Chapter 84: Chapter 81

Alice’s group of [Students], along with the injured [Knight] and the convulsing [Scout], made their way back towards the hunting camp in silence. Alice decided to reveal that she could discover the location of monsters with the help of [Sixth Sense], since the group no longer had a [Scout] and monster detection wasn’t exactly rare in this world. Since nobody else had a good method of tracking monsters, Alice ended up taking the lead. She also took over the duty of levitating the [Scout], since Alice wanted to observe the process of a broken mana baptism. Nobody else in this world had ever been able to make the process of undergoing a mana baptism any less dangerous during hundreds of years of research and failed attempts, but as far as Alice knew nobody else could see System mana either. She could probably learn a lot from observing the process, even if she failed to improve the whole process.

Luka was more than happy to give her the duty of dealing with the injured [Scout], and so Alice was able to observe the [Scout] with one of her four mental focuses while the other three scanned her surroundings with her regular human eyes, {Sixth Sense}, and {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision}.

Every single second, atmospheric mana seeped into the [Scout’s] body through his skin. Upon entry, the System would automatically convert the atmospheric mana into the purplish broken mana Alice had seen the [Dimensional Mage] use during the fight. After being converted, some of the purplish mana looked especially odd, and was far less… pure than normal dimensional mana. Whenever this mixed mana cropped up, the System would quickly put it through a second round of purification with slightly different mana glyphs, giving Alice a few new insights about what the System thought was important to do during a mana baptism. Since the System focused so much on keeping all of the mana similar to the kind that had started the baptism, perhaps it was safer to finish the process using the same kind of mana? Alice wasn’t sure if her assumption was correct, but it was all she had to go on right now.

Once the mana entered the [Scout’s] body, it immediately began heading towards his heart and brain, ignoring the rest of his body.

However, the way the mana entered and interacted with his body seemed to cause a fair amount of damage to other areas, even if the mana used them only as roads to reach the important organs. As the mana came into contact with the man’s skin, the skin seemed to deteriorate, developing strange lesions and injuries at times, and at other times bubbling up like accelerated tumors. Alice was baffled when she saw this. She had never seen mana actively harm tissues and organs before. In fact, mana seemed to be fairly beneficial when it was below the threshold for a mana baptism. Why was the mana involved in a baptism so different? Alice had no idea, but she took note of her observation to make sense of when she had more information. She also wondered if this sensation continued inside of the man’s body. Right now, Alice had no ability to see what was happening to the man’s organs. She could observe the mana there, but she couldn’t see the actual fleshy bits and observe them in any way, which made Alice feel more than a little bit frustrated.

However, the reactions of the mana inside of the man’s body painted a disastrous picture. The mana passing through various areas in the man’s body would occasionally explode, releasing little fountains of broken dimensional mana as they spun wildly out of control. The man’s complexion was steadily getting worse, and at times his breathing began to sound labored as the group continued to walk. The strange lesions on the man’s body also began to bleed occasionally as well. The sight was gruesome enough that Alice very nearly lost her focus, but she did her best to push her thoughts and feelings aside for now. She wasn’t willing to force someone to undergo a mana baptism against their will, so this might be the only chance she had to observe one up close. Even if she sympathized with the man’s plight and hoped he would pull through safely, she needed to learn what she could here.

She redirected her focus to observe the System Mana in her surroundings. System Mana was naturally present during the entire process. It seemed to be doing two things. First, it was trying to help filter and guide baptism mana away from areas it didn’t need to touch, which helped reduce and control the damage the mana did to the [Scout’s] body and (presumably) organs. Second, the System mana was working overtime to try to mess with the mana near the [Scout’s] heart and brain.

The mana in those areas was quite a bit more… violent than in other areas. In most parts of his body, mana seemed to damage it mostly by accident as it was passing through. However, near his heart, mana was actively and violently shuffling around, erupting towards the nearby organs as they built… something. And near his brain, it seemed like a few extra bits of mana were trying to fashion themselves into a new part of his brain that didn’t currently exist. Alice was guessed that the new part of his brain was what allowed Mages to actually control their mana – without it, they might have a mage core but no actual magic abilities, making the entire process a very dangerous and lethal accident with no upsides. She didn’t have a way to verify this guess right now, so she added it to her mental list of things to search for more information for when she had the opportunity, but it seemed like a reasonable assumption. As for the mana near his heart, it was probably trying to form a Mage core.

This was also the place where System mana was most active in the man’s body. Right behind the man’s heart, the System was throwing an obscene amount of Organic Mana at the man’s body, trying to do… something? Heal? Keep flesh intact? Alice frowned, trying to make out what was actually happening and what the System was trying to do, before she realized something.

Slightly behind the human heart, there was a rather important part of the human body. This was the spine, which the human brain used to relay commands to the rest of the body. Mage cores were always, without exception, located behind the heart. Even though they didn’t touch the human spine, they definitely got kind of close to it. And unlike class fractals and such, the Mage core was an entirely physical organ. If a new organ grew right behind a human heart, it wouldn’t be surprising at all if it damaged the spine or messed up arteries or something in the process. Even a light consequence might be the newly formed mage core pinching a few vital nerves, causing a newly baptized mage to lose the ability to move anything below their ribs or something. Alice wasn’t a doctor, and she wasn’t entirely sure what would happen if a fist-sized organ was suddenly added behind the human heart, but she didn’t need much medical knowledge to realize it would be bad.

This gave Alice a much better guess what the System was doing. Even though she couldn’t make out the small, specific details, most of the chunks of Organic Mana Alice could figure out the purpose of were either rerouting the nerves in the man’s spine so that they didn’t get pinched or destroyed by the new organ, and at the same time, shifting the placement of the human heart ever so slightly so that the newly growing mage core and the heart didn’t get in each other’s way.

There seemed to be some other, smaller details that Alice couldn’t quite make out, but she was pretty sure she at least had the gist of the System’s purpose correct.

The other area with the heaviest concentration of System mana was the man’s brain. Alice was pretty sure a small part of what the System was doing there was making the new part of the brain, linking it up to other parts of the brain, and keeping everything else in the man’s skull working during the whole process. However, there were also about twenty different things going on with System Mana, Pure mana, and Organic Mana that, frankly, Alice had no understanding of at all. The lack of quantity present near the [Scout’s] brain was more than rivalled by the sheer complexity of whatever was happening there.

For now, Alice just memorized everything she could see while throwing every fractal she could get a full picture of into {Mana Construct Modelling}. Even if she had no clue what she was looking at right now, she could look more closely at the other System fractals she didn’t understand and try to interpret them later. It wasn’t much, but it was a plan at least.

And then something strange happened. The System fractals, which had previously been clearly working to guide and control the mana in the man’s body, seemed to mess up for a moment. Mana surged and spiraled out of control for about two seconds, and for a brief moment, the mana in the [Scout’s] body no longer had a guide carefully controlling the mana entering his body. The man arced his back and screamed in unbearable agony. The relatively minor lesions and bumps on his skin grew much worse, as if his condition had suddenly worsened over the course of a few seconds, before the System fractals reasserted control over the situation. Alice stared at the System fractals in shock, trying to figure out what had happened. Was this normal? Did something happen?

Was the System mana messing up the reason why the fatality rate was so high when it came to mana baptisms? Was this some sort of quirk related to dimensional mana? Was this just a result of the man’s unique biology? Was it something else entirely? Alice had no clue what was normal or a problem in this situation.

She was sure that the [Scout’s] situation was becoming more and more dangerous. The System mana stabilized and got back to work. Anxious, Alice stretched out a mana tendril and tried feeding the man a bit of Healing Mana. After all, Healing mana didn’t have any major side effects even if one had no clue what they were doing. It was absurdly wasteful and often struggled to handle major injuries with the level of precision they deserved, but it was never bad even if it was strictly inferior to Organic mana in most situations. Which was perfect since Alice had no clue what she was looking at right now.

And then after Alice tried to feed the man a little bit of help, Alice’s mana vanished into the whirlpool of broken dimensional mana like a drop of water thrown into the ocean. Alice saw no results of her action, and the man certainly didn’t heal. If Alice hadn’t been closely observing the whole process, she might have doubted whether she had even tried to heal the man in the first place.

Suddenly, Alice had a better understanding of why Mages struggled to make this process easier or safer. Since the System converted all kinds of mana into the ‘correct’ mana for a mana baptism, and the man seemingly needed to stick with one kind of mana from start to finish during his baptism, trying to use any kind of healing-based mana during the healing process might be useless. Since most of this world’s complex healing procedures involved magic, that meant that every single kind of treatment this world specialized in would vanish directly into the vortex of mana and accomplish absolutely nothing.

Alice frowned, but didn’t try to heal the man anymore. In fact, she was beginning to feel a massive headache as she tried to think about how to improve this process. Anything she did with mana would have no effect, and without that Alice felt surprisingly helpless. If she couldn’t use her magic, how could she help?

The System mana was still clearly doing something. Maybe she needed to use Perks or something? As Alice wrestled with the question of what let System mana work here while healing mana didn’t, the group finally returned to camp.

“Open up! We have one injured and a prisoner!” Yelled Arin, at the top of his lungs, the moment the group came within sight of the camp. “We ran into some members of the Society of Starry Eyes! Get me some Organic Mages! Also, the injured has come in contact with what might have been dimensional mana. Keep him quarantined.”

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Alice heard professor Felissa yell something she couldn’t make out, and the wall of the encampment was almost immediately torn apart. Four Organic Mages rushed out, before separating the group of six and quickly taking a look at the [Students] first. Meanwhile, two of the other [Knights] took the seriously injured Society member and dragged him away.

“You appear to be largely fine, Student-Lady Alice,” said professor Felissa, after giving her a quick checkup with a few Perks and injecting a bit of organic mana into her. “Just some scratches and minor bruises. Even if I don’t do a thing, you probably won’t even notice the injuries, but I gave you a heal anyway.” Then, Professor Felissa ignored her and focused on the remaining people from Alice’s hunting group.

[Knight] Arin’s arm was quickly healed up by another Professor. However, the [Organic Mages] simply took a look at the [Scout] before one of them used kinetic magic to gently set him off to the side. They gave him a bed someone pulled out of Storage, but otherwise didn’t touch him or interact with him. An enchanted item was even set up to keep other people from getting close to the [Scout], since nobody had confirmed whether he was contagious or not.

“How is he doing?” asked Alice, once one of the [Organic Mages] finished checking up on the [Scout].

“Poorly. Generally speaking, a successful mana baptism tends to be a faster baptism. The longer it takes, the worse his odds are,” said the [Organic Mage]. “Combined with how quickly his organs are deteriorating, and how much damage his body is suffering… I do not think he is going to succeed. He might pull out of it, because it’s never too late to succeed a baptism until you’re dead. However, at this point, I don’t like his odds.” Alice frowned, but nodded. She also wondered what a ‘normal’ speed for a mana baptism looked like. She seemed to recall that her own mana baptism had taken a much longer period of time than the [Scout’s], and yet she had succeeded…

She shook aside her thoughts, refocusing on the [Scout’s] desperate struggle for survival as she ignored her System notifications. Another hour passed as she watched in silence. The System mana in the [Scout’s] body never seemed to make another ‘error’ and lose control of the mana the way she had observed earlier, but the man’s situation continued to deteriorate.

The [Organic Mage] didn’t heal the man, but he was more than happy to narrate the situation to Alice in detail. His organs became more and more damaged by as time passed, his mage core continuously failed to form properly, and the System’s frantic attempts to feed mana into his brain never stopped, but never seemed to finish whatever it was trying to do either.

Finally, his body reached its limit. The man’s thrashing and screaming began growing weaker, and finally, his breathing stopped. The rainbow mana in his body seemed to give up, dispersing back into Alice’s surroundings, and atmospheric mana stopped flowing into the man’s body. Alice realized, with a small pang of sadness, that the man was dead. She didn’t feel any great amount of grief at his passing – after all, she had never met him before today, and she could count on her hands the number of sentences they had spoken to each other. She didn’t even know the man’s name.

But Alice still allowed herself a few minutes of silence for the death of the [Scout] that had fought with her and the rest of the group. Even if she had barely spoken with him, his death was worthy of a few minutes of silence and respect.

Finally, Alice returned to her own area. Night was beginning to set in, and the [Teachers] began preparing to move the [Students] back to town. A few of the [Organic Mages], led by Arin, had returned from investigating the bones Alice’s group had stumbled across, and had reported that the bones weren’t human – they were just chunks of organic matter heavily manipulated with Perks and organic mana to look like bones. This had set Alice’s heart somewhat at ease, because she had felt rather bad for the kids who had died earlier. With the investigation finished and the [Scout’s] fate already decided, there was no reason to stick around anymore. The [Teachers] in charge of the hunting trip announced that they would leave in thirty minutes. Which gave Alice just enough time to look through her Status Screen and system notifications, and after that she should still have enough time to go to the rest of her group and figure out what to do with the items they found on the bodies of the Society members. She started out by looking over her previously ignored System notifications.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 47 -> 50, Explorer of Magic 54-> 55, Kinetic Manabinder 19 -> 23, Scholar 39 -> 40

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance 122 -> 123, Magic 145 -> 146, Perception 129 -> 130, Dexterity 108 -> 109

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Kinetic Manipulation: 64 -> 65, Mana Control: 44 -> 46, Mana Precision: 45 -> 47, Kinetic Force:  41 -> 44, Projectile Awareness : 20 -> 23, Divided Attention: 23 -> 25, Broken Mana Purification: 14 -> 15, Basic Human Biology 26 -> 28

Even if today wasn’t exactly a day Alice could feel happy and celebrate about, given the fact that the [Scout] had died and Alice had finally had her first encounter with the Society of Starry Eyes, at the very least her levels had progressed quite nicely. She would be getting four new Perks. She would also be able to see her first Perk fusion, which she had been waiting to see for months now.

She opened up her Perk selection menu and started with [Explorer of magic]. As usual, there were three new Perk options. However, there was also a new icon at the bottom of her Perk selection screen.

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