A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

The next morning, Alice’s mana had regenerated enough for her to start doing things again. The first thing she did was filter all of her class mana, and then finally start looking through her System messages. She was no longer as exhausted as before, so it was a good time to pick new Perks and see what levels she had gained during the battle.

You have leveled up!

Scientist: 68 -> 70, Scholar 67 -> 68, Explorer of Magic 87 -> 88, Kinetic Manabinder 54 -> 57, Careful Enchanter 36 -> 38

Her rewards for participating in the fight had been quite generous this time. Most likely, it was because Alice had experimented with different ways to use her mana during the fight, giving her a lot of experience points for all of her related classes. She didn’t get a new Achievement, which was a little sad, but she was still happy with her progress during the fight. More importantly, she had two new Perks to choose. One for [Scientist] and one for [Kinetic Manabinder]. Alice scanned her Status Screen again, and fell into thought.

If she had enough time, she might be able to get three new Perks, instead of two. [Legendary Organic Mage] was probably pretty close to level 10 by now, and she was very interested in seeing what Perks came out of that class. She was currently in the middle of a city, so it was certainly possible to find and heal injured people. She had recovered a good chunk of her mana while working on her Magic image at night, so she could spare a bit of mana to finish pushing the class to level 10.

The other exciting thing to think about was the magic image she had been working on in [Magic Modelling]. She wasn’t quite done with it yet, but she could probably finish it in three or four hours of work. In other words, as long as she didn’t need to pay attention to the road as the group travelled, she would finish it today.

Two new Perks, followed by finishing the next step in a research project, and also unlocking a third Perk. Today promised to be a very exciting day. After she finished scanning her improvements, she started looking through her [Scientist] Perks. The first thing to check was whether she wanted to combine Perks, or make a completely new Perk.

{Mana Measurement} doesn’t really need to be evolved into a new skill. It does exactly what it’s supposed to. {Sample Collection} is basically just a storage Perk… but it’s totally fine if it remains as a storage Perk. Having a portable inventory I can bring with me is far too convenient to give up. {Safety Analysis} is far too useful to give up. {Shared Memory}… isn’t the most useful of Perks, but I still do get occasional use out of it. I wouldn’t mind combining it with another Perk, but I am also not sure if it would impact my mental health. Being able to share my memories of Earth with Cecilia and chat with her does wonders for my mood. {Advanced Mana Measurement} is just an upgraded version of {Mana Measurement}, but I very much appreciate being able to measure mana near me. As for {For Science}, the Perk is far, far too useful to give up.

Alice started scratching her head as she looked through her Perks.

The problem with [Scientist] Perks was that she wasn’t willing to give up any of them. Perk combination usually made Perks better, but they also usually changed some of how a Perk worked. At least for her [Scientist] Perks, she wasn’t willing to give up her current ability repertoire. This wasn’t a problem she had with most of her other Class Perks, since most Classes had at least a few Perks she ended up taking and then stopped using later on. But all of her [Scientist] Perks had remained relevant, making it difficult to combine any of them into anything.

Eventually, Alice sighed, and decided to grab a new Perk instead.

There were only two Perk options, which was a bit low, so Alice gave both of them a careful read before she made a choice.

The first one was rather odd, but interesting.

Experimental Duplication

Requirements: Scientist level 70 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Enchanter Class at level 35 or higher, Have experimented on at least 100 different types of material, have some interest in continued experiments on some form of physical object.

You may spend mana to create copies of materials that you are currently experimenting on. This mana may be paid from any magic seed, but the closer the mana seed is to in concept to whatever you are trying to duplicate, the lower the mana cost. (Cost of created material is based on weight and magical compatibility of item – items, such as iron that can hold dozens of enchantment-related instructions, costs far more per gram of matter than, ordinary iron).

Note: creation of physical matter using mana is expensive! Proceed with caution!

The Perk literally let her create matter out of mana. Considering the fact that Alice was still pretty sure mana obviated the laws of thermodynamics, that meant that she could theoretically create infinite matter. At least, if she had infinite time. Alice was more than a little amused by that idea, but at the same time, she suspected it wasn’t that relevant to her current situation. She started trying to analyze the pros and cons of the Perk.

The Perk had some risk to it, because Alice had no idea how expensive matter creation actually was. If it took thousands of Mariums to create one gram of ordinary physical matter, the Perk would be basically useless. Alice was getting up there in stats and mana total, but she was nowhere near someone like Ethan’s total mana capacity. However, if the cost was even semi-reasonable, it gave Alice another way to address some of the material shortage problems that Illvaria had run into after the crisis started. For now, enchanting materials were being shipped north from Cyra, giving the country a source to draw System-enchantment materials from… but there was no guarantee that Cyra would remain stable and that the shipping line wouldn’t be harmed. In addition, there was a distinct possibility that some sort of rare material might be involved in creating artificial magic seeds – in which case, having a way to duplicate more might be a matter of life or death once Alice reached that point.

Alice was actually pretty interested in the Perk when she thought of it like that, but it was also a very narrow use-case for a scenario that might not happen.

The other one was even more odd, but also considerably more interesting.

Experimental Magic

Requirements: Scientist level 70 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, At least 3 different Primary Classes are magic-related and above level 30, Magic stat of 150 or higher, At least 3 Achievements of rarity 8 or greater

You gain a magic seed which is ‘experimental.’ It is always at 100% mana conversion ratio, and this total cannot be influenced by any other Perks, Achievements, etc.

This magic seed can change what type of mana it produces at any time. It can only produce non-compound types of mana.

Note: While this Perk changes the type of mana PRODUCED, it does not change what is already present in the seed. This Perk will prevent any conflicts between the present types of mana, but you still need to wait for more mana to be generated if you want to experiment with a new type of mana.

{Experimental Magic} was… interesting. Very interesting.

Alice had a long list of types of mana that she was pretty sure System mana needed to work. There were obvious clues about some things that System mana could do that simply necessitated certain types of mana – such as Math mana and Communication mana. However, Alice was also sometimes guessing at exactly what a mana type did, or how it worked.

This Perk promised to fix that, at least to some extent. It would give her a lot more versatility in what types of mana she had access to, by letting her swap around her magic seed at any time. It would also give her a lot of room to play with different types of mana combinations. It was very difficult to combine different types of mana together if they weren’t part of the same seed, but it wasn’t as impossible as she once suspected. Her communication-disrupting magic from last battle proved that. This Perk promised to offer a whole new world of possibilities if Alice was clever about how she used it. It would also enhance her combat abilities. Alice had used up most of her anti-magic mana during the battle yesterday, and also used up all of her dimensional mana during the fight. Being able to have a seed that could swap between combat and research at any time would give her far more mana to work with in various situations.

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Of course, it would also require that she carefully prepare her mana reserves in advance. But Alice didn’t think that was a difficult task. She would just leave it producing dimensional or anti-magic mana unless she had a specific experiment to run.

This Perk… was not bad at all. In fact, Alice was sorely tempted to take it. The one and only reason she still found herself drifting back towards the first Perk was fear. If she needed some sort of specific material to keep the world from dying, and she was stuck with [Experimental Magic] instead, Alice would curse herself.

On the other hand… [Experimental Magic] would speed up some of her experiments. She wouldn’t have to think carefully about some of her seed choices when [System’s Ambition] came off cooldown, because she would already know exactly what building blocks she needed next. Most importantly, the [Experimental Magic] seed would have a lot of other utility. There were probably dozens of use cases for it, and it would make it easy to get more of any type of mana she needed, without any limits.

Alice spent a few minutes thinking about the choice, before finally, she chose [Experimental Magic].

If she truly needed [Experimental Duplication], she would be able to pick it up at level 75. However, Alice thought it was a bit too much of a waste to spend a Perk on something she might need and might have no specific use for. In addition, she was also still uncertain how much mana it would cost to make matter using the first Perk. The Perk was interesting, and potentially very powerful, but it also had a lot of risk in that it might turn out to be useless.

Afterwards, Alice felt a new Magic seed appear inside of her mage core. When she focused on it, she had a certain feeling that she could choose what it produced. For now, Alice swapped it to dimensional mana. It would be useful if they encountered the horde of monsters while exiting the city, since dimensional mana made it much easier and safer to snipe problem targets using kinetic mana. When it was halfway full, she would swap it to anti-magic mana.

After that, Alice focused on her next Perk choice. This time, it was for [Kinetic Manabinder]. It was also her first time that she had a chance for Perk combination for the class… and it was also a Class where she had taken an ‘apprentice’ version of the class before progressing to the normal version.

In other words, Alice had a lot of choices for what to do with Perk combination. Frankly, it was an overwhelming number of choices. There were so many different combinations that Alice spend dozens of minutes just sorting through what could and couldn’t be combined into a useful Perk. But after much consideration, Alice finally settled on a few different options for what she could toss together.

The first thing she ruled out was direct improvements to her combat power.

While Alice still wanted to be able to defend herself, for now, her strength was adequate. It was nowhere near the pinnacle of proper combatants in this world, but it was far from bad. Alice had also improved her combat ability with {Experimental Magic} already, so there was no need to lean further into it.

Instead, Alice decided to focus on her enchanting skills. [Kinetic Manabinder] had also been a sort of hybrid class, one that focused on both enchanting and combat as a kinetic mage. Since artificial magic seeds were created by Immortals focused on enchanting, Alice needed to boost her enchanting capabilities and then hope that she had everything she needed to mimic the feat normally only reserved for Immortals. Any help that improved her enchanting capabilities would help with that, especially those focused on the quality of her work.

When Alice focused on her enchanting-related Perks, she had five that contributed to her prowess as an enchanter. {Speed Analysis}, {Overclock}, {Kinetic Enchanting}, {Enhanced Focus}, and {Mana’s Binding}.

Based off of what results she could see, {Mana’s Binding} combined well with all five other Perks, so Alice decided to include that as the first building block in her new combined Perk.

Mana's Binding

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 5 or higher

When creating an enchantment using Kinetic Energy, the enchantment will become much more resilient against wear and tear, and also makes your enchantments more resistant to damage from both internal and external factors. Finally, this Perk helps and improve the internal stability of kinetic enchantments.

It was a Perk that had been with her for a long time, and it was still mildly helpful… but Alice honestly didn’t need the Perk anymore. It was more of a minor passive boost to her enchantments than anything else. At this point, she could do without it. Hopefully, combining it with another Perk would elevate the Perk to the point where it was useful again.

After that, Alice started figuring out which Perks to exclude. {Overclock} boosted the speed at which she made enchantments, but that wasn’t relevant to the quality of her work. It affected quantity far more. Right now, Alice wanted to focus on quality. {Kinetic Enchanting} was more of a way to buff whatever materials she was working on, rather than a direct boost to her enchanting, so it was also ignored. That left {Speed Analysis}, which let her do things with enchantments that weren’t normally available to her, such as allowing her enchantments to detect velocity, and {Enhanced Focus}, which let her focus better while working on an enchantment. {Enhanced Focus} was more of a production speed boost than a quality boost… but since it also helped her focus while working, it was also sort of a quality boost, in a sense. After all, someone who was focused on their work made less mistakes and made better products.

Alice thought about it for a few more minutes, to make sure she was happy with her choice, and then decided to use {Speed Analysis} as the second component of her new Perk. It just seemed to fit what she wanted much better.

Speed Analysis

Requirements: Kinetic Manabinder level 40, Intelligence 150 or Greater, Perception 100 or Greater, Great amount of time spent trying to manipulate object speeds using Enchantments

You may attach an additional ‘sensing’ function to any Enchantments you make. This allows you to make objects sense how quickly or slowly an object is moving, and use this to trigger other, more conditional components of enchantments.

Alice didn’t hesitate for long before she combined the two Perks.

Speed Analysis and Manipulation (Tier 2 Perk, level 55 Kinetic Manabinder) (Level 40 Kinetic Manabinder Perk + Level 5 Kinetic Manabinder Perk)

Perk Costs: Speed Analysis + Mana’s Binding

All of your enchantments become slightly connected to the concept of ‘kinetic energy.’ This allows them do detect any kinetic energy in nearby objects and use that detection as trigger conditions for other parts of the Perk, or directly warp the kinetic energy of nearby objects.

Alice blinked in surprise.

That… was not quite what she had expected.

Alice had been hoping that the Perk combination would somehow make her general enchanting abilities stronger, or perhaps add in a few more things that let her close the distance between her enchantments and the enchantments of an Immortal.

Instead, her enchantments were now innately connected to the concept of ‘kinetic energy,’ apparently. Which was a term she had never seen before, and she had no idea what it actually meant. The System’s description for her new Perk was less than helpful.

Alice frowned, before she decided that if the System description was vague, she would just have to test it out herself.

She left the inn and grabbed a few raw enchanting materials from a nearby enchanting shop, and then started tinkering with them. After some tinkering, she confirmed that it was now possible to do a few things that were interesting with her enchantments.

Before, it had been somewhat difficult to make her enchantments sense the speed of other objects. Now, however, it was much, much easier to get the whole setup working. It also didn’t cost any instruction slots anymore, meaning that she could add in far more detailed if/then statements into her enchantments without needing to improve the quality of her materials.

However, that wasn’t the interesting part. The interesting part was that some of the enchantments she could make were… different than before. Specifically, it was as the Perk noted – her enchanted objects could now interfere with the way velocity worked… or at least, that was what Alice thought was happening.

When she tried out an enchantment that slowed down objects in its area, rather than just spending mana to slow things down, it felt more like the enchantment created a small field of space where velocity itself was slowed down. Or something. Alice had a hard time putting it into more precise words than that, because it was hard to evaluate exactly what was happening. Alice wasn’t even sure if this was better or worse than just targeting specific objects and then slowing them down by spending mana. She was, at least, intrigued by the change. She would need to experiment more to figure out how to actually use this – or if there was any use for it at all.

Eventually, Alice sighed and put it aside for now. Perhaps when she met the Immortal [Enchanter] she would have a better idea what to do with her new Perk. They were pretty close to their destination now, after all.

After that, Alice found a few people in town and healed them up. She cured problems of both the class-mana variety, and more mundane injuries. By the time she was low on mana, Alice had gotten the other thing she was hoping for.

You have leveled up!

Legendary Organic Mage: 9 -> 10

Alice grinned to herself. It was time to see what her new Perk did. And right after that, she would finally finish her second image of a mana gem, and she could start doing some comparisons.