Chapter 193
The next few days were mostly repetition of the same thing. Alice woke up, had breakfast, and then watched Demor create Artifacts. Then, she experimented with the few remaining manaborn monsters, or returned to her Dream Library to review Demor’s actions. Alice kept hoping for some kind of revolutionary change to take place, illuminating the way forward. However, after three days, Alice had yet to find the revolutionary breakthrough she needed.
Even when she was in her dream library, Alice felt stressed out. The days where she could spend a few hours relaxing with a book or two were long gone. Every moment she spent awake, she observed Demor’s artifact creation process or observed the manaborn monsters. Every day she was asleep, she went back through her memories, trying to find any sort of key to figure out how the System created magic seeds without a core material.
Alice didn’t think she was an impatient person. However, with the crisis unfolding outside, it was hard to be patient. While Ethan didn’t tell her much about what was going on outside, Alice still knew that things would be getting worse every day. The few conversations that Alice had with Jonathan and his family confirmed it.
Manaborn monsters were starting to crop up anywhere people ‘believed’ that there were unusual phenomena. With people’s beliefs constantly being validated, people became more prone to believing in dangerous rumors. These, in turn, created more monsters. Panic and fear were like diseases, spreading from person to person and bringing hordes of monsters and natural catastrophes in their wake. With this dangerous cycle, things were hitting a threshold of danger that was hard to fix. People were afraid, and people around the world were dying. If something didn’t change soon, Alice doubted anyone besides the Immortals would survive the next few months.
The only thing that somewhat relieved Alice’s anxiety was the fact that she wasn’t alone. Allira had started to go to various taverns and public areas, to sing and talk about the amount of influence the Immortals and various countries were exerting to quell the spread of disaster. It helped keep things stable in the capital, but with how fast things were going wrong, her influence was limited. Alice could only imagine how much worse things were in areas without [Charisma] based Immortals to stabilize things.
Even more bizarre, Ethan mentioned a few whispers from some high level Mage circles he had made contact with. They had noticed that the mana levels in the country were dropping. It was as if a siphon had appeared in the middle of the country, and was now working on devouring all of the nearby mana. After asking Demor, he mentioned that people had always noticed that mana was a little less abundant in this country compared to other nearby regions. Nobody had ever looked into it – after all, a bit of variation in mana density was pretty normal. Demor didn’t seem to think much about people’s observation that mana levels were dropping – when Alice asked more explicitly about it, he just shrugged. Mana levels increasing or decreasing a bit was nothing new, after all.
Combined with Alice’s initial observation that the country’s mana levels were lower than Fendrallia’s, Alice wondered if there was more to it. And if there was… was it actually a bad thing? Less mana in the air meant that other disasters would start to slow down over time. Sure, it also meant that it was harder for valuable enchanting materials to appear. It also made it harder for Mages to get the raw mana needed to form magic seeds. It also meant that there wouldn’t be any mana for people to process and turn into levels … but at the same time, it meant that monsters wouldn’t be able to exist in the country. After all, monsters would rapidly die if they didn’t have enough mana to sustain themselves. People’s beliefs would also have a lower impact on their surroundings, meaning that the country would start to stabilize. In the midst of all the other chaos around the world, losing most of the mana in the country might prove surprisingly beneficial.
Of course, that was only if the decrease in mana level wasn’t the result of some other crisis brewing the background. Alice was prepared for anything at this point. With so many other things going on, she didn’t even have time to investigate the weird decrease in mana levels. Luckily, this piqued Cecilia and Ethan’s interest. Since Cecilia couldn’t help with a lot of the other projects Alice was working on, she offered to do some investigation and see if she could learn more. Ethan hooked her up with a bunch of extra enchanted items, to make sure she could stay safe, and hired a few [Guards] to follow her around and a translator who was fluent in most nearby languages. Then, Cecilia and Ethan both left to investigate.
With so many different things going on at once, Alice felt even more rushed. Especially because she just couldn’t figure out how the System handled class seeds. The one time she had observed the System create a class seed had been when she re-constructed her [Fisherwoman] class, after destroying the class seed. Alice suspected that the System had skipped some sort of obvious step that it ‘usually’ took when it rebuilt her seed. After all, Alice had already possessed the class before – it was entirely possible that some sort of remnant object or type of mana was already in her body, making the whole process smoother. This was because her memories of the process just didn’t seem like they should be very hard to replicate… but when she tried to put it into practice, it failed miserably. Her failures, the constant eruptions of small catastrophes, and the fear of what the rest of the world looked like pushed Alice to move faster and faster.