A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World-Chapter 209

The next day, Alice noticed a small, subtle difference in the world. It was slight, but she could feel… something different about her.

She checked her body, and utilized her various mana-senses to get a better idea of what had changed. A moment later, she grinned.

It was just a tiny thread of mana… but she could see small bits of belief mana gathering inside of her body, just as she had hoped. Alice had expected it to gather inside of her mana gem and turn into a new Achievement, which hadn’t happened yet - but Alice suspected that it would happen sooner or later. Perhaps she had some sort of final requirement to create a Perk that she hadn’t reached yet, or something of the sort. Either way, the little thread of mana would be incredibly useful, if it was doing what she thought it was doing. Alice could receive multiple benefits from getting the [Priests of the System] to spread news about her, but the biggest thing she was hoping to do was replicate parts of the Society’s experiment.

Still, Alice was rather surprised. Was this belief mana really what she thought it was? IT hadn’t even been 24 hours since she first met with the [Priests of the System]. How had they gotten word out so fast? Alice suddenly felt wary. What if she was jumping to conclusions about what the belief mana in her body represented? She frowned, and made her way towards Ethan’s room, before she knocked on the door.

Ethan opened the door a moment later.

“Ethan, I have a question. The [Priests of the System] that we met with yesterday… have they already gotten to work?” she asked.

“Yes. I was going to tell you after breakfast, but last night, a few of them held sermons discussing your efforts to contain the collapse of the System. While the number of people who firmly believe in the System have decreased pretty significantly over the last few months, there are still a good number of believers. The church is also filled with a new demographic of people - those hoping the church has some secret path to salvation. When the [Priests of the System] held a sudden meeting last night, while they didn’t have a full church, they had a good number of people show up. When they talked about your attempts to fix the System… well, it met the hopes of a lot of people. Especially once the [Priests of the System] stated your name and description, since it looks like rumors about you are spreading. Having an official announcement back up rumors seems to have solidified people’s thoughts about you… at least, that’s what I’m guessing.” Ethan shrugged. “Since you came here, I’m assuming it worked, right?”

Alice nodded. “It did,” she said. “I think. I have a little thread of belief mana in my body now. I have yet to figure out what it does, but I can see it’s there.”

Ethan nodded. “In that case, I can confirm the [Priests of the System] are doing what they promised. You should go test things out to make sure they worked,” said Ethan, before he frowned. “Just be careful. I trust that you know what you’re doing, but I would hate to lose such a promising apprentice to a moment of carelessness. This stuff could be helpful… but it could be dangerous as well.”

Alice sighed. “I know. I’m going to keep a close eye on my thoughts and emotions, and if I feel like something is wrong I’ll stop immediately and find a way to remove the mana before it hurts me. I don’t want to die either.”

Ethan’s expression relaxed.

“All right. Sounds good. Let me know how your next experiment goes after you finish up.”

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After that, Alice went to find Jonathan, before she requested his help testing another magic seed. While Jonathan seemed rather tired from the neverending stream of attempts to make a [Fisherman] magic seed, he agreed to help again. However, he did ask Alice to see if she could hurry the research progress along a bit. According to Jonathan, his son’s [Explorer] class mana was starting to cause more and more problems, and Jonathan was getting very nervous about it. Alice moved Jonathan to another room, before she began working on building another [Fisherman] Class Seed for him.

This time, there was something different about her work. The belief mana’s impact on her mindset and work progress was both more and less noticeable than she had hoped it would be. The first thing Alice noticed was that the belief mana seemed to have a small but noticeable impact on her ‘instincts.’ While people might not know exactly how the System worked behind the scenes, it seemed like that didn’t matter. The belief mana in her body was still giving her a small, subtle boost when she tried to work with her own, unique brand of System mana.

It took Alice a few more minutes to figure out exactly how the ‘boost’ worked. It wasn’t giving her information she had never had before - it was more like it boosted her intuition when she tried to use information she already knew. It also seemed to make it easier for her to observe mana in her surroundings, although this boost was a lot more subtle. After all, Alice already had so many different boosts to her perception of mana that one more was surprisingly difficult to track.

Even though the little strands of belief mana weren’t just giving her the answer, Alice was still glad to have a small perception boost. Anything that made her path easier was welcome right now.

Once Alice got a rough idea what had changed within her own mind, she got back to work

The first thing she tried doing was re-implementing her old version of a Class seed. Just like last time, she used {Star of Mana} to create a dense oval of stabilization mana, [Fisherman] mana, and density mana, as well as a bit of pulling mana to drag in the rest of the [Fisherman] mana in Jonathan’s body.

This time, Alice didn’t let the magic seed settle. After all, she had many, many more types of mana to integrate into the magic seed. She started stuffing more types of mana into the glowing oval of mana. Math mana, pure mana, communication mana… every type of mana that Alice knew was part of the System was added into the mana framework that she had created. Alice still wasn’t entirely sure how to make all of these different types of mana work together, but she hoped that her newly integrated belief mana, as well as a final boost from other people’s belief that she was fixing the System, would help her create a working Class Seed, despite the gaps in her knowledge.

Just like in Alice’s previous tests, Jonathan’s new [Fisherman] class seed started to absorb all of the [Fisherman] mana in his body. Within a few minutes, Jonathan seemed to feel a bit relieved. However, the magic seed itself was also becoming less and less stable, just like last time. Alice noticed that the instability of the magic seed was progressing far more quickly than before. She wasn’t entirely sure what to make of that. Was it a problem with the quantity of [Fisherman] mana in his body, or was there some other issue that was causing the magic seed to collapse more quickly? Either way, Alice had no doubt that it would collapse under its own weight soon.

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This time, Alice felt a small nudge from the belief mana in her body. She frowned, as she tried to process what her belief mana was directing her to do. Then, she focused on one of the core regions of the magic seed she was trying to create, and started increasing the density of the magic seed to create a little dense ball of mana, almost like a black hole.

Last time, the problem with the magic seed had been that it had no way to sustain itself long-term. Alice hadn’t known how to create Perks and Levels, so the seed had imploded. However, this time, Alice had started out by injecting most of the ‘correct’ types of mana into the magic seed, and the belief mana in her body seemed to be directing her to just keep making it more dense.

Even as the magic seed grew more and more dense, the mental nudge in her brain kept urging her to press forward. To keep going and going and going until something happened.

Alice started to feel a bit uneasy, but several checks with {Safety Analysis} told her that she wasn’t doing something dangerous. At least, not yet. Combined with the persistent nudge in her mind, Alice started to suspect that she was actually heading in the correct direction.

As Alice watched the sinkhole of mana spread, she started to get another type of ‘nudge’ from her belief mana. It wasn’t anything like a set of instructions - instead, it was more as if the belief mana was telling her to pay attention to something.

Then, more belief mana started to drift towards Jonathan’s new Fisherman seed. Alice blinked in surprise. The thread of belief mana almost like it was worming its way into the nexus of mana, like an earthworm burrowing into soil. Something changed about the core of the dense cyclone of mana, although it wasn’t entirely obvious what had changed. However, Alice blinked in surprise, as a guess started to creep into her thoughts.

How were classes made?

They were clearly made when enough people believed that some kind of job existed, as far as Alice could tell. After all, classes had obviously sprung up in the past, even after the System was created. Alice also knew that Classes had died out in the past, whenever their use became irrelevant. Furthermore, she knew that sometimes Perks would increase or decrease their level requirement based on technology and knowledge spreading, making it less valuable over time.

So perhaps ‘belief mana’ was inherently tied to how a Class seed itself was created? Perhaps that was also needed for the ‘baseline’ of the Class seed she was trying to create.

Alice started trying to use pure mana to nudge more belief mana towards Jonathan’s new class seed core, and at the same time, focused on what she believed a [Fisherman] needed.

Alice didn’t know much about Fishermen. She didn’t really like fishing to begin with. But she at least understood the basics. [Fishermen] got fish. They might do so by using a net to pull in fish. They might use spears or fishing lines to catch fish in a river. They might catch fish in a river, in order to survive. Or they might fish out in the open ocean. However, the core of a [Fisherman] was to catch fish, either with or without tools.

They also needed [Strength], to pull in fish. They needed [Endurance], to work long hours out in the ocean. They needed [Willpower], to patiently wait for the right moment to reel in a fish they had caught.

As Alice imagined all of this, she was struck by a sudden thought.

Did this world even have fishing poles? Those were a pretty recent, modern invention, weren’ they?

This stray thought nearly caused all of Alice’s hard work to implode, as her sudden doubt in her own beliefs caused the magic seed to swirl chaotically around. Alice managed to catch her stray thoughts and straighten out her beliefs before the magic seed imploded. She de-emphasized her thoughts about fishing lines and hooks, and focused more on things like spears and nets.

After nearly two minutes, Alice felt the mana in front of her start to stabilize. She grinned, as she saw the magic seed flash several times. However, something about it still felt wrong. It was almost functioning… but it wasn’t quite done yet.

Alice used {Raw Mana Enchanting}, to help stabilize the entire framework… and then used {Star of Mana} to compress the magic seed again.

The second round of compression made the magic seed shrink. Alice realized it was still missing something - the seed was more complete than before, but it was still imperfect. She still needed to ‘program’ the seed so that it would stitch together [Fisherman] mana and Perks, and use those to stabilize any new growths in the magic seed. She started trying to copy the little bits and pieces of the Perk library from [Fisherman Mana] into the magic seed, and hoped that it would work.

This met with a lot more problems, because Alice barely understood how the Perk library worked. Her understanding of Perk Libraries was nowhere near complete, and she still only had a rough idea what she was doing. However, by now, Alice had at least started to figure out how Perk libraries worked.

Perk Libraries were, as far as she could tell, self-contained chunks of data stored inside of each Class seed. They had a giant list of blueprints that a class seed could use at different levels, in order to give someone a Perk every five levels. Each ‘blueprint’ was, as far as she could tell from her studies, basically a picture of a certain mana configuration. Class seeds somehow took these pictures and turned them back into ‘stitches,’ which helped hold Class seeds together. Alice didn’t understand how this stitching process worked… but she didn’t need to understand it perfectly. She did her best to stuff images of [Fisherman] Perks into Jonathan’s forming [Fisherman] seed, based on the somewhat blurry images she had from her own [Fisherwoman] Class seed. Then, Alice hoped that belief mana would fill in all of the little gaps and bits of information she was still missing.

The magic seed started absorbing the mana she fed it like a man dying of thirst who had found a bottle of water. The little threads of belief mana in her environment did… something to it - some kind of enchanting technique Alice had never seen before. She wasn’t quite sure what it was, but she would have time to study it later. For now, she cared about one thing.

After the magic seed absorbed Alice’s somewhat blurry and imperfect Perk library, it changed again. It started devouring Jonathan’s [Fisherman] mana even more rapidly, and as it did so, it also started to stabilize. It started flashing with brighter and brighter rainbow colors, before it dimmed again. Then, its body started to swell and tear itself apart, but every time it grew to a certain size, instead of exploding, all of the extra growth would get shoved into a new lump of mana. The magic seed kept growing, and growing, and growing as it absorbed Jonathan’s mana… until finally, the tenth lump of mana was formed.

Then, the magic seed glowed for a moment, before it automatically extracted a random Perk from inside, and copied the picture to form a new, random Perk. This new stitch of mana held the whole thing together, keeping the Class seed from imploding as it grew one more lump of mana.

Then, the Class seed ran out of {Fisherman] mana. Alice resisted the urge to cackle in delight.

{Safety Analysis} said that the seed was safe. The Class seed looked like it was stable. Sure, the whole thing was reliant on belief mana to keep functioning, so it wasn’t quite as perfect as the System’s Class seeds. It had also picked a perk at random, instead of letting Jonathan choose the Perk he wanted. However, Alice was pretty sure that she had finally done it.

“Jonathan, do you have a new secondary Class?” asked Alice.

He frowned for a moment, before he nodded.

“Yes, I do. I have [Fisherman] level 11 - a new secondary Class. I also got an Achievement called ‘Improvised Class,’ which has a bunch of different effects. Some are at least sort of combat related, so I won’t talk about them - but it significantly boosts the rate at which I level up my [Fisherman] Class, among other things.”

Alice couldn’t resist it this time. She started cackling. After the seed had been completed, she hadn’t needed to interfere at all. It had worked. She had finally created a functioning System seed on her own. It might not look exactly like a proper Class seed - it was still missing some mana types from the original System. It might not have all of the quality of life features that a proper System Class seed did, such as Perk selection. But those were less important. What mattered was that she finally had a working product. She had created a functioning, if imperfect, Class seed.

Mana started to flood towards her.