The group woke up to a nice breakfast at the inn. Alice wasn’t entirely sure how the [Innkeeper] had done it, but he had made an omelet out of eggs that tasted faintly spicy, and had nice, crispy meat on the inside that tasted somewhat similar to bacon. It wasn’t as good as some of the meals she had eaten from Ethan’s personal chef, but it reminded her of meals she used to eat on Earth, and that made her happy. Even if it wasn’t the ‘best meal she’d ever had,’ sometimes, the taste of home was superior to high-quality cuisine.
“Do you like it?” asked the [Innkeeper], with the help of Ethan’s translations. “It was quite an odd mix of ingredients, but {Taste of Home} insisted it was the right meal for you. I’ve never tried cooking meat this way before.”
“It was lovely,” said Alice, giving the [Innkeeper] a thankful grin.
The rest of breakfast passed quickly, and the group prepared to depart from the area. When they stepped out of the inn, they were greeted by a pair of elderly villagers. One of them was an older man who looked to be in his sixties, and had a gnarled back and hands. His body resembled the trunk of an old tree that had weathered many storms, but had never broken under their weight. The other was an elderly woman, who had a straight back and bright, clear eyes. Alice faintly remembered healing both of them yesterday, but hadn’t paid very much attention to them. There had just been too many people to treat yesterday.
Alice stared at the two elderly people awkwardly. They hadn’t spoken yet, but Alice was still confused. Finally, after examining her, the elderly man smiled. He pushed a basket covered with a lovely red cloth into her hands. It was warm. Alice gently unwrapped the basket, and found a few loaves of freshly baked bread.
“Thank you for help with village, Immortal apprentice,” said the man in broken Illvarian. “Helped lots people. Good person. I make tasty bread. Try it!”
Ethan raised a hand first, and then his eyes flashed rainbow as he looked at the bread. He nodded, and lowered his hand. “It’s safe. You can eat it if you want,” he said.
Alice pulled out one of the loaves of bread, and took a hesitant bite, before she nodded in approval. It wasn’t as good as Immortal Jonathan’s bread, but it still tasted nice. The insides were warm and soft, and the outside was crusty and tasted faintly of butter and some sort of herb. Alice had never had it before, but it tasted decent.
“Thank you, elder,” said Alice. The man clearly struggled with Illvarian, but Alice hoped he at least understood her words.
“No. Thank. Good help.” The man gently smiled at her. “Would hug, but you not touch people much? Odd, but some people no like things. I give bread instead.”
As he retreated, the elderly woman stepped up. She handed Alice a little crown of flowers, before patting Alice faintly on her shoulders.
“@#*$(@ @#(*$#@ @#$*() @#*$(#& @#$(* )@#$*( @)@#($ )(@#$ )@#($@(#)$ @#)()(!@$!@&%@#$ %!(@#$*@!#(@ %&*#@$,” she said. Unlike the man, the woman didn’t even have a rudimentary understanding of Illvarian, so Alice had no idea what she had just said. She turned towards Ethan questioningly.
“She said her granddaughter made it, and thanks you for healing her and her grandchildren,” Ethan said. “She also says that her granddaughter insists that you’re the princess of the healing mages, and that every princess needs a crown.” Alice felt the urge to awkwardly smile at that. Perhaps it was due to how she had been raised, but Alice had never had the ‘wanting to be a princess’ phase in her life. Still, she appreciated the sentiment behind the crown of flowers, even if it also made her feel odd. She carefully placed it on her head. The crown of flowers weren’t very sturdy, so Alice had to handle carefully in case it fell apart.
“Thank you,” said Alice, which Ethan translated for her.
“@#*$(&@#$ @#*$(#! @#*$ @#*$* @(@#($ @#)(*#@$#@$!” The woman’s face grew animated, and the wrinkles on her forehead seemed to shrink as she smiled at Alice.
“She says that she’s grateful for what you’ve done for her daughter and the other villagers, and that she wishes you safe travels.” Ethan paused, and then gave the crown of flowers a more careful look. “You could try to preserve the flowers using organic magic, if you want a decent magic practice routine. It might even have some relevance to your current research. Altering things with magic without accidentally killing them is… difficult, and even though Jonathan has volunteered to help you with experiments, flowers might still be a good starting point. It could increase the safety margin a bit for your other experiments. Or you can jump right in if you feel confident. I’ll leave the final decision up to you.”
Alice nodded, but secretly, she vowed to squeeze in as much practice on the flowers as she could get. The old lady and the old man gave the group one more kindly smile before they walked away.
Cecilia laughed. “You’re the hero of a village, Alice. Just like the Immortals from stories and legends. You came to an unknown village, saved everyone, and then left. If my father was still around, maybe he would have told me stories about you, too.” Cecilia’s eyes seemed a little sad when she said that, but also a little happy as she looked at the village. “I’m glad that we came here, even if it wasn’t originally planned.”
Ethan gave Alice a firm pat on the shoulders. “You did a good job here. You made the lives of a lot of people better, and even though it’s only a single village, helping people always has to start somewhere. Spending all of your time researching how to cure the collapse of the System is a good thing, but it’s also important to remember the human element of your actions. In a position of power, you sometimes have to treat people as numbers and statistics – but you also have to remember that everyone is a living, breathing person. Whether they’re short lived or long lived, they have loved ones, people that care about them, and lives they cherish. Some Immortals start to forget that, and that’s why organizations like the Society of Starry Eyes come into existence. It might not be the most ‘mana efficient’ use of your time, but I’m still glad you healed the people here.” He gave Alice a lopsided grin. “If we’re lucky, the swamp problem might have been resolved through Allira’s hard work, too. Or at the very least, some experimental data can be gathered.”
Alice glanced at the swamp in the distance, and was surprised to see that it had retreated a little bit. It wasn’t much. It seemed like it had only retreated a few centimeters, and that might have just been her misconception. But Alice felt inclined to believe that the swamp had retreated a little bit. It was tangible proof that her discoveries and her efforts were making a difference, even if it was a small one.
That got Alice thinking. What was the most important priority here? On one hand, Alice was pretty sure that the swamp had moved back a bit from yesterday. If she observed the process of the swamp retreating, that would give her a lot of potentially valuable data on the interaction between human beliefs and mana.
On the other hand, if Alice didn’t figure out how to get people new Class seeds, she wouldn’t know how to fix the System, which would ultimately lead to a death spiral for the human race as well. Murim was currently exploring lands northwest of Illvaria just to find the mainframe of the System. Alice wasn’t entirely sure whether it would be possible, but she hoped that it might be possible to restore the whole thing if she found the physical framework and then repaired it. TTo do that, Alice needed a lot of information about how enchanting worked, because that was probably the foundation of the System.
Eventually, Alice sighed, and turned away from the swamp. Even though it was valuable experimental data, and Alice was loathe to miss it, learning how to make Artifacts and artificial magic seeds was still more important. It stung to miss so much data, but they had to keep moving forward.
Allira started singing again, and a ship made of illusions and light sprang back into existence. The group boarded the ship, before Ethan lifted the group into the air again.
“All right, we’re going to be flying for a little bit longer. I’m hoping to find a larger village, or a town, where we can buy some horses. This is a bit too much of a strain on my mana reserves, and I don’t like how much of my attention moving this ship needs. It leaves us much more vulnerable to being attacked,” said Ethan. “Those of you who are more observant, please keep an eye on the ground for any potential spots to swap transportation modes. Alice, if you decide to focus on research, feel free to do that instead. You’re a smart girl, you can figure out how to allocate your time.” The group nodded, and then the ship shot forward with a whoosh.
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Alice didn’t spend very long thinking before she decided to do a few experiments. One of the nice things about travel by ship was that it left Alice free to experiment in peace. On horseback she was more worried about not falling off of her horse, but on the ship, she could experiment all she wanted to. As it just so happened, the group had captured several experimental subjects that Alice wanted to run through a few tests. Maybe she could still figure out how beliefs and mana interacted with each other, even though she couldn’t observe the swamp as it moved around the village.
She moved to the cages where the swamp manaborn monsters were kept, and started examining them. Then she got to work.
The first thing she tried was simply placing the monsters into an artificial no-mana zone. Alice wasn’t entirely sure what she expected to happen, but she was genuinely curious. She knew that messing with the ‘strings’ connecting these monsters to the swamp would make them vulnerable to death… but normal monsters would just flat-out suffocate to death if they were cut off from mana entirely. What happened if these manaborn monsters were placed in similar conditions?
As it turned out, the answer was… interesting. At first, the monster didn’t react at all, leading Alice to start feeling rather disappointed. She had expected some sort of reaction, and she had not gotten one. She supposed it wasn’t that shocking – during the fight, the monsters hadn’t instantly died when she cut them off from the surrounding mana. But the monsters just seemed to be doing the same things they had done before, even after a solid five minutes.
It wasn’t until nearly ten minutes that Alice started to notice the monsters changing. Their movements started to become… jerky, like a set of rusty gears. The monster was still reacting normally – snarling at her, trying to escape from its cage, and otherwise letting out menacing hisses and shrieks from time to time. However, its movements were less fluid and animated than before. It was like a video game that was lagging horribly – it would take an action, then slow down for several seconds before jerking back into motion. Nothing it did seemed coordinated anymore.
Finally, after twenty minutes, the monster simply flopped over and stopped responding to its surroundings at all. It was like a puppet with no puppeteer. Alice hesitantly started poking it with a long stick, to see if the monster was trying to fake its unresponsiveness as some kind of trick.
It was not. The manaborn monster remained as motionless as a corpse.
Was it dead?
Alice waited for ten more minutes, to see if anything changed, but the monster remained as stiff as a log. Finally, Alice tried releasing the anti-mana barrier.
The monster didn’t return to regular function immediately. Instead, it started jerking around, almost like a doll rusty from disuse. For a few minutes, the monster almost seemed to be… confused.
About five minutes later, the monster started to jerk around again. It snarled at her, hissed at her, and tried to escape the cage. However, Alice noticed that the monster’s movements hadn’t recovered, even though the area was full of mana again. Its limbs dragged in awkward and unexpected ways when it tried to move. It was like a broken wind up doll.
Alice surmised that the time it had spent in a near-comatose state probably had left some kind of permanent damage behind. Perhaps its nerves weren’t working perfectly anymore, or perhaps the monster core had stopped pumping mana around its body as needed. Either way, the monster had minor, seemingly permanent problems now.
Equally interesting was the fact that the monster was still alive, despite spending nearly half an hour in a manaless zone. Alice knew for a fact that monsters typically died if they were cut off from mana for long enough, and half an hour was enough to wipe out almost every monster on the planet. It was almost the same as suffocation for a human – monsters needed mana to live. But for some reason, even though they were born from mana, manaborn creatures were actually less reliant on mana to survive. This struck Alice as incredibly unusual, although she wasn’t quite sure what that meant yet, if it meant anything at all.
After that, Alice had a lovely idea, for a much more interesting test.
Instead of creating a zone with no mana at all, Alice tried doing something a bit more complicated.
The first thing she did was to create a thin layer of anti-mana shielding around an area where she and a monster were located. This meant that within the room, there was a small, bubble-shaped area that was perfectly clear of mana. Then, Alice almost immediately began filling up that bubble with ‘pure mana’ from her own magic seed, while maintaining a thin layer of separation between the inside and outside of the bubble.
Alice wasn’t quite sure if this would work at all… but she was very curious to know what happened if she isolated the monster from the rest of the world’s mana, but didn’t cut off its supply of mana entirely.
The results were… interesting. The monster started to adopt similar problems to before. Its limbs grew clumsy and unresponsive, and it eventually collapsed… but its collapse wasn’t total. The monster was unconscious, but not completely so. It kept reaching out some of its limbs towards Alice, in a hopeless attempt to bite or tear at her flesh. However, its movements were almost wholly uncoordinated.
At the same time, Alice started to get an even better idea of how the ‘strings’ of belief connected her and the monster worked. The strings of belief seemed to almost use mana as a sort of medium to exist… but what Alice considered ‘threads’ were more like a web than anything else. They connected the monster to the rest of the world, and simultaneously, connected the monster to the swamp. The swamp, in turn, was connected to people’s beliefs about the swamp. Since the swamp acted as a sort of coordinator for the monster’s actions, without it, the manaborn monster didn’t have the information necessary to fulfill its role.
Then, Alice started to wonder something. Was the monster only moving the same way it had in the swamps because of her beliefs about how it moved and acted? Alice’s threads of ‘belief’ were clearly tied to the monster somehow, so it was obviously interacting with her beliefs in some way, shape, or form. What would happen if Alice left the bubble, and then someone with a completely different set of beliefs about how the monsters would act stepped into the bubble instead? Would that change the way the monster worked? And if it worked, how far could she take those beliefs? What if she believed that the monster would grand anyone who ate its flesh total immortality and godhood? What if she believed that the monster was capable of destroying the world in seconds?
Alice kind of doubted that either of those beliefs would actually work. There was probably some sort of mana requirement for what kinds of beliefs could be manifested, and how they interacted with reality. But Alice also found the possibilities both fascinating and horrifying. She had no idea how some beliefs would interact with reality, but she suspected there were dozens of ways to end the world if she tried to ‘cleverly’ manipulate the interaction between beliefs and reality. At the same time, Alice needed to a better idea how the interaction worked in the first place, so that she knew what to guard against and how to fix everything.
Alice got an idea. She left the room, and walked around until she found Cecilia.
“Cecilia!” She yelled. “I want to show you an interesting experiment! I managed to reprogram the manaborn monster a bit!”
“Reprogram?” asked Ceclia, blinking in surprise. “What does that mean? I don’t know that word.”
Alice blushed, as she realized that in her excitement, she had used the English word for reprogram, since there was no corresponding word in Illvarian. She cleared her throat.
“I managed to get a really interesting result when I was messing with one of the manaborn monsters. I’ve been tinkering with it, and I’ve realized that they’re kind of like wind up dolls. You can manipulate the way they behave and act, based on the way they interact with the mana in their surroundings. Just like the tether between the swamp and the monsters sustained them and made them move, you can also feed them a bunch of data to make them do totally different things. This monster is now trying to dance like a ballerina. Could you tell me what it looks like to you? I’m curious to see what your thoughts as an [Enchanter] are,” said Alice.
Cecilia gave Alice a dubious look, but shrugged and followed Alice back to the experimental room. Alice made sure to remain outside of her isolated mana bubble, but ushered Cecilia into it. She noticed that in her absence, the monster had stopped moving around, and had flopped over like a doll with no batteries again. But the moment Cecilia stepped into the mana bubble, that changed. The manaborn monster’s legs started twitching again. The creature still looked kind of like it was suffering from serious nerve damage… but as Cecilia stared at the monster, it started to creakily stand back up. Half of the monster’s body started to coil like a spring, as if it were about to pounce at Cecilia… but two of its limbs, rather than trying to kill Cecilia, instead lifted the rest of the monster’s body up. Just like a ballerina spinning on one leg, the monster tried and spectacularly failed to do a spin. After crashing to the ground, the monster leapt towards the edge of its cage, before slamming into the iron bars. Two of its legs helplessly tried to lift the monster around and dance, while its other legs tried to propel its body through the cage so that it could rip Cecilia’s limbs apart.
While it made less of an impact than Alice had been expecting, it still clearly showed the impact of Cecilia’s beliefs, and how they changed the monster’s behavior.
Alice smiled.