A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Epilogue – 2

Somewhere far away, there was a little mansion that was closed off to outsiders. Few people even remembered that it existed. The local [King] knew that several centuries ago, a reclusive Immortal had bought the land - but the [King] wasn’t willing to risk upsetting an Immortal that wished to keep to themselves. Thus, the land was essentially undisturbed by others. Within the mansion, a strange Immortal lay in a comfortable bed. To the side stood a strange man. Half of his body was flesh, and half of his body was made of metal.

The Immortal stirred, before he rolled over. To an outside observer, it looked as if the man were trying to find a comfortable position to go back to sleep. The man’s stomach rumbled, and after a few more minutes of doing nothing, the man finally sighed, and dragged himself out of bed.

“Make me breakfast,” he said to the half-metal man.

“Understood,” said the metal man, before he left the room. The Immortal took that opportunity to change out of his pajamas and back into his daily wear as the distant sound of eggs frying started to sound through the halls.

He sighed, and then made his way towards his workshop. He scanned through his own research notes, and thought about the past decade.

A decade ago, when he had glimpsed the inner workings of the System, he had made several breakthroughs. He had seen all sorts of strange and innovative ideas on how the original creator had used magic, and he had to admit, he’d been more impressed than he had expected. As one of the first Immortals, he honestly hadn’t thought that the original creator of the System could have done much to impress him - after all, historical documents in his childhood had pretty firmly indicated that there was no such thing as an “Immortal’ in the early days of the System. Later holy texts of the System left it a lot more vague and open to interpretation - but by then, he’d stopped believing in religion.

Despite his assumptions, the creator of the System really had been onto something. The way he’d used strings of mana to rewrite the way the System could grow, mixed with the precise enchantments that underlaid a lot of the System, was impressive. He had learned a lot during the few weeks he had stuck around, after he had saved the world from colliding with another dimension and then left.

He might have been tempted to stay for longer, but after a week or two of research, he had realized that he had accidentally let in a few intruders during his time in the System, and decided it was best to be elsewhere. After all, whatever happened afterwards wasn’t his problem. Whatever he did probably would have made the whole mess worse, since he really wasn’t very good at direct combat. The System had cleaned out the few monsters he had seen, so he figured the System probably had the ability to respond to the problem on its own as long as he didn’t get in the way and break the whole thing. After all, whoever had originally created the System surely wouldn’t be dumb enough to create all those combat  golems without creating a resilient defense force against the potential invasion of monsters.

Obviously, his assumption had been correct, since a few months after the System shut down, it had rebooted itself and quelled the chaos. The creator of the System had clearly planned even for the potential of monsters breaking in, even though the Immortal had accidentally broken a few of the defenses as he entered.

He sighed and nodded to himself, satisfied with how the entire incident had played out. He had gotten a little sloppy during the whole incident. Truthfully, he probably could have made much less of a mess if he had been more careful, or put more thought and consideration into his actions. But at the end of the day, he had done what he could. He had severed the dimensional connection between Luliv and that unknown other dimension, before the two planets teleported into each other and buried all of humanity in several billion kilograms of earth, or whatever the heck planets were made out of. He wasn’t quite sure what happened when two planets teleported into each other, but he was pretty sure it was a planetary extinction event of some sort. The specifics of how the laws of physics would kill everyone didn’t matter much, at least in his mind, since the end result would certainly be ‘and everyone died.’

He whistled as he looked over his research documents one more time, before he left for the dining table. Even if the aftermath hadn’t been entirely to his liking, and he could have been more careful, he had saved the world. And he had profited quite a bit from that experience.

By his estimation, he had seen enough unique ideas, research plans, and weird constructs within the System to occupy himself with research for the next century, at least. He had all sorts of new ideas he wanted to test. Once he finished his next round of experiments, he would need to go through his old enchantments, and upgrade some of them. He had new Innovations to make. Discoveries to unearth. Whatever the creator of the System had been doing during the creation of the System, he certainly hadn’t been slacking off.

Once the Immortal [Enchanter] finished reviewing the lessons from the System and integrating them into his own work, he had decided to set a new goal for himself. He’d always been a little curious about what lay on the western continent - the most unexplored and dangerous part of their planet.

He felt that it might be interesting to look for some new monster materials there, for another round of upgrades to his enchantments. Perhaps he could even figure out what lurked on that continent, and do something exciting there. He’d always wondered if the high mana density of that continent meant there was some kind of rare artifact or material laying there, after all.

It might take him a few centuries to reach the point where he could explore it safely… but he couldn’t wait to see what the future held.

* * *

Olin, leader of the Illvarian village, was having a very bad day.

The day had started out bad enough, when a weird metal carriage had suddenly appeared in the middle of the village, almost as if it had appeared via teleportation.

Then, a few seconds later, the Illvarian village had suddenly been ripped out of reality punted through a portal. They had landed in another dimension entirely. He had no idea what was going on, or why any of this had happened. Had some crazy Immortal used their village as an experimental site without their knowledge? Had a monster somehow teleported them here? Was there some other cause?

His Perks didn’t have much information for him, and he was completely uncertain what to make of the whole thing. Last he’d heard, the Illvarian [King] was trying to resettle the southern half of the country, and the Sigmusi had sent a wave of [Spies] and [Assassins] to terrorize the recolonization effort.

Perhaps they’d somehow gotten caught up in that mess? Some hidden Sigmusi Immortal might have kidnapped them for experimental purposes, or teleported them here using dimensional mana? Or perhaps members of the Society of Starry Eyes had attacked their village, and dragged them here. He wasn’t quite sure if that was the cause of their current situation, but it was his best guess.

Of course, while that guess made some level of sense, the world he saw in front of him seemed to directly contradict this notion. Because what he saw in front of him was utterly incomprehensible.

It was dark outside, which was a total contrast to the daylight he’d seen before the teleportation. That wasn’t the strange part, though.

Here, there were strange lights attached to metal bars, lining the sides of the streets. At first, he had thought that they were enchantments of some sort - although the idea of a street lined with giant, enchanted metal lamps implied ridiculous wealth and extravagance, it was at least somewhat understandable. He had no idea what kind of city was wealthy enough to just make enchantments like this so common that they literally lined the streets, but he had heard that the central continent was wealthier than the southern continent, at least.

His second sight had reinforced his assumptions. He’d seen some kind of… horseless metal carriage zoom past them, at speeds that beggared the imagination. Clearly, it was powered by some kind of kinetic mana.

Olin had believed that they might have been teleported into some kind of unusual mansion right up until the local [Adventurer] had stated that there was no mana in their surroundings.

Not minimal mana. No mana at all.

There were no natural environments in the entire world that had zero mana. Heck, there were barely any artificial environments with no mana in them - they were expensive to create, and largely useless, as far as Olin knew. What kind of lunatic would teleport them into an environment with no mana?

That’s when Olin had realized things were truly dire. The one and only group of people that would bother doing something so strange was the Society of Starry Eyes.

Except… even that didn’t make sense. As far as Olin knew, the Society of Starry Eyes didn’t allow their prisoners much freedom. Once people were captured for use as test subjects, they were typically locked into small rooms, and then experimented on until they were either rescued or they perished. They hadn’t even seen a member of the Society yet. Even weirder, the sheer scope of all of this seemed well outside the reach of the Society of Starry Eyes. He could believe that they might have a few rooms with no mana inside of them… but an entire city? One that they didn’t seem to directly rule over, and which had all kinds of other strange enchantments in the area as well?

Obviously, something was wrong with his assumptions.

Even more strange was the language. One of the horseless carriages had driven by them a few minutes ago, and the people inside had been yelling at each other in a language that didn’t sound like Illvarian at all. Even more strange, the people inside had music in the carriage - as if they had brought along a personal [Bard] or something. That didn’t make sense for a lab of the Society. They would have at least a few people there who spoke Illvarian, to yell orders at Illvarian prisoners. They also wouldn’t have people talking and yelling at each other in time with music - that would just be silly.

At the end of his thinking, he could only conclude that some freak accident of dimensional mana had somehow teleported the entire village to another city. But he hadn’t gotten a new language skill for whatever place they had ended up in - and they had been here for half an hour now. He should have at least gotten level 1 by now - after all, he’d spent a lot of his time specifically ruminating over what he had heard in order to pick up the language skill.

Even more strange, all of his stats and Perks were weaker than before. It might not be by much, but it was definitely noticeable.

He looked at the giant buildings in the distance again, and tried not to rub his head in frustration.

Some of the buildings in the distance were incredibly tall, and made of substances Olin couldn’t identify. Some of it looked like glass, and Olin could definitely tell there was also some kind of metal involved in their construction - but he couldn’t identify the metal at all. He also had no idea who had built these ridiculously tall buildings, or why - or more importantly, why there were so many of them. A few could have easily been attributed to Immortals or Mages with lots of money and mana to burn, but there were hundreds of these ridiculously tall buildings in their surroundings.

“Mister Olin, have you come to any conclusions about where we are yet?” asked Maria. She was a little girl who lived a few houses away from the village leader’s house - she had just turned nine. Her parents had died from a monster attack a few years ago, so Olin and the other villagers frequently pitched in to take care of her. She was standing pretty close to him, although the other villagers weren’t much further away. Nobody wanted to be too far from each other in case a monster attacked - or in case someone got hurt by one of the horseless metal carriages. They were moving pretty fast, after all.

He scratched his head, and then finally sighed.

“I have no idea,” he said.

The other Illvarains who had been dragged to this strange city with Olin instinctively clustered closer together.

“Any idea what the last group of people in that metal carriage were saying?” asked one of the older women. “I can’t make out a word, and I haven’t picked up a language skill for whatever they’re speaking.”

Olin sighed, before he shook his head. He honestly had no idea what to make of this strange place, or how the people here would react to them.

“We won’t figure out much if we just keep standing around,” he finally said. “Let’s head towards those giant, tall buildings, and see if we can get directions back to Illvaria or figure out our situation.”

It wasn’t a great plan, but it was a start. He just hoped that some of the other [Merchants] and other people they regularly contacted realized they were missing soon, and helped find them and get them back home.