A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

While Alice was asleep, she found herself within her dream library, as usual. Originally, this made Alice grin – she had just been thinking about how she wanted to test out the spidercrab shells she had spotted, and now, a golden opportunity had appeared.

Then, she realized that she had actually forgotten to grab the spidercrab corpses and stuff them into her storage Perk. Her dream library had a lot of functions, now that multiple Perks were feeding into it. However, it still needed a physical testing material to be in her storage Perk before she could start testing enchantments. In other words, she had no way to test her new research materials during her sleep, and she also couldn’t use the ‘unlimited’ mana from her dreams to test things right now.

Perhaps she had been more tired than she had thought she was. Making such an obvious mistake frustrated Alice, but now that she was asleep, she didn’t have any way to wake herself back up. Her Perk didn’t come with any sort of easy way to wake up, and Alice had always been a bit of a heavy sleeper. Unless someone triggered one of her danger-sensing Perks, she didn’t have a good way to fix her mistake until morning came.

After realizing this, Alice sighed, and took it as a sign that she really had been overwhelmed by the stress of the crisis. After some hesitation, she spent the night reading adventure stories and trying to work some of the stress out of her mind and body. It wasn’t what she would consider the most productive night, but it was sorely needed right now. As much as Alice tried to be efficient and solve every single problem related to the System’s collapse, she was still a human. She needed to take breaks and relax occasionally, or she would collapse from stress and pressure, no matter how many Perks she had to increase her work efficiency.

And so, a night of light reading passed.

The next day, after a quick breakfast, Alice rushed to the testing room. She had already spent eight hours relaxing during her sleep, and she felt refreshed in both mind and body. It was time to get moving. The spidercrab corpses had been left untouched in the corner of the room, as Alice had requested, so she stepped towards them and prepared for yet another round of experiments.

Alice gave the spidercrab corpses one last check using her Perks and the experience she had gained from spending months working as an [Enchanter]. Once she was satisfied that nothing was about to explode or go catastrophically wrong, she poked at the spidercrab corpses with her mana. She wasn’t terribly concerned with adding a specific enchantment to the spidercrab corpses, she just wanted to answer a fundamental, critical question.

Had the properties of spidercrab shells changed after the spidercrabs created knockoff System Perks?

Alice held her breath as she started feeding a set of enchantment ‘instructions’ to the spidercrab shells. The instruction itself didn’t matter, so Alice just tried to feed it an instruction to ‘show someone a basic System message’ whenever they touched the shell. It was a sloppy enchantment instruction, and it would probably leak more mana than a broken faucet, but Alice just wanted to see if the instruction would take at all. Spidercrab shells were normally completely useless as enchanting materials, so if she could imprint an enchanting instruction onto a spidercrab’s shell, it would mean something very important had changed.

She focused on making the enchantment feed off of the spidercrab monster core that was still buried inside of the creature’s corpse, and then waited to see if anything happened.

Alice’s eyes widened as she felt her mana sink into the spidercrab shell, patterning itself off of the enchantment that she had been trying to create. She stepped closer to the spidercrab shell, and touched it with her hand.

She saw mana surge out of the spidercrab core, and a moment later, a ‘System’ message appeared in front of her.

Through Testing, you have Created a System Message!

Test

Alice started cackling like a maniac. Alice’s witchlike cackle started to spread throughout Illa’s manor. If Alice had more self-awareness, she might have felt bad about scaring the [Servants], but Alice was too excited to pay attention to that. Alice spent several seconds regaining control of herself, before she stared at the spidercrab shell and grinned.

Alice hadn’t been sure whether or not the tree bark Ethan had secured a supply of would accept her new, compound mana. It would have been a good thing to test while she was asleep, but Alice hadn’t thought about it until now. But now, Alice didn’t even need to test the tree bark – the spidercrab shells had directly solved the problem of finding an enchanting material that could use her new, compound mana. Which meant Alice could start creating some emergency supplies to help the areas worst hit by the collapse of the System. Alice had no way at all to keep up with the demand of all of Illvaria, of course – there was simply way she could create enough enchantments to keep an entire country healthy on her own. Alice could only create a few dozen enchantments a day, and that was if she worked like a machine. Illvaria probably needed thousands or tens of thousands of class-fixing enchantments to stave off the crisis. But at the very least, Alice could finally get started on production. The sooner she got started on production, the faster people could level up and pick Perks, which would let them adapt to the crisis and get the rest of the country working again.

The spidercrab shells didn’t just let Alice start getting the snowball rolling, either. One of the two biggest bottlenecks in the production of emergency relief enchantments was solved if spidercrabs could be used as an enchanting material. Feeding a spidercrab an item enhanced by a Perk wasn’t that hard, and spidercrabs were almost literally everywhere. It was hard to find a part of the world where spidercrabs weren’t present. While it would still be hard to get enough [Enchanters] to meet demand, Cecilia was already working on solving that problem. If things went well, the crisis might be back under control within a few months with minimal damage.

Then, Alice frowned. Since she had a compound mana type now, she hadn’t actually tested whether the spidercrab shells would accept ‘normal’ kinds of mana, such as filtration mana. She had only tested whether it would accept Alice’s specific type of compound mana. Alice tried focusing on her new, bizarre magic seed and extracting only filtration mana. Alice felt filtration mana slowly drain out of her compound magic seed, unaccompanied by the display mana she had connected it to.

It was still possible to access individual components of her magic seeds after fusing them together. Alice felt a bit relieved at this discovery and grinned, before trying to create a basic ‘filter mana’ enchantment using another spidercrab shell.

Alice felt the mana try to sink into the spidercrab shell… and then bounce off, as if it had run into a brick wall.

Alice’s earlier delight faded away, replaced with a feeling of worry. If the spidercrab shell only accepted compound mana, this would not be a suitable solution for Illvaria. Alice didn’t know if there was anyone else in the country who could create compound magic seeds, but even if other people had compound magic seeds, they were probably very rare. After all, the Perks needed to make this possible were incredibly specific. There probably weren’t many people who were quite as obsessed with strange fields of study as she was.

Alice tried shoving more filtration mana into the spidercrab shell, but once again, the mana and the instruction she had tried to add to the spidercrab shell simply bounced off, accomplishing nothing. Alice tried shoving the compound mana type into the new spidercrab shell, more out of frustration than any hope it would accomplish something… and it also bounced off.

Alice felt her anxiety melt away, replaced by pure confusion.

Why was one spidercrab shell accepting her compound mana while another one wasn’t? Was the original spidercrab shell that Alice had tested just a fluke?

Alice grabbed a third spidercrab shell and tried shoving pure filtration mana into it. This time, unlike with the second spidercrab corpse, the enchantment sank into the spidercrab perfectly. However, Alice noticed that the filtration enchantment she had just created felt very different from the compound enchantment she had created with the first spidercrab shell. It wasn’t the feeling of an enchantment failing – instead, it was more like she was pushing the enchanting through thick honey instead of air.

She tried testing the enchantment. The enchantment did exactly what it was supposed to, filtering the mana in the air around it into a slightly purer form. However, the enchantment was very leaky. Alice looked at it for a few moments, before she started to relax again.

The enchantment being leaky wasn’t too big of a drawback. Her biggest concern had been the possibility that the first spidercrab shell working as an enchanting material was a fluke. Another spidercrab shell working as an enchanting material alieved this fear. But even though Alice wasn’t as worried as she had been a moment ago, she was still very confused. Of the three spidercrab shells she had tested, two accepted compound enchantments just fine, while the third had rejected all forms of enchantment, just like a normal spidercrab shell.

She glanced at the remaining spidercrab corpses, and shoved them all into her storage Perk before she quickly ran back to her room and took a nap, with instructions to a [Maid] to wake her up in an hour.

In her dreams, Alice started experimenting with the spidercrab shells again.

She discovered that if a spidercrab shell accepted compound mana, it would also accept pure filtration or pure display mana. Every spidercrab shell accepted either all of the components of her compound magic seed, or none of them. There was no other outcome. She also noticed that enchantments created from ‘pure’ types of mana were consistently more leaky and less efficient than compound enchantments.

Alice supposed that made sense. The Spidercrabs had adapted to System mana, not one particular component of System mana. Types of mana that were closer to System mana would thus match the spidercrab shell better.

But the difference wasn’t that severe. Her compound enchantments leaked around 30% of their mana as waste product, while filtration or display mana enchantments seemed to leak around 40% of their mana. It was definitely a noticeable amount of waste and inefficiency, but for a quick test that she had slapped together it was fine if her enchantments leaked a lot of mana.

After Alice finished her experiments, she was still left confused about what distinguished one type of spidercrab shell from the other. Why did some spidercrab corpses accept compound mana instructions now, while some didn’t?

Eventually, the [Maid] woke Alice up, and she rushed back to the testing room. She wanted to get to the bottom of this new oddity.

Alice had several more rounds of spidercrabs brought to the testing room. The first thing she did was run a control trial, since she hadn’t actually done so yet. If regular spidercrabs that hadn’t adapted to the System could also be used as enchanting materials, she would need to revise her thinking somewhat.

However, none of her control spidercrabs had useful corpses. Just like the spidercrabs from before the collapse of the System, the spidercrabs that hadn’t interacted with System mana didn’t have any interest qualities after they died. The only useful part of their corpse was their monster core.

After Alice verified this with a few more rounds of testing, she went back to experimenting on ‘enhanced’ spidercrabs. Since most of the spidercrabs in the area seemed to still be normal, Alice manually stuffed new test subjects with Perk -influenced articles of clothing, much like the first batch of spidercrabs. After they absorbed the System mana and started creating their own copies, Alice immediately killed them and started testing their corpses.

Just like the first batch of test subjects, some of the new spidercrabs had their shells drastically modified after creating their own knockoff versions of the System. A small number of the system-modified spidercrab corpses accepted compound mana, while the other spidercrabs didn’t accept System mana at all. This was despite the fact that all of the spidercrabs had successfully copied a System Perk when exposed to the same conditions.

Alice went back to the same [Maid] and told her to wake Alice up in an hour. The [Maid] gave Alice a very strange look, but acknowledged Alice’s request. Alice went back to sleep again, and used her dream library to test the next few batches spidercrab shells.

The spidercrab shells accepted compound magic, pure mana, and organic mana, but did not accept No_Magic. Alice was starting to strongly suspect that the spidercrab shells only accepted components of System mana – in other words, the closer a type of mana was to System mana, the more easily the spidercrab corpses would accept them as sources of enchantment instructions. But Alice still had no idea why some spidercrabs turned into usable enchanting materials and others just turned into waste product. After testing each spidercrab shell she had stuck into her storage Perk, Alice confirmed that the spidercrabs had around a 30% chance of turning into a useful enchanting material. Alice could not figure out what distinguished whether a spidercrab turned into a useful enchanting material or not – as far as she could tell, it seemed to be entirely random.

But even though she wasn’t entirely sure how everything worked together, After five rounds of testing, Alice was at least sure that spidercrabs sometimes turned into enchanting materials. Illvaria desperately needed enchanting materials right now.

Alice had found a way to solve the materials shortage. It wasn’t perfect, since the enchantments created afterwards would be leaky and inefficient, and they would also wear out more quickly than usual. But any solution was better than no solution. When Alice was woken up by the [Maid] again, she dashed out of her room, found Ethan, and dragged him into her testing room, before showing off what she had found.

Ethan simply sat there as Alice ran through her presentation of her new discovery, sometimes nodding approvingly, and sometimes giving the spidercrab corpses curious looks. Finally, Ethan grinned.

“Well done!” said Ethan. “This is… incredibly useful. I was originally thinking that the monsters growing more intelligent and getting access to knockoff Perks was another catastrophe piled on top of the others, and I was getting my subordinates to prepare for possibly being besieged by monsters. Combined with all of the other problems, I was honestly thinking that things were turning into a real mess. I didn’t realize that the strange adaption of monsters also represented an opportunity to fix one of our other problems.” Ethan’s grin grew wider. “I don’t think this solution will fix everything… but it’ll definitely go a long way towards fixing the aftermath of the collapse of the System. I believe I already told you about monster farms, and how they were used to farm monster cores, right?”

Alice frowned, and scoured her memory. A few moments later, Alice recalled Ethan mentioning people using ranches to grow monsters, similar to the same way people on Earth grew cattle and pigs. They weren’t common, because monsters were inherently dangerous, but people were trying it out and meeting some success with it. Most people still preferred to raise regular animals, but monster ranches still provided a small amount of enchanting materials to the Illvarian economy. Ethan had also mentioned that he thought the idea might take off within the next few centuries.

“I remember you mentioning it,” said Alice, after a few moments.

“Well, I’ll have a few of my subordinates go to some of the nearby ranches and have the ranchers there start producing batches of these spidercrab shell. I probably won’t even need to incentivize the ranchers much – I’ll just offer them a larger than average payment for every useful spidercrab shell, and tell them about what you’ve found with your experiment. They’ll do the rest on their own. Money motivates people, and if the ranchers get a tidy sum of profit every time they produce a monster shell that’s useful, I imagine they’ll be even more motivated than you to figure out how to produce batches of useful shells more consistently and reliably,” said Ethan, chuckling. “I also wouldn’t be surprised if they have an easier time figuring out why some shells are useful and some aren’t, even though you’re more focused on research than them. After all, your entire build is centered around manipulating and perceiving mana – but you haven’t learned much about monster biology beyond the basics in your magic academy class. While it’s a good start, it naturally won’t compare to someone whose entire Class is built around analyzing and making use of monsters.”

Alice thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. She definitely didn’t feel the need to waste a Perk on learning how to examine weird components of monster biology in the future, so this was probably just going to be something she needed to delegate to other people in the future. For now, she decided to just be happy she had solved the material shortage.

Ethan patted her on the shoulder. “Well done. I’ll get that started. How long do you think it’ll be until the mages you and Cecilia are training are ready to start producing enchantments?”

“The Mages we’re training are getting better at understanding what they need, but it still takes a while to get one person fitted with the magic seed that they need to be useful,” said Alice. “The failure rate for producing magic seeds without the help of the System is a lot higher than expected, since I’m helping them learn all of the things they need to succeed in building a magic seed without System aid. But so far, it has taken multiple tries for the first and second Mage to build a successful magic seed, and those are the most promising students. So the problem is that it’s taking too much time, and my Perk takes too long before it can be activated again. As for the class-fixing enchantment… I’m not sure yet,” said Alice. “I will need to check in with the Mages and see if they managed to produce anything. But with any luck, we’ll be able to start producing class-fixers soon. I want to start out by creating some enchantments that help people fix the ‘enchanter’ Class, so that they can hopefully help boost production further.”

Ethan nodded. “That makes sense.” Then, he grinned. “If this goes well, you should hopefully get a pretty good achievement for getting this whole production line started.”

Alice also nodded. She still hadn’t quite figured out what the deal with Achievements was, or how to fix them yet, but even if Achievements only gave half their benefits right now, it was something to look forward to. Alice was willing to bet that playing a large role in fixing a natural disaster for an entire country would have incredible benefits, if she managed to get it working.

After that, Ethan left, and Alice went to check on Cecilia’s mages.

With any luck, they would have been able to use their own Perks to create a blueprint for Alice to work with when creating enchantments. If that happened, perhaps they could finally take the biggest step towards solving this crisis yet.