A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 2

For every Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking in the world, there were probably hundreds of people who could have achieved similar heights of knowledge if they had the right questions and resources. Albert Einstein had spent many of his early years struggling to even get by before he had finally had the time and insight to begin making scientific discoveries, catapulting his position from a dropout struggling to get by in life to a world-renowned physicist that practically discovered half of the foundation of modern physics.

This was because he found the thing every researcher and scientist desperately needed in order to truly make discoveries: he had found a question. Alice, upon seeing a magical floating box filled with numbers quantifying her existence, had her own question. What the heck is this thing, and how does it work?

Alice, who had finally found a question…

Was lost in the woods, hungry, and a bit dehydrated. Her unimpressive athletic abilities were coming back to haunt her with a vengeance.

While she would have loved to explore whatever the System was and what was going on, what she needed now were more basic things - food, water, and a set of instructions to the nearest town would be far more welcome than the secrets of the universe.

As she moved, she paid careful attention to her surroundings, looking for a single trace of anything useful. All of these trees meant that there had to be some form of water here, or at least there had been in the recent past, right? Even if all the trees were creepy and dead, if they had been dead for too long, surely they would have withered away, right? Alice had little knowledge of the life cycle of trees, but she was desperately holding on to the hope that she could find water soon.

But there was no food or water here that she could find. In the three hours she had been walking, she hadn’t seen a single living thing besides herself, nor any hints of one. The forest was completely, eerily, unnervingly dead and silent. This made Alice more and more nervous as she walked - now that she was paying close attention to where she was going and her surroundings, every snap when she crushed a branch, every squeal of surprise when she misjudged where something was in the dim moonlight and walked into it, and every clumsy step she took seemed louder.

The only thing she had knew for sure right now was that there were an awful lot of dead trees in the area, and finding routes over/around fallen trees was a huge pain in the butt. Finally, Alice realized that she was probably an idiot for trying to find her way around this creepy forest in the middle of the night, and began trying to look for a place to sleep for a while. She would have more luck moving in the morning, when she had more light to see by and when her feet hurt less.

Unfortunately, even after she started looking for a place to sleep, she couldn’t find much, and she was getting cold. Just as she was starting to give up and wondering if she would die here, she finally found something that looked promising - a huge tree trunk had fallen, and for whatever reason, seemed partially hollow inside. The remaining space in the tree could probably fit ten of her inside pretty easily, and the shelter looked like it would probably do an okay job of keeping the wind away and keeping heat in. Almost gasping with relief at the thought of laying down, Alice stumbled towards the hollow tree trunk - and nearly died for her carelessness.

An animal that looked like a raccoon leapt out at her. Its body was covered in horrific, bleeding pustules, and one of its legs had fallen off. Fresh blood was slowly dripping from its wounds, and it was hard to tell what color its fur had originally been. However, Alice was certain that whatever was wrong with this thing, she wanted nothing to do with it.

Alice was now wide-awake, and immediately began sprinting away at full speed, ignoring the pain in her feet as she desperately tried to outrun whatever she had stumbled across. Its claws still looked sharp, and Alice was pretty sure this thing had some sort of disease. Who knew whether it was contagious?

After sprinting for a few minutes, Alice realized the animal had stopped chasing her, and fell to the ground, gasping and panting for breath. She tried her best to remain alert, looking around for any other animals, but the unnerving silence of the dead forest had returned: nothing around her moved or made a single sound, not even the rustling of leaves. There was nothing to differentiate one direction from another and no way to see save for the moonlight.

Her head started pounding, and Alice started to quickly realize something - despite the fact that her sweat hadn’t cooled down yet, she was starting to feel freezing cold. She frowned, and her vision started to blur as waves of blackness started eating away at the edge of her sight. She touched her forehead with a growing sense of fear and suspicion, and confirmed that it was blazing hot.

Oh crap. She had hypothesized earlier that another planet would have totally different diseases that her immune system had absolutely no defenses against, and hoped that the RPG system might somehow protect her from that, because she had no way of taking precautions against diseases right now. But less than a few hours after she got to this world, she already had a fever. This speed exceeded the incubation speed of most diseases on Earth by an absurd amount, and Alice started panicking as she realized she was already sick. Was she really going to die like this? Without figuring out anything at all about how she had gotten to this world or what the System was, or even seeing magic after her status screen claimed it existed?

But her eyes felt so heavy, and she was desperately trying to stay awake so that she could at least drag herself somewhere where she might have a lower chance of getting eaten while she was unconscious, but she just couldn’t stay awake. Faintly, as she felt dizzier and sleepier, she faintly saw the words

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Willpower 118 -> 119, Endurance 47 -> 48

Then everything went black.

* * *

When Alice woke up, her world was like fire. Burning waves of heat crashed through her body, and she felt like she was being dunked in a vat of acid. Alice desperately scrabbled around blindly, looking for water to cool herself off, but passed out before she could crawl very far. She woke up again a few minutes later, only to pass out again as pain overwhelmed her. The reality of being awake and being asleep began to blur together as she kept crawling around, aimlessly searching for something she couldn’t quite remember.

An eternity of crawling around later,, the forest gradually transitioned from gnarled, dead trees to living ones, and suddenly there were the words from the RPG system again, telling her about something, but Alice no longer had the mental leeway to process the glowing words appearing in front of her.

Finally, her arms collapsed, and she stopped crawling - her body didn’t have the strength to move anymore, and whatever illness she had contracted seemed to be drying up her body at an unnatural rate. Every time she tried to move it felt like she was crawling through molasses, her body slow and unresponsive. She just couldn’t summon the willpower to move another inch. Slowly, like a kite without wind, her body sagged into the dirt. Her vision was swimming in and out of clarity, and the heat in her body was growing worse and worse. For a second, she swore that she saw a rabbit hop up to her limp body, before sniffing at the area around her neck and then hopping off, completely uninterested in her.

I’m so close to dead that wild animals aren’t even afraid of me anymore, thought Alice, fighting the urge to close her eyes and give up completely.

However, as her thoughts grew fuzzier, she swore that, for just a moment, she saw a trickle of liquid out of the corner of her warped vision.

Alice’s thoughts cleared for just a moment, and with the last gasp of strength, she desperately crawled forward. If she could cool down the heat from her illness she might be able to survive! A few minutes later, inch by horrible inch, she crawled farther, until she flopped into a small stream. Even stream might have been the wrong word - if she had been standing up, the water wouldn’t have even come up to her knees, and it wasn’t even wide enough for her to fully lay down in.

However, right now this tiny little trickle of water represented her last hope to live. She had nothing to hold water in and no way to start a fire, so she had neither the tools nor strength to boil the water. She had to hope that there was nothing wrong with this water - if there was, she was dead. But right now, this was her one and only hope to live. With her body partially in the water, she managed to lower her face into the water and began to drink.

A few minutes later, the heat and pain from her illness came again, and the horrifying feeling of her bones and muscles being set on fire followed on its heels - she had the strength to scream now, but she managed to hold the need to scream inside of her throat; if she attracted a different animal and it attacked her in this state, she would die.

Time passed like glass falling through honey. Alice occasionally flopped around in the stream, sometimes managing to sit upright and other times collapsing back into the water. Eventually, by pure accident, a few terrifying moments passed as she landed face-down in the stream. The coolness from the water didn’t help the pain. Moving more by instinct than logic at this point, her body spasmed as she sucked in half a breath of water, before her body shuddered and she began coughing out the water in her lungs. With her last shred of willpower, she managed to drag her head back out of the water and roll over, then spat out the liquid in her lungs and sucked in another breath of air.

Eventually, Alice began to realize that she could feel her brain changing, and that she felt the weight of something slowly coming into existence inside of her ribcage, behind her heart. Slowly, the horrifying heat and feeling of acid tearing away at her being started to fade away, and a feeling of comforting warmth began to build up inside of her body instead.

Her limbs, by this point, had stopped flailing about, and were reduced to simply twitching in response to the pain. The fire that had consumed her body began to roll towards her heart and brain, and the pain everywhere began to fade. After a few hours the pain faded completely, leaving behind a flickering ember of warmth pulsing behind her heart, and the heat disappeared completely from her head. After a moment, she started to lose awareness of it as it faded away from her awareness. Alice opened her eyes, trying to remember when they had closed.

When she opened her eyes, a long list of notifications from the system rang out, starting with the one she had gotten sometime yesterday while her initial fever had been kicking in and destroying her ability to process the world around her.

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

You have come from another world, far from home and lost beyond the cracks of another dimension.

+30% faster attribute growth for all stats below 120, +50% class experience for all main classes below level 50, +15% class experience for all secondary classes below level 10, strengthened immune system, strengthened mana adaption and resistance, increased support from the System.

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

You are one of the four percent of survivors among the ungifted who have managed to survive mana poisoning. Furthermore, you even baptized yourself using broken mana instead of regular mana. You must really love taking risks!

+50% faster growth to the ‘Magic’ attribute, +25% growth to the ‘Willpower’ attribute, +30% experience gain for all mage and magic-related classes, +15% mana recovery, immunity to Mana poisoning from Broken Mana

You have unlocked the class [Survivor] as a result of surviving alone in the wilderness for multiple days and surviving a near - death experience. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes / No

You have unlocked the class [Explorer of magic] as a result of surviving the effects of mana poisoning and having the {Outworlder} Achievement. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes / No

Alice spasmed, trying to process what was going on. She was alive? She was alive!

What the heck had just happened? She was reasonably sure that no more than a day or two had passed – while she was incredibly hungry now, it didn’t seem like her body was suffering from the effects of malnutrition yet, just on the edge. In that case… had she just fought off a disease from this planet in just a day or two? Maybe this was the effect of her ‘strengthened immune system’ from the {Outworlder} perk? What the heck did ‘increased support from the System’ mean? What was Mana Poisoning?

Finally, she scanned through her Achievements and System notifications in more detail, before she realized that the {Baptized by Broken Mana} achievement told a very different story from her initial assumptions. The Achievement indicated that what she had just fought off wasn’t actually a disease – it seemed to be something called ‘Broken Mana poisoning.’

Also, she had apparently unlocked two classes. Bewildered, she pulled up her status screen, and saw that several things were quite different from before.

Name: Alice Verianna

Age: 15

Strength: 44

Perception: 101

Dexterity: 47

Intelligence: 153

Endurance: 50

Willpower: 119

Charisma: 125

Magic: 5

Primary Classes: 0/5

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

Secondary Classes

N/A (0)

Perks:

N/A

Skills

English (language proficiency): 100

Achievements

Outworlder (Rarity: 10)

Baptized by Broken Mana (Rarity: 6)

The first thing she noticed was that the set of glitch-signs under the ‘skills’ list was gone and had been replaced with the word ‘English.’ She was now the proud owner of the English Language skill, instead of the proud owner of a bunch of weird letters and symbols. The system was… updating its information or something? However, even though the system had apparently updated its information and figured out what the English language was, it still seemed to have no awareness of any of her other skills that she had built up during her life on Earth.

Alice also realized that her {Achievements} were no longer empty, and had recorded her two feats of survival. Her body was also warm... much warmer than it had been moments ago. It was subtle, but she could definitely feel it. However, bizarrely enough, instead of cooking her alive, it felt... right. The heat from the center of her chest continuously pulsed, sending warmth throughout her body and driving away some of the cold from the environment. She had no idea what to make of that for now, so she opted to ignore it and move on.

Finally, her [Magic] attribute had increased from ‘0’ to ‘5.’ Although it looked fairly pathetic when she realized that her other stats were all well into the double-digit range, if her earlier endurance bonus from walking through the wilderness was any indication, all attributes could probably be improved with training. If she was willing to spend time exploring magic, she could probably get the stat up to a decent level eventually; although she had no idea how long it would take. She grinned to herself as she realized that she might very well be able to learn magic now, before she turned her attention to the other changes she had noticed.

She also wondered what a ‘primary class’ was, and how it was different from a secondary class. Her status screen listed primary classes as being ‘0/5’ right now, so primary classes were obviously a limited resource, while secondary classes might be totally unlimited in number. If that was the case, primary classes might be strengthened in some way? Of course, Alice had no clue what a class did at all, and so she had no idea whether making her two classes primary classes was a good idea or a terrible one. Finally, she closed her eyes and sighed.

Screw it. She accepted both classes as primary classes and hoped she wouldn’t regret this later. In this foreign world, what she needed was survival ability now, and Survivor sounded pretty useful for the purpose of not dying. Furthermore, Explorer of Magic sounded exactly like something she wanted to do if she survived her immediate circumstances. It sounded like a class that emphasized exploring the physics-defying nonsense that this world had to offer. Furthermore, if she could figure out how to throw fireballs or heal herself, that would improve her survival ability by several orders of magnitude. Maybe she would come to regret it later, but necessity was the mother of bad decisions, and right now she needed to not die instead of trying to optimize for a distant future that may never come.

While she still didn’t know for sure that other humans lived in this world, the fact that the System had mentioned ‘survivors’ and ‘ungifted’ in the other System messages indicated that the answer was probably yes. However, if there were people here, they had probably grown up with an RPG system that, based on her understanding of it so far, allowed (probably) supernatural increases in body strength, mental ability, and potentially drastically boosted their growth speed, and might even prevent skills from decaying. At least, that was how things worked in video games – character skills never decayed or went down. Whether that was applicable to this world was an open question right now, but since video games were the only point of reference Alice had to the System, she was at least going to prepare herself for what she might see.

Hmm… the {Outworlder} Achievement might be some sort of catch-up mechanism. It stops helping my Attributes grow higher at around 120… In that case, would an average inhabitant of this world have attributes of around 120?

Of course, she could also just be wrong about the {Outworlder} Achievement being a catch-up mechanism. She just had too little context to work with right now, besides the fact that {Outworlder} was rarity 10. Whatever rarity 10 meant.

She did assume that there was probably some correlation between higher rarity and usefulness, but the {Baptized by Broken Mana} Achievement seemed to give better bonuses than {Outworlder} when it came to magical potential. Perhaps the benefits from an Achievement were related to the actual difficulty of gaining the achievement? Or how specific it was? Alice sighed, scratching her head, before sighing.

She decided to put her thoughts on the matter to rest for now – she had too little information, and no way to find out more.

Alice took a look around. The area of the forest she had stumbled into in the middle of her mana-poisoning induced haze was much less dead than the place she had been in when she entered this world, and the occasional sounds of animals scampering around in the background and birds chirping in the distance put her at ease. Even if birds chirping flagrantly ignored the fact that natural selection should never have allowed the existence of a totally different planet with exactly the same flora and fauna as Earth.

Something to think about later, when she was no longer on the brink of starvation.

Alice scanned her status screen again, trying to look for any changes, but besides ‘Explorer of Magic’ and ‘Survivor’ being listed as ‘level 1’ under her primary classes section, she couldn’t find anything else different. She shrugged and closed her status screen - she suspected she would have plenty of time to figure out the nature of the status screens and the RPG system that governed this dimension later, so right now she needed to get moving.

The bigger question, for now, was where on Earth - ahem. Where in this dimension was she? She looked around, seeing the world clearly in sunlight for the first time. The only landmark she could see was the familiar patch of unnervingly dead trees in the distance, and the creek she had nearly drowned in earlier. If it weren’t for the status screen, she could have easily mistaken this place for Earth.

If she didn’t know where she was, perhaps she should just follow the creek - odds were decent that if she just followed the water far enough, she might find a river, which would hopefully lead to civilization. Alice knew that in ancient eras rivers tended to be where most villages and early cities were founded, due to their easy access to water. Besides, the creek was the only promising landmark she had to go on now.

She took a step forward and found that her body felt far weaker than before. That shouldn’t be right, though, should it? In the first place, she had recovered from… oh.

As her stomach growled at her, Alice suddenly realized she hadn’t eaten in at least a day, possibly two or three. She had no clue how long she had spent fighting off the effects of mana poisoning, after all. She was also quite thirsty.

She lowered her head back into the creek, and praying that she didn’t get some sort of horrible disease, noisily slurped down water until her throat stopped hurting. Then, she scanned the area around her, and tried to identify all of the plants and animals. Birds - edible, but hard to catch. I don’t have any confidence in hitting one even if I throw rocks or make a basic slingshot, and they don’t have much meat on them. I think while I was delirious I saw a rabbit, so I might be able to hunt one of them if I make a snare… how do you make a snare?

Umm… Alice looked at all of the brown and red leaves of the plants around the river, and realized she had no clue what was and wasn’t poisonous. In the first place, who in the modern world actually bothered learning wilderness survival? Alice was far more proficient at identifying the packages of food in a supermarket than identifying plants in a forest.

Besides, the plants and animals of this planet, even if they looked like the ones on earth, might be totally different. The air here had seemed pretty normal, but she had contracted mana poisoning from somewhere. If everything in the world breathed in mana, a good chunk of the wildlife was probably evolved to either handle or use the mana in some way, right? Even if she knew how to identify plants from Earth, it might be useless here.

Alice finally turned to the river itself and noticed something that filled her with hope: even though the water was somewhat shallow, lazily swimming towards the center of the creek was a fish about twice the size of her hand. While it wasn’t large, where there was one fish there would probably be more. Alice quickly grabbed a fallen tree branch and began tearing off the extraneous bits, and after perhaps five minutes she had in her hands the beginning of mankind’s most primitive hunting tool: a spear. Frowning, she poked the other end of the spear and confirmed that it was nowhere near sharp enough to be used for anything stabbing-related.

Perhaps instead of calling it a ‘spear’ she should have just called it a stick.

Alice began checking some of the pebbles in the area, and eventually managed to find a somewhat sharp edge on a stone that had broken in half. Turning back to her makeshift spear, she took the stone and began hitting the edge of the branch, trying to sharpen the edge of the stick into something that resembled a spear.

Five minutes passed this way, with a girl mercilessly beating a stick with a rock.

Ten minutes…

Fifteen…

Finally, after thirty minutes, Alice had a… spear. Yes, a very powerful and mighty… extremely sharp… somewhat sharper than average… pointy stick. Alice held it up and inspected it, and was pleasantly surprised to hear the system give her two notifications.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Woodworking: 0 -> 1

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 1 -> 2

“So you can recognize Woodworking and Survivor levels, but you can’t recognize {pathfinding} or {trying to find civilization} or {lost in the woods and dying, please send help}? Who makes the rules for Skills? I mean, the last two would be pretty ridiculous, but I could definitely see a Skill like {Pathfinding} or {Wilderness Navigation} or something along those lines existing. Aren't I supposed to have increased assistance from the System? I need assistance now. Please?”

Nothing happened. Alice sighed and turned back to the river. For now, she was unlikely to find any answers. Soon, she located another fish, and began phase two of operation ‘don’t starve to death.’

She stopped moving as much as possible, holding her pointy stick over the shallow stream and preparing to stab downwards. Soon, the fish began swimming closer to the side of the stream she was positioned on, lazily drifting down with the current. Closer…. Closer…

Stab! Alice stabbed the river, perfectly missing the fish. Frightened, the fish darted away, disappearing in a flash of scales and light as it zoomed into the distance. “Fuck,” Alice muttered, watching dinner escape. How had she missed? The fish had been right below her pointy stick…

Belatedly, Alice realized the problem. The surface of the water caused light to refract slightly, meaning that anything she was looking at in the water was slightly lower than what her eyes would tell her. Since she had mistaken this, given the fact that her pointy stick wasn’t entirely straight she had just barely missed the fish, instead of spearing it down the middle as she had meant to.

Part of this could also be attributed to her rather low accuracy and her lacking physical strength, which had certainly exacerbated the problem, but she chose to blame it entirely on the light. If I was able to think of light refraction problems afterwards, I should have been able to remember it before. Who knows when another fish will come, thought Alice. If she had been a little less careless, she could have been cooking the fish for lunch instead of quietly cursing by the creek’s side. She sighed, sitting by the creek’s edge and dangling her bare feet into the water. She was so hungry…

Come to think of it, even if she caught a fish, how would she start a fire? Rubbing two sticks together? That was supposed to work, right? It was worth a shot.

She began daydreaming of convenience stores. In America, it was incredibly easy to find food as long as one had a little bit of money. If she could just step into a convenience store or a restaurant and buy some waffles. Blueberry waffles with syrup sounded delicious right now… she felt a pang of homesickness.

Finally, after a few minutes of indulging in a pointless fantasy, Alice realized she was wasting time and stood up, trying to focus again. Perhaps I can hunt and follow the river at the same time. I can periodically check the water to see if I can find any fish to eat, and I might also run into other small animals of prey that I have some chance of successfully hunting and killing.

She began following the little stream downriver, which soon joined a few other streams and started to become a properly large river. As she walked, she noticed there were plenty of other lifeforms that were bizarrely similar to Earth’s flora and fauna here. Something to investigate later. For now, she had survival to focus on. She directed herself back towards the important tasks at hand.

Through training, you have increased an Attribute!

Willpower 119 -> 120

Alice snorted, not wanting to deal with the System right now. However, she felt as if her will had been fortified compared to a second ago - the change was slight, and Alice wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t just her imagination, but she felt as if it was easier to understand her beliefs and easier to focus compared to a few moments ago.

She absently wondered if one single point in Willpower actually made this large of a difference – maybe this was actually just the placebo effect?

Finally, Alice found more fish in the river. Problematically, they also swam much farther beneath the water’s surface-Alice could barely even see the deepest fish in the water, now that the water had grown much deeper. If she fell into the river at this point, she could easily be carried off by the current and drown, meaning that hunting the deeper fish was a risky endeavor.

Alice found a more shallow part of the river, where her pointy stick could reach the bottom. Then, she gathered several sticks that could be used as kindling and a few thicker sticks that could be used to sustain a fire for a longer period of time. Then, she patiently lowered the ‘spear’ into the water, making sure that light refraction would no longer be a problem. Afterwards, she waited patiently, ignoring the rumbling of her stomach.

Finally, a fish wandered underneath the pointy stick. Stab!

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 2 -> 4

With a single stab, Alice gained two levels and a weakly struggling fish. She lifted the stick out of the water, careful not to let the thrashing fish slide off the stick in the process, and then quickly strode back over to the pile of sticks. Then, she grabbed a stick and began rubbing it against another stick, hoping to cause enough friction to start a fire.

After only a moment, though, she suddenly felt as if her preparations were somehow… insufficient. She frowned, trying to figure out where this idea was coming from, before finding a stick that had a hole in it and another stick that was around the same size as the hole. She placed one of the sticks into the other and began spinning the stick, trying to make the force of friction start the fire. Bizarrely enough, she felt that her first idea of just rubbing two sticks together would be harder than this method.

Five minutes later, her arms felt like they were going to fall off. Aside from that, no real progress had been made. Alice was starting to worry that she wouldn’t be able to get anywhere with this, either because she was doing it wrong or because her arms simply couldn’t provide sufficient force to the sticks to actually cause a fire.

She finally set down the sticks and flopped onto the dirt for a while, panting. She didn’t have any way to gut or descale the fish, she couldn’t start a fire… even though she had caught the fish, she didn’t have the ability to process it!

Finally, Alice remembered something critical - theoretically, she had magic. Extremely questionable magic that she had no idea how to use, but maybe she could start a fire with magic somehow? She closed her eyes, trying to figure out how to use magic. In most novels, magic had a lot to do with imagination, so she tried imagining flames as much as she could, imagining the stick catching fire…

After ten minutes of concentrating, she felt incredibly stupid, and exactly zero progress towards starting a fire had been made. Apart from that, she still felt tired, hungry, and frustrated. She tried meditating for a bit in order to get a skill, since plenty of stories linked meditation and 'natural energies' - maybe it would help with magic?

Ten more minutes of wasting her time later, Alice decided this probably wasn't the right way to go about solving her problems.

At least the fish had stopped flopping around. Alice stuck her face into the river and took a long drink of water - even though she should purify it somehow, perhaps by boiling it, she had no water container and no clue how to make one. And even if she did have a water container, she had no fire. If she got a disease from the water and died, it would be pretty typical of her luck thus far, but the day or two she had spent here wasn’t enough to pick up all of the survival skills she desperately needed right now.

She eyed the dead fish. Was she desperate enough to just bite into it and hope for the best? Not quite. At least, not yet. She had eaten fish before, and even eaten sushi. However, while it was a common misconception that raw fish was safely edible, sushi was usually, at the very least, frozen first to help kill off any parasites. It was chilly right now, but she seriously doubted it was cold enough to kill off parasites at the current temperature.

Finally, she thought back to earlier, when she had been trying to start a fire. She had initially been planning on rubbing two sticks together and hoping for the best, but right before she started she had suddenly had the hazy idea of trying to spin a stick inside of another stick in order to start a fire instead. In the end, she failed, but she had no clue how to start a fire in the woods besides a vague idea on how it might be done. However, while the concept of spinning a stick inside of another stick had been hazy, it wasn’t something Alice would have thought of before today. Was this the effect of a new environment and desperation kicking in, or was it the effect of levels?

Alice opened her status screen again, trying to look at it and see if it would provide any clues.

[Survivor] was at level 4 - hadn’t the message telling her that she had unlocked the [Survivor] class said it had to do with surviving near-death experiences? And it certainly felt like she was more proficient at dealing with the outdoors than she had been yesterday… was her ‘survivor’ class just… directly inserting information into her brain?

As far as she could tell, levels and stats didn’t seem to affect each other at all. Stats were raised by doing things related to the stat. Assuming levels actually ‘did’ something, inserting knowledge into her brain was a reasonable guess. However, this brought up different problems. If the system was directly inserting information into her brain, how the heck was the System doing it? Brains were incredibly complex webs of electricity and neurons, packed together into a continuously evolving network of complex biological structures. Scientists had been studying human brains for years, and it was still pretty difficult to figure out exactly what was going on inside of the human brain. The process of a human having a single thought required incredibly precise electrical signals. The System inserting vague ideas into her brain in a way that she barely even noticed, without harming any of her ability to see or understand the world around her or turning her into a coma patient was incredible.

And absolutely ridiculous. She would have been more willing to believe that the world’s best heart surgeon liked using sand and their toenails to perform heart surgery as their tools of choice. However, reality clearly disagreed with her. She took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. If reality disagrees with you, reality is correct, if reality disagrees with you, reality is correct… She managed to stop thinking about the topic for a while, and began trying to think through the implications of her newest discovery. If the System was able to do help her vaguely grasp at information she didn’t have, did it indicate that the System was complex enough to interact with her brain without hurting her? What if it fucked up and fried her brain or something? Alice was suddenly very nervous.

Still, after several minutes of trying to figure out what the heck this actually meant, Alice finally refocused on the issue of food. She needed a fire, and it wasn’t going to make itself. And that was how she spent the next few hours trying and failing to start fire, continuously failing, and eventually falling asleep with hunger gnawing at her belly.