A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Alice started scanning through the list of Perks for [Legendary Organic Mage], and was pleasantly surprised.

She hadn’t been entirely sure what difference it would make that the class was ‘legendary’ compared to normal, but the Perks the class offered were pretty good. They weren’t anything revolutionary for her current level… but then again, this was a level 5 Perk, and her best class was currently approaching level 90. At this point, most level 5 Perks she got were totally irrelevant, but the options here still offered her some utility. For a level 5 Perk, this could already be considered impressive.

The first Perk had something rather unusual as part of its description.

Legendary Efficiency

Requirements: Legendary Organic Mage level 5 or higher, Intelligence 150 or higher, Magic 150 or higher, have a Class at least partially related to combat at level 50 or higher.

When using Organic Magic for any purpose (including feeding it to Perks that transform mana into other effects), gain a 10% mana cost reduction (multiplicative with any other cost reduction effects). Any attempt to mobilize and manipulate Organic Magic also becomes 10% faster. Any internal injuries or problems that would result from healing people with organic magic are mildly reduced in size and severity. (This effect will not occur if you are deliberately trying to harm someone with organic magic).

The second and last parts of the Perk weren’t that unusual. Perks that made it easier to heal people were pretty normal, and Perks that made it faster and easier to manipulate organic mana also weren’t that uncommon. If the Perk had only consisted of those two things, Alice wouldn’t have found [Legendary Efficiency] to be a very interesting Perk.

However, in addition to those two effects, the perk also had a mana cost reduction. This was an effect Alice had never seen before. There were plenty of Perks that made Alice use mana more efficiently, but they never actually reduced the cost of an action outright. They were just helping her make better use of any mana spent in the process of doing something. This didn’t seem like it was improving her efficiency. It just… made her capable of doing the same thing, but with lower costs.

At first glance, this might not seem that impressive, but when one actually thought about how energy conservation was supposed to work, it was obvious that this Perk was bizarre in a way that was hard to put into words. What if she got, say, twenty of these kinds of Perks? Even if all of them were multiplicative and not additive, that still meant that she might be paying something like 12% of the mana cost to do the same thing. By that time, she would be outright breaking people’s understanding of how much one Marium of mana could accomplish. That was an incredible effect.

Not to mention, this Perk also applied for Perks that converted her organic mana into completely different effects, such as her Perk that allowed her to convert mana into time dilation. Alice couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if she just… stacked a bunch of similar effects together. Could she get things so low that, if she got another Perk like {Experimental Efficiency}, it would be practically free? The idea seemed far fetched, given how long it took to regenerate mana. But anything was possible if she got enough perks working together.

Alice was already pretty happy with her first Perk, but her second Perk was even more interesting.

Legendary Muscle Enhancement

Requirements: Legendary Organic Mage level 5 or higher, have a class related to experimenting with mana at level 75 or higher, Magic stat 100 or higher, Have used magic in combat at least 10 times, have used weapons in combat at least 10 times

You gain the ability to spend organic mana in order to perform a sort of ‘muscle massage.’ This will slowly, but permanently, enhance the strength of the target. (This will increase the Strength stat of the target. Higher stats mean that it’s harder and takes longer to raise the same stat further).

This Perk was also very promising. The effect itself wasn’t actually that powerful – after all, Alice had a lot of competing uses for her organic mana, and adding in one that improved her [Strength] wasn’t really a worthwhile use of a Perk slot. Her [Strength] was actually at a decent level, thanks to her physical training.

However, the Perk was still interesting for Alice. After all, raising stats was far from easy. The further along people got, the less efficient raw stat training became. That was why Immortals typically didn’t have truly insane raw stat values – past a certain point, it started to take years, or even decades, just to raise a stat by 1. That was just the way diminishing returns worked. Immortals didn’t get their ridiculous stat values just through training, but by stacking together multipliers that raised the effectiveness of their Stats. This Perk did nothing to fix this fundamental problem. ꞦΆΝỘＢËṧ

However, it still served as a catch-up mechanism for Immortals who reached Immortality later than others. In a way, it fit Alice’s needs surprisingly well – or at least, it would if she actually used her [Strength] stat for anything outside of training.

Unfortunately, while the Perk seemed quite useful at first, Alice quickly started realizing that there were other problems with it. The biggest problem was that Alice didn’t really use her [Strength] stat. When an actual fight broke out, Alice’s first response was to use her magic to help her – in Alice’s opinion, physical combat was dangerous and difficult, and she would much rather use her kinetic magic to survive instead of trying to rely on her nonexistent close combat abilities. If Alice were to think about it in terms of the computer games she used to play on Earth, [Strength] and [Charisma] were both dump stats for her. Neither of them were very useful, and so Alice usually ignored them. Even the weakest melee combatant in this world had a few dozen Perks from their classes supporting their fighting style, and unless she had an overwhelming stat advantage, a few points of [Strength] wouldn’t overcome that difference.

However, Alice was still excited to see the Perk. Even if she had no use for [Strength], it was still a hint about what kind of things she could expect to get from her [Legendary Organic Healer] Class. If this was the kind of Perk she got at level 5, how much better would the level 10 and 15 Perks be?

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Alice felt herself grinning at the thought. At the same time, she started wondering whether it was worthwhile to replace one of her main Classes with the [Legendary Organic Mage] class. If this was the kind of Perk she could get from it when it was a secondary Class, how much better would it be as a primary class?

What if, at level 10, she got a Perk that let her spend organic mana to permanently increase her [Endurance] stat instead? Unlike [Strength], Alice was always happy to boost her [Endurance]. If something went horribly wrong in a fight, [Endurance] would help her stay alive even if something managed to get through her magic and hurt her.

[Legendary Organic Mage] clearly had a lot of promise.

Alice glanced through her Primary classes, before she sighed.

Even though a part of her wanted to throw out one of her primary classes and replace it with [Legendary Organic Mage]… when she actually looked through her Primary classes, it was hard to find a good class to remove. [Explorer of Magic] was obviously out of the question – the Class was pretty much the core of her current Perk setup. [Scientist] also had a lot of valuable Perks that she was loathe to lose. [Kinetic Manabinder] and [Careful Enchanter] were likely to be very relevant to Alice’s attempts to create artificial magic seeds, so throwing them away would be foolish. [Scholar] provided her with her dream library, which Alice now used for a variety of things she was reliant upon – such as providing her with 8 extra hours every day, and ‘free’ mana for some kinds of experiments, and for improving her {Magic Modelling} Perk to make it even more useful. The Class was simply too valuable to lose right now.

That left [Survivor]… which Alice suspected [Legendary Organic Mage] would eventually replace. [Survivor] mostly offered {Adrenaline Rush}, {Enhanced Senses}, {Extended Tissues}, and {Dimensional Camouflage}. All four of those were useful to her current fighting style, but if [Legendary Organic Mage] got higher in level, it would probably provide its own replacements for those Perks. Alice decided that if [Legendary Organic Mage] ever got higher in level than [Survivor], she would find a [Priest of the System] and swap around her primary classes. However, at least for now she had a hard time justifying the swap.

With her mind made up for now, Alice turned her attention back to her final Perk option. This one had a lot of practical value.

Healing Reserve

Requirements: Legendary Organic Mage level 5 or higher, Intelligence greater than 150, have healed at least 30 people, have cured at least 5 different types of illness or injury

You create a secondary energy storage, this one with no theoretical upper limit on how much mana can be contained. This secondary ‘energy reserve’ can ONLY store organic mana, and upon being stored in this ‘energy reserve,’ the energy will become far less malleable than ‘normal’ organic mana. It may only be used to heal others. Any attempt to misconstrue this ‘healing’ into a harmful form of ‘healing’ will simply fail, wasting the mana without accomplishing anything.

May only store 250 Mariums of organic mana before it runs out of storage capacity.

This one was a simple, no nonsense increase in the storage capacity of her organic magic seed. Specifically, it gave her an extra 250 Mariums of mana to work with. This mana would be incapable of doing many of the things that regular organic mana could do, such as enhancing muscles or harming enemies. In that sense, the Perk was incredibly limiting and unipressive. However, that was only when one didn’t think carefully about it.

Alice’s organic magic seed had increased to 85% recently, as a result of [Scholar of Magic] still kicking in. Combined with her [Magic] stat of 171 and her Stat effectiveness of 192%, that meant her organic seed stored about 277 Mariums of Organic mana. This was with her unusually high Magic stat, and a stat effectiveness ordinary people could only dream of. Even if it wouldn’t impact her regeneration, and the extra Mariums of mana would be very limited in what they could do… this was still nearly tripling her organic mana storage. In a weird way, it was almost like adding 100% mana conversion ratio to her organic seed, even though a good chunk of that mana would be limited in what it could do. For a level 5 Perk, that was absolutely insane. It was the kind of numbers that Alice would expect to see on a level 50 Perk, not something she got a level 5.

Sure, the Perk didn’t scale as well as a ‘real’ mana conversion ratio increase. After all, it wouldn’t scale with her at all. Even if Alice managed to triple her [Magic] stat in the future, this Perk would still only give her 250 Mariums of storage. It also didn’t increase her mana regeneration at all, unlike a real increase to her [Magic] stat. But that was a problem that would only matter in the far, far future. Even a monster like Ethan couldn’t just treat two hundred and fifty Mariums of mana like nothing. He might not care that much about an increase of only 250 Mariums of storage… but it still gave Alice a number that even an Immortal would notice, albeit barely.

Alice didn’t hesitate for long before deciding what she wanted. {Legendary Muscle Enhancement} and {Legendary Efficiency} were both excellent Perks. They were so good that Alice wished she could take all three of them. But {Healing Reserve} was just too good to pass up. Any level 5 Perk that would give an Immortal a noticeable boost in strength was an excellent use of a Perk slot. So Alice grabbed {Healing Reserve}. A moment later, Alice felt a sort of… extra space open up inside of her mana core. It was attached to her organic seed, sort of like an inflatable sack of air.

Alice spent a few moments feeling it out, before realizing she didn’t need to ‘do’ anything with it. If her magic seed was full, her excess organic mana would just funnel itself into the extra space. Of course, Alice could also manually funnel her organic mana into the extra space, although she probably wouldn’t bother most of the time.

She did funnel a little bit of mana into it as a test, though. What she found was that the mana inside of the extra storage space was a bit… different than normal mana. She suspected that ‘difference’ was the reason that she could only use the organic mana in her extra storage for healing. It felt almost like the organic mana had turned into some strange hybrid of healing and organic mana. After inspecting it for a few more minutes, Alice shrugged, and stopped paying attention to it. The Perk worked as intended, and she didn’t think she would learn how to do anything terribly interesting with the System by inspecting her new extra storage further.

After that, Alice finally exited her room for good. She had done what she needed to for the day, and the group still wasn’t ready to leave. So she got a meal from the [Innkeeper], and waited. Half an hour later, Jonathan’s family was ready to go, so the group hopped back on their horses and left the city. Alice felt a bit nervous, as she wondered whether the nearby monsters would attack them – but it seemed like the monsters had given up on attacking the city, or at least were waiting until the group moved on. She felt a weird mixture of thankfulness and disgust as she realized that the monsters might actually be waiting for them to leave. She didn’t want to fight, but… not killing all of the monsters attacking this city felt wrong.

However, Ethan’s words also made sense. Showing some compassion and helping people was fine when it was within their abilities, and didn’t take up too much time. However, delaying too long was also problematic, because it would weaken her ability to solve the crisis as a whole. Thus, they could only leave the rest of the monster swarm be for now, and hope the people here could hold out until other areas reinforced them.

With that sliver of uneasiness and resignation in her mind, the group rode out of the city. They had nearly reached their destination.

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