Chapter 261 |
The System’s central processing hub was more complicated than Alice had expected. She had already known that it would be unusual - after all, this was the enchantment that basically ran the entire planet, or at least the human side of it. However, the sheer number of different kinds of mana operating in the central hub took her completely off guard. This surprise only grew deeper the more Alice investigated the central processing unit - she ran into at least a dozen different kinds of mana, and two of them were compound types that she had a seriously hard time even separating to investigate in more detail.
Alice was also surprised by the number of mana types present in the room for a different reason - she was starting to realize a problem. The creator of the System, obviously, hadn’t had access to the System. The System was the biggest reason that people could create new magic seeds safely, and increase their capacity for magic seeds. Alice had Perks that could help her raise her capacity today… but how had the creator of the System managed to create so many different kinds of compound mana? Based on her understanding of how magic worked before the System, mages of those times got sick because their magic seeds were usually imperfect. Alice had already seen how badly imperfect magic seeds could hurt their users. The creator of the System might have lucked out when creating a few magic seeds - after all, an education from Earth could at least go some of the way towards correcting the issues of a flawed magic seed. However, could he really get lucky enough to create so many different kinds of compound mana, especially the dozens of new types present in the central processing unit?
One of the types of mana that she had never seen before provided her with an answer, in a rather unexpected way. As she investigated both the past snapshots of the System’s core, and the current state of things, she realized that most of the new kinds of mana must have developed after the creator of the System left. In other words, the System’s automated expansion had constantly created and then utilized totally new types of mana as it grew. When she tried to figure out how the System accomplished this, she found one of the earliest types of mana - one that must have been central to the growth of the System, and perhaps central to its very creation.
The type of new mana was something Alice decided to term ‘blueprint’ mana, and it was one of the more creative uses of strings of belief mana Alice had seen.
Blueprint mana only had one function - it constrained strands of belief mana. To put it in simpler terms, Blueprint mana was a kind of mana that treated belief mana as metal, which could be poured into a mold and pounded into a proper shape. It wove all of the chaotic, disorganized beliefs surrounding the System, and wove it all into one grand blueprint, which the original creator of the System had laid out from the beginning. This kind of mana even had subtle filtration abilities, which would allow slightly incorrect beliefs to be converted into parts of the blueprint with few ill effects besides some mana inefficiency. The creator of the System had clearly constructed some kind of base framework for the System, gave it the blueprint to help it expand, and then created some rules and setup for further expansion, thus giving the central processing unit every authority it needed to keep making the System larger, stronger, and more stable. The central processing unit itself was then responsible for organizing where materials needed to go, when the System needed to expand, where and how to mine or grow the resources for the System’s base materials, and what kinds of designs needed to be present in any blueprint-type room. At least, those were the functions Alice could make out at a glance.
It also answered a few of Alice’s final lingering questions, such as why the System had never come to life. Plenty of people in this world believed the System was a benevolent, sapient god that worked hard allow them room to grow, hated laziness, and had all kinds of specific personality traits - but Alice had never seen any evidence that the System was actually sapient in the first place.
The ‘grand blueprint’ of the System was the answer. The System’s blueprint was designed in such a way that the System simply couldn’t gain sapience or sentience. This was obviously a specific worry of the System’s creator - in the ‘blueprint’ for the System, Alice saw nearly six different fallback points that ensured the System could never grow into a real, thinking being.
From this discovery, Alice extrapolated a few more things. Belief mana was one of the critical, core components of the System’s framework, and it was actively and explicitly used to help maintain some of the System’s more absurd and difficult feats. She could see other parts of the System designed to make System mana invisible to those without some kind of special permission from the System - probably to prevent exactly what had happened when someone came to the core of the System and ruined the whole thing. If enough [Enchanters] knew about the feats that occurred daily within the System, it was easy to imagine them accidentally inviting a bunch of monstrous guests into the interior, or some nation abusing the System for their own purposes - and the creator of the System had obviously been just as wary of that occurrence as Alice herself. The System creator had also added in a few other, more baffling safety stipulations - such as restrictions on how many weapons the System could ever possess at one time, how far any weapons of war or destruction could ever be from the System’s mainframe, and an absolutely ridiculous number of restrictions on how much the System could harm humans, under what circumstances it was okay to do so, and when it was reasonable. (Basically, the only time it was allowed was when humans invaded the mainframe of the System).
Alice wasn’t quite sure why the creator of the System had spent so much time on some of the contingencies he had woven into the System’s blueprint, but she had a few guesses. Based on the aesthetic of the System, it was pretty clearly designed to resemble a kind of sci-fi civilization. It was entirely decorative, but it spoke of the System creator’s tastes. If the creator of the System was a fan of sci-fi novels, Alice could easily imagine that the man had been familiar with the concept of rogue or rebellious AIs overthrowing humanity. That was probably why the man had taken so many precautions against the System going rogue, or at least that was Alice’s best guess for what she was looking at. Since she couldn’t exactly ask the creator of the System what he had been thinking at the time, all Alice could really do was look at what was programmed into the System’s blueprint and speculate.
There were also a fair number of contingencies devoted to other things - such as ‘banning’ concepts from Earth the System creator thought might end the world. Such as the concept of spacetime, black holes, and strong nuclear force. Alice vaguely remembered being confused about why the System banned those, back when she was new to this world - but now, she suspected the creator of the System was just worried that if people started questioning the nature of spacetime or physics too much, it might break something and kill everyone instantly.
Still, while a few of the creator’s contingencies hadn’t worked as planned, Alice was still impressed by the breadth and depth of the creator’s contingencies against all kinds of random, crazy problems that might appear. There were prescribed actions for the System to take which could handle anything from asteroids, to extinction-level volcanic eruptions, to most other forms of extinction event, and how the System could quickly reorganize belief mana to give people ways to survive the catastrophe, ranging from designing totally new Classes to help people get the survival tools they needed, to pulling on any beliefs people had about ‘fairness’ and using those to outright remove things that would kill people too easily. Even if the System creator missed some potential disasters, such as the Tragedy of Allenheim, where people had messed up dimensional mana and accidentally gave an entire city mana baptisms, there was clearly a lot of thought put into most of the System’s blueprint and framework.
Alice could also see why the creator of the System had never taught people about his fears of the System becoming an AI overlord. The creator of the System had known exactly how belief mana worked, and if he directly informed people of how the System worked, how belief mana interacted with it, and all of his fears about what the System could become, then human caution about the System would increase. Paradoxically, this would actually make it much more likely that the System would snap and turn into some kind of dangerous entity scheming against humanity.
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Thus, all of the Creator’s fears and worries about what the System might become were baked into this blueprint itself, instead of the beliefs people had about the System and what it was supposed to be.
The System creator’s fears about an AI uprising were also probably why the System had very little way to handle the monster infestation - the System was explicitly regarded as a danger to humanity if it had too many ‘offensive’ tools. Thus, the creator of the System had intentionally disarmed and de-fanged the System before he left, leaving the System more helpless than he had probably anticipated against the monster infestation.
Alice hadn’t even thought about the System turning against humanity - she had gotten so used to the obviously ‘working’ version of the System that she hadn’t even thought about how much scarier the System might have looked to someone who didn’t have thousands of years of history to examine, in which the System had (mostly) done what it was supposed to. Even if some of the smaller contingencies within the System had failed, most of the more important ones had worked exactly the way they were supposed to.
Apart from the blueprint with a ridiculous number of contingencies woven in, the rest of the System’s central processing unit looked a lot more in line with Alice’s expectations. The first major parts that Alice decoded were parts to figure out what the overall ‘state’ of the System was in, which had a bunch of sub-programs dedicated to mining materials, storing them, and making the decision for when a new room needed to be built or an old room needed to be expanded. Then, she figured out which parts sensed when new beliefs had formed in the outside world that needed to be recorded and converted into a new Class. She also quickly decoded a part where the System recorded the laws of physics and then sent them over to a different part of the System, where Alice suspected the System actually implemented its blueprint for how reality and the laws of physics should work. She hadn’t found that room yet, but she decided it wasn’t too important. Once she got the mainframe and the golem assembly line back up, the rest could be repaired by the System itself.
The other thing that Alice noticed was that the room itself was unique. While within the room, Alice had a much easier time sensing how beliefs interacted… with her. It was as if the System’s core processing unit was built, not just to create a stable ‘blueprint’ for the rest of the System and the rest of the planet. It was also built to create a blueprint for a person.
A person who fit the role of the ‘creator and/or maintainer of the System.’
Alice couldn’t be sure why the room had this effect, since it seemed to be maintained by a mixture of blueprint mana and a few other kinds of unidentified mana. However, she had a guess. She suspected this combination of mana was how the System itself had been created.
The System was way too complex. Based on Cecilia’s reading of the creator’s diary, the creator of the System had been a doctor. Not an engineer, not a civilization planner - just a regular doctor who enjoyed sci-fi novels, had a wife and a kid waiting for him back in Finland, and some sort of background as a medic during a war - probably World War 2, or the Winter war, or something of the sort. How had he managed to create such a massive, important enchantment in little more than a decade or two after landing in a world where his very survival should have been a miracle already?
This specific enchantment helped her visualize how that might have happened.
Perhaps the System creator had told a lot of people about his plans to create the System first. Perhaps he had wowed the people living here with miracles related to modern technology, by leaning on his background in medicine - and then used that to set up the expectation that he would succeed in creating the System as well. If enough people believed that he could save them, perhaps he had used strings of belief mana to intentionally mess with his own head, making him supernaturally good at designing the System. In a very weird way, the System creator had basically built a do-it-yourself version of a Class. It had probably had all kinds of problems with it, such as messing with his personal freedom and having other unintended side effects - but the creator of the System might have intentionally used that to boost his own productivity, and made himself better at the task he had assigned himself - saving this world and then returning to Earth.
This might also be why the System creator had stumbled at the last step of getting home - perhaps he hadn’t had the same level of skill when he was trying to design a dimensional passage back to Earth. If he’d had some kind of intelligence boost while creating the System, but that very same boost had failed him when he was creating a passage back to Earth, it could have created a huge problem. It would be even worse if he didn’t notice or understand this problem, which was entirely reasonable if he didn’t have a perfect understanding of how everything worked together.
Alice had little evidence for this theory, beyond this room’s amplification effect on belief mana, the system creator’s failed passage to Earth, and the man’s diary… but she felt like she might have finally understood the truth behind how the System was created, how it was designed, and what it had and hadn’t accomplished.
Since Alice had plenty of new seeds she could create due to her magic seed creation Perk, she decided to integrate Blueprint mana into her knockoff System seed. Then, with the help of her new mana type, the group retreated back to the power supply room. The Illvarians who had remained in the power supply to guard the area hadn’t run into any major problems so far, which was a relief - part of Alice had almost expected some kind of nightmare scenario to be waiting for them when they returned. Instead, all they had run into were a few stray spiders - enough to remind them that having a few guards remaining behind was a good idea, and there were indeed some surviving monsters - but not enough to pose any real threat. With just a few spiders attacking, even a group of three or four regular Illvarian mages could have fended them off.
The group went to sleep for the night. The next morning, Alice once again turned off the power supply for an hour, in order to starve out any remaining spiders. Doll and Allira once again ran through a systematic cleanup attempt, using a mixture of golems and shadows.
Then, Alice returned back to the power supply room. Now that most of the monsters were dead, Doll had converted the golem production rooms back to the more production-oriented System variants, instead of Doll’s war golems, so Alice had a small group of production golems following her.
From there, Alice started setting up a new blueprint using her own blueprint mana. This one was meant to rebuild what had been lost to the spider invasion - the parts of the central processing unit that had gotten too damaged by the spiders to function on their own. Alice combined this with the more material side of things, in order to repair the broken bits of the System and hopefully get everything back in working order.
She also did something else. Something to help boost her productivity, just a little bit. She used the very same properties of the room that the original creator of the System had likely used. She wanted to fix the System and help the people here. She hated the idea of handing over even a speck of her free will to something outside of her control - but just this once, for a short period of time, Alice was willing to make an exception. She leaned into every single perception that other people had about her.
Before Alice had left from Illvaria, she had set up the expectation with several people that she would go find the System and repair it. While she hadn’t announced exactly what that process would look like, where they were going, or what she needed to do, it was an unquestionable fact that she had set herself up to fix things - and evidently, some people had believed her. Starting from the [Queen] Cendaria, who Alice had briefly met during the group’s journey to the East as they moved to Morendia to learn enchanting. The [Queen] had, evidently, mentioned Alice’s deeds and help to at least a few other members of her court. Alice could feel faint, drifting hopes that she might resolve the true cause of the disaster drifting over from there. Then, from Fendrallia, Alice could feel much stronger and more resilient hopes for her success. All of the villagers that she had worked to heal and save became critical cornerstones of the beliefs Alice could now feel resonating within the room. From Morendia, where Alice had done some healing, and worked with the local Immortal to enhance her understanding of magic. From Illvaria, where Alice had spent months building up her reputation as the apprentice of an Immortal, and someone who might save the world from the current crisis, Alice felt more surges of beliefs, working to amplify her understanding of the System and make her better at this one, specific problem, that she had been working towards since the first day she had come to this world.
Alice used her mana, Doll’s golems, and her understanding of the System to create a miracle. She fell into a trance for hours at a time, as beliefs and bits of knowledge combined with her already decent understanding of the System, teaching her how to fix bits and pieces of what was broken.
Day after day of hard work continued, until at last, the last threads of the System’s central processing unit were rebuilt.
After a week of hard work, Alice turned the System back on.
In an instant, a flood of rainbow mana cascaded out of the System and back into the other rooms and components of the System.