Alice stared at the piece of wall. Even though it was jagged, as if someone had turned it into a jigsaw puzzle piece, it was still clearly recognizable. She had grown up seeing that wall as she had played with the other children on the street. It still had the same horrible paint job, the same scars on it. Even from here, she could still see the long streak in the paint where one of the boys on the street had run his bike into it and the owner had never bothered to repaint it. The wall had a fair bit of extra scarring and dirt on it from months of neglect, but that obnoxiously bright purple paint was still easy to recognize.

However, the fact that the wall was just a jagged fragment of a wall baffled her. It stood there, sunk into the earth like a long-forgotten ruin of some ancient civilization. And it didn’t make any sense at all to her. Alice frowned, turning back to Illa, who was still holding her as they hovered in the middle of the air.

“What is it?” Asked Illa, who had been closely looking at Alice.

“It’s… a wall from a house down the street. Erm… from my home world.”

Illa gave the wall a much more careful look, before she turned back to Alice. “So it really is from your home. But what is it doing here?” Illa frowned. “And why is it so purple? The [Guard] earlier claimed that the wall was from a commoner family, but purple is an expensive color to make, isn’t it?”

“Ah… at home, we have ready access to cheap ways to make colors, so things like dye are pretty accessible most ordinary households. Thus, purple is a pretty normal,” said Alice, trying to figure out how to communicate the massive difference in culture, luxuries, resources, and daily life. Even though she had touched on it somewhat with her discussions with Illa already, she often forgot how different things were between here and home. Things like dyes being expensive weren’t things that Alice thought about on a regular basis, much less the idea that some colors were more expensive than others. After a moment, Alice shook her head, redirecting her attention back to the wall fragment. “The bigger question is what it’s doing here. And why it looks like someone tried to turn it into a pentagon but gave up halfway.”

Illa frowned, as she stared at the wall as well. Finally, she turned back to Alice. “When did you arrive here?”

“I think it was a few weeks before the start of winter, so maybe four or five months?” Alice turned back towards the wall.

“Do you think the wall has been here for four to five months as well?” Illa asked, gesturing at the wall fragment.

“I… I have no idea. It would make the most sense to me, because it certainly looks like the wall has been through some extra wear and tear compared to when I last saw it. However, it’s entirely possible it might have been pulled over a few days or weeks afterwards – or it could have been pulled over yesterday and whatever process it went through while moving dimensions also screwed up the surface of the wall, which is why it looks more ragged now.” Alice almost shrugged, before remembering that she was currently floating in midair with someone who very well might accidentally drop her if she wiggled around too much.

“I’ll obviously fly the other guards and mages here one by one after this – I think it’s safe to try to observe this bit of information from the air, since it isn’t covered in monsters. Still… the presence of this chunk of wall is very odd.”

The two flew closer to it, Alice trying her best not to squirm out of fear of Illa accidentally dropping her. Alice frowned as they got closer to it, since she could see the edges more and more clearly now.

“The edges are very cleanly cut. It’s like someone took a laser and sliced it in half. Well, not that a laser would actually work that way, at least not in any reasonable time frame, but…” Alice trailed off, getting more and more distracted as she looked at the chunk of wall. This was a piece of home, laying in ruins. It was hard for her to keep her thoughts entirely focused.

“I assume that ‘really hot beam of light’ has some more… specific meaning in your original language. Regardless, however, the edges of the wall are indeed very cleanly cut.” Illa kept flying the two closer to it, before they finally stopped. They were still nearly a hundred meters away, making sure they were out of leaping distance of most monsters and well away from vegetation or surprise ranged attacks. Then, they looked at the wall a bit more closely. “I think it’s rather obvious already, but based on your statements, as well as the confusing fact that some Perks are claiming this is an ordinary cheap wall despite it being extravagantly painted using one of the most expensive colors of dye, this should indeed come from your world. In that case…” Illa frowned, looking at the wall before looking at Alice. Alice tried to figure out what Illa meant by that… Illa’s look of concern made Alice feel confused. Then, she looked at the shape of the wall, and Alice looked at the torn up and partially destroyed shape of the wall. Then, her thoughts drifted back to the racoon she had seen on the first day, and she shuddered.

For a moment, she felt an irresistible urge to run her hands along her arms and legs, just to make sure that everything was still there. The raccoon had been seriously injured, missing chunks of limbs. Some of that might have come from mana poisoning creating exploding chunks of flesh inside of the creatures body. Then again, it might have also been the result of… whatever had moved everything here. The wall in front of her also looked cleanly sliced along the edges, as if someone had just perfectly sliced away most of the wall and taken out a chunk of it. It suddenly became incredibly obvious to her that teleportation, or dimensional movement, was not necessarily inclined to grab a whole object whenever stuff was moved around. Instead, it could be said that Alice was incredibly lucky she still had all of her hands, feet, and internal organs in the same spot, instead of randomly scattered across the broken mana zone in bits and pieces. Or, alternatively, she might have only had half of her body moved to this dimension – if her torso and head showed up in this world and left her arms and legs behind, she would have bled out before she could do a thing here.

On the other hand, could that really be considered luck? If whatever caused dimensional movement was just grabbing random chunks of matter and throwing them everywhere, it should have been basically impossible for her to end up the way she did. She should have either teleported here in pieces, dying instantly, or she should have ended up with various chunks of her bedroom arriving with her. The odds of being dragged here with EXACTLY her limbs and organs intact and her pajamas, without bringing along a chunk of her bed or something, seemed incredibly low.

She felt like she could definitely learn something from that, but she was having a hard time putting everything together. Suddenly, she missed Cecilia – even though they hadn’t really begun discussing research in earnest yet, the other girl had seemed eager to get started, not just for the sake of getting an Achievement, but also due to pure curiosity. And frankly, Alice needed someone to bounce ideas off of – if she just worked with herself, she would keep missing things. Illa didn’t seem to have either the time or the interest in exploring Alice’s half-baked theories on magic, which made sense since she had a town to run and conflict with the Sigmusi Colonia to worry about. Still, Alice wanted someone to talk to. The entire expedition seemed to drive home the point that field research really wasn’t where Alice’s specialty lay – she much preferred quiet safety and research instead of travelling around, dodging monsters and fearing for her life.

Alice sighed, shaking her thoughts away as she refocused herself.

“I don’t know if I can figure out anything else from it.”

“There are several other valuable pieces of information you can provide from the wall. How far away was it from you when you were at home?”

“Hmm… I have a hard time with exact distances, but five or six houses away? That would be…” Alice tried to make a rough guess, and after a bit of thinking, shrugged. “A few hundred meters, probably? I think?” She thought that number made sense, at least.

“A few hundred meters, you say… In that case, how big do you think the broken mana zone is?”

“At least a few kilometers,” said Alice, immediately. “I guess the fact that this thing is on the edge of the zone might mean something, but it also might just mean it was caught up at the edge of the summoning circle. Argh – it’s just so hard to make judgements. Too much of the landscape is hard to see, because monsters are covering half of the area.”

“But you likely would have noticed if there was one direction that immediately led to an area outside of the broken mana zone, right? You also would have noticed if the chunk of wall was nearby when you first arrived here.”

“Hmm… you’re right. In that case, the wall either arrived after me, or the places that things arrived was jumbled up when they came to this world from my world.”

“Indeed. I suspect that the latter is, at the very least, more likely – however, both are possible.” Said Illa, looking at the wall fragment. “Is there anything else that comes to mind when you look at the wall that might be relevant?”

Alice tried her best to think, but came up blank. Eventually, she shook her head. “Not that I can think of, at least.”

“Very well. I’ll run some of the other mages and [Guards] here to take a look at the wall,” said Illa as she flew Alice back.

* * *

The next few hours were mostly spent waiting. Mage after mage, [Guard] after [Guard] was flown into the area to take a look at the chunk of wall and throw Perks at it, trying to figure out if there was something more usual that could be gleaned from investigating the wall. As more and more people saw the fragment of wall and then returned, an increasingly large group of people who had observed the wall gathered together, discussing the ‘strange wall fragment.’

“What do you think it means though?” Asked a female mage, who had been chatting with Milo. “A wall that’s so lavishly painted can’t be from a commoner family – purple is too expensive for that. The broken mana zone indicates that the Starry Eyes were definitely up to something here, but the purple wall doesn’t seem to have any meaning at all! And it’s not like the Eyes are famous for doing meaningless things – their experimentation on other humans has, apparently, led to breakthroughs in some medical fields, even if their methods are horrendous. The records we’ve recovered from raiding their bases can sometimes lead to entirely new trains of thought. What the heck were they even trying to do here? Fix the problems of Dimensional Magic?”

“If that was their goal, they did a pretty bad job of it,” said Milo, looking at the massive region of broken mana. “If anything, it looks about the same as the records from the tragedy of Allenheim. Not to mention, if those lunatics are experimenting with dimensional magic on a massive scale, who knows when they’ll do something that breaks part of the damn continent or something.” Milo shuddered. “They say the tragedy of Allenheim took place over the course of a few hours, killing of tens of thousands of people who couldn’t see mana as it filled up the air. If something like that happens in the capital, just the first wave of deaths will be a bloodbath.”

The female mage sighed, nodding as she looked at the broken mana region. “Come to think of it, we still don’t know why the broken mana zone seems so contained either, do we? The fact that it’s clumping together like this feels weird. Even if Broken Mana still tends to stick to itself, the density of mana here is… unnatural. It’s dozens of times more dense than the mana per square meter of air back in Cyra. At LEAST.”

Alice sighed, wishing that her mana-measuring Perk would allow her to measure broken mana as well. She was incredibly curious about the exact number of Mariums a square meter of air had – though, even just eyeballing it, she could confirm that the density of mana here was dozens of times higher than in Cyra. She sighed.

Illa returned with the second to last mage. However, the man wasn’t simply returning empty-handed – instead, he was holding on to something. Alice looked at the object in his hands, trying to figure out what he was holding and why.

“Whatcha got there? Something relevant?” Asked Milo, gesturing towards the stone in the man’s hands. Alice looked at the man, trying to recall his name. Something that started with an S? Sven, maybe? She had only talked with the man a few times so far, so he didn’t leave too deep of an impression.

“I don’t know. Even stranger is the fact that I couldn’t find it with my Perks at all.” Sven frowned. “I have some Perks that let me find magic items and large quantities of mana, and this rock was floating in midair. It’s definitely some sort of enchanted item, or a naturally occurring enchanting material. Despite that fact, I couldn’t pick it up with any of my Perks – if my Perception wasn’t nearly 400 after all of my Perks boosting the effectiveness of the Stat, there’s no way I would have been able to pick it out at all.”

Illa shook her head, looking at the rock. “Even I’m having a hard time figuring out what it is. I don’t specialize in Enchantments, but I can still usually get a basic idea of what something is. But this just seems like a rock.”

“There’s something even you can’t figure out? Damn. Scary,” said Milo.

“I’m not omnipotent,” said Illa flatly. “And as far as theory goes, there are plenty of mages lower level than me that are more well versed in theory. That being said, this thing… concerns me.”

The mages and [Guards] began to gather around the rock, studying it to try to figure out what it was. Perks didn’t seem to work on the rock – they universally claimed that there was nothing there, in fact. In a sense, that was even more bizarre than the fact that the rock had apparently been floating in midair far above the ground. Most Perks should have still picked up something, even if it was just something along the lines of ‘unowned rock’ when the [Guards] tried to use {Item Inspection} on it. Instead, it was as if they were trying to look at a clump of air.

Not expecting anything in particular, Alice also used {Precise Mana Measurement} on the rock. She got a result of zero Mariums of mana. This was the same result she got when she tried to look at regions of Broken mana – and literally nowhere else. One of the things she was coming to realize was that, in this world, everything had mana in it. So zero Mariums either meant broken mana, or something was super off.

“What the heck is it?” Asked the female mage.

“I don’t know. When we get back to town, I’ll have Cecilia look at it – even if her level is low, she might be able to get something,” said Illa, sighing. “For now, we’ll carry on. We have a lot more ground to cover before we finish circling the broken mana region. Nice catch, Sven. We’ll see if we can figure out what the heck we’re looking at once we’re back in town.” Illa tossed the rock at Alice. “Keep a close eye on the rock – if it starts doing anything weird involving mana, throw it as far as possible from the expedition and then report to me immediately. Even though I’m pretty sure it won’t explode, and you’re immune to broken mana so it’ll be safer for you, better safe than sorry. If you’re about to go to sleep, hand it to whichever mage is staying up to keep watch for the night. I want someone observing it at all times, just in case something goes wrong.”

Alice caught the rock, giving it a closer look, before she nodded. Handing the rock off for the night would give her more chances to interact with the other mages in the Expedition, and watching over it during the day might give her an opportunity to inspect it more closely. She had to admit, even if she was slightly concerned about the rock, she was also very curious. The fact that it had been floating in midair had to mean it was something interesting, right?

Then, out of curiosity, she tried to shove it into {Sample Collection}, since it would let her keep it away from her body.

The rock fell from her hand, but nothing else happened. Huh?

Alice looked at the rock again.

The Mages looked at Alice, as if asking her what she was doing.

“I can’t put it in my storage Perk.”

Illa immediately gestured to one of the [Travelling Merchants], as well as flicking the rock towards him with her magic. “Give it a try.”

The [Travelling Merchant] tried to put the rock into his storage Perk. Sure enough, the rock didn’t disappear into thin air, the way objects usually did when they were put into a storage. Instead, it simply fell out of his hand and clattered to the ground again. The rock wasn’t floating anymore, but the reactions from the rock were even stranger than they had been before.

“What the heck is this thing?”

“A rock.” Said Sven flatly, though Alice could see the corners of his mouth quirked up slightly.

“I can see that. What I want to know is what else it is.”

“For now, carry it by hand. Keep in mind my instructions about the rock,” said Illa, carefully handing the rock back to Alice. Alice noticed that the woman was no longer casually tossing it around – apparently, even Illa believed it merited more caution now.

Alice carefully held onto the rock, staring at it in curiosity. What are you? She wondered, giving the ordinary-looking rock a glance.