Alice looked over her new Perks, as well as {Expanding Comprehension} and {Broken Seed}, before she grinned to herself. Both Perks were off of their cooldown, so she had four Perks to use before she went to sleep for the day.

First, she decided to test what she could define as an ‘experiment’ for the purposes of {Speed Experimentation}. Time manipulation was far too exciting not to try out immediately, after all.

Alice spent a few moments thinking about the best way to test out her new Perk. After some thinking, she settled on an idea, before asking one of the [Butlers] to bring her two clocks. She set them up right next to each other, on a desk in her room.

Both displayed the exact same time: 7:07 PM. She observed them for a few minutes, just to make sure they were ticking through their seconds at the same speed, and after about two minutes of observation, she nodded to herself. They were synchronized.

Then, Alice tried reaching for her new Perk. A moment later, she felt it activate, targeting one of the two clocks. The other one was left alone as a control.

Alice felt an instinctive realization that she needed to pay mana of some sort to make the Perk work, so she connected her Kinetic seed to the Perk.

Alice felt mana quickly drain out of her, flowing out of her kinetic seed and towards her brain, where her [Scientist] Class seed was located.

Then, a moment later, a cloud of thick rainbow mana condensed around Alice, and simultaneously wrapped itself around the clock. Alice saw a great deal of mana slide out of her body, and then, a new color of mana Alice wasn’t familiar with suddenly started to materialize in the air around her and the clock. Alice quickly realized that it was Time mana.

Apparently, Time mana was a sort of mixed grey, black, and white color.

Alice felt the Perk finally activate, and time sped up for Alice and the clock she was testing.

The clock that Alice was testing, as well as Alice’s perception of time, started to accelerate by about 50%. For every second 1.5 seconds that Alice and the test clock experienced, the clock she was using as a control only recorded 1 second passing. Alice tried pushing the Perk a little bit, to see if she could improve how much the Perk accelerated time, but quickly realized that the Perk couldn’t accelerate time any more than that.

In other words, the Perk could speed up time by 50% at its maximum. However, Alice was now pretty sure that her Perk was, indeed, manipulating time.

She was actually able to manipulate time!

However, at the back of her head, Alice was also calculating how useful this Perk actually was. Manipulating time was exciting, and Alice couldn’t deny that the idea of temporal manipulation appealed to her on a certain level just because of how fascinating she found the idea of speeding up and slowing down time.

However, the mana consumption for this Perk was awful. It was chewing through nearly 0.3% of Alice’s Kinetic mana reserves per second. Alice’s Magic Stat was at 161, and she had a Stat effectiveness of 122%, meaning she effectively had a Magic Stat of 196. Combined with her Mana Conversion Ratio of 147% for her Kinetic Seed, she had about 289 Mariums of mana stored in her Kinetic Mana seed when it was completely full.

To lose nearly 0.3% of her Seed’s reserves per second meant that the Perk was eating around 1 Marium of mana per second. Which was, frankly, ridiculous. It was an incredibly high amount of mana to pay for what effectively amounted to a 50% increase to [Dexterity].

Alice hesitated for a moment, before she shook her head. The Perk was doing quite a bit more than just boosting her [Dexterity] by 50%. It sped up objects, as well as her thinking and her ability to observe and understand the world around her. This meant that she was able to do much more with the Perk, if she got clever about how she used it. She just needed to figure out a practical application for the Perk. She absently drummed one of her fingers against the table, thinking over the experiment and what she had seen of her Perk so far, and thinking about practical ways to apply the Perk.

Now that Alice had seen time mana for the first time, Alice had been able to confirm that System mana did not include Time mana in its composition. Despite that fact, the System was somehow generating it when she used her new Perk.

At least for now, Alice assumed it was related to mana filtering. The System seemed especially good at commanding and manipulating mana, as well as filtering it and changing its composition a little bit. Alice wondered if her Class Seed was just somehow directly converting her kinetic mana to time mana on the fly whenever she activated her Perk.

Alice sighed. Currently, she could only keep the Perk going for about five minutes before emptying her kinetic mana reserves. That was assuming her Kinetic seed was full, and that she didn’t spend the mana on other stuff. Her kinetic magic seed was her largest magic seed, which meant that her other seeds would struggle even more with the mana costs related to her new Perk.

In other words, Alice could make 7.5 minutes pass for whatever she was trying to observe while she would only need to wait 5 minutes for the results, which was certainly a small boost in speed. However, the fact that it only saved her 2.5 minutes for an entire 38-or so hours of mana regeneration felt rather lackluster. Alice wouldn’t really be saving very much time, bringing the usefulness of the Perk into question if she was using it for science. Of course, Alice could also use her mana reserves from other magic seeds. But that didn’t solve the fundamental issue of using the Perk for experiments, which was that it just didn’t do enough per Marium, and Alice simply didn’t have enough mana to fuel the Perk.

However, after a few moments of thinking, Alice reconsidered the way she was trying to use the Perk. Even if the Perk was only somewhat useful for scientific experimentation, its applications in combat could be amazing. Saving two and a half minutes during a scientific experiment was rather mediocre, but saving two and a half minutes during a fight could determine her life or death. One of the most surprisingly powerful Perks Alice had ever taken was the {Adrenaline Rush} Perk from [Survivor], which effectively let her enter a state of superspeed for a couple seconds whenever it was activated. When Alice combined that Perk with the incredible control a [Kinetic Mage] could exert on their, {Adrenaline Rush} went from ‘not bad’ to ‘utterly and completely broken.’ The combat style of a [Kinetic Mage] just synergized incredibly well with drastically enhanced mental speed and processing power.

If {Speed Experimentation} could be used in combat, Alice was willing to bet that its effects would stack on top of {Adrenaline Rush}, and it would be able to work as a kind of… weaker {Adrenaline Rush} with a much longer activation time. Not to mention, it could allow Alice to randomly speed up objects she was tossing at her enemies in midair. If she sped up an object in midair, without touching it with a mana tendril, enemies would probably be taken off guard, which could screw up the attempts of an opposing [Kinetic Mage] to interfere with her actions. When she looked at it that way, it was a rather mediocre Perk for speeding up Science experiments, but it was an incredibly powerful Perk if she used it during a fight.

IF she could get it to work in combat, at least. Alice pulled a coin out of {Sample Collection}, tossed it forward with her kinetic magic, and then tried speeding it up with her Perk.

Alice’s Perception, as well as the speed of the coin, suddenly accelerated by 50% compared to the rest of the room. A fraction of a second later, the coin bounced off of the floor before coming to a halt. Alice hadn’t given it very much kinetic mana, for fear of damaging the room.

Alice nodded to herself. At the very least, it was clearly possible to use the Perk in combat if she fulfilled the right conditions. She would need to ask Ethan for advice about how to incorporate this into her fighting style later.

Since Alice had finally found a good way to use the Perk, she started experimenting with different magic seeds, trying to figure out which one cost the least to keep the Perk active.

After some testing, Alice settled on using her Pure Mana seed to activate {Speed Experimentation} when she wanted to make the Perk function. Pure mana had never been particularly relevant during fights, since it was more of a scholarly/enchanting oriented field of study, but it only cost around 0.7 Mariums per second to activate the Perk using pure mana. Since Alice had about 70 Mariums of pure mana, she could activate {Speed Experimentation} for 100 seconds before her pure mana seed ran out of fuel. That was enough time for most fights to end.

Of course, after Alice got her initial burst of experimentation out of the way and she was trying to get more used to activating the Perk in the middle of an imagined combat scenario, the Perk’s activation started to become a little bit harder to control, and would randomly shut off sometimes. As far as Alice could tell, if she was ‘training’ and not ‘actively experimenting’ with the Perk, it stopped wanting to work properly. Alice frowned. The Perk kept working if she genuinely believed she was ‘testing’ something, but she needed to continuously believe that she was testing something or the Perk shut off. She would need to practice telling herself that flinging different objects at enemies was a form of testing her Perk out later on. Something else to consult Ethan about, but Alice felt the results would be well worth it once she got more experienced with the Perk.

Alice shrugged, before turning her attention to her other three Perks she meant to use today. Now that Alice had started thinking about time seeds, Alice was curious to know if she could form a Time magic seed.

She seriously doubted there was a reason to keep a Time Magic seed around long term, since it probably wouldn’t further her study of System mana, and Ethan had already noted it was a rather useless magic seed. But now that Alice knew that it existed, and could compare her time-related Perk to a magic seed, she was curious to see if System magic was significantly more efficient than the ‘terrible’ Time Magic seeds formed by Mages. Besides, even if she needed to remove the seed later on, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

It only took four days for {Broken Seed} to be ready for use again, which wasn’t a very long time at all. And she was also quite curious about what a normal time magic seed looked like.

Alice spent a few minutes forming a Time Magic seed with her currently unused seed slot, before setting it aside for now. She would need to wait a few hours for the Seed’s mana to fill up and she had enough mana to do some testing.

After that, Alice turned her attention to {Seedy Ambitions}. She could use the Perk once a month, and she might as well test the seed for the first time while she waited for her time seed to generate some mana. Alice hadn’t identified very many of the kinds of mana tied into System mana, but she had still identified a few new ones while she had examined System mana. Math mana, Organic Mana, and pure mana had been some of the first she had identified, but through careful observation with {Intuitive Mana Modelling} over the past week, Alice had managed to figure out a few more of the relevant mana types. She didn’t know exactly what they were, but Alice thought she had figured out what one of the unidentified mana colors was, and what it did. For now, she had decided to call this new form of mana ‘display mana,’ because she thought it was related to how the System showed people System Messages.

Alice wanted to form a magic seed based on this mana, to test out what it actually did, and to make forming a System magic seed easier. After confirming her plan and double checking with {Safety Analysis}, Alice began to focus on her new Perk, while at the same time focusing on her assumptions about how ‘Display’ Mana worked. She felt {Seedy Ambitions} start to activate.

A few minutes later, Alice had formed another new seed. Unlike usual, Alice didn’t manage to form the magic seed at its maximum mana conversion ratio. Alice didn’t know if it was due to some sort of penalty the Perk imposed on her seed formation process, due to her lack of intimate understanding of display mana, or whether the low mana conversion was due to some other problem. However, she still managed to form her new Display mana seed at 11% mana conversion ratio. Which was fine, honestly. She wanted to experiment with the seed and to eventually use it to help her form a System magic seed. The actual conversion ratio of her display mana seed was rather unimportant.

Then, Alice… waited. Neither of her new magic seeds had enough mana to test things with, so she needed to wait a few hours for them to fill up.

Alice used Expanding Comprehension on her Pure Magic seed while she waited, taking an hour or two to go through the odd vision-trip induced by using the Perk. The seed’s conversion ratio increased by 4% during her vision trip, but she didn’t learn anything useful this time.

By the time she had finished, her seeds had finally filled up enough that she could test some new forms of magic.

First, Alice ran a quick test on how her Time magic seed interacted with her new Perk. With time mana, the cost was further reduced to 0.5 Mariums per second. However, Alice felt that was a little bit too situation of a reason to form a time magic seed, since she wanted to focus on forming System magic seeds right now. Perhaps in the future, when she had more activations of {Seedy Ambitions} behind her, she might form a time magic seed again, but for now she had other uses for her magic seed slots.

Next, Alice started experimenting with time mana itself. Alice created a mana tendril, creating a connection between her display mana seed and her stomach, before funneling a small amount of mana out of her seed.

Nothing happened.

Alice frowned, before realizing she might have made a mistake in what she connected her magic seed to.

Alice instead connected her mana tendril to her eyes and funneled a small amount of mana through her tendril. Once again, nothing happened. Then, as a third test, Alice tried connecting the seed directly to her brain, although this time Alice used {Safety Analysis} again, to make sure she wasn’t about to turn herself into a vegetable or something. After ensuring it was safe, Alice poured a little more mana into her brain.

A completely blank blue screen appeared in front of her eyes, just like when she received a System notification. Alice grinned. Her assumptions about what ‘display mana’ did were correct. Then, she focused for a few moments. As she messed with her new seed, a completely different System notification was created.

Hello World!

Alice grinned. She was nowhere close to replicating the actual feats of the System, and how it worked behind the Scenes. But she had definitely figured out how the System created notifications.

She tried experimenting with a few new System messages, just to play with what she had figured out.

You have rolled a 20! Critical Hit! You deal double damage!

 

Nobody Expects the Spanish System notification! Our primary weapon is surprise!

 

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 54 -> 54

There were two oddities Alice noticed, when she was creating her nonsensical System notifications.

First, Alice noticed that for some reason, if she tried to reference information about her actual Status Screen, she couldn’t input false information. She had tried to make her nonsensical ‘System’ messages claim that she had reached level 100 in [Survivor], just to mess around, but for whatever reason, she was completely unable to do so. There was nothing stopping her from making stupid jokes or totally random System messages, but whenever she tried to reference her Status Screen, no matter what she meant to add, any false information related to her Status Screen was immediately removed and replaced with the correct information. She could change how that message was displayed, and even change the System message itself. She could change the ‘you have leveled up!’ part of the notification to ‘you haven’t leveled up’ or make the System notification say ‘I like waffles,’ or any other message she wanted to add. However, any actual numbers she referenced in the System message would be correct, no matter what she tried to do.

Second, Alice realized after a while that all of her System notifications were in Illvarian. Which, up until this point, had never happened.

All of her System notifications usually appeared in English. Alice had both Language Skills at 100, so having her System messages in one specific language didn’t really matter to her. However, the System had, at least thus far, stuck to the language she knew best, which was obviously the one she had spent fifteen years of her life speaking. Now, however, the System messages were in Illvarian.

In fact, now that Alice thought about it, the way System Messages worked was still quite odd. When Alice first arrived in this world, the System hadn’t known enough about the English language to correctly name her Language Skill anything logical. It had just appeared as a glitch sign until the System finally renamed it {English (Language Proficiency)} a few days after her arrival. The same thing had happened when Alice got the {Russian (Language Proficiency)} Skill. However, despite the System not knowing what the English Language was, all of her System messages had still somehow appeared in English from the moment she arrived in this world.

Alice suspected this might be related to some of the other mana types inherently woven into System mana. Perhaps this kind of mana mana was somehow preventing her from displaying incorrect information in a System message, and perhaps it also somehow directly fed her information in a way she could understand. Or something. Alice would have to try experimenting with more components of System mana in the future, to see if she could figure out how System messages actually translated themselves for users of the System. But at least for now, no matter what she tried, she couldn’t add in completely false information to a made-up System message, and any System message she made up didn’t seem to have the same… self-translating property normal System messages had. The System would display messages she made in whatever language she concentrated on using, but it wouldn’t translate itself based on whatever language the user understood best.

Still, Alice was delighted to confirm that she had figured out most of an entire, fully functioning part of how the System worked.

By the time Alice finished messing around with System messages, her Time magic seed was ready to use. She quickly fixed the clock that she had messed up during her earlier experiment, before she tried using Time magic on one of the two clocks.

Unlike when Alice used a Perk, when Alice used a time magic seed, the broken mana production was atrocious, just like Ethan had said it would be. Alice estimated that she was losing around 80% of the mana she tried to invest into manipulating time as broken mana, which was a far cry from the 3-4% she currently lost when using kinetic mana, or the 6% she lost when using organic mana. For every one Marium of mana she sank into the clock to make it speed up, another four Mariums were turned into waste product.

At least the clock did speed up, despite the massive waste of mana. However, it was nowhere near as significant as a 50% increase in speed this time. It was closer to a 15% increase.

Alice winced. She could definitely see why the Time Magic seed had been considered useless by Ethan. If she was devoting a mana tendril to getting a mild, 15% speed boost, she might as well just use that mana tendril to fling more objects at an enemy instead. The magic seed just didn’t seem very practical.

Alice frowned for a moment, before she reset the two clocks again and tried something else. This time, she tried slowing one of the clocks down. Ethan had said travelling backwards in time was possible, but maybe slowing time down was viable?

True to her suspicion, the clock did, indeed, slow down a little bit when she used time mana on it. For every 10 seconds one clock counted, the clock Alice was slowing down only counted nine and a half. Which wasn’t particularly impressive, but it was certainly interesting.

A few seconds later, Alice ran out of mana. She frowned, inspecting her magic seed, before snorting.

There was definitely a reason people didn’t form time magic seeds. Then, Alice shrugged, before deleting the magic seed with {Broken Seed}. It had been an interesting seed to mess with, even if it wasn’t particularly useful, and it had only cost her four days of waiting before she could try forming a new magic seed. This time, she would try forming a class seed.

Content that she had learned a huge amount of new information today, and happy that she hadn’t needed to watch someone die, Alice drifted off to sleep.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 71 -> 72