With her first monster successfully slain, Alice felt a lot more confident in her survival in this world. Even though she had suffered a wound during the fight, it was a minor one, and as time passed she would get more Levels, Skills, and Achievements to work with. Since she had survived her first fight with a monster at her current level of strength, she could definitely survive future battles as her strength grew. For the first time, Alice felt prepared for the world around her, something that she wouldn’t have even been able to imagine three weeks ago.

However, after her crab meat party, she was starting to pay attention to other, less important problems. Previously, she had no way to address some of these problems, but now that she had solved fundamental problems like disease, food, and warmth, she was able to pay attention to details she had previously ignored. One thing that definitely hadn’t fared well over the last three weeks were her pajamas, which were growing more and more ragged as time passed. In the past three weeks, she had torn off part of the pajama sleeves to use as bandages, been injured by monsters twice, and gotten the pajamas scratched up as she wandered through the forest. Pajamas were never particularly sturdy in the first place, and by this point they were incredibly ragged after all of the abuse she had put them through.

Alice looked at the remains of her feast, then looked at Spidercrab’s chitin, trying to figure out if there was anything she could do to make it into clothing.

That’s not happening. Not only is there an ick factor, but I don’t think I can bend it without breaking it. Is there any use for this chitin shell at all?

Alice looked at her hastily built walls for the cave, and then at the round shell. Maybe it could be used as a construction material?

That was probably a terrible use of it. Hmm. Actually, it’s pretty close to the right shape for a bowl. Is it flammable? Alice shrugged, got a pile of snow, and tried boiling a bowl of water in the shell. Her previously made stone bowl had required a huge amount of labor to take shape, so if she could use the spidercrab shells as bowls to store food and supplies it would save her a lot of time in the future. Even after Alice exposed it to her campfire, the shell didn’t catch fire or show any adverse reactions to being heated up. After a while, she had a bowl of boiled water. She shrugged, and grinned to herself. So it does make a good bowl.

However, that didn’t solve her clothing problem. She looked, with some regret, towards her blanket, which was already missing two strips of fabric, and wondered if there was a way to make it into a new set of clothes.

Hmm… I think it’s possible, but I need some sort of needle, as well as a way to make thread. I have neither, and I definitely wouldn’t succeed in making stone needles if I tried. Maybe bone?

Alice looked at the remains of Spidercrab again, but saw no materials in the corpse that could solve her problem. After a while, she sighed. This was something she felt should be doable, but she just had no idea how to do it. Maybe she should fold it up and turn it into a toga when she returned to civilization. At least it would be better than her ragged pajamas, and she would be less likely to be mistaken for a beggar. Her pajamas would hold for a while longer, so it wasn't an immediate concern, but having better clothing to ward off the cold would have certainly been nice. She really wished she could go get something from a clothing store, though it was clearly impossible in this world right now.

At the thought of civilization, a familiar, growing pang of loneliness shot through her. It had been nearly a month since she had heard another human voice, and she had no one and nothing to talk to. There were some days where she swore that she heard human voices in the distance, and would get excited and rush towards them, only to find that nobody was there. Right now, her only companion was her Status Screen.

Alice sighed and looked back at the river. The book and the corpse had been washed downstream by the currents, which meant something was farther upstream. That being said, she had no clue why the corpse had no heart, and she felt all sorts of uneasy about what that meant. Perhaps a monster had killed the guy and eaten his heart, before his body was tossed into the river? Or maybe pirates had killed the man? Alice was afraid of walking right into the middle of a bandit camp and getting stabbed, although she had no better leads on where to find civilization either.

After a few minutes of thought, Alice sighed to herself. It was useless to speculate right now. In any case, without the cave, her ability to survive the journey north was still dubious. The weather was too cold, and the potential danger of stronger monsters meant she had to remain wary of her surroundings at all time. Any attempts to contact civilization would need to wait until winter ended.

* * *

A week after Alice had successfully slain her first monster, her wounds finally healed up. Her attempt at smoking monster meat had, for whatever reason, failed. On the bright side, Alice had gotten the idea of using the cold temperature and some {Stoneworking} to make a small fridge for herself, considering how easy it was to acquire snow right now. This idea worked much better than her attempts at creating smoked monster meat, and had even netted her another level in [Survivor]. Due to her training, she had also gotten another level in [Explorer of Magic], giving her another perk choice.

She carefully thought over the three Perk choices, before she chose {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}. The Perk description finally allowed Alice to understand why half of her mana seemed to vanish during the fight with spidercrab. While inanimate objects had no particular resistance to her moving them around, it seemed that living creatures had some sort of innate resistance to external mana influences, or at least that was what the Perk made it sound like. Since Alice needed her Magic to improve her fighting odds against even weaker monsters right now, Alice chose {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}because it improved her combat ability and food-gathering ability at the same time. That simply felt too appealing to pass up.

On a side note, this was the third time a Perk choice from [Explorer of Magic] had offered her another Magic Seed, which Alice found quite interesting. She was beginning to suspect that it was somehow related to the Class, based on its name and the Perks it had given her so far. If she took the name [Explorer of Magic] literally, the Class seemed focused on learning about Magic and how it worked, and if that was true, having access to more Magic seeds would absolutely make it easier to learn more. However, Alice still didn’t want another Magic Seed that much. Even though Alice was very curious about how Magic Seeds worked, she still wanted to focus on her Kinetic Seed for now. She fully intended to pick up some more magic seeds eventually if her class kept offering them to her, but that was a plan for the future.

Apart from her new perk option, her magic attribute finally reached 50 after her week of training. After reaching 50, Alice noticed that the growth of the attribute had dramatically slowed down. Before, it advanced by leaps and bounds, sometimes going up by multiple points after a single intense training session. After it reached fifty, it slowed to a crawl, at least in comparison. From this Alice guessed that every 50 points in an Attribute there was some sort of ‘major reduction’ in growth speed. It would explain why she had such a hard time increasing Attributes like [Intelligence], while stats like [Strength] and [Endurance] had grown rapidly when she first entered this world.

Alice noted this for future reference, and continued training her physical stats and magic as much as possible each day. Apart from that, she kept translating the book and working on her Language skill. After Spring came, she would need a way to communicate with people in this world, as long as she made it to Civilization without getting killed by [Bandits] or eaten by monsters before arriving. Since she had a book that let her pick up the Illvarian Language skill, she could only hope that Illvarian would let her get by long enough to pick up other Languages if needed.

Finally, Alice had started carving little notches into her cave, in order to keep track of the days as they passed by. She had started out with around 25 notches in the cave, because she wasn’t exactly sure how many days had passed since she had first come here, and began recording each day from that point onwards.

Slowly but surely, things were getting better, and even though Alice couldn’t always find solutions to her problems in the environment, her basic Survival needs were getting easier and easier to meet as time passed. These days, she could even confidently leave her cave and try to hunt spidercrabs in her surroundings, something she never would have dared to do when she first arrived in this world.

* * *

Day 28

Alice finally found another Spidercrab during one of her hunting trips. It was the first time she had seen one that hadn’t already started tracking her down, and so before hunting it she decided to observe the creature for as long as she could. Any information she gathered now might make future hunts easier.

She realized after some observation that the monster also seemed to be following the river heading downstream rather than upstream. It wasn’t moving very quickly, and every couple seconds it would lower itself towards the ground and sniff around for a while.

Alice observed the creature for a few minutes, before it finally started picking up on her presence. Since she couldn’t observe it any longer, she prepared to fight.

This time, Alice already knew what to expect. Her wounds were healed, her Levels, Skills, and Attributes were all much higher than last time, and she had much better information.

She started off the battle by extending a mana tendril towards a nearby rock that was slightly larger than her two fists put together. The spidercrab immediately noticed her the moment she started using mana. Before it had just been sniffing around in her direction, but the moment Alice used magic the creature whirled around, faced directly towards her, and prepared to pounce.

However, Alice had enough control over her Magic now that she could properly aim during a fight. She sent a stone directly into spidercrab’s eyes, stunning it for a moment as it screeched in pain. Then, Alice reached out with her mana tendril and touched spidercrab’s shell, before shoving the monster directly towards the ground. With the help of {Lesser Combat Spellcaster}, the amount of mana the spidercrab shrugged off was much lower than before, making it far easier to push the creature around and knock it off balance. While it struggled to get up, Alice stabbed it through the eye with her spear, penetrating the monster’s brain and killing it. After confirming it had stopped moving, Alice couldn’t help but marvel at how much easier a few Perks and Skills had made the entire fight. Last time she had fought a Spidercrab, she had been bitten by it and had only narrowly scraped out a victory. This time, the fight was a one sided pummeling with almost zero risk.

The battle with spidercrab also boosted [Survivor] to level 25, granting her another perk. She quickly looked over her new options.

She looked at Harmful Energy immunity and snorted. It was a bit late to gain immunity to broken mana poisoning, now that she had already narrowly escaped dying from it. Although the fact that the perk directly referred to broken mana as something similar to radiation was interesting, at least.

She also didn’t remember finding any areas filled with broken mana in this world yet. While {Harmful Energy Immunity} might provide her protection against skin cancer, she had much bigger problems to worry about right now. Though, Alice did wonder how much mana there was in her environment, and whether there were any other unique ‘harmful energies’ in this world. Right now, she couldn’t even sense the mana outside of her body, so she had no way of telling what else she was missing in the world around her.

As she looked over the other Perks, she decided to avoid {Stoneskin} because she was afraid of getting skin literally made out of stone. The earlier perks had almost universally had guarantees that there wouldn’t be any… odd side effects if she picked them, but this one didn’t. This made her wary of the Perk. {Tough} was also discarded, because it simply didn’t seem useful enough to waste a Perk slot on.

Alice picked {Sixth Sense} and tried to figure out what had changed. After a while, she felt that she could detect… something in the air around her. It felt heavy, like a thick blanket of fog surrounding her, but her senses were still incredibly vague. Although the Perk claimed it gave her a sense of the mana around her, the ‘sixth sense’ was so weak and vague that it was practically worthless.

Alice wondered if she had just paid a perk slot for something useless. If the Perk’s ability to detect monsters was also weak, this Perk would have been a huge waste of a Perk slot. Alice read over the Perk’s description again, hoping to figure out if there were any activation conditions or boosts that would make the Perk more useful. She didn’t find any, but part of the Perk description she had previously overlooked did catch her eye.

Mana. That’s what separates monsters from animals. Normal animals don’t react at all if I use mana near them, and I didn’t get {Monstrous Encounter} from interacting with regular animals like fish either. By contrast, the moment I use mana near spidercrabs, they immediately detect me and attack. It also offers a better explanation for how their biology works, since they shouldn’t be able to support their bodies if their biology is anything like a spider back on Earth. If they use mana as some sort of replacement for food, or oxygen, or both, the question of how their biology works is answered, at least to some extent.

In that case, had getting a magic seed actually screwed her over? Did monsters leave people alone if they weren’t mages? Alice didn’t know, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered in either case – she hadn’t exactly had a choice in her mana baptism, after all. However, if Alice’s new guess about monster biology was currently, she suspected that the reason spidercrabs were so bent on hunting her down and eating her was because of her status as a Mage.

* * *

Day 31

Alice finally finished translating the other two kinds of magic seed described by the book she had found, and felt incredibly baffled when she looked over the names for the four basic Magic Seeds. The four basic seeds, according to the book, were Electromagnetic, Organic, Kinetic, and Thermal magic.

Electromagnetic and Kinetic magic seeds were pretty close to the laws of physics, and she was kind of fond of those names. Kinetic Magic had kept her alive for quite a long time in this world, and even though Alice doubted her rudimentary robot programming experience would be useful in the near future, she liked the idea of electricity being a fundamental component of Magic in this world. Electromagnetic Energy was also one of the four fundamental forces of the universe, and so seeing it show up in this world made her oddly happy.

Thermal Magic baffled her a little bit more. Temperature was, fundamentally, a measure of how quickly atoms in the air vibrated and moved around. If they moved quickly, the temperature was higher, and if they moved slowly, the temperature was lower. Therefore, the fact Thermal Magic was its own kind of magic seed, rather than just being part of Kinetic Magic, was something that confused her quite a bit.

And the last magic seed made Alice feel even more baffled, because she wasn’t quite sure what an Organic Mage did.

“What in the world is Organic Magic even supposed to be? Do they… manipulate organic material or something? That’s… that’s terrifying.” Alice suddenly had a vision of someone poking her with a mana tendril and warping her into a cthulu-esque monstrosity, or just denaturing all of the enzymes in her body and instantly killing her. She had no idea what an organic mage was capable of, but the name alone made Alice feel very uneasy. She had experimented quite a bit with her kinetic seed, and had naturally made some mistakes during her training. This had usually entailed accidentally throwing a rock in the wrong direction, or accidentally dropping an item she was trying to throw.

The idea of someone messing up while playing with the fundamental building blocks of a plant or animal were much more concerning, because it seemed like it would make a five-headed horse or a super plague if someone messed up in the right way.

Alice twitched as she looked at the final kind of magic seed, trying not to think about the implications. That being said, if [Organic Mages] were one of the four basic kinds of magic and had dozens of ways it could go horribly wrong and end the world, what did nonbasic magic look like? Why was this planet still in one piece and populated? Alice was pretty damn sure that if nations in the middle ages had access to bioweapons, civilizations never would have advanced to even the Renaissance era, because the human race would have stopped existing long before that point.

Slowly, she calmed down, trying to think things through. “Maybe there are extra restrictions on Organic Magic, or something else I’m not seeing? It can’t just be straight up manipulation of all Organic matter, right? I can manipulate all kinetic energy in the surroundings though… I suddenly have a terrible feeling about this.” Alice twitched. Maybe she was going to go upstream and find the ruins of a civilization that had created a zombie virus or seven different strands of the bubonic plague by accident? Though, she did suddenly find herself wondering if she was safer in the woods…

Day 33

With some of her spare time, Alice finally made an axe, intending to chop down some trees and use the lumber as building materials for her cave. She had often felt that the cave’s entrance was too open, and logs would provide a much more solid and sturdy way to close out her sleeping space from her surroundings and keep in heat. She had also recently realized that a spidercrab could, theoretically, waltz into her cave while she slept. However, if she built a nice sturdy wall to finish closing off her cave, it would at least help keep some heat in and random monsters/animals out.

She quickly realized that she had underestimated the difficulty of logging. However, it was still something she thought would be useful, and she now had enough food and water that she wasn’t quite so worried about supplies. She decided that even if cutting down trees was slow and difficult, it was worth it to keep going. Besides, Alice was hoping to pick up some sort of {woodcutting} skill to make the work easier once she tried enough times.

Day 35

Alice confirmed that there was no lumbering or tree cutting skill, or anything similar. This made Alice feel frustrated, but she kept working.