Once the monster nest was cleared, Alice took a look at the mana-conducting pipes that traversed the System and carried mana from one place to another. Most of the framework was still intact, despite several days of occupation from the monster horde - however, there were major, obvious holes and flaws in the framework too. Alice suspected they were created by monsters nibbling at the edges of the framework.

  “Doll? Is it possible to fix this?” Asked Alice.

  “It should be. I’m still missing - oh.” Doll blinked in surprise, before she pointed to several half-gnawed on plants in the corner of the System. Alice looked at them, and then blinked in surprise.

  “What are these?” Asked Alice.

  “If I’m not mistaken, it’s most of the remaining materials I’m missing to build the System’s base materials,” said Doll. She prodded one of the plants with her fingers, before she grinned. “These are some plants that can only grow in really mana-rich environments. That must be why the creator of the System put them in here - there aren’t many places in the world with higher mana density than this one. Perfect spot to grow them. I’ll need a few days to experiment, and there are still a few materials that are missing - but I can also cannibalize a few nearby rooms for the enchantment components I don’t have. I think I can fix the physical materials.”

  “I can help with the enchanting side of things,” said Cecilia. “I found a few explanations for less important parts of the System, such as the power conducting bits and pieces. Unfortunately, the creator of the System didn’t leave a real diagram behind, which would have been best - but he still left a lot of smaller insights behind. Putting the power flow back to its original state should still be possible - it’ll just take me a bit of work.”

  With Doll and Cecilia speaking up, the group had a rough plan for how to proceed. The rest of the group started to work on helping Doll and Cecilia fix up the missing pieces of enchanting materials, ruined enchantments, and establish a few defenses to help hold off any new waves of monsters. Alice doubted it would hold out against a real threat - but at the very least, it would help slow any newcomers down for long enough to reinforce the area. It would have to do.

  The enchantment itself was easier to fix up than intended, simply because most of the power-conducting enchantments were still at least partially intact. Combined with Cecilia’s access to the journal, it only took the group a day and a half to get everything repaired. After that, they headed back to the teleportation enchantment.

  It was finally time to head into the true depths of the System. Alice didn’t stop to think for long before she decided the group’s destination. She wanted to get as close as possible to the unique rooms in the System, and see if they had any valuable information such as a full set of schematics for the System and how to rebuild it from scratch. If the group could get access to a full set of design documents, Alice could finally figure out how to repair things without needing to piece everything together from scratch.

  It didn’t take her too long to get the portal redirected towards the room she had chosen. She chose a slightly smaller room that was close to their real destination - that way they wouldn’t be overwhelmed by monsters right off the bat if the room was infested. After she finished double checking her idea for a destination with the Immortals, she opened the portal.

  A moment later, a chunk of System-variant dimensional mana ripped open a gate in reality. Alice and the others took deep breaths, before Ethan, Allira, and Myra stepped through first. A moment later, Allira started humming, and groups of shadows dove into the area surrounding the portal.

  The rest of the group waited as the three most combat-ready Immortals scouted out the area. Thirty seconds later, Allira relaxed.

  “Nothing too scary in the area you chose, Alice. Just a few spiders. My shadows mopped them up. We can go through.”

  The group made their way through the portal. The portal remained open for the group’s potential return after they exited, which made Alice feel somewhat reassured. Regardless of what happened, the group would have a way to retreat, so long as nothing disrupted the flow of mana again. Since they had sealed the entire pipeline’s physical components in rigid materials, the shadowy spider monsters should have a much harder time working their way back in, although they would still probably do so eventually. But as long as the group moved quickly and checked the defenses often, they now had a safe way to advance and retreat within the System.

  “Based on the System’s internal map, we should head in that direction after we get started,” said Alice, before she pointed a bit northeast. “That’ll take us to one of the unique rooms I found on the map. With any luck, it’ll be the blueprint room I want and it’ll make the rest of our time here much easier.”

  “Got it. I didn’t notice any big monster nests in the rooms immediately adjacent to this one, so we can advance. The last two rooms in the way haven’t been scouted out yet, though,” said Allira. Then, her face turned a bit glum. “Of course, there aren’t any remnants from the System, either. The monsters aren’t here because they already stripped it all to dust and ruins. Nothing to eat here, and nothing to learn from, either.”

  Alice grimaced, as a new possibility appeared in her mind. Would they arrive at the room she had been seeking, only to find a ruined and decimated room?

  Alice found herself suddenly glad that she had taken {Temporal Snapshot}, the Perk that let her peer into the past and learn about destroyed magical constructs and enchantments. With it, she would be able to view the most important rooms of the System, no matter what state of destruction the monsters had left them in. It still wouldn’t be quite the same as having a fully intact structure, of course, because Doll, Ethan, and Cecilia wouldn’t be able to use their Perks on Alice’s {Shared Memories}, so the information they could gather might have a few small holes in it. However, it was far better than nothing.

  The group worked their way forward. Unlike the outer fringes of the System, the inner corridors had very few traps - though Alice could see bits of monster blood and trap debris left behind. Alice surmised that the inner corridors of the System did have traps in them - it’s just that monsters had sprung most of them already. Then, after the traps had been sprung and the monsters had been killed, the monsters had probably eaten the traps, just like they had eaten every other component of the System.

  Alice kneaded her forehead in frustration as the group continued to move forward. The fact that the traps had no risk of going off and killing a party member by accident was a relief, but Alice really didn’t the implications of what they were seeing. It meant the inner corridors of the System would likely be in even worse shape than the rest of the System.

  Sure enough, the next room that they passed by had zero monsters in it. It also had zero enchanting materials, debris, or components of the System left behind. It was just an empty room with bits of the floor gnawed away, and a connection to a dried up power supply. The enchantments responsible for conducting power from one area to another had evidently been eaten to nearly nothing in this area, making the room appear even more bare-bones and desolate.

  Alice sighed as the group observed the utter destruction before them. She could still imagine what this room must have looked like in its prime - but now it was just a ruined carcass of a once great enchantment.

  She would rebuild it, once they had dealt with the monster infestation and she had finished learning everything she could here.

  The second room they passed through was much like the first. It was empty of anything save faint evidence that it had once been part of a complex enchantment. Alice sighed, and then decided not to use {Temporal Snapshot} here either. The Perk still cost a fair amount of mental energy to use, and she couldn’t afford to spend that much on a room that was probably just another Perk library. She wanted to save {Temporal Snapshot} for their destination, then come back and record all the other rooms if she had energy left afterwards.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The group continued on their way, until finally, they reached their real destination.

  Just as Alice had feared, this room was a giant monster nest. However, while Alice had expected the room to be a monster nest, she hadn’t expected the sheer density of monsters in the room. Every single square meter of space had dozens of spiders crammed into it, like sardines packed into a can. There were some spiders that literally couldn’t even access the ground, because it was so packed full of spiders. They stoop on top of their brethren instead.

  The room itself was also far more intact than Alice had expected. It was still half-decimated, but there were several structures in the room that were completely intact. Alice found this baffling, because the room had the densest mana concentration she had ever seen.

  The other parts of the System had already been quite mana-dense. That was natural - after all, the System had a method of moving mana from one place to another, and every piece of the System relied on mana to operate. However, this room made those other rooms look like little fireflies in comparison to the sun itself. The room was practically an entire galaxy’s worth of brightness. Since that was the case, why hadn’t the monsters picked it clean? Had there simply not been enough time to finish eating yet? Perhaps there had been some kind of defense here that prevented the monsters from ruining everything, and the monsters had only just gotten past it.

  Alice squinted as she stared into the room, and tried to figure out what was inside of it. What had the System housed in here that needed so much power?

  Then, her eyes widened, as she realized that the room wasn’t a blueprint library, or a room housing an AI that controlled the System, or anything of the sort. Instead, it looked like this room directly supplied the System with mana.

  Hanging from the ceiling were several hydroponics-style trays. Inside of every single hydroponics-style tray, there were four small compartments. In each compartment, there was a type of artificial magic seed that strongly reminded Alice of the artificial magic seeds she had seen while researching Artifacts. The actual style was a bit different, of course - but the overall design principles were remarkably similar.

  Every single one of these artificial magic seeds was also contained inside of some sort of insulating material, which was probably the only reason the monsters hadn’t already broken in and destroyed all of them. The insulating materials appeared to be some kind of enchanted glass that prevented Alice from directly sensing the mana inside - she could only sense the mana in each container through the pipes funneling mana out of each artificial magic seed and into the rest of the System. The enchanted glass was also far sturdier than Alice had imagined, she could see spots where incredibly powerful monsters had clearly tried to break in, only to end up shattering their own teeth without inflicting any damage upon the glass. She had no idea how sturdy the glass really was, but it was probably at the very least capable of withstanding bullets intact, if not cannons or bombs.

  This unusual sturdiness only extended to the glass itself. Unlike the artificial magic seeds, the pipes conducting mana out of each artificial seed had suffered massive damage. The monsters in the room had ruined nearly three quarters of the pipes already, and were in the midst of slurping up the leaking mana like they were bowls of ramen.

  The amount of mana flowing out of the room was so massive that the monsters covering the room like a hairy, wriggling carpet couldn’t drink up all of the mana - and considering the sheer density of monsters in this room, that was quite a feat. This was why such a massive monster infestation existed in this room - the mana created by these artificial magic seeds every second could probably have powered at least a quarter of modern America if it was converted into electricity.

  There were about eighty hanging trays of magic seed compartments in the room. There were also several shelves and compartments installed on the floor and walls. Alice estimated there were around thirty thousand artificial magic seeds in the room - each one of which could have potentially fueled an Artifact. The ones hanging off of the ceiling seemed to be mostly pure magic seeds, while there were a few other types of magic seeds present in other parts of the room. They were neatly organized, and supplied most of the kinds of mana that Alice recognized as making up System mana - and several more types of mana she had never seen before but vaguely recognized having caught glimpses of in the past, but had never truly identified.

  It had to be mentioned that the Illvarian grand Artifact that helped control the canal system for half of a country had only had eight artificial magic seeds. The concentration of magic seeds in this room was almost four orders of magnitude more dense.

  Alice wondered why none of the monsters had found a way into the artificial magic seeds. A moment later, she realized that the artificial magic seeds in the room were glowing. It wasn’t just her mana sight that was making the room blindingly bright. The magic seeds in each compartment glowed even to her regular vision. The insulating glass stopped some of the flow of light, but it didn’t completely cover it up .However, if this was what the room looked like with the glass protecting her eyes, Alice couldn’t even imagine how bright the light was inside of each glass compartment.

  Suddenly, the fact that the artificial magic seeds had survived made much more sense. She had already confirmed that the monster spiders could get killed by strong enough light, due to the fact that they were conceptually related to shadows. Going inside of the compartments to eat the artificial magic seeds would be like jumping into the sun for this species of monster. In other words, these power sources hadn’t survived due to any sort of special defense system - they had survived entirely due to a coincidental quirk of their construction which the creator of the System hadn’t removed.

  Not that it had stopped some of the monsters from trying to sneak inside anyway. Even as she observed the room, she saw a third-evolution spider teleport inside one of the compartments, only to get burned to a crisp moments later.

  Alice grimaced when she saw the absurd density of monsters in the room.

  The power supply of the System was clearly one of the most important things to secure. It hadn’t been what she was expecting - but if monsters kept growing and strengthening themselves here, they would become the most prominent threat in the area. On the other hand, if Alice could actually regain control of this room… she might be able to flush out the monster infestation in the System.

  Monsters all relied on mana to survive, unlike humans. Without mana, they would quickly suffocate and die. Stronger monsters needed higher concentrations of mana to maintain their survival. This room seemed to supply the entire System with mana.

  Alice couldn’t help but wonder if she had finally figured out a way to deal with the monsters entirely. The weakest spider monsters might survive if she cut off the supply of mana to the rest of the System, since the ambient mana in their surroundings would still probably keep them alive… but all of the monsters that had evolved once or twice? They would probably die after a few minutes. From there, it should be thousands of times easier to mop up the survivors, since the Immortals in Alice’s group wouldn’t need to fear retaliation from monsters they couldn’t handle anymore.

  Of course, this new idea relied on one, very important question.

  Could the group actually secure this room? Alice didn’t even know how powerful the monsters in this area were. The monster density was so high that locating the stronger or weaker members of the horde felt nearly impossible.

  She hesitated.

  “Ethan, could we win if we attacked this room?” asked Alice, before she outlined her plan to starve the monsters in the System of mana.

  Ethan hesitated.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The two fell into silence as they continued to observe the room, each lost in thought. Alice wished that she could charge in and expect to win - but the danger in the room was also evident.

  So she continued to think and plan, as the other Immortals started to toss ideas around. Minutes passed by as the group retreated into the hallway leading into the area, while the group discussed whether it was feasible to attack the room, whether any of the Immortals would die in the fighting, and a dozen other things.

  Finally, Alice grimaced.

  “I think we should come back after I hit Immortality,” said Alice, after a few more seconds of thought. “I’m already really close. We can go to one of the other rooms first, get me the last couple levels, and then come back here with five Immortals instead of four. I just hope that’s enough.”

  The other Immortals grimaced as well. Leaving with potential victory in sight felt bad… but nobody seemed confident in their ability to win this fight. Heck, even after Alice reached Immortality, the group might still have insufficient combat power to take the room - but the odds would be much better, at least.

  “I agree,” said Ethan, after a few moments. “I have no confidence we can win this fight right now.”

  “Me too,” said Allira. “We’re just lucky the monsters here are so focused on their meal that they didn’t notice us. At least we know how to ‘win’, finally. If we kill every strong monster, my shadows can sweep through weaker monsters and clean up the System afterwards. We just need a way to win this fight first.”

  Alice resisted the urge to change her mind as the group gritted their teeth and retreated back into the corridors of the System.

  They are the monster rawr rawr rawr.

  As for those of you who read both of my stories, today I feel a bit sick still, but much better. My sore throat is down to like... 30% of what it was yesterday? And my head wooziness is also at about 30% of what it was yesterday. Mostly back to normal already. I'm pretty sure I got, like... a minor cold? But my body seems to have already mostly fought it off, so meh.

  Scheduling Notice for the rest of the year: Those of you who have been around for a while probably already know this, but I take the last week of each year and the first week of each new year off as vacation time. Basically, the week of Christmas and the week of New Year’s. This year I intend to do the same thing as usual.

  As a result, from December 19th to January 5th, I will be on vacation for the year. First Budding Scientist chapter for next year will probably be up on January 9th, unless I see a reason to make some kind of scheduling change to what days of the week I release chapters. I currently tend to release chapters on Friday, but I might swap this date if I feel a need to do so. I don’t think I will, but just as a forewarning - I do sometimes make changes to how I schedule things or arrange my schedule during my vacation. Vacation is a good time to look at my schedule, my plotlines for each story, and spend some time thinking about what I need and what my stories need without the time pressure of ‘gotta release another chapter soon.’ I have no idea whether I’ll actually implement any changes, just noting that some might happen. Anyway, you get the general idea.

  Join my ! (I’m at least sometimes active there, while I admit that I don’t generally check the comments section. I’m not very active anywhere, though - writers are antisocial people, okay!)

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