A Budding Scientist in a Fantasy World

Epilogue – 3

Cecilia felt her heart hammer with excitement in her chest as she looked at her Status Screen. She ignored her Attributes - what she cared about right now was the level of her Classes - or, in particular, one Class.

[System Enchanter] - Level 9. Her highest level Class, and the foundation of her next and final major step.

When Cecilia had reached level 100 of her previous [Enchanter] Class, just like everyone else who reached level 100 in a Class, she had been incredibly excited. It meant that she had a very good chance at Immortality - and that by now, her aging speed was so slow that she had plenty of time to make up the final levels. She had chosen to evolve [Enchanter] into [System Enchanter], because it had spoken to her the most, and felt most fitting for her current and future goals. After all, she had been working with Alice as a sort of ‘administrator’ of the System for a few decades now. If she didn’t take something System related, what kind of Class would she take?

The reason Cecilia was excited was also simple. According to Alice, the mana in her body had built up enough. It was almost at the point where it was boiling over, like a pot of water that had been heated almost all the way through.

That meant one thing. She was on the verge of reaching Immortality. After nearly two and a half decades of hard work, Cecilia was close to her original goal. With any luck she would reach it before she turned 40 - although physically, she looked closer to a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, courtesy of the slowed aging high level people benefitted from. Cecilia felt a wry smile pull at her lips. She wouldn’t be trapped as a teenager for all eternity, at least. Alice semi-frequently grumbled about how she was stuck as an eternal fifteen year old, although after a decade she had eventually decided to use a bit of Organic Magic to ‘age up’ her body and features a bit.

Cecilia’s smile faded as she looked over her current project again. It was just missing the last few steps. All she had to do now was connect everything together, and then, assuming nothing went wrong, she would take the final step. She did one final check.

The enchantments looked perfect. Every single Perk that both Alice and Cecilia had used to look over the pile of enchantments in front of them said that they should all connect together. They would do exactly what they were supposed to - at least, in theory. Of course, they first needed to be connected to each other.

Cecilia had grown over the years. She didn’t just stand around and observe these days. Along with Alice, she had gone through the System and begun implementing changes.

There had been several security updates, of course. The two of them were both aware of just how near humanity had come to extinction when the System faced a crisis, and while the world had recovered over the past few decades, nobody wanted the System to face another crisis ever again. They had implemented all sorts of new measures to prevent a similar incident, such as ways to drain the mana from the System if the monster population reached a certain level, better and more combat-able golems, and their own presence in the System to act as another line of defense. They had also modified several components of the System to run on beliefs instead of physical enchantments, with the explicit goal of making it hard or impossible for monsters to notice and chew on the System if they ever broke in again. Even monsters seemed to struggle to consistently notice belief mana, after all.

But that wasn’t the only change the two had made. First, they had decided to optimize a few things. The two of them couldn’t outright remove Classes from the System - apparently, anything that enough people recognized as a ‘profession’ would get picked up by the System, and the System would then create a class based on what that profession was, how people perceived it, and what tools people in that profession wished for. However, they could still mess with the Perks that class granted. While they left most classes alone, there were a few that they completely undermined - such as the [Slaver] Class. Instead of giving [Slavers] better tools to keep control of their ‘merchandise’ and more ways to hurt people, the class now gave people slightly better ability to tap dance while drunk, slightly reduced chance to trip while holding a chicken in one’s left hand, and other similarly absurd and useless Perks. The idea was to totally undermine the Class’s foundation, leaving it with a massive disadvantage compared to classes that didn’t revolve around hurting other people. A few other Classes, such as [Thief] and [Serial Killer], had gotten similar treatments.

When the two had implemented this change, they had also gotten a new idea. Most people around the world had taken this as a sign that the restored, empowered System was taking a more active stance in the world, and was expressing open disapproval of things like slavery, theft, etc.

So they had decided to find a way to utilize this new wave of beliefs. The enchantments sitting in front of Cecilia were a new idea the two had, to further gut the ability for ‘malicious’ classes to harm other people. The System itself had fairly strict countermeasures against any form of interference with human will, and after much debate, Cecilia and Alice had agreed that this was probably for a good reason. No matter what the intended outcome was, trying to hand the System any form of mind control or way to directly stop people from engaging in slavery was like opening up a much bigger can of worms to deal with the problem. It just didn’t seem like the right solution.

So after much debate, Cecilia and Alice had decided that the System should still maintain all of its already ridiculously cautious restrictions on manipulating free will. Those were there to stay. They also decided that trying to give the System the ability to strike people dead with a bolt of lightning or something was a bad idea. It was a bit too easy for something to go off the rails if they gave the System any form of direct offensive power against humans. What if it miscalculated who it was supposed to be targeting? What if it got too trigger-happy and started hitting people by mistake? What if there was some other, unknown bug in the System that caused other issues down the line? Worse, what if people started believing that the System was murderous or evil, and their beliefs then shaped the System into some kind of malicious, conniving entity that sent humanity spiraling down the path of destruction a few hundred years later? Alice and Cecilia both thought that the System’s original creator had been a bit too afraid of the System going rogue and causing harm, which was why the crisis of the collapsing System had happened. That being said, while he had been a bit too cautious about the System going off the rails, that didn’t mean that no caution was warranted. Since the System was ultimately at least partially built around human beliefs, they needed to make sure the System didn’t have the tools to end humanity of those beliefs went a bit off the rails for a few centuries.

Therefore, they had come up with an alternate solution.

After all, they still both firmly believed that slavery was a disgusting institution that both of them were more than happy to remove from this world. There were also a few other unquestionably malicious actions that really shouldn’t be encouraged by the System in any form, such as murder, theft, and… forced intimacy.

Since the System already had a framework for creating ‘negative Achievements,’ they decided to use that instead.

Cecilia finished looking over the pile of enchantments in front of her, and nodded to herself. Everything looked good. She created the last few connections needed to activate the entire array of enchantments, and then hooked it up to the power supply for the System. A surge of rainbow mana rushed out of the room and into the world.

While she herself didn’t get a notification, she knew that at this moment, around the world, every single human being who had ever been engaged in the slave trade should be receiving the same notification.

You have gained an achievement!

Slaver (Rarity: N/A)

You have committed a greatly immoral deed by enslaving another human being, or knowingly purchasing or helping someone traffic another human being.

-70% attribute growth and levelling speed for all Classes, -30% effect of all attributes.

Slavery wasn’t the only thing that the System punished - it also punished murder, theft, and anyone who had forced another person into unwanted intimacy. The two had debated punishing other ‘immoral’ crimes, but they had realized that there were only a few things they both believed were truly, unquestionably bad and deserved such heightened attention from the System. In fact, even for something like theft, there was a lot of nuance to it - and while it was mostly unambiguous, there were even a few cases they could think of where someone might deserve not to get a penalty.

For example, if someone’s family member got kidnapped by [Slavers], and the family then ‘purchased’ that person back to rescue them… was that really evil? Both of them thought that the answer was ‘probably not.’ While the family in question had, in some way, contributed to the financial empowerment of an abominable institution, they were essentially normal people who had been forced into a terrible situation due to other people’s malice. They didn’t deserve to have their life ruined as a result.

Similarly, a six year old child who stole a loaf of bread to feed themselves might not exactly be admirable, but they didn’t deserve to get hammered by the biggest punishment the System could dish out.

The two had spent a long time debating how to add in special exemptions to the System for these kinds of corner cases, before they had come across a rather more elegant solution.

Every time the System needed to assign some kind of punishment Achievement for ‘malicious behavior’ to someone, the System would create a record of all actions the person had taken that were relevant to the crime. Then, the entire scenario would be presented to one thousand totally randomly people in the world, with all identifying features blurred. The entire presentation would also be presented as a dream, while the ‘jury’ was asleep.

Then, the System would essentially the jury of a thousand random people to ask what extent of punishment should be applied, whether it should be waived, etc. The jury wouldn’t have any way of distinguishing these ‘trial’ dreams from regular dreams, meaning that most people randomly selected by the System for this kind of jury would probably completely forget about their ‘weird dream’ by the time they woke up. Even those who remembered wouldn’t have any form of identifying information remaining from the dream, and odds were quite good that most people for this kind of dream jury would be hundreds or thousands of kilometers away from the events presented in each dream.

They had felt this was a pretty good way to make sure that the System remained connected to the culture, beliefs, and morals of this world, while still having an obvious punishment mechanism for truly malicious actions. Of course, since this was the first time they were trying to implement such a big change to the System’s framework, they also had a way of collecting data from the way the System implemented this update. Once they were sure it was working as intended, they would remove their own ability to view and record this kind of information, because they believed it was for the best that even they did not have the kind of power to interfere with this kind of judgement once they were sure everything worked the way it was supposed to.

As System mana swirled through the machinery of the System and began to spread to the rest of the world, Cecilia saw a new Acheivement appear in her own Status Screen, along with a level up notification. The level up notification simply informed her that she had reached level 10 in [System Enchanter], and had a new Perk to choose. She ignored it. She cared much more about something else.

You have gained an achievement!

Immortal of The System and Enchantments (Rarity: 10)

You have spent years learning about and changing the System with the hope of helping and improving the human species as a whole. While there is never an end to study and learning, you have made significant strides.

You will no longer age. In ten thousand, ten million, or even ten trillion years, your body will be exactly as it is now, unchanged save by your own efforts and improvements.

Once per week, you may regrow any and all parts of your body from fatal damage, as long as your brain remains intact and (relatively) unharmed.

Unless you do something in bad faith that causes you to lose this privilege, most components of the System will recognize you as an administrator and allow you to change things with less difficulty and resistance.

At the cost of a small amount of mana and focus, you may run a theory or design for an enchantment through an exceedingly accurate and advanced ‘mental simulation,’ which will also highlight any major flaws or issues with it.

+400% stat effect for the [Mana] stat, +50% stat effect for all other stats.

She had finally achieved Immortality.

Cecilia smiled, and ran out of the room to go inform her friend that after decades of hard work, she’d finally reached her goal.