“It just… opened?” asked Ethan, as he blinked in surprise. Alice was also stunned.

This wasn’t how she had imagined this process going at all.

The System doors were clearly meant to keep people and monsters out of the System. Alice thought that was quite reasonable. After all, the System was practically the lifeblood of humanity in this world. If anyone got inside - human or monster - then it could be catastrophic. Heck, the System had only glitched out several months ago, and Alice still didn’t know why the System had gone off the rails. The months without the System had already started to show imminent signs of an apocalyptic meltdown of society. Many of the countries Alice hadn’t had the time or resources to help seemed to be on the verge of collapse, based on what she had seen while travelling through the Shil Confederacy.

The System should have rigid defenses. There shouldn’t be an exploitable backdoor left in the security systems of the System. That would make it possible for someone to infiltrate the System even if they weren’t supposed to be there.

And yet, despite Alice’s confusion, the door in front of her was clearly open.

Why was it possible for her to just… enter the System?

Why was it tied to her status as an {Outworlder}?

Alice found herself flooded with new questions as she tried to piece together this bizarre new information. She rubbed her forehead, and reviewed what she knew about the mainframe of the System.

The System should be one of the most well-defended places on planet Luliv. It was in the middle of a giant maelstrom of mana, encased in some kind of sci-fi-esque metal. The metal was highly enchanted, and as far as she could tell, the System was probably closed off from the outside world. However, there were doorways built into some passages between the System and the surface. In other words, at one point in time, there had been a legitimate way to enter and exit the System.

Alice had already determined that the System was almost certainly artificial. In other words, the doorways meant that the original builder(s) of the System had needed to potentially exit and enter the System - perhaps in order to eat, or take vacations, or something of the sort.

Alice glanced at the System doors that had opened in front of her, and a suspicion started to build up in her mind. It was one that she would need more proof to verify… but if it were correct, it would certainly explain a lot. Though it would also open up an entirely new chain of questions.

For several seconds, Alice found her mind wandering.

Ever since she had arrived in this world, she had been curious about the System. It seemed to make so little sense, and yet it was so utterly vital to the way this world functioned. It practically shaped culture here. It was humanity’s greatest reliance against monsters. It single-handedly allowed humans to adapt and thrive in this world’s environment, even though humans clearly weren’t built to handle mana. It was basically the core of humanity’s survival in this world.

Alice’s thoughts flashed back to the research log she had recovered from the Society of Starry Eyes leader.

The Society of Starry Eyes had given her a lot of information about their own experiments, and while the research was vile, Alice had still learned every scrap of knowledge she could from the Society’s grisly work. As much as it felt immensely distasteful to make use of the Society leader’s last ‘gift’ to her, Alice also had a planet to save.

One of the things the Society had studied in great deal was other dimensions. The Society had devoted a great deal of manpower, time, and resources to studying the mechanics behind dimensional interaction, since they had believed a dimensional collision might potentially kill everyone on this planet. As far as the Society knew, there was only one dimension ‘connected’ to this one, and that was Alice’s home dimension, which housed planet Earth.

In other words, the System wasn’t open to natives of this world - but it was open to people who had come from planet Earth.

Alice shook her head and cleared away her messy thoughts. She might have a new, potentially correct theory, but she didn’t have enough information yet. She needed to find some way to validate or invalidate her wild guess, and that information would only be found deeper inside of the System. However, a new, nearly buried hope started to sprout in her mind again.

Ever since Alice had arrived here, she had longed to go home. She didn’t want to totally leave behind this world - she had far too much that she cared about here to leave it all behind. But she still wanted to see her parents and tell them their daughter was doing well. She also wanted to hug her mother and father again, and have the freedom to visit them from time to time. If things went really well, she would love to have some kind of easy way to travel home and back whenever she wanted to - that way, she could pop back home for a weekend, spend it with her parents or her old friends from school, and then return here. If her parents were willing, Alice also wouldn’t be against having them ‘tour’ this world a bit - or perhaps settle here, if the prospect of actual magic got their attention the way it had grabbed Alice’s attention. Knowing her parents and their own love of science and discovery, Alice suspected that they would love this world… if she could stabilize it and make it safe.

If Alice’s new suspicion about the System was correct, perhaps she could find a real way home in this place. She felt her breath start to catch as she thought about hugging her parents again, and clenched her hands into fists until her nails bit into her palm.

She needed to focus. No getting lost in hopes about the future. She had a job to do, and she needed to do it before worrying about what happened next.

As Alice was getting her thoughts in order, a few of Allira’s shadows returned from inside of the System’s halls.

“No immediate danger, except for a crossbow on the ceiling,” said Allira. “We should be fine if we step inside.”

Alice nodded, and the group stepped into the System.

Alice glanced around, and noticed the crossbow Allira had mentioned. It was positioned on the ceiling, and lit up with rainbow mana - but something about the flow of mana was disrupted. The crossbow itself didn’t move. Alice took a closer look, and realized that somehow, Allira’s shadows had dug into the crossbow’s internal circuitry and cut out several pieces of it. While it looked functional, she was looking at a totally ruined piece of magical technology.

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She felt far more relaxed now that she knew the crossbow was disarmed. She studied it with no small amount of fascination.

She wasn’t sure how the maker of the System had done it… but what she was looking at was clearly some kind of automatic defense system. It reminded her of the enemy ‘turrets’ she had seen in some video games, where the turret could automatically detect intruders and fire at them. While Alice hadn’t seen a functioning turret, she suspected these crossbows were supposed to work the same way.

Alice wondered whether the crossbow would have recognized her as friendly, or whether it would have fired on her. Her {Outworlder} status seemed to grant her some level of recognition from the System, and Alice wasn’t sure how far that extended when it came to the System’s security systems. How did the crossbow recognize intruders versus allies? If the System’s defenses did recognize {Outworlders} as friendly by default, would a group of people travelling with an {Outworlder} also be protected? If so, Alice felt like this security system was surprisingly easy to abuse - anyone could kidnap an {Outworlder} and then force them into the System, and bypass all of the security mechanisms easily.

Or perhaps the System had a more sophisticated recognition system? If it could also recognize things like people being forced in against their will, perhaps the automated defenses of the System would immediately ‘rescue’ any {Outworlder} who got kidnapped and dragged in here. It was hard to say.

Alice didn’t have enough information, so she decided not to think about it. Instead, now that she had confirmed the automatic defenses weren’t about to turn her into pulp, she focused on the hallway itself.

The hallway of the System was well lit. Chunks of glowing mana hung in the air as lights, in some kind of lighting system that Alice had never seen before. The chunks of glowing mana weren’t attached to anything. Nor were they held up by anything, or filtered through an enchantment. They just… were. Somehow, a chunk of raw, glowing mana was simply hovering in midair, providing light. Alice glanced at the group, and confirmed that Allira and Myra’s eyes had also locked onto the glowing orbs of floating light more than once - in other words, they could see the mana too. Somehow, the System had made mana-lights that were visible to non-mages, and Alice had no idea how that had been accomplished.

The walls of the System were even more odd. They held enough different enchantments in them to make even Illvaria’s palace look like a shabby straw hut. Alice wasn’t very familiar with more offensively oriented enchantments, but she could confirm that every single wall of the corridor they were in was packed to the brim with defensive, offensive, and utility enchantments. Some of them ferried mana from one place to another, while others looked like they made the wall nearly impossible to rip through. Others looked like they were built to kill any intruder who touched them the wrong way. As far as she could tell, if an intruder touched a wall, the walls would immediately unleash a barrage of lightning bolts, metal projectiles, and poison gas into the hall to liquidate any hostile enemies. In short, every wall was filled with the magical equivalent of a dozen landmines.

The walls themselves were made of some kind of metal Alice had never seen before. The material was unusually smooth and resilient, but Alice could still see various valves and pipes threading in and out of the walls as mana was transported through the System. Alice was quite struck by the way the System looked - and also more than slightly confused.

The entire System looked… somewhat similar to a spaceship from a sci-fi novel. The resemblance was uncanny. If Alice had seen the interior of the System back on Earth, and if all of the mana had been replaced with futuristic-looking gadgets and tech, Alice would have been completely confident that she had wandered onto a movie set by accident.

This led to another round of wild speculation on her end. Why did the System so strongly resemble the interior of a spaceship from a sci-fi novel? Was her earlier speculation wrong? Did the System come from some third dimension, where technology was significantly more advanced than on Earth? Or perhaps Alice’s guesses were even further off base? Perhaps the System had been constructed by aliens from the same dimension as Earth, or perhaps time travel actually was possible, and someone from the future had somehow ended up in this dimension in order to design the System?

Alice frowned. At least as far as she knew, time travel wasn’t possible, at least from a magical perspective. On the other hand, based on her very rough understanding of physics, an object travelling faster than the speed of light would travel back in time as well… or something like that. For some reason, her physics teacher hadn’t spent very long on the subject, possibly due to the fact that the subject was both highly theoretical and highly irrelevant to high schoolers.

Alice felt her head start to hurt as wave after wave of groundless speculation appeared in her thoughts. After several seconds of chaos, Alice shook her head. Whatever the truth was, she would find it by exploring deeper into the System. Standing around speculating was useless without more information.

“Be careful of the walls. Some of them are rigged with a lot of traps. Even Ethan might die if he touched it and was caught off-guard,” said Alice.

The group of Mages and Immortals gave the walls a very wary look after Alice’s words, and then shuffled towards the center of the corridor. Nobody seemed eager to poke at a trap that had a chance of killing an Immortal.

The group started to carefully navigate forward. About a minute later, much to Alice’s surprise, she heard a loud bang from just outside of the walls of the System.

She blinked in shock, as she saw one of the walls of the System bend ever so slightly inward, almost as if something were trying to tunnel its way into the System.

A wave of mana flared from the wall that had just been dented, and then, much to her surprise, the wall started to flow back to its original position - almost as if the walls were made of liquid, instead of solid metal. The strange banging sound didn’t resume, leading Alice to believe that it might have been caused by monsters fighting outside of the System and a limb or body hitting the wall from outside.

As she watched the wall flow back into place as if it were made of liquid, Alice finally understood how the exterior of the System had managed to survive all of the centuries it had been here.

The exterior of the System wasn’t just a thick metal wall with a futuristic, sci-fi aesthetic. It was made of some kind of self-repairing metal, layered with enough enchantments to kill the average Immortal. Alice suspected there might even be more to the security system that the group hadn’t encountered yet. With this kind of security System, it would be very unlikely for something to invade the System.

“Let’s keep moving,” said Alice, after a few more moments of thought. “The outer walls of the System can clearly handle themselves, and we need to get deeper in here if we want to find anything useful.”

The group started carefully walking forward again, led by a few of Allira’s shadows as they scouted the way for the rest of the group. The group continued making their way down the wide, brightly lit corridor for nearly ten minutes, before they finally encountered their first variation.

Off to one side of the corridor was a room.

The group quickly halted, before Alice started using her various types of mana-sight to scan the inside of the room. She spent a few minutes looking inside, before she frowned.

Inside of the room, a wide variety of delicate enchantments and machinery lay attached to the walls, filled up the room, and covered nearly every inch of space. It reminded Alice of a server room for a computer company - and a very cramped one at that.

However, the stream of mana in the room was nearly defunct, and the delicate enchantments inside were nearly ruined. And all of it was destroyed due to a rather obvious problem.

In the center of the room, hundreds of monstrous spiders were gnawing at the circuitry.

Alice had finally figured out why the System had collapsed.