Chapter 86: Chapter 83

The next day, Alice woke up a little earlier than usual. Since she had a bit of free time, she tried using her new Perk to start building her knowledge of organic mana. This was mostly for the sake of satisfying Alice’s curiosity. The System primarily used a mixture of organic mana, pure mana, and System mana to do most things, and right now Alice felt that her ability to mess with organic mana was much worse than her familiarity with pure mana. She didn’t know how to mix the three, and she still had no access to System mana, but it was clear she would ultimately need familiarity with all three kinds of mana eventually. Since that was the case, it didn’t seem like a bad idea to occasionally use {Expanding Comprehension} on her Organic Seed as well as her pure mana seed. Besides, she might come across some interesting realizations and ideas by using the Perk on her organic seed this time. If it succeeded, she might be closer to figuring out what the System was doing behind the scenes, and if it didn’t work she would only waste one use of the Perk.

After setting up a few quick enchantments to keep her inn door closed and protect herself, she activated {Expanding Comprehension} on her organic magic seed.

After using the Perk, Alice felt her sight of the real world start to fade away. Instead, her thoughts and vision were filled with images of… organic material. Muscle fibers, nerves, neurons, organs, plant fiber… Alice’s thoughts were suddenly filled with a churning vortex of disconnected thoughts and images. Unlike the time she had used {Infusion of Comprehension} on her Pure mana seed, the images Alice saw were much more comprehensible and easy to understand, since she already roughly knew how a lot of organs and tissues worked, at least in rough terms. Nothing below a certain size limit appeared during her vision trip, but considering the fact that this world’s knowledge of the extremely microscopic world seemed lacking this was within Alice’s expectations.

Towards the end of the set of images and ideas, Alice finally latched on to a few more interesting tidbits. For a few minutes, Alice saw something very different from regular flesh and blood.

It was a muscle, but not made out of traditional physical materials. It was, instead, a lump of mana. Unlike the mana Alice saw in most of her surroundings, this mana was solid, and seemed very different from regular muscle fibers. Alice felt that there was something else underlying the mana-muscle fiber that she couldn’t quite understand. It was a sort of organic mana, but wholly different from the mana most Mages produced when they use their organic Magic seeds. It was some sort of… composite material made out of organic mana and System mana, separated by tiny layers of pure mana to keep the two from mixing together. And the feedback from Alice’s Perk let her understand that this material was better than regular muscle fibers. It consumed mana to strengthen itself, but even without mana, it could vastly outperform muscles made out of regular flesh and blood materials…

The visions faded, and Alice’s vision abruptly snapped back to the physical world. Alice grinned to herself. She hadn’t gotten much out of the vision trip this time – after all, she had already theorized that when people absorbed mana with the help of the System, they were actually using that mana to rebuild their muscles, bones, and so on out of mana. However, it was also quite strange. In Alice’s first use of {Infusion of Comprehension}, she distinctly remembered seeing an image of herself, built entirely out of PURE mana. However, in this vision she saw a muscle fiber built out of a mixture of pure mana, organic mana, and System mana. After a few moments of thinking about it, Alice decided the Perk was probably showing her ‘possibilities’ when she used {Expanding Comprehension}. Things that were theoretically possible, even if they may not be exactly what she would find with a microscope if she had one available. However, this image of a muscle fiber felt more ‘correct’ to her.

This was because when Alice had sat in a manaless chamber for a long period of time, she would often feel that her Attributes were lower than usual. In fact, Alice had theorized this was why people believed that mana deprivation was lethal – lowering one’s [Endurance] stat directly weakened one’s physical health, meaning that in corner cases it could very well be lethal to have no access to mana. An elderly or sick person losing access to some of their [Endurance] stat might very well have mana deprivation tip them over the edge and cause them to die, after all. With the image she had seen of a mixed-mana muscle fiber, Alice had an underlying theory for why stats dropped without access to mana. If the strange muscle-fiber Alice had seen at the end of her vision trip was what the System helped people rebuild their muscles and organs out of, it was natural for people accustomed to the System to have much stronger bodies than people from Earth. However, it also meant that when the strange muscle fibers lost access to mana, they would lose some of their power. They would still outperform regular, nonmagical muscle fibers and organs, even with zero external mana to eat, but they would also face a reduction in their efficiency.

She made a mental note to herself that, in the future, she wanted to experiment with the strange muscle fiber she had seen a bit more. She had seen two different possible variations for how a human body could be built using mana during her first use of {Infusion of Comprehension} and her first use of {Expanding Comprehension}. While the ideas presented from her vision trip this time felt correct, the essence of science was to test things she assumed were true.

Alice also didn’t know why her Perks lost some of their power without access to mana, but she could save that for a later test.

After that, she went to get breakfast. After this, she would probably go back to using her new Perk for Pure Mana until she built a System mana seed, but she was still glad she had tried out her new Perk on her Organic Seed once. It had definitely given her some new ideas to look into.

Through Perk Usage, you have improved a Seed!

Organic Seed (25% -> 28%)

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic Human Biology: 28 -> 29 Mana Biology: 0 -> 1

After breakfast, Alice quickly sped through the first section of her daily routine, as usual.

She met with Ezrien and his research team. Recently, Ezrien and his team had solved a lot of the smaller problems related to the kinetic plates, and had started to take the research for the remaining problems in a new direction. One of the biggest problems the research team still faced was making the movement plates figure out how much mana they should throw at an object based on its weight, since heavier objects needed more mana to stay afloat. Ezrien and his team had no luck figuring out how to perfectly solve this problem, due to how overly complicated the whole enchantment was already.

This had eventually led to the team’s current research direction. Instead of trying to throw everything together into one unbelievably complex enchantment that no normal [Enchanter] would be able to copy, Ezrien and his team were now trying to make a few smaller pieces of enchanted equipment that could be used together at the same time. One of the objects was a paired enchantment built around a kinetic plate and a… sticker, for lack of a better term. The first kinetic plate sensed the weight of objects and then applied a proper amount of ‘upward’ kinetic energy to whatever the ‘sticker’ was attached to, keeping it afloat the whole time. The second function of the ‘upward’ kinetic plate was to sense any other ‘kinetic energy’ input and amplify it based on the object’s weight. The sticker itself was some sort of rubbery substance that kind of reminded Alice of glue. If it was exposed to water, it would lose its sticky properties until it dried out again, making it fairly easy to attach and remove the rubbery object from items that needed to be lifted. It was a bit messy if one didn’t use a bucket to collect and reapply the substance over and over again, but it took less than fifteen minutes to dry out, and a [Thermal Mage] could enchant the bucket to speed up the process a lot.

Meanwhile, the original kinetic plate was a separate object that was used to apply very small amounts of kinetic force to the floating object and gently nudge it in different directions. Since the second enchanted was basically used to make weight less of a headache to deal with, the original enchanted plate was able to cut a huge amount of complex sub-enchantments away. This made the object no longer a nightmare to copy, and even though the material costs went up a bit, the mana costs to make the paired enchantments and the amount of man hours required to copy the plate went way down. The object still wasn’t quite ready for mass production yet, but it was finally starting to reach a point where it could match the cost of hiring a kinetic mage. Now that the base ‘concept’ of the enchantment was fully nailed down, the team just needed to optimize smaller parts until the cost dropped below the cost of hiring a [Kinetic Mage] before they accomplished their goal.

After working with Ezrien’s team for the day, Alice went to the [Guard] station, instead of going to the library. She felt a slight tinge of nervousness as she did so. During her time with Ezrien’s team, she had been thinking over what she wanted to do in greater detail.

Alice had directly seen what looked like two System errors yesterday, and had received news from the Society notebook that a third recent System error existed somewhere under the observation of the Society. Alice had a strong suspicion that looking further into this subject might provide her with a new direction of research to study the System. Alice had no interest in conducting inhumane and immoral experiments, of course, but there was another way she could learn more without violating her morals. Alice wanted to see if she could involve herself in protecting the kid, or find ways to check up on him regularly, or just find a way to observe him from time to time. She could even see rainbow mana and mana seeds while others couldn’t, meaning she could actually be helpful in keeping the kid safe from Society attacks if they tried to launch a sneak attack on the defenders assigned to the kid. Anytime Alice was nearby, Mages wouldn’t be able to hide unless they had Perks that circumvented her abilities. There was a huge difference between being caught in a surprise attack and starting a confrontation before the other side was ready, and so Alice would get what she wanted and would still be genuinely helpful if she managed to wriggle her way into ‘helping out’ the [Guards] around the kid. Therefore, what Alice wanted was to talk with the parents of the children and see if she could get the right to help guard the little kid, in exchange for the right to observe his daily life from time to time. This was something Alice hadn’t thought of yesterday, but after a night of sleep she felt more refreshed and was able to think more clearly.

And so, with this thought in mind, Alice walked to the [Guard] station to see what they had found out, and make arrangements for her future plans. Alice wasn’t dead set on being able to observe the strange kid, but she was definitely interested in seeing if it was possible.

When she arrived, one of the [Guards] led her to a small room inside of the building. There, Alice found Arin, sitting on a chair waiting for her, along with someone she assumed was a [Scholar]. There were also three [Guards] sitting in other chairs around a table. One of them was boiling a pot of tea with the help of some kind of Perk, while the others idly chatted about which tavern had the best alcohol. As the tea finished brewing, the [Guard] handed everyone a cup of tea, which Alice took a sip of before putting her cup down for a moment.

“[Knight] Arin, may I speak with you for a moment?”

“Of course, Lady Alice.” The two quickly stepped into another room, where Alice informed Arin of her plans to participate in guarding the strange boy from time to time.

Arin frowned, as if running over her words, before he nodded. “I can set that up for you. Still, I can’t help but say I’m a little surprised. When I went through your [Student] file it says that you’re not part of the military track, and most people that don’t join the military track don’t like fighting much. Can I ask why you’re interested?”

“It’s because the boy interests me. The way his System information seems messed up happens to potentially coincide with some of my interests, so I want to see if I can get permission from his parents to observe him. If I’m already around, it would make sense for me to help out with keeping an eye on his surroundings, even if I wouldn’t be able to do so for long. After all, my schedule is already packed to the brim.”

“Can you promise me that you don’t intend to do anything that an ethics committee wouldn’t approve of?”

Alice nodded. “If you want to, you can have some lie detection Perks double check my answer or something. I mean no harm to the child, and regardless of what direction my research goes I will not do anything to harm him and do not expect my intentions to change in the future. I currently intend to just observe and ask questions, so at worst his parents might find me slightly annoying.”

Arin nodded. “That’s not a problem. I’ll tell the [Guard Captain] to let the [Guards] around the kid know to expect you to pop around from time to time. Assuming his mother doesn’t take issue with either the presence of you or the [Guard], of course.”

Alice nodded. That was what she wanted.

Afterwards, the two returned to the room.

“While we wait for the others, may I borrow the research log you got yesterday?” asked the [Scholar], right after Alice settled back down with her cup of tea. Alice handed it over without a word, and the man started flipping through the pages of the book at an extraordinary pace while sparing a moment to shoot her a reassuring grin. “Once we make sure there isn’t any important information related to the Society inside and make a copy of everything, we’ll give the book back to you, so don’t worry too much about it. It’s just standard procedure.” Alice simply nodded.

After a few more minutes of waiting, Arin broke the silence. “Do you know when your three friends are coming?”

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“They should be here soon, unless something came up,” said Alice. A few minutes later the other three arrived. Arin nodded at all of them.

“All right, bounty money paperwork. I need the three of you to read out these statements while these three gentleman do some lie detection.”

Alice was handed a list of statements she needed to read out loud, which basically claimed that yes, they had reasonable suspicion that the people they fought yesterday were members of the society, they had no involvement in any smuggling operations related to the items they had found and either taken or turned in for rewards yesterday, they weren’t spies from another country or the Society, and a few other miscellaneous statements basically ensuring that there hadn’t been any shady business. Reading through the long list of statements was surprisingly time consuming, and the group was forced to deal with a few rounds of paperwork afterwards, but after about an hour of dealing with the cumbersome process, they were finally done. Arin smiled and handed each of them a pouch of money.

“One gold crown, one golden sun, and three silver crowns each. Definitely not bad, eh?”

Alice counted over the money, before suppressing a grin. Her finances had tanked to a few silver crowns as a result of her enchanting spree, and if she converted the golden crown into golden suns she had just received six golden suns and some change. This amount of money was more than enough to tide her through the next few weeks, and even let her replenish her enchantments she had spent or damaged during the fight. She might even indulge herself in a few board game materials, or a few days off from enchanting to read some less research related novels. It had been a while since she had last read a book for fun, and with her tightly packed schedule Alice was definitely feeling the stress she had signed herself up for.

After the paperwork was dealt with, Arsi, Erkki, and Luka gave Arin tired smiles. “Is there anything else we need to do?”

“If you want to interact with them, you can go see the parents of the kids you guys rescued. We confirmed that the tracks left by the Society members lead back to a pretty normal farming village, so we found the parents this morning. They were practically pulling their hair out with worry, and they should arrive here soon. If you want to meet up with them you’re free to stay. Of course, if you’re busy, don’t feel obligated to stick around. Mages are known to be busy, so I’m sure they won’t take offence.”

Erkki seemed to think about it for a moment, before he shrugged. “Personally, I’m kind of short on time already. I have a class that I should go to later on today, and even though the [Teacher] would definitely understand if I missed, given the amount of stuff that happened yesterday and my involvement in it, I don’t want to miss this class in particular. It aligns with my interests pretty heavily. I’ll have to give the meeting a pass.”

Arin gave Erkki a simple nod as the boy exited the room. “In that case, you’re free to go. Thank you for your assistance yesterday.”

Arsi frowned for a moment, before he sighed. “I think I’ll also duck out. I’m not bad with people, but I’m pretty tired after yesterday, so I think I’ll give this meeting a miss. I have a meeting with my potential Patron for next year in a few hours, so I need to prep myself for that. Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it. Thank you for helping out yesterday and coming today. Tracking down people to deal with paperwork if they forget or skip out is always a pain,” said Arin.

With that, Arsi also left.

“I’ll stick around,” said Luka, shrugging. “It’ll be good practice for my duties in the future, since I’ll need to interact with commoners from time to time. Honestly, my experience in that realm is a little lacking right now, and these people will probably be a lot more forgiving of any mistakes I make than others. There’s never harm in practicing skills you need for the future, right?” Luka flashed Arin a mischievous grin.

“As I already discussed with you earlier, I’ll also stick around,” said Alice. Arin simply acknowledged her statement, and the three began waiting for the parents to show up.

The three [Guards] excused themselves from the room since their duty was done, and about ten minutes later, the [Scholar] finished flipping through Alice’s research notes and returned them to her, before excusing himself. Arin and Luka made small talk while Alice ignored them in favor of looking over the research notes from the Society. Even if reading through the experiment log made her feel a little sick to her stomach, she wasn’t going to waste one of her only glimpses into the Society experiments that might prove useful to her.

Just as Alice was finishing up reading through the second experiment recorded in the notebook, seven adults came into the room. There were three pairs of parents who were each holding on to their child, while the final kid only had one parent accompanying him. The child with only one parent was the kid with weird System mana.

The first three pairs of parents gave Alice, Arin, and Luka thanks for a few minutes, and one group of parents even gave the group some homemade bread as a thank-you gift. Even though Alice wasn’t very used to talking to people outside of her social sphere, it felt nice to be sincerely thanked by people. The homemade bread was quite tasty as well. However, the mother of the kid with weird mana was the one Alice paid the most attention to.

“Thank you very much for saving him, Lady Mage.” said the mother, clasping her hands together and putting one foot behind the other for a moment as she dipped her body slightly downwards, as if she were trying to curtsy or bow. “After his father died, he’s all I have left. I was so worried when he didn’t come home last night. If he had been taken away by the Society, I would have never known that what happened to him. If you hadn’t caught the Society members in the act…” the woman shuddered, before shaking her head. “I might have thought he wandered off and got eaten by monsters for the rest of my life.”

“May I ask what the half-kneeling motion is about? Also, you haven’t introduced yourself. What’s your name?” asked Alice. Since she wanted to spend time observing the kid, she naturally wanted to get to know his mother better as well.

“Ah, my apologies, Lady Mage. My name is Natasha. The half-kneel is a custom where I come from. I was born in Eldren, but my husband and I moved here two years ago, because tension between Eldren and Norwick seemed to be spiking and we were sick of the constant war taxes and draft calls. Not all countries rely on volunteer armies like Illvaria, and we didn’t want our son to be drafted into the army when he got older. As for the half-kneel… commoners are supposed to either do a half curtsy or clasp their hands while quarter-kneeling when speaking to a minor [Noble], and in Illvaria Mages are essentially [Nobles] here, so I felt it was appropriate. I learned from a relatively high level [Tailor] in my hometown, so I’ve occasionally interacted with [Nobles] when my [Teacher] made them some clothes. It’s a habit he made sure to drill into me.” Alice nodded to herself. The woman’s level wasn’t very impressive, and probably hovered somewhere between level 50 and level 60, but it also wasn’t bad. If the woman had a high-level [Teacher] and still only managed to get to this level, it was more than a little disappointing, but Alice certainly wasn’t going to make the woman feel bad by commenting on it.

“So you’re raising him on your own now?” asked Alice, looking at the kid with strange System mana. The child hadn’t said a word during the meeting, unlike the other three kids who seemed more cheerful and lively. It seemed that they hadn’t woken up until this morning – meaning that the entire time they had been kidnapped, they hadn’t been conscious for a single moment. Perhaps due to that, the fact they had nearly been kidnapped didn’t seem to have sunk in yet. At least, three of the kids were still rambunctious and squirmy. The parents, on the other hand, had short fuses with their children right now, the worry of having their kids go missing and the relief of finding them boiling over into a strange mixture of love and irritation.

“My husband died about three years ago in a construction accident while we were building a house with some of the other villagers. A beam that wasn’t nailed in properly fell from the roof and hit him at a bad angle. His Perks were mostly focused on boosting crop yields…” the woman laughed bitterly. “I always told him that everyone should have at least one lifesaving Perk, but he never listened. He always said that he would definitely pick one up by the time he reached level 60 in [Farmer].” The woman sighed. “Idiot always was too stubborn for his own good. Anyway, I can keep the house going on my own. I’m a higher than average level [Tailor], so we get by. If you want, I could patch up your clothes or make you something nice as thanks. I hear Mages need to wear uniforms while they’re attending an academy, but you can wear normal clothes outside of classes, right? If Lady Mage wishes for it, I would be happy to make you a nice dress or casual clothes to express my appreciation for your help.”

Since Alice was pretty unfamiliar with how the Shil Confederacy worked and the woman had moved here from another member-country of the loose alliance network, Alice started chatting with the woman about the differences in cultures between member-states of the confederation. She mostly wanted to keep the woman behind without letting the other three sets of parents know she wanted to talk in private. After all, letting anyone else know that the woman’s kid was unusual would put him in more danger if the Society somehow found out, and might bring Alice into danger along with him. Over the course of a few hours of small talk, Alice learned that the about nine years ago, Eldren had tried to call for a council to settle its borders with Norwick, but Norwick, Sel’thas, and Kraelden hadn’t agreed to the council, leaving the two countries locked into a stalemate of skirmishes and bickering for several more years. This had been a big sensation among the Eldren peasantry at the time, because [Messengers] had seen a sudden boom in employment (and levels) for several months while Eldren tried to get everything in place. Apparently, the two were fighting over a strip of land between two rivers which was particularly rich farming land, and grew some sort of unique berry used to make wine successful merchants favored. The strip of rich farmland also contained a few iron mines, and even though it also bordered the land with the nomads and the iron mines were nothing special it was still considered very valuable land.

Alice was more than slightly fascinated about how well informed peasants of this world were, compared to what she had expected. Even though nothing so formal as a newspaper was in circulation, due to the high efficiency of [Messengers] and the boost to productivity the System granted people compared to Earth in the Middle Ages, most [Farmers] had at least a decent idea what was happening in the world around them.

Finally, the other three families left, leaving Alice, Natasha, her son Boris, and Arin in the room. Alice finally didn’t need to stall anymore, so she got to the main topic.

“I’ve been trying to hold you back here because there’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” said Alice.

“Oh? What does Lady Mage wish of me?”

“I think there’s a possibility that your child might continue to be targeted by the Society. I’m not 100% sure it’ll happen, but just in case…” Arin said, taking over for Alice. “I’ve been looking over some information we captured from the Society of Starry Eyes, and they were describing the kind of test subjects they were looking for. Your son might fall into that category. So I wanted to know if you were interested in having a small [Guard] detail attached to you and your son for a while. If the Society targets him again, it would be much safer for both of you if you were had some help…”

“And if you don’t mind, I wanted look into your son’s situation as well,” said Alice, looking at Natasha. “I have some Perks that can help me find Society members early, so I’ll be helpful when I’m around. And, to be honest, I’m also more than a little curious about some other things related to my own research. I just want to observe your kid and see what he does on a daily basis – I won’t do anything that will harm him.”

The woman’s eyes narrowed slightly as she heard Alice’s request, before she seemed to wrestle with something. Then, her gaze relaxed. “Truth be told, if you hadn’t taken part in helping my boy, I might have rejected you. But if you wanted to harm my boy, you probably could have spirited him away before I got to see him today.” Natasha sighed, before nodding at Arin. “And I’ll take you up on that [Guard] detail. Even if it’ll be inconvenient, my child is all I have left. Tell me if there’s anything I need to do, or if there’s any way I can help make things easier for the [Guards].”

Arin nodded, and Alice broke into a wide smile. Even if visiting Natasha and Boris would be another huge time sink, and Alice would need to spend money renewing her enchantments in case she got caught up in another Society attack while she was there, Alice also had a potential way to expand her research in a direction she had never expected before. Only time would tell if this branch of research would prove useful, but with every day that passed and every new discovery, Alice felt that she was closer and closer to unravelling what the System was and how it worked.