With her first monster successfully slain, even if she had suffered a wound during the fight, Alice felt a lot more confident in her survival as she went about her routine. She had made a few mistakes this time. Even so, this was her first real fight against a monster, and she had managed to survive and win! At the very least, instead of a far-off fantasy, Alice genuinely felt prepared for the world around her, which is something that wasn’t true three weeks ago.

However, one thing that definitely hadn’t fared well over the last three weeks were her pajamas – they had never been intended to handle anywhere near this level of abuse. In just the past three weeks, she had torn off part of the pajama sleeves to use as bandages, been bitten through the pajamas in the stomach and her ankle, gotten the pajamas scratched up as she wandered through the forest, and hadn’t repaired it at all. Pajamas were never renowned for their sturdiness in the first place, and at this point they had been through the level of abuse armor was meant to go through.

Alice looked at the remains of her feast from the day before, and looked at Spidercrab’s chitin, trying to figure out if there was anything she could do to make it into clothing.

That’s not happening. Not only is there an ick factor, but I don’t think I can bend it without breaking it. Is there any use for this chitin shell at all?

Alice looked at her hastily built walls for the cave, and then at the round shell. Maybe it could be used as a construction material?

That was probably a terrible use of it. Hmm. Actually, it’s pretty close to the right shape for a bowl. Is it flammable? Alice shrugged, got a pile of snow, and tried boiling a bowl of water inside the shell. The shell didn’t catch fire or show any particularly adverse reactions to being heated up. After a while, she had a partially-filled bowl of warm water. She shrugged. Bowl it is.

However, that didn’t solve her clothing problem. She looked, with some regret, towards her blanket, already missing two strips of fabric where she had torn them off in moments of need earlier. Then, she walked over to it, trying to figure out if there was some way to make it into clothing. Hmm… I think it’s possible, but I need some sort of needle, as well as a way to make thread. I have neither, and I definitely wouldn’t succeed in making stone needles if I tried. Maybe I can somehow make a needle out of bone? I do have some fish bones laying around that I could try using, but I don't actually have any string either. The bolt of cloth I've been using as a blanket won't be easy to unravel into string or threads here... Hmm...

Alice looked at the remains of Spidercrab again, but saw no solution. After a while, she sighed. This was something she felt should be doable, but she just had no idea how to do it. Maybe if she folded it up she could somehow make a toga? At least it would be something. Her pajamas would hold for a while longer, so it wasn't an immediate concern, but the hole near her stomach and chunks of missing sleeve didn't exactly do wonders for the clothing's ability to ward off the cold. She really wished she could go get something from a clothing store or even a [Tailor]...

At the thought of civilization, a familiar, growing pang of loneliness shot through her. It had been nearly a month since she had heard another human voice, and she had no one and nothing to talk to. There were some days where she swore that she heard human voices, and would get excited and rush towards them, only to find that nothing at all had been there. Right now, her only companion was the status screen.

Alice sighed and looked back at the river. The book and the heartless corpse had been washed downstream by the currents, which meant something was farther upstream. That being said, she had no clue why the corpse had no heart, and she felt all sorts of uneasy about what that meant. Perhaps upstream a monster had killed the guy and eaten his heart? Cultists?

It was useless to speculate for now. In any case, without the cave her ability to survive the journey north was still dubious until Spring came. She needed to focus on what she could do now. She reached over to the bolt of cloth and tried folding it up. It wasn't entirely stable, but it still... sort of functioned as a toga. Alice spent several hours working with the cloth, and eventually managed to create a configuration that at least kept itself up. She would see about creating a more permanent solution once she had access to string. For now, it at least kept in more heat and ensured spidercrabs had an extra layer of cloth they had to bite through, which was something.

* * *

A week after Alice had successfully slain a monster, her wounds were finally healed up. Her attempt at smoking monster meat had, for whatever reason, failed, although she had gotten the idea of trying to create an icebox to keep the meat preserved, and that had worked out, netting her another level in [Survivor]. She was close to her next level, but it was also getting significantly harder to level up her classes. However, she had also gotten another level in [Explorer of Magic], which was a huge plus since it finally got her another perk.

Sense Mana

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 15 or higher

Allows you to innately sense mana in a small area around you.

Lesser Combat Spellcaster

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 15 or higher, Magic 25 or higher

Living Creatures resist your mana less effectively

Another Seed

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 15 or higher

Allows you to grow another magic seed with a maximum 25% mana conversion ratio

She hesitated for a bit, before she eventually chose {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}. She finally understood why it had felt like over half of the mana she was trying to use to influence Spidercrab had seemed to disappear after reading the perk description – while inanimate objects had no particular resistance to her moving them around, if a living creature DID resist movement, it made sense that so much of her mana seemed to get pushed away from spidercrabs when she tried to force them around.

On a side note, this was the third time out of the three perks she had gotten from [Explorer of Magic] that she had been offered some sort of perk to let her choose another magic seed. She was beginning to suspect that it was some sort of quirk related to the class – after all, it was pretty hard to explore magic if you were confined to only one type of magic. Alice still felt that for now, she should focus on getting proficient with kinetic magic – however, she fully intended to pick up some more magic seeds eventually if her class kept offering them to her. It would definitely be useful to have some ways to vary her combat style if she needed to, as well as having some way to explore whatever branch of magic she needed to actually get back home.

Apart from her new perk option, her magic attribute finally reached 50. After reaching 50, The growth of the attribute had immediately slowed down dramatically. Before, it advanced by leaps and bounds, sometimes going up by multiple points after a single intense training session. After it reached fifty, it slowed to a crawl, at least in comparison. Now it only grew by a point or two a day. Is there some sort of ‘major barrier’ to stat growth every 50 levels? It would explain why it seems so hard to raise my [Intelligence] stat while my physical stats are all growing so quickly. Come to think of it, I think they grew even more quickly on my first few days here, although it was hard to notice since they were already close to fifty. If my theory is correct, that means that there will probably be another major reduction in growth speed at 100, and then another at 150. Something to test.

Alice noted this for future reference, and continued training her physical stats and magic as much as possible. Apart from that, she kept translating the book and working on her language skill. Come spring, she would need a way to communicate with people, and Illvarian was hopefully the language to fill that need.

She had also started carving little notches into her cave, trying to keep track of the days as they passed by. She had started out with around 25, because she wasn’t exactly sure how many days had passed since she had come here, but she was pretty sure it was around 3 or 4 weeks.

She set out to hunt another spidercrab, and after several hours of searching, had yet to find one. The sun set as she returned from an unsuccessful hunt.

* * *

Day 28

Alice finally found a Spidercrab again. It was the first time she had seen one that hadn’t found her scent yet, and she noted with some interest, that the monster also seemed to be following the river, although it was heading downstream, rather than upstream. This time, Alice already knew what to expect. Her wounds were healed, her levels and skills were all universally higher, and she was far more ready for this fight than she had been for the first spidercrab she had hunted.

She started off the battle by extending a mana tendril towards a nearby rock that was slightly larger than her two fists put together. The spidercrab, naturally, immediately noticed the moment she started using mana. However, Alice had enough control by now that she could control the trajectory of objects she had moved. Therefore, a stone sailed directly into spidercrab’s eyes, seeming to stun it for a moment. After that, Alice reached out with her mana tendril and touched spidercrab’s shell, shoving it directly into the ground. While it struggled to get up, Alice stabbed it through the eye, killing the creature. It was a battle with far less risk than the one she had fought a week ago.

The battle with spidercrab brought [Survivor] up to level 25, granting another perk selection.

Tough

Requiements: Survivor level 25 or higher

Effect of the Endurance stat is increased by 10%.

Stoneskin

Requirements: Survivor level 25 or higher

Your skin becomes much tougher, allowing it to absorb impacts much more efficiently and heal faster.

Sixth Sense

Requirements: Survivor level 25 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Magic greater than 0

You gain some ability to intuitively sense the magic around you, with particular focus placed on the ability to sense the unique fluctuations of mana emitted by monsters.

Harmful Energy Immunity

Requirements: Survivor level 25, Magic greater than 0

You gain immunity to various kinds of negative 'radiation' and similar effects, including broken mana, UV rays, and radioactive substances.

She looked at Harmful Energy immunity and snorted. It was a bit late to gain immunity to mana poisoning, wasn’t it? Although the fact that the perk directly referred to broken mana as something similar to radiation was interesting. She was actually half-tempted to go back to the place where she had arrived in this world, just to see if she could figure out what was actually going on there. She had yet to find any other parts of the forest that were as mysteriously dead and …. Twisted as that area.

She also didn’t think she had come across any other areas filled with broken mana, although she might also just not be able to detect them anymore. She had immunity to it, after all, and she had no actual senses for detecting mana.

In fact, her senses were still quite mundane. While that wasn’t necessarily a problem per se, Alice definitely felt that it was what she was missing the most. She had picked {Combat Spellcaster} earlier because it fixed one of the bigger problems with her combat abilities, but she was a bit reluctant to pick something like {Stoneskin} because she was afraid of getting skin literally made out of stone or something equally absurd. The earlier perks had almost universally had guarantees that there wouldn’t be any… odd side effects if she picked them, but this one didn’t. She doubted the system would do something like turn her skin entirely to stone, losing the ability to move, but she also suspected the perk might have some sort of hidden drawback, like losing the ability to swim or losing mobility or something. Not a problem she wanted to deal with.

She picked {Sixth Sense} and began looking around, trying to figure out what had changed. After a while, she felt that she could detect… something in the air around her. It felt heavy and obscuring, like a thick blanket of fog surrounding everything. She couldn’t detect anything beyond that, which was incredibly unhelpful.

Alice twitched. Had she just paid a perk slot for something useless like this? The ability to detect monsters better be pretty strong if the ‘mana detection’ portion of the perk was this vague and unhelpful.

Alice looked back over the perk’s description. While it didn't provide any clarification on what she was supposed to be looking for to better sense mana, it did finally answer a problem that had been bugging her for a while. Mana. That’s what separates monsters from animals. Normal animals don’t react at all if I use mana near them, and I didn’t get any System notifications after interacting with them. Well, I didn’t get {Monstrous Encounter} from interacting with them, at least. By contrast, the moment I use mana near them, spidercrabs immediately detect me and then attack. It also explains why they can move without suffocating and dying, even though this planet's flora and fauna don't seem to indicate that there is enough oxygen to support giant spiders - they use mana as some sort of replacement for food, or oxygen, or both, probably. That might also be why they attack me - I have mana, and therefore I look like food? Or something.

In that case, had getting a magic seed actually turned her into bait? Were monsters prone to just leaving people alone if they weren’t mages? Alice didn’t know, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered in either case – she had a [Magic] stat above zero since nearly the moment she had arrived in this world, right after she had nearly died of mana poisoning. She suspected that as long as she had any mana, she would appear as a tasty snack to monsters. Still, she was curious to know whether normal people were ignored by monsters. Something to ask about whenever she got to a town.

* * *

Day 31

Alice finally finished translating the other two kinds of magic seed that morning, and her massive confusion about magic and the world around her finally woke up with a vengeance when she stared at the four kinds of basic seed.

Electromagnetic and Kinetic magic seeds were pretty close to the laws of physics, and she had actually been kind of fond of them, partially because kinetic magic had kept her alive during her fights with spidercrabs, and electromagnetic magic reminded her of time she had spent in a computer lab with her friends trying to learn how to code and hanging out.

Thermal magic was one of the two remaining kinds of magic, which was fair. Alice had been kind of expected something like gravity or strong nuclear force or something, but thermal magic actually made a fair bit of sense as well, at least if you ignored the fact that kinetic magic should, theoretically, be able to control temperature by manipulating the movement speed of atoms around her and thus totally exclude the need for a seperate category of magic. Alice was willing to take it in stride as fairly normal, at least by her new standards that got farther from Earth every day, especially since she still suspected there might be a size limitation to magic, or some other barrier to this working out in practice.

The last magic seed, however, was a fair bit more questionable.

“What the fuck is ORGANIC MAGIC? Do you meant to tell me that Organic mages are capable of manipulating… Organics? That’s… that’s terrifying.” Alice suddenly had a vision of someone poking her with a mana tendril and warping her into a cthulu-esque monstrosity, or just denaturing all of the enzymes in her body and instantly killing her. She had no idea what the hell an organic mage was capable of, but the name alone unnerved her a great deal. “In fact, I messed up a fair bit when I was messing around with Kinetic magic, accidentally throwing around pebbles in the wrong direction. What the hell does a fuckup look like for an Organic mage, creating a superplague and ending the world? OOPS! Just another Thursday, I really hate when that happens! Guess I’ll try experimenting on some plants instead – oh look, I brought tree people to the world!”

Alice twitched as she looked at the final kind of magic seed, trying not to think about the implications. That being said, if [Organic Mages] were one of the four basic kinds of magic and had dozens of ways it could go horribly wrong and end the world, what did nonbasic magic look like? Why the hell was this planet still in one piece and populated? Alice was pretty damn sure that if nations in the middle ages had access to bioweapons, civilization never would have advanced to even the Renaissance era – the human race would have stopped existing much before that point. As much as she would like to have faith in the human race, she doubted that even modern nations would use the ability to create superplagues well, much less a civilization that would have had to develop with an easy button to 'win a war' in easy reach every step of their development.

Slowly, she calmed down, trying to think things through. “Maybe there are extra restrictions on Organic Magic, or something else I’m not seeing? It can’t just be straight up manipulation of all Organic matter, right? I can manipulate all kinetic energy in the surroundings though… I suddenly have a terrible feeling about this. Hopefully I'm wrong - I have never before thought about how desperately i want magic to be restricted in some way, shape, or form.” Alice twitched. Maybe she was going to go upstream and find the ruins of a civilization that had created a zombie virus or superplague by accident, and had ended themselves prematurely? Maybe she was safer in the woods…

Alice sighed. The other thing that was important was that none of the four basic magic seeds were related to dimensional or planetary travel in any way at all. In other words, she would need to move beyond the basic magic seeds to do so, which might have all sorts of extra difficulties, unknown requirements, or whatever else this world threw at her. Heck, she wouldn't have been surprised if there was a class requirement for interacting with higher level magic seeds, although she honestly had no idea. And that was assuming that there were, indeed, 'advanced' magic seeds or something along those lines.

However, it confirmed that there was no easy way to get home immediately in her reach. She let go of one of her little hopes, and cried for a few hours in her cave that day.

Day 33

With some of her spare time, Alice had finally made an axe, intending to go full lumberjack and chop down some trees. She had then quickly begun the glorious march of deforestatin. Or, at the very least, the process of procuring logs and wood. After dragging in her spidercrab corpse from a few days ago, she had realized that a spidercrab could, theoretically, waltz into her cave while she slept. Besides, her cave right now, while it kept some of the heat in and some of the cold out, fundamentally, still left a good chunk of the inner part of the cave exposed to the elements. However, if she built a nice sturdy wall to finish closing off her cave, it would at least help keep some heat in and random monsters/animals out.

She quickly realized that she had underestimated the difficulty of logging. However, it was still ultimately something she thought would be useful to her, so she kept at it. After all, the philosophy of this dimension seemed to be ‘if at first you aren’t good enough, grind some skills.’ Surely there would be some sort of ‘lumbering’ or ‘tree cutting’ skill if she tried for it, right?

Day 35

She had confirmed there was no lumbering or tree cutting skill, or anything similar. Depressed, she kept logging. After all, her shelter wasn't going to construct itself, and she still had a solid two and a half months or so until Spring came, if this planet had a similar calendar to Earth.

Apart from that, she had noticed that after reaching level 25 in the [Survivor] class, it seemed much harder to gain levels than before. Previously, she would have gained at least one level after making a bowl, making a stone axe, starting to chop down wood, and surviving for ten more days. However, now there was nothing. Perhaps all classes face some sort of drastically increased experience requirement every 25 levels? Alice shrugged. It was something to look out for. For now, she had chopping to do. Chopping which, apparently, the System would not help her with. At all.