Chapter 69: 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…”

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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.