Chapter 51: Chapter 49

The next two weeks settled into a comfortable routine. Alice had discovered that Milo also worked at the docks, which made Alice feel much more at ease in her new job. Milo was more than happy to show her the ropes, which made her integrate smoothly into the crowd of workers there. A lot of the work Alice needed to do wasn’t particularly complicated. It mostly involved lifting heavy objects, such as planks, walls, and so on, and then holding them steady. Afterwards, workers would come and help do the more ‘detail-oriented’ parts of the work, such as nailing in objects and putting everything together. Other than that, Alice would sometimes move large amounts of materials from one place to another, especially if they were awkwardly shaped and difficult to carry with human hands. In all, the work was more than slightly dull, but it was more useful for her magic training than she had thought it would be. As a result of the work at the docks, along with Illa’s training, Student of Kinetic Magic had gained a few levels, going from 19 to 23. At level 20, Alice had selected a Perk called {Split Mind}. This perfectly addressed one of the bigger problems Alice had felt that she had, which was the inability to multitask effectively.

Split Mind Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 20 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher

You gain the ability to focus on two things at once, creating the ability to genuinely Multitask

 

The feeling of being able to think of two things at the same time was… trippy. Alice had a headache for almost a solid hour after unlocking the Perk as she tried to figure out what in the world was going on. The way her brain worked once she was processing two sets of information at once instead of one was… different. Very different. Instead of processing information from her surroundings once, it felt as if she was receiving the same set of information twice, with one set of information being ever so slightly delayed.

Naturally, the next thing she had done was try to walk around, only to trip over her own feet and lay on the floor of the inn. After that, she decided she wouldn’t move until the room stopped spinning. Luckily, after an hour, her headache had started to go away, and Alice had started to figure out how to process multiple streams of information. Even though it was originally migraine-inducing, Alice had quickly began to figure out how useful it was to be able to do two things at once after she started to get the hang of it.

She could control two mana tendrils at once instead of one.

She could observe the formation of a magic seed while also forming a magic seed.

She could keep an eye on her surroundings, remaining alert for danger, while also thinking about magic or research.

She could even read a book while simultaneously doing her work at the docks. It had taken some convincing on her part for Illa to let her take a book out of Illa’s mansion, but once Alice had done so, the increase in efficiency was simply remarkable. It was just a shame that Alice only had two eyes, and so even if she got more Perks allowing her to Multitask, she would still have a hard time using it as effectively as she was using two streams of information at once. Still, there were probably Perks that could fix that problem. Even so, Alice was pretty sure this was the best Perk she had ever gained. The fact that it was available at level 20 was even more absurd. She wouldn’t have been surprised if a Perk as useful as this one wasn’t available until she reached the upper 40’s.

Alice was also becoming increasingly aware of the fact that she would get her [Student of Kinetic Magic] class to its maximum level soon. All Student classes maxed out at 25, and she had been curious to see what a class evolution looked like for a while. With a month remaining before she left, and only two levels to go, Alice was sure she would get to see it before she left.

With the two weeks and her newly boosted efficiency, she finished raiding Illa’s book collection. Along the way, she finally picked up {Bookworm} when she was almost out of books.

You have gained an achievement!

Bookworm (Rarity: 3)

You have read at least 50 books from cover to cover in less than a year.

+10% class experience for all classes related to Research. +5% effect of the Intelligence Stat. Significantly improved reading speed.

The final segment of Alice’s time was spent learning enchanting with Cecilia. Alice’s enchanting ability improved day by day, and at the end of the two weeks, while Alice’s enchanting couldn’t exactly be considered proficient, she was at least able to make very shoddy enchantments. They were often inefficient, wasting mana and breaking after being used for several hours, but they at least did what they were supposed to do. Bit by bit, she was making progress.

Of course, this also came with exactly as much of a money sink as Alice had thought it would be. In a mere two weeks, Alice had sunk every single day’s worth of wages into enchanting supplies. Even that hadn’t been enough – she had already started dipping back into her meagre savings, dropping her to a little under a gold sun in money. If she didn’t find a patron after moving north, she would be in a very awkward position. Still, Alice was determined to make use of her time and improve herself as much as possible. She would only save enough for a few days of sick leave, along with passage north, and hope things worked out somehow.

Her massive expenses in enchanting materials weren’t without gains. She had picked up [Apprentice Enchanter] within a few days, and it was now level 8. At level 5, she had picked up a small but useful Perk along the way.

Enchanter's vision: Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level 5 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Magic 100 or greater, some form of Mana Vision available.

Grants the ability to see mana more clearly when it is part of an Enchantment. Allows for low-level analysis of enchantment-related materials, especially if the user has seen materials with similar properties before. Perk is dependent upon eyesight.

Enchanters required all sorts of weird and out-there materials. And plenty of them were unique, or weren’t very common. Especially when interacting with high-grade materials that could remember dozens of instructions at the same time. Being able to figure out what a material was compatible with was a core skill for enchanters, and Alice had double checked some of the Perks in the Church. Apparently, this one could combine with another Perk which could be acquired at level 30 to get a fairly good analysis Perk once she passed level 50.

Alice couldn’t help but think about how much easier the System made everything. With Perks as low as level 5 being able to automatically ‘analyze’ materials for the user, it was no wonder people in this world struggled to do things once their Perks stopped working. For now, Alice had no way to avoid using Perks – however, she did keep in mind the fact that, once she grew further, it might not be a bad idea to invest some of her time into learning to do things without the System. Someone had tricked the System right in front of her, and if it could happen once, it could happen again. However, for now, she had other priorities.

Alice’s research was starting to make progress again. Once Alice got the hang of processing information from her {Split Minds} Perk, she had gotten the chance to observe the formation of a Magic Seed. She had immediately retreated to her inn room the following night, and had decided to see what happened if she formed an Electromagnetic seed.

The description of this world’s electromagnetic magic had confused her for quite a while. After all, on Earth, electromagnetism encompassed far more than just electricity and moving around metals. Electric force, on an atomic level, should theoretically interact with most of physical matter, for example. Electric charges were what kept electrons glued to atoms, and governed a huge chunk of the chemical reactions. Atoms swapping around electrons was effectively the basis for how molecules were formed. However, in this world, electromagnetic seeds didn’t seem to exhibit any abilities beyond the ability to shoot electricity and move metals around. While those were PART of Electromagnetism, it felt like the magic seed was missing a lot.

Since she could switch her magic seeds around once a month, she thought it wasn’t a bad idea to see what was up. If she focused on forming an electromagnetic seed based on the idea of atomic interactions, what would happen?

Alice wasn’t sure, but she was hoping that it would at least be something interesting.

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Unfortunately, reality was often disappointing. After establishing an Electromagnetic seed, Alice was unable to use her understanding of electromagnetism in ways that went beyond this world’s understanding. After forming the seed, Alice had tried to mess around with a few grams of table salt (keeping the resulting substances in a safe and covered container so that the Sodium and Chloride didn’t melt her face off if she actually succeeded). The result, however, was… nothing.

She just wasn’t able to do it. Which confused her to no end. It felt the same way it did when she tried to use her Kinetic Seed to slow down atoms around her. It was as if the seed just couldn’t do what she was trying to make it do. Even though it should definitely be able to.

She had specifically tried to focus on building a very different magic seed. However, even though she focused on building something completely different, what she ended up with was somehow the exact same kind of seed everyone else had.

It had the ability to generate small amounts of lightning and move metal objects. It was basically a half-baked Kinetic Seed with some half-baked theories about electricity slapped on top. She was baffled to no end by this result. Hadn’t she tried doing something totally different with her magic seed? Why did it seem like she had just formed a totally normal electromagnetic seed?

Alice felt that the result was extremely disappointing. She hadn’t figured out as much as she had hoped to from watching the magic seed form, either. Mana had continuously collected behind her heart, before it seemed to just… vanish. She had no idea where it had gone, or where the magic seed was. Alice had sort of assumed that there might be something she could observe inside of her body when she formed a magic seed. She had thought that perhaps the organ behind the heart in all mages would change somehow. Perhaps inside of the organ, a new cluster of mana would form, or something. Instead the mana seemed to go through a long, convoluted process of condensing into a smaller and smaller ball as it started to turn a yellow-grey color. And then, it just poofed into thin air, and a notification telling her she had formed a new magic seed appeared. For whatever reason, when the mana condensed to a certain level, she was suddenly unable to observe it.

Alice had originally thought that the magic had actually disappeared. She had even spent a few hours trying to figure out how and why that might happen while she was messing with the seed. However, once she had broken the magic seed, she had discovered that things might be a bit different than her expectations. The moment she used her new Perk to shatter the magic seed, several bits of yellow-grey mana had been dragged out of the mage core behind her heart. They had then stuck around inside of her body for a few moments, before they were dragged out of her body by a force she could neither see nor interact with. A few moments later, the only evidence that Alice had ever had the magic seed to begin with were a few clumps of broken mana, hanging around in her surroundings.

The broken mana told her a few things. Most importantly, the mana hadn’t just disappeared into thin air. It was obviously still somewhere, in some form, after she had formed her mana seed. However, once the mana seed was formed, she couldn’t see a thing. It was impossible to observe, impossible to interact with, and impossible to even confirm the existence of. However, it was still inside of her mage core.

Or at least, that was Alice’s current theory. She would need to think about a better way to observe whatever was going on in there.

The light experiment had provided her with 2 levels in [Explorer of Magic] and a level in [Scientist] just for observing the weirdness of the seemingly unobservable magic seed. Frustratingly enough, [Explorer of Magic] was now level 39, and [Scientist] was now level 19. Exactly one level away from gaining a Perk in each class.

However, the biggest gain Alice had from her two weeks of her new lifestyle wasn’t just levels and Achievements. Instead, Alice had finally managed to create the necessary supplies for a manaless room.

It had been surprisingly simple once Alice learned that Enchanting Materials did not have to be solid matter. Cyra may have been a relatively newly established town, but one of the major reasons Illa and her husband had built a town in the area was the easy access to enchanting materials from the south. In the wilds, plenty of weird materials existed, and adventurers had Perks to figure out which ones interacted with mana, even though they weren’t mages. It was an obvious safety need, since [Adventurers] were almost universally afraid of mana poisoning, and also gave them the ability to find new and odd materials to sell for a living.

About a week after Alice’s new lifestyle had started, Cecilia had told Alice that an adventurer sold her some plant sap that worked well with Pure Mana. It could only remember one instruction, so it was surprisingly affordable, and Cecilia had simply bought about a bucket of it.

From there, Cecilia and Alice spent a day messing with the sap, trying to figure out if there was a way to spread the sap around a bit more. As long as it was first boiled, then mixed with water, it could form a sort of ‘paint’ that was still able to remember enchanting instructions, as long as the sap wasn’t thinned out too much.

From there, Alice had finally had the basis to start her manaless room experiment. Cecilia had lent Alice one of the rooms in her workshop which was insulated, which her father had used to contain explosions or risky experiments. Alice had enchanted the sap-paint with exactly one instruction – do not allow mana to pass through it. Then, she had painted the inside of the room, used her Pure Mana seed to clear out all of the mana inside of the room, and then Cecilia had cleaned up all of the Broken Mana Alice had made in the process. Alice still hadn’t learned to purify Broken Mana, although Illa had mentioned she would teach Alice before she left. However, for now, Alice finally had what she was longing for.

A room with no mana inside of it, which repelled mana from outside the room.

“It’s finished?” Asked Cecilia, giving the room one more look.

“It is! We can finally do the manaless room experiments I wanted to try.” Said Alice, grinning. “I’ve been wondering for a while what happens if a mage doesn’t have access to mana from the air. Can we still cast spells? Do things still work?”

Cecilia frowned a bit, as she looked at Alice. “You’re free to do things that are a bit risky as long as you are only experimenting with yourself. Just… be careful. After you go into the room, let me know immediately what you’re feeling. I’m not going to let you just die in the room. I know we’re trying to be more open-minded about how mana interacts with stuff, but even so…”

“I’ll be careful. I wouldn’t do the experiment if I thought it would actually hurt me. Well, I don’t know for sure, but… I need to know,” Alice said. “At home, there was no such thing as mana. Does touching mana once really mean that I can’t survive without it any more? I just… I want to know if it’s true. The only reports I could find on the subject just said that people separated from mana started feeling weak and dizzy, before being separated from the environment on ethical grounds. And monsters do die without mana, but they also eat nothing but mana. They’re a different species to begin with. I know that I’ve changed a lot since I came to this world, but… I need to know.” I need to know how much I’ve changed. And whether going to back to Earth is just mostly impossible, or a pipe dream. Even though Alice had mostly given up on going home, she still had a sliver of hope. Deep inside of her heart. Even if she knew that people needed special permits to even form a dimensional seed without becoming a fugitive, and that it was dangerous, she didn’t want to give up hope completely. But if going home would cause her die of suffocation, there was obviously no hope of ever leaving.

“All right. The room is set up, and I’ll be sitting right outside of the door. Call out to me so that I can record everything, and we’ll start the experiments. Just… stay safe. If you feel any danger at all, let me know so I can immediately open the door and let in some mana,” Said Cecilia.

Alice nodded.

It was time to finish figuring out how mana had changed her. And see how Mana and the System really worked.

 

 

Author’s note:

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originally, I was planning on having Alice’s status screen in this chapter as well, since a time skip is occurring. However, since her status screen will also change notably after the manaless room experiments, I decided it probably made more sense to just have her check the status screen afterwards. Showing a full status screen, only for it to immediately lose relevance, feels a bit silly, or so I think. I’ll probably place it at the END (multi-chapter) of the manaless room experiments, since this one is supposed to be one of the more important experiments in the story.

I also started out trying to write a chapter setting up a bit more prep work for the time skip, but after writing a few hundred words, I started to realize the work at the docks just isn’t worth devoting much screen time to. Lifting up objects with magic is… pretty well established at this point. It would have given Milo a bit more time in-story, but apart from that, I couldn’t really find many merits in keeping the scene. Meh.

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