A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The next two days were a blur of activity. Alice spent most of each day monitoring Jonathan’s condition. Now that she had given him a new version of a ‘Class Seed,’ she desperately wanted to spend every moment observing it and seeing if it worked or not.

At first, she was hopeful. At the time, she had felt like she might have really solved the problems related to creating Class seeds and developed a viable alternative. However, she started to realize there were a lot of issues she still needed to work out.

First of all, the Magic seed was prone to the same issue the System-created magic seeds had –that is, the magic seed quickly got clogged up when it tried to absorb nearby mana. Since Alice had a way to solve that problem, it wasn’t the end of the world if she didn’t develop a solution for this. However, it required resources and manpower to create, and so Alice filed it away as a possible improvement she could make if she had time.

However, there was a bigger, more fundamental issue to her Class seed.

Stability issues.

Alice had thought that ‘stabilization mana,’ paired with some amount of mana compression, would be enough to make a pseudo-class seed. That was the entire reason that Alice had worked so hard to make the Class seed produce Stabilization mana. Without it, the Class mana would always outgrow the stabilization mana eventually, and then the whole thing would fall apart.

However, Alice’s solution only partially resolved the issue. On Alice’s request, Jonathan kept fishing in order to stress test the seed. At first, it seemed to work… and then, after thirty-six hours, the Class Seed started to collapse.

The problem was organization.

The magic seed still grew like it was supposed to. It absorbed [Fisherman] mana and generated stabilization mana, and with the help of some density mana, the whole thing remained reasonably compact. However, the way it grew was lumpy, uneven, and disjointed. After a few rounds of collecting [Fisherman] mana, the seed was barely held together by Alice’s hopes and dreams. It looked like a cancerous tumor rather than a Class seed. It was constantly trying to grow, fall apart, and spread throughout Jonathan’s body, and Alice had a sneaking suspicion the problem would only get worse if the seed kept growing like this.

In a desperate attempt to salvage her collapsing Class seed, Alice started trying to add other components of System mana to the failing [Fisherman] seed. She started out with Math mana, since she was hoping it would keep the whole seed reasonably organized and stable. However, Alice wasn’t even sure if it helped. The math mana seemed to make the [Fisherman] seed become slightly more organized for an hour or two… before the math mana also started to become a jumbled, disorganized mess. There were a variety of weird, jagged creases, lumps, and oddities in the magic seed, and the entire thing was pulling itself apart. It was a disaster.

This frustrated Alice to no end, and she started trying to add in other types of mana to create some of the stability the Class Seed needed. She tried using Pure mana to help the math mana organize itself. When the pure mana and the Math mana struggled to interact with each other, Alice used communication mana to help them relay information to each other. When that started to make the Class seed behave erratically and start to fall apart, Alice added in some Filtration mana. Not because she actually thought it would fix the seed, but out of sheer frustration and some sort of misplaced hope that she could just ‘filter away’ all of the instabilities in the magic seed.

That wen about as well as Alice had suspected it would – that is to say, the Class Seed gave up and imploded, setting Alice right back to square one. Alice was more than a bit frustrated by that, but she had no idea what else she could have done at that point. The Class seed was clearly not working as intended, and all of her attempts to save it had gone awry. She needed to fix the problems in her Class seed in some other way.

Frustrated, Alice spent several hours in her dream library studying the System version of a Class Seed. She was still missing a lot of the visual information she wanted, but she did stumble across something that she hadn’t noticed before. A part of each Class Seed that she had always known about, but hadn’t realized the importance of.

Perks.

Alice had always thought that Perks were sort of like a side benefit the System tossed in to Class Seeds. In her mind, she had always thought that the ‘big purpose’ of a Class seed was to absorb mana and stabilize it. The Perks were just a way to give humans a little benefit from the mana, instead of just leaving a neutralized time bomb inside of their body.

This was not the case.

As Alice studied the System’s Class seed in more detail, the bits of the image she had taken started to become easier to view and observe. And through that, Alice started to notice a pattern.

The System’s Class seeds also showed some of the same signs of lumpiness and disorganization that her own Class seeds had started to show. Whatever had designed the System, it had clearly run into the same problem she had.

However, while Alice was still missing a lot of the picture, she realized that it almost looked like little bits and pieces of each chunk of mana were stitched together with incredibly fine, layered thread made of mana. Alice wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at, until she noticed that the magic seed seemed to have a very specific number of ‘weird lumps’ in it. Alice had taken an image of her [Explorer of Magic] seed, and the [Explorer of Magic] seed had ninety lumps in.

Exactly the number of levels she had in the Class.

It could have been a coincidence, but Alice suspected it was not.

Even more interestingly, there were a total of seven ‘stitches’ that held the Class Seed together. Exactly equal to the number of Perks Alice had in the Class.

That was when Alice started to realize Perks were quite a bit more important than she had given them credit for.

While Alice could have been heading in the wrong direction, she trusted her gut on this one, at least until she proved or disproved it with actual data.

Perks weren’t just a case of the System turning something harmful into something helpful. They were the very framework that held Class Seeds together and kept them from imploding.

Probably.

Of course, Alice’s {Magic Modelling} Perk usually needed about a week to give her every detail she needed. Right now, she wasn’t quite sure how the System created Perks, or how exactly Perks held Class seeds together. She was mostly operating off of guesswork and hopes right now. So she decided to put it to the test by creating a basic Perk and adding it to Jonathan’s seed. If it stabilized the seed, it would prove there was some merit to her hypothesis.

And that… was where she ran into more issues. Alice didn’t know how the System created Perks. Whatever changes happened to a Class Seed when a Perk was created, it was far too subtle and tiny for her to see without the help of a Perk like {Magic Modelling}. That meant she was operating blind right now. The first thing she did was just try creating a unique kind of mana, that had some sort of hyper-specific use, and then making the magic seed start manually producing it. In her first test, Alice chose ‘fish-luring mana. Her first attempt at creating a Perk was to slap some fish-luring mana into Jonathan’s newly rebuilt [Fisherman] Class seed, try to use it to stitch the mess together, and see what happened.

It was at this point that Alice realized the new Class seed she had built for Jonathan was leaking broken mana everywhere, in addition to its many, many other problems.

Her newly created seed with a poorly built Perk was supposed to make fish more attracted to Jonathan’s fishing rod.

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Instead, the Perk leaked so much broken mana into the little stream that Alice was amazed the fish didn’t die on the spot.

Worse, if Alice left the Perk as-is, Jonathan would probably succumb to a mana baptism sooner or later. Her {Safety Analysis} wasn’t ringing any big alarm bells yet, but after Alice combined the ‘Perk’ with the magic seed, it started informing her that she should do something about the Seed before something went wrong. After realizing just how disastrously her attempt had gone, Alice carefully extracted the little stitch of mana using her compound magic seed, and went back to the drawing board.

Alice’s second attempt at creating a ‘knockoff Perk’ didn’t go much better. She had gotten the brilliant idea that fishermen weren’t just focused on catching fish – they also had a lot of [Endurance] and [Strength]. After all, hauling in nets of fish was rather physically demanding. Fish were pretty heavy, after all. Alice also had a pretty good idea how the System created physical [Strength] and [Endurance], since it was way less complicated than the stuff for Classes. Thus, Alice had set around creating a Perk that boosted Jonathan’s physical abilities.

That… had gone better, at least. Jonathan had reported a very subtle increase in his physical abilities – but the problem was that the Perk was unstable. Alice’s attempt at creating a Perk had sort of worked, but the little stitch of mana had also started sucking in a bunch of random mana from its surroundings. Alice could not figure out why, either – which was the most frustrating part. Why was her little stitch made of mana sucking in random environmental mana? She had no clue. Was it causing her Perk to slowly self-destruct? Yes. Yes it was.

After a few hours of frustrating failed attempts to figure out what had gone wrong and why, Alice gave up and unraveled the whole mess again. Better to get it out of Jonathan’s system before it hurt him somehow, even if it made Alice more than a little annoyed.

After her second test, Alice realized that she was missing some sort of core feature of Perks. They worked to stabilize class seeds, and they were also a useful way to deal with all of the extra mana a magic seed would constantly generate and interact with… but she wasn’t sure how to get the blasted things to work. This left Alice in a deep quagmire of frustration, which she had a hard time escaping from. Nôv(el)B\\jnn

The underlying, complex construction of a Class seed wasn’t to deal with the absorption of mana, the way Alice had first assumed it was.

It was to handle the Perk construction needed to make a Class seed stable.

However, after a bout of frustration, Alice did realize one new thing, at least. Something she should have realized earlier.

Alice didn’t need to invent Perks. This was for a simple reason.

It was still possible to select Perks.

The System had been down for months now, and several parts of the System had collapsed beyond repair.

However, she had never had any issues with actually selecting new Perks. When she got a new perk, it worked just fine. Achievements had all grown much weaker once the System collapsed, and Alice had needed to manually ‘repair’ them to get her Achievements back to full strength afterwards. She had never needed to do the same for her Perks.

In other words, Class seeds didn’t need access to the System for any part of the Perk creation process. Alice suspected that Class Seeds couldn’t invent new Perks on the spot, either. For the first fifty levels, Classes all had pretty consistent Perk lists. Everyone with the [Barmaid] Class had the exact same pool of Perks that the System picked from, and while the System only presented a few choices at each level, they were all part of the same ‘master list.’ In other words, Perks probably had some sort of ‘local storage’ for all of the Perks someone could get from each Class. Then, whenever someone hit the appropriate level, their class seed just searched through the library of blueprints and grabbed whatever it thought the user was ‘interested in’ and hit the requirements for.

With that in mind… Alice already had a copy of all of the Perks a [Fisherman] could ever want. She didn’t need to figure out how to make Perks herself. All she needed to do was find the local storage, and then copy it over. Assuming her assumptions were correct, of course.

Even better, Alice already had the [Fisherwoman] Class. It was stuck at level 3, and would probably never advance to level 4, but if it did have some sort of ‘local storage’ for Perks, she just needed to find it.

Alice looked at the ‘picture’ she had taken of a Class seed, and sighed in disappointment.

She had taken a picture of her [Explorer of Magic] seed, because she had thought it was a better Class to get a ‘first glimpse’ of. It was her most complicated and detailed Perk, and Alice had been hoping to figure out how it worked before she reached level 100 in the Class. It might have given her a lot of insight into why mana gems seemed to form after level 75. Now, Alice wished she had ignored the Class entirely, and gone for a picture of her simplest class first.

It was a small mistake, but it would cost her a few days to get a picture of her [Fisherwoman] seed. That was quite frustrating.

All of her experiments did give her another level in [Careful Enchanter], bringing her up to level 47 in the Class… but she didn’t get any other levels, either. Alice was probably close to levelling up several Classes, but she hadn’t quite hit the next threshold. Which also meant she couldn’t get a new Perk that would fix her problems.

You have leveled up!

Careful Enchanter: 46 -> 47

After realizing her hopes for an ‘easy solution’ would either need to come from her [Explorer of Magic] class seed or some more time, Alice stopped worrying about Jonathan’s Class seed. At least in the immediate future, she wasn’t going to be able to get a ‘perfect solution,’ or even an unorthodox workaround. So she threw herself into last-minute preparations for the upcoming raid.

The Society would be weakened, but she wasn’t going to gamble her life on something she didn’t feel certain on. Ethan and Allira would be next to her, and so would Jonathan. They would also have a group of [Mercenaries] helping them out – but at the end of the day, [Mercenaries] were far less reliable than the lineup Alice had previously been part of while raiding a Society base. Last time, she had been accompanied by hundreds of hardened Illvarian [Soldiers] who were loyal to Ethan’s father and were hand-picked to help Ethan. They were a group of competent men and women that were trained to work together and had treat Ethan as their commander for years, if not decades.

[Mercenaries] had not spent decades learning to trust Ethan’s decision making in the heat of battle. Alice suspected Ethan would have ways to weed out truly untrustworthy hires… but it was obvious there were going to be more problems with this raid than the last one.

Thus, Alice spent the last half day before the Society base raid going over the enchanting equipment Ethan had dumped in front of her door the night before the raid.

There were a variety of new pieces of gear, but most of them were either ‘stop a mage from using their magic to kill Alice’ types of equipment, or ‘toss this into a portal and then snap it shut before it explodes’ types of equipment. It seemed like Ethan had quickly realized how Alice’s new fighting style worked after she picked up {Dimensional Camouflage}, and had bought out another few enchantment stores to make sure Alice was well supplied. She appreciated it, even if Alice wasn’t quite sure how she was ever going to use all of the equipment he had given her. The quantity was ludicrous enough that Alice could probably spend days tossing out consumable enchantments before she ran out of supplies. It seemed like overkill to her. Then again, Alice was not an Immortal with centuries of dedicated combat training and experience. She decided to trust Ethan’s judgement. If he thought she needed all this equipment, maybe she did.

Finally, the day of the Society base raid came.

Ethan and Allira quickly led Alice out of Demor’s mansion, followed by Jonathan, Cecilia, and oddly enough, Jonathan’s family. Alice glanced at Ethan and Jonathan questioningly, wondering why they had brought several civilians with them, but Jonathan simply shrugged upon seeing Alice’s confused gaze.

“I don’t actually anticipate this being too dangerous. Most combat oriented Immortals are about equal to several hundred average [Soldiers], and we have two combat-oriented Immortals here. Unless the Society’s entire upper echelon is hiding in this base, we should have a massive advantage in this fight. Leaving my family back in Demor’s mansion might give the Society something to target,” he said. “So I thought it was safer to just bring them along with me.”

Alice wasn’t entirely sure whether that was a good idea, but she decided not to say anything. It was his family, and Alice already knew she wasn’t exactly a tactical genius.

After that, Alice scanned the [Mercenaries] Ethan had put together. In total, there were about fifty men and women standing outside of Demor’s mansion. Based off of Alice’s rough assessment, they were mostly between level 40 and 55 – a bit lower than the Illvarian pseudo-army that Ethan had put together last time. At the head of the [Mercenaries] was a man who seemed to be about level 65, and looked a bit on the older side. He was the [Mercenary Commander] for the company of soldiers Ethan had hired. After Alice realized that Ethan had hired a company of people, rather than fifty individuals, she did feel herself grow a bit more relaxed.

Perhaps she hadn’t given the [Mercenaries] quite enough credit. It did look like they had a reasonable level of coordination with each other. Perhaps her understanding of [Mercenaries] wasn’t as good as she thought it was. Even if their group seemed far less intimidating than the Illvarian army Ethan had commanded last time, Allira was here to pick up the slack. She still needed to be alert in case something went wrong… but she also shouldn’t undersell the group.

She tried not to wallow in self doubt and anxiety as the group finished organizing, and then started to march towards the Society base.