With the first major material shortage taken care of, Alice returned to the Perk library room while Doll went back to finding and sending her golems to mine other resources. Alice had a hard time figuring out the way the System created ‘inner layers’ to a Class seed, unfortunately, which made it hard to figure out how to repair it. When she checked the Class seeds inside of her own body, she had a very hard time spotting or even confirming the existence of these inner layers. The one and only piece of evidence she had that they existed at all was the Perk library from the past claiming this inner layer was supposed to exist - and Alice was starting to doubt whether she had seen it correctly or whether she was simply misinterpreting some other enchantment component of the System’s setup. After all, it was hard to remain confident when it contracted the evidence in front of her own eyes. After several hours of careful consideration, Alice did finally notice something she had overlooked, though. The ‘core’ of the System. Even after the collapse of the System, people had still been able to access some components of the System, albeit in a very broken and half-functional way. They could still pick Perks, although they couldn’t see what those Perks were, they could still get a mana gem, even if it wouldn’t work properly, and their inner copy of the System would still try to access the mainframe of the System to get things like reference libraries for Perk variants and such. Furthermore, the System’s version of a Class seed also had an auto mana-filtration feature attached to each seed, while Alice had not figured out how to do this for her version of a Class seed yet. Where was this local variant of the System that managed all of these features? Thus far Alice had been assuming that the mana gem in her brain house that local variant of the System, along with a variety of other components. That might actually be correct… but perhaps the ‘inner layer’ of each Class seed had some of these functions as well? Alice had noticed that her version of a Class seed was very different. Perhaps this inner layer of the System was what ran all of these features - and perhaps it was also responsible for telling the mana inside of someone’s body how to create a mana gem, funnel mana into it, and communicate with the mainframe of the System. This would also explain why Alice hadn’t noticed it so far - if these ‘inner layers’ of Class seeds were too complicated or too small, it would be easy for her to overlook it. After all, Alice hadn’t even identify all of the components of proper System mana - she had just found workarounds for mana types she was missing as she tried to recreate the System. She was under no illusion that she had perfectly replicated and understood everything she had missed. The problem was that Alice still had no clue how to bridge the gap between her understanding of the System and the real System. The Perk library she was investigating didn’t include a ‘how-to-build-a-proper-class-seed’ tutorial. It was clearly built entirely for the System, and maintaining or understanding the process that went into creating a Class seed was nightmarishly difficult with only this reference point. Finally, Alice sighed in frustration, and rubbed her temples. The problem she was running into was twofold - she was still waiting on Doll to create the materials she needed, and she was struggling to interpret the more complex inner mechanisms of the System due to the System’s lack of user friendly instructions.. Things like Perks were much easier for Alice to understand, because she had already created her own knockoff versions of Perks, and had gotten at least reasonably close to the mark. Seeing the System version of a Perk was illuminating - all she had to do was take a little inspiration to see where her own designs had fallen short and then improve. Her knockoff Class seeds, on the other hand, had been built with a different construction philosophy. From the ground up, she needed to rework how she thought about magic seeds until she figured out what major idea she was missing and how to build it correctly. Still, she had chosen this path, and moving around right now seemed foolish. Doll hadn’t found a way to protect this room yet, and Alice hadn’t achieved any of her goals here yet. The group spent the next two days prowling through the Perk library, as Alice continued working and analyzing. Doll’s attempts to recreate the System’s structural base material continued, and much to Alice’s joy, the materials used to construct the System could all be found or grown nearby. Once Doll had a golem that could slip by monsters unnoticed, it stopped being a problem for her to collect materials. Of course, Alice wasn’t surprised that the core components for the System were all located nearby. The System clearly used golems for its own mining purposes. Since the System didn’t have any sort of fancy teleportation system that took materials into the System from across the world, the System quite obviously needed to be able to source all of its materials from nearby. Otherwise, the System would have run out of repair and expansion materials centuries ago and then collapsed in on itself. While Doll’s efforts to obtain and reconstruct the System’s core materials were going well, Alice was hitting more and more walls. Even leveraging belief mana wasn’t enough for her to repair the Perk library for [Exotic Dancer], and Alice kept feeling like she was missing some important context that she desperately needed. Alice couldn’t help but think back to the first time she had ever seen the System - through the use of {Seed Enchanting}. Back then, the System had looked almost like a giant, ever-flowing river of mana. Motes of mana had drifted from one part of the giant enchantment to another, as if they were parts of a giant, interlocking whole. When she looked at the System now, it looked dead and silent, save for small channels of mana that ran through the underside of the System’s floors and walls, much like electricity from her previous life. Suddenly, Alice felt that she was missing a very important part of the System’s overall design. Something that couldn’t be understood or copied if all she saw was this one room. The missing patches of knowledge in Alice’s understanding of the System, coupled with her memory of the way the System had looked through the vision bestowed by that Perk, led to a new decision. They had to move beyond this Perk library room. Alice had originally intended to sit in this Perk library room for a few weeks, while she got the hang of repairing the System, sorted out the issues in this area, and grabbed a few levels that would make her life easier as they repaired more System rooms. However, she now realized that this wasn’t the best path forward. The System had some kind of interaction between rooms that Alice had no understanding of - one that might also give her a better idea how the inner layer of a class seed worked and tied everything together. “Ethan, I think we need to leave this room,” said Alice. “Already? I thought you were planning to sit here and keep on working at it until you got at least part of the System online again,” said Ethan, as he gave the room a skeptical glance. “So far, I’ve mostly just seen you use that new Perk of yours to delve into visions and then analyze data. The room still looks pretty broken to me. Unless there is something I’m missing?” Alice shook her head, and explained her reasoning. After she finished speaking, Ethan nodded. “If that’s the case, then we can follow your plan. We’ll head deeper into the System the moment Doll sets up some defenses for this room,” said Ethan. “Are we looking for a blueprint room or something?” “I hope so,” said Alice. “We’ll see what we can find when we go deeper. Doll, can you set up some defenses for the room in a short period of time?” “That might be hard. I haven’t really been able to multitask on setting up defenses and finding ways to build Veldymite,” said Doll, as she spared them a glance. Laid out in front of her were twelve different types of material, each of which was being subjected to a very different method of processing. There were nearly four hundred sample materials in front of her, all part of Doll’s quest to figure out exactly how the base material of the System had been created. Alice winced. She really had put a lot of different tasks on Doll’s shoulders. Doll needed to figure out how to produce more of the core materials of the System, make sure that it was a viable conduit for enchantments, and set up defences for the System that would keep the room safe after they left. That was a lot of work, even for an Immortal. On the other hand, Alice felt impatient. Now that she had made up her mind, was there no other way to get moving faster? She was still acutely aware of the fact that with every day they wasted within the System, people outside were dying at an unprecedented rate. Doll thought for a moment. “At least for now, I do still have some very rudimentary ideas about how to defend individual rooms,” said Doll. “They’re a bit basic, though, and so they might not work very well or might have other issues. These passageways that allow movement from one room to another are probably for maintenance purposes. We now know that the System utilizes golems for mining, so I suspect it also uses golems for construction of new rooms and as a way to fix any breaks or issues with specific Perk rooms. Since the room for [Exotic Dancer] Perks is already ruined beyond recognition, and isn’t really capable of transmitting mana in or out properly… we could just fill in the hallway for now. There’s nothing to maintain, and the System’s maintenance golems have likely been torn apart by monsters anyway. Now, I will note that this isn’t a long term solution - it totally ruins our own access to this area later, and it might introduce a bunch of other problems. There are also some monsters that can manipulate any kind of material I could use to fill in the passageways, and I don’t have enough material to do this for every passageway we come across. However, if it’s just a temporary solution, I could just fill in the passageway with rocks before we return and fix the area later. If we try this, it will at least prevent those shadowy spider monsters from creeping back into the room after we depart. We don’t know how many other kinds of monsters have snuck into the internal structure of the System, but if it’s a limited quantity, there is still a good chance that there aren’t any tunneling-related monsters. It’s far from a perfect solution, but it should be good enough for now.” Alice thought about Doll’s proposal. It was, indeed, far from an ideal solution - but it wasn’t like they couldn’t come back and correct the issue later. Doll’s proposal would work fine as a temporary stopgap, and once Alice had a better idea how to put everything together, they could always come back, tear down the stone they used to fill in the tunnels, and rebuild a more structured and coherent defense system once they knew what they were doing. “I like that plan. How do we fill in the area?” asked Alice. “I can melt down a bunch of rock into a type of sludge, and just fill in three or four meter-thick melted stone walls that cover the passages from top to bottom. My Perks should keep the wall intact until it hardens up. It won’t be pretty or sturdy, but it should do,” said Doll. Alice frowned. Doll could melt rocks into sludge? That sounded an awful lot like making magma. Alice thought she remembered learning that magma had all sorts of poisonous gasses inside of it. She had no clue how the System’s ventilation system worked. “Will that poison us?” asked Alice. Fortunately, Doll seemed to know what Alice was wary of. “I have a Perk that can deal with any toxic fumes or byproducts of my own craftsmanship. It doesn’t work with external stuff, but anything that comes from my forge is under my control,” said Doll. “Then let’s proceed according to your plan.” Doll quickly whipped a proper anvil out of her storage Perk, and then used a few chunks of wood from a storage Perk to get a fire going. Doll also produced several large slabs of stone from her storage Perk, before she tossed it onto a forge. Then, regardless of how little sense it seemed to make, she started hitting the blocks of stone with a forging hammer. Rainbow mana cascaded out of her hammer, while Doll began to bellow at the rock as well. Due to the influence of the heat and the Perks, the rock quickly liquified. Doll started to bellow at the liquid rock, and at the same time Doll reached into the molten rock with her bare hands and started to slather it across the ground. Due to the influence of Doll’s Perks, the liquified slabs of stone started to form an impossibly perfect stone wall. The liquified rock didn’t flow around, or drip, or cool down - instead, it hung in midair every time Doll finished a certain area. Doll repeated this process for several minutes, until a molten wall of sludge blocked the passage in and out of the [Exotic Dancer] Perk storage room. Then, Doll grinned at Alice. “Done! Let’s get going!” With that, the group started moving. Just like before, the defense mechanisms of the System completely ignored Alice and the others as they moved forward. This once again led Alice to speculate about the relationship between the {Outworlder} Achievement and the System. It simply seemed incredibly strange to her that the System let {Outworlders} move in and out of the System so freely, when it was equally obvious that the creator(s) of the System had taken such efforts to make it hard to infiltrate this structure. Why was such a specific exception included in the basic design of the System? Was she thinking too much? Was the security system of the System down? She had no answer. The group passed three more turns and about two more kilometers of walls without any incidents happening. Alice wasn’t even sure why these long empty hallways existed in the first place - it seemed very strange to her to have such massive amounts of unused space. However, Doll claimed that just behind some of the walls of the System, there were obvious passages that had been used for mining in the past. In other words, the System had originally mined these areas for minerals, then converted some of them into passages afterwards. She still had no clue why the System had created such large and empty corridors, though. This content belongs to novel⟡fire.net The next room they found was rather different from what Alice had expected. It didn’t look like any of the three room types she had speculated the System must have. It clearly wasn’t a Perk library, nor was it a massive AI database, and it certainly wasn’t a room for the assembly and construction of golems, either. It looked more like the docking bay of a futuristic space ship… except for the fact that it was entirely underwater. There were a multitude of doors that sealed off one side of the room, and right next to those doors were two glass windows that somehow remained intact. On the other side of the glass, Alice could see dark water.. “This must be the ‘correct’ way to get golems in and out of the System without any issues,” said Doll, breaking the silence. “I believe this area is designed to create a few separate chambers in the room, each of which is watertight. Anytime a golem from the System is meant to go out and mine, it will first enter one room, before one set of doors close and cut the interior of the System off from the water. Then, the second set of doors open, letting the golem out. Then a series of pumps get the water back outside, leaving a dry room behind.” Alice blinked, and then nodded in enlightenment. Doll’s supposition made sense. She hadn’t been sure how the System collected materials and avoided the danger of flooding, but it seemed like there was a method in place to handle water. In fact, since the System also had pumps installed in this room to get water out of the area, Alice suspected that the System had multiple other pumps installed in other places. The group took a few minutes to inspect the golem docking bay, before confirming it held no important information, and then they continued on. They came to a large set of branching hallways ten minutes later. Fortunately, they were labelled with different colors. The hallway they had just come from was labelled with a green-orange coat of paint on the doorway leading to and from the hallway, and Alice saw several other branching hallways labelled with the same color. For now, she decided to assume that the green-orange color meant ‘Perk library.’ She would avoid those for now. Of the eight hallways branching out, there were two with very different colors. One was light blue, and the other was pink. Alice decided to go for blue. The group followed the light-blue hallway for another five minutes of walking, before Alice saw a portal, established through the System’s version of dimensional mana. Alice hesitated for a moment, before tossing a few pebbles through the portal to make sure it was safe. While one of the pebbles did start producing broken mana, the System quickly purified the broken mana through a few enchantments inscribed on the walls and floor. After confirming the pebbles were safe, Alice hesitantly led the group through the portal. Past another bend, the group found a different room. This one had a word Alice didn’t recognize inscribed on it - but even though Alice didn’t recognize the words, there was no mistaking the fact that most of the letters on the door were from the latin alphabet.