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Chapter 231 - A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World
🕑 Added 2025-08-09 00:13:14 +0000 UTCThe first thing Alice did, before she got to work, was filter all of the mana from the fight. She was quietly hoping that her Status might h
The first thing Alice did, before she got to work, was filter all of the mana from the fight. She was quietly hoping that her Status might have changed during the battle. While Alice was still a bit away from reaching Immortality, with how close she was, every level mattered. Once she reached Immortality, she would probably get a few upgrades to her research abilities.
Sadly, the fight hadn’t bumped Alice over any level thresholds. She had gotten a fair amount of [Survivor] mana, meaning she was probably quite close to the next level, and she had also gotten a variety of miscellaneous experience for her magic-related Classes. She also realized, with some surprise, that she had gotten quite a bit of [Explorer] mana, not that Alice had a class fractal to funnel the mana into yet. The mana from the [Explorer] Class wasn’t enough to distract her, but it was getting more and more annoying. Alice sighed, and pushed the thought of the [Explorer] mana aside. There wasn’t much she could do about it right now, and it was still far from being a problem. She would probably have the System back online before it became an issue, with any luck.
After she finished dealing with Class mana, Alice took her first steps into the room where the System’s enchantments were housed.
“Do you need my help?” asked Cecilia, as Alice started to scan the half-eaten System enchantments in the room.
Alice paused for a moment as she considered Cecilia’s offer. Then, she nodded.
“Please help me figure out what the materials of these enchantments are made of,” said Alice. She knew that Cecilia, as someone who focused mostly on enchantments, had all sorts of Perks that could help her analyze the material components of an enchantment. In this specific skill, she might be even more qualified than Ethan. “I want to know what exactly I’m working with here, so that I know what needs to be replaced,” Alice continued. “Also, are you able to piece back together what parts of this room are supposed to look like? I remember you have an Achievement that lets you see some of the hidden components of mana, but I have no idea how it interacts with this room.”
“I can’t directly see System mana… but there’s a lot more than just System mana operating in this room,” said Cecilia. “I can probably piece back together some of the structures, though I won’t be able to do the ones that are more System-mana focused and less focused on maintaining other parts of the room. Still, I can probably give you a better idea what the room as a whole looked like.”
‘That’s good enough,” said Alice. “I’m just hoping to delegate some of the simpler work while I focus on the System aspects of the room.”
Alice then looked at Ethan, and debated whether Ethan would actually be any help. Ethan had stated more than once that he had only learned a bit of enchanting, and that he was mostly a combat oriented Mage. However, he was also four hundred years older than Alice was, and he had obviously devoted some time to learning enchanting. Even if Ethan had only spent a decade or two learning the craft, he was still probably at least somewhat useful… right? Then, a new thought struck her. Was it correct for her to give orders to Immortals in the first place? Asking Ethan to help might rub some of the other [Soldiers] in the room the wrong way. As far as Alice had noticed, none of the Immortals that were travelling with the group had particularly inflated egos. They seemed to more or less treat themselves like normal people - especially Doll, who was practically a shut-in hermit craftsman, and Myra, who acted a lot like a typical older lady gave kids cookies and hugs every holiday. Still, Alice wasn’t sure if issuing orders would create some kind of problem in the command structure. She didn’t really understand much about military discipline and structure.
As if she had noticed her worries, Myra stepped closer, and then draped one of her arms over Alice’s shoulder comfortingly.
“Just tell us what you need from us, dear. If Ethan tries to skive off, I’ll pinch his ear and give him a good talking to, just like when he was seven.”
Alice found Myra’s statement unexpectedly funny, and tried not to laugh at the image of one of Illvaria’s Immortals getting pinched in the ear and yelled at like a naughty kid stuck with his hand in a cookie jar.
Alice felt some of the worry that had settled on her shoulders disappear. The people in this room had risked their lives to do what needed to be done. They were working to save the world. Alice could just ask them if they were able to accomplish certain tasks, and leave it at that.
“Ethan, do you think you can help out in a capacity similar to Cecilia?” asked Alice. “I’m mostly looking for help with organization work, simpler tasks, and material analysis. If you feel you can do anything else, that would also be appreciated.”
Ethan looked at the room doubtfully.
“I can try,” he said. “I make no promises.”
“See what you can do,” said Alice.
Alice looked over the rest of the group, trying to figure out what other orders she could delegate. Since it had been a real question whether the group could even make it to the System, the Mages recruited for this mission were mostly elite combat Mages. That made perfect sense - but it also meant that most of them only had a bit of competence in enchanting, meaning Alice couldn’t delegate very much work to them. A few still had some competence in enchantments - but combat ability had obviously been the priority when picking people for the boat.
This also led to another realization on Alice’s end.
The people here probably wouldn’t have any issues with a command structure if Alice was seen as taking a ‘leading’ role, at least to some extent. This was also important because there were things that needed to be done.
The group wasn’t going to stick around in this room forever. Sooner or later, they would need to go deeper into the System. If the System was structured like this the entire way - rooms filled with enchantments, followed by halls of traps - then they would probably need to visit several of these rooms in the future - at least, unless Alice found a way to repair all of them from a distance, which she currently did not possess.
At first, Alice hadn’t thought very much about what this meant… but the shadow spiders had already slipped past the defenses of the hallways and made their way into the rooms. That meant that they could do it again. Alice was planning to piece the System back together, room by room, until the System was in working order. If the spiders or some other monsters snuck back into the room right after Alice repaired it, they would undo all of the work she had just done. Her levels would still go up, and her repair speed might improve as they kept moving - but Alice still didn’t want to need to constantly rush back and repair her old work.
Was there a way to fix that?
Alice’s eyes lit up as she looked at Doll. There definitely seemed to be a way to fix this problem. Other Mages, and even Immortals, might struggle to take action from afar - but Doll’s entire build was centered around making things. If someone could design a security system that could counter the spiders, it was Doll.
“Doll, can you find a way to isolate this room from the rest of the System? I need a way to keep monsters out of here after we leave. Right now, I’m thinking that what we’ll need to do is push from room to room, clear out the monsters inside, fix everything, and then seal the room afterwards so that no new monsters can enter afterwards. Do you have a good suggestion for that?” asked Alice.
Doll thought about it.
“I might have a way to fix that problem,” said Doll. “I think the spiders managed to slip by the security systems because they’re so adept at stealth, but as long as I have some time to inspect the corpses, I could probably design a countermeasure specifically for them. If that doesn’t work, I could always try to fill the rooms with poisonous gas and see if that manages the spider population effectively. The biggest concern I would have is raw material. I have a pretty big supply of random stuff in my storage Perk, but it is still ultimately limited. I definitely didn’t plan for potentially needing to build large arrays of traps and walls. Also, getting new supplies in this area seems like it would be difficult. Even so, I suspect there’s something I can do here.”
“See what you can do, and let me know how things are looking when you have a better idea what you can do and what you need,” said Alice. “We’ll make further plans from there.” Alice glanced at the Immortals in the group again, to see if they had any dissatisfaction at Alice taking charge of things. They didn’t seem displeased - if anything, they seemed ready to get to work.
“Got it,” said Doll.
With her helpers and logistical needs dealt with, Alice finally stepped up to the actual remnants of the System.
The first thing she did was start to inspect the ruined fragments of composite materials laying around her. Alice was hoping that she would at least recognize a few of the mana structures embedded in the rubble, which would give her a place to start analyzing the room.
Most of the enchantments in the room were heavily damaged. The spiders had evidently been in this room for quite a while - they had gnawed and ripped and bit and tore at the materials and mana inside of this room, until the originally whole and intact enchantments had turned into a giant mess. Still, she could get a rough idea of what the overall structure of the room had looked like in the past. As far as Alice could tell, this room was originally arranged in several large slabs of material, most of which were raised upright and had small walkways in between them. Each slab of material housed thousands of smaller enchantments, and each slab was either square or rectangular. Then, an array of smaller, coin-sized rods and wires had probably connected these slabs of materials to each other. As far as Alice could tell, most of these rods and wires had been situated well above human height - perhaps to ensure that people could still walk around if needed.
Of course, now, even the composite materials that had once made up large ‘slabs’ of material in the room were ruined. Alice had no idea how the spiders had gnawed apart some of the enchanting materials - they seemed rather hard.
Alice continued to walk around the room, inspecting the ruins of the slabs of material, ruined rods and wires, and chunks of missing floor. She hoped to find a relatively more intact slab of material - that would give her a baseline to start figuring out what each slab of material actually did.
Her first big breakthrough came from near the edges of the room. After several minutes of searching and investigation, Alice was pleasantly surprised to discover that one of the ‘slabs of material’ that she had been envisioning was mostly intact. One of the monsters had gnawed through the base, causing it to topple over - but while there was indeed a rather large hole in the bottom of the slab of mixed materials, causing it to split in half and topple to the floor, the actual amount of missing material wasn’t very high. Once Alice started analyzing the top half of the structure, she could still see most of what the slab of material had looked like in the past.
Alice smiled as she found her first subject of study, before she got to work. She wanted to see if she could recognize any of the enchantments in the System slab, or figure out what it was for.
The complexity and materials of the enchantment in this single slab of material was far, far beyond anything Alice had ever seen before. She had already thought that the System mana that used to cover the world was ridiculously complicated, but this was on a completely different level. Despite that, Alice had spent nearly a year buried in her studies of the System now. Unlike most other Mages of this world, Alice had a good enough understanding of System mana to at least analyze the basics.
The first type of enchantment that Alice identified with some degree of certainty was a ‘connection’ component of the enchantment in front of her. Alice had already confirmed, several months ago, that the System used some kind of paired enchantment to ‘connect’ the internal circuitry of the System with the outside world. This was done, as far as Alice could tell, by transforming the very molecules in the air into makeshift enchanting materials, and then using them the same way people on Earth used to use telegraph lines. The air would convey information to and from the System, ensuring that communication between the mainframe of the System and magic seeds was possible.
Alice had seen the counterpart to this particular enchantment multiple times, but always on the receiving end. Now, Alice was pretty sure she was seeing the System-side half of the paired enchantment for the first time.
However, the communication component of the slab of material wasn’t the only component that Alice could see. The majority of the enchantment in front of her was surprisingly similar to one of the mana ‘stitches’ that Alice had seen when she was trying to understand what perks were. When Alice had been trying to create her own version of a Class seed, she had observed that each time someone got a ‘Perk,’ it was kind of like a stitch that held the entire Class seed together. Now, Alice was astonished to realize that this odd, threadlike ‘stitch’ type structure wasn’t only used in people’s Class seeds - it was also used in the System itself.
Then, Alice frowned, and leaned a little bit closer to the intact spire she had seen.
“Wait a minute…” said Alice, as she started to inspect the spire of materials more closely.
She quickly realized that this slab of metal wasn’t just a communication system attached to a single Perk. Instead, most of the slab of metallic components was meant to contain information, using a new type of mana Alice had never seen before. It was surprisingly similar to her ‘coding’ mana, although the exact nature was more like that of a library than anything else. For now, Alice decided to call it library mana.
The library mana in the slab of materials was meant to detail a single Perk. Along with the ‘basic’ setup for the perk, it had details for hundred of variations in that Perk to account for different unlock requirements. It could tell a class seed how to improve the Perk if someone had reached a higher level of [Charisma], allowing a stronger version of the Perk to work with that person. How to handle a lower [Endurance] stat, minimizing the Perk’s harm upon the host while maximizing its strength.
The slab of material that Alice had found was a list of dozens of variations for the Perk {Dancer’s Grace}, a Perk that [Exotic Dancers] could unlock at level 30. Alice blinked in surprise as she sorted through more and more information, until she confirmed that the large slab of material was devoted entirely to the Perk {Dancer’s Grace}. Nothing else was recorded in this slab of material.
She eyed the rest of the room, and a suspicion started to form in Alice’s mind.
If one slab of material contained a Perk, as well as hundreds of variations for it… then did each slab have a specific Perk inscribed in it?
Was this room also similarly devoted to one specific Class, or perhaps some other categorization deemed valuable by the System?
Alice started to investigate the other slabs of material. While the information was more damaged, Alice quickly confirmed that her suspicion was correct.
This entire room was filled with thousands of different ‘libraries’. Each and every one of them was a different Perk for [Exotic Dancer]. This was the room of the [Exotic Dancer] Class, and all associated Perks and variations on those Perks.
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
Rain
Oh dear Lord This is amazing though!!!! TFCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
MinE
She did study the church's book about the system, and she has copy of it in her sleep reading perk, forgot the specifics.
Salvo
When did she study exotic dancers to know their perk list?!
Fii
The slabs and the pipes... this is a server room isn't it?
kyle
Does she really need to though? It might be a stepping stone to understand and solve the larger problem but it doesn't matter in the scheme of things if some classes perks are messed up. Rather if there is a room for every class, there's no way she can afford the time to fix them all with the world falling apart
Stephanie Washburn
Fascinating. I liked the delegation, though I'm a little sad that the chapter ended so abruptly again. Oh well, at least this level of membership is so cheap I'm not overpaying for what I get.
MinE
I was right; I hope she figures out a way to fix this room before they have to resort to eating the monsters.
