Five days passed by. During that time, Alice spent a lot of time thinking about Boris and his Class Seed. By using what she had already learned from previous experiments, Alice eventually came to a few new guesses about how broken mana worked.

Alice remembered that when she had done a few other tests with the System, she had learned that she couldn’t level up when mana wasn’t present in her environment. If she stepped into a manaless room and then exercised or did an experiment, she wouldn’t gain any Attributes or Levels in related classes.

From this, Alice realized that mana wasn’t being created by people like [Farmers] when they farmed. Instead, they were probably breaking the mana they came into contact with. In other words, when someone farmed, the mana they were close to would probably become [Farmer] broken mana, get absorbed by their body, and then their class seed would absorb it from their body and turn it into Levels and Perks. This had a lot of implications that she needed to sit down and think about, but it did allow Alice to expand her thinking in a new direction.

For a long time, people talked about how quickly dimensional mana could spread, and about how a huge amount of mana in the air around any portal would rapidly break. Alice had originally had no clue why this might be true, but if a [Farmer] could break normal mana and turn it into [Farmer] mana, just by touching mana while farming… what if dimensional portals did the same thing? Right now, Alice assumed that mana would be converted from pure mana into broken mana if it came into contact with a certain ‘concept,’ such as farming. There were obviously some restrictions on this; after all, fires didn’t leave ‘fire’ broken mana everywhere, and plants also didn’t create ‘plant’ broken mana when they came into contact with mana. Alice wasn’t sure why this was the case yet.

But the idea that pure mana was so easily influenced by its surroundings was an interesting one, and if every single chunk of mana that flowed through a portal became dimensional broken mana just by coming into contact with a portal, it would explain why any use of dimensional mana quickly flooded an area with broken dimensional mana. The mana in the air was always moving, and so any portal from one place to another would have small amounts of mana passing through it every second.

She wasn’t sure why some people became ‘contagious’ afterwards, polluting their environment with more broken mana after being ‘baptized’ by dimensional broken mana, but she did think she was on the right track for learning more about broken and dimensional mana. While she hadn’t had time to set up a specific experiment to test her assumptions yet, she was getting all sorts of ideas she wanted to analyze in further detail.

Unfortunately, while Alice had gotten some useful information out of Boris’s situation, she was still completely clueless about why Boris’s class seed was partially working when it previously hadn’t. Even though Alice had learned all sorts of interesting tidbits that could help fuel research about the nature of mana, she had no idea how to actually speed up Boris’s recovery. She racked her brain, running back over Natasha’s recount of the past week, but no matter what she thought about, there just didn’t seem to be anything that could have caused Boris’s class seed to change. And, more importantly, Alice had no idea how to help it work faster, or help the Class Seeds of other afflicted start working. This caused Alice no small amount of frustration.

To work off some stress and raise her Levels a bit, Alice took some time to update her enchanted items. She had been meaning to swap out her enchantments ever since she picked up the {Kinetic Enchanting} Perk, which allowed her to permanently increase the number of instructions an enchanting material could ‘remember’ by one. Most of her enchanted items currently only had one or two instructions right now, and given her increasing skill as an [Enchanter], and the increasingly dangerous threats she might face in the future, Alice decided it was time to improve her items. The extra power her enchantments could give her in an emergency situation might save her life one day. Since Ethan was giving her enough money that she no longer cared about her income, Alice decided to splurge on some materials to make her upgrades even bigger.

Alice’s bracelet was the first object she updated. Previously, Alice’s bracelet of stone beads had simply had beads that would turn into makeshift bullets when being thrown, and Alice had eventually added in an Organic component to further attack the flesh of people who got injured by the beads. However, now that Alice had a little bit more funding and better Perks, she decided to swap out the enchanting material entirely, replacing it with a kind of metal that was already able to hold three instructions on its own: one organic, one kinetic, and one pure-mana based instruction. Then Alice tried layering a few different instructions together to explicitly counter what she had faced during the fight to rescue Samantha.

First, she made the objects fire themselves like bullets upon activation towards a specific target. This hadn’t changed from her original bracelet at all. Then, she added in the instruction to make it hard to heal or manipulate flesh within several centimeters of a metal bead after it hit something. Since many of the Society members were Organic Mages, shutting down or weakening their healing abilities seemed like a good idea, even if the natural magic resistance all creatures possessed would weaken the effect of this enchantment instruction by a large amount. Finally, she added in a layer of pure magic to the beads, in order to make them try to mimic the patterns of mana around them. Alice wasn’t sure if this idea would actually help or not, but she felt that it should make it a bit harder for Mages to track the objects using most forms of mana related vision. Some Perks, such as Alice’s {Vastly Improved Kinetic Vision}, would still be able to track the beads easily. However, there were plenty of Perks that relied on mana and mana-related ideas to track objects, and with Alice’s most recent addition to her projectile beads, she would be able to counter those Perks in the future.

With the extra instruction slot granted by {Kinetic Enchanting}, Alice also made the beads explode like shattered glass when they hit something, making them into shrapnel-based enchanted bullets that avoided some detection by Mages and made it hard to heal wounds caused by them. It was an effective counter to lower level Society Mages, although Alice suspected the use of her enchantments would decrease significantly against higher Level combatants. However, even against high Level combatants, wave after wave of beads had a decent chance of killing them if they made a mistake.

Since Alice was happy with her new bracelet, she made a {Blueprint} out of it and made six more copies. Then, she stuck them into {Sample Collection} for future use. After that, she made a necklace that detected and repelled objects that moved too quickly towards her as well. The detection part of the enchantment was rather tricky to figure out, but the Perk Alice got after making her new bead bracelets helped out a lot.

Alice decided to pick this Perk up because trying to get an enchantment to properly ‘sense’ its surroundings was often a major pain in the neck. Alice’s first version of her ‘safety necklace’ had only been able to stop ‘all’ objects in her surroundings, and worked only when Alice turned it on. While that wasn’t bad, it also meant that Alice needed to first sense an attack before she could respond to it. And while {Adrenaline Rush} being activated would certainly tell her that something bad was about to happen, she didn’t want to be at the mercy of a Perk that could easily be on cooldown during a crisis. {Speed Analysis} let her attach an extra condition to her necklace, letting it react to objects flying towards her at high speeds even if {Adrenaline Rush} wasn’t around to warn her in advance.

The other Perk Alice picked up that week was {Enchanter’s Armory}.

Alice took this Perk in order to improve her enchantments, especially the bead-bracelets she used. The biggest problem she was worried about was whether additional enchantments on each bead would do their job properly after hitting an enemy. After all, living creatures resisted external mana, and so [Organic Mages] might be able to ignore Alice’s attempts to ruin their healing abilities, and her mana-camouflage might not be good enough to fool people’s  senses. After some testing, {Enchanter’s Armory} seemed to solve the camouflage problem, although Alice had no ethical way of testing the influence the Perk had on her Organic Enchantment.

While Alice’s enchantments were progressing well and her research on Boris’s situation was  stalled out, her time at her magic academy had become much more… interesting.

Most of the [Students] in school originally hadn’t been aware of Alice’s existence. As word began to spread that Immortal Ethan had taken an apprentice, more and more [Students] began to glance at Alice out of the corners of their eyes and pay attention to her. Alice didn’t pay very much attention to them, since she had always been rather socially oblivious, but she was surprised to see {Sense Hostility} activate a few times while she was in school. Alice assumed some people were jealous of her status as an apprentice of an Immortal.

Luckily, the jealous people weren’t very common. People had better sense than to pick a fight with an Immortal’s apprentice, even if they were jealous. Luka and Erkki, Alice’s two friendly classmates with the highest status, also stood up for her in the background, letting people know that Alice had always been a rather talented and high Level Mage with an interest in… combat. And a side hobby of doing research. With her friends sticking up for her and helping her smooth out her reputation, most people were content to go back to ignoring her. After all, regardless of whether Alice was an Immortal’s apprentice or not, most people still had better things to do than obsess over her lifestyle and status. Whether she was a nobody or an Immortal’s apprentice, it wouldn’t help people level up faster or learn more, and so most [Students] didn’t care. But there were definitely more eyes on her than before, and her [Teachers] in particular paid a little more attention to her than before.

Of course, this was with the exception of Professor Feliza, who had already learned Alice was Ethan’s newest apprentice last weekend, and didn’t seem to care very much. During the week, Alice kept in contact with Professor Feliza. With Professor Feliza, she continuously discussed what the [Teacher] knew about mana. Sadly, professor Feliza didn’t know much that would help Alice treat Boris. Since Alice had massive advantages in observing with mana, due to her ability to see System mana, she had already overtaken the average understanding a Mage had towards mana in this world by a huge margin. Professor Feliza had no idea how to remove mana from inside of a body at all, much less how to do so without harming the patient, because nobody had ever needed a treatment for mana saturation before. Which meant Alice was completely on her own.

Alice had already expected that, but it was more than a little frustrating to see that there were seemingly no resources she could tap into to look for ideas. Alice’s understanding of the internal structure of Class Seeds was still rather weak, and finding ways to interact with and manipulate Class Seeds was difficult for her.

Even the academy’s library didn’t have anything in particular that Alice could use for this situation. The only upside seemed to be the fact that Boris’s condition was getting better on his own, meaning that at the very least Boris would probably be fine. But the Society had recorded a few dozen children who had also unlocked their Status Screens early. And unlike Boris, they hadn’t started getting better. Alice still hoped to develop a solution for their illness so that Ethan could apply it to any children the Illvarian government found with the same problems. But right now, she had no idea how to fix anything.

That Friday, after class, Alice received a response letter from Illa, and another letter from Milo. She was more than a little bit surprised to see a response letter only a week after she sent a letter all the way to Cyra, especially considering the fact that there weren’t many roads to the frontier towns yet. The easiest way to get to and from the southernmost towns under construction was still by boat, but Alice remembered it taking a week or so to travel from Cyra to Metsel when she had come north. High level [Messengers] managing to get to and from Cyra in half that time while travelling backwoods areas, while dodging monsters and [Bandits] the whole way was quite impressive.

After returning to Ethan’s mansion for the night, Alice opened the letter and began carefully reading its contents.

Lady Alice,

I am glad to know that you are doing well in the North. My husband and his company stated that they had some difficulty finding a sponsor for you, but still managed to get one that was willing to pay for your entry into a Magical Academy under some work-related conditions. I’m glad that things worked out for you on that front.

I can also see that you have gone far above and beyond any level of connection my husband’s business network may have granted you. To be an apprentice of one of Illvaria’s six surviving Immortals is a feat few people have achieved. I would like to claim that I had a hand in your success, but at this point, I do wonder if you wouldn’t have reached the same heights with or without my help. Congratulations to you, and I’m glad to see that you are doing so well for yourself.

My acquaintanceship with Immortal Ethan goes back to my days in the army. I served on the northern border under Immortal Ethan’s father, and the Sun Knight spent a good amount of time and effort providing me with the materials and training I needed to succeed. I would not have reached the Level I have reached today without his assistance, and I am grateful for his help.

I have interacted less with his Immortal son, but I have still spent some time with him. I have known him to have a somewhat… odd personality. He is sometimes frustrating to work with because his personality can come off as abrasive, especially in certain situations. However, while he can come across the wrong way, I have known him to be very… enthusiastic about the idea of another Immortal showing up in Illvaria.

Alice was highly amused to see Illa, of all people, referring to someone as sometimes abrasive. While Alice didn’t mind Illa’s blunt, pragmatic personality, she was willing to bet it had also irritated plenty of people Illa had worked with in the past.

One of the things you should keep in mind is that most Immortals are lonely. An Immortal is still, at the end of the day, a human. They love their family, laugh with their friends, and cry when their loved ones get hurt. This is why many Immortals are afraid to interact with non-Immortals too frequently; they fear growing close to them because they are afraid of the day their friends will leave them, never to return because they, like many others, failed to reach Immortality before old age took them.

The Sun Knight, for example, grieved for nearly three decades when his first wife died of old age, or so the legends go. Afterwards, he refused to even entertain the idea of remarrying until his current wife approached him. Since she was also an Immortal, he was more willing to entertain the idea of a relationship, and eventually they got married.

They then had several children, most of whom died of old age.

Doll, the Immortal of Steel and Fabric, is an even better example of Immortal loneliness. She refuses to even see non-Immortals for fear of getting attached to them unless they are effectively guaranteed to become Immortals, meaning that they must have proven they have access to a Tier 2 Class and still be relatively young.

The point that I am trying to make is that Ethan is no exception to the concept of Immortal loneliness. In fact, he might be the Immortal who is most influenced by it, since he grew up with parents half-convinced he would die of old age like his siblings. He managed to beat the odds and become an Immortal, but… being the child of two Immortals means that he grew up with a very different view of life and death than most people. And he also had a very unique social status while growing up, making it even harder for him to connect with other people. This is the reason he continuously takes in apprentices and tries to raise them to Immortality, although he has yet to succeed.

If Ethan thinks that you have a good chance of reaching Immortality, he is likely to prioritize your safety and growth over almost everything else. The more you convince him that you have a good chance of reaching Immortality, the more trustworthy he will be with all of your secrets, needs, and wants. The more he feels that you won’t make it, and the more he worries you will die of old age and fail to reach Immortality, the less trustworthy he will become. While I do not think of him as the kind of person who would harm one of his subordinates or acquaintances, either through malice or recklessness, your matters will certainly weigh less heavily on his heart if he thinks you will die in a few decades either way. He is more concerned with making friends who will be around for a few centuries than with friends who will disappear in the blink of an eye.

Considering your age and what I’ve heard of your achievements, you should be very safe.

It has been a delight hearing from you, and I hope to hear from you again in the near future.

Sincerely,

Illa Weissarus

Milo’s letter was much less concentrated on Immortals and Ethan than Illa’s letter, since Alice hadn’t asked him for any information on the subject. His letter was mostly a collection of ramblings about life in southern Illvaria, talking about things such as the increased flow of trade and money in the south, the completion of Illa’s dock, and a pretty [Barmaid] that Milo had begun courting. Alice read over his letter as a pleasant distraction, catching up with Milo’s life before she turned her attention back to the information given to her by Illa.

She had been debating whether to fully trust Ethan for a while now, and while Illa hadn’t said she could trust Ethan unconditionally with her secrets, Alice was happy to have Illa’s thoughts on the psychology of Immortals in this world. And, perhaps more importantly, while there were some conditions attached to Alice’s trust of Ethan, based on Illa’s words it would probably make Alice safer if she told Ethan about her past as an {Outworlder} than if she tried to keep things hidden. Alice felt that her odds of reaching Immortality were quite good; she was much higher level than most people her age, and while her experience multipliers still needed some work before they reached the levels needed for Immortality, Alice was definitely getting closer and closer as time passed. And so, that Friday night, Alice found herself once again outside of Ethan’s study, preparing to talk about the most dangerous part of her past.

acaswell

The thing I mentioned that I need to be done with by Feb. 15^th is eating up a bit more time and mental energy than expected. Next week’s chapter might be delayed a bit, depending on what happens, or might be shorter than usual. Well, the Patreon chapter, which I guess public readers won’t see for another couple weeks… but anyway. I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does, I apologize in advance. After next week we should be back to a normal schedule.

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