A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 25

Alice spent the night in nervous anticipation, before she finally got up the next day. She started out by reading through more of Illa’s library, as usual, but couldn’t focus on the words in each book as well as she normally could.

Today, she would finally test one of her theories. She had generated dozens of them during her time in the wilderness, wondering what the System was and how it worked. Finally, she had the ability to test at least a corner of how this dimension worked. A tiny start, but it was, finally, a start.

Finally, after a few hours, the usual time for Alice’s training session with Illa was here. Alice stepped into the room with far more eagerness than she usually felt at the prospect of having beans thrown at her face while she ran herself to exhaustion. Even if she could see the usefulness and the necessity of it, it was far from what Alice considered to be enjoyable.

However, today was different. For once, Alice was looking forward to training today. She ignored the strange look Illa was giving her as she practically bounced up and down on her feet, waiting for the training to start.

Alice’s theory about Mana and its relationship to how muscles worked was a bit underdeveloped at the moment. It was more based on a rough assumption, rather than a well-built hypothesis. Her current materials for experimenting were also all incredibly crude – she only had her eyes and her body right now. However, Alice wasn’t looking for a great experiment right now – this was mostly because she didn’t have enough familiarity with mana to design a more complex experiment in the first place. Nor did she have the tools needed to run a ‘great’ experiment. What she was doing now was closer to a very rough test – not intended to create a specific conclusion, but just generate some observations she could do more specific tests with later on. If it were ever presented as a serious science experiment, it would probably be laughed out of the classroom. However, she also had so little information in her topic of interest to work with that, instead of an experiment that perfectly isolated variables, double-checked for any errors, and had a flawless methodology, right now she just needed some food for thought to figure out what direction she should be heading. It wasn’t even quite a proper experiment, in some sense – she was testing her hypothesis, but doing so in a way prone to errors. But it was also the best idea she had at the moment.

This led to the idea behind her first experiment. The books that both the church and Illa’s library contained mentioned that people who had higher stats, levels, and skills all consistently had more mana than those who had lower levels, stats, and attributes. This was true regardless of whether or not somebody was a mage – which struck Alice as odd. Illa’s books confirmed this statement, taking it as common sense that, without exception, those who were stronger had more mana in their body.

Since Alice had also noticed that people in this world were much stronger than those at home, and the System didn’t SEEM to negate the need for some sort of energy to fuel the body, Alice theorized that, somehow, the bodies of people in this dimension were using mana as a fuel source to make themselves stronger. Specifically, Alice theorized that, maybe, people were burning mana in place of fat or something when they used their seemingly superhuman strength and abilities, which somehow translated to the extraordinary feats of human strength and endurance most people considered commonplace in this world. She had no idea how that would work from a biological perspective, in practice, or even if it was correct. However, if she was wrong, it wasn’t a big deal – what mattered more was just getting a rough idea of whether she was looking at a branch of theory worth pursuing at all. And if she was wrong, then that was that. No big deal. Just a few hours of wasted concentration, and maybe a slightly embarrassing memory of the time she thought that she had stumbled onto something incredible only to find out her entire assumption was totally wrong from the very beginning. However, it would be much better to find out now that she was wrong, instead of finding out she was wrong after investing several months of her wages and materials into an experiment.

For her experiment, she wasn’t doing anything complex. She was just going to use her {Above Average Mana Sight} to carefully observe the mana inside of her body and muscles while she exercised. What she expected to see was mana inside of her muscles continuously decreasing as she exercised, assuming her theory was correct. Or, alternately, perhaps mana would continuously flow into her muscles from the air around her at a much faster than usual rate. The mana in the air already flowed into her body, as far as she had observed last night, but it usually did so at an extremely sedate and stable pace. The amount of mana she absorbed from one moment to the next didn’t really change, and after staring at it both at night and this morning, she knew how quickly she absorbed mana while ‘at rest.’ She wasn’t exactly sure whether this was ‘normal’ or not, and none of Illa’s books referenced it either, but she was at least confident in noticing if her mana absorption rate changed. And if she saw either the mana in her muscles decreasing or the rate she absorbed mana increasing, she would know that she might be onto something. If neither happened, she was probably wrong, and should scrap the idea and search for another angle to start investigating the System.

And so, Alice started her weighted jogging. As usual, Illa would occasionally randomly throw a bean at her, and Alice would do her best to sense it and stop its movement before it hit her. However, she paid very, very close attention to the mana in the air around her.

As far as she could tell, her initial hypothesis… seemed to be correct? The mana in the air around her was continuously drifting into her, much, much more quickly than it had when she was resting or reading this morning. It was still small enough that she wouldn’t have noticed it if she wasn’t paying attention, but she could definitely tell that her ‘mana absorption rate’ was increasing while she was exercising. In addition, if she slowed down her jog, or took a break, the mana absorption would immediately slow down. In short, the amount of mana she was absorbing from the air around her was always directly related to how much she was exerting herself.

She was about to pat herself on the back for making a good first hypothesis, thinking that she was onto something, when something totally out of her expectations happened that immediately threw her hypothesis out the window.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Endurance+1

The moment before she gained an attribute point, the mana in the air around her grew much denser. Then, suddenly, all of the mana in the air around her swarmed towards her, like a group of piranhas that had smelled fresh blood. In an instant, mana was suddenly invading her body much more quickly than it had been mere moments ago. The amounts of mana involved were still tiny - if she hadn’t been paying such close attention, she wouldn’t have noticed anything at all. However, since she was watching the entire thing as closely as she could, she knew that the mana swarming into her had happened exactly the moment before she had picked up an Attribute point.

The excess mana that had invaded her body swirled inside of her muscles and bones, quickly assimilating itself into her body. She could barely make out what was going on once the mana was actually inside of her body – the only thing that she could tell for sure was that whatever was happening, it was complicated. Way, way beyond anything Alice could process, even with double or triple her [Intelligence] stat. It was like watching somebody perform Calculus when you barely understood basic Algebra – the only thing she was sure of was that it was a poor idea to drink and derive. Similarly, the mana was swirling around, assimilating itself, and interacting with her body in ways that she simply couldn’t understand.

Right on time, Alice felt the typical small improvement in her abilities from gaining an Attribute Point. It was subtle, but she could feel her body become the slightest bit sturdier, her stamina just the slightest bit better. Just like usual.

And, most importantly, the mana in her body was, ever so slightly, more dense than it had originally been. Especially in the spots where the mana swarm had targeted – her bones and muscles.

What did I just see? Alice tried to stop her imagination from running wild – however, it was impossible for her to not start feeling wild anticipation build up after seeing the way the mana had behaved. She had been expecting to either be totally correct or totally incorrect when it came to her theory – after all, being wrong wouldn’t have been too strange here, and she had already mentally prepared herself to start over completely and design a new observation test.

Instead, it looked like she had been somewhere in the ballpark of the right answer, but totally wrong in several aspects of her original hypothesis. Or, at least, she might have been. Alice gritted her teeth, and continued jogging – it was possible the mana surge had just been some sort of anomaly. She should at least double check, and see if she saw the same thing happening when she gained her next Attribute point.

However, at the same time, Alice began to quietly wonder what her observation meant. Her first theory was probably wrong, or at least only partially correct. However, there was another way to explain what she was observing, and also accounted for her new observations. What if mana wasn’t being used as some sort of fuel source, as she had first imagined? What if, instead, mana was somehow being used to build up muscles or something like that instead? Or was it being used to replace muscle fibers? She was having a bit of a hard time visualizing that, because she couldn’t understand how mana, which seemed to mostly act like a gas, would map to physical matter, but it would explain what she was looking at.

Alice paused for a moment, as she felt a trickle of cold sweat. She thought about the first part of her experiment. For a moment, she had felt confident that her theory was correct, based on the fact that the observations she had generated seemed to match her expectations. If she hadn’t been luckily bailed out by the fact that she had gained a Stat Point at the right time, she might have kept pursuing her first theory for weeks, or even months, wasting huge amounts of time and resources.

Clearly, she was missing several things when it came to setting up proper experiments. She needed more rigor – control groups, ways to check for false positives. Possibly an assistant if she could find someone who would serve as a good candidate for one and was actually interested, to bounce ideas off of and help check her work and ideas. A fresh pair of eyes would go a long way towards improving her ability to find and correct minor mistakes and errors in her experiments. That way, instead of crappy science, Alice would be able to actually engage in good science. Otherwise, she would just generate another one of those terrible scientific papers that showed up in the news and had half a dozen problems with their methodology, rather than a legitimate and academically rigorous research result.

In fact, after a moment of thinking, Alice realized that there was yet another possibility - it was possible that mana was related to the supernatural strength of people in this world, but it was also possible that there was some other factor, and mana was just reacting to it. Or that both mana and the System were just reacting to an improvement in her physical abilities, rather than causing them. While it seemed unlikely to her, it was still entirely possible. She needed to come up with ways to test all of the above.

Still, at the very least, this experiment had given her some food for thought. Alice continued to watch the mana in the air around her as she ran, and began trying to see if the mana in the air around her consistently reacted to her gaining an attribute. She would need to test it against other people in this world, but she wanted to at least see if the mana surge was a consistent reaction for her gaining an attribute.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alice could see Illa start to frown at her. However, Alice ignored it for now, in favor of continuing to run – she wanted to see what happened next.

It took less than an hour for Alice to next observe a surge of mana. Once again, she stopped for a brief moment, ignoring Illa’s increasingly bizarre gaze, while she stared at the mana. The mana in the air around her quickly restructured itself, before surging towards her moments later.

Another attribute gain?

Less than a second later, a System notification appeared with a pleasant ‘ding.’

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Strength+1

Once again, Mana flooded into her body. However, this time, she was able to notice a few slight differences from the way the mana had reacted when she had gained a point in Endurance. Instead of mana flooding into her bones, muscles, stomach, and throughout her body, this time the mana primarily seemed to accumulate in her muscles, especially her arms and legs.

Hmm… For now, Alice decided to try to find a ‘control group’ for this experiment, before proceeding any further. The Priest at the Church taught children twice a week, right? There were probably at least a few kids who would gain attributes per day in that environment. She should see if the Priest minded her dropping in and asking kids to let her know when they gained stats. If she was able to predict who gained a stat before they said anything, it would lend credence to the idea that the mana surges and stat gains were a regular phenomenon in this world, instead of some weird mutation brought about by her {Outworlder} Achievement or her previous world’s lack of mana or something. After all, Alice had already noticed that the amount of mana in her body was much lower than everyone else she had seen in Illa’s house. She wasn’t sure whether Illa’s mana was simply abnormally dense or Alice’s mana was abnormally low, although she was betting on the latter.

Alice had, at the very least, discovered one thing as a result of her small experiment – she could tell that there should be some sort of relationship between mana and stats, even if it was completely different from her first hypothesis. Rather than mana being some sort of fuel that the body burned in place of fat, it seemed far more likely that mana was somehow improving her stats by…replacing her muscles as she exercised? Something like that? Unless, of course, one of the other possible explanations proved to be more correct. However, it was a good enough theory to at least base some future experiments off of. She could work with that.

And then, with a sense of confusion, Alice watched as the mana in the air began to grow far, far more dense than it had when she had just picked up a point or two of attributes. Instead of just a thin extra layer that invaded her body and then broke apart, this looked more like a tidal wave of mana.

It surged into her skin, exactly the same way it had when she had gained an attribute. She braced herself for… something. Pain, strange sensations, anything. Instead, she noticed absolutely nothing, besides the fact that a huge string of notifications suddenly popped up.

Through Training, you have increased an attribute!

Intelligence +1, Perception +2

You have gained an achievement!

Seeker of Truth (I) (Rarity: 8)

You have gained a singular glimpse into the mechanics of the System and at least partially understood it, allowing you to understand more of the truths of mana and the world around you.

+1 Primary Class Slot(s), +40% class experience for all research-related classes, +10% Effect of Intelligence, +15% Effect of Perception. Your ability to see Mana is significantly enhanced.

You have leveled up!

Scientist: 1 -> 9

Scholar: 13 -> 15

Explorer of Magic: 29 -> 31

Huh? Alice looked at the string of notifications. The Levels in Scientist were, more or less, what she had been expecting. If anything, she thought the System was being quite generous, since it was giving her eight levels for a half-baked low-quality experiment on how mana and muscles interact. The number of levels she gained in [Scholar] seemed a bit low, probably because the class was more geared towards books and knowledge than experimentation and knowledge. The Attribute increases also made sense, since she was doing research and had focused a lot on her observational skills to do so. However, what the heck was {Seeker of Truth}?

It implied that she had seen… something a bit different than just a random guess at the truth. Or, rather, that most people didn’t realize something that she had seen in her experimentation. Alice had already started to work out how many of the mechanics behind levelling and attribute growth went – the System didn’t necessarily reward correct actions. Instead, it rewarded critical thinking and planning, regardless of how correct or incorrect a statement was. If she did an experiment that proved that the System was intelligent, even if the System wasn’t intelligent it would still give her levels in [Scholar]. It was like her math teacher – it would reward her work, giving her plenty of points even if she got the final answer wrong as long as the steps leading up to that answer were kinda reasonable-ish.

However, the {Seeker of Truth} Achievement implied something very different. It probably meant that she had, at some point, stumbled across something correct.

Alice had started out with the theory that people in this world used mana as some sort of fuel source in place of the regular energy supplied by the human body, and had nearly decided she was correct before she luckily gained an Attribute point and realized her theory was definitely missing something. Most people in this world accepted the current theory that was promoted by [Scholars], which claimed that mana was, instead, something similar to air – human bodies needed it in order to survive, and so humans naturally ‘breathed’ it in every second.

The theory Alice had ended up with at the end was that maybe mana was somehow reshaping the body as it passed through it. Was the System implying this theory was correct, or was there something else to it?

Alice shook her head. For now, she would do her best to be careful. Even in this experiment, she had nearly messed up, and only succeeded anyway as a result of pure luck. She didn’t want to keep stumbling by on pure luck. She couldn’t improve too much right now – her methodology for her experiment had been dubious, but none of Illa’s enchanted stuff had helped her do anything like measure mana in the air or inside of her body, and she simply didn’t have the materials to do more rigorous experiments. Illa DID have a tool to measure Broken Mana, but that was hardly what she needed right now.

However, at the very least, she could put more time and energy into removing the more obvious loopholes in her experiments – as well as finding an actual control group.

She took a look around the room, trying to get a sense for what {Seeker of Truth} was improving. The sensation of her mind moving too quickly for her body to keep up with increased, just like it had the first time Alice’s [Perception] had improved. Her thoughts were also clearer – in fact, they were clearer than they had ever been in her life. She quickly did some math. The effect of her [Intelligence] stat had just improved by ten percent, so that was about the equivalent of adding 15 points to her [Intelligence] total? It was certainly noticeable, now that she was getting so many points at the same time. Her ability to see the world around her and think were both much clearer. Her ability to process information became faster, and everything was easier to understand. There was something else, too… she couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but after gaining so many points in [Intelligence], something else felt different as well. For now, since she couldn’t figure out what that something was, she set it aside.

Of course, far more notable was her ability to see mana. Before, she had mostly seen the world with a sort of colored ‘film’ over it. However, making out individual swirls of mana had been difficult, especially farther away. Now, however, Alice was seeing something else entirely – her vision was much, much clearer. She could see that the broken mana in this room, for example, had two very slightly different shades of color associated with them. One of them was obviously Alice’s Broken Mana – as she deflected another bean, Alice could see a very small chunk of her mana, perhaps four or five percent of it, break off and form another little speck of Broken Mana. The other color, by simple elimination, should probably belong to Illa, since she was the only other mage in this mansion.

That led to the question of what Broken Mana was– nothing she had read or heard about indicated that there was a major difference in the Broken Mana produced by one person versus another, but she could clearly see that there was some sort of difference. Another question to investigate, when she had more time and a better idea of what she was doing.

Alice closed her eyes, trying to adjust to the feeling of her new Stats as her body tried to compensate for assumptions about how she moved and saw things that simply weren’t true anymore.

Apart from that, she also had an extra Primary class slot. Suddenly, the knowledge that she was going to lose the [Scholar] class in the next few weeks just... vanished. If she had six class slots, she didn't need to give anything up. It was an unexpectedly liberating feeling - she had acknowledged that she needed to focus on her survival, and the {Sense Hostility} Perk was simply too useful for her to abandon right now. However, she certainly hadn't felt good about giving up [Scholar]. Now, suddenly, she didn't have to give it up. Most of the Achievements she had seen that granted something like an extra class slot were rarity 9 or 10, and involved such ridiculous feats Alice was absolutely confident she would die if she tried for them. However, even though she didn't remember seeing this Perk in the Church's book, she now had one final class slot. She breathed a quiet sigh of relief, before she focused again, trying to redirect her attention back to what she needed to do.

In the next two days, she had two things to do. First, she needed to find a control group. Hopefully Priest Friedheim didn’t mind her sitting in on the lessons he conducted – if so, she could probably get decent information from that. Second, in two days, Alice needed to visit Erik’s daughter and discuss enchanting with her. Alice still didn’t even understand the different types of Enchantment, and she had no ability to start learning Enchanting by herself at all.

Of course, before that, she had Perks to select. One in each class, in fact.

"If you are done staring at your System notifications, may I ask what exactly you're doing?" Asked Illa, staring at Alice and frowning.