Chapter 196
The morning after Alice’s first magic seed experiment, she was in a good mood. She had finally made some progress towards making an artificial magic seed. She was still missing several things for a ‘full’ class seed, and she wasn’t entirely sure how to solve some of the problems she had… but she had a rough idea how to move forward, at least. She started out the day by filtering the rest of the levels she had gotten during her magic seed experiment. She had already filtered most of the mana she had gained in order to get her new Perks, but she had gained a bit more during the experiment on Jonathan.
You have leveled up!
Scholar: 70 -> 71, Careful Enchanter 40 -> 43
Alice didn’t get any other levels, but she was happy to see more progress for [Careful Enchanter] after only one evening of careful mana manipulation. After all, [Careful Enchanter] was starting to look like it might have a unique level of relevance in fixing the current crisis, and the Class had lagged far behind a lot of her other Classes. It didn’t benefit from some of her leveling speed boosters in her Achievements, but that didn’t mean Alice was happy with it being so far behind. She hoped it would at least start getting combined Perks soon, so that Alice would have another tool ready to help repair or replace the System.
Of course, that was far from the only progress Alice had. While she was in her dream library the previous night, she had also spent a bunch of time reviewing her own memories of the System, mana, and other mana constructs she had witnessed the creation of. And as she went back through her memories, she had noticed something that she had previously overlooked.
When Alice had observed someone survive their mana baptism, all those months ago, Alice had seen someone’s mage core ‘light up’ several. Alice had also noticed a similar ‘lighting up’ process when observing monsters transform into alphas, during the group’s journey to meet with Demor in Morendia. Since Alice had observed it twice, in two different spots, she suspected that it was important. The question was what, exactly, she had observed.
Alice suspected that what she saw was some sort of ‘finishing touch’ to magic cores, monster cores, and various other types of mana structure. Having seen her own attempt at making an artificial magic seed, and how it turned into a double helix, Alice knew that there were a lot of details about artificial magic seeds that she was missing. However, unlike before, she actually had a few guesses about what this meant.
Alice’s first guess was that artificial magic seeds would ‘light up’ once they became dense enough, or reached some sort of critical mass. Alternately, maybe it meant that something was ‘turned on,’ sort of like hitting a switch for a light. Alice felt that these two might be good directions to focus her research on, in order to hopefully finish her research on artificial magic seeds more quickly. The faster she got everything solved, the faster she could start genuinely helping people instead of sitting in her research lab while the world burned. Of course, Alice’s version of the System was still several steps behind the ‘original…’ but it was far better than no solution at all.
Of course, Alice’s guess that ‘density’ was what produced the flashing lights she saw in completed mana structures was a guess that lay on shaky foundations. At first glance, this would seem to make sense. After all, Alice knew that both newly forming mage cores and monster cores drew in huge amounts of mana when they were forming. Since magic and monster cores didn’t grow any larger in size, it would make sense to assume that the mana was being compacted into a denser and denser ball of mana for both types of mana-structure.