A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The next set of Perks that Alice focused on were the two Perks from [Legendary Organic Healer]. The first set of perks she had seen from that Class had impressed her quite a bit, and Alice had very high hopes for her next Perk choice.

The first Perk that she saw was enough to reaffirm her high expectations.

Legendary Healer’s Resilience Requirements: Legendary Organic Healer level 10 or higher, have an Immortal as a mentor, fight at least three battles in dangerous circumstances (calculated based on the strength of the opposing side, Magic stat 100 or higher, have taken at least one major injury before and then had it healed using magic or Perks

Your brain’s ability to survive is drastically improved, granting you the ability to function even if oxygen flow is cut off to your brain for up to ten minutes. During this time, you will be able to think and act clearly, even if you are beheaded or strangled. Once per day, while healing yourself, you may change this Perk to an active one. While active, this Perk will give you 100 Mariums of organic mana. This mana may ONLY be used to heal yourself, and will dissipate after ten minutes, once the effect of this Perk being activated ends. While this Perk is in an active state, your [Endurance] stat is doubled, and any mana spent healing yourself has its effectiveness doubled as well. (This does NOT count when using organic mana to do things such as improve your muscles). Once active, this Perk remains active for ten minutes, before ALL perk-related benefits shut off until it recharges (24 hours after activation ends).

In Alice's opinion, this Perk was quite interesting. It was about on par with {Adrenaline Rush}, despite the fact that this Perk was 35 whole levels earlier than {Adrenaline Rush}. In many ways, it also reminded her of the second life that all Immortals possessed. Unless very unusual circumstances appeared, Immortals could survive truly ridiculous occurrences, such as being beheaded or having their entire body destroyed - so long as their brain was not damaged. This Perk basically let Alice fake having the same ability, although unlike Immortals, her body wouldn’t regrow itself from scratch on its own. Still, it was excellent for a level 10 Perk.

If there weren’t any better options available, Alice would have been happy to take {Legendary Healer’s Resilience} and use that as a way to supplement her somewhat lacking defensive capabilities.

However, when Alice saw the second Perk she could take at level 10, she decided that it was just better.

Healing Enchantment Requirements: Legendary Organic Healer level 10 or higher, Have healed at least 20 people who are afflicted with ‘class mana poisoning,’ have at least 1 Rarity 10 Achievement related to manipulating mana, have helped at least 50 people by altering the mana inside of their body, have created at least one enchanted item dedicated to helping those who were harmed by altered mana, have some sort of [Enchanter] Class

You gain the ability to take ANY material that can be used for enchanting and turn it into an enchantment that can repair class mana clogs. (Material must still have room for at least 1 organic mana instruction, and the enchantment will only be able to heal organic magic related Classes). Enchantments made in this way have vastly reduced mana cost for completing the enchanting process. This Perk may only activate three times per day.

This Perk was amazing, for what Alice currently needed to accomplish. It fed into Alice’s goals neatly, and helped her to accomplish one of the hardest parts of her overarching goals - propagating her ‘patch’ to the System in a meaningful time frame. In short, it fit her current and future needs exceptionally well. Alice still wasn’t sure how she was going to fix the entire planet, because she was utterly incapable of creating the hundreds of millions of enchantments she needed to create within the next month or two… but this Perk would at least help her manage the situation a bit more effectively. It was far from a real solution, but it would help forestall problems and give her more time to think and plan.

Thus, with only a little hesitation, Alice grabbed {Healing Enchantment}.

After that, Alice took a look at the level 15 [Legendary Organic Mage] Perks. Given what she had seen at level 10, and level 5, she now had even higher expectations than before.

There were only two options for this Perk choice as well, and the first option was pretty bland and uninteresting. It was a generic boost to her Magic stat and a similar boost to her organic seed capacity. The number for each stat boost was higher than she normally expected from this level of Perk, but there was nothing outstanding about it. However, the second option was so exceptional that Alice saw no reason not to take it.

Delve Requirements: Legendary Organic Healer level 15 or higher, Have have at least 1 Rarity 10 Achievement related to understanding the nature of some sort of mana, have helped at least 50 people by altering the mana inside of their body

You gain the ability to ‘delve’ into the past once per month. So long as you touch an enchanted item, you may send yourself into a form of vision trip that will give you key information about the object, its past, and how it was created. It will also give you critical insight into how it worked and its various sub-components. This enchantment must have at least some relationship with organic mana. The more focused this enchantment is on organic mana, the clearer the vision will be and the more insight you will be able to glean about how the enchantment’s components work together to make the enchantment function.

One of the biggest issues Alice still had was how to propagate her patch for the system throughout the entire globe. For that purpose, Alice was hoping that Murim would come through. Before they had left Illvaria, Alice had asked Murim to trace her rough directions and find the mainframe of the System. After all, the System was very obviously capable of propagating a certain type of enchantment across the globe - it had already been doing so for centuries before she arrived here. However, Alice was also under no illusions that she had truly mastered everything the original creator(s) of the System had. Her patch for the System worked, but it was far inferior.

With this Perk, if all went well, Alice would hopefully find the mainframe of the System, use it on a big, important enchantment inside of the System’s mainframe, and then use that information to either fully fix the System or propagate her workarounds.

The fact that it was only once per month stung, but at the very least, it would give her a start if everything worked out correctly.

Of course, if anything went wrong in her ‘predicted course of events,’ this Perk might end up being kind of useless. But at this point, Alice was willing to take a few risks with her Perks to help guarantee the future of the world. She could always change her Perks around when she met a [Priest of the System] anyway. She needed to prioritize what she thought she would need and plan for the only path forward she could find. Then, she needed to cross her fingers and hope for the best.

She decided to focus on [Careful Enchanter] next. Much like her Perks from [Legendary Organic Mage], [Careful Enchanter] was not yet at a point where she could combine Perks. That made it much simpler to do her leveling, because she didn’t need to think about any of the more complicated parts of Perk combination. All she had to do was choose from a list of available Perks.

There were three options to choose from. The first one was nothing special - it was just a general [Intelligence] and [Magic] boost. Alice discarded that one. The second one was better.

Enchanting Beliefs Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 50 or higher, Have a Reasonable Level of understanding about how humans and enchantments can be combined, have at least 1 Rarity 10 Achievement, Magic stat of 100 or higher, have interacted with ‘belief mana’ and used it to serve your own needs and wants

You gain the ability to better integrate Belief mana into enchantments by making your enchantments somewhat capable of filtering themselves. Enchantments that you create while this Perk is active will have some ability to reject beliefs ‘outside’ of what you want to be part of your enchantment, while they will be more accommodating towards beliefs you actively want to integrate into your enchantments.

This Perk was pretty obviously useful to Alice. She had been working with belief mana for far too short of a time, and yet Alice was running into more and more situations where belief mana would be useful. The interaction between human beliefs and mana was integral to patching up parts of the System that she didn’t understand.

Normally, Alice would scoff at the idea of not taking the time to fully understand something before using it. After all, her primary beliefs about reality and the way people interacted with it was that understanding was king. It was the core of how humans advanced through the ages, how science worked, why science was important, and the basis for how she made decisions and took actions. Intentionally trying to get around her lack of understanding by using an untested and somewhat unpredictable tool was, in her eyes, foolish.

Unfortunately, this was not a situation where she could afford to spent time perfectly understanding everything before taking action. Too many people were dying around the world. Every second that she wasted, every day that she made a wrong decision, people died. Alice needed to move, even if it meant relying on belief-strings of mana instead of ensuring she had a perfect understanding of mana before moving forward. As much as she didn’t like it, {Enchanting Beliefs} would fill in a gap in her abilities that she needed to fill.

Alice took a quick glance at the third Perk, in hopes that it would provide her with a better option. Sadly, the System did not oblige.

Enchanted Framework Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 50 or higher

Upon completing an enchantment for the first time each day, a moderate ‘correction’ will be applied to the enchantment, making it work more in line with your aspirations for what the enchantment was supposed to look like. Does not apply to enchantments that fall significantly outside of the parameters of ‘regular’ enchantments (such as human enchantments).

This Perk was kind of interesting, and Alice suspected it would have been great for making Artifacts, if she combined it with a few other things and reached Immortality with a focus on enchanting. Unfortunately, Alice was not focused on Artifact creation or enchantments. This Perk failed to meet most of her current needs, and did almost nothing to help her solve the crisis.

 Thus, with a bizarre mixture of distaste and acceptance, Alice grabbed {Enchanting Beliefs}.

With that, Alice was down to her last two Perk choices. And, unfortunately, they were also the most complicated Perk choices. Perk combination was never easy, because there was so much choice

in what she could do. Alice decided to start with [Scholar], because that tended to be a Class that gave her more magically-oriented options, and Alice decided that she wanted one more combat boost if she could get it. Even though Alice was still mostly focusing her Perk choices on solving the crisis, there was no reason not to at least make herself a bit harder to assassinate, and make it a bit harder for the average monster to end her life. Alice couldn’t help anyone if she ended up inside of a monster’s stomach.

Alice glanced at her available Tier 1 Perks… and realized there were only two left in [Scholar]. {Photographic Memory} and {Rhetorical Flourish}. Alice doubted those two Perks would actually create anything useful if she fused them together, and a quick check of the System’s predicted ‘net result’ confirmed her suspicions. There was no point in wasting a Perk combination on a half-useless result. Thus, she decided to take a new Perk instead of combining old Perks. It was a bit disappointing as her final level 50-75 Perk choice, but Alice would live with it.

She looked at the new Perk options. There were four, but only one of them aligned with her current needs - and it did so well enough that the other three just weren’t worth considering.

True Scholar of Magic Requirements: Scholar level 75 or greater, extensive experience interacting with and manipulating belief mana, have at least ten major types of ‘belief mana’ applied to you (Achievements count)

You gain greater ability to filter and alter belief mana, so long as you don’t fundamentally alter the ‘core’ of the beliefs you are interacting with. Rather than simply waiting for belief mana to assign itself to whatever the focus of its ‘belief’ is, you may now actively make an object ‘pull in’ related belief mana (this costs a small amount of any type of mana to activate).

Even more Perks that interacted with belief mana were exactly what Alice wanted right now. She still needed to figure out a way to stabilize the world, and while she was hoping the Artifact Demor was working with would solve that problem, having more ways to help out or work on a backup plan were definitely needed. This Perk explicitly referenced ‘filtering’ belief mana, and while Alice wasn’t completely sure what that meant, she was hopeful that she would find it useful, at least.

Then, Alice turned her attention towards her final Perk. Much like [Scholar], [Scientist] only had a few surviving perks that hadn’t already been used for Perk combination. Alice debated using one of the few remaining Perks, but couldn’t find any combinations that were useful for her immediate goals, so she decided to go for a new Perk instead. The level 75 [Scientist] Perk had four options. However, none of them were immediately useful, much to Alice’s disappointment. Since that was the case, Alice decided to grab the most interesting looking Perk. It was a long-term growth Perk, much like the ones she had been explicitly trying to avoid because she was running out of time… but the other Perks were just not useful enough to justify taking.

True Researcher of Magic Requirements: Scientist level 75 or greater, extensive experience researching different types of mana, at least one Class devoted to interacting with and exploring the nature of magic, at least 1 rarity 10 Achievement focused on magical research, at least 3 Rarity 5 or greater Achievements related to researching magic

You gain a type of ‘overflow’ Seed, which allows you to store excess mana based on the number of major discoveries you have made and how much they have contributed to the world. Note: This Perk does NOT quite function as a new magic seed - it is a separate storage which allows you to store mana you regenerate beyond your maximum storage capacity. It can store any type of mana, but does not change your regeneration rate. Any type of mana can be stored without issue.

The moment Alice took this Perk, she felt her magic start to surge and bubble, almost like a soup that had been left in the pot for too long. A moment later, she felt a new sense of emptiness inside of her mage core. The feeling was bizarre - but still useful.

Alice tried to feel out her new storage area, and after some testing, determined that the storage capacity was actually quite a bit larger than she had been expecting. Alice suspected she could store about 3,000 Mariums of mana inside of it, although she would need to do more testing to get more precise numbers. Either way, it was a very welcome addition to her abilities - Alice had often bemoaned how little storage capacity she had for some of her mana types, such as dimensional mana. This offered a solution, although she wished it also improved her regeneration rate.

Even though the Perk wasn’t a magic bullet that solved all of her problems, Alice grinned.

With such a huge boost in her storage capacity, she could take much greater strides in integrating dimensional mana into her fighting style. She was already starting to rely on her new portal strategy for cheating when it came to mana tendril ranges, and having a way to reinforce that strategy was incredibly useful. It might not totally change everything… but it was still a massive boost. Even more importantly, she could also use it to store things like her compound mana, ensuring that she could help more people.

Then, she turned her attention back to Jonathan. based on the levels and Achievement she had just gotten, Alice was pretty sure she had created a working version of the System. She would need to observe him for a few days to make sure she understood what was happening, but… it was time to focus on the other part of the equation. It was time to check in with Demor and see if they could solve the manaborn monster and terrain crisis. Then, if all went well, it would be time to return to Illvaria and see if Murim had returned.