After Alice finished identifying what the room’s purpose was, she fell into thought. Alice had never thought that closely about the System’s internal structure before, mostly because Alice had previously thought of the System as a unified whole. In fact, Alice hadn’t even been sure what she would find in this room - she had just expected to find ‘System components.’ Now, she was confronting a reality she wasn’t prepared for - the sheer mass of the System, and the need to figure out how it was structured. Seeing an entire room dedicated specifically to the [Exotic Dancer] Class raised many new questions. For example, perhaps most importantly for Alice’s goals… how had this room been made? How was it modified? Alice had already learned by examining history books that the System could change. Certain Perks might lose requirements and become easier to access, such as Perks related to the knowledge of Steel. When they had first appeared in history, their requirements had been exceptionally steep - but as more and more people learned how to make steel, and as knowledge spread the regular way, the corresponding Perk requirements also dropped, until now, it was an easily acquired Perk that most [Blacksmiths] didn’t even bother learning, since the knowledge was so prolific and easy to access. ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ ꜰʀᴏᴍ noveⅼfire.net This meant that the System had to have some way to modify rooms one. If the information related to Perks and Classes was being modified, that meant that the room related to that Class also had to change. That was just basic logic. However, Alice couldn’t find a way to change this room’s structure - at least, not from within this room. As far as she could tell, every bit of information she had encountered so far in the room was directly related to the Perks of [Exotic Dancer]. There were still some chunks of enchantments that she had yet to identify - but as far as she could tell, they were related to how to form the original Class seed and how to restructure it during a Class evolution. Of course, since both of those enchantments were the most heavily gnawed on, there was a chance Alice simply couldn’t find enough of the structure-building enchantments to figure out what they had looked like - but Alice suspected such a massive and important part of the enchantment should have left some traces behind. It didn’t look like the monsters had managed to destroy all of the infrastructure in this room, and Alice was pretty confident she had at least roughly determined what most of the enchantment slabs in this room had been for. She hadn’t seen anything even remotely related to restructuring and rebuilding the room. In other words, this particular room had no way to remodel itself based on the needs of the people of this world. This also brought a new question to mind. How did the System know what a Class was needed? How did the System know when to create a new Class to fit something that wasn’t included in its original design? The System was clearly capable of remodelling itself based on people’s needs, but how it did figure out what those needs were and then modify itself to meet those needs? Alice suspected that, at least at the start of humanity’s golden age in this world, there hadn’t been any [Exotic Dancers], because humanity had been too impoverished and too close to extinction. With that in mind, [Exotic Dancer] must have been one of the Classes that appeared later in humanity’s history here. This room should have been one of the rooms with an immediate, obvious need for a way to sense and modify itself based on people’s needs. However, Alice couldn’t find anything. Unless… that type of enchantment had never existed in the System at all. Alice felt a momentary surge of suspicion - a vague, deep-seated fear that she might have missed or misunderstood a vital, major part of the System. But a moment later, Alice shook her head. She knew there were still parts of the System she didn’t understand, but she was pretty sure she had understood at least the majority of the way mana and the System worked, and how they interacted with each other. Alice was pretty sure that there needed to be something in the System that allowed it to interpret people’s needs and turn it into new rooms and Perks. Even if the System could probably just absorb people’s belief mana, and use that as a sensor to figure out what new Classes were needed and how to make them, Alice didn’t think belief mana could create large, well-organized, well-structured rooms. Especially since most people didn’t really have an intuitive understanding of the System. The System needed a way to take in people’s belief mana, organize it into new blueprints, and then build those blueprints. Some kind of infrastructure was needed for that, but Alice couldn’t find that infrastructure in the room. Unless… there was, indeed, infrastructure related to building new rooms and new slabs of material, but it was located elsewhere in the System? The moment Alice had that thought, she felt as if a light had dissipated the fog in her mind. Based on everything she knew, the System would need a way to interpret and use string of belief mana to create new structures. Those weren’t present in the room - but there was no reason to believe this was the only kind of room present in the System. Alice began to theorize what other types of room might exist in the System, if her suspicion was correct. If Alice was correct, the System could actually be divided into at least three components. The first type of component would be blueprint creation rooms. These rooms likely held some kind of AI or enchantment that figured out the needs of people in the world, perhaps by absorb belief mana and then turning that into data. Then, those rooms should figure out where and how real copies of those rooms needed to be placed, and then passed their blueprints along to other parts of the System. The second type of System room might be directly tied to blueprint rooms, or it might be separate. However, Alice was sure that there was probably something that built rooms after the blueprints were done. These were probably construction rooms. Perhaps they housed some kind of golem that built rooms after they were planned, or perhaps they relied on some other mechanism to build rooms after the planning phase was done. Either way, these rooms would probably be located near the blueprint rooms. There was also an outside chance that the System used the regenerating metal walls of the System to handle construction of new rooms. Finally, there should be the type of room Alice was currently standing in. A Class-type Room. Alice was pretty sure that if this room was exclusively devoted to the [Exotic Dancer] Class, other System rooms were probably organized in the same way. There was probably a [Blacksmith] room in another part of the System, and an [Explorer of Magic] room somewhere else in the System. Every Class humanity had ever discovered probably had a dedicated room of its own, to store relevant perks and Class-related information. There could be more types of room present in the System, but Alice suspected these three types of room, at least, were likely to exist. She could revise and update her assumptions when she learned more. For the second component of the System, Alice suspected that regenerating walls were NOT the answer to how the System constructed new rooms. This was because of the monster infestation in the System. Alice had already seen evidence that monsters had infiltrated, at the very least, quite a large chunk of the System. There was a good chance that the monsters might have infested the entire System, though Alice didn’t have enough data to say for sure yet. If monsters were in this room, it stood to reason that they had probably made it into other rooms too. If Alice’s theory about ‘blueprint rooms’ was correct, then the spiders or other monsters might have infested those as well. If that was the case, and if the regenerating metal was in charge of fixing and constructing new rooms, Alice suspected the walls of the System would be in much worse condition than this. The group should have seen all sorts of problems, such as holes appearing in the ceiling, as blueprints were ripped apart and eaten by the infestation of monsters. Since the walls did not resemble swiss cheese, Alice suspected the System had some other mechanism in place for constructing new rooms. After Alice finished sorting out her wave of theories, she absentmindedly rubbed a few of the pieces of gnawed-on composite material beside her as she frowned. How could she take advantage of this information? For a moment, Alice was sorely tempted to abandon this room and head deeper into the System. If she could view the blueprints for every room in the System, she would get a lot more information in a very short amount of time - perhaps she could even find a map, since the System was massive. After some hesitation, however, Alice put her temptation aside. She still understood too little about the System right now. At the very least, the group should wall off this room against further monster incursions first - and that would take some time. Even if Alice was correct about the blueprint and construction rooms, those were probably also infested with monsters. If the group wanted to keep the System intact, they needed more than just understanding - they needed to deal with the monster infestation, and whatever other unknown problems and threats lurked within the System. For that to happen, Alice would also need more levels - and understanding this room would provide those levels. She sighed, and turned back to the rest of the group, especially the Immortals. “This room is focused on housing the Perk information and blueprints for [Exotic Dancer],” said Alice. Her voice was loud enough that even the Illvarian Mages outside of the room could hear her. At this point, Alice wasn’t going to keep trying to hide things from them. They had come this far, and they were literally inside of the System. What Alice needed to do now was trust her teammates and try to get this sinking ship afloat again. “Oh?” Cecilia seemed interested in Alice’s words as she fiddled with a group of ruined chunks of a slab of composite materials. “That’s quite interesting. It implies that the System is actually organized one Class at a time. I wonder how many rooms there are in total.” “There are thousands of Classes,” said Ethan. “If the System has a separate room for every single Class in existence… it would be a ridiculously large number of rooms that we need to go through and fix. How long is it going to take us to fix all of this?” Alice shivered at Ethan’s question, because she hadn’t thought about how much time it would take to fix things until now. There were thousands of known Classes. If it took her a few days to fix every single room, that would imply she would need years to finish fixing the System. Years during which the outside world would spiral further into chaos. Of course, Alice would speed up as she got more familiar with how the System’s internal construction worked, and as her level increased… but the thought of spending years wandering these dark corridors, repairing chunks of the System as monsters flooded in to replace those she slew… the idea filled Alice with a kind of quiet desperation. She felt awful just thinking about that situation. She would do it if she had to - she wasn’t just going to stand by and let hundreds of millions of people in this world die. But she wanted a better solution. Alice found herself desperately hoping that her assumptions about a ‘blueprint room’ were correct, because if not, Alice was going to have a very long, very repetitive task in front of her. Clearing out the monsters from thousands of rooms was still a daunting task, but at least that work could be somewhat delegated to others, such as the Immortals in the group. It was a team effort. Repairing the System, on the other hand, was a job where Alice needed to do most of the work. “Can you actually repair it?” asked Cecilia. Alice turned her attention once more to the slab in front of her. Unlike most of the other slabs in the room, this one was mostly intact. Alice leaned closer to it, and then tried to piece together what was missing. “Try comparing the different slabs,” said Cecilia. “Based on what you said, every single slab of material in this room has a different Perk, right? However, the bottom of each slab seems to be a way to connect it to the rest of the room and the System. The mostly-intact slab you found might only be missing a way to connect to the rest of the System. Kind of like a… uh… power cord,” said Cecilia. The last two words were spoken in English, not Illvarian. Alice nodded. That was a good point. Alice moved over to one of the other slabs of composite material, and started to analyze the structures in the slab of material. Soon, she confirmed a few more things. “The bottom of each slab, at least from what I can tell, is almost the same,” said Alice. “All of them have a rigid bottom that helps conduct mana in and out of the enchantment. The enchantments for class evolution and for forming the Class seed look different, and they’re too damaged for me to analyze. I’ll figure those out later. For now, what matters is the regular Perks. I can tell that these things don’t run off of monster cores at all - it looks way more like an electrical grid from home…” Alice frowned, as she looked at the most intact Perk-slab she had discovered. If the System worked like a power grid from Earth, how the heck was this Perk slab still filled with mana? A few more minutes of investigation revealed something Alice had overlooked the first time. It was remarkably simple. It was a backup power supply. The Perk slabs of this room did, indeed, run off of power supplied by the System - but each of them also had a few backup ‘batteries’, presumably to keep the System running if something went wrong with the power supply elsewhere in the System. It also made repairing the slab of material in front of her very easy - all she had to do, for this slab at least, was reconnect it to the general power system of the System. After that, this Perk slab would be repaired, even if the rest of the room was still trashed. If nothing else, it would teach her more about how the System worked. Furthermore, Alice was eyeing her Classes. Repairing even a small part of the System should give her a level or two in [Explorer of Magic], and perhaps a new Achievement. Given how close she was to level 100, Alice was also very eager to see what her next Class evolution would bring her. The benefits of a new Perk, followed by a Class evolution, would hopefully make the task in front of her several times easier. Alice felt more of the anxiety and fog in her head clear. The room was almost impossible for her to fully repair with her current abilities. She understood several bits and pieces of it, but there were missing materials, huge question marks with regards to how some things were supposed to look, and a quantity of work that beggared the imagination. She also had no clue how to fix the instructions for how to build an [Exotic Dancer] seed, since the System’s blueprint looked very different than her hasty, cobbled-together version, and Alice had no idea what to make the ‘Class Evolution’ Chunks of the System components in front of her. How could Alice solve these problems? The simplest and easiest step she could take to try to address these issues was to level up a bit more and improve her abilities. She was already close, and she had multiple Classes that were perfect for tasks . She just needed to feed them a little more and hope that they gave her what she needed. Alice hesitated, before she found a few chunks of composite material that seemed roughly similar to the parts missing from her original slab of material. Right now, Alice didn’t have any replacement materials on hand, and she had no idea where she could go to get more. She started trying to cobble the two materials together. With the help of a bit of mana-conducting glue that Cecilia provided, and some kinetic mana to slice away less-relevant bits of her materials and make everything fit together, Alice managed to cobble together a repaired(?) slab of material. She slammed it back into the mana-supplying power grid beneath their feet, and hoped her messy repair job would give her what she wanted. For a moment, the mana grid seemed baffled by Alice’s actions - it looked almost like it was travelling through molasses instead of a properly formed connection. Alice could tell that she had probably made a few small mistakes when repairing the slab of material in front of her - but that was to be expected when she had essentially repaired it with scissors and glue. Still, even though Alice had done a messy repair job, it was good enough to work. The Slab of material in front of her started to flash with mana, and then a wave of mana surged into Alice’s body. She grinned. It was time to grab a few more Perks and Levels, and see what new tools she could get to make her life easier.