A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World
Chapter 61

After a night spent inside of the manaless room, Alice’s mana deprivation symptoms didn’t get any worse. This more or less lined up with what Alice had experienced and seen so far. It seemed that there was no difference between half an hour and sixteen hours inside of a manaless environment – once the mana deprivation symptoms reached a certain ‘maximum’ threshold, they did not seem to get any worse no matter how long the body went without getting more mana. Alice originally found this reduction of Stats and Perks to be quite uncomfortable, because she had long gotten used to the extraordinary strength and balance she had acquired after living in this world. However, as time passed, she found herself growing used to the sensation of being weaker and less balanced again.

More important was the fact that Alice’s mana was still regenerating. She had emptied it completely after entering this room, and even cleared out every speck of mana and rainbow mana here, just to make sure there was no mana left at all. Anytime she acquired any amount of mana in her magic seeds, she would immediately empty it, trying to track the moment where her body stopped producing more mana. With {Timer} and {Improved Memory}, she would have an exact time estimate after that.

This was predicated on the assumption she would eventually stop producing mana. Which, true to her worst fears, never happened.

Alice was still regenerating mana just fine even though there was no mana in the room at all.

There seemed to be no difference at all in her mana regeneration rate, no matter little mana there was for her to absorb.

Even after falling asleep and waking up, Alice kept inexplicably producing mana from seemingly nothing whatsoever.

This led to Alice feeling even more confused. Why was this happening? In the first place, thus far the world had seemed to have an at least loosely consistent sort of energy economy. Monsters ate mana to survive, and thus inhabited areas with more mana. Areas with less mana were usually inhabited by humans, because humans relied on crops and animals to eat food and thus acquire energy. Monsters all had cores inside of their body which stored energy, much like how the human body stored energy in the form of fat. Humans could even directly measure and use the energy a monster stored inside of its core by turning it into a fuel source for enchantments. The enchantment would slowly drain away the mana in the monster core until it ran out, at which point the enchantment stopped working until the cores were replaced. The fact that monster cores seemed to follow the laws of energy conservation while Alice’s magic seeds did nothing of the sort confused her even more.

Alice spent several minutes trying to wrestle with this seeming inconsistency, before she remembered a statement she had made to Milo in the not too distant past.

Monsters and humans weren’t the same. The mechanics behind how each one dealt with, processed, and used mana were totally different. Monsters consistently died whenever they were cut off from mana, didn’t need to eat physical food at all if enough mana was present, and couldn’t access the System. While human magic cores bore some resemblance to monster cores, Alice had erroneously been assuming that the two were almost equivalent. However, right now she had no evidence that this was true besides the fact both could be used as enchanting materials.

Humans had tried, and failed, to figure out how human Mage cores worked for thousands of years now, and to this day nobody seemed to have any clue what exactly they did or how they worked. They just knew all Mages had them, and if the organ was seriously injured, it might damage or totally disable magic until it was healed. None of Illa’s books, or the mages Alice had spoken to, even seemed completely sure that there was mana inside of a Mage core in the first place, and instead left it for academia to debate. Alice also didn’t know how monster cores worked, though this one was significantly more possible to read up on and research from an ethical standpoint. Right now, all she knew was that monster cores were good ways to fuel enchantments and they stored energy for monsters.

Did human cores have the ability to provide ‘permanent’ enchantments, or produce mana seemingly from nowhere? Using human magic cores was illegal inside of Illvaria, and most other countries in the Shil Confederacy also didn’t tolerate the usage human cores for enchanting. Therefore, Alice had no way of answering this question legally. While the Sigmusi might know the answer, Alice had zero intention of going into the Sigmusi Colonia to replace out.

For a brief moment, she wondered if the Society of Starry Eyes knew the answer. While the Society seemed to be known for emphasizing a few kinds of ‘illegal’ research, such as dimensional research, the Society was still known to dabble in several illegal branches of research. The country of Illvaria seemed to be in a state of perpetual conflict with the Society, so it was inevitable Illvaria had found and attacked Society research bases. If Alice was lucky, maybe she could read some research notes Illvarians had stolen from a successful raid? Even if Illvaria banned dangerous and unethical research, keeping and using the information obtained FROM that research might be perfectly legal, much like the way the Allies had handled Nazi research notes after WW2. It was worth keeping an eye out for, at least.

However, that didn’t help her right now. Right now, Alice was left scratching her head and wondering why her mana seeds were still producing mana. Either human magic seeds were producing mana from nothing, or she was missing something. Alice sighed in frustration, before she turned her attention to something easier to think about.

At the very least, Alice finally had a better idea what distinguished ‘classes’ and normal ‘magic seeds.’ After her vision trip from {Infusion of Comprehension}, she had started to seriously consider whether classes and magic seeds were the same thing, and why the System categorized them as two different things. However, she could at least say with certainty that things like Attributes, Perks, etc. didn’t work at full power without mana in her surroundings, while Magic Seeds did. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was a place to start.

Finally, Alice left the manaless room.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 45-> 47, Scholar: 24->29, Scientist 24->28, Survivor 41-> 43

Seeker of Truth (II->III) (Rarity: 8->9)

You have consistently taken steps to understand the System and the underlying nature of reality, regardless of how well or poorly you are equipped to understand what lays before you. While the nature of reality is often confusing, striving to understand it is what it truly means to seek the truth.

+1 Primary Class Slot(s), +50% -> 200% class experience for all research-related classes, +10% Effect of Intelligence, +15% 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.

{Seeker} of Truth’s upgrade wasn’t too interesting, all things considered. It quadrupled the bonus she had towards Experience for research related classes, which was useful, but didn’t require much thought or planning. If she wanted to reach immortality someday, she would absolutely need to stack massive amounts of XP boosts together, so Alice certainly wasn’t complaining. Still, she had been a little hopeful that she might get some sort of new ability when the Achievement gained a tier. Still, [Explorer of Magic] was getting pretty close to level 50, and that meant {Outworlder} would stop boosting XP gain for that class. Coupled with the fact that every 25 levels, the XP needed to gain more levels would increase exponentially, this meant that Alice would start to seriously struggle to level up without this kind of boost. Even though she found the new Achievement to be a bit bland, it was certainly very useful.

Apart from that, she had gained another two mystery levels in Survivor. Alice still had no clue why she was getting levels in a class that was supposed to thrive off of surviving close scrapes with death and living in the raw, untamed wilderness. She had already pretty decisively proven that there was no real danger in sitting inside of a manaless room, so the fact she kept getting levels for this was just odd. Alice was starting to wonder if this was some sort of glitch in the System, or something of the sort.

For now, she couldn’t make heads or tails of it. She added it to her list of ‘weird observations’ before ignoring it and turning her attention to her Perks.

Enhanced Mana Tendrils

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 45 or higher

Doubles the range at which you can manipulate mana tendrils.

Magic Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 45 or higher

Allows you to form another seed of magic with a maximum mana conversion ratio of 54%

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.

Alice dismissed {Magic Seed} because she didn’t need another seed right now. {Enhanced Mana Tendrils} was also surprisingly lackluster for a level 45 Perk. She probably would have been happy to grab it at level 10 or 15, but it just didn’t seem worthy of level 45. Therefore, that one also got removed from her considerations.

{Mana Construct Modelling} would let her mess with class fractals without the risk of accidentally melting or killing herself. Given Alice’s newfound ambition to try recreating whatever the System was doing, this Perk was perfect for some of her early exploration and experimentation. Experimenting would also give her more levels, thus giving her more Perks to make future experiments easier and more viable, creating a positive feedback loop. Since one Perk was useful and the other two were disappointing this was an easy pick.

Then, eager to try it out, she tried copying the mana fractal she had seen in her body when she evolved her {Student of Kinetic Magic} class to the {Kinetic Manabinder} class.

Immediately, an accurate mental model of the {Kinetic Manabinder} class fractal appeared inside of her thoughts, as well as a list of mana types inside of the construct.

Pure mana Mana, Organic Mana, Kinetic Mana, and System Mana are all present in this class fractal. That seems about in line with what I think the System is doing, and surprisingly, I have access to three of the four types of mana present already, even though I can’t really use my Organic seed yet. Wait a minute. System mana? Alice suddenly felt baffled. There was such a thing as System mana?

Upon further reflection, Alice remembered that it was possible to form a magic seed out of literally any concept, at least in theory. Even though she had nearly killed herself trying to form seeds based on Earth’s understanding of physics, it was still well known that people had created dozens or hundreds of magic seeds throughout the centuries. The four most common magic seeds were simply the ones that people had the easiest time forming, while also providing high amounts of versatility and minimal broken mana pollution. There were even a few magic seeds such as ‘hope’ or ‘sadness’ magic seeds. Their efficiency level was atrocious, and they dumped the vast majority of their mana into the atmosphere as broken mana while accomplishing very little, but their existence still proved a point. Theoretically, it seemed like anything could be turned into a magic seed. Once Alice considered that fact, it didn’t seem too unusual for there to be something called ‘System’ mana.

The next step seemed rather obvious. After checking with {Safety Analysis}, Alice tried forming a System magic seed.

Alice saw something rather unusual afterwards.

Normally, the rainbow mana seemed to act like a kind of filter. It messed with mana before it entered the human body, and somehow or another this made it easier for humans to absorb and interact with mana. However, for the first time, it looked like the rainbow mana was at war with itself. A chunk of mana started drifting towards Alice, and, as per usual, the rainbow mana started to form a sort of ‘filter.’ Alice was more than slightly intrigued by the fact that forming a magic seed seemed to also require System input. Maybe the reason she had nearly melted herself when trying to form magic seeds based on Earth physics was because the System just… didn’t know how to deal with creating those seeds? Alice had no clue how much or how little assistance the System was actually providing when it came to forming magic seeds, but she would definitely be testing this later.

Alice’s body drew in the mana that had passed through the rainbow fractal. Then, the moment it entered her body, a chunk of rainbow mana also drifted inside of her body and kicked the mana right back out of her body, well before it reached the mage core. The core continued desperately trying to suck in mana, and the rainbow mana outside of her body seemed to be actively trying to help her form a magic seed. Meanwhile, the rainbow mana inside of her body actively messed up the formation of the magic seed. It helped move the mana safely out of her body, straightening out any potential damage the failed seed formation may cause, but in this case Alice could clearly see the System’s rainbow mana actively preventing the seed from forming.

After a few more seconds of observation, Alice felt her magic seed formation fail.

After that… nothing happened. Alice gave her body a careful glance, and noticed that some of the mana inside of her body was moving a bit erratically. Even though the rainbow mana had clearly tried to stop the failed seed formation from harming her, there were still a few small aftereffects. Alice had a sneaking suspicion that the reason she had nearly hurt herself so badly when she tried and failed to form seeds was probably related to this erratic quivering of the mana inside her body. Even if failing to form one or two magic seeds might not be dangerous, if she failed a bunch in a row, it would probably put her in another dangerous situation.

She promptly decided that messing with this could wait until later. She was definitely going to come back to this idea, but she would at least wait a day or two for her mana to settle down a bit. She turned her attention back to her other Perks.

Shared Memory

Requirements: Scientist level 25 or greater

You may take a specific 'memory' you have and then share it with another (willing) target, allowing them to see the memory from your perspective. You must first be in physical contact with the other party, and focus on the memory you wish to share. The other party will experience the memory as something akin to a slideshow or movie – only vision and sound will be shared.

Deeper Investigation

Requirements: Scientist level 25 or greater, Perception 100 or greater, {Outworlder} Achievement.

You gain the ability to drastically improve your vision for short periods of time, especially while trying to investigate a specific phenomenon. Can be used to get better looks at very tiny objects, or objects which are very far away.

Neither of these were too exciting. {Shared Memory} had some potential for letting other people take a look at the rainbow mana, which could be useful. Nobody besides Alice had the ability to see it, so Alice figured it was a decent way to share information and get other opinions. This made it surprisingly attractive. If Alice could help Cecilia see what was going on, and get another set of opinions on what she was looking at, Alice would certainly welcome it. When it came to Scientific exploration, discoveries were almost never made in a vacuum. Trying to work alone with minimal manpower and resources would be incredibly difficult. Using this Perk, Alice might have some ways to help other people get Achievements that let them see the rainbow mana, or at least get second opinions on experiments sometimes.

{Deeper Investigation}, on the other hand, could replace a microscope in a pinch. Alice didn’t need a microscope right now, but maybe somewhere down the line it would be useful. That being said, Alice had no immediate use for it, while she did have a possible use for {Shared Memory}. Therefore, she grabbed {Shared Memory}. She would try it with Cecilia later to see if the other girl had any interesting ideas about the rainbow mana, or class fractals.

Almost as Good as Glasses

Requirements: Scholar level 25 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

Increases the effect of the Perception attribute by 10%

Passion for Reading

Requirements: Scholar level 25 or higher

If you have finished reading a book within the past 30, your intelligence stat grows 25% faster and the effect of the Intelligence stat increases by 20%.

Scholarly Pursuits

Requirements: Scholar level 25 or higher

All research-based classes gain experience 15% faster.

Photographic Memory

Requirements: Scholar level 25 or higher, Intelligence 150 or greater, Perception 100 or greater, {Improved Memory} Perk (or a similar Perk taken from within the Scholar Class)

You gain the ability to perfectly remember and reproduce all sights and images you have seen since the acquisition of this Perk.

{Almost as Good as Glasses} was an easy Perk to ignore. {Passion for Reading} was actually kind of interesting. Alice was pretty sure the Perk would almost always be active as long as she hadn’t lost access to libraries or books entirely. That being said, Stat boosts weren’t usually particularly exciting. {Scholarly Pursuits} suffered from a similar problem. 15% boost to XP gain wasn’t… bad, per se, but it just wasn’t very important either. Furthermore, after getting a 200% boost from her Achievement, 15% just didn’t seem like a very big bonus.

{Photographic Memory} was the best pick here. It would allow Alice to finally start remembering exactly what the fractals the rainbow mana spontaneously formed looked like, as well as the exact context she had seen each fractal in. Even though {Improved Memory} was pulling its weight more and more as Alice mentally kept a growing list of oddities and suspicions she had, it only fueled her desire to improve her memory further. Right now, she could kind of remember what mana fractals looked like, but not well enough to visually recreate them inside of her head. {Photographic Memory} would directly solve this problem, and also give her a bunch of other useful minor bonuses. A {Photographic Memory} Perk would be invaluable when she was trying to investigate the mana fractals further, since drawing them was basically impossible for her to do with any level of accuracy or precision.

With that out of the way, Alice bought a small copper ring from Cecilia’s supplies, covered it in pure mana sap, and started working on enchanting it. She was more than a little frustrated by how hard it was to see her surroundings ever since she had gotten the ability to see rainbow mana consistently. Alice had originally been planning to just make the ring block off her ability to perceive mana for a bit, but on further reflection, Alice decided that was a little too drastic. She might miss something useful or interesting while she was ‘blinded.’ Therefore, Alice instead decided to work on making the ring block off around 80% of her mana perception. This would be a little bit trickier, but it should make her life more bearable without potentially missing valuable information she might need later.

Her first attempt at enchanting the ring… ended in failure.

Alice had tried to just make the ring ‘turn off the color for surrounding mana.’ This… didn’t really work. Instead of removing the bright rainbow colors that made it hard to see, the ring spurted out broken mana while making the other mana around her turn a weird grey color.

Even more frustrating was the fact that the System-controlled mana perfectly avoided the ring’s attempts to interact with it. Thus meaning the ring only worked on normal mana. Not to mention, at the rate the ring was burning through mana and wasting it, it would probably chew through a spidercrab core every few hours. Alice had expected a little bit of inefficiency because she was using basic spidercrab cores, but this was way worse than she had been imagining.

Alice quickly realized that this ring was a total failure. Though, it did give her a small money-making idea that she would work on later today, if she had time. First she wanted a ring that stopped the distracting nausea-inducing rainbow though.

The second ring was a fair bit more effective. Instead of trying to decolor all of the mana around her, Alice made the ring create a pair of ‘sunglasses’ out of mana, then force them to hover in front of her eyes. It was a bit tricky to get the height correct, but after some work she had two patches of mana that hovered in front of her eyes. These patches of mana blocked out the color of her surroundings, turning the mana around her into a bunch of muted colors.

This unfortunately came with the downside of affecting not just mana, but every other color in her surroundings as well.

Finally, Alice gave in. She grabbed a type of rock that could remember two instructions and made sure to deposit the correct amount of money on Cecilia’s ‘shopkeeper’ counter. Then she used Cecilia’s enchanting tools to punch a small hole in the middle and loop a string through it. Then, she made the ring figure out when Alice was perceiving a ‘color’ created from mana. The second instruction was to seriously dampen her ability to perceive that color whenever it was created from System mana. Since the enchantment was reliant upon her own perception, she would be able to dodge the issue of rainbow mana avoiding other kinds of mana. She put it on, and finally, the dancing rainbows disappeared. Even though she could still perceive muted colors shifting quietly in the background, they were no longer overwhelmingly bright and distracting. She grinned to herself.

Alice’s enchanting proficiency was coming along nicely. Even though this enchantment had been a fair bit more complicated than her previous ‘simple’ rings, it had only taken her three tries to get a working model.

Then, she turned her attention back to her money-making idea.

[Adventurers] often went into the wilderness to scavenge for valuable items such as enchanting materials. While higher level [Adventurers] usually had Perks that let them identify useful enchanting materials and avoid mana poisoning, lower level [Adventurers] didn’t usually have access to these Perks yet. Alice had already accidentally created a ring that let one perceive mana in their surroundings.

Alice decided to make a ring that would let people perceive mana, by ‘coloring’ mana near them. This mana would become visible even to totally normal people, and would provide on the spot feedback on how mana interacted with materials. This would let [Adventurers] have an easier time figuring out which materials were valuable and which spots were prone to cause mana poisoning.

While it wouldn’t be valuable to high-level [Adventurers], who would naturally have Perks to deal with these problems, for mid level adventurers this ring would be far more useful than the Perks available at earlier levels. Mid-level [Adventurers] were usually people that had at least made a bit of money. Even though people tended to pick up the [Adventurer] class because they were desperate, they usually gained levels and materials quickly or ended up in a monster’s stomach, meaning that mid-level [Adventurers] often had a little bit of money floating around. This kind of ring that could potentially save their life and help them avoid missing valuable things should have a market. Especially in Cyra, which directly bordered the unclaimed wilderness of the south and had access to trade arteries to sell enchanting materials. Furthermore, the stone she had used wasn’t SUPER expensive. It was a single silver sun, which wasn’t tiny, but was still affordable. If she charged three silver suns, it would be most of the daily income of a normal dock worker. An adventurer should be able to afford that much, right?

After thinking about it, Alice got to work making a few of the mana-coloring rings. If anyone bought a few of them, she could finally have a use for her Pure Mana magic seed, since right now she didn’t have a good way to convert Pure Mana mariums into money. It wasn’t a good long-term source of income, because she would inevitably scrap the Light magic seed sooner or later, but it would help her raise some funds before she went North.

An hour or two later, Cecilia also came down to the shop. Alice used {Shared Memory} to give Cecilia a better idea of what she had been seeing all of this time regarding rainbow mana, which Cecilia found fascinating, but couldn’t make heads or tails of. Alice decided to put it out of her mind for the rest of the day, and focus on her enchanting. The two spent the rest of the day chatting as they quietly worked on their own enchantments, with Cecilia occasionally springing up to make sales. It was a comfortable and relaxing day. Alice felt vaguely reminded of days she had spent soldering robot parts together after building a code in Arduino with her friends, before she had been teleported to this world. All in all, it was a nice way to spend what would probably be her last full weekend in Cyra.

You have leveled up!

(Apprentice) Enchanter 9-> 17, Kinetic Manabinder 1->2