Life settled back into Alice’s usual routine. Alice continued to help Cecilia form a magic seed without the help of the System, go to classes, work with Ezrien’s team, build enchantments for Cecilia’s shop, and spend Saturdays playing board games with her friends before visiting Boris and Natasha. As the group got tired of The Settlers, eventually Alice switched to Infection, a game built around stopping a series of plagues from destroying humanity, although she swapped the continents around to match Luliv’s geography instead of Earth. As weeks passed by, Alice reached the end of summer.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic : 55 -> 56, Scholar : 40 -> 43, Scientist : 43 -> 45, Kinetic Manabinder : 23 -> 27, Careful Enchanter : 14 -> 19, Student : 3 -> 6

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance : 123 -> 125, Dexterity : 109 -> 111, Strength 109 -> 110, Charisma 128 -> 129, Perception 130 -> 133, Intelligence 165 -> 166, Magic 146 -> 150

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Basic Human Biology : 29 -> 33, Kinetic Manipulation 65 -> 66, Mana control 46 -> 48, Mana Precision 47 -> 48, Kinetic Force 44 -> 45, Projectile Awareness 23 -> 25, Divided Attention 25 -> 27, Mana Filtering 8 -> 17, Dodge 22 -> 25

During the weeks that passed by, Alice accumulated a fair number of levels, Skills, and Attributes just from going about her day to day routine. It was nowhere near the explosive increase of levels she experienced whenever she finished an experiment, but she was still glad to get ahold of three new Perks.

Enchanter's Basic Magic Seed

Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 15 or greater

You gain another magic seed slot with a maximum 15% mana conversion ratio.

First, Alice gained another magic seed slot. Frankly, she had needed another seed slot in order to build up a System Magic seed whenever she got one working. The {Experimental Seed} she got from her Scientist class wasn’t suitable for her current needs because Alice intended to use this Seed for more in-depth enchanting and experimentation, rather than learning about the process of building a seed. Thus, having a System seed limited to 15% mana conversion ratio, even after her Achievements were factored in, just wouldn’t give her the mana needed for her experiments. This Perk could be influenced by other Perks, so once Alice got the actual seed built its conversion ratio would start quickly shooting up as she used {Expanding Comprehension} on it. She wasn’t sure whether {Scholar of Magic} would apply to her System seed, since {Scholar of Magic} upgraded her Seeds when she read a book or took a class related to the magic seed, and Alice wasn’t technically taking classes or reading books on System mana since none existed as far as she knew. Maybe if Alice read through the Church of the System’s holy book she would be able to improve her System seed that way? Alice had no idea, and she might not have time to experiment with the idea if her schedule stayed busy. However, {Expanding Comprehension} could at least get her a good chunk of the way towards the mana reserves she needed to properly experiment with the seed.

Kinetic Enchanting

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 25 Or higher,

If you interact with an enchanting material for an extended period of time while focusing on this Perk, you may increase the amount of 'instructions' the Enchanting material can remember by 1 permanently. This extra instruction may ONLY be used to increase its memory for Kinetic enchantments, and the material must already have some affinity with Kinetic mana or the Perk will not work.

This can only be used on a given material once, and will fail if other similar Perks, Achievements, or any other effects have already been used on it.

The second Perk Alice ended up grabbing was from her Kinetic Manabinder class. While the Perk was highly limited in its activation requirements, when it actually worked Alice would be doubling the amount of ‘instructions’ a cheaper enchanting material could remember. Many of the materials she currently used were only able to remember one or two instructions each, because while magic research and Perks had ways to artificially produce lower-quality enchanting materials, higher quality materials were still rare, and thus beyond Alice’s financial reach. Adding an extra one instruction to these materials would give them a big boost, which was especially valuable for the items she personally used. She was excited to make kinetic beads that launched themselves at her foes before suddenly accelerating mid-flight, for example, or beads that detonated when they hit something and hurled fragments of stone or miscellaneous materials everywhere. Increasing the number of instructions a material could remember greatly expanded what she could do with her enchantments.

After some experimentation, she determined that it took about a week of concentrating on a material to get the Perk to activate. Which made it rather limited in commercial use, since Alice would make more money mass-producing enchantments instead of spending a week working on one piece of equipment in that time. Still, Alice at least managed to turn her new version of the disposable stone bead bracelet into a bracelet of exploding beads, as well as partially automating her necklace that stopped projectiles from hitting her. Instead of only activating when she consciously used it, it was now also capable of stopping any objects moving faster than a certain speed towards her, which was a big improvement to her defensive abilities. It could stop an arrow, a dagger, or a sword coming at her as long her necklace had a working mana core ready. Sadly, her self-healing ring didn’t get any benefits from this Perk, since the material had no affinity at all for kinetic mana.

Finally, Alice picked up a new Perk from [Scientist].

For Science!

Requirements: Scientist level 45 or greater

Whenever you successfully complete an experiment related to science or magic which you do not already know the results of (with reasonable certainty), you gain a permanent increase in levelling speed of 20% for all Research related classes. You will also gain a permanent +5% bonus to the attribute growth of all mental stats. (This will be added to your Status Screen as an Achievement named {Scientific Discoveries Rarity: N/A}. Upon reaching five completed experiments, an additional beneficial effect will be added to the Achievement.

Alice hadn’t really had anything specific in mind that she wanted when she reached level 45 in her Scientist class, since the things she currently wanted were mostly related to building a System seed right now, and that wasn’t exactly the specialty of the [Scientist] class. This seemed to have showed in her Perk selection this time, since the options were pretty random. Alice eventually settled on {For Science!} because it seemed like a relatively useful Perk to pick up long-term. Alice had been doing experiments for months now, and she had successfully concluded several experiments in that time. An average Immortal had around 1100% levelling speed for their main class in order to offset the growth penalties every twenty five levels, plus or minus 100%, and the fact this Perk applied to ALL research related classes made it rather appealing. Alice considered [Explorer of Magic] to be her main class, and since she was interested in reaching Immortality eventually, boosting her levelling speed didn’t seem like a terrible idea. With this Perk, she might be able to reach 400 or 500% levelling speed by the end of the year, which would hopefully get her through the post-level 50 stretch of levels. It wasn’t anything that was particularly useful short-term, but Alice was in a position where she could take slower Perks that took time to build up now. This one seemed promising, at least. Furthermore, Alice was a little curious. She had never seen a Perk that had such a… weird ‘operating mechanism’ before. A Perk that created an Achievement was novel and interesting to her, so Alice wanted to see how it worked behind the scenes, whenever she finished another experiment.

Apart from Alice’s new Perks, she had still been using her other Perks and trying out new projects. She used {Expanding Comprehension} whenever it came off cooldown. Alice had debated whether she had a reason to use it on her Organic mana seed more, but had ultimately opted to focus back on her pure mana seed for the time being, leaving her organic seed to only improve as a result of {Scholar of Magic}. The lacking mana conversion ratio made it surprisingly hard to experiment with pure mana while still making enchantments, and Alice definitely needed to keep paying for food and a place to sleep. The two Perks added a slow but steady boost to her seeds.

Through Perk Usage, you have improved a Seed!

Kinetic Seed (145% -> 146%), Organic Seed (28% -> 34%), Pure Mana Seed (21% -> 36%), Healing Seed (23% -> 25%)

The amount Alice had learned from her vision-trips into the nature of Pure Mana weren’t exactly groundbreaking, primarily because each vision was shorter and less detailed than {Infusion of Comprehension} had been. However, with every single usage of the Perk, Alice would notice more and more oddities in the way her Perk… ‘described’ Pure mana, for lack of a better term. It showed a lot of things that Alice would never have thought to associated with pure mana, such as [Fishermen], [Knights], and other things. Alice wasn’t quite sure why the Perk was so insistent on pointing out there was a connection between mana and classes, since Alice had already guessed the System used mana to make Stats and Classes somehow and the relationship seemed pretty obvious. However, she kept feeling like she was missing something important there. For now, she couldn’t make sense of it, so she put the question aside and focused on Boris.

In the final week of Summer, Cecilia finally formed her Magic seed without the help of the System, granting her a rarity six Achievement and finally freeing Alice up to experiment and focus on her own interests again. Since Alice no longer needed to use {Broken Seed} on Cecilia, in two weeks she would finally start working on building a System seed. Alice grinned to herself, already imagining how much time and effort she would be able to put into trying the seeds from Earth again, as well as experimenting with System mana seeds. At the same time, Alice couldn’t help but let out a small sigh. Without her realizing it, nine months had passed since she arrived in this strange world. Alice found herself increasingly grateful for her memory, which had become photographic as a result of her Perks and ever-increasing [Intelligence] stat. Those two things kept her memories of home from degrading more than they already had, allowing Alice to never forget where she had come from. She had no idea whether she would ever be able to return home, and studying dimensions was a touchy subject due to the way it interacted with broken mana and the actions of the Society of Starry Eyes. However, even though Alice felt her prospects of returning home were dim, she didn’t want to ever forget her friends and family back on Earth, because even if she might never see them again, she wanted to remember their faces and the times she had spent with them.

During the last weeks of summer, plenty had happened in Illvaria as well. The country had continued to prepare for armed conflict with the Society of Starry Eyes, and two research bases had been found and attacked in that time. People on the streets also started to vanish or get sick, although it was still a small portion of the population overall. The [Guard] had started to pay attention to the children of the slums, who seemed particularly vulnerable to disappearances, and after tracing back records, witness reports, and a variety of other information, they realized that people had indeed started to disappear from the slums. Most of the disappearances were children, although plenty of adults had also disappeared. [Beggars], [Courtesans], and other people who weren’t easy to notice the disappearance of occasionally just stopped appearing one day, and sometimes it would take days or weeks for people to notice. By that time, the person in question had usually disappeared for long enough that tracking them was impossible. The people of Metsel were on edge, and a quiet, oppressive atmosphere had descended over the city. Most people stayed indoors at night, and avoided dark alleys as if they contained hordes of monsters in every shadow.

Apart from that, however, while listening to her friends gossip before class, Alice had learned of a few more bizarre recent happenings.

It seemed that recently, mana baptisms were failing more often than usual. Luka and Erkki had only briefly mentioned this, saying that the people seemed particularly unlucky this year, but Alice couldn’t help but wonder if it was the start of something more dangerous. It was entirely normal to fail a mana baptism – after all, the success rate was a mere 4%. This was the reason why only people who were desperate usually opted to go through a baptism – someone who wasn’t desperate wasn’t usually willing to throw the dice and try to become a mage if they had a 96% chance of dying a horrible and painful death. But even though other people didn’t find more frequent failures to be terribly unusual, Alice couldn’t help but wonder if it was related to the way the System had seemed to mess up during the [Scout]’s mana baptism. Alice didn’t know enough to figure out the whole story yet, but she was sure something was going wrong right now. And she desperately needed to figure out what was going on before it affected her.

It was with an oddly melancholy and worried mood that Alice welcomed the first week of Autumn.

That weekend, like any other, Alice went to Natasha and Boris’s village after playing board games. When she arrived, however, Boris’s behavior was even more unusual than before. After Alice greeted Natasha, and then greeted this month’s ‘relatives’ who were staying in Natasha’s house after ‘falling on hard times,’ Alice gave the mana in Boris’s body a closer examination, as usual.

The results of Boris’s oddity were growing increasingly evident, at least in Alice’s eyes. Boris had not developed a second class, even though by all rights he probably should have picked up another class just by sheer coincidence at this point. After all, levelling up a class like [Farmer] required a fair amount of physical exertion and labor, so picking up a class like [Laborer] should have almost certainly happened by now.

The class fractal in his body looked increasingly faint, which was incredibly odd. The more someone levelled up a class, the more colorful, mana-dense, and vibrant the class fractal in their body would get. This was the basis of how Alice guesstimated the levels of people around her. However, Boris was definitely growing stronger and sturdier, and better at farming… without his class fractal getting brighter and more packed with mana. The amount of mana in his body now resembled somebody who was level 30 or 35, despite the fact he had only had his class for less than two months, and his class fractal didn’t look like it was becoming higher-level. Alice had no idea what to make of this.

Boris still did not talk very much, either. According to Natasha, the number of sentences he said on a daily basis could be counted using her fingers, and Boris no longer enjoyed playing with his friends. He spent all of his time obsessively farming. He learned more about how to farm, spent time in the fields with the grown-up farmers working with them, and otherwise taking actions that should normally result in Boris levelling up. Alice wouldn’t have thought much of his behavior if she hadn’t heard what the boy used to be like from Natasha – after all, even many of the [Farmers] who worked in the fields of the village every day seemed to find his behavior cute, rather than weird, and Alice had seen plenty of other people who grinded out levels whenever they could in hopes of reaching Immortality before they died. Being a hard worker was nothing unusual, but having someone’s personality radically change this way was definitely unnatural.

“Lady Alice, do you know what’s wrong with my son?” Asked Natasha, breaking Alice out of her thoughts.

“I’m sorry?” asked Alice, shaking off her train of thought.

“My son. Why is he so different? I know you said that the Society might be targeting him, but we haven’t seen them a second time, even though over a month has passed now. Instead, my child is growing increasingly different. He wasn’t awake when he was kidnapped, so even if he was shaken up a little bit, the effects on his personality shouldn’t have been this severe. But every day, he grows more distant from me…” Natasha said, shuffling a little bit as she eyed her son. Boris didn’t pay very much attention to the two of them, and was simply staring at the door. His hand twitched and occasionally moved, as if he were imagining holding a hoe or plow in his hands, and even Alice found his behavior concerning.

Alice sighed. She didn’t want to talk about some of her abilities, but she also didn’t feel that it was entirely right hiding everything from Natasha, who was only worried about her son. However, telling Natasha more might cause the woman to make a mistake that put her and her child in more danger than they were already in, as well as put Alice herself in danger. Alice pushed down a strange feeling of guilt, before she turned back to Natasha.

“I don’t think telling you will help you fix it, or allow you to take any countermeasures against it. On the contrary, knowing may put you under greater threat from the Society without having any beneficial effects…”

“But you know the reason why he’s becoming different, right?” Natasha said, stepping closer to Alice. “Can you help my son? I’ll pay you for your time – whatever I own, I can give you. I’ll do anything, so if you can stop whatever is changing my son…” Natasha shivered, and Alice felt an even greater surge of guilt as she looked at the woman.

Then, she turned back towards Boris. Could she help him? Alice wasn’t great with little kids, but that didn’t mean she disliked them. She did have some thoughts of helping him if she was able to. The problem was that she had no confidence in fixing the problem. Alice barely even understood what the problem was, honestly. She knew that the System wasn’t supposed to give people classes before the age of six, and was beginning to suspect that getting one ahead of time might be the cause of Boris’s mental problems. She wasn’t sure why the problem existed though, and she had no clue how to fix it. After all, removing levels from another living human being in this world was impossible, as far as she knew. Once one gained a class, they had it forever. If they really didn’t like it, they could move it to the secondary classes section and replace it with something they actually wanted, but that usually required speaking with a [Priest of the System] who was higher level than them and paying a fee to the church. People usually only did so to pick up a marriage-related class, or on rare occasions when they wanted to change professions and didn’t have a free main class slot. That didn’t give Alice any idea what she needed to do to remove a class entirely. Alice didn’t even know if the class itself was the problem, or if it was the symptom of deeper problem, because correlation did not equal causation and Alice had yet to establish exactly what the ‘root cause’ of Boris’s abnormality was.

In short, Alice had no idea where to begin.

Furthermore, messing with Boris’s body would put Alice in a rather dangerous legal position. In Illvaria, people weren’t allowed to heal other people without a license. This was to prevent incompetent people from trying to sell their services as a healer to others and messing up, harming or killing patients in the process. The Law wasn’t entirely rigid, and there were some circumstances where it could be ignored. If an [Organic Mage] stumbled across a man who was bleeding out and there was nobody more qualified nearby who could help, for example, they could try their best to save the man and wouldn’t suffer from legal consequences if they failed to save him, and there were some other exceptions. However, this clearly wasn’t the scenario Alice found herself in right now. Boris wasn’t in immediate risk of dying – Alice only suspected that bad consequences would occur if the problem continued to grow worse and wasn’t fixed somehow. The fact Alice didn’t have a healer’s license was suddenly proving unexpectedly annoying. Her Introductory Organic Mana class with Professor Felissa would allow her to apply for an apprentice license, but that would only let her heal while under the supervision of someone with a proper license, and Alice had simply never found the time to get an apprentice license.

Alice realized that she might need to work towards picking up an apprentice healing license if she wanted to help Boris without landing herself in legal hot water. How would she even convince professor Felissa to oversee Alice’s attempts at healing the boy when half of Alice’s attempts at healing the process were dubious, and related to secrets Alice didn’t want to expose? If Alice wanted to heal without supervision, she would need a full license, but she didn’t have the qualifications to get one yet.

If Alice did nothing, she might not be able to get to the root of whatever was happening right now. She didn’t know all of the minute details behind why mana baptisms were failing more often, but she still suspected it was related to a much bigger problem that would eventually affect her if she didn’t figure out what was going on. However, if she did do something, she ran the risk of being targeted by the Society, which was already showing itself to be more and more active in Illvaria as the country desperately tried to hire more [Guards] and [Soldiers] to fill in the gaps of its military. Alice had always been wary of the Society, and things were getting worse right now.

She felt a growing headache as she wrestled with this problem, before sighing.

“Let me think. I don’t have a healing license, so I need more time to figure out what’s going on. Let me… let me think for a bit,” said Alice. She made some small talk with Natasha for a few more minutes, before she returned to Metsel after excusing herself. In the past month, things seemed to be slowly but surely getting worse, and Alice had some harder choices she needed to make.