"If you are done staring at your System notifications, may I ask what exactly you're doing?" Asked Illa, staring at Alice and frowning.

“Huh?” Alice gave Illa a dumbfounded look.

“You’re obviously up to something. You’ve been acting strange all morning – first you looked excited for training, which is something you never do. I know my training methods are a bit harsh, and you being excited about training is something I’m almost tempted to say means I failed to include the proper rigor in each part of the exercise. However, even disregarding your sudden enthusiasm for weighted running and projectile awareness training, you’ve stopped running twice, the mana in your body suddenly increased, and your facial expressions have been jumping all over the place. It would be strange if you weren’t up to something under these circumstances.”

Alice winced. She hadn’t thought much about her behavior from an outside perspective. However, now that she thought about it, it was kind of rude to half-ignore the person who was training you and in the room with you, and her behavior had been rather obviously off once she thought about it. She searched around for a reasonable explanation, before she settled on how she wanted to address the topic.

“Ahem. Ever since I got to this town, I’ve been thinking that people in this world are stronger than my previous one.”

“Stronger? Do you mean physically, or in another aspect?”

“I mean physically stronger. The average person in my world would probably have significantly lower stats than the average teenager here, and so the difference is really noticeable for me. I was trying to figure out if mana had any sort of role in improving physical strength, since it’s one of the most obvious major differences between this world and my old one. So I was trying to observe how mana moves while it’s inside of my body, and see if it was somehow influencing my muscles or something.”

“Hmm.” Illa actually appeared thoughtful at that. “What did you find?”

Alice hesitated for a moment, wondering if she should really just hand over her hard-earned insight into mana. However, Illa had also helped her in the courtroom when Lady Vallis had attempted to skewer her. Furthermore, she had a decent working relationship with Illa overall – not to mention that, right now, Illa was her teacher, and might have useful insights on how to progress her experiments further. Alice had a unique advantage in having an outside perspective on a variety of topics, but that wasn’t always an advantage – like in the case of selecting her classes. Having the input of a native from this world was probably inevitably going to be something she needed eventually if she wanted to progress her experiments. And really, was there a reason to keep this hidden?

“I found out that every time I get an Attribute Point, there’s a surge of mana that gets added to my body,” said Alice, truthfully. “My body seems to absorb mana at a somewhat consistent rate even when I’m doing other things, but that bit seems to vary from activity to activity. However, right before I gain an attribute point, I can see a big surge of mana about to enter my body.”

“That makes sense – after all, mana is needed for life to thrive and exist-” Illa looked like she was reciting something she had heard a thousand times, a sort of unconscious reflexive urge. However, partway through the sentence, she suddenly snapped to attention, as if she had suddenly noticed something. “Hmm… at least, that was my understanding a week ago, but the fact of the matter is that your body far, far outperforms what it should, given my estimations for how much mana there is in your body. Is mana really critical to survival? Hmm… but monsters all universally die if they are isolated from mana, at least in all of the experiments performed so far…” Illa frowned. For the first time since Alice had met Illa, the woman seemed… uncertain. “I don’t understand. Even livestock have traces from mana, and get weaker if they are cut off from mana. Not to mention, in the very few and rare historical cases where people were cut off from mana due to extenuating circumstances, they reported feeling weak and dizzy, similar to being cut off from oxygen. Does that…. Hmm…” Illa suddenly looked as if she was deep in thought, before she turned back towards Alice.

“You say that your original world had no mana at all in it, right?”

“To the best of my knowledge, yes.”

“And the amount of mana in your body increased by far too much when you observed the differences… That makes no sense, unless…” Illa started pacing, thinking as Alice lost track of her mumbling. A moment later, Illa stopped, and turned back towards Alice. “You discovered something major and got an Achievement for it?”

Alice twitched. This woman was disturbingly good at finding things out – or her mana senses were incredibly acute. Come to think of it, the surge of mana when she had gained her Levels and Achievement a few moments ago had dwarfed that of the mana surge when she had gained an Attribute. Did mana somehow influence Levels and Achievements as well?

Alice began by describing her theory about how mana might be used as an energy source used by the body, perhaps somehow improving people's muscles in the process. It was more of a half-baked theory she had wanted to try looking into, so Alice didn’t have a great amount of detail to discuss in a lot of aspects, but she did her best to describe what she was looking for and why. Illa had simply nodded along, unwilling to interrupt Alice’s initial explanation. Once Alice began describing her initial results, Illa had simply said nothing, opting to keep listening. However, once Alice began describing how she had sensed a rush of mana whenever she gained an Attribute, Illa’s eyes popped open.

“Wait, so you mean that whenever you get an Attribute, you can tell before you get a System message?” Illa said. “I’ve never heard of that… how odd. It could still make sense with the old explanation for mana being required, if we assume the body is upgrading itself and requires more ‘nutrients,’ or in this case, ‘mana’ to do so. However, that seems decidedly… odd, as far as explanations go. Hmm…”

“That’s not all – I gained an Achievement called {Seeker of Truth} when I was thinking that maybe mana was reshaping the body somehow every time you get an Attribute point. From that perspective, maybe every Attribute point notification is actually just a record of mana altering your body? Or something along those lines? I am beginning to at least suspect that the body improves before the System notification occurs, meaning that perhaps the notification is just a… notification. Not … I mean…” Alice struggled for a moment with describing what she was thinking. If mana upgraded the body before a System notification, that might totally flip around her assumption on cause and effect. She had previous assumed the System was granting a notification as an upgrade happened, or perhaps the notification caused the upgrade somehow. It had at least seemed logical. However, what if the System was just recording what was already happening to her body?

Or something like that. Frankly, she needed far more research and investigation to conclude anything.

Illa simply frowned. Then, she turned back towards Alice. “That is a… strange theory. I will have to think more about it. For now, tell no one of your thoughts on Attributes being records of mana – I will send a message to the North and ask if there have been any similar lines of scholarly research in the past couple centuries. It seems unlikely that no one else has encountered this particular phenomenon, so I’ll see if I can get any results on what’s happening on that front. The snow has already melted, and so the faster [Messengers] are already starting to make the transit between the north and south again.” Illa tapped her finger against her arm, seeming to be deep in thought. After a moment, she turned back towards Alice. “By the way, what does {Seeker of Truth} do? If it is combat related, feel free not to tell me, but I am curious, and it may help me tailor my training for you a bit.”

Alice debated whether or not she should tell Illa, before she decided it wasn’t a huge problem and listed the effects of the Achievement. “I’m already using the extra class slot. I was planning on ditching [Scholar] down the line because it doesn’t level much from experiments, and I had another class I picked up that I’m interested in. However, if I can keep [Scholar] as well, it would mean I don’t have to give anything up, which feels a lot better to me.”

“Reasonable. [Scholar] has a lot of nice effects, but ultimately isn’t critical for a mage, or critical for conducting research. It’s a class that’s more in the realm of ‘utility’ than ‘critical.’ However, the fact you got a rarity 8 achievement so easily feels strange to me. Hmm…” Illa frowned. Then, finally, she turned back towards Alice. “What do you know about Achievements?”

“Uhh… they give bonuses and you get them for…. Achieving stuff?” Truthfully, Alice hadn’t thought about Achievements very much since she came to this world. With everything else that had been going on, it had been set on the backburner and then overtaken by more important questions.

“That is both correct and incorrect. An Achievement’s rarity is based on two things – how many people have the achievement, and how ‘likely’ it is for the conditions to gain the achievement are. For example, {Baptized by Mana} is a rarity 5 Achievement because somewhere around a quarter of mages have the Perk, at least in Illvaria. Mana Baptism is always an option for the desperate to lift themselves to a new life, catapulting themselves from nobody to a valued member of society. If they can survive, at least.

“{Baptized by Broken Mana} is only rarity 6, even though it is much rarer. This is because the conditions for gaining the Achievement aren’t massively harder than {Baptized by Mana}, and that drops the Rarity, despite the Achievement’s rarity. Does that make sense?”

Alice nodded, and Illa continued speaking.

“Apart from the Achievements everyone can achieve, however, there is another kind of Achievements – Achievements created based on unique feats or events. For example, I have the {Fifteen Heroes of the Winter Siege} Achievement based on a particularly massive raid from the northern nomads where I and fourteen other mages held off over two hundred nomads for three hours, using a massive amount of enchanted items and Magic to help us survive the encounter. While half of us died, we held them off long enough for the army to finish cleaning up a more critical part of the raid before reinforcements arrived and won the battle. I suspect your Achievement is of the latter type – an Achievement formed based off of unique circumstances or events that are likely to leave a mark on the world.

“The fact that you got an Achievement for your little discovery that is at a rarity of 8 means you stumbled onto something a lot more interesting than just disproving a single scholarly theory, though,” said Illa as she absently tapped her fingers. “I advise you to be careful about discussing it. While it would not matter in Cyra, if you intend to go North in the future, talking about theories regarding how the System and mana interact might be frowned on by the church, or [Scholars] with some amount of influence. They won’t do anything too bad, but it could still be irritating, at least if you intend to enter an academy. And, of course, most works that are read in public are written by [Scholars], so they can affect your reputation as well.” Illa shrugged. “Really, it is dependent on your future plans and how much they can be influenced by such things, but your choices are your own. Still, tread cautiously.”

“Indeed,” said Alice as she thought it over. She was still focused on surviving now, but the expedition was coming up soon. Then, she would have a period of working for Illa, but… what came after? Going home was either impossible, or unachievable in the short term. What did she want now?

She didn’t know. She wanted to explore the mysteries of magic and the System, but she had a hard time finding a concrete way to pursue those goals.

She hesitated for a while, before deciding to think about it later. At least for the next three months, she already had her plans laid out, and at the end of it she might have totally different intentions for what she needed to do in order to keep moving forward. Going North wasn’t an impossibility, but Alice hadn’t made up her mind on what came next.

Something she needed to think about in the coming days.

“For now, I want to focus on what’s in front of me. I’ll figure out what comes next later on,” said Alice after some thought.

“Fair enough,” said Illa, as the woman seemed to slowly recover her more confident demeanor.

The training session resumed, although this time, Illa permitted Alice to stop and look at mana whenever she needed to. Alice did so semi-frequently, trying to observe what exactly the mana in the air and in her body was doing. She could now predict, with certainty, when she was about to gain another stat point, but still couldn’t really confirm why she was absorbing mana when she wasn’t gaining any attribute points. Perhaps it was making progress towards the next Attribute Point? Perhaps it was being used as fuel, and her first theory was still partially correct? Perhaps something else entirely?

She had no answers by the end of the training session.

Afterwards, she took the time to look over the new Perks she had unlocked.

Precise Mana Measurement

Requirements: Scientist level 5 or greater, [Explorer of Magic] class is a primary class, Perk related to Seeing mana has been taken from ANY class

If you concentrated on a single area for a moderate period of time, you will begin to accurately measure how much mana there is in that area, rounding to the nearest tenth of a Marium.

Precision

Requirements: Scientist level 5 or greater

If you are using a tool to measure something in your environment, that tool will slowly repair itself and improve its ability to accurately take measurements. Works up to a specific, bounded upper limit - cannot improve the same tool infinitely.

Discovery

Requirements: Scientist level 5 or greater

If you have made a Discovery in any subject which you are studying within the past year, the effect of the [Intelligence] and [Perception] stats are improved by 7% each.

Without hesitation, Alice grabbed {Precise Mana Measurement}. She had heard of tools that could be used to measure mana in the surrounding environment, but all of them were incredibly expensive, and none of them were available in Cyra. If she wanted to get access to a tool for this, it would take her months to even be able to see one. Worse, she would lose the three months of time she could have spent working on her [Scientist] and [Scholar] class more effectively – many of the experiments she was likely to do in the future would probably require the ability to quantify mana, and this Perk did exactly that. {Discovery} was sort of interesting, but not really appealing enough to pull her towards it. After all, it was ultimately just a stat boost, and while those were useful, they weren’t what she wanted to prioritize here. Precision was quite a bit more interesting, but as of right now Alice owned no tools to measure anything, meaning it was also unlikely to be useful in the near future. Illa had a few instruments of measurement, but none of them covered what she needed to measure the most – which was mana. Even if {Precision} would be useful in the future, she needed {Precise Mana Measurement} more now in order to cover a glaring hole in her needs for experiments.

Immediately after picking the Perk, Alice felt a kind of… certainty as she looked around the room. She had been able to make rough guesses for how much mana there was around her before, but it had been extraordinarily imprecise, like looking at a patch of grass and trying to guess how many blades there were inside of it. Now, instead, Alice had both an instinctual understanding of how much mana there was in the air around her, and if she concentrated on any specific area, she could tell how mana was inside of it.

The term Marium was used to measure magic – one Marium was equivalent to the amount of mana granted by one point in the magic attribute inside of a magic seed with exactly 100% mana conversion ratio. Alice had stumbled across it while looking through Illa’s small library, thankfully.

Alice looked at her room, and while the mana in the air around her continued flowing around, she was able to tell after a bit of concentrating that it contained around 675 Mariums of mana, give or take around 10 based on simple movement every second. When she looked inside of her body, she could tell that it contained around 67 Mariums at a given moment. Even after she took into account the fact that her room was much larger than her, she was sure that the room’s mana was more dense than the mana inside of her. She didn’t know the height of the room, but if she roughly guesstimated, she figured her room was around 4.5 meters by 4.5 meters by… maybe 2.5 or 2.7 meters? And she had been around 5 feet and three inches tall last time she had gone to the doctor’s office. If she assumed she had grown a little bit and translated that into meters, it should be… around 160cm? Give or take a bit? How did she translate her height into Volume though?

She frowned, trying to come up with a mathematical equation to help her and drawing a blank. In any case, she was sure that the mana in an average chunk of her body was lower than in the room around her. Still, it would be interesting to know if mana behaved like a gas, as Alice currently thought it did. Did it move from high pressure to low pressure areas? If so, it might have been invisibly assisting her stat growth the whole time.

Questions to be answered with more experimentation. She could test this as well, now that she could actually measure mana.

Next.

Cracked Seed

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 30 or higher

Allows you to gain another seed of magic, which has a maximum mana conversion of 40%.

Converted Mana

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 30 or higher

You gain the ability to absorb mana from the air around you, allowing you to replace nutrition and, in especially mana dense areas, oxygen entirely with mana if you are able to absorb it quickly enough. Absorption ability is limited by mana in the air around you and your own abilities. Only works if you devote attention and focus to the task of converting and absorbing mana.

Increases the effect of the [Magic] Attribute by 10%.

Three Seeds

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 30 or higher, Perception 100 or greater, Magic 100 or greater

You may form three more magic seeds, with a maximum mana conversion ratio of 10% each.

Improved Seed Capacity

Requirements: Explorer of magic level 30 or higher

One magic seed of your choice gains a 35% improvement in its mana conversion ratio

Hmm. Converting Mana was sort of interesting. As far as Alice could tell, it would basically allow her to use mana in place of food, as long as she meditated or whatever the equivalent demanded by the Perk was. Still, she wasn’t really hurting for food right now, so it wasn’t something she thought she wanted to focus on. And unfortunately, it didn’t allow her to do something like absorb mana in the air to replenish her magic seed, which would have been far more useful. While the Perk was fascinating, she didn’t feel that it was actually that useful, in practical terms, at least right now.

{Improved Seed Capacity} was kind of nice, but her Kinetic Seed was already at 135%. Considering the fact she was planning on picking up Enchanting soon, she would much rather get a new magic seed, to give her more versatility in the subject. She still wasn’t exactly clear on what the difference between System and Non-System enchanting was, but she did know that she needed magic to do the latter. And apart from that, she needed a magic seed related to a specific ‘subject’ to make enchantments related to that subject. In which case, {Three Seeds} would be incredibly valuable.

After a bit of hesitation, she decided to wait and see if Cecilia was willing to teach her Enchanting. If she was, Alice would grab {Three Seeds}, since while Mana Conversion Ratio would affect her ability to make high-quality enchantments, the effect of a seed’s conversion ratio was much, much lower than it was when it came to actually doing magic in the heat of the moment. By contrast, if Cecilia was not willing to help Alice with Enchanting, she would probably still grab {Three Seeds}, but she would at least think {Cracked Seed} over more carefully. She was particularly interested in trying to grab an Organic Magic seed, for example, since having a decent Organic magic seed would get her some useful Perks from [Scientist] and [Scholar] if she wanted to look at what was happening inside of people’s bodies.

She closed her Perk Selection screen for [Explorer of Magic] without making a selection yet, and then opened it for [Scholar], her final class that had gained a Perk level recently.

Written Word

Requirements: Scholar level 15 or higher

Your handwriting becomes significantly easier to read, and you will more easily find words that are likely to be easier to understand. This will make it easier for others to understand your ideas which are written down. Warning: will not correct your ideas or persuade others. This makes it easier to understand what you are saying. It does not make it more persuasive or correct.

Rhetorical Flourish

Requirements: Scholar level 15 or higher

Your ability to construct a logical argument while debating verbally with others in an academic setting becomes slightly improved. While debating an academic topic, you gain 5% effect of [Charisma]

Mana Sight

Requirements: Scholar level 15 or higher, Any magic seed at 100% mana conversion rate or greater, Magic Stat 50 or higher, Perception 100 or higher

You gain the ability to see mana in the world around you. This effect is weakened for mana inside of living organisms.

Waterproof Books

Requirements: Scholar level 15 or higher

Any book which you have owned for at least 3 months becomes waterproof so long as you are still considered the owner.

Alice looked over the Perks, and wasn’t particularly impressed by any of them. {Written Word} was… uninspired. Her handwriting was already quite neat, and she did not think the Perk would offer anything particularly impressive to her. {Rhetorical Flourish} was… interesting? But far, far too specific – she hadn’t even made up her mind on whether or not she intended to share her ideas with the world around her, or go to a northern mage academy yet. It was quite possible she would, eventually – but the fact that the Perk was so specific and applicable to only a single field was a major demerit. Especially since the Perk noted her ability would only be ‘slightly’ improved.

She was a bit surprised the class still offered her {Mana Sight}, considering the fact she had already acquired it from {Student of Kinetic Magic}. She had already checked around, and having multiple Perks with the same effect did absolutely nothing until after level 75, when one could start to combine Perks from different classes together instead of being restricted to the same Class, as one was after level 50. Maybe it was still worth picking up, with the assumption it might be useful someday for Perk combination purposes?

As for {Waterproof Books}, Alice was already quite used to keeping her books safe, considering how many of them she had back home.

Finally, after debating a bit, she went back to the Perk choices that had been available at level 10 of [Scholar] and grabbed {Accelerated Thinking}. Even if the Perk seemed to mostly be a way of boosting the [Intelligence] stat, it was still at least somewhat useful. And more importantly, it could probably be combined with {Enhanced Memory} from level 5 of [Scholar] to make something cool after level 50, if Alice reached that level in the future.

She felt her thoughts clarify. She could think slightly faster, have an easier time thinking. It was especially notable once she tried to solve a few math equations in her head, and felt the speed at which she went over her work and arrived at the answer increase. However, she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but it felt… less effective than boosts to her [Intelligence] stat did. Like there was something missing. However, she had already expected that, since the Perk noted it improved some aspects of her thinking rather than just improving the effect of her [Intelligence] stat. At the very least, it was still providing a slight effect, even if it was ultimately rather minor. Mostly, though, she grabbed it for combining purposes down the line.

Finally finished grabbing Perks for now, Alice collapsed into bed, exhausted by the events of the day. She tried not to think about the next two days. Tomorrow, she would check to see if others had the same surge of mana she did when she gained an Attribute point. That would be fun, and might net another level or two in [Scientist] if she was lucky.

However, ultimately, Alice felt her nerves clench for a different reason. Soon, she would need to go and face Erik’s daughter. The girl whose father's death she had all but confirmed with her presence and story, as well as whose corpse she had, at least partially, looted.

That was a conversation Alice wasn’t looking forward to.