A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World-Chapter 216

The next few days of the journey back to Illvaria were blessedly quiet. Alice had been half-expecting something to go wrong during the journey. Perhaps they would run into an unavoidable swarm of monsters, and be forced to fight for their lives, or another piece of terrain gone rogue due to the influence of mana. Alice had also been expecting to run into at least a few villages, where she might be able to get a few levels by healing people and helping them out.

None of these things happened.

This was for a very simple, if deeply depressing, reason.

As the group journeyed from Morendia back to Illvaria, every village they encountered was empty.

Some of the villages had already been empty when the group was heading towards Morendia, but there had still been plenty of populated villages, too. The villages they had encountered on the way to Morendia had seemed like they had been holding on, even if the villagers were worried and preparing for the worst.

Now, signs of hasty departure were present in most villages they passed through. Crops that could be harvested had been harvested, and houses were emptied of all of their valuable.s Meanwhile, other crops were left to rot in the fields, and other fields were left unplanted despite the arrival of spring. Swarms of monsters didn’t even bother attacking these deserted villages, because there was no mana for them to eat.

The hastily-evacuated villages were the lucky ones.

There were also evidence of other villages, which had come to far more grim fates. The broken houses, dried bloodstains, and half-eaten corpses were testament to the desperation of the villagers as they approached their ends. The group didn’t stop at any of these villages - they moved past them as quickly as possible. There was nothing they could do for the dead.

When the group stopped at their first populated town, Alice realized that monsters and refugees weren’t the only problems the world was facing. Originally, Alice had thought the group would restock their supplies in town, get a hot meal and a soft bed in an inn, and then move on. However, when the group made their way past the gates, Alice realized that the town was crammed full of people.

In and of itself, that wasn’t very strange - the village refugees had to go somewhere, after all. But then Alice started to notice that there weren’t very many people suffering from Class-mana madness. Or any, in fact. Alice had been hoping to gather a bit of Class mana by helping some people with the type of problem she could handle best, but quickly realized there was nobody for her to help.

This didn’t make very much sense to her. Class-mana madness was a near-inevitability in the current situation. Why weren’t there groups of people in the streets, struggling to fend off their increasing erratic and nonsensical desires?

“It’s malnutrition,” said Ethan, as he eyed her increasing confusion. “There’s not enough food, so the least productive members of society have died of starvation or dehydration. The people overcome by their uncontrolled class mana have likely already perished here. In the first place, without some form of governmental support, it would be hard for those overcome by class mana madness to survive. Here… it seems that the local government has not stepped in. There may still be a few families trying to keep their loved ones alive, but those without a support network have already fallen.”

Alice blinked in surprise.

“They died so fast? But it hasn’t even been two months since we were last in this region! Back then, things were at least somewhat controlled. How have things gotten so bad, so quickly? Why wouldn’t the local government step in to help people? I know some people don’t want to help other people, but…” Alice trailed off, as she tried to imagine hundreds of people being left to die during the crisis. Even if that thought wasn’t entirely foreign to her, she still felt that governments were supposed to step up and help people during a crisis.

Ethan sighed, and shook his head.

“Look at the weather,” he said. “Then, think about the villages we’ve encountered as we passed through the region.”

Alice frowned, and then observed the weather. She hadn’t noticed it, but the cold of winter had started to disappear, replaced with the first hints of Spring. It wasn’t actually springtime yet, but it was getting close. With a start, Alice realized that not only had spring returned - her seventeenth birthday had also come and gone sometime during the last month, and she hadn’t even noticed. Naturally, her System screen still claimed that she was sixteen - which only served to prove her growing disparity between the rate at which she and other people aged. The System recorded physical age, after all, not chronological age. Alice briefly wondered how long it would take before her System screen claimed she was seventeen, before Alice wondered if that day would ever come.

Alice realized she had gotten distracted, and turned back to Ethan.

“What does the weather have to do with people dying?” she asked. Then, a moment later, Alice frowned. Actually, this wasn’t a very hard question to answer, especially after Ethan drew her attention to it.

“The harvest,” said Alice.

Ethan nodded.

“There are a variety of crops that are grown throughout the Shil Confederacy, and a variety of Perks that [Farmers] use to help boost their harvest. This means that the amount of food a [Farmer] can harvest is far beyond what farmers from your world’s middle ages could accomplish. A [Farmer] here might not match up to the crop output your machines can produce, but there are still plenty of [Farmers] here who can grow crops during winter. This means that villages produce four harvests each year - one at the start of each season, typically. The winter harvest is by far the smallest, of course - you need to be of above average level to plant fruit in the middle of a pile of snow and still grow tasty crops out of it. But it certainly helps tide people through the early stages of spring, where people are planting and not harvesting crops. Combined with the villages that have been forced to evacuate, that means that people left behind stockpiles of food in their villages as they fled the approaching monster swarms… at the end of the day, it’s a double hit to food reserves.

“Worse, people know that there’s no spring harvest coming. The villagers who are supposed to plant and harvest those crops are hiding in the walls. Monster swarms are patrolling the wilderness, so nobody can go plant more crops. On top of that, even hunters are having a hard time hunting down animals and monsters for food, because there are too many monsters in the woods. Famine is approaching,” said Ethan. “It’s still in its early stages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a few towns have proactively removed the less productive members of their society in order to preserve their supplies.” There was a mixture of disgust and recognition in Ethan’s voice.

Alice grimaced. The idea of letting people die of thirst or starvation, simply because they weren’t capable of taking care of themselves, left an awful taste in her mouth. If this had been back on Earth, she would have loudly decried such actions as monstrous. Then again, on Earth, there had been far greater material abundance than in this world. Food had been plentiful, and she and her family had never struggled to take care of their basic needs. Famine was a problem that necessitated hard decisions, even if Alice didn’t like them.

Alice didn’t have a way to actually solve this town’s problems, and as far as she knew, neither did the rest of her group. Ethan, Allira, and Jonathan were Immortals - but they weren’t omnipotent. They couldn’t just solve problems with a wave of their hand. It wasn’t like the town had some sort of magical food stockpile that could resolve the looming famine if it were just distributed more equally. If Alice didn’t fix the System soon, famine would become imminent. In fact, even if Alice solved the System right this second, famine might still be imminent - although it would be lessened, at least, since humans could at least retake their farmlands once the monsters weakened again. But the only way more food would magically appear was if Jonathan used all of his Perks and spent several days growing crops here - which would leave the rest of the world at the mercy of the collapse of the System. There were probably hundreds of towns suffering from similar problems. Jonathan couldn’t help all of them.

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A moment later, Alice’s stomach lurched as she realized this was definitely happening elsewhere. If it was like this here… what did Illvaria look like?

Alice sighed, and shook her head.

“If there aren’t any people with class-mana madness here… I guess we should just keep going?” Alice said, although by the end, it sounded more like she was asking Ethan a question rather than making a statement.

Ethan sighed.

“I don’t see another way.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry that we can’t help them. I know you want to, but I can’t think of a way to do so - unless we empty our own storage Perks and give them food. But we can’t survive off of nothing either, and… well, to put it bluntly, if we distribute food like that, I’d rather do it in Illvaria.”

Alice felt her stomach tighten, but she gritted her teeth and nodded. They were about to set out for the mainframe of the System. They would need food when they went there - and the amount of food they needed was unknown, because Alice had no idea who would be coming with her, or how long it would take to fix the System. If she starved to death at the mainframe of the System right before she finished repairing the whole thing, just because she wanted to help people here, this world would perish.

The group spent a few hours trying and failing to find an inn room for the night. The town was crammed full of people - and many of those people were stuffed inside of overcrowded inns. As it got closer to the night, Alice realized with some surprise that some people were even sleeping on the floors of inn rooms or in the streets outside. Even more bizarre, some places no longer accepted metal coins as currency - they only accepted barter for things like food and clothing. At least in this little town, order and civilization had truly begun to break down.

That night, as Alice laid down to rest, dark thoughts about the state of this world swirled through her head. Despite how much death and suffering this world had already endured, the famine and desperation in this town reminded her that no matter what she did, she couldn’t truly undo the collapse of the System. She might be able to fix the System itself - but those who had died, and those who would die in the upcoming famine, were beyond her reach. No matter what she did from now on, there were some things she couldn’t fix anymore.

It was a depressing thought, and Alice spent several minutes wondering if there were ways she could have done better. Perhaps there were steps she could have taken to reduce the time between discoveries, or ways that she could have been faster. Perhaps if she had been better at surviving right as she arrived in this world, she might have sped up the time she took to reach Cyra? Or perhaps if she had just been smarter, if she had thought faster, she could have made discoveries about the System faster, and fewer people would have died.

It took her over an hour to finally drift off to sleep. In her dream library, she worked harder than ever, trying to eke out even a few more hours of research time as she tried to prepare for whatever was awaiting her in the System’s mainframe.

* * *

When the group left the town, they were in a somber mood. The tapestry of rising desperation, starvation, and despair woven through the town had done much to silence the group, and so they simply trudged through the wilderness in silence. The only communication was when Allira’s shadows spotted a monster swarm, which usually led to an immediate reroute to dodge the monsters. There wasn’t a point in clearing out a few monster swarms anymore - there were so many swarms that a few here or there wouldn’t make a difference. Monsters were outright besieging the capitals of some smaller countries already, and the world beyond the walls of the cities had already slipped out of human hands.

Meanwhile, Alice continued to keep an eye on Immortal Jonathan and his son. As far as she could tell, the [Explorer] magic seed that she had put into Jacob was still working fine. She still hadn’t figured out how to purify the broken mana the seed produced by operating, but at this point, it was clearly a minor concern. Alice had tried purifying Jacob’s body of broken mana, and had found that it was actually easier to purify than regular broken mana, for reasons she didn’t understand but was thankful for.

The group continued to journey onward, until they returned to the swamp that they had explored when they were first journeying towards Morendia. Alice noticed, with some relief, that the swamp had shrunk significantly from the last time they had seen it. The swamp didn’t seem quite as vibrant to her mana sight, and it was far more difficult to spot odd monsters or manaborn creatures flitting through the depths of the marsh as the group passed by. Far more importantly, the swamp no longer blocked their path. It was only visible from the distance as the group moved by it on the road. Of course, there was still something deeply unsettling about the way the swamp looked, especially when Alice wasn’t looking directly at the swamp. It felt like every time she took her eyes off of it, the swamp was looking back at her. Alice had a sinking feeling that at some point, belief mana would turn the swamp back into a problem - but at least for now, it was manageable.

Normally, Alice would have loved to explore the weird changes to the magical swamp over the past several weeks, since it would have provided a lot of valuable data about how manaborn monsters and terrain worked. With three Immortals by her side, dying was very difficult. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough time. So instead, Alice convinced Ethan and Allira to let her run a very small test at the border of the swamp, and then tried dumping some reality mana right on the edge of the trees. She also used her rulebook of coding mana to establish the rules swamps were ‘supposed’ to work off of.

The swamp… did nothing. Alice had been kind of expecting the swamp to just shrivel up and die, or at least retreat from the area, the moment she showered it with reality mana, but unfortunately, she couldn’t see much of a reaction at all.

At the very least, showering the swamp with some reality mana made Alice stop feeling like something was watching her, which was a plus. She wasn’t sure if the feeling had even been grounded in reality to begin with, but if it had been, she might have removed some sort of unknown danger from their surroundings. Not that Ethan and Allira couldn’t have handled most threats anyway, but Alice still hoped she hadn’t just wasted some time doing nothing at all.

Finally, after another week of travel, the group arrived at Illvaria. The number of empty towns and decimated villages they had passed in that time had been… haunting. The cities and towns were crowded and starving, and the villages were empty or destroyed by monsters. In a grim way, it made Alice wonder which was truly worse - a slow, despair-laden death as you slowly withered away from hunger, or a quick end in the jaws of a monster. ƒгeeweɓn૦vel.com

When they returned to Illvaria’s borders, Alice’s heart sank when she saw the fort guarding the border of the country. Like many towns they had passed by, it was empty.

Fortunately, as they kept walking, Alice was pleased to see that the country hadn’t suffered quite as badly as the rest of the world. The border was now unguarded, but there were still villagers and [Guards] maintaining order in some of the villages they passed through. Several [Soldiers] and [Guards] seemed lightly injured, and Alice didn’t have the heart to ask if any of them had lost friends or family members during the chaos. However, it was obvious that Alice’s early relief efforts in Illvaria had made at least some kind of difference.

The most obvious sign of this was the presence of filtration rings. In most villages that Alice passed by, villagers didn’t seem to be under very much threat from class-mana madness, at least for those with common classes like [Farmer] or [Soldier]. Every single functional village that the group passed by had at least a few class-mana filtration rings for common Classes, all designed after the ones Alice had originally made during the early days of the crisis. Alice wasn’t sure how the Illvarians had gotten so many rings ready in time, since Cecilia hadn’t had that many [Enchanters] working on the problem. Perhaps they had levelled up, and managed to blindly pick a few beneficial Perks, even though they couldn’t see their perk options without display mana?

Or perhaps Achievements were what had made the difference. Making enchantments that directly fended off a dire crisis affecting the whole world had to be worth some pretty amazing Achievements. Alice wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if Cecilia’s [Enchanters] had gotten some incredibly potent Achievements that helped them ramp up production and quality of their rings to levels that they would never have reached without help. Either way, Alice decided to celebrate the small blessing, even if it was a thin comfort after all they had seen on the journey back.

As the group travelled back towards Metsel, Alice hoped that her work would be enough to keep Illvaria together as the group left, hopefully for the final time.

It wouldn’t be long now. Once they reached the capital, they would meet up with Murim, and then set off towards the System’s mainframe.