Alice and Cecilia spent the rest of the boat ride relaxing and talking. After another day or two of sailing, Alice decided to follow up on one of her earlier ideas. On the boat there was also a fairly high level [Merchant] who had a storage Perk. After talking to the man for a bit, Alice was happy to find out that he was in the habit of stuffing random bits and bobs into his Storage. This included some scraps of wood he hadn’t been able to sell for several months now. After a few minutes of negotiation, Alice managed to talk him into trading some wooden scraps to her in exchange for her vinebear bones. She was happy to have actually found a use for them.

She considered the size and shape of the wooden scraps for a while, and then got to work. Her goal was simple. She wanted to make some board game pieces.

A few hours later, Alice eyed her work. The results were… lumpy.

That wasn’t to say that her mechanical skill at carving the pieces was terrible. Alice wasn’t that great at using her kinetic magic to carve the wood into other objects, and had botched the first six attempts. However, with time and practice, she was getting better at it. Now that she wasn’t lifting up construction materials at the docks, she had a surplus of kinetic mana to dedicate to carving wood.

The problem was that Alice’s artistic abilities were basically nonexistent. No matter what she tried to carve, the pieces just looked off. Even after she started to get the hang of manipulating the wood, shaving and cutting it into the right size, she was rapidly realizing that she wasn’t that great at translating her memories, materials, and mana into tangible objects.

The only real upside was that she ended up getting another level in {Woodworking}. Alice had nearly forgotten about the {Woodworking} Skill entirely – after all, she had used it literally zero times since arriving in Cyra. It was more of a long-lost relic of her time in the wilderness than it was a meaningful part of her abilities.

Unfortunately, {Woodworking} did not improve her artistic ability. It improved her ability to make a piece of wood stable. It helped her figure out how to transform wood into something useful.

Even the System was apparently unable to improve someone’s art if they just bashed their head against it long enough, unlike literally everything else in this world. So the level in {Woodworking} did nothing to help her with her current goal.

Alice had grown used to the System assisting her whenever she tried to do something. If at first she couldn’t succeed, all she needed to do was look up the unlock condition for a Skill and then practice. To actually need to resolve something by researching what she was doing wrong, and then try to figure out how to improve it, was an experience Alice had started to forget. It also made her far more interested in developing her artistic wood carving skills, if only to show that she could still do things on her own without the System.

Apart from Alice’s exploration of her nonexistent artistic skills, Alice and Cecilia ended up talking a lot more. Alice had grown used to talking with the other girl about research and the System, but even without research providing a common topic, Cecilia turned out to be surprisingly interested in other aspects of Earth culture.

Alice found that some of the technology from earth was very easy for the other girl to understand. Artillery and gunpowder were surprisingly close to things that already existed in warfare, for example – the only difference being that in this world a ‘piece of artillery’ was just a group of [Kinetic Mages], and ‘gunpowder’ tended to be pretty close to what a competent [Kinetic Mages] did with their surroundings in battle.

Cecilia pointed out that something similar to dynamite already existed in this world. In fact, the first time Alice had gone to Cecilia for help with enchanting, the other girl had been in the midst of trying to develop her own knockoff version of it. While the dynamite in this world was based entirely on kinetic mages and enchanting, and was also unwieldy and underdeveloped right now, it was still a valuable tool for mining. Once the parallels were pointed out, Alice was surprised to realize that she had missed some of them, even though many of them had been right in front of her the whole time she had been here.

Cecilia’s comments gave Alice another reminder that interacting with the outside world didn’t necessarily slow down her research. On the contrary, holing herself up and focusing exclusively on her projects might end with her missing obvious ideas and points of interest that she might find useful. This world’s version of dynamite, for example, seemed like something worth taking a peek at in the future.

The rest of the boat ride passed by in much the same manner. While Alice worked on her carving skills, and, by extension, her kinetic mana skills, the two took this as a time to relax and unwind. The boat kept sailing its way upstream, gradually sailing towards its destination.

Finally, the boat arrived. The river didn’t directly connect to Metsel, the capital of Illvaria, but it arrived in a medium sized fishing town located a few hour’s ride away from the capital. As Alice and Cecilia walked around, taking some time to get used to the ground no longer swaying, they saw [Guards] and [Soldiers] patrolling the riverbanks and city streets with much higher regularity than in the south. Each of the patrolling [Soldiers] made it a point to give the two respectful nods and a ‘good day, Lady Mage’ whenever they saw them. Unlike in the south, where the address had always seemed more friendly than anything else, the [Soldiers] and [Guards] had a certain edge to their greetings. This caught Alice a little off guard because it felt so different here.

After thinking about it for a few minutes, she realized why people seemed so nervous near her in this fishing town. On the southern frontier, many of the people went there to make a new life for themselves. Institutions like the five Estates and the influence of nobles and magic academies were much weaker, since the towns were newly established and mostly founded by wealthy merchants. There wasn’t any urgency to the acknowledgement of her status in Cyra, and there wasn’t any fear either. Here in the North, the Mage’s estate and Noble’s Estate had a much greater presence.

Alice didn’t know how she felt about that. On one hand, it was nice to be treated well by random strangers. Everyone was courteous and polite towards her the moment they saw her mage insignia. On the other hand, it felt unnerving for random people on the streets to be afraid of her. There was a strange sense of being divided from the other people she saw on the street that hadn’t been present in the South.

The two of them decided to cut their stroll short after a few hours, tired of the wary glances people gave them out of the corners of their eyes. They were starting to run low on cash, so they decided to look for a caravan they could guard on the way to Metsel. If they could find one, it would neatly solve the problem of transporting Cecilia’s luggage, and also get them a little extra money. Even if neither of them specialized in combat, they were still Mages that could hold their own in a fight. Most caravans would jump at having a Mage or two reinforce their guards, just for the sheer intimidation factor.

Sadly, it seemed rather hard to find a caravan that was looking for more [Guards] right now. The people in the North found the Sigmusi threat to be very distant from their day to day lives, and with the amount of troops transferring around and dealing with monsters as they headed to the South, bandits were surprisingly rare in the area. Therefore, most caravans were running light on [Guards] right now.

While the two of them couldn’t find a convenient caravan to make some money during the journey to Metsel, they did come across a friendly farmer. Seeing the two of them carting around Cecilia’s luggage everywhere, he offered them a spot on his donkey-pulled cart. He claimed to have a farm pretty close to Metsel, and was returning after selling his crops in the port city. Judging by the amount of mana in the guy’s body, Alice was pretty sure he was higher level than she was by a fair bit, which was probably how a [Farmer] had harvested and sold a batch of crops barely a month after the end of Winter. It was nice to see that a some people maintained a friendly attitude towards them.

They happily took him up on his offer, and hopped into the back of the cart after loading up Cecilia’s luggage. The cart smelled like wheat and strawberries, which was an oddly pleasant combination.

“Thanks for letting us ride along with you, mister…” Alice trailed off, realizing she didn’t actually know the [Farmer’s] name.

“Horton!” said Horton, with an easy laugh. “And it’s no trouble. I don’t mind a couple passengers, and neither to do Bessie and Honks,” he said, giving the two mules friendly pats. The two snorted at him, apparently less than thrilled at his assertion, but he just chuckled as they kept plodding along. Alice decided she liked Horton’s attitude. Instead of the visible uneasiness much of the townsfolk seemed to feel towards them, Horton seemed happy to chat with them.

“It’s not often I see young ones like yourselves wandering about, Lady Mages. If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I’m heading to Metsel to enroll in one of the Magic Academies, if things go well,” said Alice.

“And I’m heading there to set up an enchanting shop,” said Cecilia.

“Aren’t there still a few weeks left before the Magic Academies start their new terms? They usually make a big fuss about it near the beginning of every summer, and I don’t think age is catching up to me yet. I still have all of my Intelligence Stats, unless I’m really losing it,” said Horton.

“I’m looking for a patron. I’m not too eager to join the army, so I figure I’ll need a few weeks to look for someone interested in sponsoring my time at the academy. If things work out, at least. Otherwise, I guess I’ll be enchanting with her for a while until I can come up with my tuition on my own,” said Alice, with a light laugh. “I guess I’ll see how well my luck holds out soon enough.”

“True, true. I’ve heard it can be hard to get in contact with them nobles, but if you’re an exceptionally prestigious Lady Mage or have something unique to offer, maybe things will go well for you. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors, Lady Mage,” said Horton, giving her a cheerful nod.

Alice took the man’s cheery words as a good luck charm. The three of them settled into a relaxed discussion about crop prices soon afterwards, where the two learned that food prices were on the rise. The South hadn’t gotten all of its agricultural centers properly set up yet. Naturally, the people moving south still needed to eat, so they were pulling in as much food as they could get access to from the north. According to Horton, it was a good time to a [Farmer] right now. From there, the discussion drifted away from the topic, and began to shuffle towards more random ideas and tidbits of gossip.

Eventually, they arrived at Metsel. The two thanked Horton for giving them a ride before they entered the city.

Since it was getting late, the two found a cheap inn, had dinner, and went to sleep.

The next morning, the two had a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs. After that, Alice and Cecilia decided to check out Cecilia’s potential new shops first. Illa hadn’t extended any help to Cecilia, probably because it wouldn’t a good idea to reward people for fleeing Cyra. Currently, Cecilia had a few contracts with people that basically let her reserve the right to purchase the building for a few weeks. She still needed to decide which one she was actually buying, which required seeing the buildings in person.

It took Cecilia the better part of the day to finalize her decision and make the purchase. The two spent the rest of the evening unpacking Cecilia’s various enchanted items, enchanting materials, and assorted bits and bobs. Alice was more than happy to help out, and considered it the least she could do for the other girl since Cecilia was so willing to accept her even though she was from another world.

The next day, after sleeping in Cecilia’s workshop, Alice went off find the company owned by Illa’s husband. Illa’s note had indicated that she was looking for a company called ‘Enchanter’s Stockhouse,’ and that they should already be expecting her.

The company was surprisingly easy to find. It was housed in what Alice mentally dubbed the ‘upper middle class’ section of the city, which was where a lot of working class mages lived. The third person she asked knew exactly where the building was located, and was willing to lead her there if she paid them a copper artisan for their time.

Less than five minutes later, Alice walked to the building in question. She found herself in a fairly well populated shop stocked to the brim with enchanting materials. There was far greater variety than had been present in Cecilia’s shop – there were cheap materials that could only remember a few instructions, expensive materials that could remember six or seven instructions each, and even enchanting materials that could interact with multiple different kinds of mana and combine them together into a coherent set of instructions. There were six different workers keeping the place stocked and attending to customers, and Alice noted with some amusement that four of them were fairly attractive ladies and two were fairly attractive men.

She walked up to one of them, showed them Illa’s letter of introduction, and after a few confirming questions, was quickly ushered into a room on the second floor of the building.

Upon reaching the room, Alice swallowed nervously. This decision might make or break whether she could actually attend a Magic Academy or whether she needed to put her plans on halt for a year or two.

* * *

Somewhere on the Southern Continent stood two people. One was an Immortal, who was hard to notice. The second was something that looked like a person, but was partially made out of metal.

Before them stood a research base, packed to the brim with people going about their business. [Hidden Guards] bustled about, keeping the perimeter secure and monitoring the area for intruders. [Forbidden Researchers] occasionally entered and exited the base, carrying materials around.

Of course, an ordinary person wouldn’t have been able to notice the base’s existence at all. There was a four layered enchantment that surrounded the entire research base, making it exceptionally difficult to notice. The first layer sensed what the surroundings looked like, and then fed that information to the other two layers of the enchantment. The second layer mimicked the colors and shapes of the surroundings, creating an effect similar to a chameleon from Earth. The third layer prevented any obvious signs of mana leakage, making it exceptionally difficult for even an experienced Mage to spot the massive concealment enchantment. Finally, the fourth layer of enchantment detected Organic life that crossed the enchantment, and raised an alarm whenever anyone not already keyed in to the enchantment and above a certain mass crossed through the area.

None of the attempts at concealing the enchantment mattered to the man and his assistant, who were able to simply ignore the attempted camouflage. One of the Immortal’s two main specialties was large, structured Enchantments. It would take much more than this to fool him. The Immortal looked at the base, before he grinned.

“I think we finally found what we’re looking for,” he said, whispering to his assistant. Even though he had a Perk to keep his conversations with his assistant private, the number of Perks that existed to counter other Perks was practically uncountable.

“I agree, master. The people here inhabit a hidden research base in reasonable numbers. It doesn’t appear to have the markings of the local government, meaning it’s probably a base of the Society of Starry Eyes. I smell a great deal of death in this area as well, meaning plenty of people have died in this research facility. Given these factors, it should be a Society research facility.”

The Immortal’s grin grew even wider. He took a look around, inspecting the [Hidden Guards] and seeming to make a variety of estimations. Finally, he frowned slightly. “There are a few that might be able to notice me, even with my Perks and Achievements. I didn’t think there would be many people with this much mana concentrated inside of their bodies… how troublesome. Did you bring my equipment?”

The half-metal man nodded. “I have everything you asked me to bring. What would do you need?”

“Hmm… How high is the combat power of this area?”

The half-metal man seemed to frown, looking at the base for a while. “I believe it’s impossible to win a frontal assault. If you were a combat oriented Immortal, storming a base this small would probably be viable, but as it currently stands, you have no ability to win a normal fight.”

The Immortal nodded in agreement. “Good analysis. No matter how powerful Immortals seem, most powerful Perks have a limited number of uses per day, or are limited in scope. Human bodies are also similarly limited in stamina. I don’t have the stamina or mana to fight a base filled with people unless I counter them perfectly, or unless I am willing to spend an obscene amount of materials and enchanted items. You have grown a great deal from when I first rescued you.”

“I was not in my right mind at the time, master,” said the half-metal man with a nod. “I am grateful for the second chance at life you gave me, and regret my less well-considered ideas when I was recovering.” The Immortal smiled at that, giving his servant a simply nod of acknowledgement. Then he turned back to the base.

“Since a frontal assault is impossible, and some of the [Hidden Guards] have the ability to spot me if I wander in, what do you think my best course of action is?” asked the Immortal, maintaining a relaxed and confident smile .

“Hmm… given my knowledge of Master’s abilities, if you knock out the [Hidden Guards] who can potentially spot you, I don’t think anyone else in the base would see you. So if I were master I would simply take a few ranged weapons and kill them, before walking in? There are a few piercers that I brought along, and they should be sufficient for taking out the ones capable of noticing master…”

The Immortal shook his head. “Stealth Perks don’t quite work like that. Even if my Stealth Perks make it very hard to notice me, that’s contingent upon the idea of people not realizing there’s anything to notice in the first place. If I waltz into a nobleman’s house, for example, as long as they don’t have high level [Guards] patrolling they usually won’t notice anything wrong if I don’t do anything easily noticeable. But if I stab someone in the face, they’re absolutely going to realize something is wrong, and stop subconsciously overlooking me. As will everyone around them. Shooting down the [Hidden Guards] that can see me would break my stealth Perks and force me into a head on fight.”

“Hmm… is there a quieter way to get into the base then?” Asked the half-metal man, giving the question more serious thought.

“Your thinking is improving, but it still has some way to go.” said the Immortal with a sigh. “Give me these tools…”  before listing several enchanted items. After that, he put on a few different items. First, he put on a necklace, which had the strange effect of redirecting mana towards it while shielding itself from being easily noticed. He also put on two bracelets, which began distorting the flow of mana in the air around them, before taking a small metal rod and stabbing it into the side of the enchantment surrounding the base.

The metal rod started to disappear from his view. Within a minute or two, it was completely invisible to the naked eye. The Immortal and the Metal Man left the area and retreated several hundred meters away, keeping the area in view but making sure they were hard to spot.

Eventually, the enchantment surrounding the base began to shiver. It didn’t look like anything unnatural was happening to it – it just looked like the area wasn’t being powered properly. If one hadn’t seen the Immortal place the metal rod there, it would have been very hard to realize what was happening was unusual.

A few hours passed as the ‘unpowered enchantment’ became weaker and weaker, until chunks of the enchantment started to totally lose its effect. Instead of a base that blended into its surroundings, chunks of the base were now visible to the outside world, with chunks of stone and metal seemingly floating in thin air. A few more minutes passed before a few [Forbidden Researchers] came to investigate the area. They quickly found the problematic area and began to dig into the soil. Soon, they uprooted several spikes of wood, all of which looked like they were incredibly ordinary. Unless one was able to observe mana, in which case they would notice that each spike of wood was continuously pulling several different kinds of mana out of a large attached container of monster cores.

As the researchers dug out the wooden spikes, the [Hidden Guards] spread out, increasing their patrol area to make sure no curious passerby accidentally stumbled upon the base. Since the enchantments keeping the base hidden were currently offline, they needed to make extra sure that nobody saw the area while they were repairing the enchantment.

The number of [Hidden Guards] in the area rapidly thinned out. The Immortal and his companion quietly shifted their position, taking advantage of their vastly superior [Perception] Attributes to track the [Hidden Guards] they wished to avoid. They skirted past them, weaving their way out of each problematic person’s line of sight until the potential threats left the area.

Then, once the [Hidden Guards] weren’t directly watching the enchantment, the Immortal activated several Perks.

He quietly strolled around the perimeter of the Enchantment, keeping a wary eye on the problematic [Hidden Guards], until he came across an area that was currently devoid of other people. He took a final cautious look around, before he began to fiddle with the enchantment. If the Enchantment were still operating, it would have been incredibly obvious someone was working to subvert the enchantment. However, since it was currently not operational, the man’s tampering went unnoticed by anyone.

Once the Immortal finished, he strolled into the base. The localized part of the enchantment the man had subverted was now online again, although the mana flow was irregular. Most importantly, the enchantment was now shielding itself from the view of the people who had originally built the enchantment. And the enchantment that was supposed to conceal the base now had a different function – it actively shielded the man from people’s eyesight, making it very hard to notice him even if one managed to get past all of his Perks. This tampering would certainly be discovered eventually, but it would be hard to spot unless someone was very carefully examining it. It would do, for now.

Just like that, he walked into the base, strolling curiously through room after room. He saw a room filled with humans, some of whom were in various states of agony as they went through forced mana baptisms while instruments at the sides recorded the state of their bodies. Mildly curious, he picked up one of the research logs.

Experimenting to see if it’s possible to increase the success rate of human mana baptisms?It seems the [Organic Mages] of the Society of Starry Eyes have some interesting projects they are working on. The Immortal nodded to himself before putting the research log back down.

He left the modified humans to their fates, completely indifferent to their suffering. He saw rooms filled with experiments on dimensional mana. In these rooms, he sometimes took another look, sometimes shaking his head in disappointment or nodding in wonder. Even though he didn’t understand all of the experiments at a glance, at least some of them were close enough to his own research and interests for him to make a few rough guesses about what he was looking at.

Finally, he came upon a room filled with records. Unlike the other rooms, which were in the middle of active experimentation, this room seemed innocuous. It was filled with maps, as well as discussions of anomalies found across the world and discussions of what they might mean. This was the reason he had come here.

He rooted through stacks of papers, reading them in seconds as various Perks boosted his reading speed to ridiculous levels. He scanned stack of paper after stack of paper, until finally, he found what he was looking for. He grinned, placed all of the papers back exactly the way he had found them, and strolled out of the base. He had perfect memory, so he had no use for the physical copies of the notes.

At the edge of the visibility blocking enchantment, he paused to undo his little modification. The metal rod he had used to force the enchantment to leak would dissolve into oxygen over the course of the next few hours. There would soon be no evidence he had ever been here.

He beckoned to the half-metal man, who nodded when the Immortal returned. The two of them walked away from the base.

 “Did you find it, master?” Asked the half-metal man.

“I have a much better idea where it is now,” said the Immortal. “In hindsight, it makes a great deal of sense. I would have tried looking in those areas earlier if I had realized the mana density couldn’t possibly be natural. Even monsters don’t produce quite so much Broken Mana, and I should have narrowed the search to those areas instead of focusing on total mana density. Oh well – there were a dozen different possible places it could have been, and each of them is infested with monsters. Best to double check other’s work instead of risking our lives trying to check each one.” The Immortal sighed, before he shrugged. “I am more than a little frustrated my original train of thought seems to have been a dead end, though. I was really expecting Dimensional Mana to play a bigger role. I wonder if perhaps their ideas are going in the wrong direction, and the areas I pulled from their notes are dead ends?

“In any case, we have much more specific areas to look at now. It should be worth investigating them to see if we can find it. Let’s bring this to a conclusion, shall we?” He recovered his jolly smile, and led his assistant away from the base.

Within the base of the Society of Starry Eyes, after the enchantment was fully repaired, everyone returned to their respective tasks. Not a single person noticed the intruder who had strolled through their base and looked over their research, or the temporarily made modifications to the enchantment hiding everything.