Chapter 130

Chapter 130

Neither Alice nor Ethan said much on the way back to Ethan’s manor. The [Guards] also remained fairly silent, simply leaving Alice to stew in her thoughts.

Now that she wasn’t worrying about her new Perk, or the disappearance of the System, Alice spent a few moments thinking about the woman she had failed to save earlier.

Alice sighed, and for a moment, she almost wished for the comforting presence of Ethan’s emotion-deadening Perk. Then, Alice shook her head.

Trying to run from her emotions certainly wouldn’t make things better.

“Ethan? Do you think there’s anything I should have done better?” She asked.

Ethan paused for a moment, and the group of [Guards] and the two Mages simply stood there on the street near Ethan’s mansion. A burst of rainbow mana flickered into existence around Alice and Ethan, preventing others from eavesdropping.

“Alice,” he said, sighing. “A lot of [Organic Mages] and [Doctors] start to lose confidence when their first patient dies. It’s less common for patients to die in big cities, since there are more [Organic Mages], and thus there are more Perk setups available to deal with unique illnesses. But in smaller towns and villages, losing patients is something a lot of medical practitioners go through.

“It would have been better if the second patient hadn’t been treated in a way that left him in a great deal of pain and future medical complications, and it’s unfortunate that the third patient died, but... keep in mind, you only have an apprentice healer’s license right now. You’re... what, level 20 in [Organic Mage]?”

“Level 17,” said Alice. “And it’s a secondary Class.”

Ethan nodded. “So not even a real level 17. You’re basically a level 5 [Organic Mage], for most intents and purposes right now. You don’t even have a level 10 Perk from the Class yet. And despite being a level 5 [Organic Mage], you managed to save a patient’s life when I’m pretty sure almost nobody else could have saved him. You also healed the first Patient using a Perk or Achievement I’ve never even heard of, and that gives you access to unique tools for handling problems like this.

“I said this while you were actually healing the patients, but I’ll say it again. These people were dead without your intervention. You did everything you possibly could have, and you’ll be able to do better next time. The biggest issue you ran into was that you were low on mana for the final patient. You did extremely well given the limited resources and knowledge you had available at the time. And now, you’ve levelled up a bit more, and in the future you’ll continue to level up more. You aren’t even a real medical practitioner, and yet you still managed to save two people’s lives today. You’re doing a lot of good.” He gently reached down and patted Alice’s shoulder a few times. “Don’t worry too much about what happened. You lost a patient, but it was due to factors entirely out of your control, and you’ll keep saving people’s lives just by experimenting with the System and learning more about our current situation. Even though you might feel like a failure right now, you’re doing better than I did when I was learning organic magic.” Ethan gave her a gentle smile.

“Did you ever lose a patient?” asked Alice, despite herself.

Ethan paused, and for a moment, a dark grimace caused his lips to twist into an ugly frown. Then, he sighed.

“I did. When I was younger, I was very confident in myself. I was, to put it bluntly, arrogant. I was a young Mage, the child of two Immortals, and I was making excellent progress towards Immortality. I thought that I couldn’t do anything wrong, and that every action I took was a guaranteed success. I tried to treat a rather complicated issue when I was way too low level to handle it, and... well, I messed up,” he said. He shook his head. “I don’t want to say anything else about the issue, but it was a big wake up call for me. I slowed down a bit in levelling, and started thinking a lot more about how to improve as both a person and a healer after that. I admit that I also didn’t want to practice using my Organic Magic for almost an entire decade after the incident. Obviously, I can use my organic magic just fine now, but at the time, it felt like the sky was falling. It took me a long time to move past it.” He sighed. “Sometimes, I wonder if I still haven’t fully moved past it.” Then, he gave Alice another more relaxed grin.

“So you’re not alone. Even I’ve lost patients before. And while I lost mine because I thought I was arrogant, you lost yours because you didn’t have enough mana. So whatever you did, it’s still far better than the reason I lost my patient back when I was younger. All right?”

The rainbow mana in their surroundings disappeared after that, and the group started walking again. Alice thought about Ethan’s words.

The fact that Ethan had lost a patient as well made her feel oddly better. She was used to seeing Ethan as some sort of half-invincible person. Most Immortals that were old enough seemed to be nearly omniscient, at least within their respective Classes. The idea that Ethan, a Mage focused on combat magic and, to a lesser extent, things like organic magic...

It didn’t make everything fine, but it made her feel better, at least. Some of the pressure in her heart felt like it was dissolving, even if it wasn’t completely gone.

She wasn’t happy that the woman had died. She wasn’t happy that she had failed someone and that someone had died as a result.

But she also realized that she had no idea what she could have done differently. Perhaps if she had been smarter, and quicker on her feet, and made different choices during her Perk selections, there might have been a different outcome. But she had no way of knowing that what would kill this woman today would be lack of pure mana, and she had genuinely done her best to keep her alive.

The incident wasn’t entirely behind her, but she could at least push it behind her for now.

She would never forget the woman she had failed to save – later, she would ask Ethan to look up every single detail about the woman’s life, history, and who she had been. She wanted to know who the woman was, and who she could have been if she had lived today. Alice felt that it was the best way she could honor the woman’s death.

But she could at least function again.This chapter's initial release occurred on the n0vell--Bjjn site.

A few minutes later, the group arrived at Ethan’s manor.

Even though Alice felt exhausted, she still needed to tell Ethan about what she had seen today. Since she had told Ethan everything about her experiments on the System, System mana, and how this world’s magic worked, she didn’t need to try to solve every single problem on her own.

Even though she wanted nothing more than to sink into her mattress, fall asleep, and forget the world for a few hours, she knew that those hours might be the difference between hundreds of people living or dying as the collapse of the System and its aftereffects progressed. Right now, as the effects of the System’s collapse slowly made themselves evident, she needed to make sure that the relevant people knew everything she could possibly discover if she wanted to mitigate the effects as much as possible. She groaned, but waited as the [Guards] started to disperse.

Then, Alice quickly shared all of her memories about what had happened during her Perk selection with Ethan, as well as her thoughts and assumptions about what everything meant.

She also requested that Ethan keep an eye on the Church of the System for her, as well as to look out for any reports of people behaving oddly after levelling up or seeing strange Perk and Achievement notifications.

And then Alice felt that her duty was done. She stumbled to her room, half-asleep by the time she got there, and collapsed onto her bed.

She was asleep before her head even hit the pillow.

* * *

Several hours passed. Alice used her {Sleep Reading} Perk to read a few lighthearted adventure stories she had laying around in her storage Perk. She also discovered, for the first time, that she had a little more control over her dreams than she thought she did. Since she was technically asleep and dreaming, it was easy to conjure up a cup of warm, soothing tea, for example, even though the Perk said absolutely nothing about anything other than reading. Alice could even imagine an entire, rather comfortable library while in her dreams, and then relax in a comforting environment for a while.

She felt that she might have missed a few other ways to exploit her {Sleep Reading} Perk, although she didn’t feel like thinking too much about new, innovative ways to use her Perks right now. That could wait a few days. For now, she simply did her best to relax and work through her emotions.

She resisted the urge to growl in frustration. She had felt bad and wanted to distract herself, but she might have ultimately ended up wasting several hours of pure mana without accomplishing anything if she couldn’t get rid of some of the excess mana in her body.

Alice split off three of her mana tendrils to keep the chunk of [Scholar] mana next to the [Scholar] seed, and then used the other four mana tendrils to try to grab the [Scientist] mana that was clogging up the seed. It took a few tries, and at one point, Alice was dangerously close to letting the [Scholar] mana slip and return to the [Scientist] seed. But after a particularly close call, she succeeded in nudging the [Scientist] mana out of the way and getting the [Scholar] mana to the correct seed.

The class seed greedily absorbed the correct kind of mana, and Alice let out a sigh of relief. Even though she was still in an awful mood, at least she had accomplished something worthwhile today.

You have leveled up!

Scholar: 56 -> 57

A few seconds later, before Alice could bring her [Scientist] mana over to the [Scientist] seed, Alice ran out of pure mana.

Instantly, the chunk of [Scientist] mana was dragged back towards her [Scholar] seed, where it once again got stuck. Most frustrating of all, Alice could still see multiple chunks of [Doctor] mana and a few other types still laying around in her body. They were much smaller in size, and they weren’t really a big problem yet, but Alice definitely felt that they would become an issue if she didn’t deal with them eventually. But she didn’t have a [Doctor] Class seed, meaning Alice had nowhere she could go to remove the [Doctor] mana from her body. And as she had already discovered while trying to move around the [Scholar] mana, anytime she wasn’t actively pushing mana away, it would fly right back to its starting position. Meaning she couldn’t just push it out of her body.

A few moments later, another few globs of mana from her surroundings started to flow towards her class seeds. Most of it was [Explorer of Magic] mana, which meant that at least there wouldn’t be any other problems after absorbing this mana.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic 76 -> 77

And then, a few new types of unidentified mana quickly made their way into her body, and Alice resisted the urge to curse.

Apparently, in addition to one level in [Explorer of Magic], Alice had gained some mana for [Pure Mana Manipulator], [Esoteric Mage], and some more misplaced [Scientist] mana. Some of which had promptly gotten stuck trying to enter her clogged-up [Scholar] magic seed, and some of which had gotten stuck trying to enter her [Explorer of Magic] seed. The amount of [Scientist] mana that made it to the correct seed didn’t even give her a new level.

Alice felt an increasingly large headache start to form near her forehead. She took a few more deep breaths, and tried to quell the increasingly high level of annoyance she was feeling. Annoyance was not a productive emotion, and she hated feeling it, but after everything else that had happened today, it was just so easy to be frustrated by small problems, even if she had the tools to resolve most of the issues she had run into after waking up. She took a final deep breath, and tried to focus on her new observations.

She had a much better idea of just how important some of the steps the System usually took when people levelled up were now, and had a budding theory to go along with her new observations.

Alice now suspected that any time anyone did any action that was related to a specific ‘idea,’ they would get a huge hodgepodge of different mana types. For example, if someone healed someone, they would get a bunch of different kinds of mana. [Organic Mage] mana, [Doctor] mana, and perhaps a few other similar kinds of mana, because those were the classes people associated with healing. Despite that fact, when the System was still around, most people didn’t have dozens, or hundreds of classes. It was pretty unusual for someone to have more than ten in total.

Why was this?

It was likely because the System converted various similar kinds of mana into one, specific kind of mana, thus concentrating people’s benefits for performing specific actions into a few categories they could make the most use of. There was probably some way to convert similar kinds of mana into each other, although there might be restrictions on the exact nature of these conversions.

This might also be why there were requirements for people to get new Classes: they acted as a way for the System to understand what people wanted to prioritize.

Of course, there were still some oddities with this theory. Alice had looked it up before, and knew for a fact that nobody had ever observed a decrease in levelling speed for their classes, even if they had several similar Classes. If somebody had twenty different research related classes and then made a new discovery, each class would level up just as quickly as if the person only had one research-related Class. However, Alice also knew that magic probably didn’t follow the law of conservation of energy, so maybe this observation was simply because conservation of energy didn’t always work in this context.

Either way, at least for now, she had to find a way to copy the System’s filtering ability. She had a huge amount of mana her Class seeds couldn’t absorb properly, and if she didn’t find a way to deal with it, it would cause huge issues for her mental stability sooner or later. Especially right now, when she already felt bad, she didn’t feel like trying to manage an increasingly strong desire to act like a [Doctor] or a [Scientist].

The biggest question was what kind of magic seed she needed to properly convert mana from one type to another. She spent several minutes tossing ideas around, trying to figure out what magic seed she could form with {Seeds of Ambition} once the Perk came off cooldown in about a week.

As she was lost in her thoughts, she heard a sudden crash in the distance. It was loud enough that it threw her out of her thoughts, and she immediately started scanning the place outside of her window.

What was that sound?

Moments later, Alice began to pick up an increasingly noticeable set of clanging and scratching sounds, as metal clashed against metal in the distance.

She frowned.

Something was very wrong.

She immediately started preparing her magic tendrils. The sound of metal ringing against metal could be the sound of some [Guards] training, but it was very late.

Suddenly, Alice thought of the hostile gaze that had been centered on her earlier that day, and a chill ran down her spine.

She wasn’t entirely sure if the manor was under attack yet. However, she suddenly felt as if the night was filled with hidden eyes, hungrily gazing at her from the distance.

She quickly moved away from her window and began heading towards the hallway.

Alice wasn’t terrible in a fight, but she wasn’t great either. If something bad was happening, the first thing she needed to do was find Ethan or her [Hidden Guard]. Preferably both.

As she was moving through the corridors, the sound of metal clashing against metal became increasingly obvious. Someone was attacking the manor, and they were getting closer by the second.

Author’s Note:

NOTE TO SELF: CHANGE COVER ART FOR STORY. (Don’t forget today... unlike yesterday and the day before).