Chapter 89

Chapter 89

After Alice came to her hypothesis about the nature of class seeds, she felt a whirlwind of excited thoughts start to spin around in her head. If classes were actually magic seeds that had been altered in some way, she had made a huge step towards understanding how the System worked. She had never previously come across the idea of classes being based on magic seeds, because it was so far outside of her previous guesses about the nature of mana and the System that she simply wouldn’t have ever thought of the idea.

Then, Alice took a few deep breaths as she did her best to shake off her excitement. Even if class seeds and magic seeds looked like they were close to same thing when she had used {Expanding Comprehension}, she needed to do more testing, to make sure her ideas were correct. She also needed to figure out what this actually meant in concrete terms. If class seeds were actually some kind of weird, deformed magic seed, what were the notable differences between a class seed and a magic seed? What were the similarities?

Alice frowned, going back over her thoughts and memories as she tried to highlight the differences between a magic seed and a class seed.

First, one needed to go through a mana baptism to use a magic seed. A mana baptism formed a mage core, and was a fundamental requirement to use ‘magic’ in the truest sense of the word. Class seeds didn’t require one to go through a mana baptism at all. Instead, one could use them safely with zero danger. So the fundamental danger each kind of seed posed to the user were very different, because class seeds were much less strict in their requirements than a magic seed was.

Second, class seeds were much, much weaker than a magic seed, especially at first. Any Class provided few benefits before one started getting to a high level, and before level 50, most classes were still strictly inferior to magic seeds. However, class seeds continued to ‘grow’ as people took actions related to their class. If Alice explored Magic, for example, her [Explorer of Magic] class would keep levelling up, granting her new abilities every so often.

Magic seeds never did this. Once they were formed, they were basically totally finished unless Perks or Achievements started to boost them up. Therefore, while the initial power level of a class seed was much, much lower than a magic seed, they seemed to have a much higher growth limit, but it also took much more time, effort, and work to get there.

Third, in Alice’s vision trip with {Expanding Comprehension}, she had noticed that magic seeds seemed to keep generating mana without any need for external resources or input. This correlated pretty well with her tests in manaless rooms, where she had proven unable to find any real ‘source’ for the mana a magic seed produced. As far as Alice could tell, magic seeds seemed to just never heard of the law of conservation of energy, and had no intention whatsoever of following them. While class seeds also worked without external fuel sources, they grew weaker without them, which was unlike a magic seed.

Alice also realized that in her vision, a class seed would keep consuming more mana from its surroundings as long as it was related to the seed. There seemed to be no point at which a class seed stopped absorbing mana, actually. Maybe that was how a class gained levels? They just... kept absorbing mana?

Alice also didn’t understand why class seeds absorbed mana only after someone took an action related to their class. Why didn’t class seeds just keep absorbing mana every second? If absorbing mana was what made classes level up, there was no logical reason to tie mana absorption to classes at all. Someone taking the time to train themselves in the art of swordsmanship would obviously get better at swinging a sword around, but it didn’t make sense that swinging a sword around gave them more mana, even if that mana was used to fuel magic abilities vaguely related to swordsmanship. Why did class seeds gain mana and level up from doing things totally unrelated to magic?

Alice frowned, wrestling with various ideas as she tried to come to a conclusion on how levelling up actually worked, before she gave up on thinking about the idea. She just didn’t have enough information to guess yet. Finally, she began thinking of Boris’s situation again.

Couldshe use {Broken Seed} on a class? She had never thought of trying, but thanks to {Seed Creator} she was able to break other people’s magic seeds, as long as they were willing to let her. And if classes and magic seeds were fundamentally the same idea with minor revisions, she should at least theoretically be able to break a class seed the same way she could break a magic seed.

Which was a very strange idea. As far as Alice knew, nobody in this world had any way to remove a class once it had been acquired. A [Priest of the System] could change whether a class was a primary or secondary class, but had no fundamental ability to remove a class. Once someone had a class, it was permanent. Granted, there was zero reason to remove a class once someone had one – classes were never bad for the user, even if they were sometimes useless. However, if {Broken Seed} was able to remove any magic seed, and classes were fundamentally magic seeds, could {Broken Seed} outright delete a class?

Alice tried feeding the idea of breaking a class seed into {Safety Analysis}, with the idea of removing her [Fisherwoman] class, pushing through her worsening headache from using mental Perks over and over again. Alice was willing to delete the class if it would give her more information, since she had no real intention of ever developing the class any further than level 3. To be honest, on most days Alice largely forgot that she even possessed this secondary class, because it was so utterly useless to her. She hated fishing, and was no longer in a position where she needed to desperately scramble to feed herself. And it didn’t offer her any useful Perks, either – she was still seven levels away from getting her first Perk in the class, and she doubted she was ever going to acquire those levels, or use the Perk even if she got it.

Her Perk informed her that destroying her [Fisherwoman] class was safe. Of course, that could also just mean that she would accomplish literally nothing during the experiment. She asked {Safety Analysis} what would happen if she deleted the class seed from Boris. After all, if Boris having access to the System before he was supposed was creating all of these weird problems for him, maybe she could outright remove the Class? She thought that might work better than just cutting Boris off from mana. If it worked, hopefully Boris would just lose his Status Screen until he turned six, and then he would unlock it again like normal. That would be a much better solution than Alice’s first idea, which was just to cut off Boris’s access to mana. Cutting off Boris’s mana would indeed stop Boris from levelling up, and Alice thought it was likely that it would prevent Boris’s problems from getting worse. However, it also prevented him from levelling up and forced him to become reliant on expensive enchantments to stay alive, and both of those were problems in the long run. Not to mention, it wouldn’t fix whatever problems Boris already had, because the mana accumulation and class seeds in Boris’s body wouldn’t decrease no matter how long she cut him off from mana.

As Alice contemplated breaking Boris’s class seed, a feeling of suffocating dread crushed her as {Safety Analysis} blared out warning signals. Alice shivered as the feeling started to dissipate.

Clearly, removing Boris’s class seed was a bad idea. Why though?

Alice took a moment to collect herself, before she began brainstorming reasons for why destroying Boris’s Class seed would be dangerous.

There were a few possible conclusions. First, there could be some sort of fundamental difference between primary and secondary classes, making one safe to break down while the other wasn’t. Alice wasn’t absolutely sure if Borris’s farming class was a primary class, but given how fast it was picking up levels it was probably a primary class. Alice would investigate this later, when her headache got better. Since {Safety Analysis} was fairly safe and easy to use, Alice could run lots of experimental ideas through the Perk and see what was and wasn’t dangerous when she had more time.

Alternatively, Boris might not be in danger because he had a class seed. Instead, perhaps his class seed wasn’t sucking up ENOUGH mana? Whenever someone was exposed to enough mana for a fair amount of time, they would undergo a mana baptism, where they had a small chance of becoming a Mage and a much greater chance of dying on the spot. This was a good reminder of how dangerous mana actually was. Maybe class seeds worked to suck up mana, and the fact Boris’s mana seed wasn’t sucking up enough mana was what was causing his weird personality changes?

Alice wasn’t entirely sure how that would work, but it seemed as plausible as any other theory she could come up with. Alternatively, maybe Boris could actually go through a mana baptism as a result of the mana buildup in his body or something. Alice had never heard of anyone going through a baptism because there was too much mana inside of their body, and she had no clue whether it was even possible. However, if it was possible, it made perfect sense that Boris’s situation was becoming increasingly bizarre and dangerous as time passed on, and it also made sense that deleting his Class Seed would put him in massive danger. After all, even if his class seed wasn’t working as it was supposed to, removing it entirely might speed up the potentially dangerous mana baptism Boris was at risk of going through. Being forced into a process with a 4% survival rate definitely seemed dangerous enough for {Safety Analysis} to blare a bunch of warning signals at her.

Or her theory could be totally wrong. Alice was in totally unfamiliar territory at this point, there was just too much she didn’t know. Alice sighed in frustration, before she shook her head again. At the very least, it seemed like trying to remove a class seed with {Broken Seed} would do something if she tried using it on Boris. She would figure out how to test her ideas some more when her headache settled down a bit, and when she had better ideas for testing things without putting Boris in danger.

Finally, Alice stepped out of the manaless room. The moment she did, mana flooded into her body, and level up notifications started ringing like crazy.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 50 -> 51, Explorer of Magic: 56 -> 59, Scholar: 43 -> 51, Scientist: 45 -> 52

Seeker of Truth (III->IV) (Rarity: 9 -> 10)

While reading any form of written text, you can read and process information ten times faster than before. Your comprehension abilities are also greatly enhanced while reading (note - this bonus only applies to things you are reading. If you are reading and doing something else at the same time, only reading gets this comprehension bonus).

Alice took {Super Speed Reading} because she spent so much time reading every day, and yet there were still hundreds, or even thousands of reports, books, and pieces of information left in the academy library that she had no hope of accessing within the next few months, or even within the next few years. The Library collected more books and rotated out old books semi-frequently, keeping only the most well known and useful older books around, and Alice found the idea of reading through books much more quickly appealing. With this Perk, Alice could probably finish a smaller experiment report within a few minutes of reading, and might be able to finish even a longer book within thirty or forty minutes. That reading speed was absolutely phenomenal, and Alice felt it was worth spending a Perk slot on it.

Delve into the Arcane

Requirements: Scholar level 50 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher, some sort of Perk which gives you the ability to learn information, rarity eight or higher Achievement related to Magic and Research

If you have spent at least an hour learning about magic within the past 24 hours, your mana regeneration rate is increased by 100% (This multiplier takes effect AFTER accounting for all other Perks you have that multiplies mana regeneration, working multiplicatively instead of additively).

When Alice saw this Perk, she took it almost immediately. Her current mana regeneration rate was 2.5% of her maximum capacity ever hour, meaning she needed 40 hours to completely recharge. This put an upper limit on the amount of enchanting she could do every day, and also meant that she needed to carefully manage the amount of mana she spent during classes if she wanted to remain economically stable.

This Perk would just double her mana regeneration to 5%, and would boost both her economic stability and her ability to train and enchant things. Considering how much time and energy she spent on learning about magic, Alice was pretty sure this Perk would have been active for almost every second of time she had been in this world since the moment she had unlocked her first magic seed. The difficulty of keeping this Perk active was trivial for her, and the benefits were definitely sizeable.

Finally, Alice grabbed her level 50 Scientist Perk.

The Science of mana deprivation

Requirements: Scientist level 50 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Must have extensively experimented with mana and lack of mana and its effects on other creatures and/or oneself, Magic 150 or higher, Pure mana seed (or similar seed) present.

You may use your mana tendrils to interfere with mana, allowing you to create manaless fields at will given enough time or otherwise allowing you to prevent mana from interfering with your experiments.

Note 1: The farther away the mana is, the more difficult and mentally draining it will be to activate this Perk. It is advised you use this on areas near you.

Note 2: Please remember that interfering with mana controlled by other people will be far more mentally taxing than manipulating the same amount of mana would be if it were uncontrolled.

Alice had been pretty surprised when she had seen this Perk, mostly because it seemed so... unusual by System standards. As far as Alice could tell... this Perk did a few things for her. First, it made setting up a manaless field much easier, saving her a lot of labor, enchanting materials, and time if she wanted to do an experiment without mana getting in the way. This was a minor effect, but one that Alice welcomed, since it would finally let her run experiments outside of Cecilia’s workshop.

However, much more importantly, as far as Alice could tell, this would let her prevent other Mages from using mana if she could get one of her mana tendrils in contact with theirs. This provided a very situational but very powerful antimagic ability for her, giving her a completely unexpected combat ability boost from a class she had never expected to provide her with combat options.

And, most interesting of all, Alice wondered if this could prevent the activation of Perks. As far as Alice could tell, most Perks worked by utilizing System mana to do stuff. Normally, people couldn’t interfere with System mana even if they had this Perk, because they wouldn’t be able to see it in the first place. However, Alice could see System mana perfectly clearly, and had long gotten used to cornering System mana with her own even when it tried to escape. If that was the case... maybe she could just outright prevent Perks from working? She had no idea if it would work or not, but it was a very interesting idea that Alice found herself eager to try.

Alice couldn’t stop grinning to herself as she analyzed all of her gains from the experiments she had done, before she walked out of the hallway. She started humming a tune from Earth to herself, since she was feeling especially cheerful.

As she passed by Cecilia, Cecilia noticed her grinning and humming to herself.

“Productive experiment today?” Asked the other girl, without looking up from her enchantment.

“Very,” said Alice, grinning. “I don’t have a solution for Boris’s problem yet, but I think I’m on the way to getting one. Or at least I got a big clue about how everything works behind the scenes, and I can take it in really interesting directions. I just need a bit more time, and I can figure out how all of this fits together.”

Cecilia nodded, smiling faintly at Alice’s joy. “Just make sure you pay attention. The Society is getting even crazier recently, and I don’t know why, but they’re making the recent problems with the System even more dangerous. Figuring out what’s going on is hard enough without those guys also stirring up trouble. If you stick out too much, they might come after you regardless of the consequences, especially if it looks like you would be able to help them with their research.”

“Hopefully that won’t happen, but I’m starting to wonder if whatever is going wrong with the System is an even bigger danger than the Society. If the System breaks down... what happens?”

“If the System stopped working entirely? I... have no idea,” said Cecilia, frowning. “Given how much it seems to help out behind the scenes, a world without the System... is probably one without humans in it? If everyone suddenly lost all of their levels and Perks, that’s what I imagine would happen. But the fact that we kept our Perks, Levels, and Attributes even when we cut ourselves off from the System in previous experiments probably means that even if the System collapsed tomorrow, we wouldn’t lose what we’ve already acquired. However, when I think of children born in the future, I can’t imagine many of them surviving...” Cecilia frowned, sinking into thought.

Alice sighed, shaking her head. “I’ll do my best to stay out of danger, but I’m starting to think there’s no way to stay safe no matter what. In the end, I might need to brave the Society’s attention or stand to the side and watch as whatever is going wrong unfolds.”

Cecilia’s frown grew deeper, before she also sighed. “I’ll start training up my combat classes a bit more, in case we’re forced into a dead end and something happens. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but... if something really does go horribly wrong, I’ll be there for you, okay?” Cecilia shook her head. “But do your best to make sure it doesn’t come to that. I’m only a little over level 50, and my primary classes are [Enchanter] and [Merchant]. Neither of those are very handy in a fight, and while I do have some self-protection enchantments on me, I would rather not test their effectiveness on some combat-oriented level 70 come to kidnap you in the middle of the night or something.”

“I’ll do my best,” said Alice, grinning mirthlessly at Cecilia. At the same time, she decided that she needed to finish rebuilding her second generation of self-protection enchantments sooner rather than later. She also hoped she wouldn’t ever tangle with the Society of Starry Eyes. But with the way things were unfolding now, Alice wasn’t sure if that was possible anymore.