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Chapter 235 - A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World
🕑 Added 2025-09-05 23:48:36 +0000 UTCAfter Alice chose her class, the mana inside of her body exploded, almost like a star turning into a supernova. A tidal wave of mana crashed through her body, before it started to condense into something different.
Before, Alice’s class seed for [Explorer of Magic] had resembled the seed of a plant. It grew denser and more laden with mana as she grew stronger, but its shape had never fundamentally changed. Now, the class seed in her body started to expand, like a fast-forwarded video of a plant spreading its roots. Her muscles and bones were reshaped, and mana started to seep into every single orifice of her body.
Everything besides her brain, that is. The mana conspicuously avoided her brain, and instead focused on her other limbs and organs.
After the tidal wave of mana faded, just like before, the Class fractal for [Explorer of Magic] settled back into her brain. It looked similar to how it had looked before, save for the fact that it was now connected to a large, intricate network of mana spread throughout every single part of her body. Alice observed it for a moment, before she shrugged and moved on. She took a look at the rest of her body to see what had changed.
She looked different than before. She looked almost like a cloud of mana, with mana interwoven into every single muscle, bone, tendon, and drop of blood. The transformation wasn’t 100% complete - but Alice could now see a very strong resemblance between her body and the other Immortals she had seen with her mana vision.
Of course, Alice wasn’t an Immortal yet. However, Alice suspected she was close. Very close. If Alice got a few more specks of mana and integrated them into her body, Alice suspected that her new Immortal body would become ‘complete.’ Then, she would finish reaching Immortality. If her estimations weren’t wrong, she would probably officially become an Immortal by about level 5 of her new Class. Perhaps level 10, if her estimation was a bit off.
“Ethan, do Classes still have level limits after you evolve a level 100 Class?” asked Alice. “Like, student Classes evolve at level 25, and regular Tier 1 Classes evolve at level 100. What about after that?”
“I have no idea,” said Ethan. “As far as anyone has publicly stated, there is no known point at which Tier 2 Classes can evolve again. That being said, it’s entirely possible that one exists and nobody has reached it yet. Some Immortals have speculated that at level 200, another Class evolution occurs. Nobody knows for sure, though - or at least, it’s not public knowledge. There are a few rumours floating around that the oldest Immortals in the world have reached level 200 and evolved their Classes again, but…” Ethan shrugged. “Their recorded historical feats just don’t match up to my imagination of what another Class evolution would look like. I suspect those are just rumors, and aren’t accurate. In any case, there isn’t much information available.”
Alice thought about it for a moment, and then shrugged. She hadn’t seen any definitive hints about what came next from the System’s framework either, and it was largely irrelevant for now. People’s beliefs had a strong influence on reality, so perhaps the beliefs of several Immortals were enough to make level 200 a proper ‘level evolution’ point?
On the other hand, Alice had to wonder whether the System even had a Class template for Tier 3 Classes. If nobody on this planet had actually reached level 200 yet, it was entirely plausible that the System hadn’t even bothered compiling data to make another set of Classes in the first place. Perhaps it would eventually… if Alice got the System working again, at least. Either way, fixing the System and saving the world would still need to come first. She had simply been curious. She shook her head.
“I guess it doesn’t matter,” she said.
Ethan nodded. “You still have a long way to go. How did your evolution go? Did you get any good options? Or did anything go wrong while you were evolving your Class seed?”
Alice nodded happily. “I got something that should work really well with my plans for repairing the System, and help deal with a few other issues. Stabilizing the laws of physics should be much easier than before, at least. I didn’t see anything too unusual when my Class evolved - at least, nothing that should cause problems in the short term.” Alice suspected that there might be some minute imperfections in the way her new Class seed was set up, but those probably wouldn’t hurt her - they would just slow down her progress a bit, and perhaps give her weird errors when she tried to get totally fresh Perks. That would be annoying, but not a big deal long-term. They should be resolved once Alice fixed the System.
Ethan smiled. “That’s great. How about your progress towards Immortality? I’ve heard that some people reach Immortality the moment they evolve a level 100 Class, although it’s very rare.”
“I’m not quite there yet, but I think I’ll get there pretty soon,” said Alice. “I would be surprised if I got past level 10 without getting my immortality Achievement.”
Ethan nodded. “Well, that makes sense. Your journey to Immortality has been a lot shorter and faster than most people’s journey to Immortality, but there are always some people who are born into absolutely crazy circumstances and manage to come out on top. It makes sense that you would lag a bit behind, especially with the System being down. In any case, you aren’t really at risk of dying from old age anymore, so it’s not too big of a deal. Even if you aren’t technically Immortal yet, your aging rate is probably ridiculously slow by now. Even if you don’t gain a single level after this, you should have several centuries of time. That’s more than enough time to round out those last few levels, unless you actively avoid levelling up for some reason.”
Alice nodded. Then, she turned back towards the ravaged pieces of the System. Doll was already working on finding a way to gather more resources to recreate the enchanting material she needed, but Alice didn’t want to just stand around and wait for Doll’s progress. She immediately stepped towards the center of the room, and then used {Temporal Snapshot}, combined with {Magic Modelling}, to get a perfect image of what this room had looked like in the past. If she could see what this room had looked like before the spider monsters had trashed the room and torn everything to pieces, it would make it much easier to finish repairing everything once Doll had the material shortage straightened out.
After the two Perks finished operating, Alice felt her vision start to blur, almost as if she were suffering from a bout of extreme dizziness. She felt as if she had a new ‘image’ seared into her brain - one that she could access at any time. She focused on it, and a moment later, it seemed as if time had rewound within this room. The damage from the spider monsters disappeared, and a completely different room appeared in front of her eyes.
Just as Alice had suspected, the room had originally been filled with giant slabs of Veldymite. Every single slab of Veldymite near the edges of the room was used as a library for a specific Perk - it recorded dozens of minor variations for the Perk, connected the Perk library to the rest of the room (and the rest of the System), and broadcasted that information from inside of the room to everyone who needed that information in the rest of the world.
The center of the room was where the more interesting things were located.
First of all, there was a much larger pillar of Veldymite. Unlike the other slabs used for Perk records, this one was a massive cylinder that stretched all the way from the floor to the ceiling. More importantly, as far as Alice could tell, this one wasn’t used to record Perks at all. It was used to record how to set up the original Class seed for [Exotic Dancer].
The other pillars of Veldymite that Alice noticed were built around other things. The second major pillar she managed to understand contained the information for several potential Class evolutions for [Exotic Dancer]. Alice didn’t have a good enough grasp of the System to figure out exactly how many progression paths there were for the Class, since the enchantment wasn’t exactly structured in a way that was easy to read - but she estimated there were at least a hundred potential evolution paths for the Class recorded in the pillar of Veldymite.
Alice was rather surprised by that fact. As far as she knew, Immortals were quite rare in the world. Illvaria, a country with a population of around a million people and several centuries of history, still had only six Immortals from its roughly seven centuries of existence. Based on some very rough napkin math, Alice estimated that about one person would reach Immortality per population of a million, per century. Perhaps other countries might have slightly lower or higher rates of ascension to Immortality, based on their teaching resources, national policies, and a variety of other factors - but for quick napkin math, Alice thought that Illvaria served as a good enough template. She had no idea how populated the central continent was - but either way, she would be surprised if there were more than ten thousand Immortals on this entire planet, in total. There were several thousand Classes, and Immortals usually ascended to Immortality by focusing on one Class and pushing it to an extreme limit.
In other words, there was basically zero chance that most of these evolutions to the [Exotic Dancer] Class had been used any time in the past thousand years. In fact, there was a pretty good chance that they might not be used in any reasonable timeframe at all - there just weren’t enough Immortals on this planet to use anywhere near the total number of potential Class evolutions that existed. The remaining unused Class templates would just sit in the halls of the System, collecting dust and waiting for the one in a billion chance that they were needed sometime in the future.
How much redundancy had been built into the System, to make all of this possible? Alice couldn’t even imagine it. She also confirmed that the System must have some kind of way to infer paths that might be needed in the future, and designed Classes well in advance once a base Class was created.
Alice shook her thoughts away, and turned her attention back to the pillar detailing how to build the basic Class seed for [Exotic Dancer]. Class evolutions were interesting, but right now, Alice wanted to nail down the very basic formation of a Tier 1 Class seed. This was one of the things she was most curious about. Alice had found her own rough method of constructing Class seeds, but she was very interested in knowing how the System’s method worked, since Alice’s class seeds still had some minor issues she had never worked out..
The first thing Alice finished analyzing was the structure that sent information out of the System. While interesting, those particular magic structures weren’t very relevant for her current needs - she could work on them later, if or when the actual System was up and running again. After Alice confirmed which parts of the enchantment sent information to people around the world, she ignored it and focused on the remaining structures.
This was where she ran into a problem. She quickly realized that analyzing this magic structure in the System was a bit more difficult than she had thought it would be - because the System had multiple enchantments, all tangled together. The process of assembling a Magic seed, at least in the eyes of the System, was an incredibly precise, long-distance surgery operation. Therefore, there were dozens of enchantments that didn’t just transmit information over long distances - there were also safety checks that constantly activated, to make sure the procedure was going smoothly, and enchantments that took over specific parts of the Class-construction process. It wasn’t quite spaghetti code, but there was definitely a lot of components to the enchantment that were very hard to understand at a glance. However, after analyzing the magic structures, Alice identified a few things that she hadn’t noticed before.
The System used a type of mana that Alice decided to call ‘pseudo-dimensional mana’ to take action over long distances, coupled with another type of mana that she decided to call ‘mana-resistance suppression’ mana. The mana-resistance suppression maan allowed the System to directly weaken the mana resistance that life innately possessed, allowing the System to operate inside of people without major issues. Interestingly enough, this mana suppression effect wasn’t very strong - the System seemed to get around this issue by just flooding the patient with more mana when the first application failed. However, the bigger part of this type of mana worked by installing a kind of back door in someone’s mana resistance. Once a connection between that person’s body and the System was established, the System mana would have a much easier time continuing to operate within that person’s body.
Alice could easily see why this type of inefficient setup worked. Most people in this world got their first class within a few months of turning six years old - a time when they had almost no mana in their body, and thus had almost no innate resistance to external mana. Once this mana installed a System-access backdoor, the System would have an easy time continuing to maintain someone’s Class seeds in the future - and after someone formed a class seed inside of their own body, the System didn’t really need to do much in the first place. It just needed to send instructions to the System mana seeds already present in someone’s body, and let the local copy of the System handle most actual actions.
Pseudo-dimensional mana, the other kind of mana that Alice managed to identify this time, basically let the System perform magic surgery at a distance. It wasn’t too complicated - it was sort of like a portal made with dimensional mana. Alice was pretty sure the two types of mana did the same thing, they just approached the method of ‘opening a portal’ through slightly different methods. One could easily be swapped for the other, without any problems or ill effects.
The way the System created a Class seed itself was far more interesting, at least based on Alice’s rough understanding of what the instructions in the slab of Veldymite meant. It was hard to understand everything, but through several hours of study, Alice started to understand the System’s design principles for building a Class seed. In a weird way, Alice was reminded of Bonsai trees, from back on Earth. The theory that the System used to create a base Class seed was to first use a similar version of her own method - take a large, existing pool of class mana that someone had generated through their own actions. The System then had several different ‘unlock conditions’ for that Class - which were basically specialized actions someone could take to inform the System what specific Class they wanted. After the System received this ‘key’ from the System user in question, the System would use filtration mana to convert all similar types of mana into one singular, ‘correct’ type of mana, then compress it into a small, dense seed of mana. However, after that, the System’s method sharply diverged from her own.
The System’s compression method for mana was at least reasonably comparable to the way Alice compressed mana during the creation of a magic seed, but after that, the System used a new type of mana that Alice couldn’t understand or identify. Based on the instructions that followed the usage of this mana, somehow a second, internal layer of System mana would appear directly after the use of this odd mana type. This would function as something like an internal ‘core’ for a Class seed. It would work kind of like a real plant seed - it was explicitly designed to grow when it encountered enough water and fertilizer - or in this case, enough similar mana. As this plant-like structure grew, it would also grow increasingly unstable - which was why Perks would constantly sprout from this Class, which would work to bind the whole thing together. The internal layer of System mana made the whole structure far more stable than Alice’s version of a System seed, but Alice guessed that a regular Person’s Class seed would still start to suffer from instability if they reached level 40 without taking a single Perk.
Alice was glad that she had correctly identified the way Perks were used to bind a System Class together, but she was also baffled by what she had seen. Turning mana into a pseudo-plant seed was not an approach she had been expecting at all, and it was rather different from what she had seen the ‘final product’ look like.
Though, upon further reflection, Alice had been calling them Class ‘seeds.’ However, Alice had really thought that Class seeds were probably some kind of hybrid between the way monster cores worked and magic seeds worked. Seeing the System treat a magic seed like a plant seed was a bit different from what she had assumed the process would look like.
After this plant seed started to sprout, there was a new, giant branch of the enchantment that Alice didn’t understand at all. It looked like it was some kind of method for establishing a core framework that would ONLY take effect if this was the first Class seed someone had received - but Alice had no idea what the enchantment did. It was complicated, and all of the instructions were so intertwined and tightly packed together that she could barely make heads or tails of it.
Alice spent several more hours working through the System’s basic instructions for how to ‘grow’ this seed, and eventually, rubbed her forehead in frustration.
She had learned far more than ever before, but she still had huge questions she wanted answered. Still, at the very least, Alice had finally verified some of her earlier speculation and guesses about the System. The System did, indeed, seem to have taken some design principles from a monster core. The process of absorbing mana and growing a Class seed was remarkably similar to what monsters did when they absorbed mana to evolve from a regular monster into a monster alpha. The System’s instructions for what the final process should look like were at least similar enough that Alice could see the underlying example the System was copying from.
As Alice started to parse through more sets of information, trying to figure out more about the type of mana that the System used to create the ‘inner layer’ of a class fractal, she was interrupted by Doll.
“Alice, I think I figured out how to make the Veldymite. However, there’s a problem,” she said.
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 realised that Alice will soon be able to claim that she is forever 16, haha. System Approved(tm).😄
Coleman
That was my first thought as well. It looks like everybody is so excited to solve the system issues that stuff is falling to the wayside.
Stephanie Washburn
Very good progress, though no notifications for the class evolution?
