As the group continued walking through Fendrallia, Alice began to notice a little bit of a chill. It wasn’t overwhelming, the way Illvarian winter had been when she first arrived in this world. Instead, it was more of a subtle, creeping chill burrowed into her bones.

Which surprised Alice. While she didn’t have much cause to think about it these days, she had taken {Extremophile} as one of her Perks, all of those days back in the Illvarian wilderness. Combined with her exceptional [Endurance] stat, she usually didn’t notice major fluctuations in temperature unless she literally stuck her hand in a fire.

Alice looked behind the party, where Jonathan’s family was trailing behind the rest of the group. Since Jonathan was afraid of his family picking up [Explorer] mana before Alice found a way to treat it, they were well behind the group. They were close enough that the Immortals could rush to their aid if they were attacked… but they were still far enough behind that they weren’t picking up [Explorer] mana.

Then again, the main group hadn’t picked up any [Explorer] mana yet either. So it was likely that they just hadn’t hit unexplored territory yet.

Walking alongside Jonathan’s family was also something… different. Something Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on, but made her hair stand on end.

Allira had sang to a few shadows for several minutes after Jonathan’s family had decided to join them. Then, the shadows had started moving.

When Alice had seen that, she couldn’t help but think that were as still an awful lot that she hadn’t learned about Allira’s combat abilities. She had felt that Allira’s ability to summon illusions of the past was already powerful enough, but on hindsight, Ethan had revealed a truly mind-numbing number of trump cards when Emilia had tried to assassinate them. It wouldn’t make sense if Allira only had one trick up her sleeve. Still, Alice really wasn’t sure what was up with the shadows moving around. They were… strange.

“Ethan, could we get a bit of warmth?” asked Alice, as she looked at the group of people behind them. “Jonathan’s family might be a bit cold. Even I’m feeling a little chilly, and I have a bunch of stats and Perks that they probably don’t.”

Ethan froze, before he also glanced at Jonathan’s family.

“I was distracted. Thank you for reminding me, Alice,” he said.

After that, Alice noticed a wave of thermal mana exit Ethan’s magic seeds, and the air around them became noticeably warmer. Another wave of thermal mana also drifted towards Jonathan’s family, and Alice thought she saw Jonathan’s wife sigh in relief.

“Is that good?” yelled Ethan, as he turned towards Jonathan’s family.

Jonathan’s son gave Ethan a big thumbs up.

“Good. Let’s keep moving then,” said Ethan, as the group continued walking through the Fendrallian countryside.

The cold wasn’t the only thing that started to change as the group marched further into Fendrallia, however. The next thing that Alice noticed was the water. The land started to become notably wetter and swampier. Apart from that, Alice noticed that there was a light layer of fog that had formed around them. It made it more difficult to see anything in the distance. Even more strange was the fact that the fog made it more difficult to hear things, as well. Alice was fairly certain that the fog wasn’t natural, but some sort of product of people’s beliefs and mana mixing together.

And even more noticeable than the mud and the fog was the stench.

She turned towards the other Immortals, and realized that they were also frowning.

“It stinks,” said Ethan, finally.

Allira frowned, and then closed her eyes and started humming. The group waited patiently while Allira’s music, as well as her rainbow mana, drifted into their surroundings.

Finally, Allira’s eyes snapped open.

“Ethan, do you have a good way to filter the air around us?” she asked. “It won’t be a problem for us, but it might be a problem for Jonathan’s family. And your apprentice.”

Alice shuddered, and immediately scanned the air around them. She had noticed the stench, but she hadn’t thought it was an actual problem. Was there some sort of dangerous chemical compound in the air? Or some sort of magic poison?

A burst of rainbow mana extended out of Ethan’s left hand, before it started spreading outwards. Alice saw that wherever the rainbow mana went, it seemed to shred through the air itself, as if it were trying to remove something.

“The air should be safe to breathe now,” said Ethan. Then, he turned towards Alice. “Give me {Patient’s Consent}.”

“Feel free to use organic magic on me,” said Alice.

Ethan immediately grabbed her arm, before sending several pulses of organic magic into her body. A few moments later, Ethan nodded.

“You’re fine. Let me go check Jonathan’s family,” he said, before dropping back towards the other half of the group.

As Ethan left, Alice turned towards Allira. “What’s happening?” she asked. Allira was the one that had alerted the rest of the group, and Alice still wasn’t entirely sure what was going on.

“It seems that some kind of poisonous gas is in the air,” said Allira, frowning. “I don’t actually know what it is. I’ve never encountered it before. But one of my Perks alerted me to it. One of my shades also started to meet with problems when I sent it forward. Since they don’t need to breathe, I suspect that it can also harm through skin contact. But breathing it in is much worse,” she said, frowning.

“Is it mana related?” asked Alice, before she frowned. If it was mana-related, she should have seen it. Her ability to view mana was considerably better than most other people’s mana vision. At least as far as eyesight went, Alice outclassed even Ethan.

However, it didn’t seem that there was anything mana-related in the area. Or at least, nothing actively poisonous. Alice did, however, something else.

“The mana here is pretty dense,” commented Alice. “I also notice that the fog here is unusual. I think that the world here is a bit distorted by people’s beliefs.”

“Jonathan’s family is safe,” said Ethan, as he returned to the main group. “As for the mana here… I think you’re right. The fog seems to swallow up sound in a way that doesn’t feel natural. And the mana is very dense. It should still be low enough that Jonathan’s family won’t undergo a baptism, but we should keep an eye out. This area definitely didn’t look like this originally. It’s hard to say what monsters live here, or what other dangers we might run into.”

Alice kept scanning the area, and as she did, she frowned. She was beginning to notice that the area itself was wrong. It wasn’t that any one geographical feature of the area was obviously different from how it should look – most of it looked about right, at least to Alice’s uneducated eyes. However, there was something about the area that still struck her as strange. It was how… perfect the area was.

This area looked almost like it had come straight out of a fairytale. If Alice took a children’s book, and then drew a picture of a ‘treacherous bog…’ this was exactly what it would look like.

This was not promising news. Alice had already suspected that people’s beliefs had influenced this area, but it was hard to say how they had influenced the area. But Alice definitely wasn’t eager to traverse through a storybook-perfect replica of a ‘treacherous bog.’

“Is there a way to go around this area?” asked Alice. “I think this is now a ‘treacherous bog.’ While we would probably be able to make it out safely, the idea of going inside makes me nervous.”

“Sadly, there is not,” said Allira. “This area is one of the more traversable areas, it has stable footing, and doesn’t have too many monsters in it. Most of the other areas are prone to sinkholes, much worse weather conditions, and monster hordes. The western boundary of Fendrallia is quite difficult to get through,” she said.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“What do you see inside of the area, Allira?” asked Ethan.

Allira frowned, and squinted. “There are an awful lot of monsters lurking in the woods. Most of them look like ambush predators. Lots of camouflage, lots of monsters hiding just below the surface of the water… it’s a very messy area.”

“Sounds like walking through it could still be dangerous,” said Ethan. “How about we fly over instead? I can pick up the group and fly us forward for a few hours, find a spot to rest, and then fly us the rest of the way. Even if people’s beliefs have turned this into a ‘treacherous bog,’ that shouldn’t affect the airspace. I can also fly ahead first, just to make sure that there aren’t any flying monsters or other problems.”

“That seems reasonable to me,” said Jonathan, before he gave Ethan a nod. “Thanks for taking the front position. I appreciate it.”

Ethan nodded, before he lifted himself off the ground with his kinetic magic. Alice, Allira and Jonathan stayed behind as Ethan started to carefully fly over the outermost reaches of the treacherous bog. Jonathan’s family also caught up to the rest of the group and joined them. After all, while picking up a bit of explorer mana was dangerous, getting eaten by monsters was far more dangerous.

After a bit of airborne scouting, Ethan returned to the group.

“There aren’t any airborne problems that I saw. I think we should be safe as long as we fly, and don’t get too close to the ground. Alice, can you help me keep an eye on any flying monsters that might appear once we take to the skies?”

Alice nodded.

After that, Ethan lifted up the entire group by their clothes with his kinetic magic. Alice kept an eye on their surroundings as Ethan started to float them over the swamp, but thankfully, there weren’t any flying monsters. Truth to Ethan’s word, flying over the swamp seemed to insulate them from most of the danger in the area.

Nearly four hours passed by, before the group started to get tired. Allira started trying to find good spots for them to camp, and so Ethan set everyone down and started setting up tents.

Alice found that the area was rather damp. Much more disturbingly, the swamp seemed to literally squirm and move whenever she wasn’t paying attention to it. It was like a sapient labyrinth that was actively trying to trap them. If the group had tried to pass through it via land, instead of the skies, Alice wasn’t sure how the group could have possibly navigated the area.

Most unnerving of all, Alice could feel dozens of sets of eyes watching them from the shadows. The feedback she got from {Enhanced Senses} let her know just how creepy the swamp actually was. Alice wiped out several of the pairs of eyes, and pointed out several more to Allira, who was happy to help get rid of any troublesome onlookers. However, the two couldn’t find any monsters in some of the spots that were ‘watching’ them. Instead, after some testing, Alice was pretty sure the swamp itself was the one doing the watching. Alice shuddered.

This place really was creepy.

Still, Alice didn’t feel too worried. She was travelling with three Immortals. While Immortals weren’t invincible, being surrounded by three Immortals should guarantee her safety in this situation.

After Alice and Allira cleaned up the surrounding threats, the group settled down for the night, with Allira standing guard over the group.

Shortly after the group settled down for the night, Alice returned to her dream library. There, she had something much less creepy than the unnerving bog to take care of.

{Magic Modelling} had finally come off of cooldown. Which meant that she could finally run an experiment she had been thinking about.

Alice had already spent several days using {Magic Modelling} to map out every single nook and cranny of the mana gem sitting inside of her brain. Alice also knew for a fact that there was something wrong with it – for whatever reason, the mana gem that was supposed to absorb all of the ‘Alice mana’ inside of her body was not managed by the mana gem.

This had been a source of worry for Alice. It wasn’t urgent, since she could handle a pretty sizeable amount of Alice mana before it really started to influence her personality. But it was still a creeping concern for her that she wanted to solve sooner rather than later.

It was hopefully time for her to fix that problem.

First, Alice examined {First Steps}, the Achievement that she had upgraded recently.

The Achievement gave her two abilities: first, she could increase the number of enchanting instructions an object could hold by one, which would allow her to make slightly improved enchantments whenever she had the time and interest in doing so.

However, what Alice cared about right now was the second option. Alice could also use the Achievement to repair mana constructs.

Mana constructs such as the mana gem located inside of her brain, which seemed to manage Achievements and also do some other things that Alice didn’t understand quite as well yet.

Alice threw several queries at {Safety Analysis}, just to make sure that she wasn’t about to create a bomb inside of her skull or something, and then activated the Achievement to repair her mana gem.

All of a sudden, the mana gem inside of Alice’s brain became more. Before, the gem had looked kind of like a multifaceted, cut diamond made out of mana. However, several of the faces of the mana gem had looked… cleaner now. More polished.

And Alice also noticed that the mana gem also transformed drastically. For a brief moment, rather than a gem, the mana gem seemed almost like a ball of wires and cables. Several of them connected to the rest of her body, almost like a second set of nerves, while another part of the mana gem almost seemed as if it were trying to catch something.

Alice frowned, and immediately used {Magic Modelling} to create a copy of her ‘working’ mana gem. Then, she started to poke and prod at the now-obvious center of her mana gem, to try to figure out what was going on.

A few moments later, some of the fibers between her mana gem and the rest of her body collapsed, almost as if they had never been there to begin with. Alice frowned in confusion.

Why had the mana gem broken again right after she fixed it?

Alice spent a few more minutes poking through her Achievements, their effects on her body, and her stats, before she realized something else.

Her Achievements were working again.

One of the biggest things that had puzzled Alice after the collapse of the System was why Achievements seemed half-broken. Any Achievement that was supposed to help people do something didn’t operate at full efficiency after the System collapsed – most of them consistently underperformed, by somewhere between 40% and 60%. It was incredibly odd.

Alice had also observed on another occasion that Achievements seemed to be a massive hodgepodge of different things. Achievements were almost like the ‘misc’ folder of the System. Anything that didn’t fit into one of the other parts of the System was tossed into the ‘Achievements’ folder.

The weird tendrils that had extended out of her mana gem had also fixed her Achievements, and everything seemed to be running at 100% efficiency again.

Alice felt even more thoughtful as she looked at her Status Screen.

Perhaps the mana gem hadn’t ‘broken’ again after she used her Achievement to fix it?

Perhaps the little tendrils that exited her mana gem were supposed to only exist for a few moments?

Alice still didn’t quite understand what had just happened, so she continued investigating her body. After a few more moments, Alice realized that all of the ‘Alice’ mana in her body had been funneled into the mana gem. Thankfully, the biggest looming issue that threatened her personal safety was fixed. But Alice didn’t understand how or why the mana gem had suddenly fixed it. She decided to focus on {Magic Modelling} for now. Hopefully, after she finished reconstructing everything inside of her Perk, she would have more answers.

Alice started using her mental energy to rebuild the ‘fixed ‘version of her mana gem inside of {Magic Modelling}. As the image became clearer, Alice paid particular attention to the structure of the mana gem, as well as the part of the mana gem that seemed like it was supposed to ‘receive’ something.

And eventually, Alice actually came up with an answer. It was surprisingly simple, once she knew what she was looking for.

The part of the mana gem that was supposed to ‘receive’ something acted as a kind of relay between someone’s mana gem and the System.

Then, the mana gem seemed to be built to relay the System’s commands to the rest of the body. Alice had no way at all of figuring out what information the System was ‘supposed’ to relay to the mana gem… but she could at least make a few educated guesses.

Alice guessed that the mana gem was meant to collect all ‘unusual’ types of mana within someone’s body, and then send it to the System to deal with.

In the first place, Achievements were a sort of ‘misc’ folder for the System. Anything that wasn’t part of a different category of the System got thrown into the Achievements section of the Status Screen.

Perhaps the local version of the System inside of people’s body just stuffed all of these types of mana into the mana gem. Then, those mana gems sent that information to the System, where the mainframe would process this information. After all, the computing power inside of the mainframe of the System was several orders of magnitude higher than the computing power of the local version of the System.

Then, the System probably sent back information to people’s mana gem about how to properly use and organize these weird forms of mana.

If Alice’s theory was correct, the entire point of the mana gem was to collect everything and then ask the mainframe of the System ‘hey, what do I do with this?’

This was probably why Achievements all underperformed so much these days, and why her mana gem didn’t absorb and manage all of her ‘Alice’ mana.

After her mana gem said ‘Hey, stuff is weird, what do I do?’ the System had never responded. After all, it had collapsed. So her mana gem just kept asking the mainframe what to do and never getting a response.

If Alice’s theory was correct, she was more than a little bit baffled by what {First Steps} had just done. Theoretically, if her guess was correct, her mana gem wasn’t actually broken at all – it was just missing access to whatever made it work. Since that was the case, shouldn’t her attempt to ‘fix’ the mana gem just resulted in nothing happening?

For her Achievement to still help her mana gem fix all of the broken Achievements she had collected, and absorb all of her Alice mana…

Either her first theory was totally incorrect…

Or for a brief moment, her Achievement had somehow simulated the correct responses from the System and helped her mana gem straighten out all of the Achievements in her body.

Alice thought that the first theory was more likely, and she was just dead wrong about some aspect of how this worked. But even so, if her Achievement had somehow replicated the mainframe of the System and Alice had caught a picture of it with {Magic Modelling}…

Alice felt a wave of excitement at the thought. She might finally have a key to fix Achievements.