Chapter 137

Chapter 137

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.

Improved Memory

Requirements: Scholar level 5 or higher, Intelligence 100 or greater

Greatly improves your ability to remember information.

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.N0v3lTr0ve served as the original host for this chapter's release on N0v3l--B1n.

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.

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.