A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 29

Alice started out the day by taking a look at her newly acquired level 10 [Scientist] Perk. She opened up her Status Screen and looked over her options.

Experimental Procedure Requirements: Scientist level 10 or greater Assists you in locating minor problems or alterations to any experimental setup you have created, as well as assists in locating any flaws in your methodology when conducting an experiment. Note: ‘assists’ makes you more likely to perceive things – it cannot fundamentally totally overwrite any major shortcomings, especially if you are not paying attention. Sample Collection Requirements: Scientist level 10 or greater Allows you to store a limited number of items inside of a special 'item box' separately from each other. You must be holding the object in your hand. Note - it is recommended that you pay attention to the amount of resistance living objects have, as living beings will heavily resist being stored, and may break out if they are sentient. Also note that time is not stopped or altered inside of the storage box - if you attempt to store something inside of the item box, it will likely suffocate or die of mana deprivation, depending on circumstances. Proper Observation Requirements: Scientist level 10 or greater, Perception 100 or greater If you focus on one object or area for an extended period of time, you will gain the ability to 'zoom in' your eyesight, allowing you to get a better view of smaller things you might ordinarily miss. Can also be used to increase the distance of your vision.     Alice dismissed {Experimental Procedure} first – it was the least interesting of the three. More problematically, though, was the note – it assisted her, but that didn’t necessarily mean that it would solve problems in her methodology. If she wasn’t paying enough attention, she might still miss important problems in the way she was conducting her experiments, even under her most optimistic projection for how useful the Perk might be. And in the worst case, the Perk might do practically nothing – the wording was just too vague, and even optimistically it didn’t seem that useful. {Sample Collection} was interesting. It… sounded like dimensional magic, but the Perk had been recorded in the Church’s holy book, and there weren’t any noted problems with it. That might not mean anything – after all, the Church didn’t have any problems with any Perks granted by the System, as far as Alice could tell. Questioning your god wasn’t really the most solid way to build a theological institution, after all. Still, the idea she could explore something that resembled what she thought ‘dimensional’ magic would look like without consequences was fascinating, and revived a very, very tiny ember of hope that she might see home again one day.

  Wait, now that she thought about it, she swore she could remember the Guard at the gates when she had entered town asking if she had any Perks that let her store items? Even with {Enhanced Memory}, her ability to recall the encounter wasn’t perfect, but she was pretty sure he had asked about it. In that case, it was really unlikely the Perk would get her into trouble on that front. Still, she should at least consider the final option.

  {Proper Observation} was also interesting, because it might allow her to replace Microscopes or Telescopes in the future. Alice was seriously lacking all sorts of equipment, even with Illa’s old teaching supplies, and having ways to substitute Perks for those missing pieces of equipment wasn’t actually a bad deal. After all, equipment restricted her ability to conduct experiments, which in turn restricted her ability to level up and gain more Perks. However, again, the Perk was somewhat vaguely worded. What was the maximum amplification? If she could only ‘zoom in’ her vision to twice what she normally could, for example, it would be a sort of useful Perk, but one that was ultimately replaceable. Not to mention, Scientist had plenty of ‘Boost Perception somehow’ Perks, and this one was ultimately pretty replaceable down the line.

  Alice hesitated, but ultimately, she chose {Sample Collection}. It was the closest thing to ‘safe’ dimensional magic she knew of, and she was highly interested in trying to figure out how it worked. Furthermore, she could use it for all sorts of things – storing enchanting materials, maybe storing a bit of food for if something went wrong and she needed to avoid starvation again, and a variety of other things. Really, the idea behind the Perk was what fascinated Alice the most – even if she might not be able to figure out what was going on, just trying to figure out how the heck the Perk worked would probably give her a bunch of levels out of the deal. And, at least based on her understanding of the Perk’s wording, it might let her store items in an isolated environment, which would be seriously helpful if she needed to run any experiments in the future where materials couldn’t have contact with the air or something. It was a bit of a vague premise, but Alice could see a lot of potential long-term use for the Perk, as well as a lot of short-term use.

  After that, Alice decided it was time to use one of her newly acquired spare magic seeds. She still had plenty of time before training with Illa, and her Perk, {Three Seeds}, had given her three new magic seeds to work with. She intended to save two of them for grabbing some stuff useful for enchanting. However, she had a lot of ideas for what she could use her knowledge of physics for, and she wanted to figure out how several things worked. For example, why did Thermal Seeds exist? Theoretically, Alice remembered that heat was just supposed to be the speed at which atoms were moving. In other words, she would have assumed that Kinetic Seeds were entirely able to manipulate things like temperature. However, even though Alice had infused all of her knowledge of physics and kinetic energy that she was able to into her kinetic magic seed, she was totally unable to manipulate ‘small objects’ with her mana. She had at first attributed this to the idea that maybe her control just wasn’t good enough, but she was beginning to wonder if it would be impossible to do with her Kinetic Seed, even though she should be able to manipulate small objects like atoms.

  After all, this world’s understanding of things below a certain size was pretty… patchy. The books in Illa’s library could describe in great detail exactly how internal organs worked, and look at a variety of problems in the body and give detailed instructions on how to fix them with organic magic, and even had case studies of unique Perk combinations and how they played into some treatments.

  However, once the books started talking about cells, they started to get vague. This world knew that cells were there, and that they made up the physical body of humans, but didn’t really know much about how they were constructed or what they were made of. They also didn’t really understand the size differences between things like viruses and bacteria – in this world’s eyes, both were ‘stuff smaller than a cell that causes problems when inside the body,’ and didn’t understand much more than that. Alice was willing to bet that the System probably played a huge role in the fact people even knew that they were two different things. The Perk she had picked at Survivor level 10 explicitly mentioned it fought off both, and although she didn’t know what the exact text of the Perk was to someone from this country, she was willing to bet some Perks in classes like [Doctor] probably explicitly mentioned both and helped fight them off.

  Still, Alice figured she could probably do better by using her knowledge from Earth.

  The first thing she wanted to do was make an ‘Atomic’ magic seed. She thought it would be useful for figuring out why she had such a hard time manipulating the motion of atoms, and the seed would probably be useful for a variety of other things as well. For example, Alice knew that different numbers of Protons, neutrons, and electrons could create different substances – maybe she could do some sort of crafting nonsense with it? There were probably other uses, but Alice was having a hard time imagining them off the top of her head. Still, she could definitely do a lot of interesting things with the ability to manipulate atoms.

  Alice sat down on her bed, as the morning sunlight streamed in from her window. She was briefly broken out of her thoughts by the first bell of the day ringing throughout the town, ringing six times to let her know it was halfway between midnight and midday. She focused on the concept of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons. While she knew it wasn’t perfect, she tried to imagine the model she had seen in her physics textbook as well – she wanted to have a magic seed that could manipulate atoms. Alice felt something react to her thoughts, every so slightly shifting.

  This time, she knew that she was probably feeling mana – it was reacting to her ‘idea’ and trying to help her form a magic seed. She smiled before shifting her focus back to her magic seed. She pulled the mana deeper inside of her, trying to weld it together into a solid concept. The idea of atoms, of protons and neutrons welded together in a solid core by some of the strongest forces in the universe while electrons danced around them in a cloud of orbits.

  She felt the mana gathering together, solidifying as it began to pulse in tune with her body. She felt a rush of heat from just behind her heart, her mage core doing whatever it was in charge of and helping her process the mana inside of her body. She drew the mana closer together… And then it suddenly vanished. It was as if Alice had been tirelessly working to create a sand castle, and then someone had simply taken a vacuum cleaner and sucked up all of the sand she had been using. From a nearly-solidified seed of mana inside of her body, there was now nothing. In fact, Alice couldn’t even feel any extra mana inside of her body.

  Huh?

  Alice’s eyes snapped open and she looked at her body. The mana inside of her room looked to be a little lower in quantity than usual – her Mana-measuring Perk informed her that there were around two hundred fewer mariums of mana in the room than there had been when she took a measurement before starting to form her seed.

  The amount of mana in her body was still 69 Mariums. No change from this morning, since she had regenerated some more of the mana in her Kinetic Seed.

  Where had the mana she was gathering gone to? Where was her magic seed?

  Her status screen didn’t show anything unusual – she still had 3 unused magic seeds which had a maximum of 10% for their mana conversion ratio.

  Alice wondered if she had been dreaming about forming a magic seed and had somehow mistaken it for reality. She closed her eyes to try again. Gathering mana, focusing on a concept, building an idea…

  And the mana disappeared again. Alice had no clue where it went. Alice had no clue what went wrong. One moment, there was a mana seed on the verge of forming, exactly the same way she had felt her first magic seed form.

  The next moment, there was a sudden void in her chest. No mana. No magic seed. The only evidence that she had been working on a magic seed at all was the lingering traces of warmth near her heart, rapidly fading as the seconds passed.

  What the heck is going on?

  Alice frowned.

  She was sure that her understanding of atoms wasn’t so terrible that she was unable to form a magic seed. She hadn’t been expecting much, but for it to fail completely in the process of forming was… odd. Unheard of, even. Even people who had no understanding of a subject, when trying to form a magic seed, would usually just form a magic seed with a terrible mana conversion ratio, forming a 2% or 3% seed. However, there weren’t any records of people failing to form magic seeds at all – at least not in Illa’s library.

  Since there was some sort of unknown problem with forming an atomic seed, maybe she was having a hard time forming magic seeds? At that thought, a twinge of panic started to form in Alice’s stomach. If she couldn’t form magic seeds, it would be a massive problem for if she was trying to become an enchanter.

  She tried to think of other seeds she could create that would exploit the gaps in knowledge that seemed to be present in this world.

  Spacetime?

  Failed.

  Fabric of reality? Alice didn’t understand it that well, but she could at least vaguely remember some of it, and should be able to form a weak magic seed on the subject.

  For a moment, Alice could feel the sensation of a magic seed forming – an incredibly weak one, but a magic seed.

  And then, just like before, Alice felt the sensation of mana being… deleted. Poof. Gone. Nothing remained except lingering heat behind her heart. Desperate now, Alice began throwing concepts of physics at the mana around her, hoping for anything to work, regardless of how well she understood the concepts she was trying to form seeds based off of.

  Strong Nuclear Force?

  Weak Nuclear Force?

  Black holes?

  Photon manipulation?

  Alice tried several dozen ideas out.

  Everything failed. The sensation was always exactly the same – mana was deleted, and then there was no magic seed.

  The result of two hours of trying to put together Alice’s second magic seed resulted in a long string of failed seeds, and Alice’s entire chest was literally starting to feel like it would start burning her if she didn’t stop trying to form magic seeds. Alice felt like she was about to go insane. What was wrong with her magic seed formation ideas? Why was it that magic seeds were theoretically able to encompass any idea, but any idea she tried to use to exploit the laws of physics failed?

  Desperate now, Alice tried to construct one of the basic four magic seeds. She wanted to see if anything worked. Was there some sort of problem with her? Could {Outworlders} have some sort of flaw that made it impossible for them to make new magic seeds? The answer was… no.

  She tried to form an Organic Seed, and this time everything went as planned, with basically no oddities at all. Mana gathered as it reacted to her understanding of ‘organic matter,’ heat welled up behind her heart. The odd sensation of mana suddenly disappearing from inside of her body never happened. She simply formed a mana seed, the same as usual.

  Alice felt relief at that – if she couldn’t form new magic seeds at all, even though she had just gotten three new seed slots, that would have been a massive problem – she had no idea what that would have meant for her, or what problems would have followed, but she was glad she wouldn’t have to figure out how to run damage control that particular aspect of being a mage.

  But that brought up another question. What the heck was going wrong with her seed formation? The whole concept of magic seeds failing was weird in the first place. In fact, books actively advised new mages to make absolutely sure they knew everything they could easily learn about a specific topic before they made their magic seed, since there were no do-overs. If you fucked up your first seed, you might be saddled with a meager 30 or 40% Mana Conversion Ratio seed, or even worse, and would always have weaker control and lower mana than a ‘proper’ mage with a better seed of the same level.

  Nobody had ever mentioned anything about a magic seed entirely failing. And it seemed… to only apply to concepts from her old world? What?

  Alice had no idea what to make of that, or any idea what could be causing it. Some quirk of how mana really worked, a topic Alice barely understood? Some failure in her understanding?

  She had no clue.

  Confused and frustrated, Alice began to open the door to her room. And to her shock, the wooden handle of the door started deforming. It didn’t burst into flames, or transform from solid to gas. Instead, it looked kind of like Alice had dumped a massive container of acid on the wood – it started deforming, collapsing into… something. It was kind of dark, and kind of like putty, and Alice didn’t really know what to make of it. She pulled her hand back, shocked, and the door immediately stopped melting.

  Huh?

  Alice finally paid more attention to the gathering heat inside of her body. She had previously thought the temperature difference couldn’t be that much – the heat generated from creating a mana seed was relatively minimal, after all. Books even mentioned that, while mages would often be a little hotter temperature-wise after forming a mana seed, it usually decreased after a few days or weeks, and usually didn’t change much.

  Clearly, none of those people had ever tried to form so many failed seeds Alice had just made at once. The heat wasn’t harming her while it was inside of her chest, but the moment she touched anything, she could feel the temperature difference between herself and her surroundings. Especially her hands, which were leaking heat much more quickly than the rest of her body. However, the heat from her body wasn’t solely what was causing the problem – something funky was going on with the mana inside of her body. It was still the same number of Mariums it had been this morning, but it was behaving… erratically. It was spinning and cycling through her body like sand blown around by a wind current, and anytime she touched something, the mana inside of her body started surging towards it, desperate to escape from her body. Equally bizarre was that, whenever a bunch of the mana in her body escaped, a bunch of the mana from the surrounding air would also rush towards her body, surging inwards. Shortly after touching her body, the color would shift by a slight amount, and then it would join the madly swirling whirlpool of chaotic mana inside of her.

  What the hell is going on? Alice was starting to feel terrified. Had she somehow killed herself with her experimenting? She hadn’t thought of forming magic seeds as an inherently dangerous task before. This was just terrifying though. What if it liquefied her organs, or killed her, or did something else?

  The whirlpool was getting worse and worse, and Alice was beginning to feel the boiling sensation in her body also grow worse along with it. The mana was getting more and more chaotic, and Alice was beginning to truly panic.

  Another surge of mana flickered towards her, and for a moment, Alice saw a System notification spring up.

Error Detected!

Error: 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 01100110 01101100 01101111 01110111

Error Detected!

Error: 01000110 01100001 01101001 01101100 01100101 01100100 00100000 01001101 01100001 01101110 01100001 00100000 01000011 01101111 01101110 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110011 01101001 01101111 01101110

Error Detected!

Error: 01001111 01110101 01110100 01110111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01000100 01100101 01110100 01100101 01100011 01110100 01100101 01100100

Error Detected!

Error: 01000100 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01010010 01100101 01110011 01101111 01110101 01110010 01100011 01100101 01110011

Error Detected!

Error: 01100011 01100001 01101100 01100011 01110101 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111

Error Detected!

Error: 01000011 01100001 01101100 01100011 01110101 01101100 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101111 01101110 01110011 00100000 01100011 01101111 01101101 01110000 01101100 01100101 01110100 01100101

Error Detected!

Error: 01001001 01101110 01101001 01110100 01101001 01100001 01110100 01101001 01101110 01100111

Alice could see System notifications suddenly start ringing out like crazy. However, a fraction of a second after an error message would open, it would immediately close, leaving her dazed as she tried to figure out what was going on.

  A second later, Alice could see several fragments of the mana in the surrounding air suddenly stop. They formed an incredibly intricate web of something– the color of the web varied wildly, and it all formed some sort of incredibly intricate pattern Alice couldn’t understand at all, like a three dimensional fractal made of colored unicorn puke. It was like somebody had taken a rainbow, thrown it into a blender, and then had used the results to create the most complex thing Alice had ever seen in her life. It wasn’t a web, it was an unending fractal of billions of different connections and strings of mana, pulsing in the air around her and interlocking with her body. Alice had no idea what she was looking at - no, maybe it was impossible for a human mind to understand whatever this was. It was unimaginably complex - even trying to process a single corner of the thing would have required hours of time and effort.

  In response to the swirling web of madness that had suddenly appeared in the air around her, the swirling chaos inside of her body began to calm down. Second by second, the madly dancing mana began to ease. The horrifying heat boiling up from behind her heart began to cool, and the sensation that she was burning alive from inside out began to ease.

  Slowly, second by precious second, the pain that had started to wrack her body began to ease.

  Four minutes later, the mana in her body had settled back down. The heat had also decreased, and she felt close to normal again. Before she could think further, another surge of mana rushed towards her, followed by a System Notification.

Error Resolved!

Response Code: 01010011 01110101 01110010 01110110 01101001 01110110 01100001 01101100 00100000 01110010 01100101 01100011 01101111 01110010 01100100 01100101 01100100

For a moment, Alice swore that, unlike before, the System message somehow communicated a feeling of… smugness?

  And then the System message deleted itself, completely unlike how normal System messages waited for her to dismiss it.

  Alice sat down on her bed, thankfully no longer melting everything she touched. Her hands shook, and she tried her best to breathe deeply and slowly. However, she couldn’t quite suppress the terror that pervaded her being. She had… She had almost died.

  She had almost died, and something insane had happened afterwards. None of the books in Illa’s library mentioned anything like this, and Illa herself hadn’t mentioned anything dangerous related to forming new magic seeds.

  What the fuck was all that?