Reincarnated as a mana core

Argul waited until every other guest had left before she began to create her light spell. Her plan was to create a sphere that emitted a soft yellow light so it wouldn't dazzle them.

Mia stood besides her swaying back and forth impatiently. “Auntie, what are we waiting for?”

Argul patted her and smiled. “Give me a second and you will see.”

Then she formed a sphere with her mana and urged the surface of the sphere to create light with a wavelength that was a bit higher than the yellow of the sun. The mana underneath the surface would fuel the spell for some time even if Argul cut off the mana supply. Once there wasn’t enough mana to form the surface of the sphere anymore the spell would collapse and any leftover mana would disperse into the environment..

A slightly orange glowing ball appeared a meter in front of Argul and illuminated a bit of the dark room.

Mia gasped and looked wide eyed at the sphere. “Wow. It’s so pretty.”

Argul bent down a bit and took her hand. “Yes and it will even follow you into our bed.”

Then she began to drag Mia to their room. “Off we go.”

Luna looked at Alyra a bit puzzled. “Has she always been able to do this?”

Alyra shook her head and smiled proudly. “Nope, she just created that spell.”

Luna looked a bit lost. “Oh.”

The rest of the conversation Argul couldn’t hear and also didn’t care about. She cleaned Mia and herself and then changed into her pajamas. Once Mia laid inside the bed Argul opened the door and moved the light spell into the hallway. She closed the door again and joined Mia. “Allright dear, have a good night.”

Argul scratched her behind the ears for some time and then made herself comfortable. She started to slowly drift off into sleep after some time, but chose to move her consciousness back to her core instead.

Argul took in the information of her knowledge domain and compared it to the last time she had done so. Then she discarded all the things that hadn’t changed or only changed a little and looked at the rest. 

The way she did this made her feel a bit like some machine, but as a mana core that might not be too far off from reality. She could do some routine things like this pretty fast if she wanted to.

Anyways, back to the rest of the information. The only interesting things that happened in the Luna floors was a gigantic cave caving in on the fifth floor and a meteor falling on the first.

The cave in had caused the whole cave system around it to change and shift. A lot of the tunnels were destroyed in the process together with a few of the smaller caves. The only evidence of the cave in were some empty caves that the flora had yet to take back.

The meteorite Argul wouldn’t have noticed without her knowledge domain. The crater it had left behind was already overgrown again and looked like every other crater there. The only difference was that the meteorite had consisted of a multitude of different ores that were now inside of the ground.

That was an interesting development Argul hadn’t thought about before. The amount of resources brought to the first floor by asteroids and meteoroids might cause it to become popular for mining in the future. 

People likely won’t bother for metals like iron or copper that you could mine on the 8th floor for eternity, but rather go to the first floor for rarer metals like titanium.

Argul changed over to the information on her Erod floors. They were all still growing and her sixth floor especially. The portal to the ocean of Erod really kicked the activity on her floors up a notch, though there still wasn’t enough prey around to sustain something like a kraken.

It didn’t bother her all that much though. If things continued like now then the krakens could feast on small fish like nothing else. Her growth boost for small plants was screwing with the amount of plankton and the fish were busily increasing their population because of this.

The plants were also slowly spreading over the gigantic archipelago. Curious birds that had come from Erod and weren’t eaten by the seagulls were carrying their seeds. Argul was really interested in how this all will look like in the future.

She looked at the last bits of knowledge. Her 8th floor was largely unchanged, except that moongrass had spread here. Something interesting had happened though. The hebiwashi hadn’t been able to sustain themself with the goats and mountain lizards, but instead of hunting them to extinction they had somehow managed to go to the sixth floor and were now hunting there. 

They were also actively spreading smaller animals like rabbits around the archipelago. Argul wasn’t sure why they were doing this. As far as she knew they weren’t sapient and only sentient, but the actions of them suggested that they were pretty intelligent.

The prospect exited her a bit. Their intelligence made them the most likely to become sapient next to the slimes and where the slimes were super cute, the hebiwashi were super cool.

Argul grinned inside her mind. She loved watching her domain develop and especially when unexpected things happened. To keep it that interesting it was time for the next floor.

Argul wanted a jungle or rather rainforest floor next. There were a few things she needed for that. Firstly it had to be humid and warm and secondly it had to rain a lot. She also had to give the floor the foundation for the level like growth of a rainforest.

To start though, Argul needed an entrance. There was currently only one more mid-sized island on the sixth floor and she wanted that island to stay normal, so she added a percentage probability to the floor for an island to appear with the weather and entrance of the 9th floor, similar to how she had done with the 8th floor.

The only entrance would be located on the 8th floor for now instead. There were currently 6 different zones between mountain ranges so Argul chose one of the outer ones to become a rainforest and the entrance to the 9th floor. If the rainforest somewhat spread into the mountains she would even have a space for a possible future entrance to a different floor there.

Anyways, to enter the 9th floor you just had to walk to the center of the zone and to exit the 9th floor back to the 8th you would have to go to the very edge of it.

The weather in the region immediately started to change and thick rain clouds began to form near the mountains, spreading slowly into the zone.

The location of the entrance could change with the event of the 8th floor that changed the temperature, but there had to be at least one entrance on the 8th floor.

Happy with the entrance, Argul proceeded to choose the floor options and let her mana AI show them to her.

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Floor 9

• Rainforest
• Daytime: 14 hours
• Nighttime: 10 hours
• Temperature: ~25°C
• special weather conditions: all time humid, nearly daily rain
• Events:
  • Storms
    • Through natural processes storms can occur

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There weren’t a lot of events, but the environment of a rainforest had to be relatively stable or extremely specialized species wouldn’t evolve so Argul didn’t have much of a choice here.

She accepted the option and a new space structure was formed for her new floor. Argul watched trying to understand what was happening through brute force right now, to one day be able to do it better. 

Sadly she couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. She had a bit of an idea how to add to an already existing space structure, but creating a new one was still beyond her.

Argul’s core moved and she tried to ignore the crude way the mana began to create the earth and air for the floor. Instead she focused on the plants and animals she wanted to create.

Argul wanted to give nature an example of the storey growth she knew a rainforest had so she had to make sure to create plants in the same way.

The first she created was a tree. She needed it as the foundation for some of the other plants so it only made sense to start with that. The tree only had branches on its top and had green leaves. The treetop was formed in a way that made the leaves catch the most light.

A few of the trees grew, creating a pretty deep shadow underneath their tops. Here and there the light broke through and illuminated the ground.

Next she created a tendril with leaves that climbed up the tree to catch as much light as possible. It had white blossoms, but didn’t do too that much otherwise.

The third plant she created was a large fern. It grew up to 4m tall and filled out the space in between the trees. Argul focused more on creating the foundation for a rainforest than crazy plants so there wasn’t anything that sounded too special. The plants had to use most of their resources to fight for light either way and wouldn’t have much that they could put towards crazy stuff.

Argul watched as the plants grew and they got moist. The temperature underneath the trees became a little bit colder, but it was enough for a thin mist to form. It already began to feel like rainforest for her, even though it was still a bit empty.

To fill some of the space Argul created a small plant that reached about half a meter in height. Its stalk was a bit thicker and it had large leaves to catch more of the artificial sunlight.

Now for the last plant Argul wanted one of these carnivorous plants. Her mana took that a bit too seriously though and what she got were two large red closed flowers. Tendrils grew over the ground around and a few even slithered around. One of the flowers opened a little bit for a moment and Argul could see spikes inside of the blossom.

Couldn’t she populate a floor without unintentionally creating weird things for once?

Argul shuddered and identified the plant.

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Unnamed

This is a large plant. These flowers grow in rainforests and are living traps for anything foolish enough to get near to them. They have movable tendrils to grab any prey that comes near them and pull it into their blossoms. The blossom then closes, impaling the creature multiple times and securing it. Over the next few days the flower will then digest her hunt.

If the flower gets hungry it will emit an enticing scent, luring in new prey.

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Argul sighed in defeat. At least you would likely die by being impaled and wouldn’t have to feel how it is to be digested alive. She could live with that or die depending on how you looked at it.

Argul got back to finishing the floor or more precisely creating animals. The first animal she created was some kind of fly-like insect again, though it was a bit larger and more elongated.

She needed these as a source of food for her second animal, a poisonous kind of frog. Argul took it a bit further with the poison and the frog was now able to create a small poison cloud around itself utilizing its mana.

And last but not least she created a small bird. Its feathers were of bright yellow and red colors and the bird was rather fast. The few of them hid themselves in the ferns and began to sing in beautiful tones.

Argul listened to their symphony for a few minutes thinking about the floor. She would need to create a lot more animals later and include fish and stuff for the large rivers that would form because of all the rain.

Argul smiled happily to herself and opened her status and system messages.

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Quest completed!

• Wonky technology
  • You have found out the reason for old technology going haywire and discovered a new aspect of mana in the process. This discovery was of great importance.
  • Int +4, Wis +6
  • identify (5)

 

New skill:

• Identify (5)
  • The skill displays everything you know about your target. The skill has a mere chance to hint at information that other sapients know and you do not. Even knowledge you forgot will be shown. The skill does not display false knowledge.

 

You have discovered three laws of Intent!

• Str +1, Int +2, Wis +2

 

You learned a skill!

• Light
  • You can create a source of light with your mana. The more mana you invest the longer the light will illuminate its surroundings.

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So the light spell had already been created by somebody else. That was good and meant that it wouldn’t take that much more time until Argul could create more magic without feeling bad about not giving others a chance to receive the skill creator achievement.

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Floor finished!
Level up!

Status:

 

Name	Argul Agren	Stats
Race	Mana core	Str	48
Age	7 months	Int	52
Level	9	Wis	53
Structural integrity	100%
Mana	45.37/166.11
Mana generation	1.68/min

 

Skills	Active	Passive
	core special	domain skills
	Mana manipulation	Learning (3)
	Magic missile	Sense skills
	Identify (5)	mental fortitude
	Water magic	curse of harmlessness (s)
	space magic	aspect clothes
	Fate contract	Cleaning
	increase heat (solid)	magic gunning neutral magic sniper bullet
	light	Stat growth boost (1) currently:  Str +1 Int +1 Wis +2
	invisibility (light)	Mirror image

 

Floor	Template	Size (radius)	Area/ Volume
1	Luna (moon) surface	500 km	785,400 km²
…	…	…	…
7	Erod Deep Sea with ‘Asteroids’	560 km	735.6 M km³
8	Erod Mountain ranges	570 km	1.0 M km²
9	Erod rainforest	580 km	1.1 M km²

	Template	Size (radius)	Area/ Volume
1	Luna (moon) surface	500 km	785,400 km²
…	…	…	…
7	Erod Deep Sea with ‘Asteroids’	560 km	735.6 M km³
8	Erod Mountain ranges	570 km	1.0 M km²
9	Erod rainforest	580 km	1.1 M km²

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