversation besides her.”

The woman squinted at Ethan for a few more seconds, before she sighed. She looked somewhat mollified as she turned back towards Alice and Cecilia. Alice noticed that the [Priests of the System] with lie-detection Perks seemed far more interested in Alice than before.

“My apologies, apprentice of Honored Immortal Ethan. And her friend?” The woman said, as she looked at Cecilia.

Alice internally winced.

Ethan had treated this crisis with all of the seriousness it deserved. However, Alice had, in a way, done exactly what the woman was irritated by – use the crisis as an opportunity to boost Cecilia’s levelling speed. Of course, Alice’s guilt was mollified by the fact that Cecilia had genuinely been integral to some of her early research. Presenting Cecilia at this meeting would do more than just boost Cecilia’s levelling speed – it would also show that Cecilia was an alternate person that people could talk to and ask questions if Alice wasn’t available for whatever reason.

Admittedly, that was also a justification Alice hadn’t thought about until just now, but she was pretty sure it was still valid.

Alice cleared her thoughts, and finally got to the reason she had arranged this meeting in the first place.

“I had Ethan bring all of you here today for two reasons. I have information about the System’s collapse that I want to share with you. When the System collapsed, you didn’t fall into a panic or otherwise start making crazy claims with no basis in reality. Instead, all of you kept a level head and tried to help the people who came to your churches, even without knowledge of what was happening,” said Alice.

Complimenting the people who were gathered to hopefully help her was a good way to really get the topic started, right? Alice wasn’t that familiar with public speaking yet, but she was pretty sure it wasn’t a bad idea, at least.

Alice also noticed a bit of [Courtier] mana float into her body, although the mana was mixed with a few other things, such as [Orator] and a few other classes she couldn’t identify.

“I would like to start out by talking about my research – for a long time, I’ve been fascinated by the System,” said Alice. “To the best of my understanding, nobody has ever really done a proper, in-depth analysis of exactly how the System works. At least, not from the perspective of mana. Sure, there are have been a lot of people who examined the System from the perspective of religion – trying to figure out the System’s intentions and why it does what it does, and how to better follow its will,” said Alice, trying very hard not to change her facial expression.

Since she was 90% sure the System was a nonsentient, nonsapient clump of mana, or some sort of enchantment, it was a bit difficult for her to seriously talk about the ‘will of the System.’ But Alice also suspected that talking directly about her thoughts on the System would go over quite poorly with a crowd of religious [Priests], and rather than argue about theology, Alice was much more interested in helping people.

“What I wanted to focus on was how the System worked, specifically. After all, things like Status Screens, Perk descriptions, and so on must require a lot of effort to maintain if the System is always managing every single person’s System notifications, right? So I always wondered how everything works behind the scenes,” said Alice.

She saw a few [Priests] start to blink in confusion. It didn’t look like they were angry, but it looked like they were preparing to get angry in the near future if they needed to. A few of them started shooting daggers at Alice with their eyes.

A different [Priest of the System] chose that moment to speak up.

“Why did you assume that the System needs a ‘how’ at all? The System is a god – it makes sense that it would be able to do things impossible for us mere mortals to understand,” said the man.

“I simply felt that the System might have some sort of method of… erm… communicating with people, I suppose,” said Alice. “I was originally trying to study several things at once, because I found a lot of facets of how mana worked to be incredibly interesting.”

“But isn’t that questioning the divine will of the System?” asked the [Priest of the System], frowning at Alice. “It isn’t our place to question how the System works – we need only work hard and believe.”

“I believe the System approves of my actions,” said Alice. “After all, as a reward for my continued experiments, eventually, the System granted me a special Achievement. It wouldn’t have done that if it didn’t feel that my research had value in it.” Alice noticed that the [Priest of the System] who had previously been frowning and arguing with her had stopped frowning, and looked much less irritated. She felt a sigh of relief almost escape her lips. She had been hoping that would pacify the crowd a bit. Since the [Priests] believed that the System was a sentient, sapient god, Alice claiming that she had ‘discovered a new type of mana called System mana’ would probably go over poorly. However, if she first mentioned that the System itself had granted her the ability to see System mana as a reward for her hard work… she and Ethan had both felt that would go over much better with the religious crowd. After all, the System itself was what granted her the ability to see System mana. She was glad to see that assumption was correct.

“This Achievement allows me to see a new kind of mana – one that most people, as far as I’m aware, are completely unable to see,” said Alice. “I’ve taken to calling it System mana, and what it does is allow me to see how the System works. Every single time somebody uses a Perk, they access some of the System mana in their body to do so. Every time the System grants someone a point in a Stat or Skill, the System mana in the air reacts to the mana in their surroundings entering their body, giving them the reward for their hard work.

“I’ve kept this research to myself and a close circle of friends for a long time. However, as many of you have noticed, the System has been behaving oddly ever since a few days ago,” said Alice. “That is because the System mana in all of the air around us simply disappeared for some reason.”

A few of the [Priests of the System] gave Alice blank looks, as if they were trying to process what she had said. A few of the other [Priests of the System] started to look at the air around them, as if they were trying to see the missing System mana and figure out where it had gone. A few other [Priests of the System] furrowed their brows, as if they were trying to put the puzzle pieces together and figure out what could have possibly happened to make System mana ‘disappear.’ And Alice noticed that perhaps four [Priests of the System] were frowning at her again, although she wasn’t sure why this time. She started racking her brain, trying to figure out what they might be unhappy about, but before she could focus more on the frowning [Priests], a different [Priest] interrupted her.

“What does that mean?” asked one of the [Priests of the System]. This one seemed more horrified than upset, which Alice was much happier to deal with. Someone who understood the gravity of the situation and wanted to help was the kind of person Alice wanted to see in the meeting. And luckily, it seemed like the majority of the people here were reacting the way Alice had hoped they would, even if a few people were instead glaring at her for some reason.

“I suspect it is the reason that the Status Screens started to get weird recently,” said Alice. “I would like to say that this is a lot worse than one might expect: the System didn’t JUST create our Status Screens and System notifications – it also did a lot of other very important things. For example, the System helped people form magic seeds – and without the System, trying to form a magic seed is very difficult. Cecilia can tell you a bit more about this,” said Alice, gesturing towards Cecilia.

In order to get the Achievement for forming a magic seed without help, Cecilia had also formed a magic seed without the help of the System. Naturally, this meant that this was the best topic for Cecilia to talk about if Alice wanted Cecilia to get a good Achievement for helping to manage all of this.

However, before Alice could step back and let Cecilia take over the conversation for a bit, one of the [Priests of the System] who had been frowning at her stood up and pointed at Alice, looking like he was about to explode.

“Did you make the System mana disappear? Did you do something with your studies? If you dared to experiment on the System itself-“

Ethan glared at the man, and rainbow mana flashed across Ethan’s eyes.

The man’s face turned white, as Ethan applied some sort of intimidation Perk to him. “My apprentice did not do a thing to harm the world, or Illvaria. She is currently placing her life at risk due to the presence of the Society, explicitly in order to save people’s lives. If you have a problem with that, you may leave.”

The man shut up.

Ethan nodded at Cecilia. “You may continue.”

Cecilia, who seemed a bit rattled by the interruption, took a moment to stabilize her emotions, and then stepped forward. She began detailing her attempts to form a magic seed without the help of the System – first detailing how the two had cut off the System mana from their surroundings, and then talking about how the numerous attempts to form magic seeds without System help had gone. Once Cecilia finished talking about forming magic seeds without help from the System, Alice stepped back in, and talked about the mage that had recently died while she was trying to help the Mage keep control of their messed up mana-flesh. Her voice caught in her throat a few times, but Alice managed to push forward until she finished speaking.

“Excuse me Cecilia, but may I ask why you were trying so hard to form a magic seed without help of the System?” asked one of the [Priests of the System]. Once again, a few of the [Priests of the System] were frowning, although they were different ones this time, and they seemed far more civil than the last man that interrupted the meeting.

“I felt it was reasonably likely that the System would give me a nice Achievement for doing so,” said Cecilia, not mentioning the fact that she was confident about this because Alice had gotten a nice Achievement of her own for forming a seed without the help of the System. {Seed Creator} was a rarity 8 Achievement, and while Cecilia had gotten a degraded copy of the Achievement, it was Cecilia’s best Achievement, as far as Alice knew. “And I turned out to be correct. The resulting Achievement was somewhat combat-related, so I would prefer not to discuss the details, but it was indeed quite high rarity, and rather helpful for my future as a whole.”

Some of the [Priests] looked mollified. While it still seemed like a few [Priests of the System] were merely trying to hold back their temper because of Ethan’s presence, most of them still looked thoughtful and concerned, instead of angry or suspicious.

Alice stepped forward again, and began talking about Class mana – and how, now that the System wasn’t present in the world, unfiltered class mana may forcibly warp people’s personality or mess with them if it wasn’t properly filtered and dealt with.

After a few more moments of thought, one of the concerned-looking [Priests] spoke up.

“What do you propose we do about this as a whole?”

“I think that it wouldn’t be a bad idea if we start talking about cutting off mana, and about how to manage the strange instincts people will start to have in the near future. It’s also probably not a bad idea to encourage people to buy manaless rings, since some [Enchanters] under Ethan have been manufacturing them since the moment we realized the System had disappeared. And I would also really appreciate it if any Mages that were part of your churches came to see Cecilia or me, so that we can help them get pure mana seeds,” said Alice. “I can help some with Perk selections, although only for a few specific people – but we can use that to get people a few more magic seed slots, and then help them get the right magic seeds. That would help alleviate some of the problem we’re having with not having enough [Enchanters] to meet the needs of the country as a whole.”

The [Priests of the System] discussed Alice’s requests and suggestions between themselves for a while.

After some discussion, many of them agreed to her requests, apart from the few [Priests of the System] that still looked more suspicious than helpful. Alice decided to memorize their names and faces, and mention them later to Ethan to make sure they wouldn’t become problems. Even though Alice didn’t like the feeling of effectively telling Ethan to assign a few [Spies] to watch over people on the suspicion they might become dangerous, Ethan would probably have already taken note of them and prepared to spy on them anyway. Alice just wanted to make sure that threats to her and her friend’s safety and attempts to save everyone didn’t get screwed over by a few people who were more suspicious of her than they were willing to help.

However, Alice was still satisfied with the number of [Priests] who were discussing how to implement Alice’s suggestions and were willing to help, even if not everyone was on board.

The first step to quell the chaos following the collapse of the System had been taken.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug! You can read up to 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Pre-order the e-book of Budding Scientist Volume 1! (It goes live in like 3 days! :D )

https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0CFW34H98

(Or the Audiobook)

A Small Town in Southern Illvaria

(Or both?)

Chapter 135

After the meeting with the [Priests], a few more days passed. During that time, Alice had numerous smaller meetings with [Priests of the System], all of which included both Ethan and Cecilia. Alice clarified and reclarified what she had seen of System mana, what specifically it did, and her understanding of how to handle the effects of its disappearance.

Most of the [Priests] seemed open to continue talking with her, which was a relief. Apart from the few [Priests of the System] that had seemed disgusted with her for the very act of treating the System as an object of study, the rest seemed much more worried about evaluating what Alice’s information meant to Illvaria and the innocent citizens of the area than worrying about how Alice had gotten that information. The one time her research methodology was questioned for morality, Alice had willingly read through several lists of statements under the watchful eyes of a few lie-detectors, which seemed to ease most of the remaining concerns about her experiments. Alice wouldn’t say that the [Priests] were happy about her experimenting on the System, but they weren’t angry, at least. She could live with that.

The 38 cooperative [Priests] also seemed more than happy to spread a limited version of Alice’s information to the people who frequented their church.

While the [Priests] and Ethan had both agreed that telling people absolutely everything was probably a bad idea, through a mixture of mail and in-person visits, the [Priests], Ethan, Cecilia, and Alice worked out a full idea of what to tell people about the System.

First, the [Priests] that were keen to work with Alice fully acknowledged that the System was ‘damaged’ right now. The [Priests] stated that they weren’t quite willing to discuss how or why the System’s ‘divine mana’ had been injured with any of their followers, which Alice was fine with. Frankly, Alice suspected that the [Priests] who were working with her believed that the System had ‘dumbed down’ what was happening in order to reward Alice for her efforts, creating some sort of unique worldview that Alice could use for her experiments without telling her everything. That was the impression she got after talking with a few of them, at least.

As long as the Church didn’t push a narrative that was actively against her and didn’t hurt people, Alice was fine if they refit all of her explanations into something that made more religious sense to them. Normally, she would have been a lot more worried about giving people accurate information so that they could expand on it in the future. However, right now they had much bigger problems to deal with.

After all, people’s lives came first. If this was what it took to get the cooperation of the [Priests], then so be it.

The [Priests] also revealed the existence of Class mana to the people who followed them, and taught people about the help the System usually gave people when forming magic seeds. The [Priests] seemed quite gleeful to learn just how critical the System was to Mages everywhere, although they were slightly less pleased to hash out the exact details of how class seeds worked. This information ensured that people were aware of the danger of collecting any kind of mana from their surroundings, and also to ensure that as many people as possible were informed of the dangers of forming a new magic seed. It would take time for this information to spread beyond Metsel, but Alice hoped that the more people were talking about it, the more likely someone would be able to avoid ending up in dangerous situations. They could at least keep the injuries and deaths to a minimum this way.

Apart from that, the Church of the System actively told people what they could do to help themselves stay safe – which mostly boiled down to getting ahold of the rings that blocked mana from their surroundings.

Apart from that, with Ethan and several [Guards], Alice and Cecilia also ended up meeting with a few Mages who had Classes that gave them lots of Magic seed slots and had recently passed another Perk level. This was for the explicit purpose of helping them form a pure mana seed, so that they could help pump out more anti-magic rings. Cecilia took over part of that project after Alice used her Display Mana to help them figure out what their Perks did and choose the ones they wanted – it was the biggest part of the project Cecilia could help with, and it was also a load off of Alice’s shoulders to delegate that to someone else.

Of course, when the Mages in question actually got around to forming Seeds, Alice would still need to be ready to step in and shatter their magic seeds if something went wrong. For now, Cecilia was leading them through visualization exercises and teaching them about her and Alice’s experiences forming Magic seeds without the help of the System – while under heavy guard, of course. Alice also used {Shared Memory} a few times, to share her own experiences with forming magic seeds without the help of the System. It wouldn’t completely cover the experience these Mages would be missing, but hopefully it would keep mistakes to a minimum.

Apart from the cooperative [Priests], there were still the three disgruntled [Priests] to deal with as well, in addition to the attention some other people were starting to pay to the [Priests] talking about the weakened System and the need for more pure mana seeds.

Ethan had [Spies] keep a close eye on the three [Priests] who were less willing to play along with Alice’s program. And he also started keeping an eye on every single person who seemed to question the wisdom of claiming that the System was in any way damaged or weakened. Keeping an eye on every single person of power who was even mildly dissatisfied with Alice’s program was a massive drain on manpower, even when compared to the resources one of Illvaria’s six Immortals could mobilize. It was also a time where it became clear to Alice just how much Ethan was giving to her to make her as safe and efficient about levelling up as possible – she had always known that he was helping her, but to have the completely ludicrous costs of keeping a spy network active over the entirety of Metsel metaphorically shoved into her face during the entire fiasco really showed just how much Ethan was helping her.

The [Priests of the System] who were willing to work with Alice also started sending reports and pages of statistics to Ethan, which was a huge help for Alice. Even if the [Priests] might not have the memory or mana-sensing Perks she had, and might not have the ability to precisely quantify how much mana someone’s class fractals absorbed, they could still roughly gauge how quickly some of their more well-known members were growing, and quantify some of their Stats and note changes in personality. It wasn’t the most precise information ever, but it was at least good enough that she could work with it. With this information, Alice was able to start checking some of her previous assumptions and guesses about how the broken System would interact with things like people’s levelling speed, personality corrosion, and the impact of Achievements when the System wasn’t around to mess with them.

Alice didn’t even have to go over the data entirely on her own. Ethan had pulled a small team of high-level [Mathematicians] and [Analysts] to go over any information collected by the [Priests of the System], and then put them under Alice’s direct command. Alice didn’t know how Ethan had convinced a bunch of high-level people to follow the commands of a teenager, but suspected her title as the apprentice of an Immortal and hefty paychecks were a huge part of it. Instead of pushing through every speck of data herself, Alice was free to try to put together the big picture.

For example, Alice could now confirm that [Willpower] was a Stat that actively fought against the personality corrosion of unfiltered class mana. The higher one’s [Willpower] stat, the lower the reported influence of one’s unfiltered class mana on one’s mind and personality. This was at least slightly reassuring to Alice – evidently, the System hadn’t left people with no defenses against its collapse, even though people were still pretty screwed in the long run.

Combined with the increasing awareness of people regarding the catastrophe, as well as the knowledge and cooperation of many [Priests of the System], most people began putting aside some of the more traditional exercises of the Church, which usually focused on helping children get some of their early Skills, Attributes, and levels, and instead focused almost exclusively on Willpower training. And through Alice’s own experiences, she could confirm that there weren’t any problems with levelling up Attributes, even if Class levels all carried some danger with them.

By Thursday, the cooperative churches of the System began targeted [Willpower] training, with a plan to keep it up every single day of the week. The exact nature of these [Willpower] training sessions varied from one church to another. Some of the more extreme churches subjected people to relatively painful situations, while forcing people to work through the pain to accomplish some sort of ultimately unimportant task that the church assigned as the objective of the exercise. Even though it was done with people’s full knowledge and consent, it still made Alice flinch a bit when she thought about what some of those churches were putting people through.

Most churches chose much less extreme methods, though. After explaining the situation, they would encourage people to take part in tests that would give them some sort of reward – and then delay that reward, explicitly withholding it and asking people not to ask about it in exchange for a larger reward later, as a method of training their willpower.

It strongly reminded Alice of some sort of bizarre version of the Marshmallow test. She wasn’t sure how effective it was as a training method for [Willpower], but it would hopefully be somewhat useful for the people who were a bit less willing to subject themselves to agony in exchange for improved future safety.

Apart from that, through the information the churches managed to collect from cooperative citizens, Alice confirmed that her messed up Achievement wasn’t unique to her at all. When Alice had gotten the {Creative Healer} Achievement, she hadn’t been entirely sure what to make of it – however, she had confirmed that it was only giving her around 50% of the boost it was supposed to give her. Which wasn’t that important, considering how minor the Achievement’s boosts were. But it still definitely sucked that she was only getting half of the benefits she was supposed to get, especially when every drop of mana and every level could mean the difference between Alice getting a more permanent solution going.

Every single other person who got an Achievement was reporting much the same thing Alice had noticed – Achievements weren’t giving quite the bonuses they claimed to anymore. Most people noticed that they got somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of the bonus they were supposed to, and the [Analysts] and [Mathematicians] Ethan had hired claimed that it seemed to correspond to what the Achievement did. People that got an Achievement that essentially gave them a new Perk usually had a lower percentage of their Perk working, while those who had boosts to their raw Attributes tended to be closer to 60% of their new Achievement working. Achievements like {Creative Healer}, which dealt with things like mana, or had unusual effects on Stats, usually fell in between the two numbers. It was harder to quantify how much the ‘levelling speed’ component of Achievements were impacted, since there hadn’t been enough time to collect data yet, but Alice had told the cooperative [Priests] to keep an eye on it, at least.

For now, Alice theorized that giving people new ‘Perks’ via Achievement was probably more complex than just buffing a few numbers, which was why they were more prone to messing up than Achievements that just boosted strength or something. Alice really did want to figure out how to fix her Achievements at some point in time, but for now she only had one broken Achievement, and it didn’t seem to be causing any immediate problems.

The response of the other churches was, at best, anemic. The churches led by [Priests of the System] who had basically had mental breakdowns when the System collapsed had further subdivided into three categories – one group that supported the actions of Alice’s churches, one where the [Priests] still hadn’t recovered enough to do anything and were starting to lose adherents, and the final category composed of those who decried any claim that the System had fallen or was in any way, shape, or form weakened or injured at all.

The third group was the most annoying, and seemed to be merging with the group of churches that had started making absurd claims once the System collapsed. Alice had the distinct impression that these people were going to be a major headache in the future, but Ethan had promised that he would take care of them. Alice was more than happy to fob off the thankless task of wrangling stubborn people to Ethan. Even though it would probably be valuable experience for if-when she became an Immortal, Alice would be happy to learn how to manage people when Illvaria wasn’t in the middle of a major catastrophe.

She and Ethan had also had more time to check up on the man who Alice and Ethan had only partially healed over the course of the week, and had found that, whatever was going wrong with his mana-flesh, it wasn’t getting much better on its own. So Alice and Ethan spent a bit of time each day stabilizing more of his mana flesh, which did seem to at least moderately reduce his pain. Instead of needing to be unconscious all the time, due to being unable to even sort of function, the injured patient could now move around with some painkilling Perks – which were quite rare, since [Organic Mages] usually just healed the problem away. However, a few [Doctors] in the city had access to them, since their means of curing wounds were usually slower than those of an [Organic Mage].

This treatment work also led to a few levels in Alice’s [Student of Organic Magic] Class.

You have leveled up!

Student of Organic Magic: 17 -> 22

If circumstances were different, Alice would have felt excited by how quickly [Student of Organic Magic] was now growing, despite being a secondary Class. With all of her Achievements and other modifiers stacked together, as well as the current circumstances, the class was levelling up more quickly than a regular person’s main classes usually did. It was a bizarre but interesting thought.

Alice didn’t have to think too much about which Perk she would take, once she used her display mana to figure out what her New Perks did.

Perk Selection: ----- Contact with main System lost. Loading from last previous record…

Perk_Name: Patients_Yes

Requirements: Host Meets Requirements: Achievement Organic Level 10 (Error: secondaryclass need_Level20 or seed implosion. Requirement met!)

Cheaper heal when Patient yes. Perk fail on malicious magic – must use user benevolent intent or no Perk.

The broken grammar in the System message was still hard for Alice to adjust to, but she was pretty sure this Perk was one of the many, many variations of {Patient’s Consent} that [Organic Mages] had access to. It was one of the most valuable Perks that [Organic Mages] who wanted to heal people could get, because it made healing much cheaper as long as the patient agreed to be healed. Most versions of {Patient’s Consent} could knock the penalty for pushing mana into another living being down by somewhere between 20% and 50%, depending on how limiting the requirements for the Perk were and how high level the Perk was. After testing it on the patient, Alice had confirmed that her Perk was close to 25%. But even a 25% reduction in mana cost to heal future patients was huge, and with the help of the Perk, Alice was finally able to finish stabilizing the patient’s mana-flesh the following day.

On Saturday, after a week of Alice’s excused absence from her classes, analyzing the movements of the church, and running through data with Ethan’s [Mathematicians] and [Analysts], something Alice had been waiting for was finally ready.

Her {Seeds of Ambition} Perk had finally come off of cooldown – which meant that Alice had work to do.

She needed a way to clear out the personality-altering mana that had started to build up in her body, and was also clogging up her Class seeds.

And Alice’s best guess for how to do that was to create some kind of mana conversion seed. For now, Alice was planning on focusing on the idea of filtration and conversion to create something like a ‘filter’ magic seed.

So, the moment her Perk came off cooldown, Alice spammed {Safety Analysis}, and after confirming it was fine, she started going through the usual process of making a magic seed without the help of the System.

She spent a few hours carefully thinking about exactly what image she was planning on using to build the seed, and exactly what she needed out of it. Then, she got started.

She almost expected something to go horribly wrong. In the week after the System had collapsed, Alice had gone through a slowly escalating series of catastrophes, all of which needed to be dealt with before they spiraled out of control. So part of her expected that something would just fail to work while she made her new magic seed.

And nothing did. For once, things went exactly as she hoped they would.

Alice spent several minutes after she finished just using {Safety Analysis} over and over again, trying to figure out if she had missed something. Finally, she accepted that things had actually gone according to plan. After that, she grinned, and started working on filtering away several kinds of mana that had gotten stuck to her magic seeds.

[Doctor] mana became [Student of Organic Magic] mana. Newly built-up [Scholar] mana became [Scientist] mana. [Scientist] mana became [Scholar] mana. All of the incredibly random miscellaneous types of mana that Alice had collected over the past week started to melt away as she purified and filtered them, turning them into the correct kind of mana to meld with her Class seeds.

She was gratified to see that her new magic seed was doing exactly what it was supposed to – and she was equally pleasantly surprised to see a new wave of level-up notifications, as all of the mana types that had previously been unused got converted into the appropriate type of mana, before her class seeds ate them and converted them into parts of her class fractals.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 58 -> 59, Student of Organic Magic 22 -> 24, Scholar 57 -> 58

The leftover chunks of mana weren’t quite enough to level up all of her Classes, and it didn’t bring her to a point where she unlocked any new Perks. However, four of her Classes were now only one level away from getting a new Perk, which made Alice very excited. Soon, she would probably have a new wave of Perks to use while trying to put things together in the aftermath of the System’s collapse.

As an added bonus, moments after Alice finished dealing with all of the leftover mana, a final wave of mana came and rushed towards her [Explorer of Magic] class fractal. After Alice used her filtration seed to convert all of the [Scholar], [Arcane Researcher], and [Organic Mage] mana into [Explorer of Magic] mana, she just barely got one, final level.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 77 -> 78

The levels in that Class were still excruciatingly slow right now, but the boost from Ethan’s mother she had gotten from the tea party, as well as the fruits of her own hard work, were beginning to pay off.

After that, Alice spent several minutes thinking about what she wanted to do with her second class seed, before she eventually settled on dimensional mana.

Less than a month ago, she and Ethan had gone to a village that had been strangely flooded with broken dimensional mana. The Society was also one of the major institutions in the world that focused on studying dimensional mana, and for some reason they were losing their minds recently.

That seemed like pretty good evidence that there might be something going horribly wrong with dimensional mana, somewhere in the world.

And Alice already had a license to form a dimensional magic seed laying around, although she hadn’t taken advantage of it yet.

Besides, if Alice ever wanted to go back home, she definitely needed to understand how dimensional mana worked.

Those seemed like pretty good arguments to prioritize making a dimensional magic seed over anything else. If a crisis involving dimensional mana popped up, Alice wanted to have some way to respond to it.

Therefore, with a mixture of excitement and nervousness, Alice finally started forming a dimensional magic seed for her second magic seed of the month.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 136

Alice had always wondered why dimensional mana behaved the way it did. She had heard, multiple times, of the tragedy of Allenheim – where a bunch of dimensional Mages had effectively nuked their kingdom into the ground by polluting it with dimensional mana.

For a while now, Alice had been tossing around ideas for how this worked. Her most recent theory, and the one that she favored the most, was that any objects, such as oxygen molecules, that passed through a portal would start to ‘infect’ any mana they came in contact with, turning it into broken dimensional mana. This would imply that dimensional broken mana worked kind of like how class mana worked.

Her second idea was that mana itself became broken while passing through any portal. She was pretty sure that mana did naturally pass through portals. That wouldn’t explain why broken mana had such a ridiculous cascading effect, but if Alice was missing something, it was entirely possible.

Her third idea was that portals just warped mana that existed near them. This would be a little odd by the standards of the way most mana Alice had observed acted so far. Most mana only broke when a Mage lost a little bit of efficiency while using magic. However, dimensional broken mana had already proven that it was unusual in a wide variety of ways – and it also made perfect sense for dimensional mana to ignore things like distance in a way other broken mana types might not.

Since Alice had only seen dimensional mana used by Society Mages and natural occurrences so far, she wasn’t sure which of the three theories she had was correct. It was even possible that all three were wrong, and Alice was overlooking something.

Either way, Alice was eager to finally put it to the test. Since the broken mana part of dimensional mana was what made it so dangerous, Alice needed to have an idea what caused broken dimensional mana to form before she could start trying to figure out how to defend against it.

Figuring out how dimensional broken mana worked might also help Alice protect herself against any Society Teleportation in the future, and protect herself against whatever was causing the Society to freak out. So there was a lot more than just Alice’s curiosity at stake right now.

She waited a few hours, for her new magic seed to form some mana for her to experiment with. Then, she informed Ethan that she was going to be experimenting with dimensional mana.

This was in case Alice messed up and accidentally created a massive cloud of broken dimensional mana, potentially causing everyone in the area to undergo broken mana baptisms. Even though Alice doubted she would create such a massive problem just by creating a few basic portals and testing how they worked, there was no sense in taking risks with other people’s lives, or her own. Having someone willing to watch over her tests and step in if something went horribly wrong was a good idea when playing with something as dangerous as dimensional mana, even though Alice’s {Safety Analysis} had already claimed that the tests she wanted to run were probably fine.

After Alice outlined the tests she wanted to perform and her reasoning, Ethan gave her the green light to start her tests. He brought her to one of the testing rooms in the mansion, located a reasonable distance underground. It was already enchanted to keep broken mana inside of the room from spreading. He took a seat nearby and watched as Alice got started.

The first thing Alice tried was opening up a small portal between two spots in the room. It was best to start simple.

Alice quickly noticed that there was a great deal of resistance against opening portals.

When she tried to use dimensional mana, it felt like she was trying to wrench open a firmly closed door. She had imagined that opening a portal would be… easier. Instead, she could actively feel her mind and her mana straining to make her portal appear, fighting against space to make her portal happen. Alice vaguely wished that she had a lot more mana to work with – it would certainly make portal manipulation dozens of times easier.

The resistance she felt grew based on how big of a portal she wanted to make, and also increased based on how far away the other end of the portal was.

Interestingly enough, once Alice stopped messing around with little flecks of dimensional mana and finally opened a thumb-sized portal that teleported things about a centimeter away, she realized something else. Alice’s ‘portal’ didn’t cost any mana to toss items through it. It simply consumed a big chunk of mana when she created it, and then consumed a small amount of mana to remain every second.

Absently, Alice wondered how the passage of time interacted with portals. There didn’t seem to be any time at all that passed between an object entering one end of the portal and exiting the other, although that could just be because of how limited her eyesight was. Her [Perception] pushed her senses well beyond what a regular human was capable of, but she still couldn’t register things that happened on the scale of nanoseconds.

For a moment, she wished that she hadn’t sacrificed the {Timer} Perk a while ago. It would have been quite helpful here.

The reason she was so focused on the time between entering and exiting a portal was simple. Alice vaguely remembered from her physics class that time and space were the same thing, or very closely related, and that the faster one travelled, the weirder the flow of time got for them compared to ‘normal’ time.

Or something like that. Even if she hadn’t taken all of the physics classes available at her high school before being pulled out of Earth, she at least remembered that the passage of time got very weird once one started travelling at or near the speed of light. Alice’s understanding of why that happened was a bit patchy, but it still raised an interesting question of how exactly time worked in this world. There was obviously time mana that she could use, but this world also seemed to mostly work off of the same physics that Earth did. Since that was the case, did this dimension’s laws of physics regarding time just work completely differently from Earth’s?

Alice honestly had no idea, although she did wonder what would happen if she sling-shotted a pocket watch back and forth between two portals at opposite ends of this planet for a few hours. Sadly, that experiment was completely impractical to arrange, even if Ethan used all of his influence trying to make it happen.

Alice spent a while thinking about weird questions related to time and space, before she decided to set it aside for now. Even if the questions were interesting, she certainly had other priorities. Her memory of how relativity worked from Earth was also a patchy framework of understanding she got from a high school physics class. As much as she wished she knew enough to test more, she simply didn’t have the knowledge foundation to play with this subject.

The second thing Alice noticed was the broken mana. Alice had already seen a few other portals before, but now that she had time to study them in greater detail (and without people throwing knives or firing objects at her), she confirmed that her first and second hypothesis about what caused dimensional broken mana to appear were both correct.

During the time Alice had been working on treating Borris and his early Status Screen, Alice had mused that perhaps the reason that Dimensional mana ‘spread’ so quickly was because the air travelling from one portal to another somehow caused the concept of dimensions to ‘infect’ the air around it, sort of like how people ‘broke’ the mana in the air around them by doing things one typically associated with a Class.

After some testing, Alice’s observations lined up with this hypothesis. When Alice used a mana filter to let air pass through the portal without any accompanying mana, the mana on the other side of the portal still turned into dimensional broken mana after a few seconds. The same thing occurred when mana passed through a portal – however, mana didn’t ‘naturally’ pass through portals very quickly at all, unlike air. Alice mused that if one made a longer-range portal, the difference in air pressure would probably accelerate the process of air molecules passing through the portal, causing one side to suddenly break out into a massive flood of broken dimensional mana. Meanwhile, even if Alice created a massive difference in mana concentration on each end of her portal, it didn’t cause mana to flood through the portal and create the kind of cascading broken mana flood that dimensional mana was infamous for causing. While this could be an issue with Alice’s testing conditions, she was pretty sure that the majority of broken dimensional mana came from air’s interaction with broken mana.

Which was fascinating.

After testing what actually caused the mana in the air to turn into dimensional broken mana, Alice moved on to chucking more normal objects through the portal, to see what happened. Alice was vaguely hoping to find some objects that didn’t start breaking mana after passing through a portal – if she could figure out what made broken mana and what didn’t, Alice might be able to find a clue to stopping the broken mana production entirely.

First, Alice tried tossing a few copper paupers through the portal, to see if they ALSO infected the air around them with dimensional broken mana.

Alice quickly confirmed that, for some reason, some coins would start infecting the air around them with dimensional broken mana, while other coins did not.

Alice had no idea what the difference was. Her first guess was that maybe some of the coins had different metal contents, and that somehow influenced which coins started spewing out broken dimensional mana everywhere. So she tried standardizing her tests by using a few different items that had less variance in them. After all, there was always a chance that coins in Illvaria just weren’t that standardized, right?

Apparently, the metal content of coins was not the issue here at all.

After Alice tried tossing a few pieces of pure iron that Ethan lent her through the portal, they also seemed to have a completely random chance of either infecting the mana around them with dimensional broken mana.

Standardizing how long the pieces of pure iron were exposed to the portals still resulted in seemingly random results. Changing how hard she threw the pieces of iron through the portal didn’t change the randomness of her results. Changing the amount of mana they were exposed to didn’t suddenly make her test results make sense.

Throwing the same piece of iron through the portal over and over again still had random results. And there was no consistent ‘it starts breaking mana it comes into contact with every third throw’ or anything like that. It was more like Alice was just randomly rolling the dice anytime something passed through the portal, and sometimes the object thrown through the portal caused mana it touched to turn into broken mana, and sometimes it didn’t.

Alice didn’t understand why it only applied to whole objects, either. Logically, every single atom or molecule should have had its own ‘roll’ for producing dimensional mana if the results were truly random… right? However, each piece of pure iron either produced dimensional broken mana or didn’t after exiting the other side of the portal. There weren’t any cases of some parts of it producing broken mana while others didn’t. How did the dimensional broken mana know whether each atom of iron was part of a whole block of pure iron not?

Eventually, Alice tried banging her head against the plates of pure iron before throwing them through the portal.

This also didn’t change the fact that the results were totally random, but it made her feel better.

Alice had taken a small break to ask Ethan if she was doing something wrong, after which Ethan had given her a very unhelpful shrug.

Alice had been sorely tempted to scream into her pillow for a while after that.

She tried several more things, but no matter what she attempted, she just couldn’t figure out why on earth the presence of broken dimensional mana coming from an item seemed completely random.

Not to mention, cleaning up all of the broken mana in the area so that she could get a clear view of what was happening was also growing increasingly irritating as her experiments plodded along. The fact that anything that passed through a portal had around a 40% chance of infecting all mana it touched for somewhere between 2 seconds and 2 minutes was something that Alice simply couldn’t understand. There must be some pattern behind how everything worked. But Alice could not for the life of her figure it out, no matter what she tried.

After about twenty minutes of testing things with a portal the size of her thumb, Alice ran out of dimensional mana, and was no closer to figuring out what the heck she was looking at.

Apart from discovering that pure mana didn’t turn into broken dimensional mana after passing through a portal, Alice had also discovered that she had a massive headache.

Was this what the physicists who discovered quantum physics had felt like?

“Find anything interesting?” asked Ethan.

Alice was about to seriously answer the question, before she realized that Ethan’s voice had a rather playful edge to it. Instead of responding, she opted to give him her best intimidating glare. Ethan actually laughed at her before he started talking again.

“Don’t worry. If dimensional mana was easy to study, other countries would have lifted the ban on dimensional mana studies years ago. The fact that the ban has lasted as long as it has is proof of how complex and weird it is.”

Alice didn’t feel any better at all after Ethan’s words. Just because other people had failed to solve a mystery didn’t mean that she felt better after failing to solve the same mystery. Alice simply felt frustrated.

She decided to take her mind off of her unsuccessful first foray into dimensional mana experimentation by looking at her System notifications. Of course, she first converted all of her mana into appropriate classes, to make sure she didn’t lose any of her hard-earned levels, or lose a her personality. She got a couple Attributes from the tests as well as a few scattered levels.

You have leveled up!

Scientist: 60 -> 62, Scholar 58 -> 60

Sadly, despite doing an entirely new experiment, as well as benefitting from Ethan’s Mother’s boost since it hadn’t quite worn off yet, Alice still didn’t get quite enough XP to level [Explorer of Magic].

Alice noticed, with some concern, that there was now a fair amount of [Dimensional Mage] mana floating around inside of her body. She was pretty sure she had seen a few Society researchers that looked like they had a class built around dimensional mana, but it hadn’t occurred to her until now that she could now get mana for a class she couldn’t form a seed for.

Which would be very bad. The influence on her personality wasn’t very noticeable yet, but if Alice didn’t find a way to deal with it, she would have to stop messing with dimensional mana. The idea of wasting all of her work here and being forced to give up on searching for answers left a horrible taste in her mouth, even if she still intended to mostly focus on System mana as her subject of study.

The [Dimensional Mage] mana kept swirling around near her mage core, as if it were trying very hard to form a class seed but simply couldn’t. This made Alice very, very concerned.

Luckily, after a few minutes of worrying, Alice realized that even though her [Dimensional Mage] mana wasn’t sticking to any nearby class seeds, unlike all of the other mana she had gathered while levelling up her classes, it was still sort of similar to [Explorer of Magic]. Or at least, she hoped it was. She had no clue how to form a proper class fractal yet, and without that knowledge, Alice was pretty sure any attempts to make a [Dimensional Mage] class seed would backfire horribly and possibly kill her.

After a quick confirmation with {Safety Analysis}, Alice started using her filtration magic seed to whittle away at the [Dimensional Mage] mana. Even though the efficiency was horrible and half of the mana was disappearing into who-knows-where, Alice managed to get rid of the unsafe mana with some effort. This made Alice feel very relieved.

At the very least, she wasn’t going to accidentally wipe out her mind during her experiments. Unfortunately, even that wasn’t enough to get [Explorer of Magic] to level 78. Alice was finally starting to understand why so many people struggled to reach Immortality. [Explorer of Magic] was probably close to levelling up – but it hadn’t levelled even after experimenting on an entirely new kind of magic. Which was very frustrating.

Then, as Alice was thinking about the way she had converted [Dimensional Mage] mana into [Explorer of Magic] mana, and idea hit her. It wasn’t related to her own Status Screen – instead, she started thinking about all of the problems caused by the disappearance of the System.

Currently, it was a huge problem if people got more mana from their environment, because their Class seeds weren’t properly handling the mana they absorbed the way the seeds were supposed to. [Farmers] who worked in the field, for example, might get a level or two of [Farmer] experience over the course of a few weeks of farming now – but they also got a whole lot of other, similar classes that would clog up their seed and gum everything up, then cause an overflow of mana that they couldn’t absorb and would corrode away their personality.

But what if Alice could create an enchantment out of her filtration mana that solved this problem?

Sure, the System itself was still missing, but Alice could, theoretically, create a type of enchantment that would reach into someone’s body, grab all of the kinds of mana that were ‘similar’ to [Farmer] mana, and then convert it all into [Farmer] mana before stuffing it all back into the body and letting the class seed do its job.

After all, the System had clearly been doing it before it shut down. It was very obviously possible. Alice was nowhere near as skilled as the System was at mana filtration and manipulation, but she could already manage to do this without enchantments. The trick was just figuring out how to automate it.

And having rings that could permanently ‘cleanse’ mana problems would be a huge breakthrough in solving the current crisis.

After all, people didn’t need to have any problematic mana wiped out immediately. They could obviously last several days without the bad types of mana from their environment wiping away their personality. A few wisps of a different kind of mana wouldn’t do much to someone besides annoy them a bit, as long as it didn’t build up. If Alice’s idea worked out, people might just be able to wear a [Farmer] ring once a month to get all of their ‘pending’ levels, clear out the mana harming their mind, and then get back to work in the fields. Not only would it solve all of the health problems associated with too much buildup of the wrong mana type, but it would also let people keep levelling up, AND it would take far fewer resources and much less time than it would take to make a mana-blocking ring for everyone in Illvaria.

After all, right now people were scrambling to get one mana blocking ring per person and then wear it all the time. However, if Alice’s ‘mana filtration’ rings could be made, a farming village could probably get by just fine if they shared a ring for [Farmer] mana and just swapped it from one person to another every few hours. It wouldn’t be too hard to organize, and it would require far fewer enchanted rings to be made.

The mana blocking-rings would still probably be useful for children, since the System restricted children from gaining access to their classes until the age of six. Alice had no idea why six was such a magic number for getting class seeds, but it was probably logical to do the same thing until she could figure out the reasoning behind it and determine whether or not it was needed. However, for adults, as long as their class seeds only needed to deal with the right kind of mana, it was entirely possible to keep levelling up, gaining Perks, and growing stronger even with the System down.

Of course, Alice also realized that she would run into a few problems.

First, all enchantments needed three things. A power source (usually a monster core), a material that could contain ‘instructions’ which an enchanter programmed into the material, and finally, an [Enchanter] to actually bring everything together.

Power sources weren’t that hard to find – even if it was best for enchantments if they had a similar kind of mana to the type the enchantment used, most enchantments could run on any monster core. They would just degrade a lot faster if the monster core used a totally different kind of mana. Which was a good thing, because as far as Alice knew, no monster in existence used any kind of System mana as its primary mana type, meaning that it was probably impossible to get something like a ‘Filtration mana’ monster core.

However, the other two things would still be major problems. Alice had no idea where to find materials that could memorize ‘filtration mana’ instructions, and Alice was also the only filtration mana mage that she knew of. Cecilia might be able to pick up a similar kind of mana with Alice’s help, though. And perhaps the Mages who were training under Cecilia could be trained to make filtration mana seeds instead of pure mana?

Admittedly, the fact that they had never seen or heard of filtration mana before today would make it far harder for them to conceptualize and build the magic seeds, compared to pure mana magic seeds, which were already well-known, even if they were uncommon.

Alice sighed.

It was something worth trying, at least. She made a mental note to herself to let Cecilia know about her new thoughts, and then walked over to Ethan to discuss her failed dimensional mana experiments and her new request to look for ‘weird’ enchanting materials. Maybe some [Adventurers] or [Enchanters] could scrounge something up, either by finding it in the wild or by artificially forcing a material to accept instructions from unique types of magic seed. It was worth a shot.

Alice now had yet another project to work on. And this one might actually be game-changer that started solving the problem, instead of just mitigating damage. It was nice to know that she had gotten something out of her dimensional mana experiments besides a massive headache.

A note from acaswell

I accidentally had Alice level up Explorer of Magic from level 76 to level 77 in chapter 130… and then she levelled up from level 76 to level 77 AGAIN in chapter 135. Obviously, the second one should have been leveling from 77 to 78. This has been corrected.

Shameless plug – you can read up to 3 chapters ahead on Patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 137

After settling on her new plan to mitigate the impact of the System collapse, Alice finally took a moment to settle her new Perk from [Scholar].

Alice started out by scanning over her Perk combination options, as well as her options for new Perks.

After a few moments, she felt a flicker of disappointment.

She had really been hoping that some of her new Perk choices or combinations would either help her restore some semblance of the System and its mana, or help her a lot more with her enchanting experiments. After all, if Alice wanted to create a ring that mimicked the effects of the System, she was going to need a lot of time and effort to succeed. Having a Perk that made the process easier would have gone a long way right now.

Unfortunately, she didn’t find any Perks that directly impacted her enchanting or her experiments with System mana components. So she ultimately decided on a different Perk combination by sacrificing {Delve into the Arcane} and {Improved Memory}.

Delve into the Arcane

Requirements: Scholar level 50 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher, some sort of Perk which gives you the ability to learn information, rarity eight or higher Achievement related to Magic and Research

If you have spent at least an hour learning about magic within the past 24 hours, your mana regeneration rate is increased by 100% (This multiplier takes effect AFTER accounting for all other Perks you have that multiplies mana regeneration, working multiplicatively instead of additively).

Alice had leaned into {Delve into the Arcane} to help fuel the mana she needed for her experiments for quite a while, and to some extent, she still relied on it. In fact, considering the fact that she spent 8 hours a day reading while she was asleep, she found it easier than ever to trigger the Perk’s activation conditions, meaning that she was basically always enjoying the benefits of the Perk.

However, she was also starting to run into limitations on what she could do even with all of her mana regeneration stacked together. Right now, her biggest limitations weren’t mana-based at all – they were usually based on either the amount of time she could spend researching something, even with all of her time-efficiency enhancing Perks tossed together, or they were limitations based on the usage of her Perks. Her limitation of using {Broken Seed} once every four days, {Seeds of Ambition} once a month, and {Expanding Comprehension} every 2 weeks currently proved to be the biggest blocks on her forward progress. Right now, Alice had several magic seeds she wanted to try forming – and she seriously struggled to get all of them built. Even with two seeds a month, she already had several components of System mana that she wanted to make and experiment with, and nowhere near enough time to make them all. And having only 24 hours a day to experiment often proved a major problem for her progress.

Therefore, even though losing {Delve into the Arcane} would sting, it was a bearable loss. And the text Alice had seen for her new Perk combination seemed promising enough that she was willing to lose the Perk.

The other Perk Alice was losing was much less of a struggle.

Improved Memory

Requirements: Scholar level 5 or higher, Intelligence 100 or greater

Greatly improves your ability to remember information.

As for {Improved Memory}, {Photographic Memory} was simply a much better version of the same Perk. Alice felt absolutely nothing at the prospect of losing it, and probably wouldn’t even notice that it was gone.

So, without further hesitation, Alice combined the Perks into something new.

Perk Naaaame: Delve _ Memories

Perk Costs: Delve into the Arcane + Improved Memory

Perk _ Synergy detected: Sleep Reading

Vastly improved understanding while using remembering. Can level, analyze, and improve magic better.

Synergy detected_ Sleep reading.

Add_Text Synergy.

Ah yes, the ever-enlightening ‘add_text synergy,’ thought Alice, sarcastically. Even with the help of display mana, she had no idea what the ‘synergy’ part of her Perk did.

It took several more moments for her Perk to figure out it was bugged and fix itself, although Alice was pleasantly surprised the Perk actually fixed itself. She hadn’t really expected it to, now that the System was down and most other things remained bugged once they became glitch.

Perk Naaaame: Delve _ Memories

Perk Costs: Delve into the Arcane + Improved Memory

Perk _ Synergy detected: Sleep Reading

Vastly improved understanding while using remembering. Can level, analyze, and improve magic better.

While {Sleep Reading}, can use objects you remember. Levelling speed improved by Get_Number while sleep reading. Experiments and Enchantments very accurate while sleep.

As her Perk rewrote itself in front of her eyes, Alice blinked.

The chunks of the System that were still active in her [Scholar] Class fractal had reached out and rearranged themselves, even without the input of the System from the atmosphere. It had never done that before. At least, not that she had seen. Equally interesting was that Alice’s {Intuitive Magic Modelling} caught sight of a new type of mana, operating purely within her Class seeds. She wasn’t entirely sure what type of mana it was, but as far as she could tell it was something like ‘meaning’ mana, or perhaps ‘correction’ mana. It felt like the mana leaned a bit into both of those concepts – almost like it was capable of correcting information from ‘display’ mana, but also like it was meant to interact with something else on a deeper level.

Alice was reminded of the fact that people were normally able to read their Perks without help. But ever since the system collapsed, unless Alice used her display mana, all she saw when looking at Perk options was a glitched out System box that said “Perk Selection: ----- (missing entry). This was obviously a glitch, even if Alice could fix it using display mana.

In addition, Alice remembered the fact that proper System messages were readable no matter what language one spoke. Meanwhile, the fake System messages Alice could create using Display mana were basically just floating books – they didn’t contain any sort of auto-translate feature. Alice could create System messages in English or Illvarian, but if someone who spoke a different language appeared in front of her, she would have no way to make her display mana fix their bugged Perk selection screen.

Perhaps this mana type filled in the gaps that she had been missing? It was very much something she was interested in trying out, whenever she could make another magic seed.

Unfortunately, Alice had no way to get more magic seed slots right now. Since her new Perk seemed to be related to {Sleep Reading}, Alice supposed that she would need to feel out how the Perk worked.

After she finished selecting her new Perk, she turned towards Ethan, who hadn’t moved since Alice had started messing with her status screen.

“Thank you for helping me with my experiments,” said Alice.

“That’s what I’m here for,” said Ethan. “Besides, as much as I think it’s unlikely that you’ll blow yourself up or recreate the tragedy of Allenheim in my basement, there’s no sense in tempting fate.”

Alice nodded. “I had a new idea about how to potentially address the collapse of the System. I believe I already mentioned how I was using filtration mana to correct my class seeds. I’ve started thinking that maybe this can be reproduced on a larger scale, perhaps using enchantments of some sort. If we only rely on Mages who get a new class seed open, it will take a great deal of time to get people with filrtation magic seeds available throughout Illvaria – and it would probably be hard to realistically get filtration Mages everywhere they would need to be. But if we can get the entire process done through enchantments…” Alice continued detailing her rough idea for how to automate the mana filtration process usually handled by the System, as well as the problems she expected to encounter. Meanwhile, Ethan simply listened to her as they walked back towards the upper parts of the manor.

Once she was done talking, Ethan nodded.

“It’s a good idea, and it has a reasonable chance of working around the problems we would face if we tried to just make a lot of Mages get filtration magic seeds. Since you need an enchantment material that can record instructions from filtration mana, I’ll look into any mysterious enchanting materials that people have found over the years. There might be something that reacts with System mana that was previously considered ‘odd’ or ‘useless,’ so I’ll have someone look into that. I’ll also see if anyone has access to an enchanting Perk that lets them create the kind of enchanting material you would need. I think most Perks that let enchanting materials learn more instructions tend to be limited to a specific type of mana, but there’s a decent chance someone has a Perk or Achievement that removes that limitation. I’ll see what I can find,” he said, as the two of them finally reached the upstairs area again.

With their conversation finished, Alice thanked Ethan again, before she went to her room to take a nap and play with her new Perk. Since it synergized with {Sleep Reading}, Alice wanted to see if anything had changed while using the {Sleep Reading} Perk. It didn’t take her long to fall asleep.

Within her dream, Alice returned to her usual dream-library. However, unlike before, the dream-library had a new addition to it. It was a giant room filled with every enchanting material Alice had ever come across and examined in any detail.

Alice grinned.

Perhaps she had been too pessimistic when she had assumed that the System hadn’t given her any options for improving her enchantments and experiments on the System. Even if the text for her new Perk was buggy as heck, Alice was starting to get an idea what the new Perk might do.

Alice strode towards the new room. At the same time, another memory bubbled up. An idea on top of an idea.

There had been a few times, recently, where Alice had wondered if she wasn’t using her {Sleep Reading} ability to its full potential. However, with the project to save Illvaria from the System’s collapse, her attempts to manage the collapse of the System, and her projects to keep the country from spiraling towards collapse, Alice hadn’t found the time to experiment with her Perk that she had wanted. She had spent almost every moment inside of her dream library looking up information that she felt would be useful to her or Cecilia. Information about pure mana, and how it could be used to filter other kinds of mana, for example, as well as historical records of changes the System had made over the years, and speculations about how and why the System changed when and how some Perks could be accessed.

However, now that Alice had her new enchanting room added to her dream library, and had the issue brought to her attention once more, she started to think about what her new Perk did, and the ways she might have been failing to use her old Perk.

She pulled up the description for {Sleep Reading} again, to see if she had missed something.

Sleep Reading

Perk Costs: Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement + Super Speed Reading

Any time you are asleep, so long as you are close to or touching a book and have permission to read it from the owner of that book, you may read it inside of your dreams. This will not affect your sleep, meaning you will still fully rest after a night of sleeping, and all of the speed and comprehension bonuses offered previously offered by {Super Speed Reading} will still apply while you are asleep.

Note: Any books stored inside of any storage Perks you have are considered to be touching you at all times for the purposes of this Perk.

She frowned.

Now that she was explicitly looking for exploits, she started to realize that there really might be a few things she could do with this Perk that weren’t explicitly outlined.

So far, she had used this Perk to gather background information and data as efficiently as possible. However, what if she used her dream library as a brainstorming area?

Her Perk specified that she could read books inside of her dreams, but it was also obvious that the Perk actively let her ‘lucid dream’ as much as she wanted to. After all, Alice had imagined up this giant, comfortable library, and let her walk around inside of the space to ‘pick up’ books and look at them, even though that wasn’t explicitly ‘reading.’ She could even imagine cups of tea and snacks and eat and drink them, even though they were pretty obviously unrelated to what her Perk was supposed to do. And her Perk didn’t stop her at all.

So what if she just… sat around and fiddled with enchantment blueprints, or something? In the first place, Alice had taken the {Blueprint} Perk at level 10 for [Careful Enchanter], which let her create blueprints of enchantments which made it easier for her to copy the blueprint into reality without messing them up. She looked up the description for {Blueprint} again, to see if she could do anything with the Perk while asleep.

Blueprint

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 10 or greater, Intelligence 150 or greater

You may create up to three different 'blueprints' inside of your memory, by carefully imagining each enchanting material you wish to add to the enchantment and then imagining what kind of 'instruction' you wish to add to each enchanting material. You will be able to get some sense of how well the enchantment will work in practice - and you will also be less likely to make mistakes when making a physical copy of a blueprint if you spend a larger amount of time on making the item.

Note: You can freely delete old blueprints, but some amount of mental taxation will occur. Frequent use may cause headaches or migraines, so it is advised not to delete blueprints too frequently.

Alice nodded thoughtfully to herself.

She felt that she could probably have also been brainstorming and using some other Perks during her time she spent asleep.

Of course, as of now, there was a whole lot more that she could do while she was asleep.

She looked at the new enchanting room, and grinned.

She didn’t know exactly what materials she would be working with when she tried to make her rings of [Farmer] levelling, since right now, Alice had no knowledge of any enchanting materials that could work with System mana. And her new Perk specified that it would only let her interact with materials she remembered. Meaning that she needed to have had contact with an enchanting material first.

However, she was pretty sure she could design new enchantments inside of her dreams now, using materials she had already made. And if she liked a particular design, she could then save it into her {Blueprint} Perk, making it easier to replicate in reality. And she could probably also test what new materials were capable of inside of her dreams. Her new Perk also implied that she would now have a boosted levelling speed inside of her dreams, making it easier to get new Perks and make the whole process even easier.

Alice took a step into her new dream enchanting workshop, and took a few materials off the wall before experimenting with them. Just as she had expected, they behaved exactly like they did in real life – leaving her free to mess with materials and practice enchanting as she pleased.

Even better, while she was asleep, she didn’t seem to be spending any of her ‘real’ mana on the enchanting experiments. She would have to wake up to check if she really was leveling up her enchanting classes efficiently this way, but at least so far, Alice was pretty sure she had just hit the jackpot with her new Perk.

She just needed to find a material that could use {Filtration} mana, and she could put her class rings idea into practice. And now she had an easy and efficient way to test new materials without wasting her time and mana.

Alice felt herself getting more and more excited as she started messing with her enchanting materials, and in the span of a few minutes, got lost in her work.

* * *

Illa Weissaurus stepped down from her ship and onto docks with a sigh, before grimacing and using one of her kinetic mana tendrils to float her luggage behind her.

The news that she had come across as she was sailing towards Metsel was not promising. All of the passengers that had boarded the boat were discussing strange things. Things like the System bugging out, or acting oddly. More recently, they were talking about [Willpower] training, or the [Priests] of the Church of the System going mad, or… frankly, a wide variety of other scenarios, all of which Illa found disturbing and ridiculous in equal quantity.

Illa was usually skilled at picking out which information was accurate and which information was worthless from a large stream of information. Ever since she had started delving into politics, it had become something of a necessity for her. However, she usually picked out useful information by comparing it to what she already knew and figuring out what actually made sense. Right now… nothing made sense.

People that had boarded her ship and spoken with the other passengers were scared, and a strange sense of tension hung in the air. However, concrete information was hard to find.

Illa dearly hoped that was simply because [Messengers] hadn’t reached most parts of the kingdom yet, because if nobody knew what was going on, it would be even more of a catastrophe.

She strolled through the streets of the little dock town that was only an hour or so away from the capital, and after some hesitation, decided to spend a few hours chatting with some other patrons of a tavern. Drunk people passed information back and forth between each other far more easily than people who were sober, after all.

She took a few steps into the first decent looking tavern she saw, and spent a few moments relaxing as the nostalgic scent of alcohol hit her in the face like a giant boulder thrown by a [Kinetic Mage].

Absently, she wondered how long it had been since she last stepped into a tavern on her own. She had used to hit up a tavern with a few other [Mages] she was good friends with during her time in the army, whenever they could sneak away from the barracks for a few hours. However, once she transitioned from a [Warmage] to a political figure, she had never quite found the time to just sit in a tavern and relax, the way she used to.

“Hello there, lady Mage!” said a [Waiter] after she took a seat near the center of the room. It was harder to notice the strain at the edge of his voice than it had been with some other people, but Illa could still detect an edge to his demeanor that most professionals wouldn’t normally show. “What can I get for you?”

“A mug of beer, please,” said Illa, trying to push back her nerves a bit, and feeling a bit nostalgic for her army days. There had been plenty of nightmares during her time in the army, but there were also plenty of good memories associated with those times.

The [Waiter] quickly got her a mug of beer, and Illa felt a little bit of the stress and frustration she had accumulated during the journey melt away after taking a few sips of the cheap-tasting swill they served in the establishment.

It tasted foul. Which, frankly, was what Illa preferred if she was drinking beer. The point of beer was to get drunk, not to taste good.

After that, Illa simply settled down to relax and listen in on conversations. Luckily, unlike the scattered, ambiguous information she had collected during her travel north, the people this close to the capital seemed to have much better information on whatever was happening to the System right now.

“-say that the church is trying to raise people’s [Willpower]. If your [Willpower] is too low compared to… something about ambient mana, or something, your personality will start to get warped by your Classes. Not sure what the heck anyone means by ‘ambient mana,’ since they don’t seem to be talking about the pure mana in the air around us, but I don’t like the idea of my personality-“

“-Heard that the apprentice of Honored Immortal Ethan discovered it. I heard she was a combat Mage, but I didn’t really pay much attention. The guy who claimed she was a combat mage must have been drunk. She’s clearly a researcher, if she found-”

“-Society is openly at war with the Shil Confederacy! They have to be, with the way they’re openly attacking people!”

“-Something about Perks is wrong. All of my Perks just look like error messages when I go to the Perk selection screen. My daughter got her first couple Achievements last weekend when I brought her and a few of her friends to kill a few spidercrabs, and they just didn’t get the full stat boost they should have! With both Perks and Achievements getting weird –“

“-And the high [Priest] of the System church collapsed, or so they say. Hasn’t seen anyone since-“

“-[Farmer] Edmund hasn’t spoken with anyone since yesterday. He just keeps throwing seeds onto the ground over and over again. It’s the wrong season to sow seeds, and I know for a fact he isn’t high enough level to ignore planting season yet. I can’t tell of this is some sort of version of the personality-warping the… uhh… ‘ambient class mana’ stuff causes, but something’s wrong with his head right now. Maybe if we get him to a church -”

Illa spent nearly two hours collecting conversation fragments and stringing information together, before she got a solid idea what was happening right now.

It seemed that the System was truly collapsing, at least in some limited way. The Church of the System had a variety of mixed responses to that, but it looked like at least somebody knew what was going on and was trying to organize a response to it.

And the more she listened, the more Illa was fairly certain that somebody was her former apprentice, Alice.

Illa grinned as she finished up her last tankard of beer, paid, and left to continue moving towards the capital.

It was becoming increasingly clear that whatever was going on, her former apprentice was right in the center of it.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 138

Alice woke up from her nap with an excited grin, and checked her class fractals.

Just as she had hoped, there were several chunks of mana stuck to her enchanting-related Class fractals, and her Class fractals had also grown by more than they normally would after several hours of testing ingredients.

Clearly, she could not only level up in her dreams as usual, but if Alice wasn’t mistaken, she was getting somewhere between a 50% and 100% boost to the XP for her enchanting Classes while asleep. While not exactly massive, it was certainly a nice boost, especially since she had much weaker multipliers for her enchanting classes compared to her research Classes. A 50%-100% increase in her levelling speed to whatever she worked on while asleep wasn’t bad at all, especially now that Alice was trying to bring her enchanting up to speed with the rest of her build.

It had even been enough to tip [Careful Enchanter] up to the next level, despite the fact that she had only put in one night of work.

You have leveled up!

Careful Enchanter: 29 -> 30

Alice briefly considered grabbing a new Perk immediately, before she decided to wait a while. She had a few different ideas on what functions she might want from her next [Careful Enchanter] Perk, and she would need to talk with Cecilia and Ethan before she finalized her decision. After all, Alice might need her new Perk to help her compensate for lack of enchanting materials, or boost her speed, or do something completely different depending on the situation.

Apart from boosting her levelling speed, {Delve Memories} had a lot of interesting effects that Alice had noticed during her testing.

Apart from the obvious new ability to test enchanting materials in her dreams, Alice had also noticed that she now understood things better when trying to remember them as opposed to the first time she saw them. For example, if she tried to think over the text of a particularly dry study written several centuries ago, she would now have a much easier time understanding the text if she read it and then tried to remember it afterwards, instead of simply reading it once. Of course, that in itself wasn’t particularly strange: humans usually tended to understand things better if they spent more time thinking about it and analyzing it, after all. However, if Alice simply memorized the ‘picture’ of a page in a book and then ‘read’ it in her memories, she would get a much better understanding of it than if she simply read it normally. In addition, while thinking about experiments that she had recently done, she would get certain instincts and flashes of insight that she wouldn’t normally have about what the ‘answer’ was. Which had proven exceptionally useful when trying to figure out which enchanting materials she wanted to pay more attention to.

Unfortunately, her newly improved understanding and instincts still couldn’t help her figure out what the heck was up with dimensional mana, but Alice figured she would understand it sooner or later.

The new Perk was a small, but useful boost to Alice’s comprehension and levelling speed, as long as she used it well. Alice was certainly happy to have the Perk in her toolkit.

Alice’s material testing in her dreams had mixed results. Alice hadn’t found any materials that synergized with filtration mana during her dream-testing, unfortunately. However, Alice HAD found that a few miscellaneous chunks of tree bark that accepted instructions from Display mana, even if it didn’t seem like it was a perfect fit. The material clearly wasn’t the optimal material for handling display mana, but it worked.

The material in question was a type of gray colored tree bark that Cecilia had stored in her old shop in Cyra, before the two had moved to Metsel.

Alice hadn’t originally been as focused on display mana. However, for people to choose new Perks, it was obvious that they needed to be able to see what their new Perks did. Since the System’s Perk selection screens were bugged out unless someone manually fixed them using display mana, it was obvious that people needed some way to fix that problem as well. Right now, all of Cecilia’s Mages that she was training were personally assisted during their Perk selection by Alice (while Ethan stuck around to make sure an [Assassin] or Society Member didn’t sneak in and attack her while her guard was down). This was workable for now, but wasn’t really a good long-term solution.

Making a ring out of the tree bark that let people read their Perk choices normally would fix this logistical issue. Which meant that Alice needed some way to get access to large quantities of that tree bark. That meant that she needed to ask Cecilia where the bark came from.

She quickly left her room and moved to Cecilia’s room, where she found Cecilia sitting at her desk, buried in paperwork.

Alice tried not to chuckle at the sight. Ever since the collapse of the System and the start of the pure mana Mage project, Cecilia had nearly as much paperwork to manage per day as Ethan. [Mathematicians] and [Data Analysts] could only work their way through so much of the information, since Alice and Cecilia were the only two with direct familiarity with the System and its mana. Some information simply needed to be handled by the three of them to properly make sense of everything. And since Alice’s time tended to be spent dealing with experiments and working through information, the paperwork tended to fall to Cecilia right now.

“Cecilia, do you have a moment?” asked Alice.

Cecilia quickly put down the document she had been messing with and looked at Alice.

“I can certainly spare a few moments,” said Cecilia, quietly shoving her paperwork as far away from her as possible.

Alice looked at the document Cecilia was so eager to avoid, and tried not to wince as she read through a few of the questions. One in particular brought back a few bad memories.

It was a letter that had obviously come from one of the Mages Cecilia was training. In it were outlined several variations on odd questions about pure mana, System mana, and the way the two interacted with each other. Several of the questions were actually kind of interesting – for example, the man who had written the letter Cecilia was currently looking at had asked whether it was possible to manually tear apart a failed magic seed using pure mana. Which was something Alice had already seen firsthand and was eager to never repeat.

Of course, if people could figure out how to do it, Alice’s {Broken Seed} Perk would no longer be the first and only line of defense against Mages screwing up their magic seeds and dying horrific deaths. Which would be amazing: after all, Alice could only use the Perk once every four days, and she was also only present in one place at a time. She had no idea how many Mages had died across Illvaria before Ethan’s messengers hit new cities, but she was sure that the three she had seen die or nearly die in Metsel weren’t the only ones that had been hurt.

Unfortunately, Alice couldn’t think of a single way to ethically test breaking down seeds using Pure mana. She hadn’t even figured out how to heal away the aftereffects of the way she and Ethan had accidentally given to the sick Mage she had treated recently – all they had managed to do was minimize the pain the man dealt with on a daily basis and let him return to mostly normal life.

Several of the man’s questions were in the same vein of thought as that initial question – interesting ideas that Alice had either already tried out and found problematic, or questions that couldn’t be ethically tested in any way that Alice could think of. Unless the Mage did the testing by using himself as a test subject, of course, but Alice understood that most people weren’t quite as willing to use themselves as a test subject as she was. And even suggesting he do so would be inherently unethical.

Alice finished scanning the letter, and then shook her head. Even though the Mage who had written the letter had a decent mind, their current thoughts didn’t provide very much useful insight. Though Alice appreciated that the man was asking questions. Perhaps with a bit more information he would have more useful ideas in the future?

“How are you planning on responding?” asked Alice, curious enough to get distracted from her original goal.

“The Mage who wrote the letter evidently has some decent ideas, so I’m planning on feeding him more information and seeing if he comes up with any good ideas that are actually useful. But sifting through all of his ideas is kind of a headache. His handwriting, and the way he expresses ideas, are both somewhat scatterbrained and chaotic, making everything very difficult to parse,” said Cecilia, sighing. “And reading through some of these questions and comparing it to some of the stories you’ve told me make me feel a bit depressed. Whatever. That’s a problem on my end. I know that trying to lead even a small part of all of this is bound to have a lot of issues. It’s just… frustrating to deal with all of the minor issues and annoyances that I find on a daily basis now. Not to mention getting stuck trawling through paperwork and running classes instead of enchanting.” Cecilia sighed. “I didn’t realize how much I enjoyed enchanting and running my shop until now.”

Alice nodded. There wasn’t much that she could do to help Cecilia, unless she wanted to weaken the Achievement Cecilia was likely to gain from doing all of this. Alice understood that Cecilia’s odds of reaching Immortality weren’t great, but she wanted her odds to be as good as possible. And Cecilia getting a good Achievement would go a long way towards giving her even a small chance at reaching Immortality. That meant leaving Cecilia to deal with her own problems, as bad as that felt.

Alice decided to get to the point.

“Hey Cecilia, do you remember a certain kind of enchanting material that you had in your shop in Cyra? It was a kind of bark that was gray color, and was a bit heavy and hard to the touch. You had them laying around in the section for items that had poorly understood properties. Do you know where you got those pieces of tree bark? They have a pretty useful interaction with System mana I want to use.”

Cecilia frowned. “Can you describe them a little more? There are a lot of enchanting materials I’ve bought that fit that description.”

“I have a better idea,” said Alice. “Can I just share the memory of the item I want?”

“Ah, yes, that would be much easier.” Cecilia nodded.

Alice quickly grabbed Cecilia’s wrist and shoved the memory of the item she wanted into Cecilia’s mind.

Cecilia frowned in thought for a few moments, before she sighed. “I bought it from a few [Adventurers] who were scavenging in an area near the outskirts of Cyra. They asked me if I wanted more, but I didn’t end up buying more than a few samples. I mostly bought them because they were interesting and cheap. My Perks claimed that the materials were good with informational mana. I wasn’t really sure what ‘informational mana’ was, but I decided I might as well test it and see if anything interesting came up. I couldn’t figure out any types of mana I had that were compatible with it, though, so I never found a use for it. I was thinking of eventually selling it to someone for a markup when I moved to Metsel, but never got around to it. I can get the bark to you pretty easily, but I can’t get more unless we can find those [Adventurers]. And they live all the way in Cyra. Or at least they did. Who knows if they moved or got eaten since we left.”

Alice frowned. The fact that Cecilia still had a little bit of the bark laying around was good news. However, the fact that there was no easily renewable source of more was bad news.

“It was from near Cyra, you say?” said Alice, frowning. Shipments from Cyra to Metsel usually took somewhere between a week and a week and a half to arrive. However, that was only during normal times. Now that the System was collapsing, there may very well be a huge variety of logistical issues that would start to crop up in the near future.

And it didn’t sound like Cyra even had a stable source of the bark she wanted. It would take a lot of effort to get a proper supply line going, and Alice wasn’t sure how long that would take or what unexpected problems would crop up while securing the bark she wanted.

Still, Alice desperately needed access to enchanting materials. Even if a display mana ring was a lower priority than filtration mana enchantments, it was also much simpler to set up and could help people mitigate the immediate aftershocks of the System collapse. As long as people could choose Perks again, Alice suspected that all sorts of people would start to invent their own solutions to at least some of the problems Illvaria would soon experience.

She sighed. Since it seemed unlikely that she would have access to renewable quantities of that particular bark in the near future, she would need to ask Ethan if he had any solutions. If he had way to copy the properties of the bark or a different material she could use, that would work out. If he didn’t, Alice might instead need to see if her new Perk choices from [Careful Enchanter] offered some sort of solution.

“Help me get those few chunks of bark, please. I need them,” said Alice.

Cecilia looked at her pile of paperwork, and shoved it to the corner of her desk before she grinned. “Right away!” she said, before grabbing a few [Guards] and heading towards the door of the mansion.

Meanwhile, Alice started heading towards Ethan’s study.

* * *

“Illa Weissaurus?” asked Ethan with a frown. “You mean the retired [Warmage] that taught Alice before she moved to Metsel?”

Naturally, Ethan had done an in-depth investigation of Illa’s recent past after he had taken in Alice as an apprentice. Ethan had initially been rather familiar with Illa, since he had hoped that she would become another Immortal, but had stopped paying much attention to her after she stopped racing towards Immortality and decided to go into politics instead. Everyone’s choices were their own to make, but Ethan had always felt it was a shame the woman wasn’t pushing towards Immortality anymore.

What he had not expected was for one of his [Spies] to let him know that Illa was now approaching his manor. What was Illa doing in Metsel? Given the collapse of the System that Alice had talked about, as well as the various issues that were more evident even to people like him who couldn’t see System mana, Ethan had assumed that Illa would be busy putting out fires in her own territory. What would be the point of wasting so much of her potential to try to found a barony if the woman didn’t even look after the land she was in charge of?

Ethan frowned, and then realized that perhaps he was thinking about it incorrectly. The woman might have heard that there was more information in the capital about the current crisis, and come here to collect data. Illa might even know that Alice was one of the bigger sources of information about the current crisis, and might have come to get information firsthand.

Although if that was the case, the timeline for Illa’s arrival would be quite strange. The System had collapsed a little over a week ago, so Illa would have needed to start moving towards Metsel almost immediately after the System’s collapse. Either Illa had a way to speed up her movement, or she was very good at figuring out who had information that she needed to deal with the current crisis.

Ethan thought about it for a few moments, trying to figure out if Illa had ever had a reason to pick up a powerful movement-based Perk, and then shrugged. Ultimately, it didn’t really matter much. If Illa was making her way towards the manor, she probably wanted to see her old apprentice. Ethan didn’t see anything wrong with that, as long as Alice was willing to see Illa again. Illa might also want to see him, which was also fine. Ethan normally wouldn’t make time to see a minor potential Baron from southern Illvaria – but he was perfectly willing to make time for the former mentor of his current apprentice. Especially now that the System had collapsed, and Illa’s influence in the south might help quell some of the chaos there.

“If Illa stops by the manor, make sure she’s who she claims she is. Have several people with lie-detection Perks verify it, just in case she’s a [Spy] or [Organic Magic] impersonating Illa,” said Ethan, giving his spy a nod. “If she is who she claims she is, I’m willing to see her.”

“Understood, Honored Immortal,” said the [Spy], before she left the room. A few moments later, the [Spy] moved around a corner and Ethan lost track of her.

Ethan quickly got back to his paperwork, until a few minutes later, there were several knocks on the door.

He quickly activated {Pervasive Perception}, allowing him to see past most lower-level disguise Perks and get an excellent grasp of the properties and existence of nearby physical objects, and quickly confirmed that Alice was on the other side of the door.

“Come in,” said Ethan.

Alice quickly opened the door and gave Ethan a quick nod, before she started speaking. “Ethan, do you have a few minutes? I had an idea for how to start the System-enchanting rings project I mentioned yesterday, but I ran into a few issues.”

“What do you need?” asked Ethan, trying not to feel a little burst of excitement when Alice mentioned that she already had an idea for how to start.

When Alice had mentioned that she wanted to get rings enchanted with filtration mana, Ethan had thought it was a good idea. However, he hadn’t expected her to find a way to implement the idea for quite a while: after all, doing tests and making new enchantments could take months if led by a team of lower level researchers, and weeks even if led by higher level [Scholars] and [Scientists] with good Perks and Achievements to boost their progress along. And Alice wasn’t working with a known kind of mana or readily available kind of enchanting material – instead, she had to develop everything almost completely from scratch, and almost entirely alone, because there was nobody else in Illvaria that Ethan knew of who could interact with System mana. This made her job several times harder.

For Alice to have made any progress at all in just a day was rather impressive.

When Alice had talked about her origins, Ethan had found it ludicrous that somebody could reach level 75 in less than a year. Now that he knew Alice better, he felt it would be ludicrous if she didn’t reach Immortality in a decade.

“I found an enchanting material that can work with display mana. It isn’t quite the filtration mana ring that I wanted to make, at least not yet. However, I did realize that there is another major area of concern that we need to address, which is letting people actually see what new Perks they can take. This can allow people to at least reshape a little bit of their build even while the System is down – which is critical for allowing people to adapt to the collapse of the System and allow the workforce of Illvaria to start managing the crisis on its own,” said Alice. “The problem is acquiring more of the material – it’s a type of tree bark that Cecilia had laying around in her shop, which was acquired from Cyra…”

Alice quickly began detailing the conversation she had just had with Cecilia, especially regarding the details of where the tree bark had come from, while Ethan nodded along in thought.

“I’m still assembling my own samples of enchanting materials. They should be ready in another day or two,” said Ethan. “In the meantime… you say that the enchanting material comes from Southern Illvaria? Specifically Cyra, the town run by Illa Weissarus?”

Alice nodded.

Ethan felt a grin tugging at his lips.

Illa just so happened to be in town right now. And Cecilia was apparently going to get a sample of the material that Alice needed, which would make it very easy for Illa to see what was needed and possibly help work out a supply route of some sort.

Ethan felt that all of the puzzle pieces for how to start solving the enchantment problem were assembling themselves for his apprentice, right in front of his eyes.

A note from acaswell

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Join my Discord!

Chapter 139

“Honored Immortal Ethan, Lady Illa is at the door of the manor. She has requested to see you, and also requested to schedule a meeting with her former [Student],” said someone from the shadows, startling Alice out of her discussion with Ethan.

“Illa?” said Alice, suddenly feeling very confused. The first person she thought of when she heard the name ‘Illa’ was the leader of Cyra, who had spent a few months training her when she was new to this world. However, the idea that Illa would have shown up here and requested to see her was very strange. Why in the world would Illa have come to Metsel in order to see her? Didn’t she have a town to run?

Alice turned towards Ethan, and hoped that he would explain what was going on. Ethan, instead of telling her what was going on, simply looked at her and grinned.

Alice stared at Ethan some more, until Ethan finally burst out laughing. “You need to work on controlling your facial expressions, Alice. Yes, the Illa outside is the same one you know. I admit, I haven’t confirmed why she’s here. But I assume she gathered some sort of information about the collapse of the System, and then came here to ask you what you knew?” Ethan grinned. “There’s a reason she lived through so many close scrapes in the military. She has good instincts, so I wouldn’t be surprised if she figured out that you’re the best source of information about the current crisis. Although I’m a bit surprised that she managed to get to Metsel so quickly. Perhaps she has a Perk that lets her move more quickly? Or perhaps she simply got information about the collapse of the System more quickly than I expected. I wasn’t sure if Illa would come to see you, but I had thought it would take her another week or two to arrive if she did.”

Alice felt her memories of Illa spring to mind, and after a few moments of consideration, she nodded.

During the time she had spent in Cyra with Illa, Alice had shown herself to be extremely interested in mana, the System, and how this world as a whole worked during the time she had interacted with Illa. Heck, Alice had explicitly told Illa about the Achievement she had gotten for observing the interaction between Attributes and mana. Even if Alice hadn’t outright said she was studying the System, it wouldn’t be very hard for Illa to put two and two together, especially if Illa knew that [Priests of the System] were talking about the collapse of the System and how people should mitigate its impact. The information about the System and how it worked would have had to come from somewhere, and Illa was certainly smart enough to put all of the information she had together and realize Alice had been researching the System all this time.

“Are you willing to meet with her?” asked Ethan, breaking Alice out of her thoughts. “If you aren’t willing to see her, you are free to leave the room for a while,” he said. “I intend to speak with her, since she is your former [Teacher] and she could have a role to play in stabilizing this whole mess. But you are naturally free to make your own decisions. I will not force you to see people you don’t want to.” Ethan paused. “Although I do think that speaking with her would be beneficial.”

And so Ethan will still encourage me to meet with Illa, even if he won’t actually force me to, though Alice, completing the rest of Ethan’s words in her mind.

Alice thought about it. Was she willing to meet with Illa?

While most of Illa’s reasons that she had helped Alice in the past were pragmatic, it was also true that Alice had received a fair amount of assistance from Illa during her initial months in this world. Not to mention, Illa had been very fair in her dealings with Alice during the time Alice had worked with her. She had always made it as clear as possible what consequences Alice could expect to deal with if she worked with the woman, and even raised Alice’s payment during the expedition to see the broken mana zone outside Cyra, once it became clear that Alice was in more danger than expected. In Alice’s mind, that action proved that Illa was a fair person.

Alice could also see some benefits to working with Illa. Alice was currently in desperate need of weird enchanting materials. The south of Illvaria was known for producing enchanting materials, even if it was currently rather underdeveloped. Illa was the leader of one of the best maintained towns in the South, since it was ruled by a massively overleveled [Warmage] with connections to the military and a surplus of Mages. While most southern towns struggled to draw in Mages, Illa had managed to hold on to the Mages in her town. Her city was also positioned on a river that many trade routes from the south to the north passed through. It seemed likely that Illa could help Alice resolve her pressing needs for enchanting materials.

“I’d be happy to see her again,” said Alice after she finished thinking.

“Good,” said Ethan, giving Alice a curious look. “Well, potentially good. Why did you agree?”

“I was thinking about the potential for getting enchanting materials, and the fact that the previous cooperation I had with Illa turned out well. Illa is fair and easy to work with,” said Alice. “And she also has direct access to several southern trade routes, and direct access to the southern Illvarian wilderness. I know that that a lot of Illvaria’s enchanting materials used to come from the south, so Illa is in a position where she could help us get access to a large quantity of weird and potentially useful enchanting materials. I know that you said that you would have a set of sample enchanting materials for me to work with tomorrow, but getting access to more raw materials could be critical if we want to get a large number of [Enchanters] working on this problem. And having more options is never a bad thing.”

Ethan grinned incredibly widely. “You’re learning to think properly about how and when to interact with people. I’m very glad that some of my lessons are sinking in.” After that, the two of them fell into a comfortable silence as they waited for the new visitor to come to the meeting room. A short time later, Illa Weissaurus came to the room, before giving Alice and Ethan curious glances.

“Honored Immortal Ethan,” said Illa, giving Ethan a respectful nod. “I thank you for being willing to meet with me, and allowing me to see my old [Student].”

Then, she turned back towards Alice, and Alice saw a brief moment of confusion on Illa’s face, as if she wasn’t quite sure how to address Alice now. Ultimately, she gave Alice a quick nod. “Lady Alice,” said Illa. “I am glad to see that you are doing well.” Then, Alice saw a little bit of the pragmatism and bluntness that had characterized all of her interactions with Illa fade away, and Illa gave her a cheeky grin. “Perhaps saying you’re doing ‘well’ is an understatement. Honored Immortal Ethan does not take in many apprentices per century, and I imagine that you’ve levelled quite significantly. The way you sit is much more poised as well. Is your [Dexterity] simply much higher than before? Or have you taken some kind of {Etiquette} lessons?” Illa’s grin widened. “If you weren’t very promising, I doubt Ethan would waste time helping you learn {Etiquette}, so you must be doing quite well, both as far as levelling speed goes and as far as societal position goes.”

Alice felt a hint of pride as Illa mentioned her levelling progress and the strides she had made over the past six months. When she had left Cyra, her highest level class had been level 47. She had already felt decent about her progress at that time – after all, the average adult in Illvaria was somewhere between level 40 and level 60, depending on their age, Achievements, and work ethic. For Alice to reach the same level in only a few months had felt quite good to her at the time, even if she knew that a lot of her success came from the advantage of being born on Earth and picking up the {Outworlder} Achievement right after arriving on this planet.

However, Alice’s status screen had grown leaps and bounds since the last time Illa had seen her.

Alice glanced at her Status Screen again, to see just how much she had grown.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 16

Strength: 117 -> 119 (122%)

Perception: 139 -> 140 (165%)

Dexterity: 119 -> 120 (124%)

Intelligence: 169 -> 170 (128%)

Endurance: 134 -> 135(121%)

Willpower: 148 -> 152 (108 -> 109%)

Charisma: 132 -> 133 (107%)

Magic: 164 -> 167 (122%)

Primary Classes: 6/6

Survivor: 56 -> 59

Explorer of Magic: 75 -> 78

Scholar: 55 -> 60

Scientist: 58 -> 62

Kinetic Manabinder: 41 -> 44

Careful Enchanter: 27 -> 30

Evolved Classes: 2

Student of Kinetic Magic: 25

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 25

Secondary Classes: 2

Fisherwoman: 3

Student: 8

Student of Organic Magic: 11 -> 24

Courtier: 1

Perks:

Survivor Perks:

Foraging (Survivor 5)

Microbe Resistance (Survivor 10)

Extremophile (Survivor 15)

Camouflaged (Survivor 20)

Enhanced Training (Survivor 30)

Moderate Tissue Regeneration (Survivor 40)

Adrenaline Rush (Survivor 45)

Extended Organics (Survivor 50)

Enhanced Senses (Tier 2) (Survivor 55)

Explorer of Magic Perks:

Enhanced Regeneration (Explorer of Magic 10)

Seeds of Magic (Explorer of Magic 25)

Broken Seed (Upgraded) (Explorer of Magic 35)

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 55)

Combat Seed (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 60)

Intuitive Magic Modelling (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 65)

Seeds of Ambition (Tier 2) (Explorer of Magic 75)

Scholar Perks:

Accelerated Thinking (Scholar level 15 (-5))

Rhetorical Flourish (Scholar level 20)

Photographic Memory (Scholar level 25)

Improved Multitasking (Scholar level 30)

Scholar of Magic (Scholar level 35)

Lesser Organic Vision (Scholar 40)

Sleep Reading (Tier 2) (Scholar 55)

Delve Memories (Tier 2) (Scholar 60)

Scientist Perks:

Precise mana Measurement (Scientist level 5)

Sample Collection (Scientist level 10)

Safety Analysis (Scientist Level 20)

Shared Memory (Scientist Level 25)

Advanced Mana Measurement (Scientist Level 30)

For Science! (Scientist 45)

Speed Experimentation (Tier 2) (Scientist 55)

No_Mana (Tier 2) (Scientist 60)

Kinetic Mage Perks:

Object Control (Student of Kinetic Magic 5)

Above Average Mana Sight (Student of Kinetic Magic 10)

Folds of Magic (Student of Kinetic Magic 15)

Split Mind (Student of Kinetic Magic 20)

Improved Object Control (Sensory Enhancement) (Student of Kinetic Magic 25)

Mana's Binding (Kinetic Manabinder 5)

Enhanced Focus (Kinetic Manabinder 10)

Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision (Kinetic Manabinder 15)

Overclock (Kinetic Manabinder 20)

Kinetic Enchanting (Kinetic Manabinder 25)

Reflection (Kinetic Manabinder 30)

Kinetic Tendrils (Kinetic Manabinder 35)

Speed Analysis (Kinetic Manabinder 40)

Enchanter Perks:

Enchanter's Vision (Apprentice Enchanter 5)

Monstrous Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 10)

Faster Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 15)

Faster Mana Regeneration (Apprentice Enchanter 20)

Speed Enchanting (Apprentice Enchanter 25)

Repurposing (Careful Enchanter level 5)

Blueprint (Careful Enchanter level 10)

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed (Careful Enchanter level 15)

Pride of a Craftswoman (Careful Enchanter 20)

Enchanter's Armory (Careful Enchanter 25)

Organic Mage Perks:

Improved Organic Manipulation (Organic Mage 5)

Patient's_Yes (Organic Mage 10)

Skills

Academic Skills:

English (Language Proficiency): 100

Illvarian (Language Proficiency): 100

Sigmusi (Language Proficiency): 7

Russian (Language Proficiency): 1

Verinthian (Language Proficiency): 0 -> 1

Basic Mathematics: 123 -> 124

Intermediate Mathematics: 79 -> 81

Advanced Mathematics: 19 -> 22

Basic Human Biology: 38 -> 39

Mana-biology: 11 -> 21

Magic Skills:

Kinetic Manipulation: 70 -> 73

Mana Control: 52 -> 54

Mana Precision: 53 -> 55

Kinetic Force: 51 -> 53

Projectile Awareness : 32 -> 33

Divided Attention: 34 -> 38

Basic Enchanting: 31 -> 37

Broken Mana Purification: 18 -> 19

Mana Filtering: 24 -> 27

Seed Formation: 19 -> 22

Crafting Skills:

Weaving: 27

Woodworking: 28

Cooking: 12

Stoneworking: 11

Physical Skills:

Dodge: 31

Etiquette: 21

Spearmanship: 19

Sprinting: 22

Riding: 15

Climbing: 9

Fishing: 9

Digging: 8

Stealth: 4

Basic Medicine: 3

Dancing: 6

Magic Seed: 1/1

(unused seed has 15% conversion rat. Max)

Kinetic Seed 154 -> 157%/159%

Healing mana seed 55% -> 58%/60% (Deactivated - you may link this to a Perk if desired!)

Electromagnetic Seed (15%) (Deactivated)

No_Magic (33%/35%)

Lesser Magic Seeds

(Base Max 25%, Achievements now apply as usual)

Display Seed (11%) -> 14%/16

Organic Seed 74% -> 77%/79% (6% Exp. Comp.)

Pure Mana Seed 44% ->47%/49% (12% Exp. Comp.)

Filtration Seed -> 37%/40%

Dimensional Seed -> 37%/40%

Achievements:

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Seeker of Truth (IV) (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

Survivor of Winter (Rarity: 3)

Monstrous Encounter (Rarity: 1)

Monster Slayer (III) (Rarity: 2)

Well Trained (Rarity: 4)

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

Kinetic Manabinder (Rarity N/A)

Careful Enchanter (Rarity N/A)

Capable Enchanter (Rarity: 5)

Seed Creator (Rarity: 8)

Scientific Discoveries (III) -> (IV) (Rarity N/A)

Immortal's Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

Legendary Healer (Rarity: 7)

Creative Healer (Rarity: 4)

Alice’s highest level Class was now level 78. Level 75 was already considered the level of a properly elite craftsmen or warrior, and was a level few people would reach, even with an entire lifetime of hard work. It was only when seeing Illa again and thinking about her progress over the past several months that Alice could truly feel how much she had grown in a short five or six months. She had come a long way from the scared teenager who was dumped into the middle of the Illvarian forest nearly a year ago.

Of course, as much as Alice was happy to see her levels steadily increasing, she also felt the urge to wince. Most of her Classes had gone up by 3-4 levels… which was pretty good when one considered the fact that her highest level Class was above level 75. At the exact same time, almost every action that Alice had taken recently was primarily focused on exploring magic, and despite that fact, she had only gained three levels in the Class. If it had been before she reached level 75, Alice was willing to bet she would have gained six or seven levels in [Explorer of Magic] instead of three. Trying to level up Classes after level 75 was incredibly painful if one didn’t have the Achievements to support it.

“I’m indeed doing very well,” said Alice, giving Illa a smile. Then, feeling just a little bit cheeky, she gave Illa a slightly more mischevious grin. Since Illa was dropping a bit of formality around her, it felt right to do the same. “I might even be higher level than you now.” Then, Alice laughed. “Thank you for all of the work and time you put into training me when I was in Cyra and had no connections or abilities to fall back on.”

Illa chuckled. “A sixteen year old who might be higher level than me… that would really be something.” Then, she shook her head. “We both benefitted from your actions in Cyra. You don’t need to thank me – your current state is a result of your own hard work and your willingness to pursue your interests to the very end.” Then, slowly, the mirth faded from her face, as she adopted a more serious expression. “Now, for the reason I came here. I’m sure you’re aware of it already, but recently, things are quite… odd. A little over a week ago, I got a very strange feeling, as if something important had simply vanished into thin air. Shortly after this, people started to notice all sorts of oddities regarding their Status Screens. People couldn’t read their new Perks anymore, Achievements started to incorporate strange glitch symbols into their words, and last I heard, there are also issues with Mages forming new Magic seeds?” Illa frowned. “The last one is harder to verify, since there aren’t that many Mages forming new magic seeds on a regular basis. But I am greatly concerned by these changes. And as far as I know, you are probably aware of how and why these changes have occured,” she said, nodding at Alice. “I would greatly appreciate more information.”

Alice glanced at Ethan, who simply gave her a curious look. Alice realized Ethan was testing… how well she would handle this interaction?

Maybe he’s testing me, to see how I handle trading with Illa, thought Alice, frowning. Illa had something that Alice needed. Illa had also come all this way to see Alice, so she certainly wanted the information Alice had.

Or at least, Illa had wanted that information. Alice and Ethan had gone to a decent amount of effort to get more people informed about the current state of affairs, and even if they weren’t giving away every shred of information available, they were still making a very large part of Alice’s research results freely understandable to the public. Almost everything relevant to regular people regarding the crisis was currently available in some part of the city. Illa had likely already found some of this information out herself, if she had done any investigation into the city at all.

Alice resisted the urge to sigh. If Ethan was testing how well she tried to bargain with Illa, her position would definitely be weakened by these facts. Of course, Illa wouldn’t give her a terrible deal – after all, Alice was confident in Illa’s long-term planning abilities, and it was obvious that dealing with the current crisis was priority one. But that didn’t mean it was fair to ask Illa to spend huge amounts of time and manpower helping to solve the current crisis without being compensated for her time and effort, either.

Alice sighed. She had been in a vastly inferior bargaining position the last time she was in Cyra, and almost all of her deals with Illa had been rather one-sided. Illa had still treated her fairly, but it was also unquestionable that Alice hadn’t had much of a bargaining position at the time.

Now, she needed to bargain with her former mentor from a very different position. This was also the most freeform test Ethan had given her so far. Usually, he asked her how she should respond to something, and would then give her ‘the answer’ right afterwards. This time, she needed to do this on her own.

“I do, indeed, know quite a bit about the current situation. I’m in the midst of developing countermeasures for it at this very moment, in fact,” said Alice. “For this, I would very much appreciate some help from you.”

“Oh?” said Illa, sounding genuinely surprised. “What can I offer to the apprentice of an Immortal? I’m sure you have much better tutors available if you want training for magic or combat, and Immortal Ethan certainly has more resources than me when it comes to experiments…” Illa trailed off, giving Ethan a curious glance.

“I need enchanting materials. Specifically, I need a material with certain properties, but I haven’t found anything suitable yet. For the other, I need a specific kind of tree bark that Cecilia purchased in your town several months ago. Will you permit me to use a certain Perk to give you an image of what tree bark I am looking for?”

Illa hesitated for a very long moment, eyeing both Alice and Ethan, before she finally nodded. Alice quickly grabbed Illa’s wrist and sent over an image of the tree bark she needed, before retracting her hand and waiting for Illa to process the information Alice had sent her. After a few moments of processing, Illa nodded at Alice, indicating that she could continue. “As for the other enchanting material I need, I would like something that allows me to use a certain kind of mana with it. The mana type is… somewhat similar to pure mana, but has a few different characteristics. It needs to work with filtration mana, which, as far as I’m aware, isn’t a mana type that is particularly well known…” Alice started describing what kinds of mana were at least similar enough to work as a ‘starting point’ for what materials she might need, while Illa nodded.

“And in exchange, I suppose you’re willing to give me information on whatever is going on?” said Illa, giving Alice a grin.

Alice nodded.

“I’m afraid that’s not good enough as a trade,” said Illa. “I want to know more, but it’s also obvious that you’re already taking efforts to spread this information far and wide. I would like a little bit more out of this deal. After all, you’re asking me to tie up a bunch of my own funds and manpower finding weird enchanting materials.”

“I don’t recall you having any [Enchanters] in the south since Cecilia left,” said Alice. “Meaning that we’re still going to need to do a lot of the testing and processing on our end. Even if nobody else is likely to have access to filtration or display mana, most [Enchanters] still have Perks that let them gather information. And if you don’t have an [Enchanter] on your end, that still leaves a lot of work for us. Unless you’ve lured another one to your town?”

“I have found a replacement, yes,” said Illa, grinning. “It took a pretty penny to get a new [Enchanter] to come to my town, as well as a sponsorship for one of the woman’s children into a magic academy. But do indeed I have a new [Enchanter] that can help gather information for you… for a price.”

Alice nodded, trying to think. Illa still probably wanted information, and Alice could give her some unique information that wasn’t available to the public. But what else could she offer Illa?

As if sensing Alice’s thoughts, Illa leaned a little bit closer. “I’ll tell you what I want,” said Illa. “Right now, it seems like you have a lot of information about the current crisis. I want a more in-depth discussion of exactly what’s happening, straight from the source of the research herself. And I also want first priority for whatever you’re making with your enchanting materials. I don’t know exactly why you need enchanting materials that can hold filtration mana and display mana… but I imagine it’s somehow related to solving the current crisis. I want you to prioritize Cyra as the first town that gets access to these solutions the moment they’re implemented.”

Alice thought about it. That was… fair. Probably. And if Cyra turned into the main supplier for Alice’s enchanting needs, keeping Cyra stable would ensure that future supply shipments weren’t disrupted. By becoming a useful component for solving the current crisis, Illa was basically guaranteeing that Alice would need to keep the town safe and up to date until the crisis was over.

Alice looked at Ethan, who simply shrugged.

“I think I would probably need to prioritize the capital first,” said Alice, after some hesitation. “But after that, I could put Cyra as the next priority for this?”

Illa thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “That’s reasonable. I accept.”

A deal was struck.

A note from acaswell

Even though this wouldn’t ‘technically’ be part of Alice’s Status Screen as she sees it, I decided to include both the 2.5% and 5% max mana boost that Alice SHOULD be getting from {Creative Healer}, since the Achievement is working at half efficiency. Technically Alice’s Status Screen is just whatever she sees on it, but I included it as current number/whatever number it should be in her Magic Seeds list. This is mostly to help me keep track of what is partially activated and what isn’t, and make future calculations or changes easier to keep track of.

Also, I accidentally had Alice level up Explorer of Magic from level 76 to level 77 in chapter 130… and then she levelled up from level 76 to level 77 AGAIN in chapter 135. Obviously, the second one should have been leveling from 77 to 78. This has been corrected.

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on patreon!

Join my Discord!

Table of Contents

Title Page

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

April Fool's Chapter

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

My grandfather will not make it.

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

Chapter 72

Chapter 73

Chapter 74

Chapter 75

Chapter 76

Chapter 77

Chapter 78

Chapter 79

Chapter 80

Chapter 81

Chapter 82

Chapter 83

Chapter 84

Chapter 85

Chapter 86

Chapter 87

Chapter 88

Chapter 89

Chapter 90

Chapter 91

Chapter 92

Chapter 93

Note - I am probably getting sick, and may need to delay chapters for a while.

Chapter 94

Chapter 95

Chapter 96

Chapter 97

Chapter 98

Chapter 99

Chapter 100

Chapter 101

Chapter 102

Chapter 103

Chapter 104

Chapter 105

Chapter 106

Chapter 107

Chapter 108

Chapter 109

Chapter 110

Chapter 111

Chapter 112

Chapter 113

Chapter 114

Chapter 115

Chapter 116

Chapter 117

Chapter 118

Chapter 119

Chapter 120

Chapter 121

Chapter 122

Chapter 123

Chapter 124

Chapter 125

Chapter 126

Chapter 127

Chapter 128

Chapter 129

Notice: a Discussion about KU and the story

Chapter 130

Chapter 131

Chapter 132

Chapter 133

Chapter 134

Chapter 135

Chapter 136

Chapter 137

Chapter 138

Chapter 139