A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World-Chapter 207

The journey back to the city was uneventful, to Alice’s relief. Part of her still expected the situation to be some sort of elaborate trick. Her mind kept throwing out scenarios where the Society leader hadn’t actually died, and attacked them when they had their guard down, or scenarios where a monster swarm attacked the group before they could respond. Part of Alice knew that both of these scenarios were ridiculous, but the tense anxiety in her stomach didn’t go away even when she knew she was probably safe.

By the time they reached the city walls again, she couldn’t help but feel a growing sense of hope. Maybe the Society really was done stirring up trouble and killing people. It still seemed unbelievable to her… but maybe it was the truth.

As they finally passed through the city gates, she saw Ethan and Allira heave quiet sighs of relief as well. It seemed that she wasn’t the only one who felt disbelief at the situation. That made her feel at least a little bit better. If even Immortals felt the current situation was hard to believe, at least she wasn’t the only one struggling to process what had just happened.

The [Mercenaries] split off from the group shortly afterwards, while Alice and the rest of her group returned to Demor’s manor. Once they arrived, Alice and Demor worked out some times where they could look over the Society artifact and figure out how it worked and how to modify it. Ethan also insisted that he be present during those times, since he wanted to understand at least roughly what was going on. Alice had a sneaking suspicion that he also wanted to keep an eye on Demor when he was near both Alice and the Artifact, but she wasn’t going to fault him for amping up the security around her when the world was falling apart.

Unfortunately, the Immortal’s preliminary analysis was that the Artifact would be less useful than she had hoped. The conversion efficiency of the mana from the Artifact wasn’t as good as she had expected - perhaps 90% of the mana the Artifact tried to convert would be ‘wasted’ when it was activated. With that kind of conversion efficiency, Alice wasn’t sure if all of the mana in the Shil confederacy would be enough to cover even one country.

However, it wasn’t entirely hopeless. Alice was well aware that mana didn’t follow the laws of conservation of energy, especially when it came to magic seeds. While she wasn’t entirely sure how to exploit this to its maximum potential yet, there was probably some way to fix the mana sourcing problem. Alternately, there might be a way to fix the inefficiency issue. Alice wasn’t sure which of these options was more viable, but luckily, she had an Immortal who was focused on enchantments. After double checking her plan with Ethan, she shared a few bits of her research with Demor, specifically those related to energy conservation and magic seeds. Then, she left the actual problem-solving to Demor.

After that, she returned to her room to start looking over the Society notebook more carefully. She had already learned about something useful from the first few experiments recorded in the notebook. Alice didn’t want to miss any other potentially useful bits of information.

The next few experiments that Alice read about were focused on testing a few background things. Specifically, the Society had been trying to figure out what ALICE believed about the System, and then they had tried to verify whether those assumptions were correct or not. For example, the Society had somehow gotten it into their heads that Alice believed the System was sapient, and had spent a great deal of resources trying to verify this assumption - even though Alice had decided a long time ago that the System probably wasn’t Sapient. The Society had spent a lot of time and resources on this question, but had failed to produce any sort of meaningful result before they had given up. It was much harder to test the sentience or sapience of something that had disappeared from the world, after all.

Since the Society had no idea whether the System was sapient or not, they had apparently gone with the general assumption that it was sapient. After all, the Church of the System’s teaching strongly implied that the System was sapient, and the Society had decided to roll with that interpretation. This was probably why the statue the group had recovered was a living creature.

That brought Alice to the next set of experiments recorded in the notebook. The entire second half of the notebook was devoted to the creation of the stone statue, as well as its purpose. True to Alice’s first suspicions, the Society had been trying to recreate the System.

However, the System they had tried to create was very different from the System as Alice understood it. The first and most obvious difference was sapience. The second biggest difference was the Society’s understanding of the System’s ‘purpose.’

After the Society confirmed that mana and beliefs would directly warp reality, the Society had decided that the System itself was probably directly influenced by the beliefs of the Church of the System. From there, they had decided to go almost entirely off of the holy book of the System for their version of it, treating the System as a legitimate sapient deity instead of a giant enchantment. Under this interpretation, the ‘disappearance’ of the System also became a huge head-scratcher for the Society. They had eventually decided that the System was probably sapient, and had thus decided to either punish humanity or leave the planet for some reason.

From there, the Society had started to realign with Alice’s plans again, at least in part. The group had decided that, if the first System had left or decided to punish humanity, it was a good opportunity to reshape the System to something a bit more human-friendly. Thus, much like Alice, they had started working on constructing a replacement System - in this case, the stone statue. They had decided that the first priority of the System should be to protect humans - as long as that didn’t oppose the Society’s research or plans, of course. The Statue had a giant backdoor for members of the Society to change the way their ‘god’ operated, which Alice suspected would have created a huge mess somewhere down the line.

In any case, despite its glaring flaws, the statue had worked, at least to some extent. The statue had observed the world, then started trying to save humanity. The way it did so was by deleting all of the mana in the environment.

This was the actual cause of the huge mana void in the center of Morendia. Not a terribly inefficient fuel system designed to keep the reality mana coming, the way Alice had first assumed. Instead, most of the ‘mana void’ was caused by the statue’s attempts to eradicate mana and fix the root cause of this mess.

The Society had also used this process to help fuel people’s ‘worship’ of the knockoff System. They had created a set of enchanted items that gave people a sort of limited mana-vision. Then after ruining people’s regular critical thinking abilities with a mixture of drugs and brain surgery, the Society had shown everyone their new ‘god.’ When people saw the massive changes to nearby mana and reality that the statue was capable of doing, they had at least somewhat believed that they were looking at a ‘deity.’ From there, belief started to take over as the statue’s primary fuel source, and the Society mages had stopped needing to manually do everything for the statue.

Alice didn’t have a good way to replicate most of this process, at least not in a way she considered ethical. However, it was good to know that the Artifact the group had retrieved was not responsible for the massive void of mana in Morendia. It didn’t have the power to absorb and convert that much mana.

This knowledge was very important, because it gave Alice a better idea what the objects they had recovered from the Society were capable of.

The next part of the Society’s attempts to create the System were less interesting. They detailed what materials had gone into the statue and why, how they had kidnapped a [Sculptor] to give the System a face, and other miscellaneous details. These details would probably interest Demor, but Alice didn’t think she would end up delving into those details as much as expected. After all, her time was limited, and if there was an Immortal she could offload some work to, she probably should offload that work.

The only other part of real note was the statue’s attempts to constrain Ethan - which were detailed near the back of the book. The Society itself was meant to help humans, but the Society had built several ‘add-ons’ for it to help them. One of the more unusual things they had added was a sealing bubble - which they had created specifically to try to kidnap Alice. The Society Leader had felt confident that he could hold off Allira, since she was younger and weaker than the average Immortal, and the other three high-level Society Mages had felt reasonably confident they could grab Alice even if Jonathan tried to keep her safe. After all, Jonathan wasn’t a combat Immortal - he was a threat to regular [Soldiers] and noncombatants, but his Perks just couldn’t pull their weight on a battlefield with high level combatants flinging Immortal-level Perks around. This ‘sealing bubble’ had been built into the statue’s hands shortly before the Society had kidnapped the [Scholar].

Based off of the descriptions of the book, the Society had thought it was a coin flip whether the fight would go their way or not. Their entire battle strategy revolved around sealing Ethan off from the fight, since he was the strongest combatant on their side. Based on the plans the Society had outlined in the book, the fight had ‘ended’ almost the moment Alice freed Ethan. The moment Ethan had rejoined the fight, the Society leader had realized the fight was unwinnable, and prepared for his death.

After reading the book, Alice sighed. The Society’s attempts to build a god to control the System were still somewhat enlightening. They detailed a lot of the ways that belief and mana interacted with each other, and discussed a lot of smaller details in how belief could warp mana. Alice would need more time to pore over each experiment, and try to figure out how to apply that to her own efforts. However, the more she read, the more Alice reaffirmed her earlier idea. She was going to start out by creating a strong ‘baseline’ for the way the System worked, and then use belief mana to finish rounding out the abilities the System needed but she didn’t know how to create. It would be a little bit less stable than the original system - but it should work well enough to help stabilize the planet. After that, Alice would just need to find a way to ‘export’ this version of the System to the rest of the world… and at least in theory, she would finally quell the chaos from the collapse of the System.

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Alice sighed.

She had a lot of work to do, and not anywhere near as much time as she would like to get to it. But at least she had a strong direction now.

* * *

The next few days were spent neck-deep in research. Demor, along with Alice and Ethan, worked to understand how exactly the Society’s artifact worked and why it was so inefficient. When she wasn’t focused on that, Alice worked on understanding the Statue and the way beliefs and mana interacted with each other. When she had spare mana and time, she also helped heal a few people who were badly afflicted with class-mana poisoning. While her priority was fixing the bigger issues plaguing the world, Ethan had pointed out that she might get an upgrade to the {Distributing the Cure} Achievement if she directly healed more people. In addition, making sure that higher level government workers remained sane was incredibly useful for keeping the city stable while they worked.

Apart from those practical reasons to heal others, Alice found that helping a few people every day helped center her mind and mood. Struggling with her own, convoluted research was time consuming and tiring work, and Alice was glad to have an occasional break, especially one where she could visibly see that her actions were changing people’s lives for the better. It helped remind her of why she was doing this in the first place.

After a few days, Alice had a slightly better idea how beliefs and mana worked with each other. She wasn’t quite ready to launch her own version of the System yet - but she was starting to put together a rough plan.

Unfortunately, that plan had a requirement for it to work. If Alice wanted to use beliefs to patch up any errors in her version of the System, she needed people to have a specific set of beliefs. Alice was a [Scientist], not a [Priest]. She wasn’t very good at public speaking, or tricking people into joining religions the way a cult leader might.

Ethan’s suggestion was simple. Instead of founding a new set of beliefs and trying to manage it, he suggested that she piggyback off of a set of beliefs that was already present. In this case, the Church of the System. The Church of the System already worshipped the System, so having them propagate a few beliefs related to the System made perfect sense… if the [Priests of the System] were willing to work with her, at least.

For the first time, it wasn’t just the value of her Immortal mentor that brought people through the door when Alice wanted to arrange a meeting.

While Alice’s attempts to save people from Class mana poisoning might not have saved many people, word had still spread. The villages that the group had stopped at had told some travellers of Alice’s work, and while the rumours of her actions were quite distorted as they spread through word of mouth, they did still exist. Paired with the few people Alice had helped in Morendia’s capital, some of the local [Priests of the System] were more than happy to meet up with her.

“Do you have it? A way to see the System again?” asked the first [Priest of the System] who walked through the door.

Alice blinked in surprise. Rather than a stable [Priest of the System], the man standing in front of her resembled a drug addict looking for his next fix. The look in his eyes was off.

It only took Alice a few seconds to realize why. The man’s body was buried in [Priest of the System] mana. It was probably messing with his actions and mental acuity.

“Umm… yes, I have,” said Alice, nodding her head. She wasn’t being entirely honest, but to have an open conversation, she would probably need to heal this man first. She had been planning on waiting until more [Priests of the System] arrived, but the man in front of her was rather high level. He was probably around level 80. That meant he was probably rather high in the church hierarchy. “It isn’t perfect, but I have indeed found a way to ‘contact’ the System. I can do so by using this ring.” Alice held up an enchantment she had made right before setting up the meeting - this one would straighten out [Priest of the System] mana.

The old man didn’t even make a show of doubting Alice’s words - the moment she held it out towards him, he just grabbed the ring and put it on. A moment later, he started laughing.

“I can see it again! The holy words of the almighty System!” The man kept laughing. Alice hoped he wouldn’t hurt his throat, or feel too embarrassed once he was of sound mind again.

It took a few minutes of cackling, but as time passed, the man’s expressions started to change. At first, it only looked like a few traces of lucidity had returned to him - but as more time passed, the man’s eyes started to become clearer and clearer. Finally, after nearly ten minutes, the man blinked, and then glanced at Alice again.

“Ahem. My… my apologies. Lady Alice?” The man gave his appearance a quick glance, and winced as he noticed how wrinkled some parts of his garments were. He cleared his throat awkwardly. “My apologies for the… unseemly display. And my thanks, for your assistance.” The man gave her a nod, and then narrowed his eyes. “I seem to be quite different than I was merely half an hour ago. While I do wish that the System was the one that intervened on my behalf… this situation doesn’t seem like a divine intervention to me.” He looked at Alice again, and this time, there was a weight to his gaze. This man was someone who was good at understanding the things he saw around him, and Alice doubted the lie she had originally been planning to spread would work here. The man seemed too sharp for that.

That wasn’t great… but it wasn’t terrible either. Alice preferred working with people who could help actively promote a few ‘changes’ to the System that she might need to make. Specifically, ones that helped the System function in some form, despite the limitations to her own understanding of the whole thing. The man was high level, and thus probably highly ranked. Ethan had also screened everyone invited to the manor for discussion, to make sure no one of bad character was involved. Alice nodded to herself. She could work with this.

“Could we speak in private?” asked Alice. “I have a proposition for you.”

The [Priest] gave Alice a curious look, before he nodded.

It was time to set up a new ‘god.’