Reincarnated as a mana core

The term human is imprecise and seldom used anymore in the universe of Lotusriver. Human is everything of humanoid shape that originated from a human and as such there are further smaller categories of species like beast-kin or animal-kin.

An exception are the monstrous species that came with the advent of mana. These species such as goblins, kobolds and others are intelligent, but for some reason always attack other species. Because of that they are not considered human, but as monsters.

Excerpt of “Words whose definition changed largely in the last millennium / First edition”

 

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Argul woke up abruptly and felt the mana zone encroaching on them. Maybe half an hour more and the density would reach level 1. Her getting more wisdom actually sped up the spreading of the mana zone, but she wouldn’t stop doing anything just because of that.

That she was even trying to help humans right now was something she would not have done in her last life. She would have watched, sure and then she would have hated herself for not even trying.

Argul got out of her bed and started to get dressed. She went with the army pants again and a brown shirt this time. She had actually found herself some boots. They looked more like something you would wear to go running and were black. The boots gave her a reason to wear some white socks.

Argul didn’t really care about her looks. She was happy with herself and as long as the clothes felt nice she would wear them as much as possible.

She started to hum to herself and danced a bit through the room. It was silly, but Argul felt like it right now. She hoped nobody would come looking for her.

Argul would have given a lot for some music that moment. She really wanted to try and create a spell, but she believed that connecting one to her memories was too far ahead of her. In no way would she create music herself, she couldn’t do that to the universe.

She stopped dancing and blushed a bit. Then Argul straightened her back and opened the door to her room. The hallway was empty, but she could hear Alyra and Trevor discussing something in the living room.

Argul walked through the mostly bare hallway to the living room and entered.

Trevor was sitting on a chair next to a couch which Arthur occupied. Alyra laid in the middle of the room where a table once had been and Mia had curled herself around Aina on the couch to the right. She was likely asleep and Argul had to smile at the sight.

She had no idea why she felt the need to care that much about Mia. Maybe she had gotten some kind of maternal instinct with her form. Argul didn’t care all that much. It was a nice feeling to have.

She greeted the three adults in a subdued voice and then walked over to Alyra. Once there, she sat down and leaned against her daughter, just listening to their conversation.

They were discussing possible ways to convince the military to help them. Argul had no idea why they didn’t call them government. Wasn’t that exactly what the military had become in the last four months?

She didn’t care all that much. Argul would offer her help beforehand and if she was denied would do it again afterwards. She hated all the politics and organizing part. They were important and she could understand them, but she didn’t want to be part of it.

After about fifteen minutes Trevor made a choking sound and fell forward on the ground where he made pained noises.

Argul immediately jumped up and rushed to him. She crouched down, put her hands on his back and started to push her mana into him. It wouldn’t work normally as the organism would reject her mana, but right now Trevor’s body didn’t even know about mana so it worked. Though the efficiency was terrible.

The sight of Trevor changing was weird. Argul could understand that Arthur found it disgusting, but she was rather fascinated by what was happening.

Trevor was clawing the ground desperately as his body changed. His hair had fallen out and now feathers were growing instead. The feathers were also growing on his back and arms as far as Argul could tell.

The noise woke Mia up, who then also watched the whole thing.

Trevors face was contorting weirdly and a beak grew where his mouth used to be. His eyes angled slightly more downwards towards his nose that was slowly receding. His eyebrows were exchanged with feathers too. Then his eyes became completely black.

His hands and feet looked like they were about to change, but Trevor suddenly exhaled in relief and something weird happened. His beak and feathers started to crystallize until they were completely composed of silvery crystal and his eyes formed silver iris’.

Argul touched the ploumache in wonder and discovered that it was still soft as feathers and did in fact not feel like a crystal.

She looked at Trevor. Uh…ohh… Could it be that the crystal part was her fault?

Argul blushed a bit and cleared her throat. “So, how do you feel?”

Trevor sat up, opened his beak and made some weird noises. When he heard this he looked at them confused and tried again, but a lot more slowly. It was still hard to understand, but at least you could understand it. “Utterly shit. That was the worst fucking thing I have ever felt.”

He laid back down on his back and closed his eyes again. “So, what happened to me?”

Argul looked at Arthur and Alyra for help, but found none. She fidgeted a bit around with her hands until they found her swaying tail that had betrayed how excited she was about what she had just observed. “Uhm… I have good news and maybe bad news?”

She cleared her throat. “You are still yourself you see? That's the good thing.”

Trevor looked at her expectantly and Argul moved awkwardly from one foot to the other. “As for the maybe bad thing you should look at yourself in the mirror. I think you look quite beautiful, but you will have to decide on that yourself.”

She blushed a bit more and looked away.

Argul really thought him quite beautiful. It looked as if you had taken a human and fused him with a silver raven.

Without saying a word he got up and walked to the bathroom. There was a mirror there and most of his body he could observe without one.

Alyra looked at her expectantly. “So have you found anything out during your little experiment.”

Argul was aware that she asked more for Arthur. She had likely seen the exact same thing as Argul and could get the information through the archive if she wanted.

Argul, immediately caught by the question, let her excitement run free. “It was really fascinating to watch. I couldn’t actually see the influence of the universe, but was able to see how mana fought it and got used up in the process.”

She clasped her hands together and smiled brightly, her tail still swaying. “Injecting your mana into a person helps, but it also gives the person some features of what you are.”

Her smile got a bit smaller. “The efficiency sadly is terrible and I had to use nearly all of my mana for Trevor.”

Then her smile grew back. “Though if you were to inject all your mana into the head of the person they should stay at least themselves in their minds. Your mana can’t influence the mind of another without some tweaks here and there.”

She would not invent mind magic to manipulate other people, others could do that, but it went against her own moral code.

Arthur sat up and looked at her curiously. “What aspect of you is crystalline?”

Argul opened her mouth, but didn’t manage to say anything. She had been completely caught off guard.

Alyra cleared her throat. “We should go outside. Trevor getting initiated only means that the same is happening to the other villagers.”

Argul was thankful for getting an escape possibility. “You are absolutely right Alyra!”

She made it completely obvious that Arthur had just found something secret. Argul turned around and nearly ran to her room.

It was strangely silent outside, but the group nonetheless shouldered their packages and prepared to get going. They now only had to wait for Trevor.

Argul opened the door and stepped outside ready to help anyone who needed help. 

It was dark outside and still mostly silent. A loud shriek got her attention and Argul moved in that direction. The others could hopefully manage without her.

The shriek was followed by a loud and distorted crowing. Argul began to sprint in the direction of the house. She could now hear that something tried to fly inside the house. The door was locked, so she just made use of her heightened strength and kicked it open.

Argul had been ready for anything to be behind it, but not for the crow-like woman that was leaning against the wall and was silently crying. The woman looked at her, stood up and ran towards Argul.

Argul was still unsure of the intent behind the movement and took a step back. She was surprised when the woman fell to her knees in front of her, still crying. “Please tell me what is going on! What happened to me? What happened to the man I had to serve the last four months?”

Serve? The heck is going on here?

Argul looked around warily. “What happened is why we came to this village and why you were banned from speaking to us.”

She focused on the woman again. “As for what happened to you, you integrated successfully into mana without losing yourself. By the sounds of it I wouldn’t say the same thing about the other occupant of the house.”

The woman looked up at her, with what looked like hope in her eyes. “Really?”

Argul was totally weirded out by the situation. Something strange had been happening in this village and Trevor hadn’t known about it. 

She just nodded to answer the question.

The woman sat up, raised her fist to the sky and shouted out. “I! Am! Free!”

Then she just sat there laughing and crying in happiness and relief. Argul had no idea what was going on, but didn’t get the time to ponder about it. 

A moment later a loud crowing sounded through the night. Argul moved to the woman and took her hand. “Sorry, but I believe we should move on.”

Doing this made Argul feel incredibly uncomfortable, but she had to get through it. The woman didn’t offer any resistance and let Argul more or less drag her back to the others.

A few windows broke throughout the village and things were flying off into the night. Argul had yet to hear any pained cries or the sound of fighting. There were a few more shrieks of fear here and there but nothing more.

Argul got back to her group. “I think the corrupted are not aggressive this time. Seems like we have been lucky. I would suggest we light a fire so people know where to go.”

She just ignored the still laughing woman and the weird glances she got from her group. Then she sighed. “Please just ignore her for now. Something weird had been going on in the village, though I have no idea what.”

Arthur nodded, he had seen enough weird people as a drug dealer. “Just make your fire. Not having to run away for once is nice. We can just take our time and then take those that want to come with us and continue on.”

They then did just that. Argul collected some wood, mainly by breaking off branches of a tree and then used her heat skill to heat up a stone until the wood caught fire. After that they waited and Argul spent her time collecting more wood with Mia.

With time a few confused and fearful people came to them and wanted to know what was going on. There were a lot of people who had raven features and for some reason the majority of them were female.

When Trevor came outside after one and a half hour a lot of the woman with raven features began cooing around him and tried to get nearer to him. It was really weird to watch and it confused Argul greatly.

After a moment of that the woman all seemed to realize what they were doing and tried to desperately apologize to Trevor. Argul smirked to herself, having realized what was going on. The guy became a magnet for female raven-kin.

After about two hours nobody was coming anymore, but a lot of windows had been broken in the time, freeing whatever was taking flight afterwards. Argul had never seen one of the corrupted fully.

All in all maybe 80 people had come, 83 in fact. There should have been around 400 people living here, so the result was a lot better than last time. Sadly or luckily, Argul wasn’t quite sure, Andrew was not part of them.

Of the 83 people, 28 didn't want to come with them. From what Argul had overheard here and there, those were Andrew’s supporters and by the hateful gazes they were getting it was likely better to not have them. 

Of the 28 people, 18 were men and 10 women. Though Argul still didn’t know what the heck had been going on in this village and wasn’t sure if she wanted to know.

Now, with 55 more people they started their journey to the next village.