After the enchantments she had put together got back to work, Alice felt a spike of anxiety worm through her guts. Even though Alice had already done so, she spent several seconds querying {Safety Analysis} to make sure she hadn’t made a horrible mistake. At the same time, monster cores that the Illvarian Immortals had supplied to her crumbled away like dust as they substituted for the ridiculous power supply that the System’s enchantments needed to run.
Just like the last twenty times Alice had sent information to {Safety Analysis}, the response she got back was that she was perfectly fine. Even though the whirling mana and enchantments around her still made Alice nervous, she let them work their magic.
It took a few more moments for the System itself to start the process of her ascension to Immortality. Fortunately, things went smoothly. The mana inside of Alice’s body churned and bubbled, almost like a pot on the verge of boiling over - but the enchantments in the room help Alice compress and expand her mana over and over again.
The mana inside of her body stretched, twisted, and compressed, over and over again as her body and the mana within her body became one and the same. For a brief moment, Alice felt as if she had stepped into a pool of boiling lava - every single cell of her physical body screamed, and for a brief moment, Alice felt as if she had jumped into a volcano - the heat was remolding her, breaking down everything that she was and remolding her. Then, all of it vanished. Alice’s flesh transformed, as Alice mana, regular mana, and biology all wove together until Alice was no longer human.
In her place stood a cloud of mana, constantly shapeshifting and transforming into herself.
Alice looked at her arms and legs, and smiled.
Her ascent to Immortality had succeeded.
Alice took a moment to check her System notifications, and grinned as she saw the notification waiting for her.
Alice eyed her three new Perks, and whistled appreciatively. All of them were very useful, and incredibly powerful.
Systemic Analysis was the most immediately useful one - it would give her access to a direct explanation of any component of the System. This meant that at long last, Alice wouldn’t need to spend several hours or days translating parts of the System and puzzling out what something meant, or why it existed - she would now have a decent understanding of any System component she looked at. This would save her a lot of time in figuring out how to built the exact details behind things like Perk libraries or rooms that transmitted information to and from the System. As long as she had a rough idea what a room did, and she had the materials, she would be able to rebuild the room. It would also give Alice a loose understanding of how some parts of the System were meant to be operated, such as what all of the enchantment based switches and levers were in the System. That would let her control stuff if she needed to do something ‘weird’ by System standards - such as shutting off the power supply for the System for a few hours in order to suffocate all the stronger monsters in the area.
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Of course, while Systemic Analysis was the most immediately useful, at least in the long term, Alice was far more enthusiastic about {Rapid Reconstruction}. That Perk was exceptional - it would let her build almost anything she understood, provided she had the materials, mental energy, and any forms of mana needed to build the object she wanted to build. In other words, Alice could now create new enchantments mid-battle as long as she had a few seconds of breathing space - and she could also rapidly put back together the System once the monsters inside were dead. Doll could now supply materials, Alice now had the blueprints, and now Alice could also rapidly rebuild the System itself just by understanding what needed to exist and having the mana and materials in front of her. Cecilia would have a smaller role in the reconstruction of the System, which was a bit of a shame, but Alice wasn’t going to condemn thousands of people per minute to die just so that her friend could have a better chance of ascending to Immortality. Besides, Cecilia should have still gained a huge number of levels and achievements from the reconstruction of the System, and her role wasn’t over - Alice would just be taking over more of the direct reconstruction work than she had expected to.
Of course, the most interesting Perk of all was {Conceptual Manipulation}. Alice wasn’t 100% sure how this Perk would work - but based on the wording, Alice suspected it would let her warp reality itself in specific, limited ways, based on manifesting people’s beliefs and then turning it into an enchantment. While Alice had no idea what kind of reality-breaking, physics-violating nonsense she could conjure up with this Perk, it had a lot of promise for what she would be able to do in the future once she really got familiar with her new abilities and settled into life as an Immortal. It would even make it easier for her to return home someday, after all of this nonsense was dealt with.
It also opened up a few other avenues for System upgrades that Alice thought might be worth pursuing. First of all, she was hoping to shift the System’s physical framework into a more conceptual one after a few centuries of hard work and research - which would prevent another example of chaos like this from happening again. If the System was entirely based on conceptual components, it would probably be impossible for monsters to see it, unless humans collectively stopped believing in the System’s existence or something. Coupled with Alice’s ability to warp and change the impact of people’s beliefs on reality, Alice should be able to outright remove the option for people to accidentally annihilate the System and create a second crisis in the future.
Second of all, Alice was pretty sure this Perk had a weird but useful secondary ability - the ability to force the shadow spiders back into physical form, so long as Alice treated them as ‘enchanting materials.’ One of the most annoying abilities the shadow spiders had was the ability to basically turn into a living shadow and start moving through solid objects, essentially allowing them to float around and materialize whenever they wanted to attack. Allira could somewhat limit this ability by using her illusions to create massive bursts of light, but it was also blinding for their own soldiers, and far from an ideal solution. With this perk, Alice could probably force them back into a regular physical form with far less hassle - which would let Ethan fry them with lightning bolts or metal fragments right afterwards. It was a good solution to the problems they had been encountering during their battles within the System.
Apart from that, Alice also got a few levels in her Classes, as a result of successfully putting back together the Immortality room and using it to ascend to Immortality.
Alice frowned. She was only one level away from getting a new Perk in [Scientist], but it didn’t seem like this experiment had been quite enough to push her over the edge into another level. She was actually a bit surprised by how few levels this had given her - though in hindsight, perhaps some of her extra mana had been used as materials for helping her ascend to Immortality? Or perhaps she had only gotten the levels for ‘repairing a single enchantment within the System.’ Alice felt that should have still been worth a little bit more than what she had gotten, but since she had just reached Immortality, Alice wasn’t going to complain. At least she had gotten two more Perk choices - one in [Survivor] and one in [Careful Enchanter]. Alice started by looking at the new [Survivor] Perks, and quickly realized that one of the new Perks was so useful she didn’t want to give it up.
If it was before Alice had reached Immortality, she would have dismissed this Perk as being way too specific. That being said, Alice already knew that the one weak point of the average Immortal was their brain. This Perk was obviously built specifically to address this weakness. Even if the Perk was a bit one-dimensional in what it did, right now Alice definitely wanted to become as hard to kill as possible since they were about to go through one more major battle. Not to mention, this Perk would make it dozens of times harder for future [Assassins] to kill her.
The resiliency boost to the rest of her body was also appreciated, even if it wasn’t quite as substantial as the boost to her brain’s resiliency. It meant that Alice would be much harder to hurt or kill during the battle, which she found highly valuable. Alice wasn’t exactly sure how the rest of her body being two times more resilience against cutting, acid, burning, etc. would work, but it would definitely make it harder for a monster to chow down on her head or kill her in the heat of battle.
After that, Alice turned her attention to her other, final upgrade.
This Class also ended up with a new Perk choice - one that was so useful that Alice discarded her original intention of doing some Class combination.
{Tough Brain} solved one of Alice’s greatest ‘weak points’ and made her much harder to kill. {Mental Overcharge} boosted her offensive abilities, since Alice still mostly relied on her bead bracelets to deal damage. Boosting her [Perception] by 50% for one hour, and the rest of her mental stats by 20%, was also a substantial boost to Alice’s reaction time, thinking speed, and basically every stat she used for magic combat. The fact that it lasted for one hour also meant that Alice would have a much easier time sustaining a certain level of combat ability, even after her stronger boosts such as {Adrenaline Rush} ran out. It was a simple upgrade, but Alice felt it was valuable enough to avoid wasting it.
“Did it work?” asked Ethan. “Are you an Immortal now?”
Alice grinned widely.
“Illvaria has seven Immortals now,” Alice confirmed.
Ethan’s smile became so wide that it could have lit up an entire city.
Alice’s grin also widened. She was free from the fear of death and old age that haunted so many other people.
Now it was time to finish the job. She had the tools that she needed to rebuild the System. She had several new tools to help her succeed in combat. All that they needed to do was deal with the monster infestation in the System’s power supply.
Getting surgery next week on February 13th. Expect some level of schedule disruption that week, and the following couple weeks as I meet up with the surgeon to make sure everything is healing properly.
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