Chapter 81: chapter 78

Two more weeks passed in relative quiet. Apart from being ludicrously inefficient, Alice’s new electromagnetic seed didn’t harm her in any way. Alice spent a few minutes every morning just running through whatever variants of ‘is this dangerous’ she  could feed into {Safety Analysis}, as well as using her once-per-day usage of {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to make sure that there were no problems. After that, she would run some basic tests with the seed, moving coins around, producing little sparks of lightning, and generally just trying to compare and contrast her electromagnetic seed with a more ‘normal’ seed made with the System’s help.

Apart from messing with her new deformed seed, Alice went to work on Ezrien’s kinetic plates every morning, went to classes, and read at the library. Now that Alice had made some progress on her research into the System, she was able to redirect her attention to learning more about Enchantments. Her research into the subject was nothing groundbreaking, but since Alice’s finances were barely stable she felt that stabilizing her income was a good use of her time. In the evenings, she tested out her new ideas, making slow but steady progress in reducing the broken mana production and energy waste of her enchantments and boosting the effect of her healing stones and dynamite. Apart from making money, Alice had decided she was unlikely to make any major breakthroughs in her research in the next two weeks since most of her Perks were either on cooldown or being kept for the sake of her safety. Her bad feeling was also getting worse and worse as time passed, so Alice decided to prepare for the worst, just in case her bad feeling was correct.

Since Alice had seen a variety of other enchanted items, especially Laila’s giant pile of enchanted items, Alice had felt quite a bit more inspired about what enchantments she wanted to carry around for herself, and had made three new enchanted items.

First and foremost, Alice had grabbed a ring, stuffed it with a few blue rocks that could interact with organic and healing mana effectively, and enchanted it with her healing magic seed to heal whoever was wearing the ring upon activation. This ring suffered severely from wasting huge amounts of mana due to the fact that it was using Alice’s healing seed instead of her organic seed, as well as the fact that Alice’s enchantments were still far from optimized, but it was an extra layer of lifesaving protection if Alice needed it in a pinch. Even if the enchantment would probably break in a few years, and would waste almost half of each monster core by turning it into broken mana instead of making it do something useful, it got around the fact that {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} could only be used once per day. Alice wasn’t entirely sure whether this ring would come in handy, but it only cost one and a quarter golden suns to make and she definitely felt that it wouldn’t hurt to have around.

The second enchantment Alice made was a bracelet similar to Laila’s bracelet she had used during the duel. Trying to power each bead had stumped Alice for a while, but eventually she came across the idea of taking monster cores from smaller monsters and melting down an enchanting material, specifically a type of stone, before hardening it around the monster core. This basically made the stone beads into consumable enchantments, and needed some help from a [Blacksmith] who specialized in more unusual materials, but it got the job done.

Upon activation, all of the stones attached to the bracelet would fling themselves at a target via a burst of kinetic mana. Alice had gotten some inspiration from her organic magic as well, and had done her best to add a special function to the stone beads. After touching anything ‘organic,’ the stones in the bracelet would try to ‘rip’ all of the flesh around them, making a wound significantly worse than it otherwise might have been. Since the enchantments were already basically consumable enchantments, Alice figured she might as well go all out in using up the mana from each bead, which would hopefully let the beads overpower the natural mana resistance of whatever she shot the beads at. It probably wouldn’t work on anything that was too strong, but it would do the job against weaker monsters or humans. Hopefully.

The only real reason Alice added the second enchantment to the bracelet was because Cecilia ended up buying a bunch of two-instruction stones that accepted kinetic and organic mana for a fairly cheap price, and so Alice ended up buying them from Cecilia for pretty cheap as well. Since the enchanting material could hold two instructions, it just seemed like a waste to leave an empty instruction slot laying around.

The third thing Alice made was a little hoop of… monster sinew. Which was kind of gross, so Alice wrapped it in leather with the help of a [Tailor] to turn the monster sinew into a necklace that she could wear without touching monster guts with her bare skin. At the bottom, she got a [Blacksmith] to make a little metal container with a lock that could be easily undone, but wouldn’t come undone unless she undid the contraption keeping the lid shut. Inside of it, she planned to store a few monster cores to feed the necklace as needed.

The monster sinew itself was given the ability to, when activated, stop all Kinetic Motion within about ten meters of the necklace. It would ignore living creatures with a high enough amount of mana inside of them, which was a slightly tricky instruction that Alice took a few tries to get right, but at the end of the day she had created a good second layer of defense for herself if more than four projectiles were about to hit her and {Adrenaline Rush} didn’t save her.

Alice wanted to make more enchantments if she could. Even if she had no clue how she might make something like a flying enchantment, and her ability to keep herself airborne with just her kinetic mana was dubious at best, it would have given her a mobility option if she needed it. However, by the time Alice was done making her first three tools, she was flat broke again.

On the bright side, even if Alice was now basically penniless, she had gained quite a few levels and skills from her enchanting spree.

You have leveled up!

Kinetic Manabinder 14 -> 19, Careful Enchanter 3->13, Scholar 38->39, Student 1 -> 2

Sadly, Explorer of Magic didn’t level up during the two weeks. Alice was beginning to really appreciate how heavy the growth penalty was for a class above level 50. The class gained levels more slowly than it had in the past, and even two weeks of steady work wasn’t enough to gain a level. Even with a 375% bonus to growth rate, she had barely managed to get [Explorer of Magic] to level 54. It was no wonder people found it hard to reach Immortality. Thinking about it another way, it was actually incredible that she managed to push the class to such a high level despite having a massive ‘late start’ in this world. Alice was a little disappointed she couldn’t see her first Perk fusion yet, but she knew she would be able to see it sooner or later. With another major experiment or enough slow but steady work, she would get there.

For her three new Perks, Alice was delighted to start getting more options to improve the quality of her enchantments and improve her control over her Kinetic Mana.

Vastly improved Kinetic vision Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 15 or higher, {Improved Object Control} Perk, {Projectile Awareness} Skill 20 or greater, Perception 100 or greater

You gain the ability to see in all directions at once, as well as drastically enhanced perception of any and all kinetic energy or objects in motion within your surroundings. Note: Vision of your surroundings created by this perk is different from your regular vision. You will only be able to see in black and white, and will not be able to see mana in your surroundings without using your real eyes.

The ability to see in all directions was one of the fundamental boosts that Kinetic Mages relied on to survive potential ambushes. The bonus of being able to see in all directions and avoid getting sneak-attacked was well worth a level 15 perk slot, especially because the two earlier versions of this perk, {Object Control} and {Improved Object Control}, had more than pulled their weight.

The Perk didn’t disappoint. The moment Alice took the Perk, she gained the ability to see in all directions. After some testing, Alice determined that every single inch of her skin now acted as something like an inferior pair of eyes, even the back of her neck and her arms. While they weren’t able to see mana or color, this still greatly reduced any potential danger an [Assassin] or otherwise might pose towards Alice, since she almost literally had eyes in the back of her head now. She could also sense any objects moving with crystal clarity now. Even though an [Assassin] with enough stealth perks would still be able to sneak up on her, anyone without a highly specialized build or enough levels to just overwhelm her with a greater quality and quantity of Perks wouldn’t be able to sneak attack her ever again. More importantly, Alice would have a much easier time tracking pieces of flying objects during a fight. [Kinetic Mages] were theoretically able to make themselves almost totally immune to projectiles and physical objects during a fight, but that required a [Kinetic Mage] to first notice them all and have enough mana tendrils free to deal with all of the oncoming threats. Alice had taken another very important step towards becoming a competent [Kinetic Mage].

Repurposing Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 5 or greater

You gain the ability to 'repurpose' old enchantments much more easily than before.

Alice had grabbed this Perk from {Careful Enchanter} without much thought. One of the bigger ‘tuition costs’ for learning how to enchant objects, and create new enchantments was the number of times she would fail to make an enchantment work the way she hoped it would work. While she could sometimes salvage the materials from a failed attempt, most of the time once she failed an enchantment she ruined the materials and had to buy a new set. This Perk made it much easier to ‘salvage’ these materials, and also provided a surprisingly noticeable boost to Alice’s status in Ezrien’s research team. Normally, when the team discovered a problem or tried to optimize part of the movement plates, they had to make a new part and then swap out the old part. Even though the movement plate prototype was made of several different enchanting materials stuck together in some bizarre patchwork of an enchantment, needing to physically remove one component without messing up the others and then replace it took up a lot of time, and each enchanting component lost chewed through some research funds. After getting this Perk, Alice was able to salvage enchanting materials more often. It was a small, but nifty, bonus to the team’s budget, and was also the reason Alice managed to make her new bracelet and necklace, even with her limited budget.

The second perk from Careful Enchanter helped Alice improve the quality of her enchantments, though not in a way Alice had expected.

Blueprint Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 10 or greater, Intelligence 150 or greater

You may create up to three different 'blueprints' inside of your memory, by carefully imagining each enchanting material you wish to add to the enchantment and then imagining what kind of 'instruction' you wish to add to each enchanting material. You will be able to get some sense of how well the enchantment will work in practice - and you will also be less likely to make mistakes when making a physical copy of a blueprint if you spend a larger amount of time on making the item. Note: You can freely delete old blueprints, but some amount of mental taxation will occur. Frequent use may cause headaches or migraines, so it is advised not to delete blueprints too frequently.

This Perk was one that caught Alice a little off guard at first, since she wasn’t actually very prone to making big mistakes while making an enchantment. If she made a major error that ruined a material, it was usually because she was trying something she hadn’t done before. However, she did make lots of smaller mistakes during the course of making an enchantment – after all, there was a reason Alice’s enchantments were prone to leaking more mana and creating more broken mana than a professional [Enchanter]’s item would, even if both enchantments did the same thing. Part of the reason was just that Alice didn’t have enough Perks and Achievements backing up her actions, of course, but another part of the problem was that Alice didn’t have years of practice and Skills behind her yet. She was able to spend mana to hurry up the completion of an object now, thanks to {Speed Enchanting}, but even though that allowed her to use all of her mana every day she still had a long way to go.

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{Blueprint} was surprisingly effective at helping Alice create dozens of different copies of the same item, while making minor changes to the item’s design over and over again. She might not be able to fine-tune the enchantment in blueprint form, but after Alice started using this Perk to evaluate her healing rings, she was at least able to spot some of her bigger mistakes and start fixing them when making the actual products. It didn’t bring her enchanting up to the level of a professional [Enchanter] yet, but it was getting closer and closer. In addition, it proved to be another minor bonus to Alice’s standing in Ezrien’s team. Ezrien was starting to joke that he should have paid her more than just forty gold suns to work for his team for a year, and after some thinking, he had given her a bonus of an extra four silver crowns midway through the second week. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but Alice was grateful for the little boost to her strained finances and the intent behind the gesture. Legally speaking, when Alice had joined the team she had already signed a contract stipulating that Ezrien had paid her wages for the next year in advance, so he wasn’t obligated to give her even a bent copper coin. A small bonus was still a bonus, and Alice appreciated the gesture as an acknowledgement of her growing skill and value to the research team. This brought Alice’s finances back to about five silver crowns in total, or half of a golden sun.

Apart from her new Perks, Alice got to see {Scholar of Magic} working more over the two weeks. Now, every couple days of her hard work would get rewarded with another 1% bonus to one of her Magic seeds. To Alice’s delight, when this happened she would see a new System fractal pop up and start pushing mana into her body. This was in line with what Alice had expected to happen, and apart from recording each fractal with {Mana Construct Modelling} and carefully memorizing it, she didn’t have much to work with in order to figure out what the fractals here were doing yet. After all, there was still way too much information in each fractal and she could only make sense of bits and pieces of it. Seeing a new System fractal still made her happy though, even if she couldn’t quite figure out what it was doing yet.

As a result of two weeks of classes and Library reading, Alice got a 1% bonus to her Pure Mana seed, 3% bonus to her Healing Seed, and 4% bonus to her Organic seed.

Finally, besides focusing on improving her enchanting and income, Alice spent a fair amount of time trying to look up information about what a ‘normal’ electromagnetic seed looked like in the library. Sadly, the seed slot generated by {Experimental Seed} couldn’t be influenced by other perks, so Alice’s research didn’t end up boosting the seed. Though, this was perhaps for the better, since the seed suddenly gaining new properties mid-experiment would have been a massive headache. Overall, Alice’s findings were limited, but she was at least able to get a better idea of what an electromagnetic seed should look like if it was developed by the System. Next time she made a seed on her own, it would be better.

Since she didn’t come across any new problems, after two weeks, Alice set up a mana filtration system and helped Cecilia set up the manaless room again. Then, using Cecilia’s newly opened magic seed slot that the girl gained from her level 45 [Enchanter] Class, Alice helped Cecilia as she tried forming a healing magic seed without any System assistance.

“How does the seed feel?” Asked Alice, as she started feeding questions into {Safety Analysis}.

Cecilia frowned, before she shook her head. “This seed feels very… weird. Do you have any info from {Safety Analysis}?”

Alice frowned as her Perk started giving her responses to her questions. “The seed is no good. Give me permission so I can break it back down.”

Cecilia nodded, before leaning against the wall and stretching out her other hand towards Alice and letting Alice break down the faulty healing seed.

Cecilia sighed. “Darn. I was hoping it would go faster, since you were helping me along the way and you even had the mana filter set up in advance for me. I guess there are more problems in the seed-making process than just mana filtration… How much time did it take you to make a seed without System help?”

“Three months. And the best result I got is that terrible electromagnetic seed. But since I’m helping you out, it should hopefully take less time than that. We can also do three tries a month instead of two, since my Perk cooldowns are getting shorter and shorter.”

Cecilia sighed again. “I don’t mind working for it, I guess. Good achievements take time to earn. I’m just starting to feel a little bad – I know you probably have other experiments in mind and I’m using up your Perk activations instead.”

“I don’t mind helping you,” said Alice. “This isn’t useless to me. And you’re my friend. I can forego a little bit of progress to help you out, especially considering all of the help you’ve given me since I came to this world. Just having someone I can talk to about Earth when I’m feeling nostalgic or lonely is a huge help, honestly.”

Cecilia smiled at that. “I’m glad. Since we’re both on our own, I like having someone to talk to as well.’ She paused, as she looked at Alice. “Say, what do you plan to focus on, once I get my Achievement squared away?”

“I want to see what a System Magic Seed looks like. And I really should try forming a seed based on Earth’s knowledge again, when I finally work up the nerves to do it. If I can figure it out, I also want to link it all back up to self-sustaining enchantments, and maybe turn that into a source of revenue. But I don’t actually have a seed slot free for use right now. My {Experimental Seed Slot} is probably fine for testing Earth stuff, but for System Magic I need a useful slot ready. I really wish my last couple {Careful Enchanter} Perks had offered me a new magic seed slot, but I haven’t gotten an option for it yet. Maybe at level 15 or 20?” Alice shrugged.

Cecilia chuckled. “If you can find time in your schedule, the Church of the System almost definitely has a Perk list for [Careful Enchanter].”

“Finding time is the problem,” grumbled Alice, absently. Then, she shrugged again, before smiling to herself.

Even though today was a failure, they could keep trying. The two spent an hour or two just chatting as they made a few more enchanted objects. Every so often, a customer would come in and look around, although they usually left without buying anything. The day drew to a close, and eventually Alice returned to her inn room for the night.

As she went to sleep, Alice tossed and turned as she thought of tomorrow.

The next day was the first day the self-defense class would do its ‘extra’ activity. She would be hunting monsters fairly close to the capital, along with many of her classmates.

She had made three new enchantments just to keep herself safe. She had practiced how to use {Adrenaline Rush} with the help of her self-defense teacher during her classes, gotten a handle on how to deal with the sudden loss of extra [Agility] and [Magic] when the Perk ended, and had boosted her Skills and Stats by small but useful amounts during the two weeks of duel training. She would even be going to the extra training sessions with the classmates she had come to know better, minus Laila who wasn’t interested.

It was just a routine program the crown had initiated, in order to deal with increasing manpower shortages and safety concerns in wake of the southern recolonization effort. But even though Alice intellectually knew that this was an important step towards keeping herself safe in the long run, she was nervous.

* * *

Somewhere far to the north, two people finally reached their destination. An Immortal and his servant, a man who seemed to be half-made of metal. After sneaking past the monsters surrounding their destination, they snuck through the outer layer of protection and finally reached the place the Immortal had been looking for.

However, their entrance was imperfect. Both of them missed something. They might not have cared about it, even if they had noticed it. After all, in many ways, it wasn’t their problem.

The outer layer of defenses had the ability to flood an area with mana whenever the monster population got too low. Using monsters as a defense mechanism had a very obvious drawback, which was the fact that the monsters might make a mess if they got inside of the place they were supposed to protect. The place the Immortal had been investigating had a very well-made enchantment embedded in the metal walls, insulating the rich mana inside of the area from the senses of the monsters outside. Since Monsters were universally stupid and mana-hungry, most of them bumped into the incredibly well-made, regenerating physical wall before ignoring it completely. When the Immortal and the half-metal man snuck past the monsters, they left a small crack in those defenses.

And as the two laughed and began walking into the area they had sought for so long, a monster began creeping towards the crack. It was a relatively small monster, difficult to notice if one wasn’t paying attention. It looked like a spider, but had thirteen eyes instead of eight. It was a creature specialized in stealth and manipulation of shadows.

Before the wall finished rebuilding itself, it found the little crack and wriggled its way in.