A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

As the group rode forward, Alice went back to working on her mana gem. Her image of a fully functioning mana gem was nearly complete, and by her estimation, it would only take three or four hours before she totally finished it. Now that there was nothing else to do, Alice was eager to get to work.

The next three and a half hours were spent in a daze, as she worked on the image of a mana gem contained inside of her mind. But once it was completed, Alice grinned. She had spent several days working on this image, and she was excited now that it was finally done. It was time to see what distinguished a broken mana gem from a working one!

The first thing Alice noticed upon comparing the two images was that the working mana gem had incorporated her Alice mana in a rather odd way.

Alice had already known that the mana gem in her brain was somehow intrinsically linked to Achievements. After all, every single one of her Achievements seemed to be stored in her mana gem, and using her Achievement to fix her mana gem had immediately restored all of her Achievements from working at 50% efficiency to 100%.

It was also already obvious that a working mana gem did something with ‘person’ mana, the strange type of mana that appeared after someone reached level 75. After all, Alice mana had appeared inside of her body around that time, and had only disappeared completely once she used her Achievement to ‘fix’ her mana gem. After that, the mana gem had absorbed all of her Alice mana, and as far as she could tell, it had then disappeared completely from her body.

However, the working mana gem hadn’t just absorbed all of the Alice mana, nor had it simply tossed her Alice mana into a new facet of the mana gem, the way Alice had expected. Now that she could see all of the intricate details of her Alice mana via {Magic Modelling}, she could see several details that she had missed the first time she had looked into her fixed mana gem.

Instead, it seemed almost like the Alice mana was core to the mana gem itself. It was as if there was now a resplendent little glowing core of mana in the center of her mana gem, as tiny as a star in the night sky, but dimly glowing as the rest of the mana gem orbited it.

Alice frowned.

The Alice mana in this image was very, very tiny. Without the ability to zoom in that {Magic Modelling} had, Alice would have had a very hard time seeing in. In fact, if she tried to use her regular types of vision and Perks to investigate her own mana gem, she still had a hard time seeing the Alice-mana core in her mana gem. However, it was clear as day when she zoomed in enough using {Magic Modelling}.

Alice was very glad that she had taken {Mana Modelling} for this reason alone. It solved a lot of problems when it came to image resolution and zooming in and out of pictures she needed good copies of. However, that wasn’t the only thing that caught her attention.

Much more interesting was the connection between Alice mana and the rest of her mana gem. Not only did Alice mana look like it was working as some sort of mini-core for her mana gem, but it also had a lot of little threads of mana connecting it to the rest of her mana gem. Those threads strongly resembled the belief mana that Alice had analyzed while looking at Manaborn monsters. That implied that somehow, belief mana was connecting Alice-mana and the rest of the mana core.

Alice had no idea what to make of that. It was information she didn’t have enough context to actually do anything with. However… it did make her think about something.

Alice mana was probably a form of belief mana. After all, Alice distinctly remembered that Alice mana tried to make her behave the way people expected her to behave. When Alice mana had a stronger influence on her personality, Alice had a strong urge to act in ways that sort of mimicked her own behavior, but totally lacked the internal context she had for her own actions. She felt a stronger urge to research things that didn’t actually interest her, less desire to socialize, and a stronger urge to obsess over things.

Belief mana made things behave the way people thought they should behave, even if that overrode physics or the laws of reality. Class mana was very similar – if one had [Fisherman] mana and didn’t have a Class seed to absorb it, they would behave more and more like a stereotypical [Fisherman]. They would lose any other aspects of their personality in the process, essentially becoming a walking stereotype with no actual personality or sense of self.

All of these things behaved similarly.

Alice had also realized, at an earlier point in time, that Achievements were inherently linked to beliefs. There was no other way to explain why her Achievement, {Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society}, described her as a combat-oriented mage, even though she clearly wasn’t. In fact, last time she had looked at her mana gem, she had theorized that Achievements were like a dumping ground, where the System tossed weird chunks of mana that it didn’t know what to do with.

Now, she realized that this theory was only part of the whole picture.

Looking at the way the threads of belief mana connected Alice mana to the rest of the mana gem… it seemed almost like the mana gem was built exclusively to regulate beliefs and how they interacted with people. Alice noticed, after some further observation, that the mana gem in her brain was almost like a nexus of different people’s beliefs about her. All of them were stored in slightly different ways, and all of them had slightly different forms… but they were all kind of the same thing. Achievements were a representation of people’s beliefs about her, and so was Alice mana.

Class seeds were similar. They were essentially built to absorb mana, which had people’s beliefs mixed into it, and then turn those harmful forms of mana into something useful that didn’t harm the host.

Why was there a division between the two? What made a mana gem different from a Class gem?

Alice started thinking about this question as she analyzed the images of mana gems, but it didn’t take her long before she started to notice something. It was right in front of her, staring her in the eye.

Standardization.

Based on her understanding of the System, as well as what historical records Alice had of ‘updates’ the System had made over the centuries from back when she was scouring the academy library, the System added new Classes every so often. These Classes were probably built whenever enough people recognized the existence of a new ‘job,’ after which the System took those beliefs, standardized them, and created a new set of Perks to suit that Class’s needs.

The ‘Achievements’ section of the mana gem seemed to be a place to toss ‘belief mana’ that didn’t have a ‘job’ associated with it. Or a place for belief mana that didn’t quite match with the identity of a ‘normal’ user of a Class seed. For example, a healer that found the cure for an incurable disease, as compared to a regular healer. They were both healers, but people would still think more highly of the former, adding a certain ‘distinction’ to that person that set them apart without wholly changing their identity. That was probably how the System determined what was an Achievement versus more mana for class levels.

Or at least, that was Alice’s best explanation for why Class mana and Achievements seemed almost the same, but subtly different. She thought she was heading in the right direction with her hypothesis, but she was open to being wrong. She also thought that the dividing line between something that was a ‘job’ and ‘wasn’t a job’ seemed rather arbitrary. In fact, it was probably only based on what people believed counted as a job or not a job… making it weird and inconsistent. Just like the Achievements section of her status screen.

But why did this mana gem only seem to appear after level 75? And why did Alice mana appear around that time?

Alice spent a while trying to find anything in the structure of the mana gem itself that would answer this question, but sadly, there was nothing to work with. The mana gem didn’t exactly have a ‘user’s manual’ laying around in a corner of the mana gem, just waiting for someone like Alice to find it. Therefore, Alice started to think and guess.

After some more thinking, Alice came up with a theory. It might be totally wrong, but right now Alice was just guessing anyway. If it was wrong, she would just revise her idea later.

After level 75, people started to change pretty drastically. The rate at which people aged started to slow down drastically. Most level 75’s took two or three years to age one year. They weren’t quite Immortal yet… but the reduction in their aging speed was at least 50%. Their lifespan became drastically longer, and they started to be able to do things humans had no chance of ever achieving without heavy mana-related assistance.

This could be considered the beginning steps for proper Immortality. Before level 75, while people gained some resistance to old age, it was usually more of a lifespan extension than a major difference. It was more like the distinction between lifespan for people who ate healthy and exercised often on Earth – it could make you live longer, but it didn’t totally transform your lifespan into something unrecognizable.

This implied that level 75 was a dividing line, of sorts. The moment someone hit level 75, they were truly striding towards Immortality, stepping out of the realm of an ‘ordinary’ human to become something different.

Perhaps the ‘Alice mana’ that she had seen, as well as the belief mana and the mana gem, were all some sort of preparation stage for proper Immortality?

Alice still remembered that Ethan had told her all Immortals got a special Achievement upon reaching Immortality. This Achievement gave immortals the ability to recover from lethal damage once a week, as well as a host of other, more specific bonuses. Ethan had never told Alice exactly what his Achievement for immortality gave her, since that directly pertained to his combat abilities. However, he had strongly hinted that Alice should expect huge bonuses to several Attributes, a few unique abilities that were equivalent to level 100 combined Perks, and possibly a few weird but useful new abilities. That seemed to be what most Immortals got, according to what details Ethan had. He had admitted he wasn’t 100% sure if that was how every Immortality Achievement looked – but Alice was willing to trust his advice as being at least somewhat reliable. After all, Ethan came from an Immortal father and an Immortal mother. If anyone was likely to have an unusually high amount of data on what, exactly, Immortals had in their Status Screen, it was Ethan.

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So perhaps ‘Alice mana’ was, in and of itself, the building block for her Immortality Achievement? As she grew more well-renowned and her other abilities improved, the Alice mana would grow denser and more well-established, until it finally transformed into a proper Achievement? And once that Achievement finished forming, Alice would get her ‘Immortality’ Achievement and stop aging?

That still left a few questions, like what specifically was required to form ‘person’ mana, and how mana gems were created. Alice still wasn’t 100% certain whether people below level 75 just had tiny mana gems she couldn’t detect, or whether Achievements were handled some other way before that point. But it felt like a reasonable start of an explanation, at least. She could always revise her guesses later, but she thought she might be on the right track.

Alice shook her head. If her guess was correct, trying to reach Immortality without the System might be… very problematic. While Alice had always thought of Immortality more as a side-goal, she had to admit, the closer it got the more appealing she found it. Growing old seemed like a miserable way to die. Avoiding that forever sounded nice.

But her body had no innate ability to process all of this mana on its own. Humans, sadly, had no real way to interact with mana safely, at least without the help of the System. If Alice wanted to get this mess working, she would need to keep observing how the System used to solve this mess and then use that as a foundation for fixing her own Alice mana. Humans… were really bad at managing mana.

In fact, now that Alice thought about it more carefully… weren’t humans awfully poorly adapted to mana, and this dimension, in general?

Humans suffered from mana poisoning the moment they came into contact with an excessive quantity of mana, unlike monsters. The fact that monsters were born with no fear of mana poisoning clearly meant that it was possible for life forms to be properly adapted for mana. In that case… why were humans in this world so abysmal at handling the various repercussions of living near mana? They needed the System to regulate almost every aspect of mana, because a small mistake would spell immediate death, or loss of consciousness. It was like a species that was clearly suited to live near volcanoes trying to live in Antarctica – the whole thing made no sense whatsoever.

Alice thought about how she had arrived in this world. When she had come from Earth, she had known absolutely nothing about magic, nor had she had any sort of ‘innate connection’ to this world. She had arrived here through pure dumb luck, with absolutely no control over her arrival. She hadn’t taken any sort of special action to arrive here, and she had been caught totally off guard by her arrival. In that case… perhaps humans weren’t native to this world at all?

In the first place, it would be exceedingly bizarre for two species to develop so similarly to one another on two different planets. The odds were probably about on par with someone flipping a coin several billion times and it landing on heads every single time. It was theoretically possible… but probability like that never actually happened in reality. The odds were just too absurd. Not to mention, certain environments made the evolution of certain types of species more or less probably, because those species were adapted to survive in that environment. That was what Natural Selection was – survival of whatever species was most adapted to the current environment.

Not to mention, there were several species of plant and animal that closely resembled their earth counterparts. This week alone, Alice had eaten a meal made of potatoes, and had also eaten bread made from wheat. She walked near trees that strongly resembled trees from earth, and knew that regular animals like chickens and cows were also present in villages around the world.

Were humans adapted to this planet’s environment? Could they realistically evolve here?

Hell no!

They needed the System to scrape out even the most rudimentary form of existence. While historical records of pre-System years were scant, from what Alice could find, it seemed like humans had scraped out an existence at the fringes of society, right at the bottom of the food chain. Monsters had come to munch on humans frequently, and mages had lived short, pitiful lives trying to keep their villages and tribes safe from the monsters that ruled the world.

Alice seriously doubted humans could have ever evolved in this world. Their biology was just too poorly suited for this dimension. Unless mana was new to this dimension, or some sort of massive change had happened in this world recently, there was just no way humans could have evolved here. And there was absolutely no historical or archeological evidence of a ‘big change’ in this dimension, at least not in the recent past.

Now that she looked at her mana gem, and then thought about how she had arrived here, it seemed abundantly obvious.

Humans probably weren’t native to this planet. Every single fact she knew about Natural Selection, biology, and probability stated that it was totally impossible for humanity to have been born here.

Sometime in the distant past, a tribe or village of humans had probably been spirited away to this dimension, much like she was. That tribe had managed to survive and reproduce, and perhaps with the help of new interdimensional migrants, they had managed to scrape out some form of existence on this world – fragile though it may have been. After that, for reasons Alice still didn’t understand, the System popped into existence, and the ‘golden age’ for humanity in this world started. But humanity was probably not native to this place.

Alice sighed, and put her thoughts aside for now. Today, she had made one interesting discovery, and had two new theories she wanted to verify. However, she had no good way to test her new guesses, so she would just have to keep an eye out for further clues and evidence for or against her guesses. The most important thing in science was to keep an open mind, and discard your hypotheses if it became obvious you were wrong. The hardest thing to do was admit one was incorrect and then improve, after all.

After that, Alice returned to the image of her working mana gem. There was one other thing she had wanted to check, and now was the perfect time to do so.

Alice knew that at least for a few seconds, right after using her Achievement to ‘fix’ her mana gem, her mana gem had somehow categorized and ‘fixed’ all of her Achievements. Alice was hoping that her image of a ‘working’ mana gem had captured this image – if so, she might have a good idea how to fix Achievements manually, without relying on her Achievement to do it for her. So she started scouring the image of a working mana gem again.

It took a lot more searching and analyzing, but after a while, Alice did find a little chunk of rainbow mana working on ‘straightening out’ one of the facets of her mana gem. Since every single facet of her mana gem was an Achievement, that meant one thing.

Alice had, indeed, captured an image of the System ‘at work’ fixing an Achievement. She grinned.

She spent several more minutes trying to figure out what the System was doing with her mana gem facet, and after some analysis, she came to a rough understanding of how the process worked. She wasn’t sure if she could replicate it yet, but she was pretty sure she at least understood what was happening.

In order to ‘fix’ an Achievement, it looked like she had to do more than just properly ‘categorize’ it. As far as she could tell, what the System was doing was some sort of… surgical alteration to the Achievement. This surgical alteration was done using a mixture of math mana, pure mana, filtration mana, and at least one other type of mana she was less familiar with. Somehow, these types of mana were straightening out the Achievement, turning it from a chunk of partially-controlled belief mana into something a bit more… standard? Controlled?

Alice didn’t have a good word for it, but it was obvious that something had been done to make the mana more controlled and stable. It wouldn’t totally change the nature of the mana, but Alice suspected it would make it ‘fit in’ more with the other types of Achievements present in her mana gem.

Alice frowned, and rubbed her chin thoughtfully.

She still only had a rough idea what was going on, but she could sort of see what the process was going for. The System probably had some sort of ‘standard framework’ for how Achievements were supposed to work. The surgical alteration process was taking the Achievement and converting it from raw, unprocessed mana into something usable by making it fit that template. Alice still wasn’t entirely sure what that template was, but if she kept analyzing her image of a working mana gem, she could probably make some guesses. From there, she would just need to do some trial and error to get a real idea what the System needed an Achievement to look like. Once that happened… Alice would finally be able to fix Achievements. She found herself smiling at the thought.

The two components of the System she still couldn’t fix were Achievements and Class seeds. Now, she had a glimpse of how to fix Achievements. There was still work to be done, but she had a foot in the door.

Sadly, there wasn’t much she could do to experiment with Achievements here. She would have to wait until later before she tried messing with Achievements more. Instead, Alice pulled herself out of the mental images created by her Perks, and turned her attention towards Ethan.

“Ethan… do you mind if I take a look at your mana gem later,” asked Alice, after signaling for him to move closer and dropping her voice to a whisper.

Ethan quickly set up his privacy Perk, and then gave Alice a glance. “Did you finally finish looking at your own mana gem, in both a working and broken condition?”

“Yes, I did,” said Alice. “Do you want to see?”

Ethan nodded, so Alice used {Shared Memory} to give Ethan a full view of what she had looked at during her use of {Magic Modelling}. She spent several minutes going over the two images, as well as explaining her own guesses about the origins of humanity on this world, the nature of ‘person’ mana, and what she had found out about Achievements so far. After listening to her theories, Ethan nodded.

“What you say about the origins of humans in this dimension is very speculative. I’m not familiar with ‘natural selection,’ as you put it… but I can understand the logic behind it. Honestly, though? I’m not sure if it matters much. Even if humans all originally come from Earth, as you theorize, we live here now.” Ethan shrugged. “But I think you might be on to something with the nature and importance of mana gems and ‘person’ mana.” Ethan looked a bit nervous. “If so, reaching Immortality will be harder for you…” then he relaxed, and actually laughed. “But I suppose it’s lucky that my apprentice this time is perhaps the only person who can solve this problem. If I were to place an issue like this in front of Sujia, she would definitely struggle to fix it even if she had an extra two centuries to work with.” Ethan grinned. “As for Achievements, it seems like you’ll need access to people who have dysfunctional Achievements so that you can start trying to find the ‘template’ the System uses for Achievements. I’ll try to see if there’s a way to get willing test subjects – or see if there’s a different way to get information without putting people at risk. We’ll think about it later. But for now, keep your eyes on the road. We’ve finally reached our destination.”

Alice blinked in surprise as Ethan spoke, before she looked around.

While she had been lost in her thoughts, the swamps and tundras had started to fade away. That meant that they had left Fendrallia. Perhaps a few hours of travel away, Alice could just make out the outline of another large city.

After several weeks of travel, the group had finally arrived at Morendia, the homeland of Demor. And the place where Alice would hopefully learn to make proper Artifacts, and with that, learn to replicate class seeds and create enchantments that let people use critically useful Perks like {Broken Seed}.