The first thing Alice did was look at her [Explorer of Magic] Perks. She had been looking forward to this moment for a long time now.

Just to make absolutely sure she wasn’t making a mistake, Alice first scanned the new Perks she had unlocked by reaching level 85. One of the Perks looked all right – it would give her an extra five magic tendrils and slightly increase the effect of her magic stat. Alice did want to increase her combat abilities. But it wasn’t her priority right now. Alice had already had plans for her level 85 Perk combination, and she had just been checking to make sure there weren’t any better options.

Without further hesitation, Alice combined the Perks {Expanding Comprehension} and {Intuitive Magic Modelling}.

Expanding Comprehension (Tier 2 Perk, level 55 Explorer of Magic) (Level 50 Explorer of magic Perk + Level 40 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Infusion of Comprehension + Reset Perk sacrificed to create this Perk.

Once per two weeks, you may select one of your seeds. Over the course of the next hour, you will gradually expand your understanding of the Seed, as well as the concepts associated with it. The clarity will be lower compared to directly using {Infusion of Comprehension}. In addition, the Mana Conversion Ratio of the seed may improve by small amounts with each use of this Perk. At maximum an increase of 5% may occur. This Perk may never improve the Mana Conversion ratio of a given seed by more than 50% in total.

Warning: You will be helpless during this time, so it is highly recommended you activate this perk only when your safety is assured and you are in an environment where you will not be disturbed.

Alice had gotten a great deal of use out of {Expanding Comprehension} in the past. It had given her a lot of inspiration and a lot of useful discoveries. However, Alice was starting to feel like the Perk was just a bit underpowered compared to the questions she was trying to solve now. Her System seed was too complex, and there were too many types of mana Alice needed to untangle. {Expanding Comprehension} just wasn’t suited for handling compound magic seeds, and that was what Alice was working with these days. So the perk needed an upgrade. She had high hopes for what the Perk would achieve once combined with {Intuitive Mana Modelling}.

Intuitive Magic Modelling (Tier 2 Perk, level 65 Explorer of Magic) (Level 5 Explorer of Magic Perk + Level 45 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Magic Proficiency + Mana Construct Modeling sacrificed to create this Perk.

You intuitively mentally ‘model’ any form of mana within ten meters of you, whether they are complex mana constructs, forms of mana, or enchantments. You will intuitively know what kinds of mana they are made of and have an intuitive understanding of some of the simpler components of anything you model. In short, this will give you some level of understanding of what an enchantment or mana construct is, how it works, and what it does, although it won’t feed you information beyond a certain level of complexity.

{Intuitive Magic Modelling}, similarly, was only somewhat useful to Alice these days. She used it to help understand the effects of some enchantments that she came across on a day to day basis, and having a natural ‘intuition’ that pointed her in the right direction was very useful while doing research. However, the biggest problem with the Perk was the final sentence. The Perk would not feed her information beyond a certain level of complexity… and most of the System constructs Alice had come across were like giant fractals made of mana. They were about as complex as mana could possibly get. If the Perk was capable of explaining simple problems to Alice, akin to the magical version of algebra, Alice was trying to tackle calculus. The Perk just wasn’t able to keep up with her needs. Unlike {Expanding Comprehension}, at this point, {Intuitive Magic Modelling} didn’t have much value for Alice in a research setting anymore.

Alice took one final look at her two Perks, before she combined the two. She used her System seed to make sure that the translation for the Perk made sense, and then started reading her new Perk.

Magic Comprehension (Tier 3 Perk, level 85 Explorer of Magic) (Level 55 Explorer of Magic Perk + Level 65 Explorer of Magic Perk)

Perk Costs: Intuitive Magic Modelling + Expanding Comprehension sacrificed to create this Perk.

You gain the ability to naturally understand types of mana that you come into contact with. Once per week, you may also create ‘mental maps’ of any type of mana or mana-related phenomenon you come into contact with. Mental maps will create a comprehensive, detailed mental image of a type of mana which can be accurate tested in your mental library, or analyzed for any details you wish to learn.

Note: Creation of a mental map requires that you first interact with a type of mana or mana-related phenomenon, then spend a time and mental energy focusing on it and thinking about it. The longer you spend working on a mental map, the more detailed and accurate it will become.

Alice grinned.

First of all, the limit on information complexity limit was gone. Instead, it had been replaced by the mental map feature. She could only use it once per week, and she would need some time to flesh out a mental map… but afterwards, she would have a detailed, accurate picture of any mana construct she wanted to investigate. She could work on her mental maps whenever she was asleep – her dream library was practically custom-built to work with this Perk. Alice was very happy with the result of her Perk combination.

The ability to enhance her magic seeds was also gone, but Alice didn’t really care about that. She already had {Scholar of Magic} to help improve her magic seeds over time, and her magic stat was still increasingly surprisingly quickly. While Alice was nowhere near the font of mana Ethan was, she was still steadily improving her magic seeds as time moved forward.

Alice gave her new Perk a try by focusing on the weird mana gem that she had seen inside of her own brain. After a few minutes of focus and effort, she felt a very fuzzy image of a mana gem form inside of her thoughts – it was almost as if Alice was looking at a picture that she had taken in the past, albeit at very low resolution. She started poking at her new Perk, before she realized with delight that the Perk neglected to mention a useful feature. Not only did she have a mental map that she could examine and experiment on, but she could ‘zoom in’ to any level of detail she wanted to. It was like having a perfect sample of a mana construct situated in the middle of a lab, with state of the art equipment ready for use.

Of course, the details were far too grainy for her to see anything right now. But after Alice finished solidifying her mental map, she was sure that this issue would disappear. Based off of a rough guesstimate from a few minutes of work, Alice would probably need twenty or thirty hours to finish solidifying the mental map. She would be done in three or four days, assuming she only worked on it while she was asleep.

Once she was done, Alice would finally be able to finally figure out why her magic gem wasn’t absorbing her Alice mana and dealing with it. The solution was in sight.

After that, Alice focused on her [Scholar] Perks. She had one more Perk to deal with, and Alice was looking forward to getting something new out of the [Scholar] Class.

Alice started looking through her old Perks, to figure out what was useful and what she didn’t care about losing or using as combination fuel.

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After looking through her list of Perks, Alice’s gaze drifted towards {Scholar of Magic}.

Scholar of Magic

Requirements: Scholar level 35 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 100 or higher, at least 1 magic seed is at a mana conversion ratio of 150% or higher, at least 3 magic seeds present.

When reading a book, listening to a lecture, or interacting with schoolwork related to a certain kind of magic seed, if you have a correlating magic seed inside of your body at that time you will be able to raise the mana conversion ratio of the seed beyond its limit.

Note: This process is rather slow, and the speed will slow down further the higher the current mana conversion ratio of the related seed is.

Right now, the biggest use of {Scholar of Magic} was that it helped grow her magic seeds. Alice didn’t think this was some world-shatteringly powerful Perk. But it was certainly useful. Alice’s research abilities were much stronger than her combat abilities. Alice seriously doubted this would ever change. But that didn’t mean that she didn’t want to get better at fighting. After all, Alice had seen firsthand how much havoc the monster swarms were wreaking upon the unprotected countryside. Multiple kidnapping or assassination attempts targeting her had also happened over the past few months. Alice firmly understood that even if her focus was research, she couldn’t completely abandon combat. While things like reaction speed, combat instincts, and other similar abilities were a big part of combat… mana was also important. If Alice had the same number of mana tendrils as Ethan, it wouldn’t actually help her, because she would run out of mana in seconds if she tried to use 140 magic tendrils. There was just no way that the mana present in her seeds could sustain that level of consumption. Improving her magic seeds would still be useful for the future.

Not to mention, one of the limitations on enchantment production was the mana reserves of the [Enchanters]. If Alice wanted to do anything big with her System seeds in the future, like copying or repairing the System, she might an absolutely mind-numbing amount of mana.

Alice couldn’t help but think of Ethan. He had dumped thousands of mariums of mana into the two monster alphas Alice had wanted for her experiments. And that was just the amount of mana Ethan felt comfortable spending while in the middle of uncontrolled territory, surrounded by monsters, and with potential [Assassins] lurking around every corner.

Ethan had always been very clear that he was putting safety before science. Which made it hard to imagine just how massive Ethan’s mana reserves must be.

The question was what Perk to combine {Seeds of Magic} with. Alice wanted to focus on improving the size of her magic seeds, but [Scholar] didn’t have any other Perks related to magic seed size.

Since [Scholar] was only at level 66 right now, Alice couldn’t combine her Perks with any Perks from other classes, either. She was limited to other [Scholar] Perks for her Perk combination.

Alice kept looking through her Perk combination options, and eventually sighed.

The best idea she had was to grab {Accelerated Thinking} as the other part of her Perk combination process.

Accelerated Thinking

Requirements: Scholar level 10 or higher, Intelligence 125 or greater

Slightly improves your thinking and processing speed.

It was a bit of a basic Perk, which Alice had grabbed all the way back at level 15. At the time, Alice distinctly remembered that she hadn’t even found a Perk from her level 15 options, and had chosen to go back and grab another level 10 Perk. Alice imagined that {Accelerated Thinking} paired with {Scholar of Magic} might enhance the rate she understood magic AND the rate at which she improved magic seeds… or something like that.

In any case, even though she wasn’t entirely sure what the result would be, Alice felt that she had a reasonable direction for improvement now. She stuffed the two Perks into the combination screen, and then activated her level 65 Perk combination.

Alice felt the two Perks start to combine, and a few moments later, a new Perk appeared. Alice used her half-built System seed to fix the Perk’s various grammatical and comprehensibility issues, before she started reading.

Scholar of Thought and Magic

Tier 2 Perk, (level 65 Scholar) (Level 35 Scholar Perk + Level 15 Scholar Perk)

Perk Costs: Scholar of Magic + Accelerated Thinking sacrificed to create this Perk.

Your ability to understand magic is greatly expanded if you have a magic seed already related to the concept you are trying to understand. As your understanding grows, so too will your related magic seeds.

Alice grinned.

Another upgrade to her understanding was an exceptional boon, especially given how absurdly complicated some of the topics she was trying to understand were. Combined with the understanding boost from her other new Perk, {Magic Comprehension}, Alice suspected that she would be able to do her research far more quickly and efficiently than before. And the Perk hadn’t lost the ability to increase the size of her magic seeds – instead, based on the wording of the Perk, Alice suspected her magic seeds would grow faster than before. The Perk wasn’t anything fancy, but it did what it needed to and helped Alice improve.

With both of her new Perks built, Alice focused her attention inwards, towards her magic gem. She spent a few minutes nailing down its exact location, before she continued using her ‘mental map’ to build a perfect copy of it inside of her mind.

Alice quickly confirmed that she could ‘build’ her mental map of the mana gem far more quickly if she was also observing the real thing. At the same time, her {Scholar of Thought and Magic} Perk was actually surprisingly helpful – it was capable of assisting her in making intuitive leaps that she might have had a hard time making originally. She could look at some of the components of the mana gem, and just… understand what they were trying to do. She would be able to do the same thing with some work, but it probably would have taken her several minutes of squinting at each part of the mana gem to figure out what she was looking at. The help from her two newest Perks let her skip this process.

But Alice was shocked when she looked at one of the ‘facets’ of the mana gem, and realized that it boosted her… physical strength?

To be precise, it seemed that the facet of the mana gem she was looking at was a +1% boost to the effect of her Strength stat, along with a few other bonuses. Alice stopped focusing on the other parts of the gem, and instead started poking at that one facet of the mana gem. The fact that it was boosting her physical strength just didn’t make sense to her. She had expected the magic gem to be related to the growth of Alice mana, or related to some sort of way to preserve her personality, or… something. A physical strength boost was totally different from what she had expected to find.

However, as Alice kept poking at the specific facet of the mana gem she had found, she realized that strength wasn’t the only thing that the magic gem contained.

In addition to the +1% boost to strength, the little facet of the mana gem had four other components.

One of them gave her a 1% boost to the effect of her Dexterity Stat.

One of the components was a 1% boost to her Perception stat.

The second to last component of the gem facet gave Alice a… +15% boost to experience growth, but only applied to the concept of fighting?

As Alice identified each part of the gem facet, she started scanning her Achievements list. The description for this gem facet sounded awfully familiar, and the last bit in particular was a type of boost she had only ever recalled seeing from one part of the System…

A few moments later, Alice found it.

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

You have slain another human being.

Effect of Strength, Dexterity, and Perception increased by 1%. Classes with some relationship to fighting other humans gain experience 15% faster.

The effects for this ‘gem facet’ were exactly the same as the effects of the {Murderer} achievement that Alice had gotten all the way back in Cyra.

In short, the mana gem that Alice was looking at was… some sort of Achievement collection?

Alice, admittedly, had never actually figured out where Achievements were ‘stored.’ Attributes were obviously stored in the respective muscles and nerves related to them. Classes were ‘stored’ inside of Class seeds, which were usually located in people’s hearts or brains. But Alice had never actually found where Skills and Achievements were ‘stored’ in the human body. She had always sort of assumed they were lumped into class fractals and muscles somehow.

Now, it appeared that she had been mistaken.

Alice concentrated on the last aspect of the fractal, that she hadn’t identified yet… and quickly realized it was, by far, the most complicated part of the whole thing.

As far as Alice could tell, the last component of the mana gem facet was further subdivided into two parts.

The first part was something like ‘containment,’ and restrained the other half of the facet component.

And the other part of the gem facet… was the concept of {Murderer}.

Alice confirmed something.

She had finally figured out where Achievements were stored. But her discovery didn’t give her an immediate way to fix the problem of Alice mana, or even a clear idea of what all of the components of the gem were for. If the gem was responsible for storing Achievements… how was it related to Alice mana? And why were mana gems seemingly only present in people above level 75?