Chapter 62: Chapter 60

When Alice walked into Cecilia’s enchanting shop, many of the less popular items had been packed up. It was obvious based on the emptied shelves that people were coming into the shop more frequently right now. Once Cecilia left, it might be a while before another dedicated [Enchanter] came to Cyra. Therefore, the people who were able to afford enchanted items had obviously been buying up everything they could before Cecilia headed north, along with the magic cores needed to power everything. Even if it would still be possible to import enchanted items afterwards, that would introduce extra costs, wait times, and further inconveniences.

The only exceptions to the mass buyouts were the neat rows of enchanting ingredients. After all, only Mages who were able to do some enchanting actually had a use for those. Even though they were displayed on the shelves as ‘merchandise,’ they were often used by the shop owner rather than customers. Even though some Mages, like Alice, would buy the ingredients to practice enchanting or to make some quick and easy enchantments, the market was far more limited for enchanting materials than for actual enchanted items.

Milo arrived at the shop a minute after Alice did. “Lady Alice! Good to see ya!”

“Thank you very much for coming, Sir Milo,” said Alice, giving him a courteous nod as well.

“You’re here too!” said Cecilia, as she walked out from the back of the shop. “Good to see you, Lady Alice. And you as well, Sir Milo.”

“Good to you see you as well, little lady Cecilia!” said Milo, giving Cecilia a wide grin.

“Are you two ready?” Asked Alice.

“Yeah. We’re mostly testing to see how fast stats drop without mana, right?”

“That’s… one of the two things we’re testing,” said Alice, feeling her eyes twitch slightly as she thought of her new theories about mana and energy conversion. “I also want to… HOPEFULLY finalize the results of our test on where mana comes from.” If the laws of conservation of energy still worked, and if Alice wasn’t missing something else that would realistically lend itself to producing mana. Even though Alice was pretty sure she was hitting all of the obvious ways to produce energy, she was also willing to believe that she could be wrong or missing something.

“Sure. Makes sense – we might as well get that experiment done too. By the way, before I move, we’re going to need to take down the manaless room. I’m contractually obligated to make sure there are no remaining enchantments inside of the building before I turn the building over to the new owner. Therefore, next week, we need to take it down,” said Cecilia.

“All right. Next weekend, we’ll set aside Sunday to break everything back down into components,” said Alice, not too concerned. She had already started to get into the habit of stuffing some mana cores and random enchanting materials into her storage Perk, just in case she wanted to enchant something on the go. She was already storing a few buckets of the pure mana sap inside of {Sample Collection}. Recovering the sap from the walls would probably be difficult, so she would be down a bucket of sap and the mana cores she had already fed the enchantment. Still, setting up another manaless room wouldn’t be too hard now that she had both the supplies and the know-how.

The three of them quickly got the preliminary work out of the way – testing how much Cecilia and Milo could lift at once, preparing sacks of sturdy objects to evaluate how much their strength had decreased, and so on. Testing mental faculties and some stats like [Dexterity] was much harder to quantify, but Alice had at least prepared a few simple Sudoku puzzles that the two could work on during the experiment, all at approximately the same difficulty level (as far as she could tell, at least). It was far from a perfect way to gauge intelligence, but it was something. With some luck, maybe she would think of a better way to test mental stats in the future, but this was her best idea for now. She gave Milo and Cecilia a bit of time to familiarize themselves with how the puzzles worked, and once they both had a decent grasp of what they were supposed to do she moved on. Finally, Alice readied her{Timer} Perk, thankful that they no longer needed to rely on heartbeats to measure time.

With that out of the way, the three of them proceeded to the manaless room. Just to make absolutely sure that nothing was about to go horribly wrong, Alice used {Safety Analysis} on Cecilia and Milo one last time. Lowering one’s [Endurance] meant temporarily weakening the body’s immune system, overall resilience, and health, and so even though Alice’s Perk had said the experiment would be safe when she had tried it a few days ago, something might have changed since then. If Milo or Cecilia got sick, for example, the experiment could easily change from ‘ultimately harmless’ to ‘dangerous’ or even ‘life threatening.’ Obviously, Alice didn’t want her friends getting hurt over this, so she was very careful to double and triple check everything. Once she was satisfied that the experiment was still safe, Alice double checked whether Milo and Cecilia had any Perks that might mess up the experiment somehow, before finally beginning the experiment.

Milo was the first to step into the manaless room.

Similar to when Alice had done the experiment, it didn’t take long before Milo started to notice a decrease in his strength. But Milo’s stats seemed to be dropping faster than Alice’s had, and his symptoms were also far more pronounced than Alice’s.

“I have a horrible headache,” said Milo. “My strength is also going pretty fast. How much time has it been?”

“Three minutes.”

Milo frowned, as he reached over to the sack he could barely lift, even at full strength. He was unable to lift it. Then, after that, he went to the 95% strength sack… and was also unable to lift it. Alice immediately recorded the results. Milo’s strength was decreasing more quickly than hers had. Alice had still just barely been able to lift the 95% strength sack at around five minutes, but Milo was already unable to lift his at 3 minutes.

“My headache is getting worse. It’s harder to think as well. Hmm…. If I had to say, it’s actually sort of like I had an extra drink or five more than what I might normally get at the bar,” said Milo, waving his hands in front of his face. “My vision is getting much worse, and my movements are getting slower and clumsier. It feels... Ughhhh,” said Milo. Then, wincing a little as he moved around, Milo pulled out Alice’s first ‘logic puzzle.’ Milo took about two minutes to solve the first one.

As the experiment continued, Alice took a moment to appreciate the rainbow mana inside of the ‘manaless’ room. Since Alice hadn’t been able to observe the rainbow mana during her first experiment, it had almost certainly still been in the room, so she had left the rainbow mana in the room the second time as well to observe it.

Normally, every so often, the rainbow mana would rearrange itself. Alice was beginning to get more used to the way it flowed and moved, and was actually starting to recognize some shapes and patterns. Even if she didn’t know exactly what was going on behind the scenes, she could still remember the way rainbow mana seemed to transform when it was trying to guide mana inside of someone’s body. Whenever people moved, when they gained levels, the rainbow mana would swirl around them. The seemingly random eddies were people continuously gaining tiny fractions of Stats and levels, every single second of the day.

Or at least that was Alice’s running theory right now.

And as of right now the rainbow mana didn’t move at all. Even though Milo was doing things that should, realistically, have started to get the rainbow mana in his surroundings moving, nothing at all was happening. In fact, Alice found it more than slightly unnerving, because she had gotten so used to the rainbow mana constantly shifting and swirling about. This was the first time she had ever seen the rainbow mana just be… silent.

Alice started to wonder how it was that the System even figured out when people were supposed to be awarded Stats and Perks. For that matter, why did you need to do something related to a Stat or a Perk in order to absorb mana and boost your abilities? And why did Classes and Skills have such oddly specific and strict requirements for all of them?

Alice was fairly sure that the System was benevolent in this world, or at least relatively friendly towards humans. The System also showed very clear favoritism – it helped exactly humans. No other species got any benefits whatsoever from the System, as far as anyone could tell. The rainbow mana avoided monsters even more actively than it avoided humans, and monsters also seemed incapable of noticing its presence (or, at least, thus far Alice had yet to see any of them try to eat rainbow mana. Considering the fact Alice had, in the not very recent past, seen a monster try to literally eat a building while mages blasted them down during the vinebear hunting expedition, her expectations for intelligent life amongst monsterkind had pretty much dropped to rock bottom already. Who knew what they were thinking?).

Alice was also pretty sure that the rainbow mana was strongly related to however the System actually worked behind the scenes. If the System was really biased towards humans, though, why not just continuously dump Stats and levels into humans? If, say, everyone just got dozens of stat points per second starting the moment they were born, by the time humans were six or seven years old they wouldn’t need to fear monsters at all. Even better, everyone would probably be an immortal by the time they were like twenty or thirty, and be functionally immune to disease, monsters, and pretty much everything besides other humans. Even if that was an extreme example, and there might not be enough raw mana to sustain that kind of operation, the fact that the System specifically rewarded people for their efforts was starting to seem downright strange to Alice. Mostly because it didn’t feel there was any underlying need for it at all. Surely the System could just… draw in mana and filter it properly, before distributing it to humans or something? Even if it left out a few ‘paths’ for people to follow, if the goal was just to empower the human race the System could just give people stats of 500 or something. It was hard to threaten someone who could punch through an iron plate with their bare fist.

Therefore, she was probably missing something. Either her understanding of the purpose of the System was mistaken, or she was still missing something big in her understanding of mana.

While she pondered these things, Alice continued to watch as the rainbow mana around Milo did absolutely nothing. After five minutes, the ‘class’ fractals inside of Milo’s body also started to seem… dimmer. Like a flashlight with dying batteries, the fractals grew dimmer and dimmer. Finally, at around 15 minutes, they stopped changing brightness, settling at a much less intense level of light than they had previously inhabited. At exactly the same time, Milo’s stats stopped decreasing.

At the end of half an hour, Alice asked him to move to the far side of the room. Then, she opened the door, carefully observing the rainbow mana.

The moment the door to the manaless room was opened, the rainbow mana started to go crazy. Apart from studiously avoiding Milo, it was like someone had given it twenty cups of coffee. Less than a second later, the fractals that Alice was beginning to recognize were related to ‘filtering’ formed in midair, and at the same time, pure mana began to surge into the room before being guided into Milo’s body.

Milo then reported he had also gotten {Discovering the Unseen}, a rarity three Achievement that gave him some minor boosts and had perk requirements directly related to the experiment. He had also gotten a minor stat bump in Intelligence. Most curiously of all, he had gained a level in [Survivor], a secondary class he had acquired mostly by accident when he had gone through his mana baptism long ago. Alice scratched her head at this, but still didn’t quite understand why that might be the case.

Cecilia went through much the same process a few minutes later. Alice had Cecilia stand at the far corner of the room. This time, the experiment was a fair bit less interesting – there weren’t any notable deviations from Milo’s experiment.

Alice had lost about 15% of her Stats in total during her experiment.

Both Cecilia and Milo had experienced far worse reductions in Stats, suffering around a 30% loss to their strength. By the end of the experiment, they had also been very noticeably impaired mentally, with the time it took them to solve Sudoku puzzles approximately tripling by the end of the experiment. Their vision and hearing had seriously suffered a fair amount as well. Of the more easily quantifiable and testable stats, Cecilia and Milo had lost about 30%. Furthermore, the ‘symptoms’ they experienced also seemed far worse than Alice’s – including headaches, joint pains, and a variety of other minor ailments had cropped up left and right somewhere between the ten and twelve minute mark. These had all disappeared within less than a minute of being re-exposed to mana, and had all been mild to moderate in nature. However, this all seemed to indicate that Alice suffered a lot less than the natives of this world when she was in a manaless zone.

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Cecilia had also gotten the {Discovering the Unseen} Achievement, meaning that Cecilia had now gotten two Achievements from helping Alice with her Experiments. Alice had gained a fair bit more… mana, as well as some levels in [Scientist] and [Explorer of Magic]. She had not gained any levels in [Scholar], possibly because the class didn’t seem to care at all about rigorously double check one’s ideas and conclusions. Since no class gained a new Perk, Alice just dismissed the notifications for now, because she wasn’t done yet.

After looking this over, Alice decided to run a few more experiments on herself. After all, if she was going to need to help Cecilia take down the manaless room next week, this was basically the last time she would be able to run experiments in this environment for a while. Why not make the most of it? She thanked Milo for coming to help her out, and after they chatted for a while longer, Milo went to get a drink and relax. Cecilia stayed behind, interested in potentially gaining more useful Achievements.

After a few checks with {Safety Analysis} to make sure there wouldn’t be a problem, Alice slowly began to drive the rainbow mana out of the manaless room along with the normal mana.

This was easier said than done – the mana actively avoided her at every turn, and ‘touching’ it with her mana was basically impossible. All of her mana seeds were equally difficult to use here, because the rainbow mana wasn’t ‘pure’ mana and thus couldn’t be interacted with. Not to mention it seemed to be actively avoiding her. Finally, after a great deal of wrangling, Alice managed to drive out the rainbow mana, and shut herself in the manaless room again. This was to see if perhaps Stats would fall by a greater amount when the rainbow mana wasn’t present.

The answer was no. Alice noticed no major differences between when the rainbow mana was and wasn’t present in the room, so long as no ‘pure’ mana was present. This was about what she had expected, but it was nice to confirm it.

Then, Alice decided to try something a bit more interesting. What happened if the rainbow mana had pure mana near it, but didn’t have a connection to the outside world?

Thus, she let the rainbow mana back in while driving out the ordinary mana. This time, Alice tried spewing some normal mana back into the air using her ‘pure mana’ magic seed. Alice theorized this would let the rainbow mana start doing its job again, and she should gain Stats and such as per usual. After all, the reason the rainbow mana didn’t work earlier was probably because there was no raw mana in the room. Right?

Wrong, apparently.

Alice used her pure mana seed to create some pure mana, injecting a bit of ‘raw’ mana back into the room.

And….

And that was it.

Nothing happened. The Rainbow mana didn’t react at all. The pure mana in the room, however, did something a fair bit more interesting. It drifted towards Alice, just as it would when she normally gained levels and Stats.

And then it was absorbed by her, just like usual. However, the mana didn’t integrate itself with any of her muscles, or class fractals, or anything of the sort.

Instead, it just kind of… drifted around in her body. It moved with the ferocious speed of a dying snail as it limped its way around her body over and over again, not accomplishing much of anything. Occasionally, when the mana drifted near one of her class fractals, a small amount of the mana would be absorbed inside of it. However, the amount was quite small compared to the number of Mariums of pure mana Alice had dumped into the room. She had thrown out around 30 Mariums from her pure mana seed, and maybe two or three were being absorbed per minute. Since Alice was used to seeing dozens or hundreds of Mariums of mana get filtered and absorbed every second, this was truly way too slow.

Finally, after a few minutes of absorption, her [Explorer of Magic] class… leveled up?

Y*& le#$veled uppppppp!

Explorer of Magic: 44 -> 44#@L%#$

Alice looked at the incomprehensible glitch signs on the System notification, before she turned back to her Status Screen. The [Explorer of Magic] class was still at level 44 on her Status Screen, despite her having ‘gained a level’ in it. Furthermore, there were now a row of extra glitch signs directly attached the class’s level in her Status Screen.

The System had finally bugged out.

Alice opened the door, and the rainbow mana finally reacted. For the second time ever, it stopped avoiding human beings and went inside of Alice, seemingly dead set on straightening out whatever was wrong with her class fractals now. Less than a minute later, she properly got a level in [Explorer of Magic], the glitch signs having all disappeared completely. She briefly checked her Perk choices, before she decided to think a little longer. She would deal with Perks once she was done experimenting. She had done multiple new experiments, and {Truth Seeker} might or might not be close to getting another tier. If it did, Alice wanted to at least she what she got first since it might change what she wanted in her next Perk, and none of the options were terribly relevant right now.

Besides that, Alice had a sudden thought. It was closer to a fit of curiosity, but it was also the natural result of the many things Alice had been seeing and thinking about during her time at Cyra.

The System being able to be fooled and manipulated made it fairly clear that, whatever the Holy Church of the Almighty System claimed, the System wasn’t a god. It was some sort of incredibly complex machine or enchantment, or something. However, it was neither omniscient nor omnipotent, despite being close in what it could circumstantially accomplish.

The Church had very clear mentions of there being a time where humanity had existed, but the System hadn’t. Why had the System suddenly come into being?

And was it possible for Alice to do the same thing as the System?

It had only been an idle thought, but once Alice spent a few more moments pondering the idea, the ‘System’ seemed to be some sort of incredibly complex thing that changed mana somehow. There were obviously a lot of specific mechanics behind how it worked, but at the end of the day, that seemed to be the gist of what the System was doing. In that case, was it possible for her to achieve the same effect, even in an environment where the System was cut off?

Sure, it was thousands of times more complex than anything Alice had ever seen before. If the System was equivalent to Calculus problem, Alice barely knew multiplication right now.

Still, the more she observed, explored, and experimented, the more she felt that even though she barely understood what the System was doing or why and how it worked the way it did…

At the end of the day, she already had some vague ideas about what she was looking at. And if she just kept striding forward, she would eventually figure out what the System was and why it existed. How it worked.

Alice grinned a little at the thought, before she started her final experiment that she had planned. She had wanted to see whether Mages needed mana in their surroundings to use magic, and that would require spending a much more extended period of time inside of the manaless room to confirm what happened to her mana regeneration. Thus, with Cecilia’s permission she got some meals ready, got some basic bedding set up, and prepared to spend the night inside of the manaless room.

However, now that the little idea of trying to copy the System had sprouted inside of her head, it simply wouldn’t leave.

The System was the most miraculous thing she had ever seen before. But at the end of the day, if there were definite, specific mechanics behind how it had been constructed and how it worked, surely it was possible to recreate it and observe it.

That was the nature of all technology – it would be miraculous and nearly magical, so long as one didn’t understand the nature of what one was looking at. While this world had literal mana, and magic, inside of it, the System seemed to defy the way even those two things worked. However, seeming to defy the nature of magic and actually defying the nature of magic were two totally different things. There had to be some reason behind how and why the System worked, right?