The first few System messages were largely as Alice expected. She had gotten a few levels in some Classes, which was about what she had been expecting.

  What Alice hadn’t been expecting was to get two levels in [Reality Mage]. She had utilized a few strands of belief mana during the fight in order to enhance a few Perks, and bend them in ways they didn’t normally work, so Alice had suspected she would get experience for the Class. Two levels was far beyond her expectations, though, given how hefty the experience penalties were for classes over level 100.

  Perhaps she had been close to level 4 already, and the battle had pushed her over the edge? Alice also suspected that applying ‘beliefs’ to a System Perk had also played a role - Alice hadn’t directly tried to manipulate the System’s inner workings using belief mana before now.

  Of course, even with all of those factors combined, Alice had only gotten two levels in the Class. She could definitely see why Immortals didn’t grow very quickly in power once they reached Immortality - the experience penalties for their main class was just too hefty. Perhaps Myra’s path was better suited for long-term growth, since she could always find a new secondary Class to keep working on? On the other hand, Myra also had a huge core of Perks to manage and keep track of, and Alice suspected her build might have a lot of other penalties that made up for its obvious advantages. Alice shrugged. Either way, it wasn’t that important to her - she was just happy to escape the threat of old age and get to play with magic.

  After that, Alice looked for any new Achievements or unusual System messages. She had previously suspected that she would hit Immortality either at level 5 or level 10 in [Reality Mage]. According to Ethan, all Immortals got a new Achievement to announce their Immortality, complete with some kind of ‘title’ and some sort of major benefit. Alice didn’t know exactly what benefits her Immortality Achievement would confer, but with any luck, those would be the key to breaking the stalemate within the System.

  A few moments later, Alice sighed in resignation. She couldn’t find any sort of new Achievements in her System notifications - just the level up notifications, as well as a few mention of new Perk choices she could use. It seemed that she wasn’t quite at the threshold of Immortality yet - she would need to wait a few more levels for that.

  Then Alice frowned as she investigated the mana she had accumulated in her body.

  When she took a closer look, it certainly didn’t seem like she was missing the mana density needed to reach Immortality. It looked almost like the mana in her body was boiling water in a pot, now - it was constantly streaming and fluctuating throughout her body as it tried and failed to reach a certain critical mass. The actual amount of mana per square centimeter in her body wasn’t much lower than Allira’s either. Allira had only hit Immortality seventy or eighty years ago, and the mana density of her body was probably representative of the ‘minimum threshold’ to hit Immortality. Alice’s mana density was about the same. Why wasn’t she getting her Achievement.

  Alice observed herself for several more minutes, and checked Allira, Ethan, Myra, and Doll’s bodies a few more times, before she confirmed her observation.

  She didn’t seem to lack the mana density needed to transform into an Immortal. Something else was missing.

  Alice glanced at the fragments of the ruined System that she could see laying all around her in the room, before she sighed.

  It seemed that in order to step into Immortality, Alice would need more than just levels to take the final step. The System had some kind of critical role to play in transforming her into an Immortal - and without that, Alice would not be able to take the final step. Worse, this wasn’t something Alice could recreate from her own understanding of the System, for a very simple reason - she had never seen someone transform into an Immortal. She had no idea what pitfalls might exist within the process, and thus she had no idea what the System was doing to help people along. While there was a chance Alice could successfully improve and keep herself safe by improvising during the process, she wasn’t willing to bet her life on that prospect. To become an Immortal, Alice would either need to restore the System, or find whatever part of the System was responsible for Immortals, and then copy it or replace it.

  She shook her head. At the very least, she had grown considerably stronger. She knew that the System had a few other critical rooms nearby. She could use {Temporal Snapshot} to investigate any rooms that had been ruined, and the group should be able to clear out weaker monster infestations, especially now that Doll had a way to speed up her golem production. With any luck, it wouldn’t be too difficult to find a way to ‘patch up’ her road to Immortality. Alice found herself eagerly anticipating the Achievement she would get for reaching Immortality - hopefully, it would make it easier to retake the power supply.

  After that, Alice turned her attention to her new Perks and Perk combinations. Alice really wanted to find ways to patch the major weaknesses in her build - so the first thing she needed to do was see if any of her new Perks offered her major boosts to what she was currently missing. In total, she had three new Perk selections - one from [Explorer of Magic], and two from [Kinetic Manabinder].

  Alice decided to save the [Explorer of Magic] Perk for last, and looked at [Kinetic Manabinder] first. The first Perk selection for [Kinetic Manabinder] actually had a rather potent Perk - one that Alice ultimately decided to take instead of opting for a Perk combination.

  With this Perk, it seemed as if Alice could outright delete weaker monsters by forcing the mana in their body to implode. More importantly, this Perk would let her potentially bypass some mana resistance even in stronger monsters and severely injure them. That would buy enough time for the other Immortals to finish them off. Alice suspected that this Perk would still have some effect even on third-evolution spiders, though the cost in ‘mental energy’ might incapacitate her for the rest of the battle. That wasn’t quite good enough to make the Perk viable on its own… but Alice had another thought.

  What if she took this Perk, then upgraded it with her next Perk combination, and then upgraded it again with [Explorer of Magic]’s Perk selection? In that case, she might create a monstrously powerful Perk that would single-handedly resolve some of the problems the group was experiencing with third-evolution spiders.

  Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  The idea was interesting, at least. Before she decided to commit her next Perk selection to this path, Alice spent a few minutes testing this Perk, to get a better idea how it worked. The first thing she confirmed was that [Kinetic Collision} required a certain minimum amount of kinetic mana to be used on an object before she could exert ‘free’ control over it for ten seconds. However, this threshold was quite low - about two and a half Mariums of mana, roughly. This was quite a small amount of total mana, and in exchange, Alice could exert control equal to about ten mariums of kinetic mana over an object. This ‘free’ control didn’t cost her any extra mana, and even more interestingly, she could swap the direction of the object she was controlling without spending any additional mana - however, she couldn’t accelerate objects beyond a certain velocity with the perk alone, and after ten seconds, her control over the object would fall off.

  This was still quite powerful. Of course, this still had a downside - while this didn’t cost her any extra kinetic mana, it still took just as much concentration as other forms of magic. Since Alice’s ability to multitask was directly related to how many magic tendrils she could control at once, this Perk essentially required her to spend a magic tendril on an object in order to keep messing with it, even if it didn’t actually require her to maintain magic contact with an item in order to enhance it.

  Of course, this also had a major upside - if Alice used 2.5 Mariums of mana to influence an object, she could then exert an extra ten ‘free’ mariums of mana on it using the Perk. Then, she could keep applying more kinetic magic manually - giving her the ability to accelerate objects to an even greater extent with the same amount of mana by essentially giving her a ‘free’ 7.5 Mariums of mana with every single object she moved.

  The mental energy cost was also lower than she had expected.

  As for the ability to make monster mana reject its original owner, when Alice tested it on a monster alpha that Ethan fetched for her, the monster instantly exploded into pieces. Alice ended up with a very mild headache and a very dead test subject. The results were promising.

  Alice immediately decided to commit to using at least one more Perk combination upgrade on this Perk. She decided to combine the new Perk with {Reflection}, to create a Perk that would hopefully work even against third-evolution spiders. {Reflection} was excellent at helping Alice manipulate large, powerful objects that were already in motion, which she got a fair amount of use out of, but she wanted a bit more burst power and lethality. {Reflection} was a very useful Perk, but also had several conditions that needed to be met before the Perk was useful.

  After combining the two perks, Alice looked at the result, and grinned.

  Alice felt that this Perk was exactly what she wanted. This Perk didn’t require any of her attention, didn’t require any of her magic tendrils to contact an item first, and it was sort of equivalent to having an extra pool of ten thousand Mariums of kinetic mana. Alice didn’t think that most of the third-evolution spiders they had fought so far would have had an easy time dealing with this Perk - as long as their ability to teleport around and transform into a shadow was cut off, at least. She could even imagine a few more creative ways to use the Perk - for example, getting a blast crystal from Cecilia and then hurling it at a spider. The mana from the blast crystal would then run rampant through the monster’s body upon contact, which could be even more damaging to a monster than the regular explosion from a blast crystal, depending on how resilient the monster’s body was. Of course, that was still contingent upon the blast crystal hitting its target.

  While Allira could temporarily shut off the ability for shadow spiders to mess with shadows and shadowstep around, Alice didn’t want to be entirely dependent on Allira. Since she had one final perk combination or new Perk from [Reality Mage], Alice decided to combine {Crushing Kinetic Blast} with one of her other Perks from [Explorer of Magic]. After all, at this point, Alice had most of the tools she needed to repair the System already - and it certainly looked like combat strength was the final roadblock to repairing the System, since she needed a way to regain control of the power supply room.

  After that, Alice turned her attention to her final Perk choice, and looked for the best combination with {Crushing Kinetic Blast}.

  After some checking, Alice realized that very few of her Perks were actually equipped for combat from her [Explorer of Magic] Class. She decided to use {Broken Kinetics}, mostly because it was the best option she had. At the very least, it was also a Perk built around kinetic mana, which should mean it had a decent compatibility with {Crushing Kinetic Blast}. Much of the text also had a fair amount of similarities between the two Perks.

  With no further hesitation, Alice combined the two Perks.

  Alice looked at her new Perk, and then burst out laughing.

  The Perk was absurd… but it also felt like exactly what she needed. She just hoped it would be good enough to help them retake the power supply.

  After that, she gave the Immortals and other Mages a quick overview of her updated combat abilities. Normally, she wouldn’t share those details with other people - but since everyone was working together as a team, she felt that withholding the information might lead to more deaths or serious injuries.

  “So, your Immortality Achievement didn’t appear, right?” said Ethan, after Alice finished speaking.

  Alice nodded.

  “I think we should try for one of the other unique rooms,” said Alice. “I’m hoping one of them will have info that’ll let me build my Immortality Achievement manually and finish transforming into an Immortal. With Doll’s golems, we’ll have a much easier time seizing weaker rooms, too.”

  “So we have our next target already?” asked Ethan.

  Alice nodded. The group finished making plans, and then set off for the next room.

  Two things.

  First of all, the third volume for Budding Scientist has released as an e-book. Wooooo

  Here’s a link if you’re interested.

  https://www.royalroad.com/amazon/B0FNFNYWQT?maas=&ref=

  Second, I will be getting surgery during the second week of February, on the 13th. The scheduling for Budding Scientist that week might get… weird? Expect that the chapter might be delayed a day, or if I’m REALLY knocked out from the surgery, it might be cancelled, although I’m really hoping that doesn’t happen. But fair warning - if the surgery anesthesia is too strong, and I don’t get the work done early that week, I will probably not be able to post a chapter that day.

  Surgery itself shouldn’t be too bad, hopefully. It’s not an ‘oh god, things are about to implode’ kind of surgery, it’s more ‘maintenance before things really get bad.’ Ahem. Anyway.

  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!)

  Shameless plug - you can read up to 3 chapters ahead on Patreon for $3!