Reincarnated as a mana core

The coming of mana had been a time of catastrophe and opportunity. It was a time of constant changes and adventure, a time of danger and death. As such many a hero or evil overlord rose and fell during that time, giving birth to an uncountable amount of legends still told to this day.

Excerpt of “Legends of old”

—

Argul had to admit that watching Trevor organizing things was really impressive.

After they had chased away the 28 undesirables he had become the impromptu leader of their group and had formed groups that were tasked with collecting stuff they would need or may be of use later on.

Because of that it took only another hour for the group to get ready to depart. The whole event left Argul wondering how in the dimensional carrot salad Trevor had not been the leader of this village. Him just doing what he was good at was enough to become the leader, so what the hell?

Anyways, the group started their journey to the next village. Trevor set an acceptable pace for everyone, but they were still slower than Argul and Alyra jogging everywhere. Arthur guessed it would take them a week to reach the next settlement.

Argul and co walked at the rear of the group. She felt very uncomfortable with so many people around. 

It was rather weird that nobody was truly panicking and they all acted rather composed. Maybe it was because of the teleportation incident? Or the village was just plain weird?

Argul thought it was likely the latter. There hadn’t been any children in the village and from what she could overhear here and there most of the people here were of the hardier kind. They took what had happened at face value and tried to live with it. Argul couldn’t understand.

When dawn came they took a break and Argul learned what had been going on in the village with Andrew and his henchmen. 

To summarize it, the people who supported him would get one of the others as slaves. The enslaved didn’t have a choice but to follow what happened, because they were promised worse things than death and by what they were shown it was not bluff.

The people also all didn’t know and trust each other in the beginning, which allowed such a thing to happen. Once Andrew had been fully in control there hadn’t been much the others in the village could do about him. Though the appearance of a fully equipped military squad that claimed the village to be under their jurisdiction pacified the slavers somewhat and made them a lot more cautious about what they showed on the outside.

After the break the woman Argul had found crying actually came to her and asked about magic. Argul was only too happy to oblige and talk about the thing she liked, so much in fact that she immediately forgot the woman's name again. 

Over time more and more people came and listened to her. In the end Argul taught them all sense mana and mana manipulation over the next two days. Every time she became more technical or tried to describe her theories about something she lost her audience, so the teaching became incredibly boring after a short time.

The only thing she learned in that time was that it was actually easier to sense mana if the density of mana outside of you was lower than inside of you. Not being able to do something interesting and there being something incredible to be discovered, made Argul antsy more and more over time. Sure she could create new spells and skills, but compared to perceiving the world in four dimensions it paled.

Argul had wanted to wait until they were at least at the next settlement, but she couldn’t wait anymore. It had to be done, no matter what.

Excited to get started she crawled inside the tent of Mia, Aina and her. Argul smiled when she saw Mia lying completely sprawled inside the tent with her tail on her belly. Argul proceeded and laid down beside Mia as much as that was possible without having to move her.

She closed her eyes and left her avatar so it would just lay still and stop wagging its tail uncontrollably. 

To calm her mind a bit Argul did her routine check of her domain. A few small plants of the birch forest had started growing on her sixth floor, mainly some kind of grass and a lot of different insects had moved there too. Sadly something larger like the bird had not come again.

The moon grass had actually spread all the way to the fifth floor, though the variants of the fourth and fifth floor varied largely from the original moon grass.

The moon grass of the fourth floor had a slightly orange tinge and heated the air around it instead of producing water.

The variant of the fifth floor on the other hand had an ice blue tinge and was cooling the air around it.

Nothing much more had happened, so Argul created something you could call krill. It was a small shrimp-like animal that ate the plankton in the water. Krill was as far as Argul could remember part of the food of whales and other larger animals of the ocean.

Once she had done that she changed her view to the portal area and prepared herself for her experiment.

Similar to before, Argul kind of zoomed in her vision without doing so and created more depth to everything she could see. She looked at how she could see the world now and couldn’t comprehend what she saw for quite some time.

After what felt like hours she started to slowly become accustomed to her new perception. It made everything she had known and seen until now look insignificant and small, as only part of a greater truth.

Argul looked around and by just doing that she learned so much more about the world. It was overwhelming. She looked at her portal and was greeted by some kind of tunnel. The portal now had depth to it and wasn’t just a planar thing anymore.

She activated her mana sense and was again overwhelmed. It was as if her mana hadn’t known about this depth and was slowly spreading out more to fill out what had not been filled before. All her spells just seemed wrong, really anything she had done until now was worse than what she could do now.

Argul spent some more time to improve her mana sense as far as she could and after that all the skills she had. They improved by a lot and would make absolutely no sense for anyone who could only perceive 3 dimensions.

Argul looked around a bit more and had to smirk to herself. If humankind had seen the world the way she saw it they would all bang their heads against a wall for how stupid they had been. Really, space travel and true artificial intelligences would have likely been a thing when she had been alive.

Heck! Through her knowledge domain Argul knew that there were ores in her domain that you wouldn't even know about as a normal human. Just imagine all the crazy things you could do with them!

She tried to calm down again. She hadn’t even activated her sense for space and already she had gained so much, but she had mainly done it to take the next step as a space mage.

Argul activated her space sense and cringed a bit. Her portals, she really didn’t want to call them that, were just wrong. They were so crude, an animal could do better and it hurt Argul to house something like that.

To remove the abomination, she used her mana and started to align the portal structure to the structure of space. She could now see a lot more of what space was and could make some sense of the white wisps.

To make it short, space was entropy given a structure. The more in order space was, the weaker it was. As the structure moved around the whole time there was no true weak point in space for more than a split second. 

Well except for her portals as they were order incarnate. The order wasn’t truly the real problem though. 

Entropie is regular disorder, mess or whatever you want to call it. This means you can actually predict the movement of the structure that is space, as it constantly tries to be the worst mess possible.

Her portals on the other hand had an ordered structure that was moving around completely random. Compared to entropie their activity just made no sense.

Argul still needed the order to make space weaker, which was why she didn’t align the whole thing to the structure of space, but the movement of both structures. Her mana AI would then do the same thing to the other portals, which was really convenient.

It wasn’t perfect as Argul couldn’t see the entirety of space, but it improved the efficiency of the portals more than threefold.

She watched as her portal seemed to stabilize somewhat. The cracks receded and the rough edge smoothed out a bit. The weird ripple effect still stayed and it looked a lot worse with her new perception. Argul tried to ignore that and instead look at the positive side of things.

All that mana that had before been used to maintain the portal could now be used to grow her floors and if they were at their maximum size it would help Fia in growing her universe.

Wait, that meant she had just sped up the spreading of the mana zone by three times, didn’t it?

Argul groaned to herself. Couldn’t she just do things without making something else worse? 

She didn’t even get time to check out some things she really wanted to do. Argul still looked at her status before she got back to her avatar.

Quest completed:

• Saving fools
  • You saved 83 people from the village, even though you didn’t really do anything. 
  • Int +1
  • You saved Trevor! Now the world will get organized! Wis +2

She got more for saving Trevor, which considering the effort she had put in respectively made sense.

New Quest:

• And onwards we go!
  • You didn’t really think it would stop now did you? There is a lot more to do so get your ass up!

Argul just ignored the system's comment.

Quest completed:

• Magical teacher
  • You successfully taught five people the basics of magic.
  • Int +1
• What am I? A walking knowledge dispenser?
  • You arduously taught fifty people the basics of magic. If that was already too much for you please don’t become a teacher.
  • Int +2, Wis +1, Str +1

Achievement made:

• Seer of hidden depths (1)
  • You are able to perceive the world in more depth than any other known entity! Because of you mana has developed more depth.
  • The deeper you go the more rewards this achievement will give
  • Int +5, Wis +5
  • Identify (4)
    • The skill displays everything you know about your target. The skill has a low 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 can upgrade the skill through quests.

That was one of the best rewards Argul had got until now and it could even reward more. Still, that hadn’t been the end of her notifications.

New skill:

• Stat growth boost (1)

• • Mana has developed more depth and your core has more place to grow.
  • For every 50 stat points of Int and Str together, your Wis will grow by one.
  • For every 50 Wis your Int and Str will grow by one.

That skill was just wow. Right now it wouldn’t do a lot, but these statpoints would make a lot of difference later on.

You have made major discoveries as a space mage. All stats +4

New skill:

• Space manipulation

• • You can manipulate space. This skill will make improvement easier.

You created a skill involving space. All stats +1

Holy that quest was shitting stat points on her left and right. It just raced straight past her Seer achievement.

Status

Otjag

Have a map of the continent Argul is currently on! I definitly did not create it while procastinating instead of writing *cough*

Spoiler

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I know dry mountains are very much a thing, but I couldn't make a mountain range without trees... sorry.