After Ethan finished talking with Alice and arranging details about the tea party, including things she needed like proper clothing and {Etiquette} teachers, he left. Alice was left alone with her thoughts again.
She frowned, thinking about the ‘tea party’ Ethan wanted her to attend. She had agreed to it, because having new resource channels and levelling boosts would absolutely be helpful. However, she didn’t actually have any suitable clothing for a tea party with two Immortals and a mber of the royal family. Nor did she have any real understanding of what etiquette looked like in Illvaria. Which ant that the potential advantages of attending the tea party also had so very significant annoyances that ca with it.
On the bright side, she had about two weeks to prepare. Given how much the System accelerated learning, that was a reasonable amount of ti to pick up the skills she needed, even if they would be sowhat low in level. However, Alice still felt nervous. She sighed.
Then, she redirected her attention back to her experint. She needed sowhere to focus her nervous energy and take her mind off of things for a while. Besides, she still wanted to see if she could create a class seed in a magic seed slot, and since she had two weeks, she wanted to see if she could reach level 75 in [Explorer of Magic] before the tea party. Even if she wasn’t going to brag about her level to anyone, it would certainly feel reassuring to have another Perk from her highest level Class available to her.
Therefore, Alice started working on her experint again.
Since Alice’s {Broken Seed} Perk was off cooldown, she could finally try forming a class seed inside of a magic seed slot. {Safety Analysis} inford her that what she was about to do was… reasonably safe, if not entirely safe. Which was good enough that she was willing to go through with the experint.
Alice started wondering what class seed she should copy for her experint. She had a lot of class seeds she had seen over the course of her ti in Luliv, and Alice wondered if there was any benefits or drawbacks to using one specific seed for her experint.
Eventually, she decided to copy her [Explorer of Magic] class. It was the class seed Alice had the most familiarity with, since it was her highest level class, and so it seed like a reasonable choice for the experint. Alice didn’t think it would really matter which class seed she tried out in this case, so she decided to take the path of least resistance.
Then, Alice focused on her empty magic seed slot, and started working on forming a class seed.
The formation process started relatively normally. Alice drew in mana, focused on the idea of what an [Explorer of Magic] was, and compressed her ideas into a magic seed. Since Alice had a great deal of familiarity with what an [Explorer of Magic] did to level up, she had a reasonably good understanding of the Class as a whole. Forming the magic seed wasn’t very difficult.
As the magic seed started to condense, Alice carefully observed it with one of her ntal divisions. As Alice watched, the System mana in her surroundings erupted, trying to help her form her Class seed. Alice noticed that, once again, she had a strong feeling that she had seen sothing similar to the System fractals before. It was much more complex in the hands of the System, but Alice was sure that there was sothing very familiar about so of the fractals she was seeing in her surroundings. But she couldn’t quite put her finger on what she was seeing, yet. It was an incredibly frustrating feeling, since it felt like the answer to an annoying question was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t quite rember what she was going to say.
Alice frowned, but a few monts later, her attention was dragged away by the needs of her Class seed. Since she still couldn’t figure out why the mana fractals the System was using seed so oddly similar to sothing else, she would try not to think about it. Sotis, distracting yourself from a problem was the best way to get new perspective on it and find a solution.
After that, Alice noticed that the System mana seed… confused.
Which made sense. Alice was trying to make the System do sothing it didn’t seem designed to do. It wasn’t strange at all that the System wasn’t quite sure how to react. Luckily, Alice’s experints in forming magic seeds without System interference or assistance helped her a great deal here. Since the System wasn’t quite sure what to do, Alice simply pushed through the issue she was encountering on her own, using her pure magic seed to help filter and manipulate the mana in her surroundings to help smooth out the process of forming an unusual magic seed. At the sa ti, Alice made heavy use of {Speed Experintation} to make sure she had ti to react to new problems as they cropped up, and made sure she was ready to activate {Broken Seed} the mont she felt sothing was wrong. Safety was the most important part of this experint, after all.
After several minutes of fumbling around with mana, to Alice’s surprise, she realized that she was actually succeeding. She had expected to fail this ti. She had considered this experint to be a practice run that she would need to repeat several tis before she got this experint right. However, it appeared that all of her other experints and hard work had prepared her for this attempt better than she had thought they would.
Alice grinned.
And that’s when everything went horribly wrong.
As the magic seed snapped into place, taking on the twisted form of a half-baked Class seed, Alice felt a sudden barrage of information assault her mind.
She felt a cascade of images tear through her very being, trying to pour into her thoughts and set them alight like oil poured on a bonfire.
Explorers of Magic explore magic, and the very core of what makes an explorer of magic exist is their desire to explore and learn. Knowledge is what matters. I need to explore magic. I… NEED TO EXPLORE MAGIC. Alice’s thoughts expanded beyond what a human’s mind could possibly encompass, filled with an all-consuming drive to explore, learn, and experint with information about magic. It consud all that made her human, all that made her Alice, and all else besides the crushing, overwhelming need to learn and investigate at the cost of all else. Even if she starved to death, Alice couldn’t be bothered to stop pursuing the knowledge that eluded her. Not even for the fraction of a second it would take to eat, or sleep, or drink.
At the sa ti, her body started to tremble, and Alice started shaking as if she were in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The need to explore magic was so overwhelming that her body simply couldn’t handle it, and it was almost literally collapsing out of the foreign need that was overwhelming her mind. Alice had always loved exploring magic and learning how it worked since the mont she had discovered its existence. But now, the desire to explore magic was so different from her own thoughts that it was as if her personality was being replaced as she watched.
At the sa ti, Alice felt a certain… connection with the world around her. One that she had never felt before.
She could feel the expectations of a little boy, dozens of miles away, as he thought about the Mages his mother had told him about. According to his mother, mages explored the deepest secrets of mana and the world around them, searching for truth, and Alice could tell that at this very mont, he was thinking about what being a Mage ant. She could feel his admiration towards Mages as they were depicted in stories, and a faint desire to one day join their ranks.
She felt the expectations of a girl who had first ford her magic seed, and was venturing out towards tsel. Her father had told her about the magic academies of the capital, and she had resolved herself to join the military in exchange for an education. However, deep in her heart, she wondered about the true nature of magic, thinking about the mana that every Mage in the world used to fuel their spellcasting. Even though her career path was focused on fight, at heart, she longed to focus on research and unravel the mysteries of mana.
She felt the weight of Ethan’s thoughts on the exploration of magic, dozens of tis more clearly than she felt the expectations of others. Ethan believed that anyone who wished to pursue the nature of magic and find the deepest truths of the world and of Mages would be an eccentric oddball, soone who loved studying magic and learning about the world around them almost as much as they loved living.
However, Ethan’s thoughts had also begun to twist recently. More and more… Ethan’s image of an [Explorer of Magic] resembled Alice herself. Even though Ethan didn’t know her specific class na, whenever he thought of what an [Explorer of Magic] looked like, he subconsciously thought of Alice.
She could feel the thoughts of a long-dead Mage from centuries ago, pondering the nature of magic as he sought to discover why Mages had magic cores in their bodies and normal humans didn’t. Surely, with his brilliant mind, he would be successful in learning what made Mages different from other people…
In a split second, Alice felt the thoughts and expectations of hundreds of thousands of people pressing down on her mind like a billion ton mountain, flattening her under their weight. She felt every single human being’s thoughts on what exploring mana ant. Every single person who was alive right now. Every single person in the past who had ever thought on the subject. All of their thoughts and feelings on exploring magic were tangled together into a giant ball of ideas and feelings that was tearing into Alice’s very being.
Before Alice’s all-consuming need to explore magic and experint could truly devour her sense of self, the System mana around her seed to realize what had happened. Like an angry swarm of bees, the System mana descended upon Alice’s mage core, wrapping itself around the magic-seed version of [Explorer of Magic] and disentangling it from her being. It didn’t shatter the magic seed: instead, it was more like it unraveled the connection between the magic seed and who Alice as a person was, leaving only the chanical components of the magic seed behind.
Alice’s desperate, overwhelming need to experint with magic quickly faded away, and the mory of who she was, her humanity, started inserting itself back into her brain. Like a soothing painkiller, washing away the maddening chaos of connections, emotions, thoughts, and needs, Alice felt herself start to return from the state of mindless need to explore magic.
Warning! Violations of Free Will are not permitted by the System. Core violation detected.
Error code:
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She shuddered as the strange set of impulses drained away. Alice hadn’t been able to understand why Boris had fard so frantically before now.
However, Alice had a sneaking suspicion that she had just experienced sothing similar to what Boris had been dealing with all this ti. She took a few monts to just take deep breaths, trying to understand what had just happened.
{Safety Analysis} had claid that the experint was largely safe. However, her sense of self had very nearly been destroyed during the experint. How in the world was that safe? Alice felt the urge to scream and punch her pillow well up inside of her, as terror started to leak out of the fragnted thoughts left behind after the experint. She took a few deep breaths, before she managed to calm down again.
A few monts later, she realized why the experint was ‘safe.’
She had done the experint while in contact with the System. And the System, apparently did not allow violations of free will to occur. In fact, after Alice’s odd [Explorer of Magic] Magic seed had been created, the System had responded in the most aggressive fashion Alice had ever seen. While the System had always been fast in responding to problems, the System this ti had practically rushed into her body and actively scrubbed out every single connection between her mind and the problematic seed.
While the risk of losing herself had theoretically been present, it had been almost wholly negated by the presence of the System.
In other words, even though the experint would have been mind-numbingly dangerous without the System, given the way Alice had conducted the experint it was almost completely safe. While there was so room for errors to occur, as long as Alice was in contact with the System, the experint she had just done was seriously unlikely to actually harm her.
Alice shivered again, and decided to take a few minutes to lay on her bed and just relax. Even if the experint had been quite safe, it had done serious damage to her nerves. The feeling of losing who she was as the identity of an [Explorer of Magic] devoured her thoughts and personality had been… terrifying.
Finally, her nerves were steady enough that she could really think about what she had learned.
What exactly had happened, and what did it an?
For a mont during the experint, Alice had felt as if her very identity and sense of self was being overwritten by the desire to explore magic. As if everything that she was, every facet of her identity, was simply being replaced with one all-consuming trait. Alice was able to feel that this was very different from her own, natural curiosity: this was a fundantally foreign set of ideas and emotions that had existed in her thoughts for a short period of ti before getting cut out of her mind, leaving her own personality again.
Interestingly, identity of an [Explorer of Magic] hadn’t been created by Alice’s thoughts. Instead, the image of what an [Explorer of Magic] was… had been defined by random people who Alice had just barely been able to feel during the experint. As far as she could tell, those ‘random people’ included every human being who had ever lived on Luliv, although the influence of human beings who had been dead for hundreds of years felt much fainter.
Alice once again thought of Boris, who obsessively tried to farm and didn’t speak much anymore.
For whatever reason, the System seed to struggle when interacting with people below the age of six. Without the System’s help, if Boris was exposed to the sa mind-numbing crush of the whole world’s definition of a [Farr]…
It was no wonder Boris stopped talking with his mother, stopped playing like a normal child, and started trying to farm nonstop.
In fact, if Alice thought of mana and magic as being related to ideas and concepts, perhaps it made sense that children below a certain age had a harder ti adapting to mana and keeping their sense of self intact while interacting with it. They weren’t old enough to have a strongly established sense of self yet, which might make it harder for them to shrug off the minor ntal effects mana seed to have on its users.
Or Alice could be mistaken on how the System worked to keep people’s personality from being influenced by their Class. Frankly, she wasn’t sure. The fact that Alice was able to distinctly separate the ‘unnatural’ impulse to explore magic made her feel a bit relieved, because she was able to easily distinguish who she was from the mind-numbing pressure of everyone else’s ideas. However, the sheer weight of everyone else’s ideas had nearly crushed her.
Suddenly, Alice thought of sothing else.
She frowned, and then pulled up two of the Achievents present in her Status Screen.
Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society (Rarity: 4)
As a talented combat-specialized Mage who is apprenticed to Ethan, the Immortal of Spells and Seeds, you participated in one of the battles between Illvaria and the Society of Starry Eyes, and played a notable role in securing victory for your side. Even if you didn’t distinguish yourself as an MVP of the battle, you perford above and beyond what would be expected of you for your age group. Illvaria is watching you!
30 Class Experience to your ‘primary’ Magic-related class (Explorer of Magic), 15% Class Experience to all Kinetic Magic related classes. The effect of the {Divided Attention} Skill is increased by approximately 50%.
The Achievent {Immortal’s Apprentice at the battle against the Society} had been the Achievent Alice had gotten after rescuing Samantha. Alice hadn’t thought too much about the Achievent afterwards, since the bonuses were rather average compared to so of her other Achievents. It gave her an extra magic tendril, which was quite nice, but it wasn’t a very important Achievent overall.
However, she rembered thinking that the description of the Achievent was a little odd. The Achievent specified that she was a combat specialized Mage, even though anyone who knew Alice knew that she was mostly research focused. However, many of the people who had participated in the battle didn’t know that. As far as the average [Soldier] knew, Alice was a combat-specialized Mage who was apprenticed to Ethan because of her promising fighting skills.
The Achievent description didn’t reflect Alice’s actual skill set; instead, it reflected what the [Guards] and [Soldiers] thought of Alice.
The other Achievent Alice pulled up was the {Murderer} Achievent.
Murderer (Rarity: 4)
You have slain another human being.
Effect of Strength, Dexterity, and Perception increased by 1%. Classes with so relationship to fighting other humans gain experience 15% faster.
When she had fought against an ambush from the Sigmusi Colonia and won, she had gained an Achievent called {Murderer}. Even though she had clearly been acting in self defense.
Why was the Achievent titled ‘murderer,’ rather than soldier or sothing else?
Alice suspected that it was because people’s perception of anyone who killed another human being got tangled up with the Perk title, aning that anyone who got the Achievent ended up with the {Murderer} achievent, regardless of whether they were acting in self defense, or as a soldier defending their country, or as a serial killer.
The hints that Achievents were influenced by people’s perception had been present all the way back as far as Alice’s first fight with another human in this world, and she had never fully picked up on those hints until now.
How much of the System was actually influenced by the perception of people in the world? In fact, what if the System itself was influenced by the perception of humans living in the world? Perhaps the Church of the System wasn’t as natural of a religion as Alice thought it was. If whoever or whatever had created the church was aware of the effect perception had on parts of the System…
Then cultivating an image of the System as a generous and benevolent god was a pretty good way to avoid any negative influences people’s perception might have on the System. Alice had no idea if that was actually intentional or not, but it was at least plausible.
Alice sighed. There were just too many possibilities and new things she needed to explore. And she doubted she had even thought of all of the implications of this discover; it just fed so neatly into everything related to the System that she needed to rethink how several things worked. Immortals. Classes. Achievents. Skills. Almost every part of the System might work a little differently than she had first thought they did, because the perception of others apparently influenced how the System as a whole worked.
However, at the very least, Alice intended to wait a while before trying another experint like this one. Even if it was safe, her nerves might collapse if she tried this again in the near future. But deep in her heart, Alice knew that she would need to investigate this more in the future. The implications of this experint were just too far-reaching, and she definitely needed to understand how people’s perception impacted the System if she wanted to understand how everything worked together.
But for now, Alice laid on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She needed so more ti to finish adjusting after the terror of nearly losing her sense of self.
You have leveled up!
Explorer of Magic: 74 -> 75, Scientist 56 -> 58, Scholar 54 -> 55, Survivor 54 -> 55
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