As the group rode forward, Alice went back to working on her mana gem. Her image of a fully functioning mana gem was nearly complete, and by her estimation, it would only take three or four hours before she totally finished it. Now that there was nothing else to do, Alice was eager to get to work. The next three and a half hours were spent in a daze, as she worked on the image of a mana gem contained inside of her mind. But once it was completed, Alice grinned. She had spent several days working on this image, and she was excited now that it was finally done. It was time to see what distinguished a broken mana gem from a working one! The first thing Alice noticed upon comparing the two images was that the working mana gem had incorporated her Alice mana in a rather odd way. Alice had already known that the mana gem in her brain was somehow intrinsically linked to Achievements. After all, every single one of her Achievements seemed to be stored in her mana gem, and using her Achievement to fix her mana gem had immediately restored all of her Achievements from working at 50% efficiency to 100%. It was also already obvious that a working mana gem did something with ‘person’ mana, the strange type of mana that appeared after someone reached level 75. After all, Alice mana had appeared inside of her body around that time, and had only disappeared completely once she used her Achievement to ‘fix’ her mana gem. After that, the mana gem had absorbed all of her Alice mana, and as far as she could tell, it had then disappeared completely from her body. However, the working mana gem hadn’t just absorbed all of the Alice mana, nor had it simply tossed her Alice mana into a new facet of the mana gem, the way Alice had expected. Now that she could see all of the intricate details of her Alice mana via {Magic Modelling}, she could see several details that she had missed the first time she had looked into her fixed mana gem. Instead, it seemed almost like the Alice mana was core to the mana gem itself. It was as if there was now a resplendent little glowing core of mana in the center of her mana gem, as tiny as a star in the night sky, but dimly glowing as the rest of the mana gem orbited it. The Alice mana in this image was very, very tiny. Without the ability to zoom in that {Magic Modelling} had, Alice would have had a very hard time seeing in. In fact, if she tried to use her regular types of vision and Perks to investigate her own mana gem, she still had a hard time seeing the Alice-mana core in her mana gem. However, it was clear as day when she zoomed in enough using {Magic Modelling}. Alice shook her head. If her guess was correct, trying to reach Immortality without the System might be… very problematic. While Alice had always thought of Immortality more as a side-goal, she had to admit, the closer it got the more appealing she found it. Growing old seemed like a miserable way to die. Avoiding that forever sounded nice. But her body had no innate ability to process all of this mana on its own. Humans, sadly, had no real way to interact with mana safely, at least without the help of the System. If Alice wanted to get this mess working, she would need to keep observing how the System used to solve this mess and then use that as a foundation for fixing her own Alice mana. Humans… were really bad at managing mana. In fact, now that Alice thought about it more carefully… weren’t humans awfully poorly adapted to mana, and this dimension, in general? Humans suffered from mana poisoning the moment they came into contact with an excessive quantity of mana, unlike monsters. The fact that monsters were born with no fear of mana poisoning clearly meant that it was possible for life forms to be properly adapted for mana. In that case… why were humans in this world so abysmal at handling the various repercussions of living near mana? They needed the System to regulate almost every aspect of mana, because a small mistake would spell immediate death, or loss of consciousness. It was like a species that was clearly suited to live near volcanoes trying to live in Antarctica – the whole thing made no sense whatsoever. Alice thought about how she had arrived in this world. When she had come from Earth, she had known absolutely nothing about magic, nor had she had any sort of ‘innate connection’ to this world. She had arrived here through pure dumb luck, with absolutely no control over her arrival. She hadn’t taken any sort of special action to arrive here, and she had been caught totally off guard by her arrival. In that case… perhaps humans weren’t native to this world at all? In the first place, it would be exceedingly bizarre for two species to develop so similarly to one another on two different planets. The odds were probably about on par with someone flipping a coin several billion times and it landing on heads every single time. It was theoretically possible… but probability like that never actually happened in reality. The odds were just too absurd. Not to mention, certain environments made the evolution of certain types of species more or less probably, because those species were adapted to survive in that environment. That was what Natural Selection was – survival of whatever species was most adapted to the current environment. Not to mention, there were several species of plant and animal that closely resembled their earth counterparts. This week alone, Alice had eaten a meal made of potatoes, and had also eaten bread made from wheat. She walked near trees that strongly resembled trees from earth, and knew that regular animals like chickens and cows were also present in villages around the world. Were humans adapted to this planet’s environment? Could they realistically evolve here? They needed the System to scrape out even the most rudimentary form of existence. While historical records of pre-System years were scant, from what Alice could find, it seemed like humans had scraped out an existence at the fringes of society, right at the bottom of the food chain. Monsters had come to munch on humans frequently, and mages had lived short, pitiful lives trying to keep their villages and tribes safe from the monsters that ruled the world. Alice seriously doubted humans could have ever evolved in this world. Their biology was just too poorly suited for this dimension. Unless mana was new to this dimension, or some sort of massive change had happened in this world recently, there was just no way humans could have evolved here. And there was absolutely no historical or archeological evidence of a ‘big change’ in this dimension, at least not in the recent past. Now that she looked at her mana gem, and then thought about how she had arrived here, it seemed abundantly obvious. Humans probably weren’t native to this planet. Every single fact she knew about Natural Selection, biology, and probability stated that it was totally impossible for humanity to have been born here. Sometime in the distant past, a tribe or village of humans had probably been spirited away to this dimension, much like she was. That tribe had managed to survive and reproduce, and perhaps with the help of new interdimensional migrants, they had managed to scrape out some form of existence on this world – fragile though it may have been. After that, for reasons Alice still didn’t understand, the System popped into existence, and the ‘golden age’ for humanity in this world started. But humanity was probably not native to this place. Alice sighed, and put her thoughts aside for now. Today, she had made one interesting discovery, and had two new theories she wanted to verify. However, she had no good way to test her new guesses, so she would just have to keep an eye out for further clues and evidence for or against her guesses. The most important thing in science was to keep an open mind, and discard your hypotheses if it became obvious you were wrong. The hardest thing to do was admit one was incorrect and then improve, after all. After that, Alice returned to the image of her working mana gem. There was one other thing she had wanted to check, and now was the perfect time to do so. Alice knew that at least for a few seconds, right after using her Achievement to ‘fix’ her mana gem, her mana gem had somehow categorized and ‘fixed’ all of her Achievements. Alice was hoping that her image of a ‘working’ mana gem had captured this image – if so, she might have a good idea how to fix Achievements manually, without relying on her Achievement to do it for her. So she started scouring the image of a working mana gem again. It took a lot more searching and analyzing, but after a while, Alice did find a little chunk of rainbow mana working on ‘straightening out’ one of the facets of her mana gem. Since every single facet of her mana gem was an Achievement, that meant one thing. Alice had, indeed, captured an image of the System ‘at work’ fixing an Achievement. She grinned. She spent several more minutes trying to figure out what the System was doing with her mana gem facet, and after some analysis, she came to a rough understanding of how the process worked. She wasn’t sure if she could replicate it yet, but she was pretty sure she at least understood what was happening. In order to ‘fix’ an Achievement, it looked like she had to do more than just properly ‘categorize’ it. As far as she could tell, what the System was doing was some sort of… surgical alteration to the Achievement. This surgical alteration was done using a mixture of math mana, pure mana, filtration mana, and at least one other type of mana she was less familiar with. Somehow, these types of mana were straightening out the Achievement, turning it from a chunk of partially-controlled belief mana into something a bit more… standard? Controlled? Alice didn’t have a good word for it, but it was obvious that something had been done to make the mana more controlled and stable. It wouldn’t totally change the nature of the mana, but Alice suspected it would make it ‘fit in’ more with the other types of Achievements present in her mana gem. Alice frowned, and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. She still only had a rough idea what was going on, but she could sort of see what the process was going for. The System probably had some sort of ‘standard framework’ for how Achievements were supposed to work. The surgical alteration process was taking the Achievement and converting it from raw, unprocessed mana into something usable by making it fit that template. Alice still wasn’t entirely sure what that template was, but if she kept analyzing her image of a working mana gem, she could probably make some guesses. From there, she would just need to do some trial and error to get a real idea what the System needed an Achievement to look like. Once that happened… Alice would finally be able to fix Achievements. She found herself smiling at the thought. The two components of the System she still couldn’t fix were Achievements and Class seeds. Now, she had a glimpse of how to fix Achievements. There was still work to be done, but she had a foot in the door. Sadly, there wasn’t much she could do to experiment with Achievements here. She would have to wait until later before she tried messing with Achievements more. Instead, Alice pulled herself out of the mental images created by her Perks, and turned her attention towards Ethan. “Ethan… do you mind if I take a look at your mana gem later,” asked Alice, after signaling for him to move closer and dropping her voice to a whisper. Ethan quickly set up his privacy Perk, and then gave Alice a glance. “Did you finally finish looking at your own mana gem, in both a working and broken condition?” “Yes, I did,” said Alice. “Do you want to see?”