Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower +1, Magic +2

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic Enchanting +6

You have leveled up!

Explorer of magic: 34 -> 37

“Your encoding is messy,” said Cecilia, looking over Alice’s first attempt at creating an enchanted item. “However, even though it can’t be called a successful attempt at creating an item, it also can’t be considered a total failure. Even if it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, it does spend mana to create an effect on the outside world. For a first work, it’s not bad.”

Alice looked over her own work, pushing aside a mild headache as she tried to eye the piece critically. After learning how to convert her mana into a set of instructions and then set up an enchantment inside of a band of greenstone, Alice had gotten to work making her first ring. Under Cecilia’s instructions, Alice had done her best to make a copy of Cecilia’s first enchanted ring. While there were three things required for creating an enchanted item, fundamentally, ‘encoding’ the instructions of an item was the most difficult and time consuming part of the process. Slowly, Alice had attempted to hammer out a set of instructions inside of a band of greenstone – by transmitting her thoughts into the item, pouring her mana into it, and trying to guide and manipulate the resulting shape of the mana to keep her instructions intact. If, before, it had looked like a thin wire, now it looked more like a piece of string someone had tied into a knot – still simple, but with added layers of complexity to it.

Still, Alice also knew that she had messed up at some critical moments during the enchanting process. The band of greenstone in front of her was, fundamentally, incapable of doing what it was supposed to do. Instead of stopping any materials that moved too quickly within a given area, it instead slowed down all objects within a given area as long as it had enough mana. This included the user, making the band basically useless. It hindered the wearer, and worse, it chewed through mana at an obscene rate in order to do so. However, Alice wasn’t dissatisfied with the result – after all, it was her first time enchanting, and she wasn’t particularly good at magic yet, either. She had been formally learning magic for around a month in total now, and half of that was spent on the expedition, where Illa was mostly focused on managing things and didn’t have time to teach her. For her to create a result that did something despite that fact felt like a success to her. She would get better with practice.

She gave the small band of greenstone a light grin as she rubbed her temples. The headache was growing worse – hours spent squinting at a tiny band of rock and mana probably weren’t great for either her eyes or her concentration, and it was beginning to take its toll on her body.

“How about we take a break? Your concentration was beginning to falter a bit, towards the end of the enchantment,” said Cecilia.

Alice nodded, resisting the urge to pop open her Status screen and grab another Perk. She could do it when she wasn’t in the middle of a conversation with Cecilia. That being said, the idea of getting another Perk from [Explorer of Magic] made her feel excited – Perks from that class were always interesting, because she never knew what she was going to acquire.

“That reminds me – I already mentioned it earlier, but did you want to look over the results of food and mana regeneration? I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it.”

“Definitely – what did you find?” Alice resisted the urge to shuffle around, a mix of nerves and excitement buzzing around under her tongue. Her first ‘experiment’ on this world could be considered more a form of observing and information-gathering, rather than a real experiment. Experimenting with food and mana could be considered her first ‘real’ experiment, in that sense – it was something that, as far as she knew, no one on this world had tried testing, and which might produce real, concrete observations. Best of all, it was a result she didn’t need to worry about keeping the results secret if she got concrete results – after all, mana was a well-researched topic on this planet. Unlike experiments involving the System, nobody here would mind researching more about magic and mana – it wasn’t part of anyone’s religion, after all. Magic, mana, and its effects on the world was a well documented and researched branch of study in the Mage community already.

“I found that there wasn’t much change, actually. Here…” Cecilia got out a precious piece of paper, where she had written down the results of her observations as she changed around her food.

“I spent almost a solid week only eating mana-rich foods, and there wasn’t any change at all in my mana regeneration,” said Cecilia. “I still regenerated mana at about 3 percent an hour, based on all of my Perks and Achievements. In other words, there was no change – or if there was a change, it was too small for me to easily notice, at least. My Perk for measuring mana rounds to the nearest Marium. When I switched to food with no mana in it, the results were also the same – at least over an observation period of five days, eating food with no mana in it didn’t influence my mana at all. It didn’t even slow down my mana regeneration. Still 3 percent an hour.”

Alice frowned, nodding as she looked over the piece of paper. The results written down detailed Cecilia’s meals, as well as her mana regeneration rate. It even went as far as detailing her daily activities that involved mana, which was a useful source of information Alice had forgotten to take into account – even if it was common sense that Mariums were regenerated at the same rate regardless of activity, Alice was here to investigate common sense. Thus, she really should have tried to control for that a bit better.

“During the Expedition, my usage of Mana was somewhat inconsistent, so my results might have been contaminated by that. I picked all of my food beforehand – unless the fact that it was stored inside of a storage Perk contaminated the results of the experiment in some other way, it doesn’t seem like my mana regeneration changed at all, either.” Alice’s frown deepened.

“Does that mean that food doesn’t produce mana?”

“It… at least seems to be that way,” said Alice, frowning. “There could be some other explanations for this, but at the very least, it seems like this idea is lower priority for now. Well, I had a lot of possible ideas for where mages get their mana from, so hitting a few dead ends is to be expected. It just means diet probably doesn’t impact mana regeneration. We also didn’t have a control for the experiment, but since there are only two of us right now, it’s a bit difficult to have one. In fact… Come to think of it, getting a control in this world seems really difficult in general. Everyone’s Perks and Attributes are different, which creates a ridiculously high level of variance…” Alice frowned. After a moment, she sighed, switching back to the results of the mana/food experiment. For now, she could focus on that.

“Fine. What other tests did you plan on running?”

“Cut a mage off from sunlight, to see if mages are just somehow turning sunlight into energy for using magic somehow. Apart from that, I wanted to see what happened if you cut a mage off from the mana in the air around them – after all, it’s entirely plausible that mages get mana from the air around them, as well. Humans already naturally suck in mana whenever they gain stats and skills, as well as at most other times in lesser quantities for unknown reasons. Since humans are already absorbing mana basically all the time, it would make sense if mages never noticed that they suck in a bit more mana or something. In all honesty, it’s the test I have the highest hopes for – it is just that the test is also the most difficult to run without materials, so I haven’t been able to set up an experiment for it yet.”

“The bit about sunlight slightly confuses me, but I can certainly see how mages would get mana from the air around them.” said Cecilia. “I agree that it’s a fairly reasonable line of questioning to pursue.”

“The issue is that we still can’t isolate mana from an environment right now, thus making it hard to test. It’ll be good to look into later, though,” said Alice, trying to project confidence. Now that she knew what she was missing, it was just a matter of getting better at enchanting and making a pure mana seed.

“Hmm… you know, now that I think about it - I’m sure there are probably at least a few mages that enjoy holing up inside of libraries or houses too much, but I’ve never heard of anyone developing any sort of mana regeneration deficiency. It isn’t impossible that people would overlook it, but at the very least, it seems unlikely,” said Cecilia, after some thought. “Bookworm mages trying to get a few more Perks related to books or practice can probably spend long periods of time indoors without sunlight – oil isn’t cheap, but it isn’t expensive, either, and some [Enchanters] also make tools like enchanted lights to provide fancier and more convenient lighting. Even if those are expensive as heck, I feel like someone would have noticed a problem in all of these years of studying mana and magic.”

“All right, that’s a good point. I’ll still try it at some point, but I’ll put it lower on the priority list and won’t expect much in the way of results, I guess.” Alice smiled. “I’m glad I decided to talk with you about this – sometimes it’s easy for me to miss things.”

Cecilia nodded. “That’s normal – people do research in groups for a reason. If it was so easy to make discoveries, everyone would be doing it left and right. And everyone can make mistakes or get tunnel-vision from time to time.” Then Cecilia tapped her fingers against her chin, deep in thought.

“Let’s see… for isolating mana, we’re still waiting on you to get some more enchanting proficiency, as well as form your pure mana seed. I assume you’ve settled on that one?”

“Yeah – I’ll form it tonight. I’ll still have one empty slot left afterwards. Any suggestions?”

“You already formed an Organic Seed, right?”

“Yeah. It was… not my most well considered action, but I have an Organic Seed now.”

“In that case, I actually recommend holding onto that last slot for a while – you’re going to have your hands full learning to manipulate pure mana and Organic materials, and trying to divert your attention three ways while still boosting your familiarity with Kinetic magic is probably biting off more than you can chew. It might work out if you don’t need to sleep at all, or have some other way of massively boosting time efficiency, but I don’t think you have one, do you?”

“Not yet, sadly.”

Cecilia gave Alice a slight grin. “In that case, you can dream of it in the future. For now, however, focus more on what you can accomplish with the time you have.” Cecilia frowned.

“Apart from that, I noticed you absorbing an awful lot of mana when you finished enchanting earlier – did you pick up some mixture of Levels or Achievements? If you got a new Perk or Achievement, it might help us get somewhere, experiment-wise. You never know,”

“You’re right,” said Alice, finally giving her new Perk options a glance. She had decided to wait until the end of the conversation to be polite, but since Cecilia had brought it up, she wouldn’t dither any more.

Another Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher

Allows you to gain another seed of magic, which as a maximum mana conversion of 47%.

Walker of many Paths

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher

All magic seeds you have formed as a result of the [Explorer of Magic] class or achievements all gain 12% mana conversion ratio. This applies to all future seeds you form as well.

Expanding Comprehension

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher

You may choose any magic seed and increase its maximum conversion ratio by 60% by integrating more of your understanding of the core concept of the seed in question. Exact gains are dependent upon your understanding of the magic seed in question.

Broken Seed

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 35 or higher

You gain the ability to 'break' one of your magic seeds every month without harming your body, allowing you to switch out one magic seed for another.

Alice threw out {Another Seed} first – she hadn’t even used up her last seed slot yet, so she didn’t need another magic seed slot right now. {Expanding Comprehension} wasn’t particularly interesting either – even though it gave her a better Mana Conversion Ratio, it didn’t do anything amazing. By contrast, {Walker of Many Paths} and {Broken Seed} were far more interesting. If Alice was going purely for combat proficiency, {Walker of Many Paths} was probably the best option out – after all, it would allow her to dramatically increase the strength of a variety of seeds. Even if mages tended to mostly focus their efforts on a few magic seeds, with {Walker of many Paths} Alice could actually start to try to build some sort of attrition-focused combat ability set. After all, 12% Mana Conversion Ratio on every seed she had would stack up to an absurd number of Mariums, eventually – not to mention, mana conversion ratio seemed to affect how easy it was to control the mana inside of a seed to some extent. Her Organic seed was harder to control because of its low conversion ratio, and {Walker of Many Paths} gave her a lot of leeway in making things easier for her in that regard. In fact, it would directly double the mana conversion ratio of her 3 extra magic seeds as well, giving her a big boost in both quantity and control of magic. Furthermore, it would, at least occasionally, scale with seeds she grabbed in the future. Even if 12% wasn’t a massive amount, it was far from a small amount, and she was likely to pick up more seed slots eventually.

On the other hand, {Broken Seed} offered a lot of things she was interested in. For one, it would allow her to observe the process of forming a magic seed over and over again, which was highly appealing. That would definitely net her some levels in [Explorer of Magic] and [Scientist]. For another, it would allow her a lot of flexibility when it came to enchanting – after all, most [Enchanters] had a severe limit on what they could do, since most of them picked up weird and suboptimal seeds to get around the inherent lack of flexibility of most enchantments. If Alice could scrap seeds she didn’t need anymore, or switch them around to suit whatever she wanted to work on, that would give her a lot of room to mess with different concepts and ideas, as well as give her a better grasp of the rules that actually governed magic seed formation. Most importantly, it would let her experiment with a wide variety of different magics, which seemed to be exactly what gained her levels in [Explorer of Magic]. What better way was there to explore magic than to keep trying out new things? The Perk would ultimately do wonders for her ability to interact with and understand magic and the world around her. Not to mention, Alice wasn’t aware of any other method to switch magic seeds around – as far as she knew, once you picked a magic seed, that was it. Case closed. There would probably be other ways and other opportunities to boost her magic seed conversion ratios in the future, but she had no clue whether any of her classed would offer such a useful Perk for messing around and testing things in the future.

Did she want to be better at fighting, or did she want to discover more of the world around her?

When she thought about it that way, there was only one option. She would be much better at fighting once she learned how to multitask, but she would much rather be in a lab or a library than on a battlefield.

Alice picked {Broken Seed}. A wave of mana gathered from the air around her, diving into her body and worming its way towards the magic core behind her heart. Alice suddenly had a random thought – what would happen if she tried to pick a Perk while in a room isolated from mana? She had no clue – and doing so might harm her. On the other hand, she was suddenly very curious. In fact, for that matter, what would happen if she tried to pick up a Skill in a room without mana? Alice had avoided meeting the Skill requirements for a few things that, realistically, she should have had already – for example, even though she would probably have a low skill level, she could probably get a few dozen levels in {Advanced Mathematics} whenever she stopped dodging the requirements. This was something that was entirely possible to test once she had a room without mana inside of it.

“Anything good?” Cecilia asked, seeing the mana around Alice stop moving.

“Yes, actually. I can change my magic seeds now.” Alice grinned. Then, before Cecilia could ask any follow up questions, Alice barreled ahead with her new idea.

“Hey Cecilia, does anyone know if messing with mana flowing into people’s bodies can cause damage to them? Like, has anyone tried to weaponize it during a war or anything along those lines?”

“No. It’s too difficult and inefficient to mess with that – if you have the mana to be screwing around with objects so far away from your main body, you might as well just electrocute them or fire a rock at them. Much faster and cleaner. Why do you ask?”

“I was just wondering – there’s a big flood of mana whenever we pick up a Skill or a Level, right? What happens if we cut off the mana and then still try to get the Skill?”

Cecilia paused, staring at Alice. “I have no idea.”

“That would let us more clearly define cause and effect – for now, I’ve had a lot of suspicions that mana somehow creates Skills and Attributes.”

“Based off of what we’ve seen so far, that does make sense.”

“That being said, there’s still some small chance that maybe gaining a Skill or something just causes a reaction that pulls in mana, or does something else weird.”

“That is also possible, yes.” Cecilia nodded.

“Well, I have avoided meeting the requirements to gain {Advanced Mathematics} for multiple weeks now, because I wanted to get a better idea of how a Skill looks while it’s forming, whenever I got some better instruments or Perks to measure things. I think that whenever we get a room with no mana in it, I want to see what happens if I meet the requirements for {Advanced Mathematics} without any mana near me.”

Cecilia’s eyes widened, and then began to shine. “That sounds interesting,” she said, after a while.

Alice let herself grin, slightly. “It does, doesn’t it?”

“You need to hurry up and get better at Enchanting – suddenly, I’m very curious to see what will happen next.”

“So am I.” Alice smiled, thinking of the experiments she would be able to run in a month or two – before she winced. “But first, I need to find out if I’m still employed.”

“Why wouldn’t you be?”

“I was hired by Illa to keep the mages in town who were planning to scurry away in line – their reputation would take a pretty big blow if a newly baptized teenager stuck around in town while working under Illa and all of them ran away, after all.”

“And now the Immortal came much faster than expected, meaning the danger is already partly resolved?”

“Yup.” Alice winced.

Finally, Cecilia sighed. “All right, let’s go face Illa. If we’re going to make plans for the future, we need to know what’s going on. Besides, I was originally still planning on leaving Cyra in a month and a half – I’ve gotten a good chunk of the legal work done for buying a shop back North, where things are a bit more stable and where my house doesn’t remind me of my dad. If you don’t have a job, we’ll figure something out. I think that your experiments could lead to something amazing at the end of the day – I still want in.”

Alice nodded. She felt awkward returning to Illa’s mansion, so for tonight, she would find one of the town’s Inns and stay. Before she left for the night, she made arrangements with Cecilia. Tomorrow, they would meet up and go to face Illa. Cecilia would apologize for breaking the strange rock, and Alice would find out if she still had a job.