Chapter 72: Chapter 69

Alice first confirmed that the metal disc on the leather cord was what was providing her with a stat buff. Even if Alice could just look at the rainbow mana popping out of the iron disc, since others couldn’t see rainbow mana Alice was forced to prove the iron disc was what provided the System enchantment. She decided to treat this as good prep work for grounding her assumptions in reality, rather than just a nuisance, and went through the necessary steps to prove the iron disc was the source of her +2 strength buff. After that, Alice moved on.

Next, Alice put together more mana-blocking sap with leftover ingredients in {Sample Storage}, grabbed a wooden box laying around, used her kinetic mana to drill two small holes on the top, and then slathered the mana-blocking sap over everything. After that, she put the strength-boosting necklace inside of the box, pulled the strings of the necklace through the holes, and used her mana to drive out all of the mana and System mana inside of the box, forming a small net on one end of the box and then gradually dragging it out of the box. Since System mana avoided other mana, it continuously retreated from Alice’s mana tendril web, leaving her with a totally manaless box.

Then, Alice put on the leather cord while the iron disc part of the necklace was still inside of the manaless box. It wasn’t exactly a perfect experiment – after all, Alice would have preferred to just drive out all of the pure and System mana in the room before starting the experiment. However, with other people involved in the experiment as well, Alice needed to make sure the experiment wouldn’t raise concerns with an ethics committee, which limited her ability to use herself as an experimental subject. While using yourself as a subject was fine if you were also the only person in the experiment, this experiment was unquestionably linked to Ezrien, since he paid for the ingredients and instigated her to start the experiment. If Alice then used herself as a test subject there was a good chance Ezrien would end up in legal hot water, even if a bunch of people with lie-detection Perks went over their statements.

Finally, everything was set up. Alice watched as the necklace activated with no problems whatsoever, completely ignoring the fact that no System or pure mana was in its surroundings, as well as the fact that the iron disc should have had zero ways to detect whether or not Alice was wearing it. Rainbow mana travelled through the leather cord until it reached her neck and then boosted her strength by two. Whether or not the necklace had access to outside mana seemed completely irrelevant.

“Huh,” said Alice, looking at the necklace. “I’ll admit, I kind of expected it to work even with no ambient mana, but I still can’t help but feel surprised.”

After that, Alice pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing some observations down.

‘Iron disc does not need atmospheric mana to keep working – it operates independently of external fuel sources.’ Of course, the notes were only for the sake of Ezrien – Alice had the System’s version of {Photographic Memory}, meaning that she didn’t really need to take notes for herself these days.

After that, Alice started trying to narrow down whether the necklace used other fuel sources. While she strongly suspected it just ran on nothing the way her seeds seemed to, it was worth double checking whether it ran on heat, sunlight, etc.

None of the above seemed to be correct. The necklace was just… creating mana somehow. Alice, for the life of her, just couldn’t figure out how this process worked. In fact, Alice couldn’t even figure out how the necklace knew when someone was wearing it. It just… knew.

She tried suffocated the necklace of pure mana and only letting it interact with System mana, as well as letting it interact with pure mana but no System mana. Neither stopped the enchantment from working, so she lathered the leather part of the necklace in mana blocking sap (along with some small wooden plates she wore underneath the sap-coated necklace to avoid making a mess). This also failed to prevent the necklace from activating, since the System mana began working out more and more convoluted routes to reach her, before it finally seemed to get frustrated and pushed its way through the mana-blocking sap. Alice had never seen this happen before – the System mana actively fought with the sap for almost a minute before it finally drilled a little hole in the mana-blocking sap enchantment and started boosting her [Strength] again. Alice quietly scribbled down more observations, making sure to just note that ‘the activation was delayed’ for Ezrien’s copy of her notes, before quietly making her own personal note that ‘blocking mana’ apparently wasn’t as absolute as she thought it was. It was the first time Alice had seen mana break through a mana-blocking enchantment. She found this process fascinating, and decided it was worth investigating later. Finally, she tried to directly interfere with the necklace using her mana tendrils, just to see what happened.

Direct interference was also somewhat effective. It caused the rainbow mana to pause for a moment, as the System mana tried to avoid her mana wherever possible. Then, it created a bizarre path that skirted around her mana and finished making its way towards her neck.

Whenever Alice wore the necklace, the matrix of rainbow mana in the center of the necklace started creating mana again. Since Alice still didn’t know how ‘creating mana’ worked, Alice decided to use {Mana Construct Modelling} to see if that got her any useful information. It was becoming increasingly obvious that blocking mana wasn’t getting her any closer to figuring out how mana creation worked.

{Mana Construct Modelling}gave her the information that System mana, Pure Mana, and Organic Mana was used to construct the glyph in the center of the necklace. Alice recalled the other time she had used {Mana Construct Modelling} on a System glyph. That time, the fractal had also contained those three kinds of mana.

Curious, Alice took a few sneak peaks at Ezrien, quietly trying {Mana Construct Modelling} on his class glyphs. Every single one of his class glyphs had System Mana, Pure Mana, and Organic mana inside of them, though about half of them were mixed with a fourth kind of mana as well. Alice grinned. There was a point of interest here, if she had the time and energy to discover it. While that might be lacking in the immediate future, she was certainly going to file it away for further investigation.

She turned her attention back to the necklace. She didn’t know much about interacting with Organic Mana yet, and every time she tried to form a System magic seed the System blocked her. So for now, she could only experiment on the mana fractal with her pure mana seed. After a quick check with {Safety Analysis} that warned her of light but manageable danger, she started trying to poke at the mana matrix itself with her pure mana seed. It wiggled, squirmed, and avoided the touch of her mana, but after some struggling she managed to trap the system fractal and touch it.

This was quite possibly one of the hardest feats of magical dexterity Alice had done so far, and made Illa’s training feel easy by comparison. When Alice finally managed to trap the glyph of rainbow mana, she extended a single mana tendril into the fractal. She wanted to pry apart the edges a little bit and see if she could observe it working. Even if it was likely going to destroy the enchantment, Alice figured she might learn something if she could observe parts of the glyph working. Right now, there was just too much going on for her to understand anything, but if she took it apart piece by piece she might be able to figure something out.

Unfortunately, it stopped working much faster than she expected. She managed to poke something and the entire mana matrix instantly stopped working. Mana immediately stopped flowing through the fractal, and Alice’s original goal of observing only part of the fractal working failed.

The last dribbles of rainbow mana continued towards her, but Alice felt something different about it now. It was less directed than before. It made its way into her body, and then Alice felt a very faint burning sensation in her muscles. It started to get worse, and Alice immediately used {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to fix whatever was going wrong. {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} burned some of the calories from lunch, and the faint burning sensation in her muscles was healed away.

Meanwhile, the necklace fractal kept trying to create more rainbow mana. However, it was no longer going anywhere. It was like an engine leaking fuel. One minute later, it stopped producing any mana at all. The necklace fractal turned dim, and Alice could no longer observe anything happening. While spamming {Safety Analysis} enough to start getting a headache Alice tried injecting some pure mana into the fractal. However, it was now broken beyond repair. Alice reviewed her memories of when it had worked (thanks to {Photographic Memory}) and then sighed. She couldn’t quite figure out what each part of the fractal did yet, or how mana generation worked. There were too many fiddly bits to the fractal, and she wasn’t even sure what caused the whole thing to break. On the bright side, Alice was confident that if she observed enough System Fractals breaking she could probably get somewhere with the whole endeavor. It would just require an unknown number of System-enchanted items, all of which were almost certainly going to become worthless in the process. And each System-enchanted item was bound to cost a fair amount of money, which Alice currently didn’t have.

Once again, it all came back to not having enough funds…

“The necklace no longer works,” said Alice, turning back to Ezrien. She tried to stop herself, but she was grinning madly the whole time. Today she had confirmed that she had a chance to go in the right direction, and gotten some hands-on experience breaking the System. She had confirmed that it was possible to mess with the System, even if she barely knew what she was doing and needed to rely on her Perks to keep her safe during the whole process. It felt great, even if it had broken an item worth three silver crowns in the process. For a regular [Laborer] that was about three days of work if they didn’t eat or sleep.

Ezrien looked shocked, as he gave the necklace a dubious look. He looked over the notes and observations Alice had intermittently penned during her experiments, before he returned his gaze to her. “You managed to break a System enchantment? But the iron disc is still intact! There’s no other way to break a System enchantment besides destroying the physical object it was attached to! All you did was poke it a bunch with pure mana for some reason and-“ Ezrien stopped, completely lost in thought. Then, he gave her a grin. “I have no clue whether or not you’re moving in the right direction for your experiments. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what you did. However, nobody has ever managed to break a System enchantment like that before, at least as far as I know. Even if I don’t know whether you’re heading in the right direction or not, you’ve managed to stumble onto something interesting. A lot of your preparatory steps and double-checking methods that you used earlier in the experiment were decent enough that I have no major complaints with them. There are some minor issues with your documentation methods during the experiment that we’ll need to talk about, but when you remembered to record stuff, it was decent. I don’t know if you have a good memory or something, but even if you do, keep in mind that if you’re part of a team other people need to be able to see your thoughts and what you’ve done. But this can be fixed,” he said as he held out his hand to Alice. “Welcome to the team.”

Alice smiled.

* * *

After that, Alice was introduced to the other two [Scholars]. There were two more [Scholars] on the team who had a day off, but she was assured they would be there in two days once their weekend ended. After signing a legally binding secrecy contract, she also learned what the team was working on as well. Apparently, the team was working on trying to find a way to substitute [Kinetic Mages] during construction. The number of mages was always a major bottleneck for some industries, and construction in this world was very reliant on [Kinetic Mages] to act as heavy construction equipment. While construction could happen without Mages, it was far less efficient, making [Kinetic Mages] something that any serious construction work needed to be competitive.

The team of researchers was trying to create a metal plate that could substitute some of the jobs a [Kinetic Mage] usually took care of. This metal plate, which had a variety of smaller enchanting materials stored inside of the metal shell, was supposed to float a specific object up and then keep it there while allowing the user to freely adjust the height. While this sounded simple in theory, making a simple metal plate accurately figure out how much kinetic mana to spend levitating one material, and allow the user to freely adjust the height was insanely hard in practice because of how stupid enchantments were. Enchantments could certainly do something like ‘push the object above this metal plate,’ but adjusting the strength of the push to keep it in place required a great deal of precision, trial, and failure. Especially since the team’s objective was to make the metal plates cheap and affordable enough to replace real mage labor. However, Alice could certainly see why manpower and funds were being devoted to the subject as well. While the project had some chance of failing, due to the requirement of the metal plates being cheap and easy to make, if it succeeded it could drastically cut down the cost of making new buildings.

You are reading story A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World at novel35.com

Four weeks passed in a flash. In that time, Alice settled in at the local inn while she continued to make and sell enchantments in Cecilia’s shop. The blast crystals started to be purchased by miners on a small scale, where they acquired a reputation for being safe and affordable. Alice’s mana-sight rings occasionally sold, and although they were never super popular they at least generated a small amount of income for Alice. Alice’s healing items proved to be the most popular item she could make, though they were also the items with the lowest individual returns. Magic materials that could absorb healing-related instructions were rather expensive. They were annoying to make, but provided very steady returns because they flew off the shelves. After deducting her future fees for the magic academy, she would have a little over three and a half gold suns remaining.

Much more importantly, as time passed and Alice steadily worked in Cecilia’s shop, worked with the team of [Scholars] making kinetic plates, and occasionally worked on her carving skills while making botched board game pieces, Alice continued to accumulate Levels, Skills, and Perks.

Explorer of Magic:  47 -> 51

Scholar: 29 -> 34

Scientist: 29 -> 38

Kinetic Manabinder: 6 -> 12

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 20 -> 24

Explorer of Magic was the first class Alice had that hit level 50. She hadn’t gotten her first post-50 Perk yet, but the moment Alice had gotten a class to level fifty a massive rush of mana far beyond her previous level-ups had flooded her body. Alice had already had her suspicions, but after witnessing the tidal wave of mana after getting to level 50, Alice was pretty sure that the biggest ‘break points’ in aging speed were exactly the same break points for when Perks got better. Every 25 levels, the Perks one could get from their classes got some sort of upgrade, and one’s aging speed dropped significantly.

Alice got five new Perks over this period of time as a result of her levels.

---