After the group dealt with the outriders of the horde, Allira couldn’t sing the ship back into existence because she needed to keep the swamp monsters imprisoned. Alice suspected that once they got to another town or city, Ethan would use magic to ‘permanently’ contain the creatures… but for now, they were being held in place almost exclusively by Allira’s magic. Thus, the group went back to being transported via Ethan’s raw kinetic magic, which was far less comfortable and far less mana-efficient. Despite the uncomfortable travel method, the group started making good time again. Jonathan was forced to occasionally plant another line of seeds, and Allira frequently reported the swamp monsters trying to catch up with them. But with the fastest members of the horde wiped out, the group was no longer at risk of being trapped in another battle, much to Alice’s relief. Still, as they continued to travel, hour after hour, Alice started to frown. Just how big was this swamp? After over a day of travel through it, during which time they were mostly flying, they still had yet to reach the end of the swamp. Ethan and Allira had said that it might take a day or two of travel to pass through it, but Alice didn’t think they had originally planned to fly through the swamp, either. She started to wonder if they had somehow been steered off track by the swamp. It was clearly built to mislead people and trap them in the swamp forever. Had they somehow gotten turned around while they were travelling? But that… shouldn’t be possible. With three Immortals in the group, the idea of getting lost seemed absurd. But they were also still stuck in the swamp… As Alice felt this suspicion start to grow in her heart, she realized that some tiny threads of magic in their surroundings were beginning to stir. Alice stared at these tiny little threads of mana, and noticed that they weren’t directly connected to people. Instead, they looked somewhat similar to the threads of mana that had connected to the monsters they captured, making the creatures seem somewhat similar to puppets or marionettes. After some observation, Alice realized that these threads of mana weren’t actually new. In fact, she had seen similar mana structures before – they just hadn’t been quite so obvious. The reason they were easy to pick out right now was because the Swamp was very… homogenous. Most free-floating mana in the world had a lot of other, smaller types of mana mixed into it, making every single drop of mana hard to break down into smaller components. However, the Swamp was very pure in that it was almost entirely made of swamp-mana. It was like seeing a blue paint in the middle of a tie-dye colored shirt, versus seeing a splotch of blue paint in the middle of white paper. Alice spent several minutes observing this thread of mana, and then comparing it to the threads of mana extending out from the monsters that the group had captured. Until finally, Alice started to get a rough idea what she was looking at. These tiny little threads of mana… should probably be her beliefs and suspicions interacting with the mana around them to make her beliefs ‘real.’ At least, that was Alice’s best guess – it could have also been something completely different. Despite looking like a mana structure, the ‘type’ of mana involved was even weirder than System mana. It felt… wrong somehow. Like looking at a color that was beyond the range that human vision could pick up. Alice knew something was there. She knew it was made of mana. But she just… couldn’t figure out what it was or how it worked. While Alice was mostly guessing what the threads of mana did, it did bring another problem to mind. One that was becoming more important with each passing day. How did the System prevent people’s beliefs from influencing reality? Was it a facet of ‘communication’ mana? Was it a new type of mana entirely? How exactly was this done? Because one thing Alice had realized while they were travelling over the swamp was that this needed to get fixed. It was of higher priority than fixing Achievements. If people’s beliefs kept constantly influencing reality, sooner or later everything would just… snap behind the scenes. And past that point, Alice doubted that the world would remain stable. She sighed. There was still so much work to do… and at the end of the day, as far as Alice knew, she was the only one who could do it. If she didn’t solve these problems, nobody would. Not for the first time, Alice wished that Ethan or Cecilia had Perks and Achievements similar to hers. Having a full work colleague who had their own, specialized versions of Alice’s toolkit would have made it thousands of times easier to fix all of this. Instead, all she could do was use {Shared Memories} to try to show other people what she had observed, and then theorize together. It was better than nothing, but far from what she wanted. Alice spent a few minutes getting lost in her thoughts and worries, before she finally realized she was wasting time. If she had time to wish for colleagues, she had time to examine her surroundings and learn more. She started observing the threads of mana in their surroundings, trying to map out what they were and how they worked. Then, after several minutes of observation and a few checks with {Safety Analysis}, Alice started experimenting. But even though it was broken, Alice still did her best to memorize every single thing that she could. For a moment, Alice deeply regretted that {Magic Modelling} was on cooldown right now. If it had been active, Alice could have gotten an image of a perfect chunk of System mana. Not some sort of fragmented, broken down version that was created to serve one and only one purpose, like the ones that she had run into while investigating System enchantments and such. Instead, it would have given her a copy of the ‘mother code’ of the System. It might have saved her weeks of exploration and made her life dozens of times easier. Sadly, there were no what-ifs in the world. And so Alice instead memorized every single thing she could as the System’s mana rocketed through the world in an unbridled mess of mana. With her photographic memory, she could sort out the details of what she had seen later – right now, she just tried to cram every single speck of data into her memories for future perusal. Moments later, the System mana dissipated again, leaving nothing behind. However, while Alice didn’t get to investigate much, she had paid very close attention to one thing. She tried to check how the System handled the interaction between beliefs and mana. This was something the System had clearly managed in the past, and after seeing the way the Swamp had expanded due to the influence of human ideas, Alice was clear that this problem needed to be solved. Not in the future, not tomorrow. Now. Every single day that human beliefs warped reality, there was a small threat of everything breaking and ending the world one day. And in this respect, Alice wasn’t disappointed. As she watched, she saw that some of the threads she had been observing earlier were… eaten by the System. It didn’t look like the System had suppressed them with some mixture of communication mana and other types of mana. It didn’t look like the System mana had deleted the mana threads, either. It was more like watching a whirlpool swallow a sinking ship. One moment, the little threads of weird mana were present, and the next moment, the System engulfed it and integrated it. Then, it seemed almost as if the little threads of mana were a natural part of the System mana. It was so natural, so obviously part of normal System mana that Alice had a hard time picking out the little threads of mana again, even when she knew what she was looking for. That was… very interesting. Alice wasn’t quite sure what to make of that yet, but she was sure it was important… Sadly, before she could gather more data, the whole phenomenon collapsed like a soap bubble in a hurricane. Still, Alice had realized that she was heading in the wrong direction when she had tried to stifle the little threads of mana. Clearly, they weren’t something the System suppressed – instead, they were actively used somehow, as a material rather than a problem. She couldn’t help but wish that she could see exactly how the System worked behind the scenes… but she would have to wait until Murim found the System’s mainframe. Until then, she would just have to keep studying the little pieces of the System she could observe. While Alice focused on studying the surrounding mana, the group found a nearby village. Alice was surprised to see that the villagers were still present. It didn’t even look like the villagers were getting ready to evacuate – although even from high above the village, she could see the villagers eyeing the swamp nervously. It seemed that they weren’t unaware of the threat of the swamp expanding, but they were simply unwilling to leave their homes and their farms to rot as they fled for the hills. Alice had heard that even back on Earth, some people were unwilling to abandon their homes even when disaster struck. It was probably much worse here, when so much of the average [Farmer] family’s wealth was buried in the ground each season. “This is a good place to start,” sang Allira, somehow making her totally normal words sound like natural parts of the song she was singing. Alice frowned as she tried to parse the meaning of Allira’s words… before Allira’s previous idea came back to her. Allira had suggested spreading various stories related to ‘defeating the heart of the swamp.’ Despite the fact that the ‘Heart of the Swamp’ didn’t really exist, if people thought that the expansion of the swamp was slowed or halted, the swamp truly would start to weaken and stop expanding. Alice nodded, and then glanced at the train of cages the group was carrying with them. She grinned. “We can use the monsters we captured as props,” said Alice. “Hmm… while we’re at it… Allira, do you have a way to make the monsters wriggle around a bit, and perhaps make some odd noises?” “I… could probably manage that with illusions, but why do you ask?” sang Allira.