Chapter 72

Chapter 72

Before heading to the Library, Alice made a quick stop near another of the floating lanterns. She spent a few more minutes trying to observe how the metal hooks and the paired lanterns worked, before she finally nodded to herself and moved away. While she didn’t get any new ideas for the metal plates, she at least got a better idea how linked enchantments worked. She might try to make a few of them sometime in the future, just to see if she was understanding the theory behind it properly.

After that, Alice reached the academy library.

Alice’s first impression of the library when she stepped into the school’s library was that it was filled with books.

There were shelves and shelves of books scattered across the room. Alice was big fan of libraries. Even before leaving Earth, Alice had loved spending time surrounded by books, and had been inside public libraries many times in the past.

The library she was currently standing in dwarfed the libraries she had seen even on Earth. An entire floor of a building that took architectural design from a castle was a whole different scale from the libraries she was used to. And considering how expensive ink and paper were in this world, Alice was seriously impressed by how dedicated the academy library was to storing and accumulating knowledge. This library must have cost a fortune to build.

Illa’s ‘private collection’ of books had only amounted to a little over fifty books. This was the private collection of a woman who had founded a developing town, was well on track to getting her own inheritable nobility title, was a high level mage who had served in the military for years, and had a husband who was extremely successful as a [Merchant]. Alice hadn’t been sure how optimistic she should be about the academy libraries, though she had figured it would certainly be worth checking out. What she found, however, outstripped her imagination.

The library was filled with students. Free access to the library was one of the bigger Perks for students of the magic academies. It was one of the biggest reasons that Alice had put so much time and energy into accessing the academy, and clearly, it had a hand in the actions of many other students as well. Far from the partially deserted libraries she was used to at home, this library was busier than a market square. It also wasn’t quiet, unlike libraries at home. The place was filled with quiet conversation. Even though it wasn’t loud, compared to the silence or low buzz of noise Alice had been expecting, there was certainly a fair bit of background noise here.

At the front desk of the library was a trio of people, all of whom were quietly watching the Library, as well as the students inside of it. Each [Librarian] was filled with rainbow mana. The amount of mana each [Librarian] had was comparable to Illa, give or take a bit. There was even a small clump of rainbow mana that extended out of one of the [Librarians] and filled the rest of the library with small doses of rainbow mana. Alice had no idea what it was doing, since it wasn’t as clear cut as something like a lie-detection Perk. However, Alice wasn’t used to seeing Perks influence an entire area at once, so she was still quite impressed by it.

“Student ID?” asked one of the librarians, upon seeing Alice standing near the entrance in a daze.

Alice looked at the woman, not comprehending what she was asking for a moment.

“Your student ID. You do have yours with you, yes?”

“Ah. Yes.” Alice quickly flashed her student ID at the woman.

“Please repeat after me. My name is Alice Verianna. I am the person who signed up for this ID, and this ID is my posession. The information about me on the ID is correct and contains no false information or omitted information. I hold no intent to inflict violence upon any other people in the library. I hold no intent to sabotage the library. I do not possess a Thermal magic seed, or, if I do, I have no intention of using it while near the books. I do not possess any enchanted items or other items which can produce a flame of any sort – or, if I do, I intend to deposit them with the [Librarians] at the front desk. I will not start any fires in the library. I will also fairly and accurate report any damage that occurs to the books as a result of my handling, and will pay the fines associated with damaging the books before I leave the library. I do not anticipate any of these statements changing until such time as I leave the library.”

Alice was even more surprised than before. The truth-detected statement was much longer than the one she had needed to repeat just to enter the building. After realizing why security was so high, however, Alice repeated the statement.

The librarian smiled at her. “All right, you’re free to enter. If you leave the library with any books, we will require a separate lie-detection statement, as well as a few documents for you to fill out. All right?”

Alice nodded. She wasn’t intending to take any books out of the library today, though she would probably do so in the future. For now, however, she finally set foot in the library.

She spent the better part of half an hour familiarizing herself with the library’s organizing system. It was organized loosely by category, but the system was a lot more... loose than things like the Dewey decimal system, which was what the libraries back at home had used. Books that covered enchanting were in one section, for example, and books that covered kinetic mana were in another section. However, if a book focused specifically on kinetic mana enchantments, it seemed to be randomly sorted into one of two categories, without any real rhyme or reason. Alice couldn’t help but think that the organization system of the library kind of worked, but it needed a serious overhaul.

Luckily, the books did at least have a system that consistently returned them to the same spot each time. After observing the movement of the people around her for a while, Alice finally figured out what the Librarian’s Perk was doing. The rainbow mana covering the library seemed to notify the librarian at the front desk what was happening to the books at all times, and whenever a student placed a book in the wrong location or one of the return trays, one of the [Library Assistants] would be notified to grab the book and place it in the correct spot. Alice doubted that was all the Perk was doing, but considering how the mana lit up before one of the [Librarians] dispatched an assistant to fetch the books half the time a student put a book back on a shelf, Alice was pretty sure that was what was happening. The Perk also seemed to make the books rather resilient against damage, considering the fact that the books felt oddly sturdy when Alice touched them.

She shrugged to herself, before she grinned and headed to the enchantment section. Alice had a very, very wide variety of things that she wanted to investigate, from monsters to the System to the workings of mana to enchantments, but since it was her first day in the library, she decided to just explore what interested her the most. Right now, that was paired enchantments. She had a year here, so it wasn’t a big deal if she shopped around for ideas and ways to make money before doubling down on her primary focuses. After selecting a few books and walking over to one of the tables, Alice buried herself in her book.

‘Hurting innocent people is bad. With the power of magic comes a responsibility to help others. Don’t get arrogant just because you’re Mages, and be a good person.’

Alice quickly started to feel like the whole class was a waste of time. If her [Willpower] had been any lower, she probably would have nodded off halfway through the lecture. Some of the male students were still greatly interested in the class, but Alice was pretty sure they were paying more attention to the teacher’s looks than the content of the lecture. When Professor Eidwiss finally stopped talking, Alice heaved a sigh of relief.

Arsi, perhaps seeing her bored expression, laughed at her as he walked over to her seat at the end of the class. “Nice and excited about this fascinating, riveting class?”

Alice just snorted.

“It’s pretty commonly agreed that this class is the worst by most people, especially the ones who love magic and learning. Don’t worry – we only have it three times a week, for two hours a day each time, any time you’re attending magic academy for any reason...”

“It’s not just a year one thing?”

“Nope.”

Alice groaned, before she sighed and began trudging to the last class of the day. “That is... unfortunate. Are the test hard? If I fail them, am I going to get dragged away to the Gulag or something?”

Through training, you have increased a skill!

[email protected]#$%@# (Language Proficiency): 0->1

“That was actually worth a point in a language proficiency skill? Seriously?” Alice said, looking at the notification.

“I don’t know what a gulag is, and I didn’t get any points in a language proficiency skill yet. But if you aren’t doing well in the class, that’s honestly kind of... impressive. It’s pretty easy to pass, just boring. Half of the grade in this class is pretty much just attending it. Well, if you actually do start to fail, the teacher has the right to pull you aside for some extra lecturing on what it means to be a good person. Which is very exciting and may or may not cause one to consider the pros and cons of banging your head against the wall until you pass out. But it’s not like there are any legal ramifications.”

Alice breathed a small sigh of relief as she and Arsi walked out of the classroom. Even if she had never failed a class before and had no intention of starting now, it was relieving to know that there wasn’t much on the line. As she was preparing to ask Arsi about Self Defense, her final class of the day, Arsi bid her farewell. Apparently, his classes were done for the day.

Alice arrived at the final class for the day. Luckily, in this class as well she was able to quickly find someone she knew – this time, it was Luka Frien and Laila. Since Alice already had two people she knew in the class, she moved to them and started chatting with them until class started. Since Alice had people to talk to, she felt no need to introduce herself to more new people, as a natural consequence of her below average interest in socializing. It could be said that if Alice had been born on this planet and not Earth, her [Charisma] probably would have never reached triple digits...

The final class for the day, Self Defense, didn’t end up drawing much of Alice’s interest. It was the first class to take place in an outdoors area, situated behind the school in a flattened area filled with weights, practice weapons, and other miscellaneous objects. The teacher was a man named Professor Tanmi. He was physically in his late twenties, and was much closer to the high level Mage Alice had been expecting to see – although that wasn’t all. His movements were fast and fluid, betraying his incredibly high [Dexterity], and since he casually moved heavy weights around the training ground as students shuffled in, he clearly had quite a high level of [Strength] as well.

Once class started, he introduced himself by displaying many different types of combat proficiency – including swordsmanship, bare-handed fighting, and even competence with a bow, before he moved on to showing proficiency with Kinetic and Organic magic as battle methods. Alice was more than a little bit surprised to see that the man used a combat style she had never seen before – apparently, the man had taken Perks that boosted the strength of his Kinetic Magic to extreme levels, but only worked when he was influencing objects very close to his body. If most Kinetic Mages could take objects and then fling them into the distance the way a cannon might, professor Tanmi instead used Kinetic Magic as something closer to a supplement for his already incredible physical abilities. In exchange for giving up a lot of his long range abilities, however, he could do things with his mana Alice had never seen before – for example, he could slap a sword that was swung at him and break it in half with his bare hands safely and reliably. Combined with the fact that he was using Organic Magic to boost his abilities even further, Alice was pretty sure that this Mage would be a nightmare to fight in close quarters combat. She had no idea if he had learned how to heal himself with Organic Magic, but if he did, he would be the nightmare of any [Spearman] or [Swordsman].

Alice hypothesized he had taken [Kinetic Brawler] as his class when he had evolved it from his lower-limit student class, or he at least had a similar class.

After giving an introduction to the man’s melee-magic proficiencies, he started getting the students to jog around the training classroom, before running through some other basic exercises. He then started... throwing objects at everyone while they ran, relying on his great physical strength and speed to make the soft objects hurt if one failed to dodge them.

Alice felt that professor Tanmi would have gotten along well with Illa.

After two hours of jogging, dodging, and other magic exercises, Alice crawled out of class completely exhausted. She had originally been debating going back to the library after class, but at this point she just wanted to go to bed. She dragged herself back to her inn room, before forcing herself to stay conscious long enough to spend her remaining mana enchanting objects to sell. Then she took a bath, laid on her bed, and almost instantly fell asleep.