A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Chapter 7

After nearly getting eaten, Alice had to re-evaluate her priorities. She had a hard time keeping track of how long she had been in this dimension for, but she was sure that it had been a little under a week. In other words, within less than seven days of arriving on this world, she had nearly been eaten by a monster on top of all the other problems she had encountered.

Obviously, this did not bode well for her future if she remained as weak as she was now.

She ran over her options, trying to figure out what the best way to achieve at least some level of combat proficiency was.

Could I make a bow and arrows? I have no experience at all with shooting, so even if I made a bow and arrows I wouldn’t be able to use it. Perhaps a Skillwould make up for that if I just practiced enough – but I don’t know if I can afford to patiently grind out an {Archery} skill when I could run into danger at any moment. This solution feels somewhat unreliable. Also, I have no idea how to build a bow either, meaning I would need to grind out the relevant crafting skill first. Woodworking would probably help me, but I’m definitely nowhere near the level of being able to make a functioning bow with it. It doesn’t seem like a solution that would be useful in the near future.

Knives? I can’t make anything that refined with stone yet – besides a knife wouldn’t give me the range I would want. Getting my hand near Spidercrab’s mouth just seems to be asking to lose a finger, or my whole hand.

Spear? A shoddy spear helped against the Spidercrab, although admittedly circumstances were favorable. However, it keeps monsters away from me if they want to bite me, and a spear is also pretty easy use. While a spear isn’t easy to make, it’s much less hard for me to make than a bow. It might be a pretty good option.

After a quick evaluation, a spear seemed like her best option.

She went back to the tree branch she had used as her makeshift weapon during the fight with Spidercrab and grabbed it. Afterwards, she moved back to her cave, scanning her surroundings carefully as she walked to avoid getting ambushed by a second monster, before she returned to her cave.

Then, she got to work. She began by finding a stone with a somewhat sharp surface, and then began awkwardly carving away the edges of the stick, trying to refine it into a sharp wooden spear point. However, in a flash of inspiration, she grabbed two more rocks – one that she was going to make into a spear tip, and one to use as a carving tool. She placed the first rock down on a particularly large boulder near the entrance to her cave, then placed the rock with a sharp edge against it.

Then, she began using the third rock as a makeshift hammer, banging it against the second rock over and over again to chip away at the edges of the rock.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Stoneworking +1

It took a great deal of time and work, with Alice nervously surveying her surroundings over and over again to see if the noise had attracted any monsters or wild animals, but thankfully, nothing showed up to attack her while she was working. Finally, she had a decent spear point. It was the first object she had made in this world that didn’t look like an incredibly shoddy, inferior knockoff item.

She looked back over to the piece of cloth she had found yesterday – then, she began trying to tear a strip of cloth from it.

The cloth was much tougher than Alice would have thought possible. In fact, it seemed quite bizarre, since she could clearly feel the fact that the cloth was somewhat coarse. It was a large bolt of some sort of rough fabric, nothing particularly fancy, but no matter how she strained against it, she simply couldn’t tear off a piece of the edge with her bare hands.

Finally, she began carefully poking little holes into the fabric with her stone spear point, weakening the edge of the cloth. Then, she managed to tear a rough strip of cloth from the edge of her new blanket. Finally, she tied the spear tip to the wooden branch with her strip of cloth, making the tightest knot she was able to with the assistance from the {Weaving} skill.

By the end of it, she was holding a serviceable spear with a stone tip.

Alice took another look at her work. It was really, really ugly. Functional. But ugly.

She waited. Usually every time she accomplished something that furthered her survival, the System rewarded her with a level. However, this time, nothing came up.

Seriously? Nothing at all? Alice felt depressed after a while. Maybe this was the difference between leveling up at low levels versus high levels? She sighed, before returning her focus back to her spear.

At least she had a stone spear now. It would be useful both for fishing and for fighting off any other monsters that wanted to maul her face off.

She glanced back at the strip of cloth, trying to figure out if she could make proper clothing out of it, before deciding that it was outside of the range of her current abilities. Perhaps in the future, but for now it would just continue to serve as a blanket.

Stone spear in hand and slightly more confident, Alice returned to fishing, although this time she kept a much closer watch on her surroundings. Her carelessness had cost her a painful bite on her ankle earlier, and she was determined not to let it happen again.

She caught another fish, and the system gave her a happy ding as a notification appeared.

Through training, you have increased a skill!

Fishing +1

You have unlocked the class Fisherwoman as a result of catching several fish through your own efforts, as well as having access to the Fishing skill. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes

No

Alice quickly selected no, since she doubted she would use this class very much. The river might freeze over soon, and she wasn’t quite desperate enough to pick a class she didn’t think would be useful for more than a week or two, maybe a month at most. Besides, she was curious to see what the difference between a primary and secondary class was.

She also wondered why the [Survivor] and [Fisherwoman] class seemed to have such a high level of overlap. [Survivor], as far as she could tell, was a class that boosted her ability to survive in the wilderness by herself. It seemed to focus on giving her some aspects that wild animals benefited from, such as ‘fur’ through Perks like {Extremophile} and other beneficial traits like night vision, while also giving her knowledge and information early hunter-gatherer humans used to survive in the wilderness. Included within that were several abilities that were related to food, water, and shelter. Even though fishing was a bit different, at heart it was focused on providing food, making it feel like a more concentrated [Survivor] class in some respects. Were classes overlapping in abilities and purposes a good thing, or a bad thing? Alice decided that once she had a better idea what the difference between a primary and secondary class were, she would need to think very carefully about her primary classes. If she could get five overlapping magic-related classes as her primary classes, for example, she would have five times the amount of magic-related perks.

Alice sighed, and turned her focus back to catching and cooking her fish. Thinking about the future felt… nice. It was something she had precious little time to do over the past week as she drifted from one near-death experience to another. It felt almost normal.

After catching a few more fish, Alice grabbed her twelve smoked fish and carried them back to her cave. She could still feel whatever illness she had caught messing with her senses, but it was already fading away as her Perk worked on it. She silently thanked whoever or whatever had created the System for helping her avoid dying of whatever this world’s version of smallpox was, and then studied the book a bit, ate one and a half fish, and then went to sleep. It had been a long day.

* * *

The next day, Alice made a stone bowl, deciding to finally add boiled water to her supplies list. She wasn’t actually sure if it mattered at this point, given the {Outworlder} achievement and {Microbe Resistance} perk both boosted her immune system already, but she figured it was better to be safe when she could. After all, if she got sick, it might still become a death sentence for her. Now that she could finally make a stone bowl and boil her water, it made sense to take every extra precaution she could. Along with her stone bowl came a welcome surprise.

You have leveled up!

Survivor: 20

It seemed like the bowl had tipped her over the edge into level 20 of Survivor, which meant another perk was available.

Flee

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

You may expend a significantly greater amount of calories in order to greatly increase your speed for a short period of time. This will cause you to grow tired more quickly.

Long Distance Running

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

The amount of stamina and calories you consume while running is significantly reduced, allowing you to run much greater distances if you pace yourself properly.

Photosynthesis

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

Your body gains the ability to convert sunlight into calories and nutrients at a slow pace. (Will not cause your skin to turn green). (You will not be perfectly sustained by this perk: it will simply decrease the amount of food you need to eat in a day to a significant extent.)

Directional Sense

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher, Intelligence 100 or higher

You gain the ability to always tell where the four cardinal directions are relative to where you are facing.

Camouflaged

Requirements: Survivor level 20 or higher

While staying still, dramatically increases your ability to blend into the environment, making creatures around you much less likely to notice you. This can be turned off.

She glanced over the perks briefly, dismissing {Directional Sense} first. She was still lost, but she had confirmed that people had, at some point in the recent past, been farther upstream.

She didn’t know what killed the person whose corpse had washed downstream or why, but a sinking feeling in her stomach made her suspect that she was going to find out, sooner or later. However, figuring out where she was just didn’t seem to be as important as surviving right now, given the fact that monsters were roaming about and either monsters or people were killing people upstream.

{Long Distance Running} and {Photosynthesis} were also dismissed due to the fact that they didn’t help deal with monsters much. If it had been just two days ago, she probably would have chosen photosynthesis, because it both allowed her to experiment with the System more and it also addressed one of her bigger concerns, which was food. However, now she also needed to make sure she wasn’t at the bottom of the food chain.

That left {Flee} and {Camouflaged}. Alice briefly wondered whether or not she would have had access to a more offensively oriented perk if she had better physical stats, since the [Survivor] class seemed to rely a lot on the physical body and hers was incredibly lacking, but she focused back on her perk selection after a few moments of wondering. What-ifs and attempts to optimize her Stats were just impractical when a single misstep at any moment might kill her.

Eventually, she chose {Camouflaged}. It had some offensive ability if she used it to spring surprise attacks, which, while still risky, at least gave her more options for food if she got desperate. If she could find any more rabbits in the area, it might even help her get food, in addition to also providing a defense against getting eaten by monsters. It might also help her spear a few more fish, if the fish around here used their eyes to avoid danger. By contrast, {Flee} was a bit more useful for escaping monsters, but also worried her because she wasn’t sure how much food would be available over the winter. The Perk mentioned that she needed to consume extra calories to ‘fuel’ the Perk, and when her food situation was still uncertain that ‘extra consumption’ might kill her.

Afterwards, Alice began boiling some water in her new stone bowl, and in the meantime took a look at her book, trying to boost her language skill.

Finally, she managed to translate one of the most important words on the cover. One that gave her a huge rush of excitement when she realized that this book might answer some of her big questions about how to improve her current circumstances.

Magic. The book had something to do with magic.She didn’t know what any of the other words meant, but now that her Illvarian language had reached level 5, apparently it had been enough to translate this one important, critical word on the cover of the book. Alice could already imagine throwing fireballs around instead of struggling for firewood, creating a house out of thin air, and all of her worries disappearing under a few well-structured spells…

Okay, even with magic she probably wouldn’t be able to cure all of her problems at once. After all, if she had learned anything about the system so far, it was that it rewarded hard work and (possibly) danger. Still, having access to magic would hopefully give her an incredibly powerful tool to help her survive.

Besides, Alice was very curious about how this world could possibly exist with a system and magic. Obviously, as far as she knew, Earth didn’t have either of these things, which meant that something was different in this dimension. She wanted to know more, and firsthand experience would help her learn more effectively than anything else.

That being said, it also raised the question of why the person floating down the river had been next to a book about magic. Were Mages hunted down by society, the same way ‘witches’ had been burned at the stake back on Earth? That didn’t seem to explain why the man’s heart was missing, but it could be some sort of ritual ‘purification.’ It could also be a cult going around killing people, or the man could have simply been a merchant attacked by bandits, or it could mean any number of other things.

She thought about the corpse for a while, but couldn’t come to a conclusion. Right now, she simply didn’t have enough information. However, it was clear that something had killed the person. She didn’t know who, or what, or why, but she had a sinking feeling in her stomach that she might find out why at some point. Especially if the man’s death was related to Magic somehow.

Or, perhaps, the reason might find her.

* * *

Alice spent the next few days devoting far more time and attention to the book than she previously had, raising her language proficiency and trying to translate the book as she nibbled away at her fish and nuts. She occasionally went back to fish some more and smoke some more fish, with growing nervousness as the river began to show more and more signs of freezing over. The {Camouflaged} Perk did help her a bit with catching fish, although Alice began diverting more and more of her time away from gathering supplies as she focused more on the book she had found. The fact she had a book about Magic kept her hopes up about her survival through the winter, even as the temperature dropped and supplies became more scarce.

On the fifth day, Alice’s {Illvarian Language Proficiency} reached level 22.

Her ongoing attempts at translating the book were getting closer and closer to paying off. She couldn’t translate enough of the book to make sense of it yet, but she could, at the very least, tell that the book was talking about the theories on the development of something called a Magic seed, and the four main forms of Magic seeds commonly used throughout the world.

Specifically, Alice had learned that a Magic seed was what allowed a human to use mana, although Alice couldn’t understand more than that yet. In other words, the reason so many of her attempts at using Magic had failed was because she didn’t have a Magic seed, and she needed to form one. However, she was very unclear on how this could be accomplished. As a result of her efforts at learning a new language, the system had also offered her a new Class, which was a welcome surprise after spending hours slogging through text she didn’t understand yet.

You have unlocked the class Scholar as a result of studying a single topic for several days, reading a book on the topic, and attempting to think beyond the teachings of the book and apply it to the world around you. Would you like to make this class a primary class?

Yes

No

Alice thought very carefully about the question. [Scholar] was… not useful to her current circumstances. At all, in fact. One could say that, compared to [Survivor] it was a waste of a main class slot when it came to surviving her current circumstances. However, if there was one thing she loved doing, it was immersing herself into the study of knowledge.

This world had the bizarre, reality-breaking System in it, and it fascinated her. It also had Magic. There was a lifetime’s worth of things to study in this new world. She closed her eyes, hesitating for a moment as she tried to assess whether it was more important to think about the present or follow what she wanted to do in the future. Then, she tapped the ‘yes’ button.

There was no huge change in either her body or mind. That was to be expected, since the class was, after all, just level one. She hadn’t even noticed the effects of the survivor class on her actions even when it was at level five, and even now it just seemed to vaguely ‘help’ her think of ways to deal with problems she encountered that were within the scope of the class.

Still, after taking the [Scholar] class, she felt better. More resolved. In the nearly two weeks she had been here, she had spent the first week teetering from crisis to crisis, always on the verge of dying if she was just a bit unlucky when the next challenge came her way. To some extent, this was still true – she had no idea what had killed the guy who had drifted down the stream last week, although she felt ominous prickles at the back of her neck when she thought about the event even now.

She hadn’t seen any other monsters, but knowing that they were out there meant that she was at risk of being attacked anytime. She also had no clue whether spidercrabs were weak or strong compared to other monsters, and had no clue what she might need to defend herself from in the future. If she was particularly unlucky, stronger monsters might even be able to use magic, adding a whole new dimension to the dangers of the wilderness around her.

However, even with all of that, the [Scholar] class called to her. It made her feel as if she was planning for the future instead of just surviving in the present. And hope was something she desperately needed right now, almost as much as any practical ability. The [Scholar] class seemed to promise her that in the future, she would be safe again, and she would be able to study the things she loved once the current crisis was over. It might take some time, but eventually she would get there.

After taking her new class, she turned her attention back to the book. Finally, after a great deal of guesswork and translation, she finally managed to translate something a little more useful.

The basis … …. … Magic is a Magic seed. They are …… …… a mixture of ….. … .. …, and primarily fall under four. ... … .. . The kinetic-magic type seed, the …… type seed, the electromagnetic type seed, and the ….. … type seed. To form one, one must ….. ….. … [Magic] Stat must be above 0. This may be done by… … .. …….. …. with a high lethality rate. Assuming these conditions are …. ……….. …… …. Then, one must form a magic seed by ….. ….. on the concept one wishes for their magic to …… There appears to be… …. … …. …. . Once a seed is constructed, … … ……. …… .. That is also why ….. less likely. However, one cannot say that….. … basic four …. all magic. Plenty of other.. . …. …. After all, the basis …… …. ….. …. …. belief. At least, … …. humble author’s …. …. ……… … .. ….

The words were a mix of things she could actually translate as well as a few words she had guessed based on the way the Illvarian language and sentence structure worked, but she was getting more confident that her translations were correct, even the words that weren’t given to her by her Language Proficiency Skill. Her Illvarian language skill was also levelling up far more quickly than her other skills, like {Stoneworking} or {Weaving}, even though she still used the latter two skills more often. This baffled Alice. Perhaps Language Skills were somehow special? Or she was somehow displaying more proficiency with the skill since she was actively trying to translate beyond the Skill’s auto-translate abilities? It was a question to keep in mind for later.

She frowned, poring over the information she had learned from the passage. She was a bit nervous about the fact that the book had mentioned a ‘high lethality rate,’ but stopped herself before she could delve too deeply into her worries. Perhaps the book was referring to the method of getting the magic stat above zero? The Achievement she had gotten for almost dying of mana poisoning had mentioned something about a high lethality rate as well. Also, the fact that the book directly mentioned the ‘magic stat must be above 0’ told her that the other people on this planet ALSO had access to the System. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be referencing ‘Stats’ as if it was common knowledge in the book.

In other words, until proven otherwise she would assume that every living creature had exactly the same System as she did. Which brought up the question of what exactly the System was again, but Alice just didn’t know enough to make a good guess yet.

She could only translate two of the four types of magic seed, given the limitations of her Language Skill, but what interested her the most was that the two types of magic listed seemed to actually be based on physics. Unlike the System which could somehow reshape her abilities at a moment’s notice, the very fact that an ‘electromagnetic’ mage seemed to control electricity and magnetism gave her some hope that magic, at least, was based on something she was more familiar with from her time on Earth.

Of course, her translations of most of the book were quite patchy, so she was partially guessing at what an [Electromagnetic Mage] actually did, but given the name [Electromagnetic Mage] there were only so many different things they could specialize in.

She hadn’t managed to translate many of the other pages of the book in such great detail, so her understanding of a lot of the other parts of the book were still very weak. However, the other important she had managed to translate the page describing Magic Seed formation, and she had at least a guess about what she was supposed to do.

A Magic Seed seemed to require a few things.

First, one needed to have a magic stat. [Magic] Stat at zero meant that it was impossible.

Then, one needed to forcibly impress their understanding of a concept onto their mana, whatever that meant. Interestingly enough, there didn’t actually seem to be any Skills required for this, at least if her translation was correct. Even if one didn’t know how to feel, see, or detect mana in any way, shape, or form, as long as one had a [Magic] stat it was possible to form a magic seed. The author had seemed to be pointing out exceptions to some sort of rule of magic, but she hadn’t managed to figure out what exactly the rule he was talking about was. It seemed to be related to ‘extra seeds’ beyond the basic four, which Alice was fairly certain was the actual topic of the book – contrasting the ‘basic four’ magic seeds with whatever other magic seeds there were.

Either way, Alice had no understanding of [Magic] right now. A ‘basic’ seed sounded ideal for her if she was going to figure out how to do something without hurting or killing herself.

She thought carefully for a few moments longer, before finally, she made her decision. Even though the {Illvarian (Language Proficiency)} skill had been growing more quickly than her other skills, ultimately, it was still progressing more slowly as its level got higher. The words and grammar rules she got at each level of the skill were far more noticeable than other skills – after all, she could understand words that she hadn’t known a few minutes ago each time the skill levelled up. However, she had no idea when she would be able to translate the rest of the book, and a more powerful monster might show up and eat her if she waited too long to improve her safety. The spear would probably help against monsters like spidercrabs, but the fact that she had no clue what this world would throw at her next made her very uneasy.

Of the two magic seeds she could translate, kinetic magic sounded like it would be more useful. The author, unhelpfully, didn’t add in any explanations of the ‘basic four’ magic seeds beyond the names when he was comparing them to whatever the main focus of the book was. However, based on the name, she could guess what it was supposed to interact with. Thus, she quickly made her decision.

Tonight, she would try forming a kinetic magic seed.