A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The next few days were mostly repetition of the same thing. Alice woke up, had breakfast, and then watched Demor create Artifacts. Then, she experimented with the few remaining manaborn monsters, or returned to her Dream Library to review Demor’s actions. Alice kept hoping for some kind of revolutionary change to take place, illuminating the way forward. However, after three days, Alice had yet to find the revolutionary breakthrough she needed.

Even when she was in her dream library, Alice felt stressed out. The days where she could spend a few hours relaxing with a book or two were long gone. Every moment she spent awake, she observed Demor’s artifact creation process or observed the manaborn monsters. Every day she was asleep, she went back through her memories, trying to find any sort of key to figure out how the System created magic seeds without a core material.

Alice didn’t think she was an impatient person. However, with the crisis unfolding outside, it was hard to be patient. While Ethan didn’t tell her much about what was going on outside, Alice still knew that things would be getting worse every day. The few conversations that Alice had with Jonathan and his family confirmed it.

Manaborn monsters were starting to crop up anywhere people ‘believed’ that there were unusual phenomena. With people’s beliefs constantly being validated, people became more prone to believing in dangerous rumors. These, in turn, created more monsters. Panic and fear were like diseases, spreading from person to person and bringing hordes of monsters and natural catastrophes in their wake. With this dangerous cycle, things were hitting a threshold of danger that was hard to fix. People were afraid, and people around the world were dying. If something didn’t change soon, Alice doubted anyone besides the Immortals would survive the next few months.

The only thing that somewhat relieved Alice’s anxiety was the fact that she wasn’t alone. Allira had started to go to various taverns and public areas, to sing and talk about the amount of influence the Immortals and various countries were exerting to quell the spread of disaster. It helped keep things stable in the capital, but with how fast things were going wrong, her influence was limited. Alice could only imagine how much worse things were in areas without [Charisma] based Immortals to stabilize things.

Even more bizarre, Ethan mentioned a few whispers from some high level Mage circles he had made contact with. They had noticed that the mana levels in the country were dropping. It was as if a siphon had appeared in the middle of the country, and was now working on devouring all of the nearby mana. After asking Demor, he mentioned that people had always noticed that mana was a little less abundant in this country compared to other nearby regions. Nobody had ever looked into it – after all, a bit of variation in mana density was pretty normal. Demor didn’t seem to think much about people’s observation that mana levels were dropping – when Alice asked more explicitly about it, he just shrugged. Mana levels increasing or decreasing a bit was nothing new, after all.

Combined with Alice’s initial observation that the country’s mana levels were lower than Fendrallia’s, Alice wondered if there was more to it. And if there was… was it actually a bad thing? Less mana in the air meant that other disasters would start to slow down over time. Sure, it also meant that it was harder for valuable enchanting materials to appear. It also made it harder for Mages to get the raw mana needed to form magic seeds. It also meant that there wouldn’t be any mana for people to process and turn into levels … but at the same time, it meant that monsters wouldn’t be able to exist in the country. After all, monsters would rapidly die if they didn’t have enough mana to sustain themselves. People’s beliefs would also have a lower impact on their surroundings, meaning that the country would start to stabilize. In the midst of all the other chaos around the world, losing most of the mana in the country might prove surprisingly beneficial.

Of course, that was only if the decrease in mana level wasn’t the result of some other crisis brewing the background. Alice was prepared for anything at this point. With so many other things going on, she didn’t even have time to investigate the weird decrease in mana levels. Luckily, this piqued Cecilia and Ethan’s interest. Since Cecilia couldn’t help with a lot of the other projects Alice was working on, she offered to do some investigation and see if she could learn more. Ethan hooked her up with a bunch of extra enchanted items, to make sure she could stay safe, and hired a few [Guards] to follow her around and a translator who was fluent in most nearby languages. Then, Cecilia and Ethan both left to investigate.

With so many different things going on at once, Alice felt even more rushed. Especially because she just couldn’t figure out how the System handled class seeds. The one time she had observed the System create a class seed had been when she re-constructed her [Fisherwoman] class, after destroying the class seed. Alice suspected that the System had skipped some sort of obvious step that it ‘usually’ took when it rebuilt her seed. After all, Alice had already possessed the class before – it was entirely possible that some sort of remnant object or type of mana was already in her body, making the whole process smoother. This was because her memories of the process just didn’t seem like they should be very hard to replicate… but when she tried to put it into practice, it failed miserably. Her failures, the constant eruptions of small catastrophes, and the fear of what the rest of the world looked like pushed Alice to move faster and faster.

On the fourth day of observation, Alice finally had a small breakthrough. It wasn’t in terms of actual research progress – Alice was still stuck on that front. However, she had a breakthrough in terms of ideas.

Alice was still pretty sure that the System was doing something special to stabilize class seeds while it was constructing them. However, Alice had no way at all to observe this process. The system was down, and while it did occasionally return for a few minutes, things were getting worse every day. Alice didn’t have time to sit around, hoping for a miracle to grant her the information she needed. There wasn’t enough time to find and copy the System anymore.

But that didn’t mean Alice had to do things the same way the System did. What Alice needed to do was find any solution that worked. Alice had never tried doing something totally on her own before. Usually, she observed the System, and then tried to replicate it. But with the growing crisis and her strained time, Alice decided to do something different. She had a problem in front of her, and she knew that she needed to solve it now. So she settled on trying out a new type of mana.

Normally, Alice might have hesitated to try a completely made up kind of mana. After all, she could only create four magic seeds a month, and she was still some time away from the cooldown for her magic-seed producing Perk. But recently, Alice had gotten a perfect Perk for testing out new types of mana. She just needed to dump all of her ‘old’ mana, and then start filling it in with a new kind.

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That, naturally, was {Experimental Magic}.

The purpose Alice had been using the Perk for, at least so far, was to create more mana that she needed. Some of her magic seeds, such as dimensional magic, were simply too small for use in emergencies.

However, {Experimental Magic} had another, much more notable ability. One that Alice hadn’t taken advantage of yet, but that she had confirmed worked after a bit of testing.

It could create mana types that Alice normally had zero access to.

Normally, Alice needed to create a magic seed of a certain type to access mana of that sort. However, {Experimental Magic} sidestepped this need entirely. As long as Alice could imagine a certain type of mana, she could give it a try with {Experimental Magic} and see what that mana type did. She couldn’t combine them together very effectively – it was still far less efficient than having the magic seeds integrated together ‘properly.’ But she could still experiment with a few types of mana she didn’t have a proper seed for.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With that in mind, Alice decided to create ‘stabilization’ mana, and see how things went. If the mana type worked the way she hoped it would, maybe it would serve as a replacement for the core material in an artificial magic seed.

Once Alice had a new idea, she immediately started to implement it. She dumped all of the old mana in her {Experimental Magic} seed, before she cleaned up all the broken mana in her area. After that, Alice set the magic seed to produce the new type of mana she had envisioned, which she decided to call stabilization mana. Stabilization mana was meant to act as a kind of ‘binding agent’ for other types of mana. The basic idea was to create a type of mana that could help lock other types of mana inside of it, thus obviating the need for an actual physical object to serve as the core material for artificial magic seeds.

Normally, Alice wouldn’t have tried creating a new type of mana this way. After all, the people of this world weren’t stupid. If there was an obvious solution to a problem, chances were that somebody had already solved that problem centuries ago. If a problem remained unsolved, it was usually because the ‘obvious’ solutions didn’t work, or were impossible to implement in a reasonable way. However, Alice felt that she had two advantages over the rest of the world this time.

First of all, Alice had a huge advantage when it came to magic seed generation. Alice could create four magic seeds a month, which was ludicrous, even among most Immortals. Ethan was around four centuries old, and he only had seven magic seeds. Alice could match that in two months, even if her seeds would have far less storage capacity. Combined with other Perks like {Experimental Magic}, Alice had far more freedom than any other Immortal she knew of when it came to trying new types of mana. If she wanted to experiment with a certain type of mana, she didn’t need to fear wasting rare Perks or Achievement rewards doing so.. Thus, Alice had some reason to believe that no Immortal would be as free as she was to play with things like ‘stabilization’ mana. After all, even if they were potentially aware that some sort of mana like ‘stabilization’ mana might exist, they might not be willing to spend a precious Perk testing it out.

The second thing that Alice specialized in was vision. She had several Perks that explicitly allowed her to collect data about mana, as well as an Achievement that let her view System mana. That was something that, as far as she knew, nobody else had. At the very least, there was zero evidence of anyone knowing how to manipulate or see System mana that she had found. No books or stories she had heard referenced System mana in even the vaguest of ways. Even Ethan thought that her ability to see System mana was unique. If there were other people who could see System mana, they were staying quiet about it.

Being able to view System mana had let Alice make several logical leaps in terms of how mana worked that the rest of the world seemed unaware of. Things like integrating different magic seeds together, making compound mana types, and understanding the underlying logic and mechanics of the System. With that in mind… Alice had at least some hope that she could create a working solution to the artificial magic seed problems she had run into.

To try to give her experiment a higher chance of success, after she changed her {Experimental Seed}, Alice told Ethan about the new type of mana she had ‘discovered.’ Alice wasn’t actually sure if this step was needed or not… but with how much people’s beliefs could influence reality, it probably didn’t hurt to make a few other people believe that what she was trying would be successful. It felt a bit like Alice was losing the integrity of a ‘proper’ [Scientist], but Alice was more focused on saving lives right now. Besides, in the worst case scenario, Alice might look a bit foolish – but with how many people were dying every day, Alice felt that her pride was the least of her worries. If she didn’t find a solution fast, there might not be people on this planet soon. Or at least, nobody besides the Immortals would have an easy time surviving the variety of calamities devastating the planet.

After Alice finished informing Ethan of her new ‘discovered’ type of mana, she had enough mana to start her experiments.

First, she spent a few Mariums of stabilization mana trying to build a sort of… cocoon. Alice was hoping that a somewhat loose ‘weave’ of mana would be stable enough for her to proceed to the next step of her experiment. After creating the cocoon, Alice waited a few seconds to see what happened.

The moment she ‘let go’ of her mana cocoon, the mana hung in midair for a few seconds… before the whole thing fell apart. It was like someone had tossed an ice sculpture into a volcano. Alice wasn’t even sure what broke first – the entire cocoon collapsed so fast that she barely even processed it. She didn’t even manage to get a good look at it as it fell apart.

Alice sighed, before she adjusted her idea. She went back to the beginning with her design. A cocoon had fallen apart nearly instantly, almost as if the mana didn’t have any ability to stand on its own. Alice suspected that Stabilization mana would, indeed, glue together other types of mana… but if the stabilization mana dissolved after a few seconds, it was completely meaningless. Perhaps she needed to adjust the shape?

This time, she tried to shape her mana into something that resembled a block of wood from one of the furniture stores her family used to frequent. The furniture store had focused on making cheap, reasonable furniture, but it also required that customers assemble the furniture itself from premade parts. Most of the pre-made furniture pieces had lots of little holes, knobs, and other features drilled into them, so that the user just had to put everything together. Alice decided to follow a similar plan, so that she had something to build off of if this glob of mana remained stable.

This time, the mana didn’t dissipate on the spot. Making things into a stable block with a few holes in it seemed to work much better than a cocoon. However, as Alice inspected her work, she realized that it was far from a success. The mana didn’t fall apart on the spot, but it was still slowly unraveling. It started out in the holes she had tried to drill into her block of mana. Moments after those holes started to unravel, the other parts of the block of mana followed suit.

Alice frowned as she watched her second test disappear into thin air.

Maybe shape wasn’t the issue here at all.

Alice thought back to what she had observed about Demor’s Artifact creation process. She remembered that Demor’s mana had been incredibly compact and thick – almost like sludge. Maybe mana density was the problem?

But how was she supposed to make her mana denser? It was a problem Alice had never thought about. It wasn’t anything she remembered reading about, either. It was unexplored territory. She started thinking about what she wanted, before Alice grinned.

If she didn’t know how to do something, maybe she could invent a new mana to do it for her?

Alice swapped her magic seed to start making ‘compression’ mana, to see if that would fix her problem. Another few hours passed by, as Alice read through a few supplementary reading materials and diagrams Demor had made for her. Time passed by, and after a few hours of waiting, she had enough mana to start.

This time, she got much better results. Her compression mana turned her stabilization mana into a much sturdier layer of mana. It wasn’t anywhere near perfect, but at the very least, it didn’t collapse within seconds this time. Instead, the layer of mana she had created lasted for nearly ten minutes before collapsing. Furthermore, Alice suspected that it was possible for the condensed mana to last longer. It was still missing something… but it was on the path to success, at least.

Alice spent several hours trying to figure out what part of the equation she was missing, but she couldn’t think of any new clues. Her best idea was to create a stabilization mana that stabilized her other stabilization mana… but she suspected that wouldn’t actually solve the problem. Instead, the new layer of stabilization mana would just fall apart, before the original layer of mana unraveled. Frustrated, Alice moved to the little garden that Immortal Jonathan had taken over, before blinking in surprise.

A while ago, Alice had requested that Jonathan generate some [Fisherman] mana, so that she would have a base material to work with once she started trying to make a class seed. Jonathan had clearly taken her words to heart, and had used some of his Perks to establish a little pond in the farming area, before having some fish imported into it. Alice was a bit surprised that still counted for acquiring the [Fisherman] class, but apparently, it was a tried and true method that some [Nobles] used if they felt like pursuing fishing as a hobby.

But seeing all of the fisherman mana gave Alice an idea. Maybe the issue was that she needed some other kind of mana to stabilize the whole mess? If she tried using already-present mana as a binding agent, maybe it would help stabilize her unstable artificial magic seed foundations. Alice felt like she was grasping at straws, but she felt stuck. There was always a chance it would work, right?

Alice ran her idea through {Safety Analysis}, and the Perk informed her that her idea wasn’t dangerous. Combined with Alice’s ability to remove magic seeds, she didn’t feel that things would lead to permanent injuries if she tried experimenting a bit with Jonathan. It still didn’t feel great… but Alice needed to move faster.

So she swallowed nervously, and walked over to Jonathan.

“Immortal Jonathan,” she said, trying not to hesitate. “Do you mind if I try an experiment with the mana in your body?”

Jonathan smiled at her. He seemed a bit uneasy, but he also seemed prepared. “I’m willing to try. What do you need me to do?”