Reincarnated as a mana core

 Argul watched the reaction of the village for a few minutes. They were surprisingly calm about the message even though she had putten her all into making it ominous and dark. She might have been carried away while planning this and went a tiny bit overboard, but it was fun to do something different once in a while.

After five or so minutes Argul let the red water slowly flow back to the spatial distortion and banished it there. The hardest part here was making the liquid look as viscous as blood and holding it in the air. Since she could use the ambient mana of her domain though, she at least didn't have to worry about that. When all the water had disappeared she let go of the space she was stretching to make it look weird and sighed out in relief.

The popular opinion of the villagers seemed to be to take whatever the Meran believers send after them head on. They were pretty confident in not only their heightened abilities, but their new tools too, even if most of them were still made of wood. That was mainly because of the trees in Argul's domain being stronger due to the higher mana concentration and them only having the metal they had brought with them for now. 

Next to their actual village near the freshwater lake, that was still void of any fish and plants, at the base of the mountain the villagers had also built barricades around the portal that allowed them to funnel any unwanted visitors into a death trap. 

Argul listened a bit longer to their plans on improving the small outpost and creating scout schedules for the outside world. She had to admit that if the Meran church should barge into her domain like they had the last time they would have a hard time, no matter their numbers. 

When the villagers began to disperse Argul changed her view over to her 8th floor. She wanted to create the first entrance to the 11th floor here and let the AI add them to the other floors later. Argul wanted to have a large grassland on the 11th floor, but she would make the entrance first for once.

The idea was to have an entrance that looked like a large burrow of some kind. You would actually be able to see the next floor through it, but from your perspective it would look like everything was standing upside down. That was because inside the tunnel the gravity would spiral and end the other way around. While you walked through the entrance you wouldn't actually notice anything, but for everyone behind you it would look like you were walking on the wall and or ceiling.

Argul liked the idea of having some kind of burrow as entrance for this floor. It still matched the floors theme and it didn't require some kind of criteria that was unique to it like high noticeable mountains. Grasslands had a rather tough time in that regard with their endless and often quite flat landscapes.

The actual conditions she had for the floor after that weren't too outstanding. She did play around a bit with one of the events, but oriented herself more on a mediterranean grassland for the rest.

Floor 11

• Grassland
• Daytime: 14 hours
• Nighttime: 10 hours
• Temperature: -10°C to 35°C
• Events:
  • Storms
    • Through natural processes storms can form.
  • Earthquakes
    • There is a really small chance for a small earthquake to occur in a region once a year. The chance for an earthquake doubles for every year that has not happened and is reset upon an occurrence. The chance for a planet threatening earthquake to occur is always a 1000th of the chance of the weakest earthquakes, with earthquakes of other strength being somewhere in between that.
  • A living planet
    • Very strong earthquakes have a 50% chance to be applied on the whole floor. They will additionally cause large amounts of magma to emerge on the floor's surface, creating wildfires, active volcanoes, cliffs and gigantic clouds of ash. For a year after this event the highest possible temperature will decrease to 5°C.
    • After this event the sub event out of the ashes will be triggered, giving a large growth bonus to all small plants on the floor for a month and preventing the event a living planet for the next 100 years.

Argul accepted the conditions she had set in place and started the creation of a new independent space structure. Her core moved to the new floor and formed the very center of a new mini planet. She waited for a good hour until enough ground had been created for her to start conjuring life into reality.

Originally she had planned to make this floor very toxic, but Argul had thought better of it. A relatively normal grassland would be more fitting in her opinion and it gave her the options to focus more on animals. 

She wanted to finish her quest Don't eat that! before completing the floor in hope that it would give her a similar boost to the one her plant related quest had given her at the 50 creations milestone. Having a population of small insects of all kinds on her floors without having to create them herself would help a lot. Until now she had always been forced to create stuff like flies herself and as far as she was aware her upper Luna floors and latest Erod floors were pretty much void of any small animal organisms because of that.

Argul started her floor by creating two different kinds of grass, they were kind of needed in a grassland. The grass types were both pretty similar in terms of height, with their tallest stalks reaching up to two meters high. One of the two however had rather sharp and hard leaves as well as one large white inflorescence. The other one had quite soft leaves and a lot of small influorescenses on the other hand. It was also of a lighter green coloring.

The next two plants she created were tall flowers. They had to reach the height of the grass to get enough sunlight for photosynthesis which resulted in them becoming equally tall. The two plants somehow matched the grass with their blossoms too. Both of them grew multiple small ones, but one had them all bunched up together at one spot while the other one had them distributed over the whole plant.

None of the four plants did anything special as far as Argul could tell, but she didn't have the required knowledge about the chemicals inside of them to say so for sure. She had wanted the commonness to be the case. If everything was special then why would you call it special anymore?

Argul left the plants to themselves and focused on creating her animals. The last plant would come after that.

The first animal she wanted to create was an insect that pollinated her plants. She didn't necessarily want to have bees and decided to let herself get surprised instead. As a result a good two dozens disgusting maggots began to grow out of nowhere. When they reached the length of 2cm the maggots began to convulse and change rapidly. 

Argul watched fascinated until some kind of hybrid between a beetle and a moth began to crawl over the ground. They had elongated bodies covered in fur of different color variations and a pair of see-through wings. Instead of a mouth they had a long proboscis that would make it easier for them to get to the nectar of any flower.

Two of the moths met and began to check each other with their antenna. It didn't take long before they lost interest and continued their scouting though. 

Argul decided to name them beetle moths.

</

Beetle moth

Contrary to the beliefs of the namesake this small insect has nothing to do with beetles. They are indeed a kind of moth however and a very active pollinator too. Beetle moths dig holes in the ground to lay their eggs before winter and die there when the cold temperatures arrive. During spring the eggs hatch and the maggots use the remains of their predecessor as first meal before slowly starting their journey to the surface.

These moths are for some reason quite aware of their role as pollinators and tend to use that as a weapon against anybody who antagonizes them. Sadly these grudges also die with them during winter and they never manage to fulfill their plans of starving out the enemy.

/>

Argul looked a bit irritated at the screen. Look, they were bugs and beetles were bugs too so it is entirely plausible to name them beetle moths! 

Well, aside from that mana seemed to have its fun with the moths too, giving them the ability to deny their adversaries their future food, but not a long enough life to see it through. Nature could be truly cruel...

Now being able to call herself the fresh creator of a bug species that would burrow maggots in your lawn while ruining your harvest for one reason or the other, Argul decided that she did not want to think further about it and get on instead. Hopefully she would have more luck creating a bug that fed on the grass and other plants. She didn't have anything against bugs in general, but like it was with everything else there were quite a few unpleasant contenders in between the beauty of nature.

This time she got a real beetle. The insect had these hard wings that beetles always have and there was just no way this wasn't a beetle. It was about the size of a fingernail and dark green with a few bright yellow spots in between. 

They didn't do anything special or at least nothing Argul would call special and began to venture out. Well, they were prone to lay large amounts of eggs at once and being a menace for plants, but that was about it. Humans had proven that you could be a menace for plants without giving birth to hundreds of thousands of kids so she hadn't done anything annoying for anyone, right?

One day Argul would be able to create a floor full of unremarkable things without accidentally creating a pest or something that was weird. The day would come, she knew it!

She wasn't too sure why it made her feel guilty to create creatures like this beetle and she could only blame it on her modern knowledge. Knowing what some insect swarms could do if they got too large likely made her think of the consequences of her actions.

She decided to just let the topic be for now and instead continue playing god. The third insect on her list was some kind of ant. Ants were awesome as long as they didn't decide to bite or sting you. They would mainly feed off of plant stuff, but would go out and hunt other insects to provide proteins for their queens. 

Argul wanted them to be semi polygynous, meaning that they could form hives with more than one queen, but normally had only one. She mostly added this so they wouldn't immediately start to kill each other after the creation and instead worked together in the beginning.

Argul started the ribm process and watched the ant queens grow. They didn't stop growing until they were about 4cm long, which was pretty huge for an ant. The queens were all completely black and had some weird kind of appendages on their front that looked like a very short extra pair of limbs. They began to taste the scent of the air, waving their antenna around and then checked each other out. A bit later one of them started to dig into the loose earth with the extra pair of limbs and the others joined her shortly after. It seemed like they had accepted each other into one hive, which would improve their survival rate by quite a lot.

While the ants were busy creating their first colony Argul introduced the first real predator to the floor, a songbird. It was pretty small and had brown and green feathers. The bird's diet consisted of worms, insects and arachnids that were smaller than itself. Finding one of them in the tall grass would be quite difficult, but they brought much needed sound to the floor. With that she now had 4 of the six animals she needed. 

As Argul wanted to create some kind of large apex predator last, the large prey came first. She didn't have any specifications here again except for it being some kind of mammal and mostly a vegetarian. If they snacked on the insects than so be it, the beatles had to be kept at bay somehow anyways.

After using ribm a bunch of fur balls grew into existence until they were a bit larger than a fist. Then they unfurled and Argul had to hold her breath when she saw the adorable little things. She could only describe them as looking similar to marmots with the difference of having longer limbs. In fact they walked around in a way something like a sheep would walk around, but they were still able to stand upright like a marmot and hold food with their cute tiny hands.

The little furballs looked around curiously before they vanished into the spots of grass to hide from any predators. After a few minutes they felt safe and began to communicate with each other, adding to the one bird that had started chirping a bit earlier.

Argul smiled at the happy little animals and decided now was as good an opportunity as it would get for her to introduce their horror to them. She wouldn't, actually and purposely changed her view a good bit away from where the small marmots were into the barren wasteland that was her floor.

For her apex predator she had actually decided to create some kind of semi hybrid between animal and plant. Instead of having fur, the beast would grow a special kind of grass that had adapted to only grow on this predator. The animal would provide the grass with necessary nutrients and the predator got an extreme upgrade to their camouflage as well as energy from the grass.

The actual animal was the size of an average dog and also a quadruped. Their forelimbs were longer than their back limbs and their muscles were specialized for fast and accurate jumping. The overall form of the animal was similar to that of a boar with a jaw full of sharp teeth and paws instead of hooves. The grass growing from their body hung limply to the side and made them appear a lot larger than they actually were. It might even trick a bird into building a nest inside there. Actually, that would be kind of funny.

Argul named and identified one of them.

</

Grass mimic

This mid-sized animal lives in grasslands and through a series of catastrophic events adapted to grow a special kind of grass on its back. This grass looks similar to the grass variants in its surroundings, but is unique to this predator. The two organisms have a symbiotic relationship so strong that they would be unable to live without each other.

Grass mimics are rarely seen moving and prefer to stay still until unsuspecting prey gets into their jumping range. They are quick and able to stay in one spot for months if they have to, but will likely reposition before that.

/>

Argul grinned to herself. She had somehow managed to create a mimic that made sense despite being utterly crazy from a biological point of view. The chances for something like this coming into existence had to be pretty much zero in her old universe, if it was even possible in the first place.

Watching the mimics turned out to be pretty boring. After having distanced themselves from each other, they now didn't move anymore and could be random spots of grass in this wasteland. 

Argul decided to check her system notifications instead.

</

Quest completed:

• Enchanting is for craftspeople, not gamblers!
  • You have found a method to control the quality of your enchantment that needs skill, not luck. Now you are free to enchant the world or random spear tips inside of your domain. Wis +2

/>

That quest was a surprise, even if it tried to tease her. She must have gotten it when she had experimented with the spear tips of the villagers and only because it was an activity performed with her core. Her avatar was exceeding the mana density of Erod by quite a lot already so she wouldn't have gotten the quest with it. Argul had no intention of complaining though and would take the stats any day.

</

Quest completed:

• Don't eat that! (4)
  • You have created 50 new animal species. Very small animals necessary for a normal working environment such as bees or worms are going to be created by your mana AI on new floors for three days after they have been finished. 10% of the mana that is used to create small plants will be used for this. 
  • Str +5

New quest:

• Don’t eat that! (5)
  • Requirements: Don’t eat that! (4)
  • Create 50 animal species! 50/100

/>

Yes, even if Argul wouldn't get small animals such as mice, this was a huge boon for her and exactly what she had hoped she would get.

</

Floor finished!

Level up!

Status

Name: Argul Agren

Race: Mana core

Age: 8 months

Level: 11

Structural integrity: 100%

Mana: 65.54/275.92

Mana generation: 2.79/min

—

Stats

Str: 105

Int: 103

Wis: 104

—

Active skills

core special

mana manipulation

magic missile

identify (4)

water magic

emergency portal

fate contract

cleaning

increase heat (solid)

space manipulation

light magic

earth magic

enchanting

—

Passive skills

domain skills

learning (3)

sense skills

mental fortitude

curse of harmlessness (s)

aspect clothes

magic gunning

• neutral magic sniper bullet

hidden might

Stat growth boost (1)

currently:

• Str +2
• Int +2
• Wis +4

artifact creation

• Artifacts: 1 (all +5)
  • Lamp pole of light

—

Floor 1

Template: Luna (moon), surface

Size (radius): 1060 km

Area/ Volume: 7.9 M km²

Floor 9

Template: Erod, rainforest

Size (radius): 1160 km

Area/ Volume: 9.5 M km²

Floor 10

Template: Erod, deep forest

Size (radius): 1170 km

Area/ Volume: 9.7 M km²

Floor 11

Template: Erod, grassland

Size (radius): 1170 km

Area/ Volume: 9.8 M km²

/>