Chapter 83
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Alyra lay awake next to her sleeping family. Actually, even if she let her avatar sleep she herself was never truly asleep, constantly busy working on the system. A part of her was always doing that.

She looked at Mia, who had somehow managed to roll herself on top of Argul whilst sandwiching Aina between them in her sleep. The girl was a pretty active sleeper and Alyra smiled softly at the sight.

Her smile did not stay for long however and she looked back at the ceiling with a deep sigh. She had a problem and she didn’t know what to do or rather she feared the conversation she had to have with her mother to solve her problem.

Alyra had something to confess and it could ruin her relationship with her mother. She would like to say she knew her mom well enough to predict her reaction, but that was sadly not true. The memories she had inherited were overshadowed by the depression and listlessness Argul had back then. It was as if someone had taken away all the color from a picture and had thrown it into the rain. 

Alyra didn’t trust those memories to show the real Argul and as such she hadn’t known her mum for more than the 9 months she had lived so far. During that time her mother had acted in various ways depending on the circumstances, but she liked her mom the most when she was free and happy like the day they had first met. 

Now though, she had the feeling that her mother was pressured by the responsibility of having to care for a child. She was still smiling, sure, but she hadn’t laughed in a long time and didn’t act as intuitive as in those first few days on Erod.

Alyra sighed again, she was getting off track with her thoughts.

When she had been born she had also created her problem. To establish the system she had needed something to fuel it and the fuel she used was the mana her mother used to grow. Putting it simply she had shackled her mother somewhat by stopping her natural growth and she feared how Argul would react to that revelation.

Alyra was sure her mom already knew something was off with her core. It just didn’t make sense for her to grow when she leveled or received stats. The system would have to know how to create pure solid mana for that and there was nowhere to learn such knowledge, her core being the big exception.

But how did you tell someone that the one thing that helps everyone does not help you? 

Alyra didn’t know. She had no idea how her mother would react to the fact that she could have grown up to a full level 100 or so by now, that everytime she got a level or stats the shackles were removed to allow her growth.

Alyra stopped herself from sighing again, she was doing that too much right now and it couldn’t be good.

While she was fruitlessly thinking of a way to tell her mother of the workings of the systems, a part of her also continued to work on the system.

Right now the system was very rough and while that kind of worked for animals and plants, the humans started to lack behind. Most of them stopped receiving quests when they had reached about 60% of their stat potential and she blamed their more complex thoughts for that. Their desire for something got split because of that and thus they stopped receiving quests. There were a few outliers like the lizard village, but they didn’t have the luxury of thinking about much more than survival for a few months.

Animals in comparison were a lot more simpleminded and received a lot more quests than the many human races. Their quests were also a lot easier at times and she had seen silly things like ‘check that bush for prey’ quite a lot already.

The 40% difference in strength wouldn’t be that much of a problem for humanity and they should be able to overcome it with their intelligence. What worried Alyra a lot more was that a rare few animals and plants didn’t stop growing stronger after the system stopped helping them and cultivated their strength on their own. 

There was a reason for her to limit the growth per level though. To increase their strength a being could either enhance their body with mana, that was what Alyra labeled stats, or they could change their body on a fundamental level, which were the levels of the system.

The former couldn’t be done endlessly and there was a safe limit. If someone continued past that they would risk something going wrong and that something more often than not ended with the being going mad and mana addicted.

Finding that out had been incredibly annoying, because of Alyra’s limitations. She couldn’t do new things herself so she had been forced to cheese herself and discover all those things by ‘accident’. It just so happened that things happened if you threw enough mana at something. Thankfully, the same problem hadn’t existed for her mum, not that that made the system shackle less bad.

The letter method to gain strength, the levels, enabled something to be able to enhance their body more without taking a risk. The problem was, one couldn’t do this endlessly either and at some point you would reach a threshold, the evolution. This, again, wasn’t a safe thing to do, but once you were past that point you were safe until you reached the next evolution so it was still better than the stats.

From studying all the small evolutions on Erod, Alyra was certain she could reduce the risk of becoming a monster - that was actually a good name for those things and most humans would know that these things are bad thanks to all the fantasy stories - she could reduce the risk to 30% and the more examples she had been able to observe the safer she should be able to make the process. 

So, to summarize the problems, humans were weaker than the wildlife, which wasn’t really something new and there were a few killer machines out there that became stronger the longer they lived, dwarfing humans even more.

Alyra couldn’t really tell if the monster problem would become worse in the future, because mana hadn’t been around long enough yet to make accurate predictions of anything and because her mother’s domain didn’t have the same problem as Erod. There were a few animals and plants there that did go beyond the system help, but they didn’t even amount to 1% of the population and they did it so reluctantly that their process was very slow. Not one of them had gone mad yet, something that sadly wasn’t true for Erods inhabitants.

Now, Alyra did fancy the humans, because they would discover and give her a lot of knowledge, probably, and didn’t want them to get occupied by mad animals too much so she had to somehow help them out.

Her plan was to keep the system as it was and use that as a foundation for another layer of systems for sapient creatures. She had already planned to add some support systems for management purposes, basically for countries and companies, but the need for the second layer was somewhat of a setback here, because she wanted to use them as the base. That way the new system would go into effect for anyone somehow influenced by one of those support systems, like workers or citizens, would get access to the sapient support system.

She really needed to sort that out and give all those things better names, it was becoming somewhat confusing.

Anyway, the new system layer would be more strict. Alyra wanted to go ahead and implement her mother’s idea of classes. Every sapient would have a slot for a class, that had to be earned through a quest of course. There wouldn’t be any free bees, that was bound to be counterproductive.

Classes were just a name for a quest series that would reward a person with knowledge and maybe titles instead of stats. This was meant to speed up the progress of a person so that they reached uncharted territory faster, at which point they would receive the pioneer title of their profession.

Creating this was going to be a pain and Alyra would have to make it possible for someone like her mum to have multiple classes. There were so many things she had to work through and that wasn’t even all.

Because the present quest system didn’t work that good for humans she would try something else and here the management systems came into play. People in power would have the option to improve these systems through quests which would affect everyone under them. It would probably be better to bind these systems to organization instead of the leader or the progress would get lost.

Through these management systems people or the main system would then be able to issue quests that reward stats to all that are part of an organization. The farmer of a country could for example be rewarded for a successful harvest or a guard for apprehending a thief. Again, Alyra didn’t want to give out stuff for free so she would make sure people had to work for it.

All this didn’t solve the issue with the monsters yet though and she was a bit at a loss of what to do. After a few she began to look through the old memories of her mum to look for something.

Alyra found a solution relatively fast, but she had to somehow balance it out. The idea was that once people have received the safe amount of stats their class would issue a trial quest and if they were successful they would level up. 

Maybe she should initiate the creation of an adventurer guild?

It would be fun and with the monsters around they would have a purpose. The question was how to do it though. There wasn’t really anybody that fit the role of a guildmaster at the moment. She could try Trevor, but…hmmm.

Alyra put the thought on hold for now and got back to her system modification.

The thing was she had to somewhat balance the level limit with the mana density. It wasn’t feasible to have people level too far past the mana density so this new system wouldn’t stop the rift between people in Argul’s domain and those outside to occur eventually.

That was another problem altogether, she couldn’t really do much against it for now however. She did have an idea that could help, but Fia would have to do that and she was sure her mother would help her too if she asked. 

Before that though she would have to confess and if that went alright Alyra had a few other things to discuss. Her mom should have somewhat recovered from her past state of mind and wouldn’t freak out by some of the possibilities.

She sighed again, noticing that she was only trying to distract herself. She really had to have that talk with her mother, the earlier the better.

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