After settling on her new plan to mitigate the impact of the System collapse, Alice finally took a moment to settle her new Perk from [Scholar].

Alice started out by scanning over her Perk combination options, as well as her options for new Perks.

After a few moments, she felt a flicker of disappointment.

She had really been hoping that some of her new Perk choices or combinations would either help her restore some semblance of the System and its mana, or help her a lot more with her enchanting experiments. After all, if Alice wanted to create a ring that mimicked the effects of the System, she was going to need a lot of time and effort to succeed. Having a Perk that made the process easier would have gone a long way right now.

Unfortunately, she didn’t find any Perks that directly impacted her enchanting or her experiments with System mana components. So she ultimately decided on a different Perk combination by sacrificing {Delve into the Arcane} and {Improved Memory}.

Delve into the Arcane Requirements: Scholar level 50 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher, some sort of Perk which gives you the ability to learn information, rarity eight or higher Achievement related to Magic and Research

If you have spent at least an hour learning about magic within the past 24 hours, your mana regeneration rate is increased by 100% (This multiplier takes effect AFTER accounting for all other Perks you have that multiplies mana regeneration, working multiplicatively instead of additively).

Alice had leaned into {Delve into the Arcane} to help fuel the mana she needed for her experiments for quite a while, and to some extent, she still relied on it. In fact, considering the fact that she spent 8 hours a day reading while she was asleep, she found it easier than ever to trigger the Perk’s activation conditions, meaning that she was basically always enjoying the benefits of the Perk.

However, she was also starting to run into limitations on what she could do even with all of her mana regeneration stacked together. Right now, her biggest limitations weren’t mana-based at all – they were usually based on either the amount of time she could spend researching something, even with all of her time-efficiency enhancing Perks tossed together, or they were limitations based on the usage of her Perks. Her limitation of using {Broken Seed} once every four days, {Seeds of Ambition} once a month, and {Expanding Comprehension} every 2 weeks currently proved to be the biggest blocks on her forward progress. Right now, Alice had several magic seeds she wanted to try forming – and she seriously struggled to get all of them built. Even with two seeds a month, she already had several components of System mana that she wanted to make and experiment with, and nowhere near enough time to make them all. And having only 24 hours a day to experiment often proved a major problem for her progress.

Therefore, even though losing {Delve into the Arcane} would sting, it was a bearable loss. And the text Alice had seen for her new Perk combination seemed promising enough that she was willing to lose the Perk.

The other Perk Alice was losing was much less of a struggle.

As for {Improved Memory}, {Photographic Memory} was simply a much better version of the same Perk. Alice felt absolutely nothing at the prospect of losing it, and probably wouldn’t even notice that it was gone.

So, without further hesitation, Alice combined the Perks into something new.

Perk Naaaame: Delve _ Memories Perk Costs: Delve into the Arcane + Improved Memory Perk _ Synergy detected: Sleep Reading

Vastly improved understanding while using remembering. Can level, analyze, and improve magic better. Synergy detected_ Sleep reading. Add_Text Synergy.

Ah yes, the ever-enlightening ‘add_text synergy,’ thought Alice, sarcastically. Even with the help of display mana, she had no idea what the ‘synergy’ part of her Perk did.

It took several more moments for her Perk to figure out it was bugged and fix itself, although Alice was pleasantly surprised the Perk actually fixed itself. She hadn’t really expected it to, now that the System was down and most other things remained bugged once they became glitch.

Perk Naaaame: Delve _ Memories Perk Costs: Delve into the Arcane + Improved Memory Perk _ Synergy detected: Sleep Reading

Vastly improved understanding while using remembering. Can level, analyze, and improve magic better. While {Sleep Reading}, can use objects you remember. Levelling speed improved by Get_Number while sleep reading. Experiments and Enchantments very accurate while sleep.

As her Perk rewrote itself in front of her eyes, Alice blinked.

The chunks of the System that were still active in her [Scholar] Class fractal had reached out and rearranged themselves, even without the input of the System from the atmosphere. It had never done that before. At least, not that she had seen. Equally interesting was that Alice’s {Intuitive Magic Modelling} caught sight of a new type of mana, operating purely within her Class seeds. She wasn’t entirely sure what type of mana it was, but as far as she could tell it was something like ‘meaning’ mana, or perhaps ‘correction’ mana. It felt like the mana leaned a bit into both of those concepts – almost like it was capable of correcting information from ‘display’ mana, but also like it was meant to interact with something else on a deeper level.

Alice was reminded of the fact that people were normally able to read  their Perks without help. But ever since the system collapsed, unless Alice used her display mana, all she saw when looking at Perk options was a glitched out System box that said “Perk Selection: ----- (missing entry). This was obviously a glitch, even if Alice could fix it using display mana.

In addition, Alice remembered the fact that proper System messages were readable no matter what language one spoke. Meanwhile, the fake System messages Alice could create using Display mana were basically just floating books – they didn’t contain any sort of auto-translate feature. Alice could create System messages in English or Illvarian, but if someone who spoke a different language appeared in front of her, she would have no way to make her display mana fix their bugged Perk selection screen.

Perhaps this mana type filled in the gaps that she had been missing? It was very much something she was interested in trying out, whenever she could make another magic seed.

Unfortunately, Alice had no way to get more magic seed slots right now. Since her new Perk seemed to be related to {Sleep Reading}, Alice supposed that she would need to feel out how the Perk worked.

After she finished selecting her new Perk, she turned towards Ethan, who hadn’t moved since Alice had started messing with her status screen.

“Thank you for helping me with my experiments,” said Alice.

“That’s what I’m here for,” said Ethan. “Besides, as much as I think it’s unlikely that you’ll blow yourself up or recreate the tragedy of Allenheim in my basement, there’s no sense in tempting fate.”

Alice nodded. “I had a new idea about how to potentially address the collapse of the System. I believe I already mentioned how I was using filtration mana to correct my class seeds. I’ve started thinking that maybe this can be reproduced on a larger scale, perhaps using enchantments of some sort. If we only rely on Mages who get a new class seed open, it will take a great deal of time to get people with filrtation magic seeds available throughout Illvaria – and it would probably be hard to realistically get filtration Mages everywhere they would need to be. But if we can get the entire process done through enchantments…” Alice continued detailing her rough idea for how to automate the mana filtration process usually handled by the System, as well as the problems she expected to encounter. Meanwhile, Ethan simply listened to her as they walked back towards the upper parts of the manor.

Once she was done talking, Ethan nodded.

“It’s a good idea, and it has a reasonable chance of working around the problems we would face if we tried to just make a lot of Mages get filtration magic seeds. Since you need an enchantment material that can record instructions from filtration mana, I’ll look into any mysterious enchanting materials that people have found over the years. There might be something that reacts with System mana that was previously considered ‘odd’ or ‘useless,’ so I’ll have someone look into that. I’ll also see if anyone has access to an enchanting Perk that lets them create the kind of enchanting material you would need. I think most Perks that let enchanting materials learn more instructions tend to be limited to a specific type of mana, but there’s a decent chance someone has a Perk or Achievement that removes that limitation. I’ll see what I can find,” he said, as the two of them finally reached the upstairs area again.

With their conversation finished, Alice thanked Ethan again, before she went to her room to take a nap and play with her new Perk. Since it synergized with {Sleep Reading}, Alice wanted to see if anything had changed while using the {Sleep Reading} Perk. It didn’t take her long to fall asleep.

Within her dream, Alice returned to her usual dream-library. However, unlike before, the dream-library had a new addition to it. It was a giant room filled with every enchanting material Alice had ever come across and examined in any detail.

Alice grinned.

Perhaps she had been too pessimistic when she had assumed that the System hadn’t given her any options for improving her enchantments and experiments on the System. Even if the text for her new Perk was buggy as heck, Alice was starting to get an idea what the new Perk might do.

Alice strode towards the new room. At the same time, another memory bubbled up. An idea on top of an idea.

There had been a few times, recently, where Alice had wondered if she wasn’t using her {Sleep Reading} ability to its full potential. However, with the project to save Illvaria from the System’s collapse, her attempts to manage the collapse of the System, and her projects to keep the country from spiraling towards collapse, Alice hadn’t found the time to experiment with her Perk that she had wanted. She had spent almost every moment inside of her dream library looking up information that she felt would be useful to her or Cecilia. Information about pure mana, and how it could be used to filter other kinds of mana, for example, as well as historical records of changes the System had made over the years, and speculations about how and why the System changed when and how some Perks could be accessed.

However, now that Alice had her new enchanting room added to her dream library, and had the issue brought to her attention once more, she started to think about what her new Perk did, and the ways she might have been failing to use her old Perk.

She pulled up the description for {Sleep Reading} again, to see if she had missed something.

Sleep Reading Perk Costs: Lesser Reduced Sleep Requirement + Super Speed Reading

Any time you are asleep, so long as you are close to or touching a book and have permission to read it from the owner of that book, you may read it inside of your dreams. This will not affect your sleep, meaning you will still fully rest after a night of sleeping, and all of the speed and comprehension bonuses offered previously offered by {Super Speed Reading} will still apply while you are asleep. Note: Any books stored inside of any storage Perks you have are considered to be touching you at all times for the purposes of this Perk.

She frowned.

Now that she was explicitly looking for exploits, she started to realize that there really might be a few things she could do with this Perk that weren’t explicitly outlined.

So far, she had used this Perk to gather background information and data as efficiently as possible. However, what if she used her dream library as a brainstorming area?

Her Perk specified that she could read books inside of her dreams, but it was also obvious that the Perk actively let her ‘lucid dream’ as much as she wanted to. After all, Alice had imagined up this giant, comfortable library, and let her walk around inside of the space to ‘pick up’ books and look at them, even though that wasn’t explicitly ‘reading.’ She could even imagine cups of tea and snacks and eat and drink them, even though they were pretty obviously unrelated to what her Perk was supposed to do. And her Perk didn’t stop her at all.

So what if she just… sat around and fiddled with enchantment blueprints, or something? In the first place, Alice had taken the {Blueprint} Perk at level 10 for [Careful Enchanter], which let her create blueprints of enchantments which made it easier for her to copy the blueprint into reality without messing them up. She looked up the description for {Blueprint} again, to see if she could do anything with the Perk while asleep.

Blueprint Requirements: Careful Enchanter level 10 or greater, Intelligence 150 or greater

You may create up to three different 'blueprints' inside of your memory, by carefully imagining each enchanting material you wish to add to the enchantment and then imagining what kind of 'instruction' you wish to add to each enchanting material. You will be able to get some sense of how well the enchantment will work in practice - and you will also be less likely to make mistakes when making a physical copy of a blueprint if you spend a larger amount of time on making the item. Note: You can freely delete old blueprints, but some amount of mental taxation will occur. Frequent use may cause headaches or migraines, so it is advised not to delete blueprints too frequently.

Alice nodded thoughtfully to herself.

She felt that she could probably have also been brainstorming and using some other Perks during her time she spent asleep.

Of course, as of now, there was a whole lot more that she could do while she was asleep.

She looked at the new enchanting room, and grinned.

She didn’t know exactly what materials she would be working with when she tried to make her rings of [Farmer] levelling, since right now, Alice had no knowledge of any enchanting materials that could work with System mana. And her new Perk specified that it would only let her interact with materials she remembered. Meaning that she needed to have had contact with an enchanting material first.

However, she was pretty sure she could design new enchantments inside of her dreams now, using materials she had already made. And if she liked a particular design, she could then save it into her {Blueprint} Perk, making it easier to replicate in reality. And she could probably also test what new materials were capable of inside of her dreams. Her new Perk also implied that she would now have a boosted levelling speed inside of her dreams, making it easier to get new Perks and make the whole process even easier.

Alice took a step into her new dream enchanting workshop, and took a few materials off the wall before experimenting with them. Just as she had expected, they behaved exactly like they did in real life – leaving her free to mess with materials and practice enchanting as she pleased.

Even better, while she was asleep, she didn’t seem to be spending any of her ‘real’ mana on the enchanting experiments. She would have to wake up to check if she really was leveling up her enchanting classes efficiently this way, but at least so far, Alice was pretty sure she had just hit the jackpot with her new Perk.

She just needed to find a material that could use {Filtration} mana, and she could put her class rings idea into practice. And now she had an easy and efficient way to test new materials without wasting her time and mana.

Alice felt herself getting more and more excited as she started messing with her enchanting materials, and in the span of a few minutes, got lost in her work.

* * *

Illa Weissaurus stepped down from her ship and onto docks with a sigh, before grimacing and using one of her kinetic mana tendrils to float her luggage behind her.

The news that she had come across as she was sailing towards Metsel was not promising. All of the passengers that had boarded the boat were discussing strange things. Things like the System bugging out, or acting oddly. More recently, they were talking about [Willpower] training, or the [Priests] of the Church of the System going mad, or… frankly, a wide variety of other scenarios, all of which Illa found disturbing and ridiculous in equal quantity.

Illa was usually skilled at picking out which information was accurate and which information was worthless from a large stream of information. Ever since she had started delving into politics, it had become something of a necessity for her. However, she usually picked out useful information by comparing it to what she already knew and figuring out what actually made sense. Right now… nothing made sense.

People that had boarded her ship and spoken with the other passengers were scared, and a strange sense of tension hung in the air. However, concrete information was hard to find.

Illa dearly hoped that was simply because [Messengers] hadn’t reached most parts of the kingdom yet, because if nobody knew what was going on, it would be even more of a catastrophe.

She strolled through the streets of the little dock town that was only an hour or so away from the capital, and after some hesitation, decided to spend a few hours chatting with some other patrons of a tavern. Drunk people passed information back and forth between each other far more easily than people who were sober, after all.

She took a few steps into the first decent looking tavern she saw, and spent a few moments relaxing as the nostalgic scent of alcohol hit her in the face like a giant boulder thrown by a [Kinetic Mage].

Absently, she wondered how long it had been since she last stepped into a tavern on her own. She had used to hit up a tavern with a few other [Mages] she was good friends with during her time in the army, whenever they could sneak away from the barracks for a few hours. However, once she transitioned from a [Warmage] to a political figure, she had never quite found the time to just sit in a tavern and relax, the way she used to.

“Hello there, lady Mage!” said a [Waiter] after she took a seat near the center of the room. It was harder to notice the strain at the edge of his voice than it had been with some other people, but Illa could still detect an edge to his demeanor that most professionals wouldn’t normally show. “What can I get for you?”

“A mug of beer, please,” said Illa, trying to push back her nerves a bit, and feeling a bit nostalgic for her army days. There had been plenty of nightmares during her time in the army, but there were also plenty of good memories associated with those times.

The [Waiter] quickly got her a mug of beer, and Illa felt a little bit of the stress and frustration she had accumulated during the journey melt away after taking a few sips of the cheap-tasting swill they served in the establishment.

It tasted foul. Which, frankly, was what Illa preferred if she was drinking beer. The point of beer was to get drunk, not to taste good.

After that, Illa simply settled down to relax and listen in on conversations. Luckily, unlike the scattered, ambiguous information she had collected during her travel north, the people this close to the capital seemed to have much better information on whatever was happening to the System right now.

“-say that the church is trying to raise people’s [Willpower]. If your [Willpower] is too low compared to… something about ambient mana, or something, your personality will start to get warped by your Classes. Not sure what the heck anyone means by ‘ambient mana,’ since they don’t seem to be talking about the pure mana in the air around us, but I don’t like the idea of my personality-“

“-Heard that the apprentice of Honored Immortal Ethan discovered it. I heard she was a combat Mage, but I didn’t really pay much attention. The guy who claimed she was a combat mage must have been drunk. She’s clearly a researcher, if she found-”

“-Society is openly at war with the Shil Confederacy! They have to be, with the way they’re openly attacking people!”

“-Something about Perks is wrong. All of my Perks just look like error messages when I go to the Perk selection screen. My daughter got her first couple Achievements last weekend when I brought her and a few of her friends to kill a few spidercrabs, and they just didn’t get the full stat boost they should have! With both Perks and Achievements getting weird –“

“-And the high [Priest] of the System church collapsed, or so they say. Hasn’t seen anyone since-“

“-[Farmer] Edmund hasn’t spoken with anyone since yesterday. He just keeps throwing seeds onto the ground over and over again. It’s the wrong season to sow seeds, and I know for a fact he isn’t high enough level to ignore planting season yet. I can’t tell of this is some sort of version of the personality-warping the… uhh… ‘ambient class mana’ stuff causes, but something’s wrong with his head right now. Maybe if we get him to a church -”

Illa spent nearly two hours collecting conversation fragments and stringing information together, before she got a solid idea what was happening right now.

It seemed that the System was truly collapsing, at least in some limited way. The Church of the System had a variety of mixed responses to that, but it looked like at least somebody knew what was going on and was trying to organize a response to it.

And the more she listened, the more Illa was fairly certain that somebody was her former apprentice, Alice.

Illa grinned as she finished up her last tankard of beer, paid, and left to continue moving towards the capital.

It was becoming increasingly clear that whatever was going on, her former apprentice was right in the center of it.