“Explain?” asked Alice, as she scratched her head. Jonathan’s suggestion had taken her by surprise. The idea of a Immortal family just… joining the group was outside of her expectations.

“Well… first of all, the monster hordes are a bit of a problem,” said Jonathan. “Based on what I’ve heard from a lot of other areas, the damage from the monster hordes is honestly getting pretty bad. Illvaria has been somewhat more sheltered from it… but even Illvaria is still starting to suffer from the monster hordes. And recently, my farm was also attacked by a large swarm of monsters. I managed to drive them back… but I didn’t manage to exterminate them. That’s a bit worrying, in my opinion.”

Alice blinked. While Jonathan had mentioned failing to drive off a monster swarm, the sentence before that worried her more. Even Illvaria was starting to suffer from the monster swarms? She had thought that Illvaria was handling it reasonably well, since Ethan hadn’t said much about it to her. She had also been caught up in her research and trying to fix the System collapsing… which, now that Alice thought about it, might have been why Ethan never mentioned it to her. She already had enough on her plate to worry about, and she couldn’t really contribute to the monster swarm problem anyway.

This was a good reminder that after all of this was over, Alice really did need to develop her own information network. Being able to learn information quickly would make her much more aware of her surroundings. Alice knew that she had a tendency to get distracted by her research, but she should still keep some awareness of the rest of the world.

But that was something to think about later. The System was far more important right now.

Ethan winced. “It’s true that some of the outlying villages in Illvaria have been destroyed, but most of them have been evacuated. Although some of the truly southernmost towns in the recolonization area have been lost completely…” Ethan sighed. “It’s really a shame that this happened right in the middle of Illvaria’s best chance to reclaim the area. And food production is also starting to look a bit worrying, since most outlying villages are agricultural centers. But that’s a topic for later. It’s not as urgent as it seems.”

Alice thought about it for a moment, and then sighed.

She really didn’t know much about crops and farming. She knew that on Earth, food production was really high because of modern fertilizer… but she had no idea how to manufacture it. She sighed again, and then turned back towards Jonathan.

“All right, so monsters are a concern. Still, it sounds like you’ve handled it so far? Also, wouldn’t this mean abandoning your country?”

“My five person country comprised of a strip of wasteland that no one wants?” Jonathan rolled his eyes. “I can rebuild this farm anywhere I want in a week or two. Sure, it might not be quite as nice as this house, but the lives of my family are more important. I mean, I’ll obviously have to leave some stuff behind. I don’t have any great storage perks, and I have accumulated quite the amount of gold and luxuries over the decades. But I’m sure my family and I will live. Besides, refounding Superbia isn’t as hard as you might think. All I really need is a strip of wasteland that no one wants and a certain understanding with any nearby countries. Considering the benefits of being my neighbor, I doubt it’ll be that hard to meet both conditions.”

Alice thought about it, and found herself agreeing with him. When one person could manufacture enough food to feed a large town, and grow crops from totally different climates, it was easy to accumulate wealth. He might lose some benefits from his [King] class for a while… but as an Immortal, Jonathan wasn’t really pressed for time. If it took him a few extra years to get his Perks up and running again, he would barely notice a difference.

“Still, isn’t moving around… dangerous, right now?” asked Alice. “With monsters transforming large swathes of land over and over again, there might be a risk of other family members getting [Explorer] mana. And if that happens, I still don’t know how to fix it yet.”

“Well, when it comes to exploration, as long as we trail a bit behind your group, most territory will already be ‘discovered’ by you. So the [Explorer] mana isn’t that big of a deal. But if I move ahead of the rest of my family, I can get a bit of [Explorer] mana… and I’m counting on that. I’ll have to manage distances very carefully, but that’s the point of all this.”

“I’m sorry, what?” asked Alice. Jonathan sighed.

“Here’s the thing. My son… really wants to leave. I haven’t let him adventure out into the world yet, because my wife is still firmly against it… but even so, my boy still came to danger just by sitting at home. Based on your descriptions, he’s struggling to fight off the invasion of his class mana, and it’s fundamentally altering his personality. I don’t know what to think about that yet… but I know that I don’t want my son to get hurt. If I end up with a lot of [Explorer] mana… I can let you try to create an [Explorer] Class seed. I’m an Immortal, so it’s much, much harder to hurt me compared to the average test subject you might have.” Jonathan’s eyes grew firmer, even as Alice’s eyes grew wider. “I may not have a lie detection Perk or a particularly high [Perception] stat… but I’m not dumb. I can still distinguish people who are or aren’t trustworthy. As a simple [Farmer] who became an Immortal with my own two hands and my hard work, I can at least tell that much. There are a lot of dishonest [Merchants] who try to swindle [Farmers] out of their earnings, and avoiding pitfalls like that is practically a requirement if you want to reach Immortality as a [Farmer] on the central continent. I don’t think you’re the kind of person who will ignore my son’s plight if you travel with him for a while… and I also don’t think that you’ll make much progress without a way to test your results. If you use yourself as a test subject and mess up, you might hurt yourself, or even die, right? I can sidestep a lot of those issues. And for my son, I’m willing to take a bit of a risk.”

Alice actually felt very moved by the man’s statements. Jonathan was an Immortal. He had forever to live, as long as he wasn’t killed by an external force.

And he was willing to risk that eternal life to save his mortal son. His son wasn’t anything special – at least right now, his odds of reaching Immortality looked slim. So Jonathan was risking his Immortal life to save a family member that would eventually die of old age anyway.

Which was touching. Alice hadn’t expected Jonathan to be willing to risk so much for his family.

Still, Alice frowned.

“I was intending to test almost everything on myself,” said Alice. “I… I don’t think it’s a good idea to try things on someone else first. I can watch myself using my special Perks and Achievements to see if something goes wrong first. And forcing someone else to be my test subject is wrong. Furthermore, using myself as a test subject forces me to be pretty sure something is safe before I try it. I don’t want to die, so anytime I do anything, it’s grounded in the knowledge that I know what I’m doing and I’m sure there’s no danger to myself. If I hurt someone else during my experiments, I don’t know if I’d be able to live with myself afterwards.”

“You might not have the option to play things safe anymore. Tell me, how much time left do we have before the System crisis spirals out of control?”

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“Well… A month or two, maybe?” said Alice. Alice frowned. “Actually, now that I think about it, the monsters rampaging around are probably a bigger problem than I’ve been giving them credit for being. As more and more people fall victim to mana hijacking their sense of self, their sense of self-preservation will also become weaker and weaker. I imagine these two problems will actually compound. It’s honestly hard to say. My ability to fix things is nowhere near fast enough to keep up with how fast the situation is spiraling out of control.”

“And how long is this journey supposed to take?”

“Less than a month, but that’s also assuming that I learn what I need to learn quickly.” Alice grimaced. “I really wish there were other ways I could get information on artificial seed construction. But I haven’t found any other research material on the subject, besides Artifact creation. And no one in Illvaria can create Artifacts.”

“That’s what I mean. When you’re messing with artificial magic seed creation, you will need a test subject. There’s just no way around it. Right now, you’re planning on using yourself as a test subject – but if you mess up once, you might be stuck sick in bed for a week or two. When we’re counting down weeks before everything implodes, that means that one mistake on your end results in the end of the world. And besides, don’t you think you’ll feel more and more pressured as things get worse? Right now, you still have a month or two left before things break, so you can be somewhat calm about the situation. But what about when you see greater and greater piles of corpses? What about when things are reaching critical levels? Will you still be cautious and make sure everything is safe then?”

Alice blinked in surprise. That was… a perspective she hadn’t heard before. Alice actually felt that Jonathan had a point. Even now, Alice felt stressed out and anxious. It would keep getting worse. Would Alice still keep everything safe for herself when people started dying en masse?

Alice hesitated. This… was a big crossroad in her decision making.

On one hand, Alice still felt that human experimentation was fundamentally wrong. The Society had gotten started on that path, and Alice was disgusted by many of the actions they had taken. Kidnapping children, slaughtering test subjects… Alice still remembered some of the test subjects that she and Ethan had rescued from the Society base, back when they had rescued Samantha. The people there, and the things they had been subjected to, still lived in Alice’s mind as half-forgotten nightmares.

On the other hand, Jonathan’s words made sense, to an extent. The catastrophe was hitting people harder and harder. Monster swarms and people losing their mind to mana was starting hit countries faster and faster. Alice had developed some solutions to mana related problems… but they were slow, hard to spread, and required special resources to create. If Alice refused to get help from anyone else, there was still a possibility that the world would collapse sooner or later. Alice didn’t think that humans in this world could realistically survive without the System, and Alice just wasn’t replacing it fast enough.

Did Alice really have the option to deny a test subject? Especially one that presented himself willingly, and could potentially shrug off most smaller problems that Alice’s tests might cause him? After all, Immortals were very hard to hurt. Ethan had beheaded himself during the fight with Emilia, and then proceeded to shrug it off afterwards. That would have killed Alice so fast that she wouldn’t have even processed her own death. An Immortal test subject was actually almost an ideal one, if one wished to do ethical experiments.

“As a [Farmer], how resilient are you?” asked Alice.

“The two main stats that [Farmers] tend to improve are [Endurance] and [Strength],” said Jonathan. “The two most useful things for tilling the fields. I have over eight hundred [Endurance], once you factor in my multipliers and miscellaneous conditional Perks. I just need to make sure I’m in the middle of farmland that I’m managing myself. But frankly, killing me is… very, very hard.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully… but she was still hesitant.

The closest she had gotten to human experimentation before this was observing people undergo their mana baptisms in front of her. A project that was currently on hold, because the collapse of the System was several orders of magnitude more important.

Deep in her heart, Alice still kind of wanted to just say no. But despite how much better it would make her feel, Alice also wasn’t blind. Things were collapsing faster and faster. Did she really have the right to say no when it might doom everyone?

Alice felt icky, but she also realized that saying no was impractical.

“I’ll… think about it,” said Alice. That was the best she could do for now. She didn’t know what she was doing yet anyway, so she would leave this problem for future Alice to think about.

Jonathan nodded. “I’ll let you think about it. But this is the best way.”

Alice gritted her teeth, and then turned towards Ethan.

“I believe it’s time to leave,” said Ethan thoughtfully. “I, for one, am not opposed to you joining us, Jonathan. You’re a good man, and I’m happy to bring you along.”

Jonathan nodded, and the group went to collect the rest of Jonathan’s family.

* * *

Jonathan’s family had not been happy about leaving the farm, apart from Jacob, who looked like someone had given him the best present in the world. The little girl, Mimi, asked why they were leaving their nice house for the dirty wilderness. Jonathan’s wife, Nerissa, felt that the farm was safer, and that they might get hurt while travelling to other lands. As for the middle child, Stuart, he didn’t seem to have much of a reaction either way. He was neither enthusiastic about leaving the farm, nor upset by the fact that they were leaving. He had simply looked at his father and asked whether this was the best decision, and after his father reaffirmed his decision, he had left to go pack his bags.

However, at the end of the day, Jonathan’s family still decided to leave as one. Without Jonathan to keep the farm safe, the position of this farm was simply too dangerous. Monster swarms were roaming the countryside, and a little bit of bad luck might spell the end for any family members that stayed behind.

Thus, a considerably larger group left Jonathan’s farm than the one that had entered. As the group started to tromp away from the farm, Alice noticed a rather peculiar reaction from the farm itself.

The moment Jonathan stepped outside of the farm, it was as though a small tremor of rainbow mana radiated out of his feet. Then, Alice rubbed her eyes, and realized it wasn’t a tremor that left Jonathan’s feet. Instead, it was the reverse. Almost like a vacuum cleaner, all of the rainbow mana in Jonathan’s farm started to move towards his feet. One droplet of rainbow mana after another rushed towards his body, joining the nebulous cloud of mana inside of him… and at the same time, the farm started to wither.

The verdant green crops started to die. Giant pieces of produce started to decay in real time, as if someone had hit the fast forward button on crop decay. The farmhouse itself wasn’t altered – but every single plant on the farm started to disappear.

The last to fall was the giant apple tree that had caught Alice’s attention when they first entered the farm. The branches and bark started to shrink and darken, until eventually it collapsed under its own weight. Instead of a magnificent tree, it was now just a pile of ashy bark.

By the time the group had walked ten minutes away, the verdant farm filled with overripe produce, abundant water, and giant crops had disappeared. In its place was what Alice assumed must have been the farm’s original appearance. It was a flat, gray wasteland with a scraggly, threadbare creek running through it. There were still a few weeds present in the farm’s former territory, showing that it wasn’t impossible to grow crops there – but the land was only a few steps away from looking like barren tundra. Alice winced.

No wonder nobody wanted to conquer this territory from ‘Superbia.’ This kind of land was so worthless that most nations would probably forget it was even part of their borders to begin with.

Mimi looked at the farm with big, sad eyes as the green wonderland vanished, and softly started crying as Jonathan’s wife picked her up and cradled her.

“Sorry. She’s very attached to our home,” said Jonathan’s wife, as the group kept walking.

“Where are we heading to next, Ethan?” asked Alice, trying to distract Jonathan’s family from the collapse of Superbia.

“This is our final nation that we need to cross before reaching our destination,” said Ethan. “It’s a much larger country, although it’s a bit unevenly shaped. It’s called Fendrallia. It’s on the poorer side, since their territory has some pretty bad climate issues – it’s simply too cold, and the rainfall is pretty uneven. A lot of the country is tundra, with weird bits of frozen swamps scattered around. However, it does also have a good amount of iron in some parts of the country, so their military has always had decent supplies. The country is a good one for [Blacksmiths]. And they have a reasonably robust magic scene,” said Ethan. “Nowhere near as good as Illvaria’s, of course. But probably somewhere in the top twenty of the Southern Continent.”

Alice nodded thoughtfully, as the group set foot into Fendrallia.