Chapter 144: Chapter 140

After the more concrete negotiations between Alice and Illa ended, there was a strange pause in the conversation. Alice hadn’t seen Illa in months, and it almost felt like a lifetime ago. The negotiations had given her a topic to focus on, but now that it was over… Alice felt strangely blank. She simply didn’t know how to interact with her former mentor anymore.

Illa eventually broke the silence.

“So you say you might be higher level than me? I see that times have been even better for you than I expected.”

Alice nodded. Her highest level Class was [Explorer of Magic], and while the class had some combat applications, most of them were related to getting her more magic seeds and increasing the number of magic tendrils she could control at once. It… didn’t seem too bad to at least hint at her current level, even if Alice would avoid giving overly specific numbers. Oddly enough, a lot of her combat abilities were from Achievements and long-term growth perks these days.

“I’m pretty high level now,” Alice said. That was vague enough that it wouldn’t give Illa a complete picture of her current status, but would still allow Alice to talk a bit about how far she had come.

Illa nodded. “If you’re pretty high level now, you must be at least over level 65. Perhaps even over level 75? The levels after level 75 are very hard to acquire,” she said. “They’re a massive slog to get through if you don’t have enough experience boosters to work for you. But you’re a smart girl. I’m sure you’ll manage.”

Alice nodded and tried not to wince. She had very much noticed how hard it was to gain levels in [Explorer of Magic] these days. Even if she took actions directly focused on improving the Class, it still barely levelled up.

“Still… I’m very surprised by how much you’ve grown. You’ve been in this world… what, a year?”

“About a year, yes,” said Alice. “I don’t have an exact date for when I was dropped into this world, and I didn’t get all of my memory Perks until a month or two after I arrived. But it was probably somewhere between 11 and 13 months ago.”

Illa nodded. “More or less a year since coming here, then.” She grinned. “Almost surpassed by a kid in a year,” she said, shaking her head ruefully. “Well, either way… I’m glad for you. I never thought you would reach this far, especially considering your late start. Normally, I would have thought it would take a miracle just for you to catch up to people who were born on this planet, considering the fact that you’re years behind everyone else. Somehow, you’ve already caught up though.” Illa gave Alice a meaningful grin. “Though you’re underestimating me a bit, if you think you’ve surpassed me already and you’re only level 70 or even 75. Maybe in another few months or a year you’ll be ahead,” she said as she chuckled.

Then, Illa turned back towards Ethan. “So how exactly are we going to do this, logistically?” She said. “The easiest way for you to handle this would be to simply let me return to Cyra, and then wait for me to start sending shipments of enchanting materials up north. But that also risks a few things – most notably among them being that I spend months searching for materials and can’t find anything useful. We did already talk about my [Enchanter], and she’ll certainly be helping out – but there’s only so much she can do on her own.”

Ethan looked at Alice for a moment, and then nodded to himself. “There are a few ways we can handle this. The first way is to head to Cyra ourselves, and directly process and test ingredients on the spot. We could also leave things to you, or send over some decent [Enchanters] to help speed things along. I personally favor sending over some members of the military and a few [Encahnters], but… Alice, would it be faster and safer if you did the testing? If so, it might not be a bad idea to consider heading to Cyra ourselves for a while.”

Alice thought about her as of yet unchosen [Careful Enchanter] Perk, as well as her new ability to test enchanting inside of her dreams. The fact that she could process information incredibly quickly now, as well as her effectively unlimited mana while testing things out in her dreams, would definitely make it much faster and easier to test enchanting materials. There might also be more… Alice finally popped open her options for [Careful Enchanter].

“Lemme look at some Perk options for a moment,” said Alice. “I’ve been holding off since I wasn’t sure what I needed until now, but now I’m thinking I want a way to test materials faster.”

“Take your time,” said Ethan. “You should choose your Perks carefully. We can wait.”

Alice nodded and started scanning her Perk options, while using Display mana to actually see the descriptions for her Perks.

The first option she saw wasn’t particularly impressive: it made any monster core that she personally added to an enchantment slowly recharge itself. This was nice, since it would save a great deal of monster cores for her personally made enchanted items in the long run. However, Alice didn’t think it was anywhere near high priority, especially with the current situation. It saved a bit of money and time, but it just wasn’t worth a Perk slot.

The second Perk choice was a bit more interesting. Rather than make monster cores recharge themselves, it made enchantments that Alice made slowly repair themselves. However, it still wasn’t that impressive. Wear and tear was a common problem for enchanted items, but it still usually took years before it mattered. Alice had bigger priorities than saving on material costs a decade from now.

The third and fourth Perks were far more interesting than the first two options.

Perk Name: Perk Name Perk Reqs: Perception Greater 100, Level 30+ Class_Name

Perk gives user option to process better. Learn enchanting material property fast!

Perk Name: Seed Enchanting

Give Information to user: Relate Class Seeds to Enchantments. Instincts for Class Seed Enchantments. Error: System related Perks must remain hidden. Hide Perk_Option 4. Hiding failed. Seeking main server to rectify error… cannot connect to main server. @#)(*$@%*()@&#$ @#)($*@#$()#@ @#$)(@*#

A few moments later, the fourth Perk’s error messages disappeared, leaving a much simpler Perk behind.

Perk Name: Seed Enchanting Requirements: Level 30+ Enchanter_Class_Quality_Enchanter, Perception______ ____

Give Information to user: Relate Class Seeds to Enchantments. Instincts for Class Seed Enchantments.

The Perk… {Perk Name} (Alice was pretty sure that was a bug) was almost exactly what she was looking for. It looked like it let her understand the properties of enchanting materials she interacted with more quickly, which perfectly fit her current needs. It was only a level 30 Perk, so it wasn’t anything too impressive, but it was still a step in the right direction. Combined with Alice’s ability to analyze enchanting materials in her dreams, which gave her access to unlimited mana because none of it was real, Alice would probably be able to drastically speed up the testing process for new materials.

However, Perk 4 looked like it was related to how enchantments and Class Seeds were related to each other. And this greatly interested Alice.

Alice hesitated for a few moments. {Perk Name} was exactly what she needed right now. It would make identifying enchanting materials that she desperately needed easier, faster, and more efficient. It would mildly improve the speed and efficiency of creating the enchantments that she desperately needed to get into production as soon as possible. Every second that the enchanted rings she wanted to make weren’t made, people were at risk.

 On the other hand, the reason Alice had advanced as far as she had was mostly because she had stuck to things that interested her and improved her main focus areas. In most cases, this meant studying how the System worked. And figuring out how the System worked was also the most important thing she could do if she wanted to actually solve the current crisis, rather than just managing some of the aftereffects and running damage control.

And a Perk that the System was supposed to remove, but failed to because the System was down?

That was definitely something that interested her. And would probably have a lot of information she could make use of in the current situation. It was a bit more of a gamble, but Alice felt it was too big of an opportunity to miss.

Alice didn’t hesitate for long before she decided to pick {Seed Enchanting}.

A moment later, her class fractal twitched and writhed for a moment, before tendrils of rainbow mana reached out of her brain, searching for… something.

It was as if it was trying to connect to the System, and failing.

Finding nothing, her Class seed started to connect with… the mana in the atmosphere?

Alice blinked in surprise. She had never seen this happen before.

The mana in the air around her seemed to get funneled towards her Class Fractal. Alice hesitated, wondering if something was about to go horribly wrong and maim her for life. She started preparing her pure mana seed and her No_Mana magic seed, to make sure she could isolate herself from the atmospheric mana, and then started firing information and queries at {Safety Analysis} to see how to get herself out of this mess.

Oddly enough, however, {Safety Analysis} let her know that there was nothing wrong with this situation. Alice stopped panicking, and after some hesitation, let the mana in her surroundings connect with her. A few seconds later, mana started getting pulled into her class fractal.

For a moment, Alice was barraged with another wave of mental images and ideas, similar to the first time she had tried forming a class seed with a magic seed slot. She could see… something.

She saw layer upon layer of enchantments. Every single enchantment was almost the same, but also slightly different from the one before it. It was like a giant underground city filled entirely with enchantments. All of them processed information and sent information back out at speeds that rivalled a supercomputer from Earth, and nearly made Alice dizzy when she tried to understand everything that was happening at once.

For a moment, Alice simply felt bewildered. However, her confusion was quickly replaced with surprise, as she realized that she felt… familiar with this image.

It reminded her of… the System?

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She blinked in surprise, but the more she looked at it, the more she was sure that she was looking at the System. Not the little speckles of mana that she usually studied and interacted with in the outside world, though. She was looking at the heart of the System. The core. The center of it all.

And she also realized that several parts of the System seemed rather… physical in nature. It wasn’t some law of reality that she was looking at, or some metaphysical construct or anything else of the sort.

It was a concrete, physical enchantment housed… somewhere. Or at least, that was what it looked like to her.

Alice’s mind reeled from the new revelation she had seen, nearly completely distracting her from the original purpose of learning how magic seeds and enchantments were connected to each other. The System had a PHYSICAL COMPONENT to it. Not just the rainbow mana she had seen in the air around her – there was a physical building of some sort where the System was located. If she knew where to look, and had ways past whatever security enchantments kept people outside of the System, Alice could walk into the System. The System was a massive enchantment of some sort.

Which wasn’t something Alice was entirely prepared for, even though in hindsight, it seemed quite obvious. The System clearly followed the same laws of magic everything else on the planet did – it was just very clever about how it worked and innovated in very specific, unique ways. But if Alice wanted to, she could go look at the… machinery? Arcanotech? Whatever it was that the System was made of. She could even poke it with a dagger or something, if she wanted to.

What would that do for the world? What would happen if someone just… took a sword, and started hacking at the mainframe of the System?

Alice thought about the sudden disappearance of the System, and started wondering if something might have gone wrong on that front. She didn’t have very much information yet, but the physical location of the System was certainly something she wanted to look into, now that she strongly suspected it existed.

Then, Alice finally jolted herself out of her chaotic thoughts, and focused on her Perk again. She could handle all of the ripple effects of this information later. Right now, she needed to observe what related class seeds and enchantments together.

She could see that a lot of the System’s enchantments were all giant blobs of different kinds of mana, mixing together as seamlessly as the water in a river. Different bits of mana often drifted from one enchantment to another, almost as if they were motes of living energy that knew exactly where they were needed.

A few moments later, Alice saw an image of a person form, created by her Perk to explain something. This image wasn’t part of the System, or directly related to the System – it was simply there as her Perk tossed the image in front of her eyes. She saw their bones, their tendons, their organs, and their muscles being besieged by mana. This wasn’t the chaotic but controlled mana of the System: it was a barrage of [Farmer] mana. Alice watched in mute comprehension as the mana swarmed towards the brain of the image, starting to erode the personhood of the fake person with every second…

And then, Alice saw something else she hadn’t expected.

Specifically, the application of something that felt like a Perk briefly touched upon the person.

Then, the Person’s brain had a Perk layered on to it. It didn’t change the physical makeup of the brain at all, or warp the person’s personality. Instead, it did one thing – it made the brain able to work as an enchanting material. At the exact same time, System mana started to filter the mana in its surroundings, grabbing a bunch of [Farmer] mana and creating a new [Farmer] class seed. To create a class seed, the enchanting material ‘human brain’ was used as a way to store the Class seed, in lieu of a mage core… and then enchanted by the System to remain stable.

Alice blinked.

The System had just used the human brain and ambient mana as enchanting materials to construct a class seed. The moment the class seed was finished, the mana inside of the body’s person seemed to light up for a moment, although Alice wasn’t quite sure why. A moment later, the image started to fade, and Alice’s view of the process was redirected towards the seed itself. Alice saw mana start to run through it, and through some quirk of how her new Perk worked, she understood.

Without the freeform nature of a regular magic seed, the newly made class seed couldn’t do anywhere near as much as a normal magic seed with the same amount of mana. The amount of mana that a regular kinetic mage would be able to use to hurl a boulder through the air and send it flying like a kite could only be used to create a few ‘Perks,’ all of which were sort of like vastly weakened versions of the usual abilities of a magic seed.

However, the class seed had two additional benefits.

First, it vacuumed up problematic mana from the body, compressing it inside of itself and using it to boost the strength of the magic seed. Through some side components of the Perk providing her with her vision-trip, Alice could see that the class seed could theoretically grow without limits, although the denser the mana was inside of the class seed, the more difficult it would become to compress more mana inside of it. This was likely why people had a harder and harder time levelling up as they got higher in level.

It also lined up with all of the other observations that Alice had made about class seeds so far. Alice still wasn’t quite sure how class seeds vacuumed up mana from inside the body, or how the System normally did some of its mana filtration tricks to keep the whole process running smoothly, so this observation didn’t tell her anything new. The second thing she noticed was much more valuable.

The second thing she noticed was something she had observed before, but never paid much attention to. Class seeds were magic seeds that weren’t stored inside of the mage core. Alice had already realized that class seeds didn’t require a mage core to be stored. This was obvious, since there were very few mages in the world and yet everyone on the planet over the age of six had access to the System.

However, she hadn’t realized quite how important it was that the magic seed wasn’t stored inside of the core.

Instead of being stored inside of a mage core, most magic seeds were stored near the brain, although they were occasionally stored in the heart or lungs instead. This limited the power of class seeds greatly, but by creating a magic seed that was also, in some respects, kind of like an enchantment, the class seed was much more stable than a normal magic seed. This made them less volatile and potentially harmful for their user… which probably had something to do with why people needed a mana baptism to become a Mage, but anyone could get a class.

As Alice was mulling over what she had seen, she felt the vision start to fade, and she was pulled back to reality again.

She blinked.

Alice… finally had some guess as to how she could create a class seed.

Out of curiosity, she tried checking with {Safety Analysis} to see if she could safely make a new class seed for herself… and got back the equivalent of a giant siren blaring at full volume with hundreds of flashing red lights sent right back to her the moment she activated her Perk.

Bad idea. She might have a guess about how to move forward, but she didn’t have anywhere near the data that she needed to make her ideas work yet.

Alice sighed.

At the very least, she had a guess about where she was supposed to start, now. She could refine what she had observed today and think about it more later, and see if there were some other ways to make the whole process work. Since she had {Safety Analysis}, she could always get at least some idea whether what she was doing was a bad idea or not, even if the Perk wasn’t perfect. The idea of using human organs as an enchanting material was… novel. Especially since human organs weren’t naturally enchanting materials at all, apart from the mage core.

Then, Alice thought about something else. She had felt that there was something familiar about System mana that she had seen for quite a while. Now that Alice was explicitly thinking about it, she remembered an old Perk she had picked up quite a while ago. She had occasionally used it to improve her enchantments, but had often struggled to make the time she needed to maximize the value of the Perk. However…

Kinetic Enchanting Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 25 or higher

If you interact with an enchanting material for an extended period of time while focusing on this Perk, you may increase the amount of 'instructions' the Enchanting material can remember by 1 permanently. This extra instruction may ONLY be used to increase its memory for Kinetic enchantments, and the material must already have some affinity with Kinetic mana or the Perk will not work. This can only be used on a given material once, and will fail if other similar Perks, Achievements, or any other effects have already been used on it.

If at level 25, she had gotten a Perk that let her add the capacity for extra instructions to an enchanting material… maybe it was possible to use other Perks to just transform materials entirely, using a similar Perk?

For that matter, what if one wanted to enchant something nobody else would think of enchanting?

What if someone wanted to make the AIR an enchantment? Every single atom of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and all of the other gasses in the atmosphere? Was it possible to enchant them?

And suddenly, Alice finally realized why the System enchantments she sometimes saw floating in the air around her looked familiar.

They were paired enchantments.

The System had, turned the entire atmosphere into a paired enchantment, and used it as a conduit to make the rest of the System work with people properly. As long as someone interacted with air in the world, the System should theoretically have access to them and be able to help them control the mana inside of them. It wasn’t perfect – since Alice had managed to create environments without System mana, it was obvious that the way the paired enchantment had been created was a bit weirder and more fluid than regular enchantments. However, unless someone knew what they were doing, creating an environment without System mana would be very difficult – and since the System actively hid its existence from the world, it was almost impossible to get the data one would need to intentionally create an environment without the System.

In other words, normally one wouldn’t create an environment without System mana unless they knew what they were doing. And nobody was ever supposed to know what they were doing.

Either way, she had gotten a huge amount of useful information and ideas from her new Perk. Even though the Perk didn’t seem to do much else besides provide her with that one vision trip, similar to the Perk she had eventually turned into {Expanding Comprehension}, Alice was more than happy with the Perk she had taken.

Then, as Alice returned to the present and looked at her mentor and Illa, who were still waiting for her to confirm whether or not Alice was about to head to Cyra with Ethan, Alice realized something else.

During her entire vision trip, Alice hadn’t gotten a better idea how to solve her current problems. She had gotten all sorts of inspiration for how to start making class seeds, but she hadn’t gotten a specific, concrete boost to her abilities from her new Perk. She would eventually be able to transform her new inspiration and ideas into something amazing, but the Perk she had saved hadn’t contributed anything directly to the current situation. She winced.