Now that Alice had tested out magic seed combination, and made a few theories about the origin of the recent monster mutations, she had two Perks left to pick.

First, Alice looked at her new [Survivor] Perk choices. [Survivor] was the closest Class she had to a combat class, and Alice needed to find a way to defend herself against Society attacks and monster attacks. Especially with the recent increase in the strength and intelligence of monsters, Alice wanted to boost her combat abilities a little bit. She checked the newly unlocked Perks, but didn’t see anything particularly appealing. So she turned her attention back to Perk combination.

She had a rather hard choice to make.

Alice had three relatively good Perks from her [Survivor] Class that she was thinking about combining. The rest of her Perks were either extremely situational, such as {Extremophile}, which let her survive in much hotter or colder weather, or were so vital to Alice’s continued survival that she was afraid of messing with them, such as {Microbe Resistance}. Combining {Microbe Resistance} with anything seemed like a monumentally bad idea when Alice’s immune system was built for a different planet and its ecosystem.

However, Alice still had 3 Perks that were useful and had good synergy when combined.

{Moderate Tissue Regeneration} was one of the Perks that Alice used to guarantee her life, if anything bad happened to her. Most of the time, Alice used the Perk to make sure that she didn’t accidentally kill herself after using herself as a test subject, but Alice had always been aware of the fact that the Perk had combat uses, even though Alice didn’t get into combat situations that often. And these days, Alice didn’t use herself as a test subject as often as she used to, either.

This Perk was much easier to use than organic mana, and Alice wasn’t exactly sure how much mental leeway she would have if she were hurt and in a lot of pain. Alice’s organic mana was improving, but she definitely didn’t think she had reached the point where she could heal serious injuries without problems yet. So the Perk was still useful enough to keep around.

But it was also worth noting that Alice’s organic magic would eventually replace {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} in use. And when Alice looked at the Perk’s combination with the other two perks, both combined Perks were likely to keep some self-regeneration abilities. While the Perk was still useful, since Alice also had {Adrenaline Rush} and {Enhanced Senses}, the Perk was starting to feel less important than before.

The next Perk Alice was thinking about combining with something was {Adrenaline Rush}.

{Adrenaline Rush} was Alice’s best combat Perk. It gave Alice advanced warning when something was about to seriously hurt her, and it also synergized so well with the combat style of [Kinetic Mages] that Alice felt nearly invincible whenever she used {Adrenaline Rush}. Of course, the Perk also had the downside of only being active for five seconds, and then needing a full week to cool off. Normally, Alice wouldn’t have considered combining the Perk with anything at all, unless the result would be spectacular, because the Perk was just so powerful. But both of the combination Perks that involved {Adrenaline Rush} seemed to keep a lot of the Perk’s original properties, while solving some of the problems of the Perk, such as cooldown time.

Finally, Alice was considering using {Extended Organics} to create a new combined Perk.

Extended Organics was probably supposed to be used as a shield against other Mages messing with one’s biology. After all, while all living beings had an innate resistance against foreign mana, that didn’t mean that it was impossible to overcome. This Perk made it much harder to overcome her natural resistances, and also prevented other people from messing with Alice’s clothes, which was a common tactic in battles between [Kinetic Mages].

Alice used this Perk more for the range and mobility it gave her magic tendrils. The ability to instantly break down and reform a magic tendril anywhere within three meters of herself gave her a larger range of magical manipulation than most Mages had access to, and the ability to practically teleport her magic tendrils around her.

This Perk continued to be pretty useful to Alice, and she was hesitant to lose it. But it also had a lot of interest effects when combined with the other two Perks.

All three of these Perks seemed to have interesting results when Alice looked at combining them. Sadly, Alice could only combine two of them.

Alice sighed, and continued thinking about her choice for several minutes. It was very hard to decide what she wanted. But a choice had to be made.

Eventually, Alice chose to combine {Extended Organics} and {Moderate Tissue Regeneration}.

Alice blinked. The messy grammar, which Alice had been vaguely hoping she was now free from, had returned, which was unfortunate. However, it wasn’t too hard to figure out what her new Perk did.

{Extended Organics} had shrunk a bit, dropping from three meters to one meter. This was a bit of a shame, but not that big of a deal.

In exchange, Alice now had a weaker version of {Moderate Tissue Regeneration} active at all times, and Alice could heal anyone else she wanted to within a meter of herself, instead of just herself. Alice gave herself a very small cut on her arm, to test the effect of her new passive healing aura, and confirmed that her new Perk was very slowly causing her wound to close. It would probably take a few minutes to heal the scratch she had given herself, which wasn’t quite the superhuman regeneration Alice had been imagining. But it was very useful for handling extended fights where Alice might not have the time to heal herself with organic magic, and its ability to heal allies within a meter was also very useful. Since Alice had also kept the once-per-day major healing boost, and retained the reduced-range version of {Extended Organics}, she felt that the new Perk was overall a net gain instead of a net loss.

She did wish that the passive healing effect was stronger, but perhaps in the future Alice would have a chance to strengthen it some. Alice knew that past level 75, instead of just combining Perks with other Perks from the same class, one could combine Perks with Perks from OTHER classes, too. Alice hadn’t decided for sure whether she wanted to take advantage of this when she got to level 80 or higher in [Explorer of Magic], but at some point, {Extended Tissues} might be a good candidate for combination. If she could combine the passive healing effects of the Perk with the complex Perk manipulation she had access to from {Seeds of Ambition}, for example, Alice might be able to create something really special.

Then Alice shook her head, pushing away her daydreams about how powerful her future Perks might be. Alice hadn’t reached that point yet, and she had a lot of other problems she needed to solve right now. She focused on her final reward for her previous experiment.

She still needed to pick a new Perk for [Scientist].

The first thing Alice started wondering was what would happen to the {In Pursuit of Science} Achievement if Alice combined the {For Science!} Perk with something else. Alice had already upgraded {In Pursuit of Science} to its maximum level, and she wasn’t sure if the Perk was just free combination fodder, or if deleting the Perk would cause {In Pursuit of Science} and all of its related upgrades to disable themselves.

Luckily, Alice didn’t have to just sit around and guess. She had an Immortal nearby who would be happy to answer her questions.

Alice quickly left her room and inquired about the results of combining a Perk like {For Science!} with Ethan. Ethan informed Alice that if she combined the {For Science} Perk with something else, the Achievement she had acquired with the Perk, as well as any accompanying upgrades derived from it, would indeed stop working. Alice couldn’t just combine the Perk with another one for easy upgrades, unfortunately.

Alice was quite fond of her newfound ability to combine different kinds of mana seed together, so she decided not to mess with {For Science}. The Perk was simply giving her too much now. Instead, she started looking at her other Perks from [Scientist].

{Precise Mana Measurement} was just an inferior version of {Advanced Mana Measurement}, so Alice would be happy to toss it for something more useful. {Sample Collection} was Alice’s only storage Perk, and Alice was extremely fond of being able to cart around a few weeks of food and water, as well as a rather large library and several different kinds of enchanting materials around with her. Having things readily available was very convenient. {Shared Memory} was increasingly useful these days as a teaching tool and a way to share information and exchange opinions with Cecilia and Ethan, and Alice was reluctant to part with it. Which left Alice somewhat at a loss for whether she wanted to even combine any of her Perks.

Finally, Alice sighed, and started looking more closely at her new Perks.

Although the new Perks weren’t as interesting-looking as what she usually got from Perk combination, she saw two Perk options that were still rather interesting.

The first Perk she saw was one she probably would have killed for a few months ago, and was now far, far less useful.

Alice resisted the urge to throw something.

Now that the System mana Alice was so eager to study was no longer easily accessible in the air around her, she got a Perk that would make breaking it down and understanding it thousands of times easier?

Alice sighed. She might still pick it. After all, there were System enchantments available everywhere. Even if the System mana in a Class Seed or System enchantment was a bit different from the formations of System mana Alice actually wanted to study, it was still something to run off of. This Perk could give Alice more insight into what kinds of mana were used to construct System mana, and might give Alice a few bits of insight into what those System mana components were for.

There were three other options for Perk choices, but Alice only found one other Perk that interested her. The other two options she had been given just weren’t useful enough.

Alice hesitated when she saw the second option, and thought about her choices. One had the potential to let her break down System mana, at least in some form. Alice knew that System mana was a compound mana combined of a huge number of different forms of mana. Alice was pretty sure that the optimal path forward for her was to keep creating and fusing different components of System mana together, until she was able to replicate the System. This would be an astounding Achievement that would hopefully propel Alice into Immortality, and also hopefully resolve the current crisis.

But Alice still had yet to identify every aspect of System mana. She was discovering more and more types of constituent mana as she experimented with creating her own System mana, but there were still plenty of components of System mana Alice hadn’t identified yet.

Alice wasn’t sure how important it was to identify everything immediately, though. Currently, she still had way more types of System mana discovered than she actually had the time and seed slots to form. Knowing more of them would just add to the list of magic seeds she needed to create but hadn’t gotten around to yet. Alice could still only create two magic seeds a month, after all.

By contrast, the ability to form System enchantments was a bit more interesting. Alice rather liked the idea of being able to create System enchantments. After all, System enchantments had two major types of enchantment: the first type was a generic attribute buff, and the second type was an item that could temporarily grant the wearer a Perk from another Class. Usually these Perks were pretty low level, so the attribute boosts were more popular and tended to sell better.

But if Alice could use Perks from ANY of her research based Classes as System enchantments, there were a lot of things that she wouldn’t mind sharing. {Broken Seed}, for example, was practically custom-made to handle one of the problems created by the collapse of the System, and {Shared Memory] from [Scientist] would make it much easier to spread around information and teaching quickly and effectively. And making System enchantments would also help Alice level up her enchanter Class, which would help her get even more Perks that she might need to continue her attempts to fix everyone’s class seeds.

Alice hesitated, and then decided to go for {Science’s Mana}. Alice was already discovering new components of System mana on her own as she experimented and improved, so she didn’t feel that she urgently needed ways to discover more components of System mana. The other thing the Perk gave her was the ability to store mana inside of her storage Perk, but Alice wasn’t sure what she would actually do with that. It was interesting, but seemed useless. Meanwhile {Science’s Mana} offered Alice an immediate Perk to start controlling parts of the crisis and improving the Situation, and also offered her some System-enchanting Abilities, which Alice had already wanted for a long time. She had originally expected that she would need to wait until she got above level 50 in [Careful Enchanter] to start making System enchantments, but she wasn’t sure how long that would take since she had a lower XP buff for her enchanting Classes.

Then, Alice smiled as she watched her new Perks take shape inside of her.

It was time to experiment a bit with System enchanting.

acaswell

If you have somehow missed all of the other times I’ve mentioned this over the last, like, two months, final note:

This is the final chapter of Markets and Multiverses for the year. I am going on vacation for two weeks, right after I post this chapter (and my Budding Scientist chapter later tonight).

Happy holidays, and I’ll see you in two weeks!

😀

Shameless plug – you can read 3 chapters ahead for $3 on Patreon!

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