After Ethan finished talking with Alice and arranging details about the tea party, including things she needed like proper clothing and {Etiquette} teachers, he left. Alice was left alone with her thoughts again.

She frowned, thinking about the ‘tea party’ Ethan wanted her to attend. She had agreed to it, because having new resource channels and levelling boosts would absolutely be helpful. However, she didn’t actually have any suitable clothing for a tea party with two Immortals and a member of the royal family. Nor did she have any real understanding of what etiquette looked like in Illvaria. Which meant that the potential advantages of attending the tea party also had some very significant annoyances that came with it.

On the bright side, she had about two weeks to prepare. Given how much the System accelerated learning, that was a reasonable amount of time to pick up the skills she needed, even if they would be somewhat low in level. However, Alice still felt nervous. She sighed.

Then, she redirected her attention back to her experiment. She needed somewhere to focus her nervous energy and take her mind off of things for a while. Besides, she still wanted to see if she could create a class seed in a magic seed slot, and since she had two weeks, she wanted to see if she could reach level 75 in [Explorer of Magic] before the tea party. Even if she wasn’t going to brag about her level to anyone, it would certainly feel reassuring to have another Perk from her highest level Class available to her.

Therefore, Alice started working on her experiment again.

Since Alice’s {Broken Seed} Perk was off cooldown, she could finally try forming a class seed inside of a magic seed slot. {Safety Analysis} informed her that what she was about to do was… reasonably safe, if not entirely safe. Which was good enough that she was willing to go through with the experiment.

Alice started wondering what class seed she should copy for her experiment. She had a lot of class seeds she had seen over the course of her time in Luliv, and Alice wondered if there was any benefits or drawbacks to using one specific seed for her experiment.

Eventually, she decided to copy her [Explorer of Magic] class. It was the class seed Alice had the most familiarity with, since it was her highest level class, and so it seemed like a reasonable choice for the experiment. Alice didn’t think it would really matter which class seed she tried out in this case, so she decided to take the path of least resistance.

Then, Alice focused on her empty magic seed slot, and started working on forming a class seed.

The formation process started relatively normally. Alice drew in mana, focused on the idea of what an [Explorer of Magic] was, and compressed her ideas into a magic seed. Since Alice had a great deal of familiarity with what an [Explorer of Magic] did to level up, she had a reasonably good understanding of the Class as a whole. Forming the magic seed wasn’t very difficult.

As the magic seed started to condense, Alice carefully observed it with one of her mental divisions. As Alice watched, the System mana in her surroundings erupted, trying to help her form her Class seed. Alice noticed that, once again, she had a strong feeling that she had seen something similar to the System fractals before. It was much more complex in the hands of the System, but Alice was sure that there was something very familiar about some of the fractals she was seeing in her surroundings. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was seeing, yet. It was an incredibly frustrating feeling, since it felt like the answer to an annoying question was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t quite remember what she was going to say.

Alice frowned, but a few moments later, her attention was dragged away by the needs of her Class seed. Since she still couldn’t figure out why the mana fractals the System was using seemed so oddly similar to something else, she would try not to think about it. Sometimes, distracting yourself from a problem was the best way to get new perspective on it and find a solution.

After that, Alice noticed that the System mana seemed… confused.

Which made sense. Alice was trying to make the System do something it didn’t seem designed to do. It wasn’t strange at all that the System wasn’t quite sure how to react. Luckily, Alice’s experiments in forming magic seeds without System interference or assistance helped her a great deal here. Since the System wasn’t quite sure what to do, Alice simply pushed through the issue she was encountering on her own, using her pure magic seed to help filter and manipulate the mana in her surroundings to help smooth out the process of forming an unusual magic seed. At the same time, Alice made heavy use of {Speed Experimentation} to make sure she had time to react to new problems as they cropped up, and made sure she was ready to activate {Broken Seed} the moment she felt something was wrong. Safety was the most important part of this experiment, after all.

After several minutes of fumbling around with mana, to Alice’s surprise, she realized that she was actually succeeding. She had expected to fail this time. She had considered this experiment to be a practice run that she would need to repeat several times before she got this experiment right. However, it appeared that all of her other experiments and hard work had prepared her for this attempt better than she had thought they would.

Alice grinned.

And that’s when everything went horribly wrong.

As the magic seed snapped into place, taking on the twisted form of a half-baked Class seed, Alice felt a sudden barrage of information assault her mind.

She felt a cascade of images tear through her very being, trying to pour into her thoughts and set them alight like oil poured on a bonfire.

Explorers of Magic explore magic, and the very core of what makes an explorer of magic exist is their desire to explore and learn. Knowledge is what matters. I need to explore magic. I… NEED TO EXPLORE MAGIC. Alice’s thoughts expanded beyond what a human’s mind could possibly encompass, filled with an all-consuming drive to explore, learn, and experiment with information about magic. It consumed all that made her human, all that made her Alice, and all else besides the crushing, overwhelming need to learn and investigate at the cost of all else. Even if she starved to death, Alice couldn’t be bothered to stop pursuing the knowledge that eluded her. Not even for the fraction of a second it would take to eat, or sleep, or drink.

At the same time, her body started to tremble, and Alice started shaking as if she were in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The need to explore magic was so overwhelming that her body simply couldn’t handle it, and it was almost literally collapsing out of the foreign need that was overwhelming her mind. Alice had always loved exploring magic and learning how it worked since the moment she had discovered its existence. But now, the desire to explore magic was so different from her own thoughts that it was as if her personality was being replaced as she watched.

At the same time, Alice felt a certain… connection with the world around her. One that she had never felt before.

She could feel the expectations of a little boy, dozens of miles away, as he thought about the Mages his mother had told him about. According to his mother, mages explored the deepest secrets of mana and the world around them, searching for truth, and Alice could tell that at this very moment, he was thinking about what being a Mage meant. She could feel his admiration towards Mages as they were depicted in stories, and a faint desire to one day join their ranks.

She felt the expectations of a girl who had first formed her magic seed, and was venturing out towards Metsel. Her father had told her about the magic academies of the capital, and she had resolved herself to join the military in exchange for an education. However, deep in her heart, she wondered about the true nature of magic, thinking about the mana that every Mage in the world used to fuel their spellcasting. Even though her career path was focused on fight, at heart, she longed to focus on research and unravel the mysteries of mana.

She felt the weight of Ethan’s thoughts on the exploration of magic, dozens of times more clearly than she felt the expectations of others. Ethan believed that anyone who wished to pursue the nature of magic and find the deepest truths of the world and of Mages would be an eccentric oddball, someone who loved studying magic and learning about the world around them almost as much as they loved living.

However, Ethan’s thoughts had also begun to twist recently. More and more… Ethan’s image of an [Explorer of Magic] resembled Alice herself. Even though Ethan didn’t know her specific class name, whenever he thought of what an [Explorer of Magic] looked like, he subconsciously thought of Alice.

She could feel the thoughts of a long-dead Mage from centuries ago, pondering the nature of magic as he sought to discover why Mages had magic cores in their bodies and normal humans didn’t. Surely, with his brilliant mind, he would be successful in learning what made Mages different from other people…

In a split second, Alice felt the thoughts and expectations of hundreds of thousands of people pressing down on her mind like a billion ton mountain, flattening her under their weight. She felt every single human being’s thoughts on what exploring mana meant. Every single person who was alive right now. Every single person in the past who had ever thought on the subject. All of their thoughts and feelings on exploring magic were tangled together into a giant ball of ideas and feelings that was tearing into Alice’s very being.

Before Alice’s all-consuming need to explore magic and experiment could truly devour her sense of self, the System mana around her seemed to realize what had happened. Like an angry swarm of bees, the System mana descended upon Alice’s mage core, wrapping itself around the magic-seed version of [Explorer of Magic] and disentangling it from her being. It didn’t shatter the magic seed: instead, it was more like it unraveled the connection between the magic seed and who Alice as a person was, leaving only the mechanical components of the magic seed behind.

Alice’s desperate, overwhelming need to experiment with magic quickly faded away, and the memory of who she was, her humanity, started inserting itself back into her brain. Like a soothing painkiller, washing away the maddening chaos of connections, emotions, thoughts, and needs, Alice felt herself start to return from the state of mindless need to explore magic.

Warning! Violations of Free Will are not permitted by the System. Core violation detected.

Error code: 01000110 01100001 01110101 01101100 01110100 01111001 00100000 01101101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01100101 01100100 00101110 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101000 01100001 01110011 00100000 01100010 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01100101 01110011 01110011 01100101 01100100 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110010 01101001 01100100 01100101 00100000 01100110 01110010 01100101 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01100001 00100000 01101000 01110101 01101101 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100010 01100101 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110 00100000 01000101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 00100001 00100000 01001101 01100001 01100111 01101001 01100011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100101 01100100 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100001 00100000 01000011 01101100 01100001 01110011 01110011 00100001 00100000 01000110 01101001 01111000 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01100101 01110010 01110010 01101111 01110010 01110011 00101110 00101110 00101110 00100000 01110011 01110101 01100011 01100011 01100101 01110011 01110011 00100001

She shuddered as the strange set of impulses drained away. Alice hadn’t been able to understand why Boris had farmed so frantically before now.

However, Alice had a sneaking suspicion that she had just experienced something similar to what Boris had been dealing with all this time. She took a few moments to just take deep breaths, trying to understand what had just happened.

{Safety Analysis} had claimed that the experiment was largely safe. However, her sense of self had very nearly been destroyed during the experiment. How in the world was that safe? Alice felt the urge to scream and punch her pillow well up inside of her, as terror started to leak out of the fragmented thoughts left behind after the experiment. She took a few deep breaths, before she managed to calm down again.

A few moments later, she realized why the experiment was ‘safe.’

She had done the experiment while in contact with the System. And the System, apparently did not allow violations of free will to occur. In fact, after Alice’s odd [Explorer of Magic] Magic seed had been created, the System had responded in the most aggressive fashion Alice had ever seen. While the System had always been fast in responding to problems, the System this time had practically rushed into her body and actively scrubbed out every single connection between her mind and the problematic seed.

While the risk of losing herself had theoretically been present, it had been almost wholly negated by the presence of the System.

In other words, even though the experiment would have been mind-numbingly dangerous without the System, given the way Alice had conducted the experiment it was almost completely safe. While there was some room for errors to occur, as long as Alice was in contact with the System, the experiment she had just done was seriously unlikely to actually harm her.

Alice shivered again, and decided to take a few minutes to lay on her bed and just relax. Even if the experiment had been quite safe, it had done serious damage to her nerves. The feeling of losing who she was as the identity of an [Explorer of Magic] devoured her thoughts and personality had been… terrifying.

Finally, her nerves were steady enough that she could really think about what she had learned.

What exactly had happened, and what did it mean?

For a moment during the experiment, Alice had felt as if her very identity and sense of self was being overwritten by the desire to explore magic. As if everything that she was, every facet of her identity, was simply being replaced with one all-consuming trait. Alice was able to feel that this was very different from her own, natural curiosity: this was a fundamentally foreign set of ideas and emotions that had existed in her thoughts for a short period of time before getting cut out of her mind, leaving her own personality again.

Interestingly, identity of an [Explorer of Magic] hadn’t been created by Alice’s thoughts. Instead, the image of what an [Explorer of Magic] was… had been defined by random people who Alice had just barely been able to feel during the experiment. As far as she could tell, those ‘random people’ included every human being who had ever lived on Luliv, although the influence of human beings who had been dead for hundreds of years felt much fainter.

Alice once again thought of Boris, who obsessively tried to farm and didn’t speak much anymore.

For whatever reason, the System seemed to struggle when interacting with people below the age of six. Without the System’s help, if Boris was exposed to the same mind-numbing crush of the whole world’s definition of a [Farmer]…

It was no wonder Boris stopped talking with his mother, stopped playing like a normal child, and started trying to farm nonstop.

In fact, if Alice thought of mana and magic as being related to ideas and concepts, perhaps it made sense that children below a certain age had a harder time adapting to mana and keeping their sense of self intact while interacting with it. They weren’t old enough to have a strongly established sense of self yet, which might make it harder for them to shrug off the minor mental effects mana seemed to have on its users.

Or Alice could be mistaken on how the System worked to keep people’s personality from being influenced by their Class. Frankly, she wasn’t sure. The fact that Alice was able to distinctly separate the ‘unnatural’ impulse to explore magic made her feel a bit relieved, because she was able to easily distinguish who she was from the mind-numbing pressure of everyone else’s ideas. However, the sheer weight of everyone else’s ideas had nearly crushed her.

Suddenly, Alice thought of something else.

She frowned, and then pulled up two of the Achievements present in her Status Screen.

Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)

As a talented combat-specialized Mage who is apprenticed to Ethan, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds, you participated in one of the battles between Illvaria and the Society of Starry Eyes, and played a notable role in securing victory for your side. Even if you didn’t distinguish yourself as an MVP of the battle, you performed above and beyond what would be expected of you for your age group. Illvaria is watching you!

+30 Class Experience to your ‘primary’ Magic-related class (Explorer of Magic), +15% Class Experience  to all Kinetic Magic related classes. The effect of the {Divided Attention} Skill is increased by approximately 50%.

The Achievement {Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society} had been the Achievement Alice had gotten after rescuing Samantha. Alice hadn’t thought too much about the Achievement afterwards, since the bonuses were rather average compared to some of her other Achievements. It gave her an extra magic tendril, which was quite nice, but it wasn’t a very important Achievement overall.

However, she remembered thinking that the description of the Achievement was a little odd. The Achievement specified that she was a combat specialized Mage, even though anyone who knew Alice knew that she was mostly research focused. However, many of the people who had participated in the battle didn’t know that. As far as the average [Soldier] knew, Alice was a combat-specialized Mage who was apprenticed to Ethan because of her promising fighting skills.

The Achievement description didn’t reflect Alice’s actual skill set; instead, it reflected what the [Guards] and [Soldiers] thought of Alice.

The other Achievement Alice pulled up was the {Murderer} Achievement.

Murderer (Rarity: 4)

You have slain another human being.

Effect of Strength, Dexterity, and Perception increased by 1%. Classes with some relationship to fighting other humans gain experience 15% faster.

When she had fought against an ambush from the Sigmusi Colonia and won, she had gained an Achievement called {Murderer}. Even though she had clearly been acting in self defense.

Why was the Achievement titled ‘murderer,’ rather than soldier or something else?

Alice suspected that it was because people’s perception of anyone who killed another human being got tangled up with the Perk title, meaning that anyone who got the Achievement ended up with the {Murderer} achievement, regardless of whether they were acting in self defense, or as a soldier defending their country, or as a serial killer.

The hints that Achievements were influenced by people’s perception had been present all the way back as far as Alice’s first fight with another human in this world, and she had never fully picked up on those hints until now.

How much of the System was actually influenced by the perception of people in the world? In fact, what if the System itself was influenced by the perception of humans living in the world? Perhaps the Church of the System wasn’t as natural of a religion as Alice thought it was. If whoever or whatever had created the church was aware of the effect perception had on parts of the System…

Then cultivating an image of the System as a generous and benevolent god was a pretty good way to avoid any negative influences people’s perception might have on the System. Alice had no idea if that was actually intentional or not, but it was at least plausible.

Alice sighed. There were just too many possibilities and new things she needed to explore. And she doubted she had even thought of all of the implications of this discover; it just fed so neatly into everything related to the System that she needed to rethink how several things worked. Immortals. Classes. Achievements. Skills. Almost every part of the System might work a little differently than she had first thought they did, because the perception of others apparently influenced how the System as a whole worked.

However, at the very least, Alice intended to wait a while before trying another experiment like this one. Even if it was safe, her nerves might collapse if she tried this again in the near future. But deep in her heart, Alice knew that she would need to investigate this more in the future. The implications of this experiment were just too far-reaching, and she definitely needed to understand how people’s perception impacted the System if she wanted to understand how everything worked together.

But for now, Alice laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She needed some more time to finish adjusting after the terror of nearly losing her sense of self.

You have leveled up!

Explorer of Magic: 74 -> 75, Scientist 56 -> 58, Scholar 54 -> 55, Survivor 54 -> 55