A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Alice spent the rest of the night desperately reconstructing the image of her rebuilt mana gem within {Magic Modelling}. The problem of ‘Alice’ mana had been solved by her, but that didn’t mean it was solved for everyone. If Alice kept relying on her Achievement to fix people’s mana gems, there was no way she would be able to help everyone who needed it. There were way too people for five restorations a month to cover everyone. Not to mention, Alice was also very interested in learning to fix Achievements.

However, even though Alice was excited to keep going, come morning, she was still dragged out of her dream library by Allira.

Alice groaned as something inside of her shadow poked her arm until she woke up. Her sleepiness was rapidly dispelled when she looked around the area.

The swamp was different. The positions of the trees had shifted subtly from last time she looked at them. The fog that laid over the swamp like a blanket had become thicker and darker in color. The smell of rotting vegetation had grown stronger.

Alice frowned.

Whatever conceptual nonsense was applying to the swamp behind the scenes, it hadn’t just made the area as creepy as possible. The trees themselves had subtly rearranged themselves while the group slept.

Alice eyed Allira with curiosity. Last night, Allira had, theoretically, been keeping watch over the group. Since that was the case, when had the swamp rearranged itself? What had it looked like at the time?

Before she could express her thoughts, however, Ethan threw her a plate of steaming monster meat and what appeared to be scrambled eggs.

“Eat up. We’ve got a lot more travelling to do today,” said Ethan. “With any luck, we’ll get through the swamp today, but with how much the geography of this area has been… distorted, it’s hard to say if anything else will change. We’re exploring unknown territory here.

Alice nodded, and tucked into the plate full of meat and eggs. A moment later, Jonathan also pulled out several loaves of baked bread that smelled positively divine. He grinned at Alice.

“Take some! I can cook basic stuff pretty much anywhere, and the produce from my farm has some of the best taste on the southern continent. I have four different Perks that enhance crop flavor,” he said, chuckling.

Alice took a bite. Then, her eyes widened.

Four minutes later, Alice looked up from her third bread loaf, and wondered what had just happened. She had eaten… quite a bit of bread. Her stomach also felt like it was packed to the brim with food.

“I’m stuffed,” she said, more than a little surprised. Alice couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten so much in one meal. She usually just crammed food into her mouth and then moved on with her day. She didn’t like eating enough to think very much about it most of the time. One of her friends from Earth had always joked that if nutrition paste from Sci Fi settings really existed, Alice would never eat a real meal again.

“I probably should have only given you half a loaf of bread, huh,” said Jonathan, awkwardly scratching the back of his head. “Well, don’t worry too much about it. The stuffed feeling will disappear pretty quickly, and my bread has some useful boosts if you eat a lot of it.”

“Oh?”

“It can enhance a few stats. Almost like a very minor System enchantment. It goes away pretty fast, but…” Jonathan shrugged. “Every little bit helps, right? My bread gives [Endurance], as well as a bit of [Strength].”

After that, Alice finally remembered her earlier question, and turned to Allira. “Hey Allira, you were on watch last night, right?” she asked.

“I was. Why?”

“What did it look like when the trees moved? I remember that they had a different layout last night.”

“Hmm… it’s actually quite interesting. As an Immortal, I have a lot of senses that help me track my surroundings. What I noticed was that whenever I was watching a group of trees, they wouldn’t move at all. It was as if they were making sure that only things I didn’t pay attention to were shifting around. But, anything that I could track with my more unique sensory abilities would just… walk around a bit,” said Allira. “Mind you, the trees made very sure to avoid the five normal human senses. If I could see them, hear them, touch them, et cetera, they stayed as still as a rock. But the moment they were only visible to my more interesting perception types, the trees seemed to grow feet and move.” Allira shrugged. “I thought they were monsters at first, so I blasted down a few of them. But the destroyed trees disappeared after I blew them up. First time I’ve seen anything like this.” Then, Allira pointed in another direction. “I kept track of the way we came from and our destination. That’s where we need to head, and that’s the way to backtrack, if we need to.”

“Interesting,” said Alice, trying to imagine ‘normal’ trees growing feet and walking around. The idea struck her as absurd… but also totally in line with people’s perception of a ‘creepy swamp.’

“All right, everyone ready to keep moving?” asked Ethan, as he looked over Alice, Allira, Jonathan, Cecilia, and Jonathan’s family.

He was greeted with a group of hesitant nods, before he grinned.

“Splendid. Just like yesterday, try not to wriggle around too much. We have a lot of ground to cover, and the faster we move, the faster we can get to a real city. I’m looking forward to a nicer bed, and I’d prefer if we got there tonight instead of tomorrow,” he said.

Then, just like yesterday, he picked up the group and started flying them towards the capital of Fendrallia.

As the group lifted off, Alice noticed more changes to the swamp. Today, there were birds. Specifically, ravens.

Alice saw several flocks of ravens wandering through the swamp. Or at least, they appeared to be ravens. However, the ravens were almost entirely constructed out of mana, which made Alice raise an eyebrow.

As far as Alice knew, ravens in this world were perfectly normal animals. They had no particular relationship with mana, and while most animals did have a bit of mana in them here, the amounts were usually quite small. The ravens that she saw in the swamp weren’t normal animals.

It looked almost like they were made out of mana. And not in the way monsters were reliant on mana, either. The ravens had no monster core. If Alice had to categorize them, the Ravens faintly resembled the stronger humans of this world. Their muscles, organs, and every feather on their bodies seemed to be constructed out of mana… almost as if they had been born from mana.

Alice frowned as that thought wormed into her mind.

…Made from mana?

Normally, Alice would have considered that idea absurd. After all, as far as she knew, mana couldn’t give birth to independent life. There was no precedent for it happening at all. On the other hand, mana had shown that it behaved very differently without the System to stabilize it. The swamp that the group was travelling through had been a pretty normal swamp at one point, but thanks to the influence of mana and people’s beliefs, it was now a difficult-to-cross hellscape that rearranged itself to keep people trapped. Monsters that had no business being here wandered the swamp, and the swamp itself was literally watching them in the creepiest way possible.

What if it was possible for mana to create living beings, too?

Alice ruminated on this idea as the group continued to fly over the swamp. After some hesitation (and a check with Ethan to make sure she wasn’t about to do something horrendously dumb), Alice tried to grab a few of the ravens with her kinetic magic and bring them to her for study.

However, it proved exceedingly difficult to grab onto them. Even considering how much mana resistance the ravens should have had, Alice felt as if she were trying to drag away an entire mountain when she latched onto the ravens with her kinetic mana tendrils.

“They’re too heavy,” she said with a grunt. “Or too mana resistant. I can’t move them at all.”

“Let me try…” said Ethan, as an extra mana tendril extended below the group and towards one of the ravens.

Then, Ethan grunted… and nothing happened. Ethan nearly dropped the group in shock, and Alice felt the world tilt unnervingly before Ethan regained control.

“What in the world?” asked Ethan. “Even I can’t move them. I get the sense that even if I supercharge my magic tendrils, and throw my entire mana pool at them, they still wouldn’t move. What is wrong with these creatures?”

Alice frowned.

Even an Immortal couldn’t move the weird ravens?

That was… disturbing.

“Do you mind if I try hitting one with a copper artisan, just to see if it dies?” asked Alice. Her curiosity was fully piqued now. If the ravens were so mana resistant that even an Immortal couldn’t move them, what other odd biological traits did they have?

“Don’t do it. That’s a bad idea,” said Ethan. “I don’t know what these things are, or why they look like regular ravens, but I don’t want to provoke them. If they can resist being dragged around by me, they’re very strong in some way, shape, or form.”

“Maybe the ravens are like enchantments,” said Cecilia, as she looked at the woods.

“What? Enchantments? What do they have to do with ravens?”

“Well… I’m just thinking. Yesterday, you said that the swamp itself was ‘watching’ us, right?” said Cecilia. “As in, the swamp itself is actively observing us in a way that implies sapience?”

“Probably. Why?”

“Well… the swamp itself was drastically changed by people’s beliefs about it and the influence of mana. I’m wondering if the ravens are also part of the ‘swamp,’ rather than real life forms. Maybe they’re part of the swamp in a more literal way. Sort of like a painting. If an artist paints a picture on a piece of paper or canvas, you can’t pick up an image inside the painting and move it around. After all, it’s just colored ink on a canvas. Maybe the ravens are similar?”

“I… suppose it’s possible,” said Alice. “Since this is new to me, I have no idea whether that’s what happened here, but I could see it happening, at least.” Alice thought about it, before she shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine for what’s happening here. I don’t have a better theory yet.”

Cecilia grinned. “If that’s the case, I actually find the ravens pretty interesting. They really do remind me of enchantments. At the end of the day, enchantments are also sets of instructions coded into objects via mana and hard work. These ravens are also sets of instructions coded into a solidified glob of mana, if my theory is correct. I kind of want to investigate them more.”

“If they’re still around once we get the System fixed, we can try to take a look,” said Alice.

Cecilia nodded. Soon, the group passed by the ravens Alice had spotted. While they spotted a few new patches of ravens every hour or two, none of the ravens disturbed the group, and the group didn’t make trouble for the odd creatures either. This gave Alice a great deal of time to think about the progression of the collapse of the System, and its impact on the rest of the world.

Until after several hours of travel, Alice was abruptly dragged out of her thoughts.

“Is that… smoke?” asked Allira, as she looked into the distance.

Alice blinked, and then looked into the distance.

There was, indeed, a thick pillar of smoke rising into the sky from a considerable distance away. Alice squinted, and then frowned.

The smoke contained an awful lot of mana. As far as Alice could tell, it was smoke-mana, or something very conceptually similar. The quantity of it was very, very high.

Most human Mages formed one of the four basic magic seeds and used that as their core ability. For a huge plume of smoke-related mana to appear meant that either human beliefs had warped the area again, or the smoke had been created by monsters.

“Isn’t that a major Fendrallian city?” asked Jonathan, as he also looked at the giant plume of smoke in the distance.

“Fuck,” said Ethan.

* * *

The group spent the next hour flying closer to the plume of smoke. But the closer they got, the more their hearts sank.

The plume of smoke was, indeed, one of the former major cities of Fendrallia. The city had been burned to ashes a few days ago, and unlike the abandoned villages the group had encountered in Cendaria, the city here clearly hadn’t been evacuated.

Instead, the group encountered huge numbers of corpses in the city. Tens of thousands of people had died trapped in the city – perhaps even more.

But even the staggering number of corpses wasn’t the most concerning part of the whole encounter.

The most concerning thing that Alice saw was the swamp.

The city looked like the swamp had come to life and then tried to take a giant bite out of the formerly human territory. The city walls had been ripped apart by tree branches, which looked like they had grown unnaturally quickly and deconstructed the city walls. Patches of fetid water had already started to form at the bottom of houses and streets, in places where fetid water had no business existing. Ravens feasted upon the dead, ripping apart their corpses and making the scene even more sickening.

Alice felt incredibly uneasy when she saw the ruins of the city.

It wasn’t too hard to figure out what had happened.

Human beliefs had already obviously influenced the swamp. Normal swamps didn’t rearrange themselves to confuse wanderers. Since human beliefs could even make a swamp rearrange its geography in an actively malicious way… human belief could clearly do much more than that.

Somehow, human beliefs had caused the swamp itself to expand and engulf the city, killing most of the inhabitants.

But even more concerning was the way the humans in the city had died.

Most of the people looked like they had been ripped apart by powerful monsters.

The monsters the group had seen in the swamp so far seemed more like ambush predators. They were dangerous, but with Ethan’s flight and Allira’s scouting, they didn’t actually pose a threat to the group. The monsters had never existed in the swamp before… but Alice had thought they weren’t that big of a deal, so long people stayed out of the swamp until the System was fixed.

That was clearly wrong.

Some people had been literally torn apart by strong, inhuman jaws and limbs inside of the city. Buildings had been flattened. Most troublesome of all, the mana-based smoke still shifted around the city, almost like a living, breathing creature.

“Let’s keep away from the city,” said Ethan, shuddering. “I really don’t like the look of that smoke. It might be more poisonous than the rest of the swamp. I’m not sure if our current measures can keep us safe from it, and I don’t want to spend a lot of organic mana right now. This place… doesn’t feel right.”

Alice had the same feeling. She also had an increasingly strong feeling that something was watching them. And this time, it wasn’t the creepy but largely harmless swamp.

“The smoke is drifting towards us,” said Allira, frowning. “I think it might be some form of monster.”

“It doesn’t have a core, though,” said Cecilia.

“I don’t like it,” said Ethan, as the group started to drift further away from the Fendrallia city.

Luckily, the strange, mana-based smoke didn’t keep moving towards them after they moved a certain distance away. However, the feeling of being watched never disappeared.

As the group started to shift away from the ruined city, Alice felt the trace of unease in her heart grow stronger.

After seeing the Fendarllia city laying in ruins, she was sure of one thing.

People’s beliefs about the danger of the swamp had caused it to expand and destroy an entire city. What if the same thing happened in other parts of the world?

What if people started thinking about how dangerous the Illvarian south was, and the mana wastes expanded to reach Metsel? Heck, what if people of the central continent happened to talk about how dangerous the southern continent was, causing the southern continent to become dozens of times more dangerous instantly?

The scary thing about mana influencing reality was that there were no brakes. Once a certain perception started to circulate through the population, the influence of mana would make that perception true. Then, people would realize that their speculation was correct… making that speculation more and more solid and observable. Eventually, there would be no fixing it.

She had thought she still had a lot of time to learn how to repair the System, and figure out how to piece everything together. But now, Alice knew with cold, clear certainty that time was running out.