The twitching, shivering mass of stone looked at them, and Alice shivered as a strange sense of disquiet settled in the pit of her stomach. It was like no living thing she had ever seen before. The bits of chaotic rainbow mana it emanated were unsettling. It looked like someone had tried and failed to create some sort of... half-baked System mana. However, dozens of parts were missing, and the structure was completely wrong.

    If Alice compared it to a painting, it was as if someone had heard about the Mona Lisa, and then, without ever seeing the painting, had tried to replicate it using a completely different color palette. Then, halfway through the painting process, they had accidentally dumped several buckets of paint onto the canvas, decided it looked better that way, and called it a day. The strange statue was both familiar and unfamiliar in a deeply unsettling way.

    However, there was a strange beauty to it, hiding underneath the nightmarish, twisted surface of the strange System mana. Alice was reminded of her own first attempts at creating System mana. Her current attempts to replicate the System were also bizarre, twisted mockeries of the original System - even after all this time, she hadn’t figured out how to perfectly replicate the System, even if she was able to ‘replace’ most of it with semi-effective solutions.

    Alice saw a pair of rainbow chunks of mana snap around their group, isolating the [Mercenaries] from the rest of the group. Then, Allira and Ethan glared at the statue, as if it owed them money and refused to return it.

    “What the hell is this?” asked Allira, finally breaking Alice out of her stupor. “This... I don’t even know what I’m looking at.” Allira’s eyes were locked on the twitching, writhing mass of stone. Even though Allira couldn’t see mana as far as Alice knew, the woman still seemed disturbed by the bizarre image.

    “It looks like a cult,” said Ethan, softly. “They’re very rare, since the church of the System is dominant on the southern continent and most of the central continent. Even those that spurn the Church of the System usually turn to the Church of Mana instead. However, occasionally, a few people stop worshipping either the System or mana, and worship something... else. Usually an exceptionally powerful monster. I’ve heard it’s particularly common in societies that get isolated for long periods of time but manage to survive - though there are only a few cases that I know of. Most ‘cults’ appeared before the colonization of the southern continent, and disappeared on their own. Not much future in worshipping a monster, after all.” Ethan grimaced. “I have no idea why a ‘cult’ would appear in the Society, though. As far as I know, they don’t worship anything. They just want power and don’t care how they get it.”

    “What are the people here even worshipping?” asked Jonathan, as he also gazed at the twisted, messy chunks of mana and stone, as well as the half-dead worshippers. “It looks almost like they offered their own bodies to their ‘god’ as sustenance or something. Are you sure this stone thing isn’t a monster? Or a manaborn or something?”

    Alice shook her head. “The stone looks like it was carved,” said Alice. “I think this is sort of like a manaborn, but not quite the same. It seems like it was artificially made.” Alice took a single, hesitant step forward, and squinted at the statue. “I think the Society was trying to recreate the System, but in a completely different way from what I’ve been trying.” At first, her voice was unsteady. However, the more she spoke, the more confident Alice became.

    “That’s...” Cecilia’s eyes widened, as she looked at the space in front of them. “Did they try what I think they tried? That’s... insane. But also kind of brilliant.”

    Alice nodded. “I hadn’t thought of trying to fix the System like this,” she said, as she saw Jonathan’s confused expression. “I’ve been trying to fix the actual, underlying mechanisms behind how the System works, but I’ve always approached it from the ‘underlying logic’ of mana. I thought that just made sense. The System is made of mana, and so I just thought it made sense to fix it based on the same principles. But the Society tried to repair the System using human belief,” said Alice. “If everyone believes that something is true, then at least to some extent, it will be true. That’s a big part of how mana and belief interact with each other. If you can convince everyone that the pile of rocks in front of you is a manifestation of the System, or some sort of substitute...”

    “Ah. I see,” said Jonathan.

    Ethan shook his head in disgust. “That’s actually kind of clever. But what the hell is up with the people here?” He looked at the half-dead, delirious worshippers, as well as the numerous corpses, and then snorted. Then, he glanced at Alice. “Did it work? Do you know?”

    Alice leaned closer to one of the little snippets of pseudo-System mana that the living pile of stone had emitted, and then frowned.

    “No. At least, I don’t think so,” she said. Even though Alice wasn’t quite sure what the statue’s pseudo-System mana did, it definitely didn’t work the way the System was supposed to. The System mana she was familiar with was a compound mana. It combined several different types of mana together to create a specific series of magic effects, all of which together formed the System. It was carefully organized and structured.

    The stone statue’s rainbow mana looked more like slurry. It was disorganized, chaotic madness that would have fit better in a Lovecraftian horror story, instead of the System. There were some chunks of mana that Alice recognized from the actual System, such as organic mana and pure mana, but they were barely connected at all. Worse, several types of mana that she had identified were completely missing, making the statue’s knockoff System mana dubious at best.

    “The Society tried something interesting, but it doesn’t look like they got it to work. I guess that for ‘worship’ to create a functioning variant of System mana, the worshippers need to understand what they’re worshipping. Or at least, they need to have a rough understanding of it,” said Alice.

    “That’s... both relieving and disappointing,” said Ethan. “If this had worked, it would have been a good way to fix some of the smaller issues in your progress...” he said, as he glanced at Alice. Alice also sighed. As disgusting as this scene was, it represented a potential path to resolving the crisis. Unfortunately, it had failed.

    A moment later, Ethan’s face darkened. “Even for me, this is pretty bad,” he said. “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do here. We’ll still try, but...” he shook his head.

    Alice nodded, while Allira started humming. A few shadows started gently picking up all of the other people, before they started to transport them out of the room.

    Meanwhile, Alice finally got her stomach back under control, and glared at the vile room.

    Based on her understanding of how beliefs and mana interacted with each other, this shouldn’t have been enough to animate the statue in the center of the room. The Society would have still somehow needed to establish a firm idea that the statue in the center of the room was both alive, and the System. Currently, she didn’t see any way for them to have accomplished that. There didn’t seem to be any direct link between the people’s beliefs and the statue. What was the missing link here?

    Alice stepped closer to the giant statue. “Ethan?” she asked. “If I try to investigate that statue, can you protect me if something goes wrong and it tries to kill me?”

    Ethan squinted at the statue.

    “Hmm... I have to admit, I’m not sure,” he said. “I’d like to say yes, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this before. I could probably keep you safe if something went wrong - but I’m not going to risk your safety on a ‘probably’ unless we have no other choice. That thing is weird, and I don’t know what it can do.”

    Alice winced. That was... reasonable. She was asking Ethan if he could keep her safe from something he had never seen before, with totally unknown abilities. The situation was as unpredictable as it could possibly get.

    She hesitated. The statue might be able to give her more information - but she also didn’t want to get killed by it. Ethan, seeing her hesitate, sighed.

    “I’ll go up to it,” said Ethan. “I’m mostly confident that I’ll be fine if I try to interact with the statue - I’m just not sure if I could pull you out if it moved fast enough and it targeted you. You’re much less resilient against assassination attempts or sudden, dangerous attacks than the rest of us. If I can get a better handle on its abilities and decide it’s not dangerous, you can take a look then. I know you won’t get anywhere near as much information as if you used your own Perks to investigate it while it’s still alive - but if you die, we won’t get any data at all.”

    Alice sighed, but nodded. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it was probably the best one she would get. Without the protection of an Immortal, she really didn’t want to mess with the statue too much. It hadn’t reacted to their attempts to save people so far - but it was impossible to say what would set it off.

    Ethan moved out of the group and started making his way towards the statue. The moment he stepped within a certain range of the statue, it finally stopped ignoring them. It perked up, before it started to move.

    Alice had never seen such an unnatural, inorganic method of movement before. As the statue twisted and bent to face Ethan, Alice realized that her earlier assessment was wrong. She had thought the statue was made entirely of stone, but now, she could see that wasn’t entirely true. The statue had little bits of mana-flesh stuck in between other parts of its body - but nowhere near enough to allow it ‘normal’ movement. So instead, it grated, and screeched, and twisted as it turned towards Ethan. It moved more like something out of a child’s nightmare, rather than a real, living thing.

    Ethan froze, and forty magic tendrils sprouted out of his body as he stared at the statue. Before either Ethan or the statue moved, Alice heard a clicking sound on the side of the room. She turned towards it, and saw another batch of Society members. Unlike the previous group of Society members they had fought, these Society members were high level, elite Mages. Alice estimated the lowest level one was level 60, and most were probably level 70 or 80. There were over a hundred of them.

    At their front, there were four people that Alice immediately realized were either Immortals, or very close. She even recognized one of them - the near Immortal that had ambushed her when she and Ethan were returning from Cyra. The man who led them gave Alice a strangely courteous nod.

    “Miss Alice, as well as Immortal Allira and Ethan. It took you longer than expected to arrive here,” he said.