That night, the expedition set up camp well away from the broken mana region. Even though it would force the expedition to travel to and from the area, wasting several hours out of every day, nobody wanted to be caught off-guard if a monster swarm decided they were food. Maintaining a healthy distance was an important precaution.
After camp was set up and people finished talking around campfires for a while, Illa privately asked for Alice to come chat with her for a while. When Alice showed up, Illa simply gave her a glance before turning back to a piece of paper on the ground.
“Do you know how to read maps?” Asked Illa.
Alice took a look at the map, making sure that she could actually read it. She obviously knew how to read maps on Earth, but there was no guarantee that people on an entirely different planet made maps in the same way. Luckily, it looked fairly close to the maps she was used to. Even if it was in black and white, and a bit off, all of the symbols were easy to understand and she could still tell what the map was depicting.
“Yeah, I do. The map looks pretty close to the ones at home,” said Alice.
“Then look over here,” said Illa, giving some parts of the map a glance.
The map had been drawn and written on, carefully detailing the expedition’s course, as well as the areas immediately surrounding Cyra. Alice couldn’t help but feel more surprised the more closely she looked at the map – based on her understanding of this world, it should have been fairly difficult for a map this detailed to have been available, especially for a newly settled frontier area. Even though there were some parts of the map that weren’t particularly detailed, especially to the south and east of Cyra, the level of detail was still astonishing considering the fact that mapmakers would need to deal with monster attacks every step of the way.
“Do you remember exactly what path you took to get to Cyra in the first place? And do you have any impressions of the Broken mana area? Do you know if it’s expanding or contracting?” Even though the female mage had already estimated that the area was likely shrinking, Illa wanted to make sure. Illa had originally expected for the expedition to spend a great deal of time combing over the broken mana region, relying on Alice’s memory to lead the expedition to the spot before the expedition would break up into smaller groups and search around. After all, there was no way a small pocket of densely packed mana would exist for long, right? Monsters would eat it out of existence in moments if such a thing existed.
However, to Illa’s surprise, what she had instead come across an ocean of monsters and broken mana. This forced her to drastically revise her plans – the expedition obviously couldn’t just merrily stroll about in the area, or kill off all of the monsters in the area before searching it. The quantity of monsters was way too high for the expedition to even put a dent in the monster population, and the monsters would fight back if they were attacked.
Therefore, she had to rely on a completely different method to gather more information about the broken mana zone. Most problematically, she had no ability to investigate the region directly. After all, sending a guard into the region would just be sending them to their death if anything went wrong. The massive monster population might not be aggressive right now, but they could be compared to a ticking time bomb. And most problematically, nobody knew how many seconds were left before it exploded.
Alice quickly nodded, looking at the map again. She took a few minutes to familiarize herself with the map, before she finally started trying retrace her journey to Cyra as best as she could. Most of it was just ‘follow the river and dodge monsters,’ so it wasn’t too hard to show on the map. However, once Alice got to the bits before she had reached the river, things started to get fuzzy. Especially because, as of now, the landscape around the broken mana zone was totally unrecognizable. It was just a mass of dead trees and monsters, making it hard to distinguish any landmarks at all in the area. Still, she did her best to describe most parts of her journey, as Illa traced her finger along parts of the map and nodded along. Then, Illa turned her attention from the map back to Alice.
“How about the broken mana region? That is what I’m most worried about. Is there anything in particular you remember about it? I know you said you went through your mana baptism here, and you also didn’t have the ability to see mana yet, but are there any interesting tidbits you can remember? Even if you didn’t know what the mana looked like at the time, were there any other unusual things in this area at the time?”
Alice frowned, trying to remember. She hadn’t been able to see mana when she first arrived in this world, making it impossible for her to know what the mana had looked like before she had come here.
“When I first came here, there weren’t many monsters in the area. Wait, there was one thing – I remember running into an animal on my first day here. It seemed like it was… basically dead, actually. Limbs falling off, blood everywhere – I didn’t stop to think much about it, especially since I learned that monsters exist here, but…” Alice frowned. Now that she thought about it, the animal she had seen on that night hadn’t given her a Perk for meeting a monster. And, in fact, the animal didn’t behave like a monster either. It had chased her off and then went back to dying in its little corner of the world. She described her memories of the broken mana zone as well as she could, but Illa frown only deepened.
“I will be honest with you – the broken mana zone looks far too large to have only summoned one person. Or even just a few people. Given the… violent reactions most living beings encounter when they absorb enough mana from their surroundings in a short period of time, animals also suffer from mana poisoning – and their survival odds are much, much worse than humans. I suspect… that you were probably not pulled here alone.” Illa seemed thoughtful. “It almost sounds like that animal was reacting in the same way as you were – encountering mana for the first time and basically frying itself.”
Alice frowned, imagining the body of the animal in question as she tried to remember what it had looked like. Now that she thought about it carefully…
She swore she remembered thinking it resembled a raccoon, didn’t she? Suddenly, Alice shivered, before she looked back at Illa. “What does it look like when someone fails their baptism?”
“It varies a bit from person to person, but usually there are a variety of strange growths that start cropping up inside and outside of their body at first. These expand over the course of a few hours, before they explode. These explosions happening all throughout the body cause internal organ damage as well as lesions and bleeding pustules on the surface of the skin. However, most problematic of all is the fact that once someone fails their baptism, they never stop producing those growths. Their body will continuously absorb mana, accelerating the process, and the growths will multiply.” Illa frowned. “A few studies tried to move some patients who had failed their baptism into a room isolated from mana, but the patients suffered from weakness, dizziness, and a variety of other effects before they died. Most people theorized this was due to cutting them off from something as vital as mana, coupled with the fact their bodies were already collapsing. In any case, cutting them off from mana sped up their deaths, and the survival rate for people failing their mana baptism remains at zero. Even if an [Organic Mage] sits with you for the rest of your life and tries to keep healing and repairing the damage, they can’t stop the actual problem – just slow down the process of the body destroying itself.”
Alice also frowned, sinking into thought. Strange growths that multiplied across the body…
Come to think of it, didn’t this sound kind of like cancer? Alice was no doctor, but she was at least familiar with the basic concept of cancer. A cell gets messed up somehow, starts reproducing, and before long, a few cells with a slightly incorrect reproduction code begin multiplying until a growth forms in the body. This spreads across the body until the problematic cells are killed off, or the body dies. Or something like that? Alice didn’t really understand all of the theory behind treating cancer, but she thought she remembered that being the idea behind radiation treatment, at least.
Granted, cancer growths didn’t explode after a few hours. Still, she felt that there was at least a faint resemblance. If a raccoon had suffered from super-cancer for several hours before the cancerous cells exploded, would it have looked like the strange creature she had seen on her first day here?
Alice tried to line up the two images in her head, and after some thinking, she felt that the two matched each other.
“I think you’re right. The creature… the animal I saw on my first day here didn’t give me an Achievement for encountering a monster, and it faintly resembles an animal from my home world called a raccoon…” Alice spent several minutes describing everything she remembered from her first day on this world in greater detail. Illa asked her several questions along the way, helping tease out further details from Alice’s memory as Alice tried to remember everything she could about the broken mana zone.
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Finally, Illa sighed, looking back into the distance. “All right, you can go to sleep for now. You have last watch again. I’ll think some more about this,” said the woman, absently tapping her leg as she thought to herself.
Alice obliged, and that was the end of the expedition’s first day in the broken mana region.
* * *
The next day was filled with a great deal more circling the region, calculating, and Perk usage. However, there was one new addition to the Expedition’s findings that Alice found particularly interesting.
“Is that a wall?” Asked one of the [Guards], looking into the distance.
“Huh? Johan, that’s ridicu – damn. You’re right, it looks like a fragment of a wall,” said another [Guard], squinting as he looked into the broken mana zone. “What the hell?”
“What are you seeing?” Asked Illa, heading over to them.
Alice also squinted, trying to figure out what the [Guards] were looking at. This region was relatively clearer of monsters because the broken mana quantity was lower, but it was still a disgusting, squirming mass most of the way around. However, Alice still couldn’t see what the [Guards] were referring to. For a brief moment, Alice wished that she had access to the vision-related Perk she had passed over from her [Scientist] class, but she quickly dismissed the thought. She had collected a few interesting samples of spidercrab corpses over the course of the Expedition, and regretting her choice was pointless either way.
“Why the wall so… purple?” Asked the first [Guard].
“Who put so much bloody dye on a WALL? Why is it in the middle of nowhere? Why does it look it was just… chopped half? Am I dreaming?”
“If they used so much dye, they must have been a noble or a merchant, right? There’s no way a commoner household could ever afford to use purple dye like that.”
“My Perks are claiming that it’s the lost property of a commoner family though.”
“A Commoner family using Purple dye on a WALL? That’s ridiculous. There’s no way that’s correct. Are there any corner cases known for when that specific Perk will give incorrect readings?”
“None that would relate to this scenario… I think.” The [Guard] didn’t’ sound convinced himself, and he turned to Illa. “I’m seeing a wall that looks like it just got chopped in half. No sign of the other half of the wall. It’s… purple. Really, really purple. The kind of color you usually see from the Corellion Empire with a high shipping fee. But it’s on a wall. I can’t tell what material the wall is made out of, either. It looks completely random, too. No sign of any of whatever it was supposed to be attached to, if it was supposed to be attached to anything. I have no idea what I’m looking at.”
Illa turned to Alice, and Alice frowned as well.
“Alice, would you take a look with me?” Asked Illa.
“How are we going to do that?”
“I’ll fly you over. Just make sure to hang on, and don’t wiggle around too much – even for me, flying takes a lot of mana. I don’t want to spend too much extra mana stabilizing our balance, since I already need to compensate for your weight,” said Illa. “Oh, and if you see any monsters lob any aerial attacks at us, give deflecting it a go. I know you’re still a bit of a novice mage, and I can probably deal with it, but it’ll put some strain on me, and if we’re in midair dropping us would be catastrophic.”
Alice nodded, and Illa quickly gave Alice a big hug before she took off. The two began floating. Alice frowned at the sensation – it was nothing like she had been expecting. Illa wasn’t actually moving her body in midair, probably because living flesh resisted mana. Instead, it seemed like Illa’s clothes were simply dragging her upwards, and Illa and Alice happened to be carried along for the ride. Alice felt as if she could fall at any minute, even though Illa wasn’t actually doing anything that might risk her fall. The clothes themselves also felt ridiculously sturdy right now.
Illa flew them through the air for a few minutes, and the two gradually approached the object in question. However, when Alice saw the object, she felt a mixture of confusion and familiarity.
Isn’t that the wall from the house down the street?