As the boat sailed up the river, Alice took time to admire the view of the river gently drifting by. A sight that was only occasionally marred by a special [Archer] shooting a Lurker, a strange plant-like monster that Alice had briefly seen during her flight to Cyra. Apparently, they were more common in this part of the river. The arrows seemed completely unhindered by the water they travelled through to reach their targets, which Alice found even more curious because of the small speckles of green, unknown mana sprinkled into each arrow. The Archer certainly wasn’t a Mage – Alice could see Magic Seeds now, and the woman certainly didn’t have one. How was the mana getting into the arrow? She pushed the thought away. For now, at least, it was irrelevant. Just another thought to add to her list, and she was trying to relax right now.

It was the first time in quite a while she had just relaxed and looked at the scenery. She couldn’t help but reflect a little on that. Even though she loved spending time investigating the System, she should probably make a bit more time for other activities as well.

Such as observing her surroundings in more detail. This river, for instance, was actually quite fascinating. It continuously branched out as it travelled downriver, and each branch looked like a canal that was riddled with weird mana constructs. This made Alice increasingly suspicious of whether this river was ‘natural’ or not. The mana constructs were nowhere near as complex as some she had seen. Still, she couldn’t figure out what they were doing. {Mana Construct Modelling} gave her a bunch of weird magic seeds such as ‘water’ and ‘examination’ in addition to some more normal ones like ‘kinetic magic.’ Alice had never heard of examination mana.

Alice frowned, as she realized she was getting caught up in her own little world again. Spending such an obsessive amount of time indoors working on her own projects couldn’t be healthy. Even when she was outside and supposed to be relaxing, she already found her thoughts drifting back to research. That was surely a sign she had spent too long with her nose in her notebook. She couldn’t help but shake her head and smile a little at herself.

When she and Cecilia reached the capital, she would make it a point to interact more with people. She would start with the contact that Illa had advised her to seek out, then she would spend more time with people she was close to. Maybe take a night at the end of every week to just hang out with Cecilia, along with anyone else she got to know better and had a good impression of.

Heck, maybe she could make some quick and easy replicas of board games from home. Alice’s control of kinetic mana was getting good enough that she was able to ‘cut’ objects instead of just pushing and pulling things around. It would take some time to get right, but maybe she could try carving wooden board game pieces as a hobby? It wouldn’t be a bad way to take some time away from her research, and it would probably get her some levels in kinetic magic skills and classes as well. It was somewhat plausible that a market for it existed somewhere, or could exist somewhere if people had enough leisure time in the capital.

After a few more minutes of random thoughts, Alice realized she could start working on spending more time with people right now. She went off to look for Cecilia, who she found sitting on the other side of the deck and watching a pair of passengers the boat had picked up from Riverbranch. The other girl was fiddling with a pair of roots that seemed to conduct mana in a particularly interesting fashion, though, Alice didn’t see any actual mana moving near the roots. Since the other girl wasn’t actively enchanting anything, Alice didn’t see a problem interrupting her.

“What’s up?”

Cecilia seemed a bit startled when she saw Alice, before she smiled and gave Alice a nod. “Are you enjoying the journey so far?” asked Cecilia.

“I’m enjoying this. I’ve never been on a boat before,” said Alice. “I think I would have found the rocking motion to be pretty nauseating if my [Endurance] wasn’t high enough, though. Even now I find it a little unpleasant. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if I didn’t have the [Endurance] that I have.

Cecilia chuckled. “That’s a pretty common problem for children. Plenty of kids get seasick when they’re on boats. I hear some noble families actually have their kids sit on boats while they do other training in order to boost both [Endurance] and [Willpower] while still boosting other stuff.” The two fell into a comfortable silence as they watched the river. Finally, Alice was the one to break the silence.

“What gives for this river?” asked Alice. Even if she was swearing off spending all her time on research, now that she had seen the mana constructs she was curious. Besides, this way she could mix socializing and research. It was basically a win-win in her book.

Cecilia snorted softly, seeming amused by Alice’s choice of conversation topic. But she still answered. “Back when Southern Illvaria was still firmly controlled by Illvaria instead of monsters, the area was altered to better suit human habitation. A lot of this region is naturally pretty dry. No water, no crops, so the area was only sparsely populated by Illvaria at the time. The [King] hired an outside Immortal to help create an artifact to change this situation. Combined with a huge budget and the support of a bunch of Illvarian Mages, the Crown succeeded in forging an Artifact.

“The artifact changes the river, creating what you see here. A perfect irrigation system that doesn’t need manpower or maintenance to keep it running. More importantly, unlike manmade irrigation canals, these rebuild themselves if monsters mess them up. Which is particularly relevant here. It increased the region’s prosperity by a massive amount after it was implemented, because the population was finally able to start growing its own food. Combined with the rich mana of this area, the Illvarian south produced far better quality and a much greater quantity of enchanting materials than the rest of the continent. With the population to actually exploit this, Illvaria started to get far wealthier and more prosperous.

“Of course, the high mana density comes with a pretty serious downside. Monsters in the area are both more populous and more powerful than other lands inhabited by humans. We’re just barely under the threshold for mana poisoning most of the time. When the war with the Sigmusi happened several decades ago, the Crown was forced to start dipping into the [Guards] and Mages in this region to support the ongoing war. The Sigmusi took advantage of this delay and the Illvarian troop shortage to attack this region. They marched an army all through this area, razing most major cities to the ground and enslaving or killing most of the population.

“After that the monster population no longer had any checks against their repopulation. They made a rapid resurgence. A bunch of different alphas rose up within the next few years, leading to a lot smaller monster attacks against human settlements.

“Most of the inhabitants left the area within the next decade or two, leaving this region once again sparsely populated. For a while, the Artifact regulated a river almost no one cared about or had access to. The previous king always wanted to take the area back, but the northern nomads got extra aggressive for a few decades and tied up too many troops. Without the income provided by southern enchanting materials, it was difficult to scrounge up the money and manpower needed to really get recolonization going even after the war with the Sigmusi Colonia ended in a stalemate. Until recently, of course. Right now the Nomads seem busy fighting among themselves, which freed up Illvarian troops to cull the monster population here. After that the crown opened up settlements and provided noble titles to people who found towns and keep them at a certain population limit and certain other requirements, providing incentives for wealthy merchants to invest in the region and also help the Crown gain some political advantage over the Noble Estate.” Cecilia shrugged. “There are probably other internal political reasons, but that’s all I know or can guess.”

“Does the Artifact never power down?” asked Alice, thinking back to her ideas about human mage cores and ‘permanent’ enchantments. As well as the weird mana constructs she had spotted along the river. They clearly weren’t being powered by anything, as far as she could tell.

“I have no idea. I’ve never seen a real artifact. I only know what this one does because it’s a well documented piece of history, and most [Enchanters] enjoy talking about famous enchanted items from time to time,” said Cecilia. Then she frowned, as she started to look thoughtful. “You know, I suddenly realize that the lack of power is a fair bit more odd than I gave it credit for. I never thought too much about Mana and power sources before, but after last weekend this really does make me wonder how ‘self sustaining’ enchantments actually work. Say, have you ever taken a closer look at System Enchantments before?”

“Why System Enchant – ah.” Alice quickly realized what Cecilia was getting at. Much like Artifacts, System Enchantments just worked, seemingly without any power sources at all. Traditional and Consumable enchanting both needed a bunch of materials to get working and then needed power sources to keep working. However, System enchantments didn’t need monster cores to power them. Alice was suddenly very curious to know how they worked. If the System had massive underlying structure and logic to it, System Enchantments surely did as well.

And now that Alice could actually see System mana, she might be able to see something more interesting when she inspected a System enchantment.

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The two fell back into silence as they watched the river pass. Soon, the bright sunlight began to fade away, and the sky grew darker as the two watched the sun set over the river.

“Do you think our stars are the same ones you saw at your home?” asked Cecilia, breaking the silence after putting up a privacy Perk.

“What?” The question caught Alice totally off guard. Mostly because Alice had long accepted that she was in a different dimension. The odds of her looking at the same night sky as the one back home seemed miniscule. And the stars she saw in the sky were totally different from the ones she remembered back on Earth.

“In the Church of the System’s holy teachings, they claim that all of the stars in the sky are actually suns, just like ours. All of them are huge, glowing balls of gas and heat that make the planets near them habitable. Just like our sun. I’ve never thought too closely about it before, because I always thought it was just faraway religious stuff. But when I talk to you sometimes… I mean, it’s not like you bring up your home a lot. But you always have such unique perspectives on magic, and it just got me thinking about what your home was like. And I realized that I don’t know too much about your previous world.”

Alice silently boggled at the idea of basic astronomy being ‘religious stuff’ in this world. Not to mention, it sounded like decent introductory astronomy. Even if it was a little simplified, if Alice had seen that statement in some sort of kid’s book about stars and the cosmos she wouldn’t have batted an eye back home.

“Not to mention, in recent centuries a few [Scholars] challenged the idea that stars were inherently nonmagical. I’m not too well versed in that particular academic debate, but I know my father mentioned it back when he was still alive. I wasn’t too focused on the idea at first, but when I talk to you, sometimes I wonder,” said Cecilia.

“I doubt it,” said Alice. “The stars here are different. The moon looks surprisingly similar to the one at home, at least as far as I can see. But I doubt they’re the same… here, hold on.” Alice frowned, trying to pull up a few images in her head. She hadn’t had any of her memory related Perks when she had lived back on Earth, which made it much harder to recall her memories from home with the perfect clarity she was now accustomed to.

But even if she couldn’t recall everything with perfect clarity, she had loved astronomy and looking at the night sky. Her computer’s wallpaper had been a slideshow of random images from the Hubble Telescope, mixed with a few pictures taken from sources like the Apollo missions. She could still remember…

“Hey, let me share a few memories with you,” said Alice, as she placed her finger on Cecilia’s arm. Cecilia didn’t push away Alice’s attempt to use {Shared Memory}, and so rainbow mana flooded out of Alice’s body and into Cecilia’s.

“This is what the constellations used to look like from my home,” said Alice, feeling a bit of longing as she pulled the relevant memories out her thoughts. “There are a lot of other pictures, too – here, this is a picture of what my old world looked like from the moon,” she said, grinning a bit. {Shared Memory} definitely hadn’t been useful in the original, intended way so far. However, she was suddenly eager to see the other girl’s reaction to one of the most famous pictures from Earth.

“Wait… FROM the moon?” Asked Cecilia, as she accessed the memory. “Was… is your moon like our moon? Like, the white orb that shows up in the sky at nighttime?”

“Yes, when I say moon I do mean the moon” said Alice, her grin widening as she watched Cecilia’s reaction.

“Is that your planet there? The little blue semicricle? It looks so… small. But how did your people go to the moon? Nobody here has even thought about travelling to the moon. It’s so… far away. And why is your planet not round? Is that something unique to your world?”

“Well, actually the planet IS an orb. It’s just hard to see because half of the Earth is covered by shadows in this image. But to answer your other questions, it was part of a massive contest between two major powers in my home. They called themselves the United States and the USSR…” Said Alice, as she began to pull up the relevant memories and images to accompany it. She was suddenly having a fun time with this. She started to create a sort of ‘mental slideshow’ in her thoughts, using her ability to perfectly multitask to pull up images that could accompany her impromptu history lesson as she talked about the Cold War and the Space Race. The fact that Alice felt like she was recreating a sort of odd, low quality movie also helped feed a little bit of her nostalgia for home.

Cecilia was a great listener when it came to Alice’s visual storytelling. She oohed and aahed at the right moments, making this kind of ‘storytelling’ even more enjoyable than Alice had originally expected it to be.

It was obvious that Cecilia didn’t understand everything. After all, this planet was still stuck in the middle ages. Even if it made a decent stab at being ‘modern’ in some surprising places like medical technology, it was far from the world Alice had grown up on. But even though Alice could tell the other girl was sometimes confused about things like nuclear bombs and aircraft, Cecilia was more than happy to sit around while Alice did her best to explain those topics and reminisce about her homeland.

Alice realized she was having a lot of fun as time passed. Even though she would occasionally chat with Illa about her home back when she was in Cyra, the older woman never seemed quite as… interested in Alice’s home as Cecilia. It was always like Illa was looking for ideas. Alice got the impression the woman was searching for useful components of Alice’s political system she could implement in Cyra. Which Alice didn’t mind – after all, if this world improved and became a better place to live in, Alice, as one of the people who lived in this world, would also benefit. Still, the dry conversations about political systems Alice only had surface level knowledge of didn’t compare to how much fun she was having just talking about a topic she liked and was enthusiastic about. She had always enjoyed technology and science far more than politics, after all.

As the story about the space landing finally came to an end, Alice had a quiet thought to herself.

If we did something like this again, it wouldn’t be so bad. She smiled as she went to sleep that night.

* * *

Jek, leader of the Old Followers, stared at tents filled with [Raiders], [Nomadic Warmages], and [Nomadic Archers] arrayed around him. Despite how glorious everything seemed to be, he couldn’t help but have a sinking feeling in his stomach. The upcoming battle would be hard. The Old Followers had been leading the New Followers in a great circle, dodging the enemy army to amass whatever dregs of support they could muster from the local tribes.

It never seemed like they had enough time or support to make things happen.

He was higher level than Feik in the [Heir of the Steppes] class. There was no way he wasn’t – his former friend almost never displayed any of the extraordinary Perks Jek had gotten from the class. Feik seemed to lag well behind him in levels for [Heir of the Steppes], but that was the only advantage he had. Feik had more troops under his command than Jek did, and far better enchanted items for him and his trusted [Raid Leaders]. The level of the leader of an army could only make up for so much.

“Are you worried?” Asked one of his [Raid Leaders] as Jek paced about in the tent.

Jek forcibly stopped himself from pacing. Seeming anxious about the upcoming battle would be terrible for morale. A leader must appear confident. Showing how worried he truly was about the battle would only give rise to doubts about his fitness for leadership. Even if most of the Old Followers saw him as the rightful leader of the steppes and tundras, he couldn’t have internal problems rising up with a major external threat already looming overhead.

“No,” said Jek. “We will win this battle, regardless of how many dogs Feik has brought to his side. The average level of our army is higher. The System favors us, for our actions are right. With the System’s favor, our advantage should outweigh our disadvantages. We are simply biding our time and waiting for the right chance to engage the enemy.” Inwardly, Jek scoffed at that statement. If they were in an advantageous position, would they need to flee from Feik’s army like injured rats, trying to find an opportunity to break the situation?

“Yes. Since the System favors us, surely we will emerge victorious.” Said the [Raid Leader].

“Naturally.” Jek’s voice was cold and collected. As a leader’s voice should be. “Is there any news of the Fallrin tribe?”

“They have given us a variety of excuses,” said the [Raid Leader], his lips curling into a sneer. “I suspect they intend to sit on the sides and wait to see who wins, before aligning themselves with the victor.”

Jek repressed the urge to sigh. This was the greatest problem he encountered when trying to resist Feik’s army. If the other nomads put their foot down and rallied around him, crushing Feik would be easy.

Jek couldn’t help but bitterly think about how much things had changed in a short decade. When he and Feik had first discovered the tomb of the long dead first leader of the nomads, he and Feik had been filled with excitement. The System had validated their excitement, granting them a rarity ten Achievement and a brand new class. At that time, the two of them had planned to unite the nomads together, reforming the great horde and finally avenging the humiliating loss their ancestors had suffered centuries ago during the invasion of the Corellion Empire.

And then Feik had sold the bow to an outsider. A strange Immortal who travelled with a man that seemed half man and half metal, and offered them a great deal of enchanted items in exchange for the bow. As well as the demand that they let him inspect them with some special tools for a few days.

The man had given Jek a bad feeling. This feeling didn’t come from a Perk or a Skill. It came from his then-thirty years of experience as a [Raider]. He had declined the offer.

Feik had accepted. He had reasoned that the bow was merely a symbol – it offered no tangible benefit. They had already gotten a Class and an Achievement for it – they were only lacking money and weapons to properly lead an army. If they traded away the bow, they would be able to unite the nomads and lead them back to the Corellion Empire again.

Quietly, he sighed to himself. Perhaps he was the fool for not accepting the offer. Feik had taken the bow behind his back, sold it to the weird Immortal, and then begun raising the army. Nothing bad seemed to have happened to his former friend after selling off the symbol of the former leader of the steppes. He had fallen out with his friend over the matter, until things had come to where they stood today. A decade of rising tensions, of skirmishes, of conflicts had killed much of the feelings he used to have for his former friend. And soon one of them will die.

“Even if the cowardly lesser clans refuse to join us, we will win. It just means they won’t have a share of the loot when we gain victory. The System watches over us, and our forefathers will guide our arrows in this battle,” said Jek.

When the battle finally came, it might very well be the last battle of his life. Or the decisive start of his legend. But with every clan’s refusal to aid him, he felt his odds growing dimmer and dimmer.

He took another long look at the tents spread around him, before he dismissed his [Raid Leader] and returned to his own tent.