Chapter 76: Chapter 73

Alice woke up the next day still tired, but at least she had enough mana and energy to get her day started. She absently wondered if this was going to be her routine, now that her academy had started up for the year – ending each day horribly exhausted. Still, she didn’t hate the idea. She was working hard to finally build a proper baseline of knowledge for herself, and earn a living. While it was much earlier than it would have been on Earth, even if she was exhausted she was still enjoying unravelling the mysteries of magic and the System.

She spent the morning working with Ezrien’s team to create a cheaper and easier to produce kinetic plate, as usual. Now that she had seen the lanterns at the magic academy and was taking another look at the enchanted plate, it was easy to see that the enchanted plate took inspiration from the floating lanterns. The primary differences were that the plate wasn’t a paired enchantment, and instead tried to ‘intelligently’ sense whatever object was directly above it. Combined with the fact that the kinetic plates were also supposed to be able to change what height they floated the target material at, the seemingly simple upgrade ended up incredibly complicated if one was trying to make them easy to mass-produce. Alice wondered if this project was a little more ambitious than it should be. Still, she did her best to record results, make suggestions when her opinion was sought, and make measurements, as usual. Anne kept the team in high spirits and made contributions, Ezrien suggested wild but interesting improvements to the design, and the other four did their work diligently. It was a team Alice could be proud of working with.

After her work with Ezrien’s team for the day, she ate a quick lunch at the inn before heading to class. After showing her ID and repeating a string of phrases to make sure she didn’t bear hostility towards the school, she entered the academy. She was a little early, so she headed to the library and formally checked out the book she had started reading yesterday. The book was worth almost one and a half golden suns, and Alice would apparently be responsible for replacing it if she damaged it. Since Alice only owned about four and a half golden suns, this made her a little nervous since it could wipe out a third of her savings in one go…

After that, she headed to her first class of the day, Introductory Organic Mana.

She looked around the classroom to see if she knew any of the other students, before sighing with regret. Unfortunately, in this class she didn’t see any of the five other students she knew. Since she didn’t feel like introducing herself to anyone new, she pulled out her book and read until the teacher started the class.

“My name is Professor Felissa. It’s my pleasure to meet all of you,” said the teacher, a strict-looking woman in her early thirties. Alice nodded to herself when she saw the professor for the class. The woman was a bit lower level than the teacher for monster biology, but she was still quite impressive. She was borderline unattractive for this planet, which was already unusual, and given how much mana was concentrated in her brain Alice was sure she had plenty of [Intelligence] based Perks and classes. While that didn’t necessarily equate to being a good teacher, it meant she probably knew her subject very well.

 “Now, a lot of teachers prefer to start out the first day of class introducing you to what the subject matter is going to be about. I don’t particularly like long introductions, but I’ll still introduce my class a little bit. Introductory organic mana is a class about organic mana. Specifically, the uses of organic mana, how valuable it is to humanity, and its history. Many people believe it is the most powerful and advanced of the four basic mana types.

“What is Organic mana? Simply put, it allows you to influence the physical structure of anything alive. If it is alive, it can be influenced by Organic Mana. Whether it is the most basic plant, a monster, or a human, it can theoretically be manipulated by an Organic mage.

“Of course, this also means that you’re going to directly run into a major problem – all life in the world has some innate resistance to other sources of mana. This is a universal rule, and the more mana a creature has inside of it, the greater its resistance to external mana intrusion. If you want to, say, heal someone’s muscles after they’re cut by a sword, the patient’s body is going to try to stop you from changing it. If you try to stop someone’s heart from beating while they’re trying to kill you, the problem will be even worse – your opponent will be continuously moving, making it hard to target the right place with your mana tendrils, meaning it’s hard to do anything with your mana at all.

“How do you solve this problem? There are a few ways. The most common solution is to use Perks. There are dozens of [Organic Mage] Perks that let you find ways around this problem. The most well-known one is {Patient’s Consent,} which allows you to mess with another human being as long as they don’t reject the intrusion of your mana. If you want to be a healer, this Perk or a similar one is practically required. A normal human being is complex enough and has enough mana inside that influencing it will be incredibly expensive and difficult, and so finding ways to reduce consumption is critical. {Patient’s Consent} is a Perk that only requires you to be level 20 in [Organic Mage] to take, and has no other requirements. It’s very easy to access, and very effective.

“Of course, that isn’t the only way to resolve this problem. You can also take [Organic Mage] in completely different directions, such as focusing on healing yourself and increasing your physical abilities, because you yourself don’t resist your own mana very much. There is still some resistance, of course, but it is significantly reduced. However, this is only really useful if you want to swing a sword around or engage in heavy physical labor. It’s also almost impossible to do things like enhance your [Willpower] or [Intelligence] – human brains are so complicated that most people who try to mess with them make mistakes and die, unless they have very high level Perks backing up their actions.

“Finally, you can just bulldoze the problem. Mana density in a target increases the mana cost and difficulty of influencing them. However, if you just have better concentration abilities and more mana, you can overcome this problem by brute forcing it. You need very high [Intelligence] and [Magic] to pull this off, but it’s technically a solution as well.

“Most people just take the Perks though, since most [Organic Mages] are healers.

“So how does one heal as an [Organic Mage]? How does one acquire the class, how does one level it, and how does one heal someone? Simply put, you must know the human body. You must know it very, very well, because if you mess up you might accidentally drill a hole in your patient’s heart, or cause their liver to malfunction and make them very sick or very dead. There are dozens of ways to mess up as an [Organic Mage]. This is why anybody interested in healing must pass a very strict set of tests to get a healing license. Anybody who heals other people without a license better either have a VERY convincing case about extenuating circumstances or be ready to go to prison for several years. Therefore, one of the focuses class is a study about the human body and its structures. Your Perks will eventually help you avoid the worst mistakes if you heal people in the future, but you shouldn’t rely on them for everything. So the first part of this class is dedicated to learning what makes humans tick. Organs, blood vessels, muscles – we will cover all of these in great detail.

“But before we start studying the human body, a word of warning.”

The serious expression of the strict woman tightened, and for a moment she looked positively furious. Alice felt a shiver run down her spine as she saw the woman’s expression.

“If you misuse Organic Magic, I will hunt you down to the ends of the planet and kill you myself.

“Let’s talk about an old story. Once upon a time, there was a [Nobleman] Count who was able to use magic. He lived about three hundred years ago, and his name was Reldion.” Alice saw several of the students in her surroundings turn slightly pale. Alice felt a twinge of nervousness as she saw her classmates shiver – how infamous was Reldion if he was this feared three hundred years later? Or worse, was he still alive as an Immortal somewhere?

“Reldion was an incredibly gifted Mage. While we will never have an exact estimate of his level at the time he went mad, most [Historians] agree he was very close to Immortality at the age of 23. To reach the class evolution at level 100 and then get near the ‘final break point’ at level 25 of the next tier class at only age 23 is incredibly difficult. One might say that Reldion’s talent and work ethic were one in ten million. If only the same could be said about his ethical standards…

“Reldion thought that it was a shame humans were separated by birth and luck. Why did some people have the gift of using magic, while some did not? Why were some people blessed with social status without needing to work hard, while some people scrounged in the gutters for scraps of food?

“Reldion might have been an extraordinary Count if he had kept this question in mind and led his territory wisely, trying to make it a better place for the poor and disadvantaged.

“Instead, he began trying to think of a way to make all humans Mages. That is also not a bad thing, in and of itself. If all humans were mages, mana poisoning would no longer kill people, and monsters would be a much weaker threat to humanity as a whole. One could say his goals were quite admirable. But one’s goals cannot justify one’s actions.

“Reldion began delving into human experimentation. He began to kidnap citizens and to dissect them while they were still alive. He took Mages and non-mages alike, try to discover what made them different. He began trying to find ways to make non-mages into Mages more easily. The records we’ve recovered today show that he tried dozens of things. The most infamous experiment was one where he used his Organic Magic to cut out the mage core of a mage, transplant it into a non-mage, and then use Organic Magic to grow the mage core back for the original mage. This failed, killing the non-mage and driving the Mage insane after several repetitions, but serves as one of the most chilling reminders of what lacking ethics and a good cause can do to people.

“In the end, almost none of his experiments bore fruit. And in the process he dissected, tortured, and killed nearly twenty thousand people before the [Spies] of his country finally caught word of his experiments. Less than a week later [Soldiers] stormed his keep and killed him. His body was brought before the townspeople and torn to pieces by the furious mob.”

Silence fell over the classroom, before the [Teacher] looked over the students, seemingly satisfied with their responses. Alice felt a deeper twinge of horror while listening to the story. At the same time, she couldn’t help but feel that Count Reldion’s actions had a certain similarity with the Society of Starry Eyes…

Regardless of Alice’s thoughts, Professor Felissa’s words continued.

“Count Reldion’s research, in a way, paved some of modern Organic Magic’s knowledge of the human body. He is one of the only people who managed to get any research done about mage cores at all. He could also be said to have founded the Society of Starry Eyes. Some madmen who followed his legacy, known at the time as the Society of Eyes, sought to continue his experiments and continue his path through human experimentation. This eventually merged with another society known as the society of Stars, a group of Mages who wished to research dimensional magic for unknown reasons. These two merged together in the semi-recent past to become the Society of Starry Eyes.

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“And if any of you become the next Count Reldion, or become a part of the Society of Starry Eyes and inflict horror and suffering upon the people of Illvaria, I will bring a squad of [Soldiers] that I know from my army days and behead you. I have done so twice in the six years I have taught, and I am sure I will have to do it again.” The tension in the class grew as Alice and a few other students unconsciously nodded.

The strict woman’s face became more gentle, as she nodded. “Good. Now, with that out of the way, I’ll begin to introduce my lesson material. We’re going to start out with human anatomy before we get into the more magical bits of the lessons, and we’ll cover the history of Organic Magic in further detail later on. It may be a bit boring at first, but it’s very important to learn everything you can if you intend to mess with human biology. We’ll start out by learning about skin, because I think it’s one of the easier and simpler components of the human body. And it’s also very hard to kill someone if you mess up skin, making it a good subject to start out with. Human skins is comprised of several layers…”

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic human biology 0 -> 18

Alice found herself impressed as the professor started to get into her lesson contents. She hadn’t been sure how good this world’s understanding of human biology was. However, for all that this world lacked in technology and technical know-how, it couldn’t  be said that this ignorance extended to the human body. The understanding this professor had about human skin easily rivalled what Alice had learned in her middle and high school classes before she came to this dimension. Even if these people hadn’t figured out how to make printers, their knowledge could match a modern day biologist and doctor rolled into one. Or at least, as far as Alice could tell with her very limited knowledge of biologists and doctors, this seemed to be true.

Alice quickly settled in to began taking mental notes, paying extra attention to the professor’s words as the lesson continued. At first, Alice started to feel worried that this class might be less useful than expected – after all, human biology didn’t directly link up to any of her interests. However, after some thinking, Alice realized the class might actually be a jackpot of information. As far as she could tell, System worked by filtering mana and helping the human body adapt to it. This was… probably how Attributes worked – filter external mana, help the human body absorb it, replace muscles with mana, and then make people stronger. However, while mana was still the biggest component of the System’s actions, knowing more detail about the human body might give Alice key insights into how the System made the human body work with the filtered mana. She wasn’t sure if this class would go into that level of detail, but it was certainly possible for her to learn valuable information from this class. This class would be as useful as she had hoped it would be, if she asked her professor the right questions and paid attention.

* * *

Alice’s final class was Theory of Mana. In this class, she did spot Erkki, the enchanter’s son she had met in her first class. Alice was more than happy to talk to Erkki, because she had been learning about paired enchantments recently and none of her classes directly related to enchanting. Which was a bit of a shame, but with the two mandatory classes and all the other classes she wanted to take competing for her time, she hadn’t ended up having room for it this year.

Erkki was more than happy to talk about paired enchantments, and Alice found herself learning bits and pieces about how to set them up through the conversation. Most interestingly, she learned that the two components of a paired enchantment didn’t need to be set up at the same time, and they weren’t completely impossible to swap around either. A paired enchantment worked more like a radio channel than a direct bond between two objects – it was, in theory, possible to make a new object correspond to the ‘frequency’ of a paired enchantment, if the original item broke or something. It was just difficult and time consuming, because once the connection between two objects was established they tended to stick to each other and reject new connections. It was also possible to create ‘tri-enchantments’ and ‘quad enchantments,’ or even create giant groups of enchantments that were all keyed in to each other. However, it grew increasingly complicated and hard to keep functioning as the group of enchanted objects grew larger and larger.

After that, the teacher for the final lesson started the class. The teacher introduced himself as Professor Kosk, and seemed like a fairly affable man. He wore a casual suit, unlike the other teachers who either wore military uniforms or full-on formal wear, and seemed pretty average in level and strength. He spoke with a confident and relaxed tone, but Alice quickly realized that he had an even bigger tendency to get sidetracked than she did.

“Theory of Mana is a class that I often wish was mandatory, though unfortunately, it isn’t deemed important enough to be part of the mandatory curriculum,” said professor Kosk. “In this class, we deal with a lot of the theoretical underpinnings of magic and mana. Where does mana come from? What is broken mana? What is the nature of mana, and why are only Mages able to directly shape it? Why is life reliant upon mana? Does anyone have any guesses about any of these questions? I like to run this class with a lot of student ideas and feedback, because this is one of the classes that is most open to interpretation.”

After some hesitation, a few students raised their hands. After some thinking, Alice also raised her hand. While being wrong in public might be a bit embarrassing, it also served as an opportunity to check how much credence others would give her theories. It was worth answering, if she could.

“Yes, the young lady with brown hair,” said the professor, pointing to Alice.

“Broken mana is mana that is produced whenever a mage uses magic imperfectly, right? And it also seems more like mana that has adopted a specific ‘pattern,’ or some sort of property from whatever mana was originally used. For example, if one uses kinetic mana to move a cup of water, a little bit of mana will get ‘wasted’ and escape into the air, becoming a small blob of broken mana. Since Mages can see different colors of broken mana based on the original kind of magic used, it implies that there are different kinds of broken mana, at least in my opinion. The history of the Tragedy of Allenheim further supports this idea. When humanity first experimented with dimensional mana, they attempted to connect two different points of space together. However, when they instead caused a massive spurt of broken mana to kill off most of the capital city and the city they were connecting, a bunch of people went through broken mana baptisms – and, importantly, some of those people became ‘infectious,’ accidentally causing people they came in contact with to go through their own broken mana baptisms. Since no other kind of broken mana causes it, it seems clear that different kinds of broken mana exist.”

The professor frowned. He gave Alice a curious look, as he rubbed his chin in thought.

“I don’t think I’ve heard anyone talk about that in detail before. May I ask where you heard that theory? Did you read it in a book, or did one of your other professors discuss it?”

“I came up with the theory myself,” said Alice, thinking back to the first time she had seen broken mana. It had been months since then, but it was the first time she got to seriously debate her ideas with someone. At the time, she hadn’t had a good idea of what she was looking at, but the more she learned about broken mana and regular mana, the more she wondered what exactly set the two apart. It didn’t seem like it was critical to her primary area of focus, which was the inner workings of the System and mana, but she still found it to be an interesting topic.

“I think it makes sense,” said the professor, with a bit of interest lighting up his eyes. “Most people don’t pay much attention to broken mana, because it’s considered harmful waste product of magic users. Most Mages learn to clean it up and then lose further interest in the topic. The answer I was looking for was just ‘waste product of mana.’ You took the answer well beyond that point, in a direction I’ve never thought of. Even if the answer doesn’t seem very important, it’s very interesting. Well done, young lady!” The professor gave Alice a cheerful grin.

Alice felt a smile tug at her lips. She was glad that her theory wasn’t being tossed out the window – and more than that, she was glad to hear someone seriously consider her ideas. Based on professor Kosk’s statements, it sounded as if broken mana was a pretty underdeveloped field of study, except for those who analyzed its relationship to mana baptisms. Though, given the potentially deadly nature of mana and broken mana poisoning, Alice did kind of understand why people wanted to stay away from it as a field of study…

Instead of following up on some of his earlier statements, professor Kosk began to lead the class in a totally different direction, trying to get other students to think of other historical incidents or experiments that proved or disproved the idea of different kinds of broken mana having different properties. Other students began to raise their hands and mention other smaller experiments that delved into the nature of broken mana. Alice was more than a little please to hear this discussion – after all, she would never have known what to look for if she hadn’t started this discussion. She had access to the library of this academy, and it was a wonderful resource she had fought to access. However, she also needed to actually know where to look if she wanted to make the most out of it.

She quietly began filing away studies she wanted to look up later. Most of the studies the students mentioned didn’t explicitly focus on the nature of broken mana. Instead, they focused on studies run by (mostly Organic) Mages that had tried to treat cases of mana poisoning that had occurred by accident and ways the attempts to treat broken mana poisoning differed from regular mana poisoning. Such studies were very rare – after all, any incident involving potentially fatal incidents came under heavy scrutiny from Illvaria’s experimental ethics committee, and so such cases needed to truly be random. Despite that fact, random case studies sometimes came into Illvarian libraries from accidents.

After the students finished debating the topic, the teacher finally got the discussion back on track. He started talking about scholarly theories regarding why some areas of the world were almost covered in mana, while some weren’t (in short, [Scholars] had been debating this but had no real conclusions.) Alice was also a little surprised to learn that mana density wasn’t as uniform as she thought it was. There were all sorts of small regions that had higher or lower concentrations of mana – for example, there was a small maelstrom of broken mana to the southwest of the central continent, between the Sigmusi Colonia and Sigmusi Imperia called the maelstrom that was known to be a massive shipping hazard due to the mana and monster density. There was also a region of exceptionally dense mana on part of the Corellion empire’s east coast, another (much smaller) broken mana zone in the Nomad steppes to the north, and a few low-mana regions scattered across the Shil Confederacy.

Alice ended up realizing that the class ‘Theory of Mana’ was a bit different than what she was expecting. In this world, mana was literally everywhere, and it was almost a matter of philosophical debate rather than strict scientific debate because it was so omnipresent. Or, at least, that was the way the class treated mana. For most of the questions the teacher raised at the beginning of class, the most correct answer Alice could have provided based on the teacher’s answers was ‘nobody really knows, but here are some interesting ideas and theories that have been tossed around by [Scholars] and [Scientists] in the past.’ Still, the discussion between the teacher and the students gave her a lot of new ideas for areas of research to find in the library, from case studies about mana and broken mana poisoning to geographical studies about low and high density mana regions. Even though the class wasn’t quite what she was expecting it to be, by the end of the three hour class she was still happy she had taken the class.