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Chapter 236 - A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World
🕑 Added 2025-09-12 23:30:29 +0000 UTC“What’s the problem?” asked Ethan. “Is there some kind of manpower need that can’t be addressed?” Ethan seemed genuinely worried about the question, and Alice felt a tremor of anxiety in her own heart as well.
This group of people was all they had. They had no way to call for reinforcements if the group suddenly realized they needed an [Explorer] or a [Leatherworker], or the abilities of some kind of other miscellaneous Class they hadn’t brought along. The Sigmusi had already proven that they were not willing to allow Illvarian ships to barge into their waters unannounced, and the Illvarians didn’t trust the Sigmusi enough to directly ask for passage. The group didn’t even have the ability to return to Illvaria or send messages back to Illvaria to request aid - they were essentially locked in here until they succeeded and got the System back online.
In short, they had no ability to send messages back to Illvaria, no way to get new kinds of specialized manpower if they were needed, and no way to get unusual materials if they realized they needed one and didn’t have it.
Doll shook her head.
“The issue isn’t related to manpower - it’s related to material collection. You need me to replace the materials that the monsters occupying the Perk library ate, right? I used a few Perks and located some nearby mining deposits already. There were two almost literally right underneath us, so I sent a golem to grab some sample materials and see how to start enhancing the materials for combination. That went fine - it took less than an hour for my golem to drill through the floor and grab some ore samples.” Doll shrugged. “That went well. I can also see that other golems have been mining the area in the recent past - probably the System itself. The problem was when I got to the third type of ore. The third time of material is a type of rather unusual rock. It apparently constantly floats in the ocean, but it never reaches the surface - instead, this type of stone maintains a perfectly equal distance between the ocean floor and the surface. In other words, to access it, I needed to send a golem into the water itself to collect some of these stones. The bright side is that the ocean around us is filled with them - and there are plenty of unusual contours and ridges in the ocean beneath us, meaning that there are a few spots where these rocks are easily accessed in our surroundings. The problem is that the golem I sent to collect those materials didn’t make it. Right after my golem exited the stone tunnel it made, a giant squid ripped it to pieces.”
“So we need to deal with another nest of monsters?” asked Alice. She didn’t understand the issue. That didn’t seem too hard - they had dealt with the spider nest in this room effectively enough. Fighting more monsters couldn’t be considered a major roadblock when the group had two and a half combat focused Immortals, right? Was she missing something here?
“Well, we could try to safeguard the golem while it mines some material samples, and then flee back inside of the System afterwards. However, the issue I’m afraid of running into is the sheer number of monsters,” said Doll. “I gave the golem some equipment I made specifically for stealth. It shouldn’t have been noticed by monsters at all - and yet, the squid still tracked it down and tore it apart within thirty seconds of it exiting the System. If we all go outside, even if we’re cloaked in stealth items, we might still attract a giant horde of monsters. Not to mention, fighting underwater is very different from fighting on land. I doubt any of us have any Perks specialized in breathing underwater or fighting underwater… apart from maybe Myra?” asked Doll.
“Don’t look at me,” said Myra. “I still try to pick up secondary Classes and Perks that I think are either fun or useful. There certainly isn’t enough water in Illvaria for me to have ever bothered going deeply into underwater fighting Perks. I honestly spent a lot of time thinking about whether I even wanted to pick up [Admiral].”
“So fighting underwater would be a huge challenge for us,” said Doll. “In that case, we definitely need to find a way to get these stones without fighting, if possible.” Then, Doll focused on Alice. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. When I found the first two ore types, I could definitely see signs that other golems have been mining it. That means that the System is almost certainly sourcing its materials locally… and more importantly, the System doesn’t have some kind of incomprehensible method of directly teleporting materials inside, or something equally absurd. It clearly had golems that mined out mineral deposits the old fashioned way. Do you have any idea how the System might have gone about collecting these stones and dealt with the monster attacks?”
Alice sighed, and furrowed her brows as she tried to think. She didn’t think the System just massacred nearby monsters and bulldozed the problem with more golems and brute force - the System seemed far more focused on stealth and subtlety where it could use those things. Unfortunately, Alice had never seen any of the System’s golems before, so she had nothing to reverse-engineer. She didn’t have a sample to observe in the first place. She was working entirely off of guesswork, and Alice didn’t like that.
Still, after thinking about how the System would solve this sort of problem, Alice found a reasonable guess.
“We could try coating a golem in a layer of System mana, and see if it makes it hard for monsters to notice it?” said Alice, after nearly a minute of silence. “After all, the System has evaded detection and consumption by monsters for thousands of years. Before the collapse, monsters were totally unable to interact with System mana at all - and even now, monsters aren’t swarming the exterior of the System and trying to break in. While some monsters can clearly see System mana now, either because the System can’t disguise itself or because the monsters are some mutant form of normal monsters, I think we can at least try it,” said Alice. A moment later, she frowned, as she realized this wouldn’t actually work. Monsters could clearly see System mana now, even if they couldn’t before. After all, the massive numbers of Perk-wielding monsters were testament to the fact that monsters could see System mana just fine, if the System couldn’t cloak itself in whatever way it used to keep itself hidden.
Before Alice could raise her voice to discount her own idea, she had a flash of inspiration. Despite knowing that System mana didn’t have the function of disguising itself now, Alice could still fall back on her Class evolution.
Just a few minutes ago, Alice’s Class evolution had given her the ability to distort the impact of belief mana on her surroundings - either by limiting it, or emphasizing it. This was in addition to the impact that reality mana could have on belief mana. If she combined the evolution ability from her new class, along with reality mana, she could potentially restore this missing ability to System mana, even though many people didn’t have a very strong understanding or ‘belief’ related to how the System’s mana disguised itself. Her class evolution should let her tweak a few of the details of how belief-strings of mana and reality interacted with each other, and then she could just ramp up the impact of those beliefs with reality mana. With that in mind, if Alice coated a golem in System mana, then implemented her belief-mana idea, she might be able to get Doll’s golems safely into the ocean.
More importantly, this idea didn’t put anyone’s life at risk. In the worst case scenario, they would lose a golem from Doll. That would sting, but it wouldn’t be a catastrophic loss - it would lose a few days of Doll’s hard work, and some materials. While Alice would still prefer to lose as few resources as possible, that was much better than losing a member of their very limited manpower reserves here in the System.
Alice decided to give it a try. The biggest question was how to coat a golem in System mana. Alice had her own knockoff version of System mana, but it wasn’t the same thing. Her mana had never had the disguising function that regular System mana did, and Alice didn’t think she could fudge the difference between these two types of mana just by relying on belief mana.
She got another idea a few moments later. They had read-made sources of System mana already laying nearby, didn’t they?
“I have a modification to my idea - it’ll just require me using some aspects of System mana and my new Class evolution,” said Alice. “Could you get me a little bit of the Veldymite from the [Exotic Dancer] Perk storage slabs? Get me some of the pieces that are too ruined for practical purposes,” she said. One of the Mages who had traveled into the System with them nodded, and quickly found a few pieces of ruined veldymite that fit Alice’s needs.
“Doll, do you have any other golems equipped with the ability to mine out minerals and withstand the water pressure?” asked Alice.
Doll rolled her eyes. “We’re less than fifty meters below the surface of the ocean. There’s not much water pressure here. Even a totally normal person with below-average [Endurance] would be fine here. I mean, you can get sick if you try to swim back to the surface too quickly, but as long as you have some kind of Perk to deal with that and some way to keep breathing, this depth is totally manageable. If my golems couldn’t handle this pressure despite me being an Immortal blacksmith, I might as well quit being a [Blacksmith] and go farm.”
“Got it, get me another mining golem, please,” said Alice.
Doll pulled another golem out of her storage Perk. Alice quickly inspected the veldymite one last time.
“All right, what we need to do is coat the golem in a very thin layer of Veldymite, almost like a layer of skin. There should be no gaps in the coating.”
“There will need to be a few gaps at least. Otherwise, the joints in my golems won’t work properly. I have a lot of Perks, but I can’t totally remove that need.”
“Hmm… in that case, minimize them. I can deal with a few small gaps and problems, they just need to be as small as possible.”
“Got it,” said Doll. She started to hum at the Veldymite, and the chunks of Veldymite were slowly hammered out into an incredibly thin, light layer of coating. After several minutes, the ruined chunk of veldymite transformed into a sleek, thin layer of veldymite coating.
Now came the hard part.
Alice tossed a few monster cores into the golem, and carefully provided a power source to the Veldymite. Since the Veldymite was totally reassembled and misshapen by now, it no longer had any coherent enchanting instructions embedded in the material - it just randomly flooded the area with a disorganized mess of broken mana. However, the most important thing was that the mana it produced was still System mana. Alice breathed a sigh of relief. The Veldymite would still do what she needed it to do.
After the System mana was present in the area again, Alice tried her best to sense the ‘beliefs’ of the people around her. It wasn’t very hard, unlike when she had first discovered strings of belief-mana. It was like the difference between trying to sense tiny particles of water floating around in the air, versus grabbing a cup of water right in front of her eyes. Since Alice was using the benefits of a Tier 2 Class for the first time, she hadn’t realized just how massive the boost from a Tier 2 class was. After her Class evolution, it was like the difference between night and day.
Alice only needed a minute of tinkering with the thin strands of belief mana to locate the beliefs she wanted to interact with - namely, people’s belief that she knew what she was doing, and the belief that System mana was ‘invisible’ and couldn’t be detected without very special means.
Alice tried to twist that belief to suit her own purposes, using the benefits from her Class evolution. She twisted those thin strands of belief mana until she converted them into an unshakeable belief - the idea that Alice could make a golem invisible to monsters, with little difficulty. Then, she flooded the golem with reality mana, to amplify the impact of that belief mana to ludicrous degree.
To her surprise, the golem vanished into thin air. Doll also gasped in shock.
“I… how strange. I can still see the golem, but only with some of my Perks,” said Doll. “I didn’t realize it would work that well. I created the golem and I can still barely locate it.”
Alice grinned sheepishly. She might have gone far beyond what she had intended to do. At least in this case, that was a good thing, though.
“All right, have the golem tunnel through the rock, and see if the monsters still react to it. Hopefully this lets us extract the stones we need in peace,” said Alice.
Doll shrugged, and pointed at a wall. A moment later, a nearly-invisible golem started cutting open a small hole in the wall of the System. It took several minutes for the golem to work its way through the wall of the System, before it reached another layer of rock directly outside. The golem started ripping into it, as the wall of the System rapidly healed itself. After another minute, the group lost sight of the golem’s progress. Alice turned towards Doll, whose eyes flickered with rainbow mana.
Rainbow mana flickered through Doll’s eyes as she concentrated. A few more tense minutes passed in silence, before Doll smiled.
“Monsters aren’t reacting to the golem,” she said. “We still have some materials to locate, but I think those are all of the ores and rocks we need.”
Alice smiled. She was one step closer to repairing the System.
Author’s Note:
Join my Discord! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)
Comments
Peplum
I just thought about it, but can they even deal with the monster infestation in the System? They seem to reproduce super fast with the amount of Mana. In the time they repair one room, ten more might get destroyed... Also, I hope we'll soon get the confrontation with Immortal responsible for it so we can learn his reaction to saving the world but launching another apocalypse. I even hope he'll die. Or that he has already been killed by an alpha plus plus spider while in a {Working Trance}.
Renniuq
Oh dear she can literally fake it until people believes she can do it and then she can *literally* make it by amplifying that belief and it's impacts.... spectacular!
Coleman
I believe we may be on the right track
Stephanie Washburn
I think you mean "ready-made"
