Chapter 181
After the group dealt with the outriders of the horde, Allira couldn’t sing the ship back into existence because she needed to keep the swamp monsters imprisoned. Alice suspected that once they got to another town or city, Ethan would use magic to ‘permanently’ contain the creatures… but for now, they were being held in place almost exclusively by Allira’s magic. Thus, the group went back to being transported via Ethan’s raw kinetic magic, which was far less comfortable and far less mana-efficient.
Despite the uncomfortable travel method, the group started making good time again. Jonathan was forced to occasionally plant another line of seeds, and Allira frequently reported the swamp monsters trying to catch up with them. But with the fastest members of the horde wiped out, the group was no longer at risk of being trapped in another battle, much to Alice’s relief. Still, as they continued to travel, hour after hour, Alice started to frown.
Just how big was this swamp? After over a day of travel through it, during which time they were mostly flying, they still had yet to reach the end of the swamp. Ethan and Allira had said that it might take a day or two of travel to pass through it, but Alice didn’t think they had originally planned to fly through the swamp, either. She started to wonder if they had somehow been steered off track by the swamp. It was clearly built to mislead people and trap them in the swamp forever. Had they somehow gotten turned around while they were travelling? But that… shouldn’t be possible. With three Immortals in the group, the idea of getting lost seemed absurd. But they were also still stuck in the swamp…
As Alice felt this suspicion start to grow in her heart, she realized that some tiny threads of magic in their surroundings were beginning to stir. Alice stared at these tiny little threads of mana, and noticed that they weren’t directly connected to people. Instead, they looked somewhat similar to the threads of mana that had connected to the monsters they captured, making the creatures seem somewhat similar to puppets or marionettes. After some observation, Alice realized that these threads of mana weren’t actually new. In fact, she had seen similar mana structures before – they just hadn’t been quite so obvious. The reason they were easy to pick out right now was because the Swamp was very… homogenous. Most free-floating mana in the world had a lot of other, smaller types of mana mixed into it, making every single drop of mana hard to break down into smaller components. However, the Swamp was very pure in that it was almost entirely made of swamp-mana. It was like seeing a blue paint in the middle of a tie-dye colored shirt, versus seeing a splotch of blue paint in the middle of white paper.
Alice spent several minutes observing this thread of mana, and then comparing it to the threads of mana extending out from the monsters that the group had captured. Until finally, Alice started to get a rough idea what she was looking at.
These tiny little threads of mana… should probably be her beliefs and suspicions interacting with the mana around them to make her beliefs ‘real.’ At least, that was Alice’s best guess – it could have also been something completely different. Despite looking like a mana structure, the ‘type’ of mana involved was even weirder than System mana. It felt… wrong somehow. Like looking at a color that was beyond the range that human vision could pick up. Alice knew something was there. She knew it was made of mana. But she just… couldn’t figure out what it was or how it worked.
While Alice was mostly guessing what the threads of mana did, it did bring another problem to mind. One that was becoming more important with each passing day. How did the System prevent people’s beliefs from influencing reality? Was it a facet of ‘communication’ mana? Was it a new type of mana entirely? How exactly was this done? Because one thing Alice had realized while they were travelling over the swamp was that this needed to get fixed. It was of higher priority than fixing Achievements. If people’s beliefs kept constantly influencing reality, sooner or later everything would just… snap behind the scenes. And past that point, Alice doubted that the world would remain stable.
She sighed. There was still so much work to do… and at the end of the day, as far as Alice knew, she was the only one who could do it. If she didn’t solve these problems, nobody would. Not for the first time, Alice wished that Ethan or Cecilia had Perks and Achievements similar to hers. Having a full work colleague who had their own, specialized versions of Alice’s toolkit would have made it thousands of times easier to fix all of this. Instead, all she could do was use {Shared Memories} to try to show other people what she had observed, and then theorize together. It was better than nothing, but far from what she wanted.
Alice spent a few minutes getting lost in her thoughts and worries, before she finally realized she was wasting time. If she had time to wish for colleagues, she had time to examine her surroundings and learn more. She started observing the threads of mana in their surroundings, trying to map out what they were and how they worked. Then, after several minutes of observation and a few checks with {Safety Analysis}, Alice started experimenting.