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Chapter 233 - A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World
🕑 Added 2025-08-22 22:33:54 +0000 UTCAs usual, the first thing Alice did to start her levelling process was filter all of the mana she could into the appropriate Class seeds. Th
As usual, the first thing Alice did to start her levelling process was filter all of the mana she could into the appropriate Class seeds. The [Explorer] mana that had been building up for a while remained unused, and there were a few tidbits of other miscellaneous mana types that Alice had no means of dealing with. However, the majority of her Classes still gained a decent amount of experience from this round of mana filtration.
The first thing Alice noticed was a new Achievement.
You have gained an achievement!
Restoration of the System (Rarity: 10)
You have entered the Heart of the World, and repaired a part of the most crucial life support for humans in this world. A small part of the System has been mended. It isn’t much, but it’s a step in the right direction. The first concrete action taken.
+300% growth speed for your highest level primary class. Certain pieces of information within the System will be free for you to access.
Alice felt a huge smile form on her lips.
+300% growth speed for her highest level primary Class was massive. Right now, she needed every single drop of experience she could get for [Explorer of Magic]. +300% would give her a very strong boost in the right direction. It would save her time - and right now, every minute she saved was another handful of lives that wouldn’t die in this catastrophe.
The second part of the Achievement was a bit more confusing, mostly because Alice had no idea how the benefits of the Achievement would manifest themselves. The Achievement claimed that ‘Certain pieces of information within the System would be free for her to access,’ but Alice hadn’t had any new information added to her mind after getting the Achievement. Perhaps she needed to physically access some parts of the System in order to gain her reward?
After a few moments of thought, Alice remembered the strange way that the System had given her access to the interior of the System due to the fact that she was an {Outworlder}. Perhaps this Achievement was similar - it might function as something like a security code, allowing her to enter certain rooms she normally wouldn’t be able to enter.
In any case, at least for now, the second part of the Achievement didn’t mean much to her. There wasn’t much she could do with it until she learned more. Alice shrugged, and then turned her attention back to her Classes.
You have leveled up!
Explorer of Magic 98 -> 100, Scholar: 78-> 79
Alice felt a huge grin form on her lips. The lackluster levels in other Classes was to be expected - all she had done was glue together two chunks of a slab of material, after smoothing out a few rough edges and making sure that everything fit. She was honestly surprised that she had even gotten a level in [Scholar] from doing that - she must have already been very close to level 79.
The fact that she had reached level 100 in [Explorer of Magic], however, was massive. A big part of that was probably due to her new Achievement - boosting the growth rate for her highest-level Class by 300% was massive. In any case, reaching level 100 meant two things.
First, it was time to take another Perk for her [Explorer of Magic] Class.
Second, and far more importantly… it was time for another Class evolution. With this Class evolution, Alice would basically have one foot in the door for achieving Immortality. Her aging speed would drop to almost nothing. Unless she did literally nothing for decades, Alice would be basically guaranteed to hit Immortality. A small part of Alice wished that she had hit this point a few years later - she wasn’t eager to get stuck as an eternal 16 year old. Still, it wasn’t that big of a deal. There were probably ways to deal with an eternal youthful physique - perhaps through organic magic, or certain Perks that might resolve the issue of stopping her aging a few years earlier than she had hoped to. Still, Alice was glad that she was about to experience such a massive power boost. She was eager to see what her Immortality-related Achievement would give her, and how much use it would be in repairing the System.
Alice pushed down her excitement, and then brought up her System screen to see what her Perk options were.
She scanned through her options for combination Perks, but none of the options available to her seemed quite in line with her needs. Most of them were good, and plenty of her combination options even offered moderate boosts to her ability to repair the System - but with the state of the world, Alice was currently focused on one, and only one goal. Fixing the System. Unless one of her combination perks could make her a god and overwrite reality, or something equally absurd, Alice only cared about how effective a Perk was at boosting her repair speed and accuracy.
She wasn’t totally abandoning her future - she still planned to spend her Class evolution on enhancing herself, making her future as boundless as possible, and future-proofing her own build. However, Alice knew that if she didn’t find a way to rescue the dying System, there wouldn’t be a future for this world. Besides, if she really wanted to, she could always replace Perks in the future - unlike Class evolutions, which were permanent.
Instead of focusing on her Perk combinations, Alice’s attention was drawn to some new Perk options.
The first [Explorer of Magic] Perk offered a significant boost to her Intelligence stat - it would boost her stat effectiveness by 100%, and every other stat would also get a 10% boost to effectiveness. This was a rather surprising ‘all-rounder’ Perk, but Alice didn’t value stats very highly right now. She passed over the Perk and kept looking without a second thought.
The second Perk gave Alice the ability to double the size of all of her magic seeds - and this would be multiplicative with all of her other multipliers, rather than additive. In other words, it would double everything from its current state. That was quite a large mana boost, though Alice didn’t think it was quite what she needed. The size of her magic seeds wasn’t the constraining factor on her ability to repair the System.
The third and fourth Perk options were more in line with what she was looking for: raw, direct boosts to her ability to repair the System, and to replace missing System materials.
The first Perk directly addressed one of Alice’s bigger concerns: material shortage.
Veldymite
Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 100, Intelligence 150 or greater, At least 2 Achievements related to the System with a rarity of 9 or higher, Magic stat of 150 or greater, Possess a compound magic seed, be inside of the System at the time of acquisition for this Perk
Allows you to create the core composite material used in the construction of System ‘slabs’ - Veldymite. Veldymite is an unusual composite material, comprised of seventeen other materials that are all treated in special ways before being combined together. Veldymite can memorize up to twenty enchantment instructions, and has very high compatibility with all known compound types of mana.
Gives you both the mental blueprint for how to manually construct this material and the ability to spend small amounts of any type of mana to transform any existing substance in the world into Veldymite. (Estimate - about 2 Mariums per gram of material).
Mana cost decreases based on how close a material already is to mimicking Veldymite, in terms of: material composition, enchantment slots, molecular structure, and raw mana quantity contained within the material.
This Perk was one that Alice valued greatly. In order to repair a single slab of System material in the [Exotic Dancer] room, Alice had needed to cannibalize another slab of System material. This was because the monsters in this room had gnawed away many of the materials originally used in construction, which left Alice at a loss for where to find replacement materials. All of the knowledge in the world wouldn’t help her if she had no way to actually rebuild the System - and unfortunately, she couldn’t conjure raw materials out of thin air. Of course, this was quite similar to one of the earlier Perks that Alice had encountered, which would have let her use raw mana to create any type of material she could imagine. In a sense, this Perk was actually quite a bit more limiting - after all, it only allowed her to create Veldymite.
However, while the Perk was far more limiting, this time, the Perk specified that it would only take a moderate amount of mana to convert materials into Veldymite - about 2 mariums per gram of material. 2 Mariums per gram was still a bit pricey - Alice estimated that she would still need a few weeks to repair this room at that rate of material production, even if she found a way to replace some of the Veldymite the System had clearly used in construction. However, it did offer a way to make the materials she needed.
This was quite important for Alice, who wanted to maintain a good pace of restoring the System and didn’t have time to wait for huge chunks of mana to regenerate. It was also useful that Alice would learn the blueprint for how to create Veldymite ‘manually,’ because if the materials were in someone’s storage Perk, Alice could get Doll to manufacture all of the Veldymite she needed. This would save on a bunch of mana that Alice could use to work on other things.
The other perk that caught her attention was an odd but a useful-looking one.
Temporal Snapshot
Requirements: Explorer of Magic level 100, Have at least a moderate understanding of temporal mechanics from any dimension, magic stat of 175 or greater, possess at least 3 rarity 10 Achievements
Gain the ability to look directly into the past, allowing you to gaze upon enchantments and structures that have since been destroyed.
This Perk has high compatibility with {Magic Modelling}, and using both Perks in conjunction will allow you to take a perfect snapshot of any magic structure that has existed in the past and then instantly replicate it in your memory storage.
(Note: To observe the past, you must either have a reasonably complete fragment of whatever enchantment or structure you wish to observe, or you must stand in the spot where said structure once stood. You must also have a reasonably accurate timeframe for ‘when’ you wish to observe.)
This Perk had a great deal of promise as well. It would allow Alice to look into the past, which would greatly assist her in figuring out how to put this room back together - as well as other, similar rooms.
If Alice could solve the material problem through some other means, this Perk would be far more valuable than the first Perk. After all, so far, she was missing a lot of critical information for how to put this room back together, such as how the System’s instructions for ‘how to build magic seeds’ and ‘how to set up the evolution routes for magic seeds’ were supposed to be structured. While Alice could create a knockoff magic seed on her own, and had even done so in the past for Jonathan’s son, there were still some issues and imperfections with her version that she wanted to correct. Furthermore, Alice still leaned towards restoring the System over making major changes, if possible. That way, she was likely to run into fewer compatibility issues as she tried to rebuild more and more of the ruined the System.
“Doll, do you have any idea what material this is?” asked Alice, as she grabbed one of the other chunks of composite material in the room. She felt bad interrupting Doll’s work, since the woman was already working on finding a way to secure the room after they moved on - but Alice truly needed a way to make up for the material shortage, or no amount of knowledge would be able to repair the System.
Doll put aside the tools and chunk of System wall she had been experimenting with, and hurried over to Alice’s side, before she picked up the small chunk of composite material that Alice was holding up. Rainbow mana flared through her body as she gazed upon the material. After several moments, Doll frowned.
“I’ll be honest, I have no idea what material this is. I do recognize several of the components, though, and my Perk claims that the rest are locally sourced. I can also see how several components of this material were treated and forged. It’ll take me some time, but I think I can probably make this, if we figure out where the System originally sourced the materials. Since my Perks claim they’re locally sourced, the System must have a mine or something nearby.” Doll’s expression was rather odd, as she gently ran her hand along the edge of the material. “I have to admit, this material is a lot softer than I thought it would be. Clearly, the sturdiness of the material isn’t what was prioritized here - though I suppose that makes sense, since the System is a big enchantment. The enchanting properties are what matter here, even if this stuff is fragile enough that I’m kind of worried I’ll squeeze it into putty if I grip it too hard.” Doll shrugged. “Well, that means it’ll be easy to forge, at least.”
Alice nodded, and then relaxed. If Doll said she could recreate Veldymite on her own, then there was no reason to hesitate.
Alice grabbed {Temporal Snapshot}. Then, she turned her attention back to her pending Class evolution.
It was time to see what the options for evolving [Explorer of Magic] were.
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
Coleman
It’s almost time for the main event. I’ve got a 20 on immortal of system administration and Science!.
Stephanie Washburn
Gah! Cut off before the big one! ( :) )
BlastYoBoots
Excellent! (She’d better remember to tell Doll what it’s called and how many materials it’s made of since the system gave her that powerful hint for free in the description.)
Dukeofchaos
Tftc
