Chapter 62 - A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The last week that Alice spent in Cyra passed by slowly. Alice went to and from the docks each day, converting her kinetic energy into silver suns and the right to keep training with Illa for a little bit longer. At the same time, Cecilia’s shop continued to pack up or sell its last remaining items. Upon seeing Alice’s attempt at making a marketable enchanted ring, Cecilia offered to sell them in the shop, which was far better than Alice’s original plan of trying to sell them to the [Adventurers] she had seen around her inn.

The mana-revealing rings didn’t exactly fly off the shelves, but they gathered enough interest for Alice to make a second batch partway through the week. By the end of the week, she had sold five of the mana-revealing rings, and had two left over that no one in Cyra seemed to want. Having acquired a net profit of eight silver suns, or one and three - fifths of a silver crown, (along with two spare rings) Alic was in a considerably better mood by the end of the week. Not just because of the money, but because it proved she was capable of designing and making a piece of enchanted equipment people wanted to buy. Successfully selling her items helped her kick start the loop most [Enchanters] lived off of. That is, buying and enchanting materials, getting levels and improving, and selling their items. Even if her actions didn’t matter too much right now, she was still happy to prove to herself she was at least capable of getting this process going.

Apart from that, upon hearing that Alice wanted to finish rounding off the early stages of {Monster Hunter}, Illa had some of her servants catch a few spidercrabs and bring them to Alice’s training sessions. Alice also mentioned a vague idea she had a long time ago, which was testing a few spidercrab eggs to see what happened during the hatching process and if monsters had any sort of ‘mana-baptism’ process they went through. Illa didn’t mind helping Alice with this, and so she acquired both grown and unhatched spidercrabs over the last week of her stay in Cyra.

Instead of just having Alice directly mow down the grown spidercrabs with Kinetic magic, Illa had Alice use them as ‘sparring partners.’ She made Alice go through a variety of different scenarios that Alice might encounter while travelling, especially ones where she wouldn’t have [Scouts] pinpoint every group of monsters half a kilometer in advance. Even though it wasn’t exactly a perfect way to train, since spidercrabs were pretty weak, it still gave Alice a good amount of combat experience and better emergency response mechanisms, as well as two levels in [Kinetic Manabinder] and another level in [Survivor]. Even though Alice had long accepted that her talents in real, up front combat were lacking, she considered boosting her combat abilities as something like going through an emergency self-defense class. Hopefully unnecessary, but it wasn’t a bad idea to learn something. Just in case.

That Thursday, Alice got the third tier of monster Slayer.

You   have gained an achievement!

Monster   Slayer (II->III) Rarity: 1->2

You   have Successfully Slain 100 monsters. (To further advance this Achievement,   please ensure that you are hunting stronger monsters. Weak fodder will no   longer suffice to advance this achievement beyond this point).

Increases   the effect of the ‘Strength,’ ‘Dexterity,’ and ‘Perception’ Stats by 5% -> 15%. Improves your   ability to perceive monsters in a ten meter radius. Any classes related to fighting or hunting monsters gain 10% more   Experience.

Alice didn’t find the difference between tier II and tier III of the Achievement to be that important. She was a little bit faster, stronger, and had slightly improved senses, none of which were terribly hard to acquire in this world. The biggest difference was that classes related to fighting or hunting monsters would get 10% more experience than before. A bonus which, at least to Alice, probably wasn’t particularly useful, since most of her classes were enchanting and research focused. [Survivor] and [Kinetic Manabinder] benefitted from it, although Alice wasn’t quite sure why the second class was included, but none of her other classes got anything out of the Achievement at all. It was still better than not having the Achievement, so Alice didn’t mind it too much either way.

The monster eggs that Alice had finally acquired had originally been to see if monsters went through any sort of ‘mana baptism’ process, since Alice wanted to know if monsters had any sort of issue adapting to concentrated mana. Humans either became Mages or died upon going through a ‘mana baptism,’ but Alice had no clue whether monsters had any similar process they went through.

After watching them hatch and grow a day, Alice found no evidence the spidercrabs needed to adapt at all. Just like their adult brethren, they ate mana and wanted to kill and eat her the moment they were out of the egg. Thus, Alice shelved the topic, though she intended to read some follow-up studies if she could find them later. Surely someone else had asked this question at some point, right? Better to just check the past instead of re-inventing the wheel.

Apart from that, Alice grabbed three Perks from {Apprentice Enchanter}.

Monstrous Enchanting

Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level   10 or higher, create at least 5 enchantments with monster cores.

Your   ability to effectively link together monster cores to enchantments is   moderately improved. From now on, all enchantments made by you will waste   significantly less mana and produce significantly less broken mana so long as   they are using monster cores as a power supply.

Alice found most of the Perks for level 10 of Apprentice Enchanter to be fairly unimpressive. This Perk at least solved one of the bigger problems Alice currently had with Enchanting, which was the fact that she seriously struggled to optimize mana consumption for her enchantments. The Perk didn’t fully solve the problem, but it at least put her on the right path. It also gave her something new to look into, because after taking the Perk, Alice seemed to ‘instinctively’ do a few things differently when building enchantments. These differences gave her a direction to keep improving, which was a great supplement to Cecilia’s instruction in enchantments. All in all, the Perk would save her a lot of time and effort in improving her abilities as an [Enchanter].

Faster Enchanting

Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level   15 or higher

Improves   the speed at which you are able to manipulate mana while enchanting,   significantly improving the speed at which you can create enchantments.

This Perk was a simple, no-nonsense improvement to Alice’s enchanting speed. Alice was starting to struggle to fit her ‘daily schedule’ inside of a day, between training with Illa, working at the docks, enchanting things at Cecilia’s shop, receiving instruction from Cecilia, and squeezing in time for sleep and meals. This problem would almost certainly grow worse and worse over time as Alice got stronger, because she would need to start devoting more time to experiments, classes, library research, and any other resources she could get her hands on in the North. {Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement} helped with this problem, shaving off some of the time she needed to sleep, but the Perk just wasn’t able to keep up with her ever-expanding to-do list. {Speed Enchanting} cut down about half of the time Alice needed to make simpler enchantments, creating a small but noticeable difference in her overburdened schedule.

And, if she couldn’t get a patron after going north, improving her enchanting abilities was the best alternate route to funding her time in the magic academies. Alice was pretty hopeful that she might be able to find a Patron, but she knew there was a decent chance she would fail. Cecilia had offered to ‘hire’ Alice as a kind of shop assistant in that case, which Alice would probably accept in that case. She could miss a semester or a year of time in a magic academy in order to amass some funds. There was a reason people were willing to risk mana baptisms to become a Mage, even though the survival rates were only around 4%. It was because once a Mage had some proper levels behind them, it was very easy to lift yourself out of crippling economic circumstances. Alice mostly wanted access to the libraries and massive research databases magic academies had available to them, and while taking a semester or a year off from her research would sting, it wouldn’t kill her research. Alice might have balked at the idea of missing all of that time when she had first come to this world, but she was a more practical person now. Sometimes things happened, and while she wouldn’t pretend to be happy about it, she could just accept it and keep going.

Finally, near the end of the week, Alice picked up her level 20 [Apprentice Enchanter] Perk.

Faster Mana regeneration

Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level   20 or higher, Magic 125 or greater

Allows   you to regenerate mana 10% faster.

This Perk was even more simple than {Faster Enchanting}. However, one of Alice’s biggest bottlenecks to practicing magic, gaining levels, and improving her income right now was the fact that her mana bottomed out pretty rapidly these days. Even though enchanting tended to be less mana-intensive than normal magic, it still cost a fair amount of mana to do. And {Faster Enchanting} just exacerbated this problem, because she depleted her mana even more quickly these days. She was starting to find that her meagre mana reserves in pure mana just couldn’t keep up with what she wanted to do. With this Perk, Alice was now regenerating 2.7% of her maximum mana per hour – a small bonus over her previous 2.5% regeneration, but combined with her ever-increasing maximum mana reserves, she was noticing a bigger and bigger benefit from all of her stacking bonuses to mana regeneration.

The other major thing Alice did with her week was try (and fail) to form System Magic seeds. Not because Alice expected to miraculously succeed. She absolutely expected to fail, since the rainbow mana would probably disrupt her attempts every time. However, what Alice wanted to observe was how the System’s rainbow mana interacted with the magic seed creation process.

No matter what she tried, the rainbow mana stepped in and broke the seed before it finished forming. However, she got a fair amount of observations out of each failed attempt.

Alice was starting to get a very weird feeling about the System. It was becoming increasingly clear that the System was designed in such a way as to actively prevent people from studying it. This was the only reason Alice could think of for why the rainbow mana was utterly invisible to everyone else. If people could actively study and dissect the rainbow mana, and the mechanisms behind how the System worked, it probably would have lost its ‘god’ status centuries ago. Furthermore, the System actively prevented her from forming a System magic seed, which seemed like pretty damning evidence that the System was built to actively stop people like her from successfully learning more.

And if that was the case, why in the world did the System also give her a Perk like {Seeker of Truth}? The one and only reason Alice could see the rainbow mana and experiment with the System was due to the tools the System itself had provided her. The {Seeker of Truth} Achievement gave her the ability to see the rainbow mana, without which Alice would only have had a vague idea that the System didn’t seem to work without mana. She probably could have worked with that, but she would have never been anywhere CLOSE to making some discoveries, and probably would have found herself totally blocked off from further exploration somewhere down the line. If the System was trying to stop people from studying it, why was she an exception?

Right now, Alice had no clue. She had some guesses – most of which were centered around ‘the System is dumb and had some sort of conflicting objectives it couldn’t resolve’ and the {Outworlder} Perk. Still, she was increasingly baffled at how something that managed to create the SYSTEM of all things could have made such an elementary mistake. The very idea felt bizarre to her – because even if the System was artificially made and didn’t work perfectly in some circumstances, the System was impressive as hell. She shelved this idea for now – she had no leads, and couldn’t even make a good guess about this for the time being, so she decided to come back to this sometime in the future.

Finally, near the end of the week, Alice’s {Broken Seed} Perk was finally done cooling down. Since that meant she could break another magic seed, Alice decided it was time form (and then immediately break) a magic seed again. This time she could observe the rainbow mana, and she was sure that would give her all sorts of new ideas to work with.

True to her suspicions, when she tried to form an electromagnetic seed the System’s rainbow mana actively stepped in. But unlike when she tried to form a System seed, this time it actively helped her.

Alice quickly realized that while she could probably technically form a Magic Seed with or without the System, the System provided a massive, overwhelming advantage when forming magic seeds.

When she first started drawing in mana, it simply headed to her magic core on its own. The System’s rainbow mana did nothing, and Alice didn’t need to actively prompt it either. She just concentrated on what she knew about electromagnetic energy, focused on the feeling of pulling in mana, and hoped for the best – the exact same thing she had done when forming all of her other magic seeds. That’s where things started to fall apart.

She could tell that her electromagnetic seed was missing several things. It was like looking at a patchy, worn down canoe after getting used to looking at luxury cruisers and yachts. You didn’t need to know anything about boats to see there was a very obvious difference in quality and materials.

Then, the rainbow mana formed dozens of different fractals around her (which Alice immediately memorized, fully intending to throw it into {Mana Construct Modelling} in the near future). The mana, which Alice continued to pull in from her surroundings, passed through the fractals and changed in small and subtle ways. Then, another set of rainbow fractals appeared inside of Alice’s mana core. The magic seed which had previously looked like it was on the brink of collapse began to change. The rough, poorly built edges smoothed out. The chunks of shoddy workmanship were fixed. The previously messy and poorly structured mana became smoother and more stable. It took less than a minute for Alice’s messy seed to become a normal, well-constructed electromagnetic seed.

For the first time, Alice had a front row seat to appreciate just how much the System really helped out behind the scenes. For all that the System was sometimes dumb, easy to trick, and bizarre, it was also quite possibly the reason Mages (and humans) could survive on this planet at all.

This didn’t seem to be without a cost, though.

Alice was well aware of the fact that ‘Electromagnetic force’ was one of the four basic building blocks of reality, along with gravitational force, strong force and weak force. It was capable of doing a mind boggling number of things, because ‘electromagnetic force’ as defined by physics governed a dizzying number of things. How protons and electrons interacted with each other, the chemical behavior of matter, the color of light… all of these were fundamentally linked to electromagnetic force.

However, in this world, ‘electromagnetic’ Mages weren’t capable of any of the bizarre and wacky things Alice knew they should be capable of. Instead, they were reduced to being the weakest and least valued of the four major types of Mage. At the end of the day, they could produce electricity and lightning bolts with their mana, and they could move metal around. Far from breaking reality, they were just half-baked kinetic mages with lightning thrown into the mix.

The System was clearly helping people form stable magic seeds. It wasn’t incorrect to say that without the System’s help, most people would probably fail to make a fully functional magic seed in the first place. However, the System also ‘straightened away’ extra concepts Alice had been trying to integrate into her electromagnetic seed. Clearly, it had some sort of ‘template’ of electromagnetic magic seeds it was working with. And when people tried to innovate too much, the System would remove that innovation in the process of ‘helping’ them form a seed. Alice wasn’t sure whether this was purely accidental or intentional.

Still, it was probably why this world’s study of the fundamental forces of physics and life were weirdly advanced in some places, and outright crippled in other places. The System accidentally got in the way of some studies just by virtue of separating fundamental forces of physics into different magic seed templates, and no one on this planet had an easy way to break free of that influence.

On the bright side, Alice had a better idea what her first attempt to mimic the System might look like. Alice had already proven that if she added mana to a manaless room, for whatever reason the System wouldn’t work properly. She wasn’t sure whether that was because she had created the mana personally, or if there was another reason behind it. Still, whenever {Broken Seed} was finished cooling off again Alice would try forming a magic seed in a room blocked off from outside mana to see what happened. {Safety Analysis} informed her that the test wouldn’t be harmful to her – so long as she broke the seed back down quickly enough. Based on the magic seed models Alice envisioned, it seemed that if she tried to use the magic seed too extensively, or left it around for longer than a day or two it would start to put her health in danger. However, since it wouldn’t cause any harmful effects if she used it for a few hours before nuking the seed back into oblivion. Alice thought it would be a valuable and interesting experience to try out whenever her Perks were ready again.

With that, Alice’s week came to an end as she made rudimentary plans for her move to the North. She needed to try to find a patron, get her financial matters squared away, find a place to live, and make contact with the magic academy she was planning to apply for. Illa, living up to the original agreement she had made with Alice when she had first arrived in Cyra, had one of her servants provide Alice with a long list of magic academies, recommendations, specialties, and information about the cities and magic academies available in the north. Included with the list were a few recommendation letters to give to whatever academies she applied for, stamped with Illa’s personal seal.

After talking with Cecilia about the other girl’s future plans, Alice had ultimately decided to head to the Illvarian capital, Metsel, with the other girl. Alice’s ultimate goal in heading to a magic academy was to get access to a much wider array of knowledge and books. The capital of Illvaria was the largest and most prosperous city in the country, and since Illvaria was the country that specialized most heavily in magic in the Shil confederacy it wasn’t an exaggeration to call it the magical capital of the Shil Confederacy. Illa’s husband also had a decent level of influence there, even if it wasn’t the city where his company had the most influence. It hosted four different magical academies. One of them were pretty research-focused (Alice’s top pick), one of them was more for enchanting specialists (Alice’s second pick), one was a low-quality but cheaper option, and the final academy mostly catered to the military.

With Alice’s future plans solidified, the week drew to a close. On Friday Alice and Cecilia were dragged away by the people they had met in Cyra. They ended up going to a local inn that was on the pricier side, where everyone got a nice meal and some drinks to send the two of them off. It was Alice’s first time actually drinking alcohol, and she had to admit the effects were incredibly underwhelming. Possibly because her Endurance was so high that she could probably outmatch a grown man back on Earth. Still, it was good to see all of the friends she had made and the people she had come to care about wish her well before she left for the capital in the north. Milo, Father Friedham, a variety of mages, Alice’s [Innkeeper], and even Illa had taken some time out of their schedule to wish the two well and remind them to send letters whenever they could, and to come back to Cyra if they couldn’t make things work in Metsel.

Alice wasn’t usually a big fan of gatherings like this. However, perhaps her time in this world was changing her more than she thought. She found that she enjoyed the atmosphere of the gathering – friends and acquaintances reminiscing over the few months she had spent with them, people chatting and laughing, and tasty food. Although she didn’t notice it, she grinned softly throughout the night as she spent time with the people she was close to. The feeling of people wishing her well and sending her off…

It wasn’t bad. Even if she still wished she could have properly said goodbye to the people from Earth, or that she could see her best friend and her parents again, she was still glad to be part of something like this in the world she had come to.

Saturday was spent deconstructing the manaless room, as well as helping Cecilia pack up the last little bits of her shop that she couldn’t sell. Alice shoved a lot of it into {Sample Collection}, which helped Cecilia cut down on her luggage quite a bit.

On Sunday, a passenger boat from the north came. A variety of people got off, many of them either [Adventurers] seeking to make a fortune in Cyra, people of all walks of life who hoped to make a new life for themselves on the rugged frontier of the South, and merchants who planned to offload crucial goods in Cyra before loading up on enchanting materials before going back north to make a profit.

And then passengers started to board the ship as well. Temporary workers who wanted to visit their families back north during a vacation. [Adventurers] who had made enough money to scrape by, and wanted to find a less life-threatening profession. People who had realized the South wasn’t for them, and were returning to more civilized lands.

And among them were two passengers named Alice and Cecilia.

Author’s note: For some reason, while I was writing the last chapter I referred to {Monster Slayer} as Monster Hunter. This is corrected, along with a few other minor typos.

Besides that, I skipped the Perk selection process for Apprentice Enchanter because, honestly, the Perks for pre level 25 classes are starting to feel a little unimportant, and I don’t think drawing out the whole process for each selection feels right to me. Especially during time skips – when Alice picks up a Perk during a time skip, I’m probably going to skip Perk selection pretty consistently, because a time skip is supposed to power through a period of time without getting too bogged down in the details, and adding in EVERY Perk available makes my already somewhat lengthy Perk selection process a fair bit lengthier.

Anyway, with that, we’ve hit the end of the first major arc! Wooooooo

I think the last line of this chapter doesn’t quite feel right to me. It doesn’t feel like it’s bad, but it feels like it’s missing something. I rewrote it like four times and I am just really unsatisfied with that sentence. Hmm…