The group marched through the empty corridors of the System again, with a new goal in mind. Find Alice the information she needed to transform into an Immortal. Then, the group would hopefully be strong enough to retake the power supply, starve out most of the monsters in the System, and finally gain control over the situation inside of the System.

  The group first retreated back to the portal again, before Alice entered their new destination and reset the portal. After that, Doll and Allira both sent out some minions to scout the path forward. Luckily, there weren’t any powerful monsters near the portal - just a few small fries that were easily wiped out. Alice was surprised by how well Doll’s golems could take the place of Allira’s shadows when needed - usually, Allira took over all scouting related duties, since her shadows were disposable mobile eyes with some combat ability. However, Doll’s golems were also very capable of scouting - while they didn't instantly feed information back into Doll’s brain, they were better at spotting clumps of unusual mana or unusual materials, which allowed her to find a hidden, small nest of monsters as the group was passing by. The group of monsters wouldn’t have been able to threaten them, it was still preferable to deal with all of the monsters they could to make sure they cleared out the infestation where possible.

  After navigating through a few corridors, the group found themselves in a far more desolate area than the other places they had seen inside of the System. The traps weren’t just ruined in this place - they had been gnawed down to nothing, along with several chunks of the walls, power supply pipes, and a variety of other materials. This place wasn’t just a ruin - it was practically ground into dust. There were even some massive holes in the floor, with yawning caverns and distant stone visible beneath them. Alice was a little horrified to see all the damage the spiders had done - and a little thankful that the System’s anti-flooding mechanisms were so good. Otherwise, the entire System would have probably been underwater by now. Just because the first hole she had seen led into a stone vein didn’t mean all of them did - she was willing to bet that the spiders had tunneled into water more than once, and probably got crushed by water pressure right afterwards.

  The holes in the floor were also a bit worrying, since Alice had already seen how good the System was at regenerating damage to its walls. The fact that this area was still ruined either meant that some critical component of the regenerating walls had been destroyed here… or that monsters had gnawed away at it fairly recently.

  Even though Alice was nervous, there wasn’t much they could do besides keep their scouts moving, keep their eyes open, and keep moving. Eventually, the group arrived at another room. This room was just as desolate and damaged as the corridors they had just passed through. However, the desolation of the room was even more unnerving than the corridors, for a simple reason.

  There wasn’t a horrifying monster infestation in it - it almost looked like the room was empty. However, while the room had almost no physical structures, it was flooded with the System’s variant version of dimensional mana. Given the usual behavior of monsters, this should not have been possible. Monsters should have slurped up all the mana in this room until there was nothing left - and it was obvious from the damage to the rest of the room that monsters had reached this room. Since that was the case, where were the monsters? Something was wrong here.

  Alice scratched her cheek in thought. The room had a high enough mana density that even an Immortal might undergo a mana baptism if they sat in the room for more than a minute or two. There were no monster carcasses in the room, so it didn’t look like they had challenged the traps inside of the room and been destroyed. Given all of that information, Alice was left baffled.

  She took another look around the room, and this time checked for any sorts of hidden floors, other enchantments, or areas where the monsters might be feeding. Apart from whatever was producing the dimensional mana, however, the room was practically empty. This room was in the worst condition Alice had seen inside of the System so far.

  In most System rooms, Alice had at least been able to see chunks of the System as it had once existed. Those remnants were usually sparse, gnawed on, and in poor condition, but she could at least confirm their existence and imagine what the System might have been like before it was reduced to this condition. This room only had a few nibs of material attached to the floor, ceiling, and parts of the walls.

  Alice squinted at the room more carefully, and used every single kind of mana sight she had available to her, before she realized something else unusual.

  Right in the center of the room, there was… something. It looked almost like there was a hole in reality - a small gap through which one could gaze into the great beyond. Alice quickly realized that this little ‘hole in reality’ wasn’t an illusion - it was a real, tangible object that existed. Even more unusual, the object was constantly emitting dimensional mana, as if it were another artificial magic seed used to power the System. However, the mana from this ‘power source’ was far more dense than any individual artificial magic seed.

  “Stay away from the center of the room,” said Alice. “Something dangerous is in the center. I’ll figure out what it is.”

  The others quickly moved away as Alice stepped closer and closer. Then, Alice used {Temporal Snapshot} to get a better idea of what had once existed here.

  A completely different framework of materials, room composition, and enchantments snapped into view in her vision of the world. Alice resisted the urge to wince as she looked at the massive difference between the before and after versions of the room. The room before was clearly some kind of core of the System - The density of mana, materials, and enchantments was so ludicrous that the room looked almost like a jungle instead of an enchantment. Alice had no idea what even half of the enchantments in the room did, and she would probably need hours of study just to figure out what was happening in the room. However, the center of the room, where the little hole in reality existed, was very different. It existed as something like a secondary structure - several attached enchantments had once been hooked into the System’s old power structure, and these had encircled the hole in reality. Alice wasn’t sure what those now-missing enchantments had been supposed to do, but like the rest of the room, they were gone.

  Alice ignored the chaotic flood of enchantments in the image of the past, and instead focused on the dimensional contortion. That was the only potential danger left here, after all.

  A few minutes of inspection later, Alice confirmed her suspicion. This gap in reality wasn’t a natural occurrence, and it wasn’t an accident, either. In her vision of the past, Alice could see that this hole in reality was artificially stabilized and created by the enchantments that had once surrounded it. The hole in reality could now exist without their assistance - but it was far less stable than it had once been.

  Alice started to get a sneaking suspicion that she knew what this hole was. The creator of the System had already left her a message telling her about its existence, after all.

  An artificially induced hole that seemed to bend space and reality, and led to an unknown destination, present in the center of the System and left behind by the System’s creator…

  This was probably a portal that led directly to Earth.

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  Home.

  Alice frowned, and then used a few strands of dimensional mana to help stabilize the portal a bit. The portal to Earth sucked up the mana she fed it like noodles, and then Alice felt as if something in the room had bent. Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on what had changed, but she felt as if the air in the room had settled down a bit.

  Perhaps there was a small difference in air pressure between the atmosphere in this dimension and Earth? Experimentally, Alice tossed a copper coin at the portal, and once it got within a certain range of the portal, the gate to Earth sucked up the coin like a black hole. Alice frowned.

  She suspected that she knew where the monsters had gone. Fortunately, the little ‘black hole’ in the center of the room wasn’t slurping up all of the materials in the room around them, or this entire part of the System might have been lost. However, getting too close to it would definitely drag someone to Earth. This was probably because the stabilizing enchantments surrounding it were gone - if they were still present, the portal wouldn’t proactively drag things over like this.

  Alice used a great deal more dimensional mana to help stabilize the portal, at least temporarily, and then blinked in surprise.

  Crammed inside of the gateway back to Earth was a huge pile of corpses, almost like sardines stuffed into a can. Most of them were the corpses of spiders, which further confirmed Alice’s guess - all the monsters had jumped into the portal and then died before they made it to Earth. However, right at the front of the dimensional tunnel created by the portal, there was a very different corpse.

  A human one. This left Alice even more confused - though she also started to feel a creeping sense of unease. Why was a human corpse stuck in the middle of the passageway between this world and Earth? Who was it? Why were they here? Why had they died?

  Alice started to get a bad feeling about what she was about to see. She also started to get a bad feeling about her hopeful eventual return home. She still had things to do in this world - but she had deeply hoped in and believed that the creator of the System had left a safe passage back to Earth. One that was simply waiting for her. However, the human corpse in the middle of the dimensional passage gave her an ominous feeling, that perhaps there was a problem with the way back home.

  Alice spent several minutes fiddling with her control of dimensional mana, before she finally managed to extract the corpse from the interdimensional passage. The lower half of the body was neatly chopped into pieces, almost as if a giant pair of scissors had neatly snipped the man in half, right at the waist.

  The top half of the man’s corpse looked like the corpse of an old man. If Alice had to guess, the man was probably sixty years old - perhaps closer to sixty five. He still had a great deal of mana clinging to his body, even after his death. Oddly enough, his body’s mana density was far higher than a regular Immortal’s mana density, despite him having died an unknown amount of time ago. However, his body didn’t have the characteristic cloud-like quality that most Immortal bodies did. Instead of looking like a cloud of mana constantly shapeshifting into a person over and over again, this man looked more like a solid brick of mana and flesh. There was a great deal of similarity between the man’s physique and a regular Immortal physique, but there was also a crudeness to it that indicated his transformation wasn’t complete. He had missed some critical step to becoming an Immortal, even though his mana density far exceeded the quantity and density needed for the final step.

  The man himself had been quite pale when he was alive. He had extremely fair skin, turquoise eyes, and high cheekbones. Paired with his nearly almond shaped eyes, Alice imagined the man had been handsome when he was alive and younger - not that it mattered much now. The man also wore clothing that was far, far out of this world’s usual production lines - specifically, he wore a set of old, faded jeans, and a t-shirt with a picture of the Beatles on it.

  The clothes were the best indicators of this man’s identity. This man had also been a transmigrator, just like her. Alice wasn’t sure who exactly this was, but it was obvious he was from Earth. The Beatles didn’t exist in this world, and jeans had never shown up in this world either, at least as far as Alice knew. A high level [Tailor] could probably make jeans and a Beatles t-shirt, but only someone from Earth would care enough to commission one in the first place.

  Seeing the corpse of a fellow traveller from Earth, Alice’s heart clenched. The man had died in the interdimensional passage from this world back to Earth. She was sure of it. She didn’t know exactly what had gone wrong, or why, but there was obviously a problem with the gate back to Earth.

  A few moments later, Alice noticed something else unusual about the corpse. The mana inside of it was rapidly dissipating. The man must have died days ago, but at the rate mana was disappearing from his corpse, it wouldn’t take more than an hour for the corpse to look like a regular human body. It was obvious that the rate at which the corpse was losing mana was utterly inconsistent with the amount of time the corpse must have been dead. Alice hesitantly touched the man’s finger, and found that his body was still warm - as if he had been breathing moments ago. Small trickles of blood were also flowing out of both halves of his body, although since much of the blood in his body had been replaced with mana, the quantity was nowhere near what a regular bisected human would lose.

  Alice’s eyes narrowed.

  It was almost as if the corpse had been… frozen in time. As if, no matter how long it had been since the person she was looking at had died, zero seconds had passed for the corpse itself.

  Alice already knew for a fact that Perks that could manipulate time existed - the flow of time could be slowed down or sped up with the right types of mana, or Perks. She also suspected that the passage of time between this world and Earth was odd. Someone from Earth had come here to make the System thousands of years ago, but based on all of the diary entries he had left behind, he should have been from the 1980’s, which was wildly inconsistent with the time that had passed on Earth. Alice sighed, and then shook her head.

  Whatever the case, something was clearly wrong with the way back home. She might be able to fix it - but for now, it was unusable. Now that ‘time’ had also entered the equation, Alice had a sneaking suspicion that she knew exactly who the corpse in front of her had once been.

  She might very well be looking at the creator of the System himself.

  Alice kneaded her forehead, and let out a long, low sigh of frustration. It wasn’t quite despair that she was feeling - but there was a certain feeling of exhaustion. She had gotten her hopes up. She had genuinely thought that the moment the System was repaired, she could go home, and after she analyzed the passage, she would be able to start hopping between two worlds at will. She had been excited to see her friends, and her parents, and tell her family she was doing well.

  Now, she found out that the creator of the System himself had died trying to return to Earth. Even worse, he might have gotten frozen in time somehow during the attempt to return. Had the man literally just been frozen in an instant for thousands of years, stuck between two dimensions? The knowledge of how wrong things could go during failed interdimensional travel was sobering.

  Alice looked at Ethan, who glanced at the corpse, used a few Perks and then shook his head.

  “Too much brain damage. I can’t heal that,” said Ethan. “The brain is the only thing that even Organic magic can’t really fix. I have no idea what caused it, but I suspected this man was dead long before you pulled him out of that strange dimensional passage.

  Alice let out a long, low sigh of despair. Then, she shook her head and tried to ignore the fate that had befallen her predecessor.

  She could analyze what went wrong with the System creator’s attempt to return to Earth later. If it was possible to travel one way, Alice didn’t believe that it was impossible to travel back. She just needed to learn from the System creator’s mistake, be careful, and not to test the passage on her own first - sending a few random cows or sheep through the portal first would be a much more prudent path to take. For now, she had a System to fix.

  She spent a few moments mourning the man that she had never met, who had created the System, paved a way forward for the humans of this world, and revolutionized almost everything about life in this dimension. Then, she turned her attention back to the other components of the room.

  The passage back to Earth might be problematic, but the rest of the System had worked for thousands of years without any major errors. She had finally found the library that housed the core System blueprints, and she was going to do everything she could to put it all together, ascend to Immortality, and fix the rest of this place.

  Two things.

  First of all, the third volume for Budding Scientist has been 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. I also apparently have MULTIPLE follow up surgery appointments, where the surgeon will be checking to make sure things are healing up, that I have not gotten an infection, that there isn’t a bunch of crazy stuff stuck in the surgery site, et cetera. Also, the medication I’ll be on so that I can… you know, get carved up without screaming and squirming all over the place will probably make me a bit loopy for the rest of the day. Chapters for that week and the following week or two might get weird… and that’s assuming nothing actually goes wrong. I’ll try to keep releases consistent, though.

  Agh. I’ve had this surgery three times before and I’m still nervous. -_-

  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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