Chapter 78: Chapter 75

On Friday, Alice finally got around to repairing the dice she and Anne had cracked during the last game of The Settlers, and reinforced the dice a bit with some leftover enchanting materials and some scraps of iron. It wasn’t perfect, but it should resist any major Mage-fights more effectively now. On Saturday, She, Cecilia, Anne, and Ezrien got together for another game of The Settlers. Ezrien got acquainted with the magically influenced rule set quickly, and the four of them enjoyed playing another round of the game. Alice was starting to wonder if this would probably become something of a weekly tradition, based on Cecilia and Anne’s newfound enthusiasm for the game. Despite the fact that the rules were totally different from what they had been back on Earth, Alice was still gratified to see that one of her favorite games from home was popular here. Besides, having some small amount of social interaction with her friends was an important way to maintain her social life, and considering how stretched for time she was already this was about all she could manage. Whenever she had more time, she would like to carve a few more board games from home, but that was impossible right now.

After Friday, the weekend began. Much like back on Earth, weekends in the world of Luliv were free from classes, so Alice had enough free time to catch up on her enchanting. This helped restore some of her slowly dwindling funds. Alice did some rough calculations and determined that, if things continued to sell for the same price and at the same rate, she could probably hover somewhere between three and five gold suns per week. It wasn’t exactly financial stability, but it also wasn’t as bad as she had been thinking it would be when she was looking over her finances earlier in the week.

Apart from that, Alice finally picked up the 25^th level of Apprentice Enchanter. Because [Apprentice Enchanter] was a Student/Apprentice type class, it maxed out at level 25, meaning Alice had her final Perk in the class, as well as her second opportunity to go through a class Evolution. She chose the Perk fairly quickly, based on her continuously increasing need to increase the number of hours she could spend awake and productive in a day.

Speed-Enchanting Requirements: Apprentice Enchanter level 25 or higher, Endurance 100 or higher, Intelligence 125 or higher

While working on an enchantment, you may spend more mana to produce the Enchantment more quickly. This effectively allows you to trade mana for time, wasting more mana in exchange for producing the same product more quickly.

In general, Alice spent at least two hours and no more than five hours working on enchantments every night. This was becoming seriously hard to sustain, because she had so many competing objectives to sink time into. This might not exactly be an optimal solution for that problem, but it was about the best she expected to get from an Apprentice class at level 25. It would require her to waste some mana to activate, but it was still less wasteful than doing nothing with the mana at all. Then, Alice turned her attention to her class evolution.

This one only had three options, unlike her first evolution.

Class Evolution: Apprentice Enchanter

Enchanter: An Enchanter that focuses on having a balanced approach to the school of enchanting. They specialize in neither speed nor in rare but incredibly detailed enchantments. A jack of all trades within the enchanting profession, but also the one that holds the most versatility when it comes to selecting Perks. Unlocked as a result of: Having the Apprentice Enchanter class at level 25

Increases Effect of [Magic] Attribute by 10%. Your ability to assess the effects of Enchantments you have not encountered before increases significantly, and the speed at which you can produce an enchantment is improved by 20%. The quality of items you enchant will receive a small boost, especially when it comes to mana efficiency (other aspects of items will still receive a boost, just a less significant one).

Mass-Enchanter: An enchanter specializing in producing large quantities of enchantments quickly. Mass-Enchanters often specialize in producing consumable enchantments, because that type of enchantment benefits the most from being able to produce multiple items at a time. The Perks of this class reflect this bias, but do not restrict the class. Most suitable for those that wish to produce large numbers of average-quality enchantments, or produce consumable enchantments Unlocked as a result of: Having [Apprentice Enchanter] class at level 25 or higher, produce at least 10 consumable enchantments, produce more than 20 enchanted items within a week

Increases Effect of [Magic] Attribute by 20%. Your multitasking abilities will become more easily applicable to enchanted items.

Careful Enchanter: An enchanter who specializes in producing very specific, unique enchantments with a great variety of details, often at the cost of producing enchantments quickly. Suitable for those who wish to one day forge Artifacts for Immortals to fight with… or for those who are simply very ambitious when they create new enchantments. Unlocked as a result of: Spend more than a month working on one specific enchantment or item, [Apprentice Enchanter] class at level 25 or higher, Intelligence at least 150.

Increases the effect of the [Intelligence] Stat by 10% when planning the details of a new item. Your enchanted items will receive a very noticeable boost in quality, but it will become even harder to apply your multitasking abilities to creating different items at once. At the same time, it will become easier to use multitasking abilities when all split focuses are working on producing the same item, and items will receive a further boost in quality for every division of your attention focused on producing an item at once.

After some thinking, Alice decided to take the [Careful Enchanter] class. One of her biggest problems remained the inability to get enough hours in the day to do everything she wanted to, but [Kinetic Manabinder] already seemed like a class that would provide Perks that solved that problem, given enough time and Levels. [Scholar] and [Scientist] also had some Perks that helped her save time or improve the use of what time she had, and so she would just start hoping that the System gave her some options from those classes instead. After all, the System explicitly responded to what people wanted when choosing the Perks people could take every time one of their classes reached the appropriate level, so Alice didn’t feel the need to devote another class to solving this problem when she could already solve it, given enough time and Levels in her other classes.

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And instead of churning out mass produced enchantments, Alice felt that it was better to make a smaller quantity of well-made enchantments. One of the reason Cecilia’s shop struggled to make a foothold in Metsel, and the reason both she and Cecilia had a harder time selling some of their work, was that their products just didn’t quite match up to the quality one would expect from a professional Enchanter shop. The two lowered the price of their objects to account for that, but it was still hard to get customers in the door sometimes, according to Cecilia. One of the only reasons Cecilia’s shop still managed to get by was the fact that Alice’s enchantments tended to be based on weird seeds or weird ideas most [Enchanters] didn’t bother building enchantments around, meaning that her enchantments didn’t have much competition in the market. And once customers were already in the door, Cecilia could use her [Merchant] Perks to figure out what customers wanted and how much they were willing to pay, meaning she could usually get customers to buy a few more things once they were already there. However, this wasn’t exactly producing buckets of money. If some sort of enchantment was needed by large numbers of people, [Enchanters] would already be producing it, so the market Cecilia’s shop currently catered to was quite niche. If the two wanted to make enough money to feed themselves, their enchantments needed to get better so that they could expand their customer base.

Besides, Alice also figured that once she finally made a proper System Mana seed, she would want to be able to make enchantments with it. If for no other reason than the sheer curiosity of finding out what she would be able to make, since besides filtering mana Alice wasn’t really sure what else System mana even did. [Careful Enchanter] seemed like it would make that process easier and faster.

Apart from that, Alice got a little bit of progress in her other classes over the weekend, especially in [Explorer of Magic] and [Kinetic Manabinder], as well as a bit of progress in her new [Careful Enchanter] class. Grinding out enchantments wasn’t the fastest way to level, but it was still slowly and steadily getting her some Experience towards levelling her classes.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder: 12->14 Explorer of Magic: 51->52 Careful Enchanter: 1->3 Scholar 34-> 36

Admittedly, Alice didn’t absorb very much mana before going from level 51 to 52 in [Explorer of Magic]. She had probably been really close the next level already. But she decided to take her blessings when they came and leave it at that. After picking her [Scholar] Perk, the week continued with little in the way of new and important events.

Scholar of Magic Requirements: Scholar level 35 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, at least 1 magic seed is at a mana conversion ratio of 150% or higher, at least 3 magic seeds present.

When reading a book, listening to a lecture, or interacting with schoolwork related to a certain kind of magic seed, if you have a correlating magic seed inside of your body at that time you will be able to raise the mana conversion ratio of the seed beyond its limit. Note: This process is rather slow, and the speed will slow down further the higher the current mana conversion ratio of the related seed is.

Alice took {Scholar of Magic} due to the fact that would help her improve her magic seeds a step further. The value of increasing the mana conversion ratio in her seeds by any amount was huge, since it allowed her to regenerate mana every day. This improved her ability to train her Classes and Skills, make more enchanted items every day, and improve her quality of life and combat ability. Best of all, the Perk would activate as a result of her going about her regular, day to day life. She didn’t need to take time or energy to work on using the Perk, because it would just passively activate in the background as she went around her daily schedule. Even if it was a Perk that was absolutely devoted to ‘long term growth,’ Alice felt it was well worth investing a Perk slot into. She had the safety and financial security to invest a bit in her future right now. And since Alice had 5 Magic Seeds, the value of improving her magic seeds was much higher than the normal value someone might get out of this Perk.

Another week came and went. Alice attended her classes, worked with Ezrien’s team, and enchanted objects to sell at Cecilia’s workshop in the evenings. {Scholar of Magic} started to show its effects, however minor they were, by raising her Organic mana seed by 1%. The speed the Perk worked at left much to be desired, but Alice was still content with the newfound potential for her seeds to keep improving.

About halfway through the second week, Alice got two small surprises.

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