Immortal Jonathan led Alice and Ethan to a side room, away from everyone else. Allira and Jonathan’s wife remained behind, because neither of them were aware of the System’s inner workings. Cecilia had originally prepared to join them, but Alice had mentioned the discussion was more… personal. The people who were most impacted by this conversation would be Immortal Jonathan and his family. Since Jonathan seemed uncomfortable with the idea of more people hearing about this, Alice and Ethan had told her to stay in the room with the other two for now.

After the group sat down in a different room, Jonathan gave Alice and Ethan a curious gaze. It was mixed with anxiety and frustration.

“All right, you have my attention. You said that Jacob is sick?” Jonathan’s complicated gaze grew deeper. “He seems fine to me. I don’t understand why you’re claiming that my boy is ill.”

“I should start with my studies of the System,” said Alice. She could understand where Jonathan was coming from – outwardly, Jacob didn’t look very sick. “I’ve spent the last year or so using a rather unique blend of Perks and Achievements to investigate the System itself. I’ve been deeply curious about what exactly the System is, and how it works, so I just kept investigating it. I’ve learned a lot about the System – for example, the fact that the System operates off of mana, the same as any other spell or enchantment.”

Jonathan gave Alice a hard look.

“The System runs on mana? That’s… hard to swallow,” said Jonathan. He sounded like he didn’t believe her. Alice sighed. That was about what she had expected.

“Well, if you use a lie detection Perk you can at least confirm that I believe what I’m saying,” said Alice. “From there…”

“I don’t have any lie-detecting Perks,” said Jonathan.

Huh?

Alice squinted at Jonathan’s eyes, and noticed, with some surprise, that Jonathan didn’t have a lie-detection Perk running right now. Alice had assumed that most Immortals picked up a lie detection Perk and a privacy Perk pretty soon after reaching Immortality. They were just very convenient Perks to have, and Alice was pretty sure they could be acquired pretty quickly with the right secondary Classes. Seeing an Immortal not have one was actually quite surprising.

It also made Alice’s job a lot harder, since she was making some hard to verify claims. Normally, the ubiquitous nature of lie-detection Perks in this world made verifying her statements pretty easy, since the other person just knew that she wasn’t lying. But Jonathan didn’t have that kind of ability, which made the situation more complicated.

“The System is, indeed, magical,” said Ethan. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I wouldn’t lie to you about something like this.”

“You might not be willing to lie to me about something like this, but claiming the divine is made of mana is just…” Jonathan massaged his temples. “I’ve been a devout believer of the Church of the System for almost two centuries. What you’re saying is… heresy.”

“It’s not heresy if it’s the truth, Jonathan. And we aren’t claiming that the System isn’t what it appears to be. If anything, the System seems to actively benefit humanity far more than the Church of the System seems aware of…” said Ethan. “It’s just that it also runs off of mana.”

“But you’re making claims that sound awfully similar to the Church of Mana’s theological position,” said Jonathan. “I guess you’re not denying the divinity of the System, so it’s not totally removed from the Church’s teachings, but…”

Alice tried not to wince. She, at least, had never really believed in the System being ‘divine.’ It was certainly an admirable enchantment, and one that the human world relied on to avoid collapsing… but it wasn’t even alive. Alice had never been particularly inclined to ascribe agency to non-sentient objects.

“Jonathan, I know it’s hard to believe, but look at the world around us. The monster swarms are behaving intelligently, monsters are using Perks that they should never have had access to, people are behaving oddly as their classes overtake their reason…” Ethan grimaced. “You can clearly see that something is wrong here.”

Jonathan looked at the window to the room for a moment, before he frowned.

“Damn. You have a point. Things really have been going wrong recently. Heck, I’ve heard that people can’t even see proper descriptions for new Perks,” said Jonathan, before sighing. “I’m not one to disbelieve what’s right in front of my eyes. But your story is really hard to swallow… Do you have any kind of proof? I know that the System not showing people their Perks properly does lend your story a bit of weight, but the other two things could be explained in other ways as well. There could be some sort of strange disease going around that causes people to behave oddly. There could also be some sort of mana surge that’s empowering monsters.” Jonathan grimaced. “It seems unlikely that those are the explanations for why everything is going wrong. Even so, I’d like something a bit more concrete.”

Alice sighed in relief. She had been expecting much worse when Jonathan had started disagreeing with their story. However, it seemed that Ethan’s judgement was correct. Even though Immortal Jonathan was a devout believer of the church of the System, it seemed that his concern for his family outweighed his belief in the teachings of the System. Alice could very much prove that she had been studying the System and could interact with it on a deeper level, at least.

“I do have a way to prove that I can interact with the System on a more fundamental level,” said Alice, after a moment. “I can’t directly prove it runs on mana, since you don’t seem to have any type of mana sense. But I can prove my abilities. Would that suffice for you?”

Jonathan paused for a few moments, as if thinking over Alice’s suggestion. Finally, he nodded.

“If you can prove that you’re able to interact with Perks somehow, that would lend your story a lot of weight. But how do you plan on doing that?”

“Do you have any Perks that affect your surroundings and that you don’t mind me messing with? A few of my abilities let me interfere shut down the mana Perks run on,” she said. “I know it’s not perfect proof, but it should still show that I have some special understanding of the System, right?” Alice could also used {Shared Memories} to show Jonathan what she had seen during her experiments, of course. But Jonathan was neither a researcher nor a Mage, and might not know what he was looking at if she shared her memories with him. Besides, Alice was a bit reluctant to share her memories with a powerful Immortal that she didn’t personally know. This seemed like a better option to her.

“Here, I’ll try to use one of my Perks that manipulate the weather. If you don’t manage to stop it, it’s not too big of a deal. The Perk just makes a few rainclouds anyway. I usually use it to control the irrigation for the farm.”

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Alice nodded, and Jonathan closed his eyes. A few moments later, Alice saw a large burst of rainbow mana rip its way out of Jonathan’s body.

Alice immediately caught hold of it, and then removed the burst of rainbow mana via her anti-mana magic seed (which had corrected its name from No_Magic mana when Alice fixed her garbled status screen).

Jonathan glanced outside of the window… and blinked in surprise.

“Huh. Well… I’ll be. You really stopped my Perk from activating.” Jonathan turned his gaze towards Alice again. “All right, you’ve made your point. I’ll believe that the System is built off of mana, and that you’ve done a lot of studies on it.” Jonathan grimaced. “That ability is also terrifying. Outright preventing Perks from activating is devastating in a fight. Heck, some Immortals could be caught off guard and killed by an ability like that. Are there limits?”

“I’d… prefer not to talk about my combat abilities,” said Alice. “And I realize that I might not have made this clear from the beginning, but I’d also really appreciate it if you didn’t spread some of this information around.”

Jonathan’s eyes widened. “I’m very sorry. My curiosity got the better of me. I shouldn’t have asked. It’s probably not that relevant to this conversation either way. I won’t spread your personal information to other people without your express consent. Back to the main topic. What’s wrong with my boy?”

“The System does a lot of really important things with mana,” said Alice. “Such as handling things like [Farmer] mana and turning them into magic seeds. Without that… it seems that mana operates on people’s mind by turning them into a sort of… puppet of their class, if that makes sense. Bit by bit, their free will is eroded and replaced by a burning desire to behave like their class. If someone does actions that people associate with [Farmers], then they start to want to farm endlessly. The System filters this mana, and instead converts it into Perks, turning a dangerous curse into something beneficial. But now, the System is unable to do its job properly. So if someone gets a large amount of [Farmer] mana, without a Class seed to handle it…”

“Ah, I see where this is going. I’ve heard that a lot of people were ‘taken over’ by their classes recently, and that the [Willpower] Stat helps mitigate this effect,” said Jonathan. “I’ve even heard that eventually, if it gets bad enough, they stop sleeping, eating or drinking, and either get someone capable of looking after them, or perish. Are you saying that these mana seeds are the root cause of all of this? Or, rather, the System’s inability to keep them working?”

Alice nodded.

“So… how does this relate to my boy?” asked Jonathan. Alice could see a flicker of unease on his face, but he didn’t say anything yet.

“Your son has a great deal of [Explorer] mana. But he doesn’t have a class seed,” said Alice. “So all of the [Explorer] mana in his body should be swarming around inside of his body, driving him to explore… and also slowly wiping away his sense of self. I don’t think the impact is that severe yet… after all, he still looks like he retained most of his sapience and sentience. On the other hand, I seriously doubt that it’s particularly comfortable for him right now. And it could get worse very easily.”

Jonathan frowned. “Now that I think about it… for the past two weeks, he has been incessantly asking my wife and I if he can be let out to explore the area. I mean, the boy has always had a bit of wanderlust in him, so I didn’t think anything of it. But your words make realize that it’s a lot worse than usual. He’s not usually this pushy. So… what’s your solution? I doubt you would have brought it up if there was no advice at all you could give me.”

Alice frowned. “Well, the best thing to do is to give Jacob an anti-mana ring. If he wears one, he won’t break any nearby mana and convert it into [Explorer] mana, meaning that he won’t get any levels. I can make one pretty quickly if I have the materials.”

Jonathan relaxed a bit, when Alice mentioned her solution. It seemed like he had been afraid that the cure would be far more complicated.

“On the other hand, that’s more of a temporary solution,” said Alice. “He will still get hit by all of the levels he should have gotten the moment the ring is taken off. But I don’t actually know how to create a class seed yet. We were going to meet with someone that I hoped would help me figure this out, actually.”

Jonathan frowned. “So there’s no real solution, just a way to prevent things from getting worse?”

“Unfortunately,” said Alice. “Although, there might be a real solution in a month or less.”

Jonathan frowned. “I wish I knew how Jacob even got started on an [Explorer] class. It seems so unusual…”

Alice also frowned in thought.

“Actually, I have a question,” said Alice. “What exactly does it mean to ‘explore’ something? The exact ideas that people associate with ‘exploring’ could have a pretty big impact on what Jacob did to get into this mess. And it might also be relevant to the process of fixing this.” Alice didn’t know how to create class seeds yet, but she suspected that understanding what a class was supposed to ‘be’ was probably part of it. “What distinguishes an [Explorer] from other, similar professions? After all, Jacob was mostly filled with [Explorer] mana, although he does have other, adjacent types of mana in his body as well.”

“I’ve spoken with Murim about this a few times, actually,” said Ethan. “[Explorers] are usually renowned for exploring unknown regions of territory. If you ‘explore’ a city that other people have already mapped out, you don’t really get much XP for it. On the other hand, if you explore a region of wilderness that nobody has ever set foot on before, that’s worth a whole lot of XP. Regions that are poorly mapped out count for some growth, but not much. Most of the people who have set foot on the Western Continent and survived were [Explorers]. If you can actually get out alive, the continent is a golden opportunity to level [Explorer] Classes. Of course, most people just become monster chow if they try.”

Alice frowned. “Then how did Jacob pick up the [Explorer] class? I seriously doubt this farm is ‘uncharted territory.’ And frankly, most of the surrounding area should be pretty well mapped out, right? We aren’t particularly close to the mana wastes right now, and there are nations in every direction. How in the world did Jacob explore a ‘new’ piece of territory? That makes no sense.”

Jonathan also frowned. “If you want to reach the mana wastes, you would need to travel at least a few days to the south, and you would also need to pass through two different nations during the process. I don’t think Jacob could have possibly been absent for four days without me and my wife noticing, and I also don’t think he could have possibly slipped past so many border patrols unharmed.”

“Are there any other ways to get [Explorer] levels?” asked Alice. “Any loopholes, or exceptional circumstances?”

“Hmm… well, I do vaguely recall that there seem to be a few other circumstances where you can get [Explorer] experience points,” said Ethan, after a few moments of thought. “I know that people exploring Southern Illvaria recently got [Explorer] levels just fine. And since the area was densely settled less than a century ago, that doesn’t really make sense.”

“So maybe significant terrain alterations ‘count’ as far as levelling goes?” asked Alice. “Or if the knowledge people have of a specific region is incorrect or outadated?”

“Maybe. But even so, I don’t recall there having been any major terrain modifications to my farm. Unless my Perks count as major terrain modifications themselves? But I don’t change up the farm much…” Jonathan looked even more confused than before. Alice also felt baffled.

Where had Jacob gotten so much [Explorer] mana? According to Alice’s estimation, if the System were working properly, he probably had enough [Explorer] XP to gain seven or eight levels immediately. The idea that nobody knew where he had gotten the XP from was… disturbing.

Then, Jonathan’s gaze started to morph into an expression of horror.

“No, I know the problem. Two weeks ago, there was a monster horde that tried to run into my farmland. I ended up beating them back with a mixture of my crops and hitting them really hard with my tilling hoe… but one of the two types of monsters used soil manipulation as their main type of magic. It was some sort of giant beetle monster. They kept creating mounds of dirt and trying to swallow me alive. I managed to kill enough of them that they retreated, but I didn’t manage to finish off the swarm. Would that count as an outdated or altered understanding of the terrain?”

Alice grimaced.

“Probably?” she said. She was operating off of pure guesswork here, but maybe that made sense. “I’m honestly not sure. Either way, the situation is the same. We need to get Jacob an anti-mana ring, and I also need to figure out how to make actual class seeds. For that, we need to reach our destination first.”

Jonathan also frowned in thought at Alice’s words. Until he turned towards Ethan.

“So the only way to fix this is with her?” he asked.

Ethan nodded. “My apprentice seems to be the best positioned person to solve this mess.”

Jonathan grimaced as he looked at his farm, before finally, he sighed. “In that case, can my family come with you as you travel?”

Alice blinked in surprise.