That night, Alice returned to her inn room. It was noisier than her room at Illa’s mansion had been, but it had been reasonably clean and tidy. On the bright side, Alice could deal with a bit of noise, and she still had meat with every meal. Monsters being present everywhere seemed to make meat a surprisingly cheap commodity in this world, so long as one wasn’t too picky about exactly what they were eating.

After she said some greetings to the innkeeper, had a meal of spidercrab wrapped in lettuce with unidentified purple fruit on the side, and spent a bit of time going over her thoughts and notes for the day again, Alice got ready. She let the innkeeper know that she might be ‘sleeping in’ the next day, and that she didn’t want to be disturbed unless it was an emergency. Then, she retreated to her room.

It was time to use her new Perk. Alice gave the inn room another glance, before she locked the door. She hadn’t detected anyone with [Sense Hostility] since the end of the Expedition, when the Immortal had come to Cyra and started purging the area of both monsters and humans who were problematic. However, just to be safe, Alice quietly spent a few spidercrab cores and a few roots an adventurer had sold to Cecilia that were good at dealing with Kinetic force. She quietly spent several minutes making a small enchantment to stop the door from moving, even if someone tried to open it. She took a few moments to be proud of the fact she could slap together this kind of basic enchantment in less than an hour, giving herself a mental pat on the back, before she got back to business.

Finally, Alice was done setting up. {Infusion of Comprehension} had stated she should wait to use the Perk until she wouldn’t be interrupted, and this was the best she could do for now. After giving her room a final check to make sure there was nothing that might get in the way, Alice laid down on her bed. Then, she used {Infusion of Comprehension} on her Pure Mana seed.

Immediately, her vision started to get blurry. Over the course of less than a minute, her sight of her inn room faded away into darkness. Soon, the physical world vanished without a trace.

The world became an endless series of drifting images and patterns. Alice felt like she was laying down in the midst of an endless ocean of mana. It floated everywhere – shifting, blurring, solidifying, and collapsing at a moment’s notice. The only constant in this ocean of mana was change – no particular pattern of mana remained stable for more than a few moments before it collapsed and reformed into something else again.

Finally, she managed to find something easier to understand. A fragment of an idea that she understood more clearly drifted into her vision, and she latched onto it like a drowning woman holding onto the side of a raft. The chaotic and nonsensical images began to stabilize, and the world around her transitioned from an endless sea of mana into a series of semi-stable images that she was more familiar with.

Suddenly, she could see physical force, electricity, light, sound, heat and cold forming in front of her.

Even though Alice wasn’t able to physically see sound and physical force under normal circumstances, she could do so here. Not perfectly, and each force mostly looked like a scattered group of colorful blobs, but with the assistance of the perk she could still sort of understand what she was looking at.

It seemed… like Mana ‘understood’ reality fairly different from the way Alice did. Alice was familiar with the concept of atoms being the root of everything. Ultimately, reality could be broken down into a set of interactions between smaller and smaller things, all the way down to the level of subatomic particles if one wished to look at that scale. This was the reality Alice had learned about in school, the way she was used to looking at the way the world worked.

Mana did not seem to interact with reality on the basis of atoms and subatomic particles. Instead, what Alice saw in front of her was a huge series of different ideas. Heat, for example, should have been the result of atoms vibrating at higher speeds. However, when Alice looked at the ‘force’ of Heat, instead, she felt dozens of different sensations. The warmth of a fire on a cold winter’s night. The agonizing sensation of fire crawling along her body, the proteins that made up her body denaturing and breaking down. The tiny radiance and heat of a candle just flickering to life. Dozens of different images of fire, of heat, of warmth, of burning, all combined together into a messy and complicated web of memories, images, and ideas.

And not a single one was related to atoms. It was sort of like a child making a wish to a genie – even though the child understood practically nothing, the genie would simply interpret the child’s wish and produce results, even without understanding what was changing or why. The way mana worked, on a fundamental level, seemed to directly sidestep physics and work in a totally different way.

Was this why kinetic magic seeds couldn’t influence the heat of one’s surroundings, even though Kinetic magic and Thermal Magic should theoretically be the same thing on different scales?

After that, the ideas displayed by the hovering mana in front of Alice changed. Before, they had mostly focused on Magic seeds – especially the basic four. However, they started to shift in a very different direction now. The mana began to build itself into entirely new forms, returning to chaos and instability of before. New images, ideas, and concepts were created and destroyed within seconds, over and over again. Eventually, a new stable image was produced.

Alice stared at the new image, trying her best to keep calm as she stared at herself.

However, the ‘Alice’ that she was looking at wasn’t made of flesh and blood. Instead, every single organ, every single cell, every single fragment of regular matter was replaced with mana.

Through the help of her Perk, she sensed that the ‘Alice’ she was looking at was still herself. In the same way all the cells of a human body would replace themselves as a natural result of deterioration and replacement every so often, the Alice she was looking at had replaced every single cell of her body with mana.

Most odd, however, was that the mana-Alice was changing. Every second, Alice could feel that the fake ‘her’ was shifting into… herself? Over and over again, every single second, she was constantly transforming into herself. An unending cycle of change, and yet despite the constant change, somehow nothing changed at all.

Before Alice could probe the image more closely, it broke apart again.

The mana shifted again. It was switching from one idea to another, almost as fast as Alice could look at and understand each image. Healing. A person. Heat.

A…. [Survivor]?

Wait, what?

A [Bard]. A [Fisherman].

Every single idea flickered by, lasting only a few seconds, but Alice was absolutely certain she had just seen some ‘ideas’ expressed inside of the mana that seemed to have nothing to do with mana at all.

And yet, her Perk was supposed to be centered directly on whatever magic seed she used it on. In other words, [Survivors], [Bards], and [Fishermen] were somehow related to the idea of ‘pure mana.’

Images began to flicker by more quickly. Alice started to lose track of what she was seeing, but the images had returned to more familiar grounds. Fire. Water. Healing. Organic Material.

The constant shifting and changing of Alice’s vision finally began to slow down. Step by step, the Perk began to lose its effects. The constant transitions slowed to a crawl, before they finally stopped completely. Alice opened her eyes.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic : 41 -> 42

Apart from that, inside of her Status Screen, Alice could see that her pure mana seed had increased its mana conversion ratio, from 10% to 50%.

She had barely gotten more than the minimum benefit from {Infusion of Comprehension}. The Perk would provide a minimum of a 30% bonus to a magic seed, and a maximum of 100%. Of that, Alice had only gotten a 40% bonus, indicating her previous understanding of pure mana was very shallow. Truthfully, Alice had already expected that. She had used the Perk on her pure mana seed because she thought it would provide useful ideas for future experiments.

And it absolutely had.

The image of a [Bard] and a [Fisherman] was firmly etched into her thoughts, now. She had barely been able to make out what she was seeing, and without her Perk guiding her understanding, she would never have understood what she was looking at. However, she was absolutely certain of one thing.

According to her understanding of mana, [Bards] and [Fishermen] had absolutely nothing to do with mana.

Her Perk claimed the exact opposite.

Thus far, while the System often showed signs of breaking down a little without mana, and had some other inconsistencies that showed up from time to time, it had appeared to be relatively trustworthy to her.

That meant that her understanding of mana was either flawed or dead wrong.

Was her vision indicating that classes were fundamentally made from mana somehow? That was shocking to Alice… and would make a surprising amount of sense, now that she thought about it. In fact, it would be at least seem to line up well with the results of Alice’s experiment with Cecilia. Still, the fact that it was lumped together with so many different kinds of magic seed was something that made Alice do a double take.

Alice sighed. For now, she would wait until she saw Cecilia again before the two of them talked about this. There were plenty of ideas and aspects of this experiment Alice needed to think in more detail about, and two heads were better than one for this.

Alice looked around her room, double checking the enchantment she had slapped onto the inn door. It was almost out of mana, but otherwise looked undisturbed. She carefully disentangled the nearly-spent spidercrab cores from the enchantment, then lifted the spidercrab cores and roots and stored them both away. Then, she stretched her body, wincing a little as she moved around and rubbed her eyes.

Sure enough, her Perk did not count as sleeping. Her body was letting her know, in no uncertain terms, that she had not slept for the entire night, and she was tired. Alice took a quick peek outside of her room, only to see that the inn was already beginning to wake up. The innkeeper gave her a friendly nod when he saw that she was up.

“Hello – erm I mean, good morning to you, lady Mage! I thought you said you were going to sleep in today?”

Alice rubbed her eyes. “Just checking the time,” she said drily.

“The church has yet to ring morning bell, so it is before the sixth hour of the day. However, it should be ringing within the next hour,” said the innkeeper.

Alice nodded.

Working in the docks today was going to suck. Still, her Perk had provided her with everything she had hoped it would. She had an awful lot more food for thought today than she had yesterday.

“Wake me up an hour and a half after morning bell, please,” she said.

“Of course,” said the innkeeper.

She retreated back into her room. Even if she couldn’t get much sleep, she was currently running on almost twenty four hours of uninterrupted consciousness. Getting a few hours of sleep would help.

She took another look at herself, thinking back to the image she had seen of an Alice formed entirely out of mana.

And froze.

Inside of her mage core, located directly behind her heart, were several colors of mana. And she had never seen any of them before. Even though she had distinctly, directly checked the magic core located inside of her chest over and over again, several times, in order to find out as much as she could about what Mages were, she had never seen a thing. Apparently, neither had anyone else in this world. What a mage core did, and what made Mages different from regular people, had been a mystery to this world for centuries, with no one ever discovering a thing about it. Magic cores had no traces of mana inside of them, showed no visible interaction with the rest of the body, and had no visible effect on anything.

The only thing people knew for sure was that all mages had a mage core, and if it got damaged, Mages usually couldn’t use magic until an Organic mage with a specialized Perk fixed it. Apart from that, Mage Cores could be used as enchanting materials, the same as monster cores – though it was also incredibly illegal almost everywhere. Even the Sigmusi Empire forbade usage of mage cores in enchanting, except for those originating from slaves or people who were not of the empire.

In short, people of this world didn’t have great understanding of mage cores.

And now, inside of Alice’s mage core, she could see mana through her skin, condensed into three solidified balls of color. All three were easy to identify, once she focused closely on them. One had the same sort of silver-grey color her broken mana did when she used her Kinetic Seed. Another was easy to miss, and was almost the same color as the mana Alice saw floating in the air around town. It was fairly clear that it was her ‘Pure Mana’ seed. The third easily identified seed looked like a mixture of green and red. Even though Alice hadn’t experimented with her Organic magic seed very much, she could at least still match this color to broken mana created from her Organic Seed.

Alice took a moment to process these new, unique additions to her vision. She had never seen them before, and they carried a world of new implications.

And then Alice walked over to her bed, dragged herself under the covers, and closed her eyes.

All of this could wait until tomorrow.