Immediately after the Society leader fell, Alice got a few System notifications.

    You have gained an achievement!

    Death of an Immortal (Rarity: 9)

    You directly contributed to a battle in which an Immortal fell.

    +200% growth speed for all combat-related classes, +50% growth speed for all Classes above level 75.

    Your mana becomes more effective at ignoring the inherent resistance to external mana that all life has.

    This Perk grows temporarily weaker if it is used too frequently in a short period of time.

    You have leveled up!

    Explorer of Magic: 90 - 91, Survivor: 69 - 73, Kinetic Manabinder 57 - 60

    Alice looked at her new Class levels, and then she grinned. She would finish dealing with this base first, but she was looking forward to getting a new wave of Perks to bolster her combat and research abilities. Even if she doubted [Kinetic Manabinder] and [Survivor] would help her handle the research she needed to get done, it would certainly help her survive any future problems that needed to be resolved with fists.

    As Alice was checking her System notifications, Ethan grabbed the notebook that the Society Leader had stuffed into Alice’s hands. After thumbing through it, Ethan seemed lost. Then, after a brief moment of confusion, he sighed, shook his head, and snorted.

    “Just a madman trying to justify his actions.” Then, Ethan sighed again. “Well, at the very least, the notebook contains what we came here for. Information about the Society’s inhumane experiments. As for the first three pages, they’re different. They look like a note from the Society leader to you. It looks like he was trying to justify what he did... as well as explain his actions. You can look at it or skip to the fourth page. It looks like the Immortal tried to format the information in a way that would be as helpful for you as possible,” he said. “Personally, I don’t put much stuck in that man’s beliefs. Regardless of what his ‘great goals’ were, he still murdered thousands of people in cold blood. Many of them were kids.”

    Alice felt a twinge of curiosity, mixed with revulsion. The Society leader had a ‘great goal’ he was pursuing? What could possibly justify so many innocent deaths? Alice couldn’t help but think back to the Society leader’s death. It had seemed... suspicious. The man had stepped in front of her, and instead of attacking her or kidnapping her, he had just... given her his notebook and died. And his first words had been ‘I thought so.’

    It almost felt like the man had expected, or even wanted to die here.

    Alice felt a moment of hesitation. Was it a good idea to read the first three pages of the notebook? The only things she ‘needed’ started on the fourth page. Then, Alice sighed, and opened the book to he first page. She had always been someone ruled by her curiosity. That was what had started her on this path in the first place.

    If you’re reading this, it means that you won.

    Your name is Alice, right? And if I’m not mistaken, you should be from that other dimension. I know very little about the world you came from, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.

    You may think of me as a madman, or a murderer.

    You would be correct. I’ve done many things that are despicable, and many things that make me seem mad. I cannot say that my conscience is clean - it hasn’t been from the moment I founded the Society of Starry Eyes.

    But my actions were necessary. I was working for the greater good - something that needed to happen. If nobody else stepped up, I had to do it. Otherwise, there would have been no hope for this world. Two dimensions would have collided, and as best I can tell, that would involve both planets teleporting into each other, or perhaps colliding. I can’t imagine that ending well for either world.

    Alice shuddered. Two dimensions colliding? She had to admit, after learning the origins of her arrival here, she hadn’t investigated much about how dimensional physics worked. There had just been one pressing issue after another, leaving her little time to investigate other interesting but irrelevant ideas. However, for a brief moment, Alice’s mind flashed to the meteor that had ended the dinosaurs. How much worse would it be if two planets collided? Or if they teleported into each other?

    Humans were capable of surviving in a pretty limited number of environments. Having another planet teleport into this one... Alice didn’t even know what that would look like. However, she suspected that no matter how it worked, it would still be an extinction event. The details were functionally irrelevant - if it happened, everyone was dead. She might not understand the exact hows of everyone’s death, but it probably didn’t matter.@@@@

    Alice turned her attention back to the notebook.

    Reality mana, contrary to Alice’s nickname for it, didn’t control reality. It didn’t even directly interact with the strings of mana that she had started to notice, the ones that seemed to serve as bridges between belief and reality. Instead, Reality mana did one thing - it either amplified, or weakened the impact of people’s beliefs on reality.

    Of course, it was quite a bit more complicated than just working as an amplifier or a limiter. It was more accurate to say that... defined things. It worked like a template - it allowed whoever used Reality mana to define what reality was ‘supposed’ to look like. Then, anything that made reality looked like it was ‘supposed to’ would be amplified. Meanwhile, anything that made reality look less like the template would be weakened. However, if the ‘template’ that reality mana pulled from was totally different from what the world looked like, the template might shatter completely, wasting all of the reality mana. It could serve as a way of stabilizing reality, or inducing small changes in the world - but it couldn’t totally warp the laws of reality and physics in an instant.

    Even though the mana type had some limitations, Alice still thought it was incredibly useful.

    Alice was only a high school student back on earth, but she still had a decent idea of what a lot of the building blocks of reality looked like. She could at least talk about how atoms, gravity, diseases, and a bunch of other things worked in basic terms. She could even describe some laws of physics with specific mathematical equations, since she at least knew basic equations like the equation for acceleration from gravity on Earth’s surface. Alice might not have the physics and biology understanding of, say, a college professor who had worked with those concepts for years, but she could do basic stuff.

    This new type of mana could stabilize the entire world, if she used it properly. If Alice could find a way to flood the planet with ‘reality’ mana, she might be able to prevent the creation of new manaborn - and also stop the laws of physics from slipping totally outside of comprehension. She had no idea how to flood the planet with reality mana... but it was a potential solution to a dangerous problem.

    As Alice was reading through the book, Ethan’s voice broke her out of her thoughts.

    “Alice, come look at this. I think we figured out how the Society created that massive mana void,” said Ethan, as Alice thought about how to use the newly found Reality mana.

    Alice made her way forward, and quickly realized why it had taken the group so long to find this particular secret.

    It was buried under a random floorboard. There was no direct way to access it - it was basically inaccessible if the group didn’t know what they were looking for already - or if they didn''t have a swarm of Allira’s shadows helping them find things that they might need. Alice suspected it might have been listed later on in the notebook the Society Immortal had given her - but at least so far, it hadn’t been mentioned.

    Alice made her way into the large room buried underneath an inconspicuous floorboard, and blinked in surprise.

    Just underneath the floorboards was one of the most complicated Artifacts Alice had ever seen. It dwarfed the complexity of even the other feats of madness in the Society base - it looked like someone had tried and failed to replicate some sort of lovecraftian horror entirely out of magic. The shapes, bends, and whorls of the enchantment before her were so ridiculous that Alice didn’t even know how to start making heads or tails of them.

    What was obvious was that the giant enchantment was siphoning mana out of everything above this floor for some reason. In exchange, it looked like it was converting it into reality mana, in mind-boggling quantities. All of this reality mana was concentrated into a giant stone container, which was also filled with layer after layer of complicated enchantments. At least this time, Alice could tell what all the enchantments were doing - they were obviously meant to help contain mana and keep it stable.

    Finally, there was a sort of ‘pipeline’ that seemed to lead directly out of the Artifact and towards the room where they had fought the Immortal. Alice realized this was probably how the Society had pulled off animating the fake ‘System’ statue. Reality mana had been pulled out of this room and used to help empower the statue.

    The last component of the room was a large steel cage. In a cage, unconscious, was [Scholar] Matista.

    In all of the chaos happening above, Alice had assumed that Matista had died. Her initial assumption had been that she would have been one of the many followers that were devoured by the System-knockoff statue, or perhaps the Society would have killed her in some other way.

    Contrary to Alice’s assumption, [Scholar] Matista seemed... fine.

    It only took Alice a few moments to make a guess about why.

    Alice had wanted to speak with Matista about the disappearance of mana in Morendia. The Society had kidnapped Matista because it would drag Alice here... but the Society had practically planned to lose this fight. The notebook the Immortal had given her was practically a way to stuff the Society’s legacy into Alice’s hands, and make sure she knew how to use it. As much as their actions were disgusting, the Society had genuinely wanted the world to survive.

    Since the Society had known Alice wanted to speak to Matista, they had kept her alive. Just in case Matista had any information Alice desperately needed.

    Alice sighed. The biggest reason that she had wanted to speak to Matista was because she wanted to know more about the weird lack of mana in the country. However, the giant enchantment right in front of her seemed to have the answers for that, meaning Matista herself was largely irrelevant now. Still, Alice was glad that at least one person had been spared from this whole mess.

    Having her former enemies extend goodwill and consideration towards her after their defeat felt odd. Alice was used to fearing the Society. However, at the end of the day, their leader and the top members of the organization had practically come here to commit suicide and give Alice what she needed to save the world. As much as their actions were awful, Alice could still see a trace of something admirable in their actions, buried underneath all the other horrible things they had done.

    She sighed, and decided not to think about it right now. Instead, it was time to awaken Matista, choose her Perks, and read the Society’s notebook. At the same time, Alice eyed the reality mana artifact, and grinned.

    She couldn’t reprogram the Artifact on her own. Luckily, the very reason the group had come to Morendia was to study under an Immortal [Enchanter]. She had just been thinking about how she could stabilize this world with some Reality mana. If they could get this thing working again, they might have a way to permanently solve one of the most headache-inducing problems after the collapse of the System.