NOVEL NEXT Chapter 113
After dinner Argul sourced some wood from the local trees for a campfire. Normally that wouldn’t work as the wood had to dry first, but she solved that problem by forcefully heating the branches with magic until enough water had evaporated for fire to take easily. As a side benefit, the amount of smoke was also reduced considerably.
The group then spend the rest of the evening around the campfire, though Arthur and Luna still kept their distance from Argul, something she didn’t begrudge them for. It was an understandable and sensible reaction all things considered.
Mia on the other hand had no such problems and spent most of the time laying on top of Argul. While the rest of the group had a boring discussion about politics and religion going, the two of them instead entertained each other by playing around with mana, something that quickly evolved into a light show as they tried to trump each other in complexity and beauty of their lights.
Without the internet there wasn’t really anything else to do and even though it would probably help the overall mental health of the world that everyone was forced to stop and think for once, children didn’t really have a need for that yet, so they had to come up with some form of entertainment. In Mia‘s case that was often training magic, playing around with magic and getting taught by Argul.
Argul herself didn’t have a problem with this. She loved magic, teaching Mia was fun and there really wasn’t much for her to add to any political debate the others had, because her opinion on both, monarchies and whatever the fuck the church was doing was pretty clear. Regarding the former, having a single leader clearly had its advantages, but the moment said leader started doing anything else but leading, like making decisions on their own for example, all that power would quickly lead to corruption, because, let’s face it, most humans did not put the wellbeing of their species ahead of their own and those that did would have a hard time leading with a perspective that took into consideration a time long after they had died. Or, to put it simply, monarchies were a no.
As for the latter, the church could go and suffer in their hell. For their blatant intolerance, for taking away the freedom of thought, they lost all rights to any form of empathy or kindness in her opinion and should be treated like the trees they cut down to heat their homes. Argul wouldn’t go out of her way and rid the world of them, that wasn’t her responsibility, but if they ever crossed her path again she would make sure to treat them like the microbes they were.
Long after dusk when the fire started dying, Luna and Arthur headed inside, leaving Argul and her family in the cold of the night. The temperature wasn’t a problem for her and Alyra, but for Mia it had to be uncomfortable and the only reason the girl wasn’t shivering was that she was lying on top of Argul’s warm belly.
Argul perked her head up a little to gently nuzzle her niece, something that was quite difficult because of her size. “Isn’t it a bit cold for you right now, Mia? Don’t you want to go with the others?”
The girl curled herself around Argul’s snout in response, mumbling into Argul’s fur. “-na stay with aunty.”
“What was that?”
“I want to stay with you aunty.” Argul watched slightly bemused as Mia tried to sink deeper into her fur. That was cute.
She didn’t have a problem with her niece staying outside, Argul was just worried about her health. “So long as you go get one of the sleeping bags from inside that’s okay.”
“Really?!” Mia perked up and started to crawl off Argul’s abdomen. “Be right back!”
Argul watched her run off and climb into their house, wondering if perhaps Mia feared she wouldn’t spend as much time with her now that she had her own room. As far as Argul could remember they hadn’t spent a night away from each other ever since they met and considering how they met some attachment issues were certainly a possibility.
It wasn’t a problem though. Why wouldn’t she let Mia sleep close to her if Alyra did the same thing?
Argul gave her daughter who lay snuggled against her a good lick.
Something wriggled around on top of her and she let out a sigh. Right, Aina could stay too if she wanted. Argul did make for a good mattress, so who was she to deny others that luxury.
Rolling her eyes, she gave Alyra another lick and after a second of hesitation, started to groom her daughter.
A few minutes later Mia came back outside again, nearly fell off the porch area and ran to Argul with sleeping bag in hand. Then she climbed back on top of her, discovering and grabbing Aina in the process and made herself comfortable.
Argul gave the smiling girl another nudge before she doused the embers of the campfire with water and laid down herself, ready to fall asleep or do domain stuff in her case.
Mia and Aina kept wriggling about for a while, until the girl lit a light in her sleeping back and started to quietly read out a book she had apparently brought with her to the slime. Argul could only huff to herself with a smile. Children. Not that she was any better.
With that she retreated her consciousness back into her core and got ready for work. She planned to create her 14th floor tonight, but before that she would do her customary domain sweep, something that got a lot faster now that she knew how to really use her [knowledge domain].
Argul’s domain was slowly but steadily growing in both size and the population of organisms within. Yet, because both were growing at the same time, not one of her floors was fully populated. Most of them were in fact practically empty when she looked at them from above like a god, like the god she was, though she immensely disliked the term.
Not even her skills that were encouraging plant growth or the higher mana density on some of her floors could do anything against the sheer immensity of free real estate area that was waiting to be claimed by nature. It would take way more time than a year for something the size of a moon to overgrow and that was okay.
That also meant that Argul would have to wait for plants and animals to reliably start crossing between her floors, but again, it was okay even if she was interested in how the different species would interact with each other. Argul could certainly wait.
The only outlier to all of this was her stupid moongrass. The stuff was everywhere and ignored any natural barrier in its way. There was an entire ocean between its current island and the next?
Well, don’t mind the grass, it will just spread across the freaking ocean floor.
There is a massive amount of stone between one cave and another?
Just grow seeds that burrow through by using mana. Easy like that, problem solved.
The fact that moongrass had even started growing on the moon orbiting Erod should be proof enough of how adaptable the plant was. There wasn’t even an atmosphere on that giant floating piece of space rock. Argul wouldn’t be surprised if she were to find the grass growing on some random asteroid in a few years.
Aside from that there were only three more points of interest. First the Kraken. There wasn’t much to be said about them yet. They were still growing and perhaps the largest reason for the population growth of fish and whales to tank a bit, but the slow down would only be temporary.
Second were monsters. There still weren’t any inside of Argul’s domain and perhaps this was a good thing as they were akin to cancer cells of a body, in this case her domain. Following that analogy their absence meant her domain was currently healthy.
According to Alyra, monsters came to be because of failed cultivation, which often stemmed from a need to grow stronger to escape constant suffering. Since most of Argul’s domain was empty though, the easiest way to escape suffering was to run away right now, or at least she believed something like that to be the reason for the continued absence of monsters.
Argul should probably fear monsters more and be less curious about them. They were beings that endlessly hungered for mana after all and she was a giant sphere of mana, producing more mana, which kind of made them enemies to put it lightly. She just really wanted to see one herself and figure out how they worked.
The third and last thing on her list was the village on her sixth floor. The villagers were mostly doing villager things. Right now they were busy building a house for Trevor and his harem for example and that one guy was dead set on domesticating the metal shellocks. The turtles did slowly transform their shells into some kind of metal over their life, so perhaps the thought had merit.
For now though, village life was slow and while they did provide Argul with a measure of entertainment, she would have to wait until something more interesting happened. It also depended a bit on her and how she proceeded with Jack going forwards.
Anyway, as it stood Argul just liked to watch the little bubble of communism. Funny how capitalism doesn’t really work when there are less than two hundred people in a society.
She observed Jack for a few minutes as he tried to create the perfect fantasy fireball and sighed as he failed to achieve that magical explosion once more. He would have an easier time if he chose to create a scientifically approved explosion first and then transformed the spell into something magical that worked entirely off of mana and didn’t involve anything physical like gas. It's certainly an interesting concept that she would have to investigate herself sometime in the future, but it looked like it was a lot more difficult than what she was doing at the moment.
Shaking her metaphysical head at the explosion-obsessed teenager Argul moved her attention to the 13th floor of her domain and got ready to create the next.