Alice first confirmed that the metal disc on the leather cord was what was providing her with a stat buff. Even if Alice could just look at the rainbow mana popping out of the iron disc, since others couldn’t see rainbow mana Alice was forced to prove the iron disc was what provided the System enchantment. She decided to treat this as good prep work for grounding her assumptions in reality, rather than just a nuisance, and went through the necessary steps to prove the iron disc was the source of her +2 strength buff. After that, Alice moved on.

Next, Alice put together more mana-blocking sap with leftover ingredients in {Sample Storage}, grabbed a wooden box laying around, used her kinetic mana to drill two small holes on the top, and then slathered the mana-blocking sap over everything. After that, she put the strength-boosting necklace inside of the box, pulled the strings of the necklace through the holes, and used her mana to drive out all of the mana and System mana inside of the box, forming a small net on one end of the box and then gradually dragging it out of the box. Since System mana avoided other mana, it continuously retreated from Alice’s mana tendril web, leaving her with a totally manaless box.

Then, Alice put on the leather cord while the iron disc part of the necklace was still inside of the manaless box. It wasn’t exactly a perfect experiment – after all, Alice would have preferred to just drive out all of the pure and System mana in the room before starting the experiment. However, with other people involved in the experiment as well, Alice needed to make sure the experiment wouldn’t raise concerns with an ethics committee, which limited her ability to use herself as an experimental subject. While using yourself as a subject was fine if you were also the only person in the experiment, this experiment was unquestionably linked to Ezrien, since he paid for the ingredients and instigated her to start the experiment. If Alice then used herself as a test subject there was a good chance Ezrien would end up in legal hot water, even if a bunch of people with lie-detection Perks went over their statements.

Finally, everything was set up. Alice watched as the necklace activated with no problems whatsoever, completely ignoring the fact that no System or pure mana was in its surroundings, as well as the fact that the iron disc should have had zero ways to detect whether or not Alice was wearing it. Rainbow mana travelled through the leather cord until it reached her neck and then boosted her strength by two. Whether or not the necklace had access to outside mana seemed completely irrelevant.

“Huh,” said Alice, looking at the necklace. “I’ll admit, I kind of expected it to work even with no ambient mana, but I still can’t help but feel surprised.”

After that, Alice pulled out a sheet of paper and began writing some observations down.

‘Iron disc does not need atmospheric mana to keep working – it operates independently of external fuel sources.’ Of course, the notes were only for the sake of Ezrien – Alice had the System’s version of {Photographic Memory}, meaning that she didn’t really need to take notes for herself these days.

After that, Alice started trying to narrow down whether the necklace used other fuel sources. While she strongly suspected it just ran on nothing the way her seeds seemed to, it was worth double checking whether it ran on heat, sunlight, etc.

None of the above seemed to be correct. The necklace was just… creating mana somehow. Alice, for the life of her, just couldn’t figure out how this process worked. In fact, Alice couldn’t even figure out how the necklace knew when someone was wearing it. It just… knew.

She tried suffocated the necklace of pure mana and only letting it interact with System mana, as well as letting it interact with pure mana but no System mana. Neither stopped the enchantment from working, so she lathered the leather part of the necklace in mana blocking sap (along with some small wooden plates she wore underneath the sap-coated necklace to avoid making a mess). This also failed to prevent the necklace from activating, since the System mana began working out more and more convoluted routes to reach her, before it finally seemed to get frustrated and pushed its way through the mana-blocking sap. Alice had never seen this happen before – the System mana actively fought with the sap for almost a minute before it finally drilled a little hole in the mana-blocking sap enchantment and started boosting her [Strength] again. Alice quietly scribbled down more observations, making sure to just note that ‘the activation was delayed’ for Ezrien’s copy of her notes, before quietly making her own personal note that ‘blocking mana’ apparently wasn’t as absolute as she thought it was. It was the first time Alice had seen mana break through a mana-blocking enchantment. She found this process fascinating, and decided it was worth investigating later. Finally, she tried to directly interfere with the necklace using her mana tendrils, just to see what happened.

Direct interference was also somewhat effective. It caused the rainbow mana to pause for a moment, as the System mana tried to avoid her mana wherever possible. Then, it created a bizarre path that skirted around her mana and finished making its way towards her neck.

Whenever Alice wore the necklace, the matrix of rainbow mana in the center of the necklace started creating mana again. Since Alice still didn’t know how ‘creating mana’ worked, Alice decided to use {Mana Construct Modelling} to see if that got her any useful information. It was becoming increasingly obvious that blocking mana wasn’t getting her any closer to figuring out how mana creation worked.

{Mana Construct Modelling}gave her the information that System mana, Pure Mana, and Organic Mana was used to construct the glyph in the center of the necklace. Alice recalled the other time she had used {Mana Construct Modelling} on a System glyph. That time, the fractal had also contained those three kinds of mana.

Curious, Alice took a few sneak peaks at Ezrien, quietly trying {Mana Construct Modelling} on his class glyphs. Every single one of his class glyphs had System Mana, Pure Mana, and Organic mana inside of them, though about half of them were mixed with a fourth kind of mana as well. Alice grinned. There was a point of interest here, if she had the time and energy to discover it. While that might be lacking in the immediate future, she was certainly going to file it away for further investigation.

She turned her attention back to the necklace. She didn’t know much about interacting with Organic Mana yet, and every time she tried to form a System magic seed the System blocked her. So for now, she could only experiment on the mana fractal with her pure mana seed. After a quick check with {Safety Analysis} that warned her of light but manageable danger, she started trying to poke at the mana matrix itself with her pure mana seed. It wiggled, squirmed, and avoided the touch of her mana, but after some struggling she managed to trap the system fractal and touch it.

This was quite possibly one of the hardest feats of magical dexterity Alice had done so far, and made Illa’s training feel easy by comparison. When Alice finally managed to trap the glyph of rainbow mana, she extended a single mana tendril into the fractal. She wanted to pry apart the edges a little bit and see if she could observe it working. Even if it was likely going to destroy the enchantment, Alice figured she might learn something if she could observe parts of the glyph working. Right now, there was just too much going on for her to understand anything, but if she took it apart piece by piece she might be able to figure something out.

Unfortunately, it stopped working much faster than she expected. She managed to poke something and the entire mana matrix instantly stopped working. Mana immediately stopped flowing through the fractal, and Alice’s original goal of observing only part of the fractal working failed.

The last dribbles of rainbow mana continued towards her, but Alice felt something different about it now. It was less directed than before. It made its way into her body, and then Alice felt a very faint burning sensation in her muscles. It started to get worse, and Alice immediately used {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} to fix whatever was going wrong. {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} burned some of the calories from lunch, and the faint burning sensation in her muscles was healed away.

Meanwhile, the necklace fractal kept trying to create more rainbow mana. However, it was no longer going anywhere. It was like an engine leaking fuel. One minute later, it stopped producing any mana at all. The necklace fractal turned dim, and Alice could no longer observe anything happening. While spamming {Safety Analysis} enough to start getting a headache Alice tried injecting some pure mana into the fractal. However, it was now broken beyond repair. Alice reviewed her memories of when it had worked (thanks to {Photographic Memory}) and then sighed. She couldn’t quite figure out what each part of the fractal did yet, or how mana generation worked. There were too many fiddly bits to the fractal, and she wasn’t even sure what caused the whole thing to break. On the bright side, Alice was confident that if she observed enough System Fractals breaking she could probably get somewhere with the whole endeavor. It would just require an unknown number of System-enchanted items, all of which were almost certainly going to become worthless in the process. And each System-enchanted item was bound to cost a fair amount of money, which Alice currently didn’t have.

Once again, it all came back to not having enough funds…

“The necklace no longer works,” said Alice, turning back to Ezrien. She tried to stop herself, but she was grinning madly the whole time. Today she had confirmed that she had a chance to go in the right direction, and gotten some hands-on experience breaking the System. She had confirmed that it was possible to mess with the System, even if she barely knew what she was doing and needed to rely on her Perks to keep her safe during the whole process. It felt great, even if it had broken an item worth three silver crowns in the process. For a regular [Laborer] that was about three days of work if they didn’t eat or sleep.

Ezrien looked shocked, as he gave the necklace a dubious look. He looked over the notes and observations Alice had intermittently penned during her experiments, before he returned his gaze to her. “You managed to break a System enchantment? But the iron disc is still intact! There’s no other way to break a System enchantment besides destroying the physical object it was attached to! All you did was poke it a bunch with pure mana for some reason and-“ Ezrien stopped, completely lost in thought. Then, he gave her a grin. “I have no clue whether or not you’re moving in the right direction for your experiments. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what you did. However, nobody has ever managed to break a System enchantment like that before, at least as far as I know. Even if I don’t know whether you’re heading in the right direction or not, you’ve managed to stumble onto something interesting. A lot of your preparatory steps and double-checking methods that you used earlier in the experiment were decent enough that I have no major complaints with them. There are some minor issues with your documentation methods during the experiment that we’ll need to talk about, but when you remembered to record stuff, it was decent. I don’t know if you have a good memory or something, but even if you do, keep in mind that if you’re part of a team other people need to be able to see your thoughts and what you’ve done. But this can be fixed,” he said as he held out his hand to Alice. “Welcome to the team.”

Alice smiled.

* * *

After that, Alice was introduced to the other two [Scholars]. There were two more [Scholars] on the team who had a day off, but she was assured they would be there in two days once their weekend ended. After signing a legally binding secrecy contract, she also learned what the team was working on as well. Apparently, the team was working on trying to find a way to substitute [Kinetic Mages] during construction. The number of mages was always a major bottleneck for some industries, and construction in this world was very reliant on [Kinetic Mages] to act as heavy construction equipment. While construction could happen without Mages, it was far less efficient, making [Kinetic Mages] something that any serious construction work needed to be competitive.

The team of researchers was trying to create a metal plate that could substitute some of the jobs a [Kinetic Mage] usually took care of. This metal plate, which had a variety of smaller enchanting materials stored inside of the metal shell, was supposed to float a specific object up and then keep it there while allowing the user to freely adjust the height. While this sounded simple in theory, making a simple metal plate accurately figure out how much kinetic mana to spend levitating one material, and allow the user to freely adjust the height was insanely hard in practice because of how stupid enchantments were. Enchantments could certainly do something like ‘push the object above this metal plate,’ but adjusting the strength of the push to keep it in place required a great deal of precision, trial, and failure. Especially since the team’s objective was to make the metal plates cheap and affordable enough to replace real mage labor. However, Alice could certainly see why manpower and funds were being devoted to the subject as well. While the project had some chance of failing, due to the requirement of the metal plates being cheap and easy to make, if it succeeded it could drastically cut down the cost of making new buildings.

Four weeks passed in a flash. In that time, Alice settled in at the local inn while she continued to make and sell enchantments in Cecilia’s shop. The blast crystals started to be purchased by miners on a small scale, where they acquired a reputation for being safe and affordable. Alice’s mana-sight rings occasionally sold, and although they were never super popular they at least generated a small amount of income for Alice. Alice’s healing items proved to be the most popular item she could make, though they were also the items with the lowest individual returns. Magic materials that could absorb healing-related instructions were rather expensive. They were annoying to make, but provided very steady returns because they flew off the shelves. After deducting her future fees for the magic academy, she would have a little over three and a half gold suns remaining.

Much more importantly, as time passed and Alice steadily worked in Cecilia’s shop, worked with the team of [Scholars] making kinetic plates, and occasionally worked on her carving skills while making botched board game pieces, Alice continued to accumulate Levels, Skills, and Perks.

Explorer of Magic: 47 -> 51

Scholar: 29 -> 34

Scientist: 29 -> 38

Kinetic Manabinder: 6 -> 12

(Apprentice) Enchanter: 20 -> 24

Explorer of Magic was the first class Alice had that hit level 50. She hadn’t gotten her first post-50 Perk yet, but the moment Alice had gotten a class to level fifty a massive rush of mana far beyond her previous level-ups had flooded her body. Alice had already had her suspicions, but after witnessing the tidal wave of mana after getting to level 50, Alice was pretty sure that the biggest ‘break points’ in aging speed were exactly the same break points for when Perks got better. Every 25 levels, the Perks one could get from their classes got some sort of upgrade, and one’s aging speed dropped significantly.

Alice got five new Perks over this period of time as a result of her levels.

Improved Multitasking

Requirements: you must be at least 50% of the way to commanding a third mana tendril and control no more than two mana tendrils, {Divided Attention} Skill 10 or higher, Scholar level 30 or higher, Magic 100 or greater

You gain the ability to concentrate on four different tasks at once. You may ‘amp up’ your focus once per day, increasing the ability to multitask by an extra one task for ten minutes. (Note – this process may feel disconcerting if you are unfamiliar with it, and will also require increased nutrients for the day.)

Advanced Mana measurement

Requirements: Scientist level 30 or greater, Perception 100 or greater, Precise Mana Measurement Perk

You gain the ability to measure broken mana with the {Precise Mana Measurement} Perk.

Degraded Seed Slot

Requireemnts: Scientist level 35 or higher, Explorer of Magic class available, Magic at 100 or greater, have all magic seed slots taken, use magic Seeds themselves as a source of experiments and inspiration for new advancements

You gain a magic seed slot with a maximum 5% mana conversion ratio. This magic seed cannot be boosted by other Perks and can never be combined with other Perks.

Reset

Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 50 or higher

Once per month, you can reset the cooldown on a Perk as long as that Perk is related to Magic.

Enhanced Focus

Requireemnts: Kinetic Manabinder level 10 or higher

While enchanting an object, you can focus more effectively. Time will seem to slow down while you are working, improving your work speed by a significant amount.

Alice was extremely happy with her new perks. {Improved Multitasking} allowed her to control four mana tendrils at once without difficulty. {Divided Attention} and {Folds of Magic} had been picked by her because she had originally thought they would get her to two mana tendrils – however, while the combination of the two had always been close to letting her control an extra mana tendril, they never quite got all the way there. Eventually, she had simply given up and taken {Split Mind} to give her a second mana tendril. {Improved Multitasking} was also a Perk that came from the [Scholar] class, rather than her magic related class, meaning that Alice could save her magic class Perks for better options in the future. With the ability to focus on four things at once, Alice’s multitasking ability and self-defense abilities both rose by leaps and bounds. It was useful both in a crisis and when she was researching, so she was naturally happy to get this Perk.

{Advanced Mana Measurement} was also very useful. Because {Precise Mana Measurement} didn’t let Alice measure Broken mana, it had gradually fallen out of use for Alice. While she did use it to confirm that there was no ‘normal’ mana in a given area during some experiments, and she occasionally used it for other experiments, Alice dealt with System and broken mana a lot more than she had originally expected to. Most Mages weren’t crazy enough to mess with a potentially poisonous substance that was likely to force a second mana baptism with a high chance of killing them, but Alice was already immune to the problem, which meant there was a lot of unexplored territory in the subject. Combined with the fact that it seemed increasingly relevant to her interests, Alice was extremely happy that she could now measure broken mana. While she still couldn’t measure the rainbow mana accurately, Alice no longer had to buy or rent cumbersome instruments for this purpose. It was also a great improvement in her ability to contribute to the research team, since it let her measure how much mana various sub-enchantments spent per second much more quickly and effectively than the instruments the team previous used and how much broken mana was being produced by some sub-optimal enchantments. It went a long way towards endearing Alice with the other members of the research team, some of whom hadn’t been convinced of her value until then.

{Magic Seed Slot} was picked since Alice had filled up her fourth magic seed slot with a healing seed. Since Alice had been seeing organic mana pop up in all of the System fractals she investigated, she wanted to keep the seed around and learn how to use it whenever she went to magic academy. That meant that she had no slots left to experiment with, and Alice obviously wanted to keep investigating how seed formation worked. This magic seed slot was far worse than the other Perks Alice had gotten from classes like [Explorer of Magic], but considering the fact she was getting a magic seed slot from the [Scientist] class Alice wasn’t particularly surprised. She decided to just be grateful for the fact she was getting a seed slot when she needed one. None of the other Perks at level 35 Scientist had been particularly exciting, so it ended up being a surprisingly easy pick.

{Reset} was picked because it let Alice use {Broken Seed} twice per month, instead of once per month. Alice had a lot of experiments she wanted to perform when measuring how the System and mana seed construction interacted with each other, and only being able to make one observation a month was really dragging down the speed she investigated things. {Reset} would solve at least some of this problem.

With Alice’s two chances this month to form a new Magic Seed, Alice formed and then destroyed two flawed electromagnetic seeds and confirmed two new things.

First, if a Magic Seed was formed without assistance from the System, there was a fair chance that it wouldn’t work very well. The first electromagnetic seed Alice formed was done in a new manaless room in Cecilia’s workshop, where she had driven out all of the System mana and then flooded the room with pure mana from her pure mana seed. The first Magic seed made Alice feel nauseous after a few hours. It was nowhere near as bad as the time Alice tried to form dozens of failed seeds in a row. However, Alice certainly didn’t feel good after making the seed – it was like she had come down with a bad case of the flu. In the process, Alice also realized that she accidentally messed up several parts of the magic seed. Several parts of the magic seed looked off when she compared it to the electromagnetic seeds she had made with the help of the System, and the new seed looked… sickly. Patchy. Alice had a hard time putting into words everything that was wrong with it, but it was definitely broken. This information opened up new questions about what had happened all of those months ago, when Alice had tried to form a bunch of magic seeds based on physics from Earth. Why hadn’t the System helped her form those magic seeds then? Why did it help her form some magic seeds but fail to help her with others? Alice was tempted to try forming a few seeds based on photons or other earth-physics concepts again, but the trauma from that time was still fresh in her mind. She decided that she would go back to the topic in the future, but she would wait… just a little longer. She would try again later.

Alice learned from this, and later that month, tried again. This time, the seed looked closer to okay. Alice didn’t get sick just from having the mana seed in her body this time. However, when Alice gave the seed some time to generate mana and then tried to move a silver coin around, she started to feel incredibly sick. Alice was forced to use {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} and then destroy the seed with {Reset} as she started to feel more and more ill. It was obvious that she had fixed some of the errors from her first attempt, but she certainly hadn’t succeeded yet.

Alice took advantage of these attempts to start training herself in something new. Anytime Alice tried to make a ‘System’ magic seed, the System would actively interfere with her. Alice had some guesses about the reasons for this, which were probably related to the reason System mana actively hid from other mages and avoided ‘touching’ human mana whenever possible. However, at the end of the day, Alice was now a girl with a dream. She wanted to try seeing if she could interact with or replicate the feats of the System – and for that, it seemed increasingly obvious that a System mana seed would be needed. If the System stopped her from forming a System mana seed, Alice needed to form a mana seed in an environment where the System wasn’t present. In other words, Alice was now starting to consider the process of forming failed magic seeds and breaking them down to be training for when she formed a System magic seed in a room where pure mana was present and System mana wasn’t. Alice also started wondering if she would get another level in [Survivor] soon. Even though she had started to consider the class pretty useless during her time in Cyra, it was surprisingly good at letting her use herself as a lab rat.

The final perk Alice picked was {Enhanced Focus}. It was Alice’s attempt to solve a problem she expected to kick in once she started her time at Magic Academy, which was lack of time and sleep. She was already aware that the schedule she had planned out for herself for the next year or two was going to be hard, and {Enhanced Focus} would lessen at least some of this burden by reducing the number of hours each enchantment took to finish. When Alice tried it in practice, it seemed to shave off about 20% of the time it took her to make each enchantment, which would add up when her schedule started kicking into nightmare mode.

At the end of four weeks, Alice registered at the magic academy of her choice. After a fairly quick and painless signup procedure, Alice was enrolled as a student of the Magic Academy for the Advancement of Mana and Research. She was to begin attending classes next week, and was given five uniforms after signing up. And at the end of the week, she also finished making her first board game from home. It was time for ‘the settlers’ to make its debut on Luliv.

* * *

As Alice signed up for her magic academy, other people were also making progress. Somewhere far away, there was a massive cloud of broken mana. The amount of mana here dwarfed almost every other location on Luliv – the mana was so thick here that even a normal person would have been able to feel it just by breathing it. Or they would have figured it out from the horrendous pain of going through a mana baptism, since the environment would have forced any non-mage to start a baptism within seconds of walking into the area.

And in the area, two people stood. One was an immortal, and one was a humanoid being partially made of metal. There were no other people around them – it was just the two of them.

“Is this it, master?” Asked the half-metal man, looking at the massive cloud of corrupted mana.

The immortal smiled. Through his eyes, the cloud of broken mana looked like it could dwarf the size of most cities. Of course, he could see far more than that.

The broken mana that leaked everywhere in this area was astonishingly dense. However, he was able to see one other thing. Something that, perhaps, only ten or fifteen other Mages in the world could see. As one of the oldest immortals, he hadn’t gained the right to see it until he had acquired an obscene number of Achievements and Perks, before finally lucking into one that let him see a whole new world.

Deep within the cloud of broken mana existed a very different kind of mana. A kind of mana that resembled a rainbow. And in this place, it was far, far denser than anywhere else he had ever seen. The Immortal smiled. This… this might finally be it.

Of course, there was much work to do before he could start investigating in earnest. The monsters in this area needed to be cleared out before he could investigate further, if he didn’t want to get surrounded and eaten. His classes weren’t specialized for combat, and while stopping the monsters from sensing any mana leaking out of him might be possible, it was a very dangerous position to place himself in. He would need magic to investigate this place thoroughly, and he didn’t fancy the odds of something noticing him, even if he tried to disguise himself. But even though there was still a lot of work to be done, he couldn’t help but feel excited. This could be the end of his journey.

“I think this is the place. Let’s get started.”