After three days of slow, tedious testing and research, Alice felt like she was about to lose her mind.
This was because of the enchantment she was studying. At first, Alice had been incredibly excited. The idea of studying a functioning safe portal enchantment had huge potential - not just for transportation within the System, but for the rest of this world at large. The Tragedy of Allenheim had occurred because of how revolutionary portals would be once they were widely available. The ability to step from one city to another in mere seconds would revolutionize trade, personal travel, and basically every aspect of human life - and more importantly, it would potentially save Alice and her companions weeks, if not months, traversing the System and trying to figure out where the rooms they needed were. As a result, ALice had held very high hopes for the portal network established by the System, learning its safeguards against dimensional broken mana, and finding the map Alice hoped was hidden somewhere within the enchantment framework.
That hope had been disappointed once Alice realized that there was no safeguard against dimensional contamination in the enchantment framework at all. Alice spent days looking for a map, for a way to handle dimensional broken mana, and for the way to make the portal enchantment start functioning again.
As far as Alice could tell, the System did not actually have any enchantments made to purify broken mana. When Alice had tossed a pebble through the portal earlier, one of the rocks had started emitting broken mana - which Alice had originally thought was due to a few enchantments inscribed on the walls of the System. However, when Alice actually studied the enchantments which had lit up… she found that they were air purifying enchantments. They were made to filter carbon dioxide and convert it back into oxygen. Alice had no idea where the carbon atoms went, since the enchantments didn’t have a way to dispose of carbon atoms or move them elsewhere, but since Alice knew magic didn’t always follow conservation of energy, she decided to just assume they were deleted somehow. She was much more concerned with the zero safeguards against broken mana. The entire System, as far as she could tell, had zero countermeasures to handle dimensional broken mana - at least within this corridor. Despite that fact, the area had very little dimensional broken mana contamination.
In theory, this should have created the Tragedy of Allenheim - a giant, dangerous flood of broken mana that spread like a disease and killed basically everything it touched, save for a lucky few who survived a broken mana baptism and came out the other side as mages.
Somehow, in the System, this flood of broken mana never materialized at all… which was perhaps the most baffling part. There were no safeguards against it. There was no enchantment to regulate it. It just… never appeared.
The portals were down, so Alice had no idea what happened when the enchantments in the area met dimensional mana. So, to get some more useful data, Alice decided to use her dimensional mana to open a few new portals within the System, to see how the System’s air purification enchantments and dimensional mana interacted with each other.
This was when Alice realized that dimensional mana itself behaved differently within the System. A few tests confirmed this.
When Alice tested items outside of the System and sent them through a portal, there was usually a random chance that they would start emitting broken dimensional mana afterwards. The odds were typically around fifty percent, although that may have also been due to the limited sample size of Alice’s tests. However, within the System, while items didn’t quite have a one hundred percent chance of emitting broken mana after going through a portal, it was still notably higher. Of the forty items Alice tossed through a portal, thirty-four started emitting broken mana afterwards. In other words, the probability had gone from around fifty percent to somewhere between eighty and ninety percent.
Of course, once Alice observed this strange result, her immediate assumption was to look for belief mana. If something appeared illogical or unusual, Alice was now very used to assuming that belief mana was manipulating reality behind the scenes to create that bizarre outcome. In this case, it turned out to be the correct direction to look. Belief mana was, indeed, somehow altering the nature of dimensional mana… but not in the direction she had expected.
Alice’s first clue about the true nature of this belief mana was when she noticed that a few of her portals seemed different than unusual. Alice couldn’t quite put her finger on what was different at first, but took note of the change. After a few more portals, Alice finally noticed that the ‘odd’ portals appeared when she was paying less attention to the process of creating a portal - specifically, when she was basically working on muscle memory and not thinking about the portal itself.
From there, Ethan and Cecilia proposed a new idea, and then helped Alice assemble an enchantment that could open smaller portals to test it. Sure enough, portals opened by ‘machines’ were very different from portals opened by ‘people’ within the confines of the System. The amount of thought and attention put into a portal within the System would directly manipulate the probability of an item emitting broken mana after passing through a portal. Machinese had lower chances of causing new versions of the Tragedy of Allenheim, while humans had much higher odds of causing a similar incident… at least, while within the System. The moment the enchantment was moved five centimeters outside of the System, however, this effect disappeared, and Alice stopped feeling the tugs of strings of belief mana.
Enchantment-made portals leaked almost no broken mana, while human-made portals leaked an excessive quantity of mana.
Alice was more interested in the belief mana underlying this mechanism, because this was a more unique variant of belief mana than what she had seen before. Alice had seen belief mana modify many things, such as human behavior, biology, and she had even used it during the creation of some of her knockoff versions of the System. This time, belief mana was directly modifying the way mana itself worked.
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But she couldn’t figure out the underlying mechanism. She couldn’t figure out what beliefs were causing dimensional mana to react so strangely within the System, nor how to convert it into a useful tool for her own future actions. She also couldn’t figure out why the air purification enchantments were somehow able to cleanse broken mana within the System, when those enchantments showed no signs of doing the same thing when moved outside of the System’s walls. It was maddening.
On the bright side, all of her testing had produced other results. Alice hadn’t learned anything new about the nature of strings of belief mana, but she had gotten at least a reasonable understanding of the portal enchantment itself, and she had also gotten another level in [Explorer of Mana].
She had also found that one of her earlier suspicions were correct - the portal enchantment in the System did, indeed, have a map attached to it. The System creator(s) had somehow created a miniature map of the entire System, which updated in real time as the System expanded and created new rooms and enchantments.
It took Alice a while to piece it together though. Not because the map was trapped, or made difficult to read on purpose, or anything of the sort. Instead, Alice was pretty sure it was the because the enchantment for the self-updating map had a somewhat lazy style to it. Unlike many of the other neatly created and well put together enchantments in the System, the self-updating map was basically this world’s version of spaghetti code. Half of the map-related enchantment was done in some kind of jargon that Alice had never seen or heard of. The room labels were listed in Finnish, which Alice had originally hoped Cecilia would translate. Unfortunately, the finnish words were abbreviations, leaving both Alice and Cecilia scratching their heads.
Even more annoying, the map of the System didn’t have real graphics, either. It was just a thin sheet of metal with random symbols inscribed on it. All of the symbols were made entirely using mana, meaning that to Alice’s non-magical eyesight, the slab of metal just looked like a random sheet of metal buried in the System floor for some reason. Alice hadn’t originally realized that straight, long symbols such as - and / were supposed to be corridors, or that symbols were meant to be rooms, until she had been staring at the map for hours. At first, Alice hadn’t even realized that she was looking at a map, because the entire thing looked like a bunch of random symbols and abbreviations. The terrible user interface made it hard for Alice to figure out what she was looking at.
After a while, though, Alice finally realized what she was looking at. It was a bit unfriendly towards non-Mages… but then again, Alice guessed that non-Mages weren’t supposed to be in this structure in the first place. The System had pretty explicitly been designed to hide itself from people who weren’t the builders of the System, after all, and while Alice was at least partially able to sidestep this restriction due to a fluke in how the System checked people’s ‘credentials’, the System still wasn’t designed to be easy to navigate for anyone who hadn’t built this place.
Once Alice decoded the map, she finally started making progress on understanding the architecture of the System itself. The System constantly expanded outwards, both upward and downward, whenever it found a need to do so. The System mostly focused on expanding downwards, though - perhaps due to fear of humans breaking into the System after the creator(s) left, or perhaps out of fear of flooding the place or unleashing a horde of monsters inside of the System. Alice had originally assumed that most floors of the System were within a fairly reasonable depth - but some parts of the System were nearly five kilometers underground at its deepest. At that depth, a cave in or a flood would probably be fatal even for an unprepared Immortal - Alice had no idea how high the water pressure would be at five kilometers underwater, but she was pretty sure it would be extremely high, at least. If she recalled correctly, the Mariana trench on Earth was only 11 kilometers deep, and it was the deepest part of the ocean.
As far as Alice could tell, the System only built rooms in areas near resources. She and Cecilia figured this out because, unlike the other weird abbreviations, some resource symbols were pictures of things like a metal bar or a tree. A few of these resource nodes were close enough that Allira could scout them out with her shadows, after which the group finally confirmed that the System had actively mined out several ore veins and then built new rooms in the excavated tunnels.
Alice still had no idea how the System actually located external resources in the first place, but she decided that wasn’t important.
In any case, the other thing Alice quickly learned was that the System had far more room diversity than she had imagined, and that the System was a lot bigger than she had imagined. According to the System map, there were upwards of twenty thousand rooms in the System. This was not including the corridors that connected all of these rooms together, and locations that were currently mines.
This, more than anything else, made Alice feel a bit relieved about her decision to delve deeper into the System instead of trying to fix the System room by room. Even if Alice could fix a room every single day (which was unlikely, given her limited mana pool and Perk usage per day), trying to fix twenty thousand different rooms and clear out the monster hordes inside would be the very definition of a hopeless task. If Alice tried to do that, she might very well spend the rest of her very, very long life wandering these holes, constantly taking one step forward and then having monster hordes destroy all of her progress a day later. It would be an endless game of whack a mole.
Near the end of the third day, Alice finally figured out why the portal enchantment itself had shut off - it had simply run out of power. The System used some kind of pipe system that conveyed mana from one location to another - and something further up the pipeline had taken all of the mana away from their area. Alice guessed that was probably a monster horde. The enchantment itself had also run into a few errors caused by the sudden shutoff of mana flow, but once Alice understood the basics of the enchantment, repairing those was easy enough. After that, she figured out how to direct the portal - which was a relief. The portal enchantment did have a way for Alice to designate specific destinations - so as long as the group could get the enchantment running, they could teleport to any room in the System. From there, they would just need some trial and error to figure out which rooms held things like blueprints.
But before the group could set out to restore power to the portal network, something even more important happened, which temporarily diverted Alice’s attention away.
Cecilia had finished decoding a few useful passages in the journal.
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. I will also be taking the day of Thanksgiving off, since I live in the US and I’d like to spend some time with my family and eat some turkey. As a result:
On November 27th, there will be no Markets chapter, for those of you reading my other story. Expect two chapters for that week, not three. For those of you who only read Budding Scientist, expect little change that week.
Then, 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.
In other news, I spent five hours today assembling a table and a set of chairs. They were supposed to arrive yesterday, when I had some time scheduled for it. (Grumble grumble grumble). Also, one of the four chairs has a manufacturing flaw where one of the screw holes for assembly is blocked by a bit of metal, so I can’t put the screws into the spot they’re supposed to be in. I guess I have to ask for replacement parts. -_-
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