When she got back to the mansion, Alice started out by writing down what she had discovered over the course of the day into her notebook.

- Magicians seem to have had a tendency to melt themselves to death before the System appeared.

- Possibly hints that the System helps people deal with mana? Further evidence is the fact that all System interactions I have seen so far begin by drawing in mana, and the fact that mana seems to have been ‘poisonous’ to people before the System started operating. Investigate further – if possible, find out if there are more detailed records of people’s reactions to mana before the System.

Alice didn’t have proof that the System was interfering with the way mana and humans interacted yet – at least, not the empirical, scientific kind of proof. Still, at least as far as she could tell, the information she had so far seemed to strongly hint that the System might somehow be interfering with the way people and mana interacted with each other, making mana less lethal and devastating to humans. At least, assuming the church’s outdated records about mages before the System were correct. Whenever Alice moved on from Cyra, she would do her best to see if she could find better historical records from the era before the System, but for now, it was mostly just speculation.

However, if Alice’s speculation was correct, and the System was interfering with the way Humans and Mana interacted, that opened up even more questions. Who or what had designed the System, and why? And HOW? The System had possibly been with her since the moment she had set foot on this world – less than two hours after she had first arrived here, she had gotten her first System notification. If the System was some sort of creature or tool or something that changed the way humans and mana interacted, how the hell had it been constructed or born which would allow it to affect literally every human being on the planet, even a human from another world that no human on this planet had ever seen? That wasn’t even at the level of satellite imagery anymore – this was closer to a satellite image continuously scanned by high level AI, or operating on another set of rules entirely.

Deep in her thoughts, Alice frowned, before she thought over Cecilia’s Achievement. Cecilia had also reported that it was difficult to observe Mana while it changed and interacted with the human body, which Alice found a bit odd. Then, Alice wrote another few things down in her notebook.

- (possibly) System (or something else) makes it difficult to observe the mechanics of the System? Possibly mind control or manipulation?

Alice shivered as she wrote the words down, before she frowned.

It… didn’t feel like the System was doing anything of the sort. No, in the first place, if the System intended to ‘manipulate’ people somehow, what the hell was it doing handing out Achievements that directly contradicted its attempts to obscure the truth? That made no sense at all.

Not to mention, Alice hadn’t observed any sort of problems with her mana experiments, or with her ability to observe the way mana interacted with the human body. Granted, she had only done one experiment so far, so it could have been a fluke or something, but…

That explanation didn’t really feel right. If the System was actively ‘mind controlling’ people or something, why was Cecilia able to properly understand Alice’s explanation of how she thought mana and muscles interacted? If that was supposed to be some sort of deeply held secret of the System or something, it should have been actively stopping Cecilia from understanding it, right? Perhaps by giving her a headache, or messing with her ability to understand the subject, or making her space out whenever Alice explained her experiments. Really, the possibilities were endless, and Alice didn’t believe for a second that the System was incapable of doing any of the above. The Perks Alice picked up had far more reality-defying effects than ‘give someone a headache for a few minutes whenever they think about stuff they shouldn’t. Heck, Alice had gone through plenty of phases where she questioned the System, its mechanics, and its purpose – if the System was doing some sort of mind-control in the background, it had already had dozens of times where it should have interfered but obviously hadn’t. Regardless of whether it was unable to, or simply chose not to, the System was not directly interfering with people’s thoughts.

Alice tried to spend more time thinking about the topic, but finally, she realized she was just going in circles, unable to figure out what all of this information meant yet. For now, she decided to stick with a more basic observation.

- For some reason, it seems difficult for Cecilia to observe the mechanics of mana and biology interacting with each other. Reason unknown. System may either be part of this, or part of the reason it’s possible to observe mana unobscured? Unknown. System probably not doing mind – control, but if the System is actively designed to obscure the mechanics of mana and human biology interacting, might have some other, ‘dumb’ solution used in place of this? Alternately, there might be some ‘byproduct’ of mana interacting with biology that makes it hard to observe, and my {Outworlder} Perk cuts through this – I still don’t know exactly what the ‘increased support from the System’ bit of the Perk means yet, but it helping me cut through problems in my observations would certainly make sense.

- Skills that I already learned while I lived on Earth and am only officially adding to my Status screen don’t seem to actually change my abilities at all - I will save other skills that I imagine can probably be ‘earned’ for when I want to observe the process of gaining a ‘Skill’ more closely, since they don’t fundamentally affect my abilities at all. It does deprive me of a bit of skill growth, but I imagine I can also earn a lot of levels in Scientist later on for observing the process more carefully, so it probably balances out.

Alice sighed as she wrote down the last of her observations, before she finally moved on to the part of the night she was looking forward to.

Alice had started wondering recently – where does mana come from? More specifically, where does the mana in her body come from? She was obviously spending mana to do ‘magic stuff’ every time she invoked her magic seed to manipulate kinetic energy – the amount of mana inside of her seed went down, and even though the numbers were way off, the number of Mariums inside of her body did decrease by a very small amount when she spent enough mana. Alice still wasn’t sure what to make of the fact that using mana caused the Mariums in her body to decrease, but only by a small amount, but at the very least she was sure mana was being spent somewhere.

So where did the mana inside of her body come from? Did it come from the air? Food? Something else entirely?

For now, Alice had five major guesses for where Mages got mana from.

1) Hypothesis: Mana is actually digested from extra food somehow – as in, Mages eat a lot more than regular people (not that I have observed, based on my own eating – possibly [Survivor] reducing food requirements or something though). Magic seeds might actually be converting extra nutrition into mana. (Do mages eat more than regular people? Check this later. If all mages consistently eat more food than this is good evidence for this, and if mages don’t eat more this hypothesis is unlikely.)

Alternatively, perhaps mages simply ‘get more’ out of each bite of food. Humans waste a lot of the matter they ingest from every meal, and mages might simply make better use of the matter they ingest in order to gather more energy. Check any studies or information on bowel movements of mages to see if less … waste is produced (I can’t believe I just wrote that) (Check books, ask Illa. Maybe see if anyone has noticed anything unique about mage stomachs/intestines?).

2) Hypothesis: Mages absorb mana from their food somehow. I have noticed that food itself contains mana on this planet – all living things seem to contain at least a bit of mana, and this includes plants. Maybe mages are just somehow digesting this energy and then spitting it out using magic seeds? Check to see if the amount of mana in the diet changes mana recharge rate).

3) Hypothesis: Mana is filtered from mana in the air, and mages just absorb when they aren’t absorbing mana to improve their stats (assuming that’s why people ‘naturally’ absorb mana). (Do I absorb more mana than usual when I use magic? Have not checked yet.) (If it’s safe to cut myself off from mana, see if I can keep using magic if I sit in a room with no mana for multiple days.)

4) Hypothesis: Mana is somehow condensed from sunlight, and mages are doing the same thing plants do without Chloroplasts or something. (Idea kind of vague, but maybe? See if cutting myself off from sunlight causes me to lose magic abilities or something. I don’t think this one is correct, but still. The sun is a big, obvious energy source, and it would be dumb not to at least check later).

5) Mana does not give a shit about conservation of energy, and is just doing whatever it wants. Unlikely, but it’s magic after all. Who knows what it’s capable of?

There might be other ways that Mages could generate mana that Alice wasn’t immediately thinking of. However, now that she knew mana was so closely linked to Stats and the System seemed to be doing some sort of job regulating mana, Alice was more curious than ever about where mana actually came from.

For now, Alice wasn’t able to check some of the hypotheses – she was about to leave for the expedition, after all, and so she wasn’t going to specifically cut the mana – dense food out of her diet and see whether it affected her magic abilities, since, obviously, having less mana during the expedition might be dangerous. However, she intended to do the exact opposite thing.

Alice was going to switch her diet around to eating exclusively mana-dense food, and see if it improved her mana regeneration. If mana was somehow absorbed from the food she ate, it made sense that increasing the amount of mana in her diet would increase the amount of mana in her body – even though Alice’s Perk unfortunately didn’t allow her to directly count the number of Mariums of mana in her Magic seeds, and Alice still hadn’t worked out how many Mariums inside a seed correlated to how many Mariums were inside of her body, she could certainly still measure time between a magic seed being empty and full. Currently, it was supposed to take 40 hours for Alice to recharge her magic seed – if it took less time while she was consuming a mana-rich diet, that would be good enough for a preliminary test and she could start doing more detailed experiments.

And if it failed, it just meant that she ate less of the foods she liked – in all, not really a big deal.

Alice suddenly frowned, as she realized that she had just made a deal with Cecilia about including her in Alice’s experiments, and hadn’t mentioned that she was going to start observing how mana and food interacted with each other. She had completely forgotten to mention it, because she had been so excited to start her next experiment…

Alice sighed. She had a really bad habit of spacing out once she started hyperfocusing on one thing. While focusing on one thing wasn’t bad per se, Alice couldn’t really say it was admirable if it led to her totally forgetting her surroundings and going off to do whatever. Which, now that she thought about it, was also exactly what happened when she was trying to figure out how the amount of Mariums in a human body and magic seeds interacted.

She wrote down a reminder for herself to talk to Cecilia about what she was testing tomorrow. Having more people check her results would be good, and Alice wanted to uphold her end of the bargain with Cecilia as much as possible.

For now, however, Alice would just have to accept that she had totally forgotten to mention it earlier today and then move on.

The next hour was spent discussing food with the chef – Alice had, first, requested that the Chef use only mana dense foods in her meals in order for Alice to conduct an experiment.

The chef had given Alice a blank look. Alice had wondered why her request was inspiring such an expression, before she realized…

That the chef did not have the ability to see mana. In short, the chef had no way of sorting out which foods were mana dense and which ones weren’t. Her request was simply impossible for the chef to carry out from the very beginning.

Alice had thus been forced to spend most of the rest of the hour explaining that she wanted to only eat certain foods for a while because she was going on a ‘diet.’ If nothing else, the chef seemed familiar with the concept of diets, which was fortunate, and so Alice had gone through the food supplies for the day and picked out all of the vegetables, fruits, et cetera, and then told the chef that she wanted her meal to be made from the specific ingredient Alice had picked out.

Alice did also note, with curiosity, that all of the ‘mana dense’ foods she had picked out were ones she didn’t recognize from Earth. The plants from Earth, by contrast, seemed to have lower average mana density, with some of the vegetables having almost no mana inside of them at all. Potatoes were particularly low in mana – which gave Alice a lot of room for further speculation and guessing about why Earth crops were randomly laying around in this fantasy world, but nothing she could test right now.

The chef agreed to her request, although the strange expression never quite left his face during the whole conversation. Alice resisted the urge to make a face in response. Her request wasn’t that bizarre, was it?

Anyway, what mattered was that for the next few days, Alice had already picked out the ingredients to be used in her meals. Since they were all mana-rich, Alice would be able to start running her second experiment. It would take days to show results, but Alice thought she could probably keep the experiment running over the course of the Expedition – even if she would need to re-try a lot of it later on, she was prepared to redo some things a few times. What mattered the most was just figuring out if her hypotheses had any merit to them at all. Granted, the mana was also slightly denser the farther south you went, and the expedition was going to be heading directly south – meaning that her experiment wouldn’t actually distinguish between hypothesis 1 and hypothesis

* * *

Illa had given Alice a strange look when she saw Alice’s food that night, but ultimately hadn’t said anything on the subject. The next day, Alice had gone to Cecilia and informed her what Alice intended to test, regarding the relationship between mana inside of food and magic inside of the body. Cecilia had given her a bit of a dubious look, but had ultimately shrugged and promised she would adjust her diet as well. In a sense, Cecilia would actually be a much better test for the experiment – she used most of her mana every day enchanting things, and unlike Alice, Cecilia wasn’t going to need to keep any mana reserved for a potential emergency later on. Currently, due to the differing nature of their jobs, Cecilia used her magic in stable and constant ‘drains’ over the course of a day, whereas Alice tended to use her mana in more erratic bursts when she was training. Alice couldn’t help but feel amused at the fact that for her second experiment, she was going to be conducting a far more flawed version of the first test than her assistant.

The next few days settled into a blur of training, as Alice desperately tried to get her Stats up to the point where she wouldn’t be a hindrance in the expedition. From Alice’s conversation with Cecilia yesterday, as well as her conversations about ‘average’ stats among the population, Alice knew that she was close to an acceptable baseline of stats for her age – most people had an average of around 100-110 in every Stat, with an extra 20 or 30 points in their specialties. Then, they stacked Perks and Achievements together to multiply the heck out of all of their stats.

Finally, the night before the expedition, Alice got one of the Achievements she had marked as ‘useful’ that she had wanted to pick up. Apart from the Achievement, she had picked up a few more levels in [Student of Kinetic Magic], as well as one more level in [Scholar] from reading through more of Illa’s library. Alice was perhaps 30% of the way through Illa’s library so far, so she estimated she could probably still get a few more levels out of Illa’s books before she ran out of reading material available in Cyra.

You have leveled up!

Student of Kinetic Magic: 10 -> 13

You have leveled up!

Scholar: 17 -> 18

You have gained an achievement!

Basic-Training (Rarity 3)

You have managed to get all of your stats to 100 or higher, and have proven that you are dedicated to at least not being far behind your peers.

+5% Effect of All Attributes

This Achievement gave her a nice little bonus, and at the same time, showcased how biased this world could be towards mages, even when it came to things like Achievements. Non-Mages weren’t able to get their [Magic] stat to 100, meaning that they could never get this Achievement – instead, they would be able to get a weaker version of the Achievement that only offered a 3% bonus to their Attributes. Alice knew that most of the people on this planet had already acquired this Achievement, or at least the lesser version of it.

However, it still felt good to get this one – it felt like her hard work was being acknowledged, and she was finally getting to the point where people in the same age group didn’t just totally outpace her in terms of raw physical and mental abilities.

Alice allowed herself a small smile as she looked at the Achievement, before she went to sleep for the night. Tomorrow, the expedition would begin, and Alice needed to be in her best mental state if she wanted to avoid messing up. Illa had been the one organizing and preparing the Expedition, so Alice wasn’t too familiar with most of the details – however, she knew that several other mages would be there, to help deal with the Broken Mana, as well as several guards to use their investigation-related Perks, and a few [Travelling Merchants] to help the supply wagons moving through the completely roadless area.

Alice couldn’t help but wonder what the hell [Travelling Merchants] got for Perks that let them move horses through heavily forested and roadless land, but it was ultimately irrelevant to her. She just needed to do her part, show her face around the Expedition, and learn whatever she could. Still, she couldn’t help it.

Ultimately, she was nervous.