The next morning, when Alice woke up her entire body hurt. She had hoped that perhaps some effect of the System or some Perk from Illa would fix sore muscles. Unfortunately, reality, destroyer of dreams, informed her that this wasn’t the case. Groaning, she flopped out of bed, her arms still twitching occasionally as she wobbled around. She took a quick look around the room, noting that it was lightly decorated and sported decent-looking wooden furniture, but nothing extensively spectacular or expensive-looking, before she stepped into the hallway. A maid was waiting outside, and when Alice stepped out the maid immediately handed Alice a plate of hot eggs, some sort of potato product, and a few vegetables that Alice couldn’t identify. Alice shrugged as she grabbed a fork and started digging in.

Apart from that, she finally took a moment to look over her Perks for level 10 of [Scholar]. Even if it was unlikely that the perk would stay active for very long before she got [Enchanter] and swapped her classes around, it wasn’t a bad idea to get some benefit out of it before the Perk got disabled.

Accelerated Thinking

Requirements: Scholar level 10 or higher, Intelligence 125 or greater

Slightly improves your thinking and processing speed.

Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement

Requirements: Scholar level 10 or higher, Endurance 75 or greater

Your body needs 10% less sleep every day, and your sleeping habits will be better optimized for the amount of sleep your body is able to function with.

Speed Reading

Requirements: Scholar level 10 or higher, Intelligence 100 or greater, Perception 100 or greater

You read words in books somewhat more quickly and process the information within more quickly. Cannot be applied to anything besides reading.

Alice looked over the Perks for a moment, immediately excluding {Speed Reading} from the choices. It wasn’t bad, but she had the problem of not having enough books to read right now, rather than the problem of not processing the information inside of them quickly enough. Besides, the other two choices were simply more appealing to her. The other two were both tempting – as far as she could guess, {Accelerated Thinking} would probably act as something akin to an amplifier for her [Intelligence] stat, improving her ability to think quickly. It would probably also help her use her Magic more effectively – being able to process information quickly was vital to actually keeping her mana tendrils focused on the object she wanted to move, as well as making fewer mistakes and wasting less mana. By contrast, {Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement} would allow her to get in some more training time. From the way the Perk was worded, Alice assumed her body wouldn't just need less sleep, but would also build itself around whatever adjusted sleep schedule she had. An 10% training time every day would be incredibly useful in the long run as well - she would be able to read more books if she had access to a library, increasing her levels in the long run, as well as increasing her Attributes and Skills as long as she took advantage of the extra time.

After hesitating for a while, Alice grabbed {Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement}. Extra training every day would have more long-lasting use in the long run, and would also help her grind stats like [Intelligence]. Those improvements would last even after the [Scholar] class was moved to Secondary Classes later on.

“When am I expected to start working on helping around Town and with monster hunting?” Asked Alice in between bites of breakfast.

“Lady Illa has stated that you can think of the time period between now and the expedition as ‘training time’ and not worry about your obligations. However, starting when the expedition departs, you’re expected to start contributing to Cyra.” Said the maid.

So I have a little under two weeks, if Illa hasn’t changed her mind about the time frame for the expedition. That’s probably sensible – enough time for me to pick up the Class I need and ensure I won’t embarrass myself and her, but still making sure she gets at least two and a half months of work out of me. Fair enough. For now, she intended to make the most of her ‘training time’ then.

“Lady Illa and I agreed that I would be allowed to look over her library of books, yes? May I ask where they are?”

“Follow me, lady Alice,” said the maid as she turned around. After walking through various hallways and rooms for a minute or two, Alice arrived in a room that was… quite different from what she had imagined. She had been expecting a room filled with books, the way she was used to libraries looking when she had been on Earth. Unfortunately, because of how much more expensive paper and ink were in this dimension, Illa’s library only consisted of fifty books or so, arranged on a single lone bookshelf. Alice would probably be able to read through this lone bookshelf in a month or so. She couldn't help but feel a bit disappointed, but tried to brush off the feeling. Considering how expensive books were here, it made sense.

The rest of the room was filled with comfortable furniture, as well as a teapot and various flavors of tea and snacks suitable for light reading. Briefly, Alice wondered why Illa would put water near the highly expensive and valuable books, before she remembered how easy it had been for her clothes to get some Perks attached to them. Come to think of it, how common were Perks that made books waterproof? Considering how valuable paper and ink were in this world, she was sure people took extra precautions towards making books safe. In that case, perhaps waterproof books were common here? It was an odd idea to her, but it was also quite interesting.

Alice thanked the maid, who simply gave a half-bow before leaving the room. Alice turned back towards the small collection of books, and with a sigh, started scanning the titles, looking for anything relevant to her interests. The books were about a variety of scattered topics, but Alice quickly found one that interested her, titled “On the Formation of Lesser Seeds.” She opened the book and, without another thought, started reading.

She spent several hours thumbing through the book, learning more about the differences in magic seeds. Apparently, the ‘basic four’ magic seeds were fairly standard choices for most mages because of their highly efficient mana conversion – almost no broken mana produced, and since people had at least relatively okay understanding of the subjects, people often formed ‘perfect’ magic seeds with 100% initial mana conversion ratio. Since mana conversion ratio directly equated to how much of one’s magic stat was converted into available mana, having a subject where people usually formed 100% magic seeds and then didn’t ‘break’ much mana when they used their seed was incredibly valuable.

However, ‘lesser’ magic seeds weren’t anywhere near as uncommon as Alice had thought they were – higher level mages often grabbed one or two ‘lesser’ magic seeds even though they wasted much more mana, specifically because they could produce a nasty surprise in a combat situation. Magic Seeds could also, theoretically, be literally anything. Basically, the process of creating a magic seed seemed to be creating some sort of ‘concept,’ and then the seed would allow one to spend mana from inside of the seed to convert the world around you into whatever your ‘concept’ was. That concept could be anything – singing, healing, kinetic energy, or even more abstract ones like ‘justice’ or ‘hope.’ However, the more abstract a seed was, and the less it conformed to the laws of physics, the worse the broken mana production would be. Something like a ‘magic seed of hope,’ for example, was estimated to waste over 90% of its mana trying to create ‘hope’ in the surrounding environment, and it was often difficult to tell what the seed was actually doing besides wasting a slot for a useful magic seed.

However, [Enchanters] had much greater use for extra mana seeds of ‘lesser’ schools specifically because traditional enchanting and consumable enchanting required one to have a magic seed similar to the force one was attempting to manipulate. In other words, to create a ‘healing stone’ consumable item, one needed to have a ‘healing’ magic seed. This was vastly inferior to what an [Organic Mage] could do, especially when it came to reducing broken mana production. However, it had the upside of being able to work even without an intelligent mind precisely directing the magic seed, whereas an [Organic Mage] who didn’t know what they were doing was prone to accidentally breaking important things inside of the body and harming or killing the patient. In short, [Enchanters] took weird and suboptimal magic seeds to compensate for the shortcomings of magic that wasn’t directed by an intelligent mind.

It was as if the class was made specifically to synergize with [Explorer of Magic]. The class offered her so many Magic Seeds that she was sure that it would pair well with [Enchanter]. Assuming that Lehmann’s daughter was willing to help her, at least – if not, there really wasn’t anything she could do about it.

Finally, after hours of reading, the maid informed Alice that Illa was prepared for their lesson. Grudgingly, Alice tore herself away from her book and returned to the training room where she had suffered yesterday.

Alice suspiciously glanced at Illa’s hands the moment she entered the room. Sure enough, there were more dry beans there…

However, thankfully, it didn’t seem like Illa had the intention of throwing them at her today. Yet. When Illa saw Alice walk into the room, she shot Alice a grin that contained both a hint of mirth and a hint of warmth.

“You should have regained a bit of mana while you slept, yes? And the maid says that you also spent the morning reading, so overall you should have about 12 or 13 hours of mana?”

“Yes, Lady Illa,” said Alice. “I have enough mana to work on some basic exercises.”

“In that case, today I intend to teach you the basics of how [Kinetic Mages] fight.” Illa simply dropped the beans in her hand. Instead of clattering to the ground, they floated in midair, all twenty dried beans floating in midair. “The core aspect of a [Kinetic Mage] is using our environment as a weapon. In other words, tree branches, cobblestones, and if we’re lucky and they don’t have Perks defending against it, our opponent’s clothing are the best weapons we have available to us in a fight if we’re unprepared.” The beans began orbiting Illa, before all of them suddenly launched themselves towards Alice. They all froze a moment before they touched her face.

“Kinetic mages specialize in combat because we can stop a sword or an arrow dead in its tracks, and in some cases even use it as a weapon against the person attacking us. And, of course, in the military we’re also far easier to move around than siege equipment, meaning that taking down or defending forts by chucking huge rocks around is also common. However, in single combat, we can also use lots of smaller objects to attack and defend ourselves.” The beans that had frozen in front of Alice all spun around, pointing towards a wooden board that Alice hadn’t noticed lying in the corner. Then, they launched themselves at the floorboard beneath her. Instead of just bouncing off of the floor, as Alice had expected them to do, they sank almost a full centimeter into the floorboard before cracking and collapsing into mush. Alice was pretty sure that beans weren’t that hard, so she had to wonder just what was reinforcing them. Perhaps a Perk? Still, totally normal dried beans drilling halfway through a board was impressive.

“The first thing I’ve noticed about you is that you have a hard time splitting your focus, which is vital to a [Kinetic Mage]. You need to be able to focus on more than one thing if you want to optimize combat. You also struggle with noticing objects, probably because you don’t have many Perks reinforcing your ability to detect the world around you. Your [Perception] Stat isn’t going to cut it by itself unless it’s much, much higher than the average person is ever going to get it to.

Fortunately, there are several Perks in [Kinetic Mage] that help with that, and even without them, there are some Skills you can pick up without spending a Perk slot. The most useful one is {Projectile Awareness}, which you should get if you actually start blocking the beans with your mana instead of letting them hit you in the face, and the other one is {Divided Attention}, which will help you multitask. What I want you to do right now is try to focus on making these beans orbit around your hand, as a way to improve your fine control over your mana while also getting you towards the {Divided Attention} Skill. Once you’re almost out of mana, it’s back to running and trying to block or dodge beans…”

Alice picked up the beans with her magic and began trying to rotate them around her wrist. Almost immediately, most of them fell to the floor. Alice dully watched the beans fall to the ground before she picked them up and got back to the exercise.

After another few hours of exhausting exercises, Alice finally got a notification for her fifth class.

You have unlocked the class Student of Kinetic Magic as a result of having a Kinetic magic seed at 40% mana conversion or higher, having at least a rudimentary understanding of kinetic energy, and having trained under a [Kinetic Mage] for at least 5 hours. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes/No

Alice immediately grabbed the class as a Primary Class – she had been waiting for it for a while, and the class would help shore up many of her weaknesses as a fighter. Since [Kinetic Mages] specialized in combat, the class related to kinetic magic gave a bunch of useful abilities that synergized well with what would probably become her primary combat style. Even though she still intended to pick up other abilities in the future, especially because [Explorer of Magic] offered her magic seeds at nearly every level, she ultimately still needed one specific ‘core’ fighting ability.

After her training session with Illa, Alice… kind of wanted to collapse into a pile again. She briefly debated going to see Eric Lehmann’s daughter, since she would need her help to pick up [Enchanter]. However, the other girl had just received news that her father had died as a result of Alice’s presence a few days ago. Alice decided she would wait a week first. She wanted to apologize to the girl regardless of whether or not she would have an enchanting teacher afterwards, but the girl probably needed some time with friends and family to grieve, and Alice doubted things would go well if she showed up just two days after the trial. Best to give her some time and space before making her presence known again.

For now, she would focus on gaining some levels and training with Illa. In seven days, she would go talk to the Enchanter’s daughter. And in about twelve days, the expedition would begin.

* * *

The next five days settled into a routine. Alice would wake up, and then read books on magic and magic seeds to improve her understanding of what the heck she was doing, as well as learn the theory behind magic. After that, she would have a training session with Illa, in which she got hit in the face with dried beans while she tried to dodge or block, or try to pour herself a cup of tea entirely using magic, or try to move objects that were hidden from her physical sight. While she often failed the magic exercises or only succeeded after a great deal of difficulty, she was getting both decent Skills and skills when it came to manipulating things and moving them around. She could tell how much she was improving every day, and it was gratifying to see, especially since her physical stats were getting quite close to 100 now.

Apart from that, she gained multiple levels. [Explorer of Magic] shot up to level 29, only a single level away from the next Perk. Now that she had been actively exploring the books in Illa’s library with the intent of correcting her deficient knowledge, rather than just trying to compare it to her old world’s knowledge, she was gaining decent levels in the class, and [Scholar] had already reached level 13. She was a bit sad to know the class would probably be a secondary class soon. She had also picked up a few new Skills, notably including {Projectile Awareness} and {Divided Attention}. Both of them were useful, allowing her to more accurately and efficiently focus on multiple objects at once and sense objects even when she wasn’t actively paying attention to them. Sure, most beans still hit her in the face, but with {Projectile Awareness} and {Dodge} she was starting to at least dodge or stop one out of three.

However, what she was most excited about was [Student of Kinetic Magic]. After all, she had made plans for how to use some form of {mana sight} to do some testing on how mana and physical exercise interacted with each other, and the Priest had mentioned she should get the option to see mana at around level 10. And just today, during her training session with Illa, she had reached level 10 in [Student of Kinetic Magic.]

She had hit level 5 earlier in the week, and she had seen a few options for the class’s Perks. However, none of them had seemed terribly interesting.

Object Control

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 5 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Intelligence 100 or greater

Enhances your ability to predict the trajectories of nonliving objects around you, as well as any objects you have interacted with via magic within the past five minutes. You also gain greater comprehension ability when it comes to moving objects using mana.

Disciple of Magic

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 5 or higher

The effect of your Magic stat is improved by 3%

Kinetic Seed Improvement

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 5 or higher

Your Kinetic Seed's Mana Conversion Ratio is improved by 5%

Proper Disciple

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 5 or higher

You gain a greater understanding and ability to remember any concepts taught to you by your teacher related to Kinetic Magic.

Two of the four options were just minor attribute boosts, which, while not bad, weren’t particularly excellent either. {Proper Disciple} had at least been sort of interesting, but it just overlapped way too much with {Enhanced Memory}. Honestly, Alice didn’t think that the Perk was really that useful in comparison to {Enhanced Memory} either, since it was way more specific. She could see the appeal, but it just wasn’t useful for her.

However, {Object Control} felt way better than a level 5 Perk had any right to be. She hadn’t expected much after reading the description – even though it sounded pretty useful, it was, ultimately, a level 5 Perk, and Alice knew that the lower level a Perk was, the weaker it tended to be.

Instead, the Perk gave her a minor overhaul in how she used mana – it was tighter, more efficient, and cleaner in nearly every respect. A small, subtle change, but she could definitely feel the difference when she used her magic. She was probably able to avoid wasting almost 5% of the mana she normally failed to use effectively. Even better, the perk gave her the ability to vaguely sense anything moving within about five meters. She couldn’t detect exactly where the object was, or how fast it was moving, but every time something moved, she could at least get a vague sensation of where it was and how big it was. In short, even if it wouldn’t let her stop an arrow with pinpoint accuracy heading towards the back of her head, she would be able to tell that one was heading towards her a fraction of a second before it hit her and try to duck or dodge. And Alice didn’t doubt for a second that she would get more and better ways to enhance this even further in the future – during some of their training sessions, Illa had demonstrated awareness of nearly the entire room at all times, regardless of where Illa’s eyes were pointing.

Now, Alice looked at the Perks for level 10 of her [Student of Kinetic Magic] class.

Proper Learning

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 10 , Intelligence 100 or greater

Increases the effect of the Intelligence attribute by 5%

Disciple's Kinetic Seed Improvement

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 10 or higher

Your Kinetic Seed's mana Conversion Ratio is improved by 8%

Resistance-piercing

Requirement: Student of Kinetic Magic level 10 or higher

Your mana becomes slightly better at piercing through the resistance all living creatures have against mana.

Range Improvement

Requirement: Student of Kinetic Magic level 10 or higher

Your 'range' within which you may interact with mana with no penalty is increased by 1 meter.

Above Average Mana Sight

Requirements: Student of Kinetic Magic level 10 or higher, Perception 100 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, Have interacted with Magic for at least 15 hours.

Your eyes gain the ability to see mana around you with an above-average level of detail.

Alice scanned over the Perks briefly before she grabbed {Above Average Mana Sight}. She had already started to notice that [Scientist] wouldn’t level up unless she actually did proper experiments. [Scholar] allowed her to accept the results of other people testing things out, as long as she was properly trying to learn from the source of information. However, for [Scientist] to level up, it seemed Alice needed to actually experiment and test things out herself. And that meant that, to do her first experiment, she needed to actually be able to see mana. None of the other Perks were anywhere close to making the cut when Alice thought about how much she needed to be able to detect mana, since {Sixth Sense} was mostly geared towards not getting eaten by monsters and barely helped her sense mana.

After taking the Perk, she felt the brief sensation of her eyes itching, before they settled down. She looked around the room, and for the first time, she could see floating wisps of colored light. They didn’t obscure her ability to see the room, but they were quite distinct. She could see two distinct colors floating around her room – one was a solid grey color, sort of monotone in nature and a bit grainy. The second color was much, much sparser, and could only be seen occasionally. It was closer to a solid white color, and it was only detectable in tiny floating wisps here and there. If she had to guess, there were probably only ten or twenty little specks of the white color within the entire room, and everywhere else was simply filled with grey mana. She also noticed that she could see mana outside of the room, even through solid walls and doors, although it was a bit more grainy and difficult to see.

Alice tried reaching out a mana tendril towards one of the wisps of white light, and tried to sense it. However, her mana tendrils gave her the same amount of feedback as usual – namely, the only thing she could tell was that there was no solid object there. However, she was actually able to see her mana tendril now – it looked kind of like a long rope extending out from the center of her chest, and like the rest of the room, it was mostly grey in color. However, there were a few small wisps of white here and there as well. She tried pushing some mana through her tendril, and watched as the inside of the tendril guided along a pulse of mana, before it exited the other end of the rope and pushed the air directly around the tendril. However, as she watched, she noticed that not all of the mana she had sent through the tendril actually turned into Kinetic Energy – instead, small bits and pieces of it seemed to collapse into themselves, before they also turned into little wisps of white mana.

Ah, the white color might be Broken Mana, she thought as she watched little chunks of her mana break off from the main flow here and there before turning into specks of white.

Then, Alice began cackling as she looked at the room around her. Finally, she could start her first experiment now! When she was training tomorrow, she just had to watch the flow of mana around her and inside of her body while she exercised – even though it was a bit harder to see through her body, her newfound ability to see mana didn’t seem to be particularly hindered by physical objects. Therefore, she could actually see mana flowing through her body, especially her muscles, as she watched. In other words, she could definitely watch what happened when she did her training.

Tomorrow, she could finally start her first experiment on this world. It had been months of hard work, most of which she had spent just barely surviving, and she had grown a lot as both a person and in terms of levels. Finally, she was set up to start a real experiment.