Reincarnated as a mana core

During dinner it turned out that Luna had successfully bribed the new slime into staying with her. Bubble, the name she had given to it, was constantly following her around while she brought food and drinks to her customers.

The slime got a lot of attention by the visitors and Luna had to explain what Bubble was multiple times. Argul was quite happy that she didn’t have to be the one who introduced slimes. Trying to calm the worries of the wary people sounded like a pain in the ass to her.

She couldn’t fault them for being wary however. Letting yourself get fooled by the cute appearance of something was naive and the naivety of people had died in the last half year. Too many strange things had happened in that time to simply trust something new and don’t consider possible dangers.

After dinner Argul went back to her room together with Mia. She only allowed the girl to play with the adults after dinner every second day. The other days Mia could choose to either go to bed or read something. 

The idea behind that was that Argul didn’t have to force the girl to read, but pushed her into doing it instead and it kind of worked. Now Mia was laying in bed on her belly with her head resting on Aina and was reading the book to the slime. Above the two of them hovered one of Argul’s light spells.

The sight was quite cute and made Argul feel warm. She smiled and turned towards Mia before she closed her eyes. It had been a long time since someone had read something out aloud to her and she thoroughly enjoyed it.

An hour later Mia got tired and the three of them decided to call it a day. Argul let her light spell slowly fade away before she made herself comfortable. She closed her eyes and moved her consciousness back to her core.

There were a few things she wanted to do there tonight. Firstly, Argul connected the lakes of the 9th floor to freshwater lakes on the 6th one and added a 1% chance for a connection to the ocean to form. This might cause a few funny things to happen and some of the oceanic creatures could migrate into the freshwater territory.

Next she created the freshwater moss for the jungle. It grew on top of a few small pebbles in the shallower regions of the water and had a green coloration. 

Argul looked through the clear water at the moss and smiled. Nothing special or weird this time. She shouldn’t jinx it though, there were three more things she wanted to create later.

Before that however she needed to address two problems she had noticed. All of her floors were spherical and for the surface floors she just filled out half of the floor. 

The second problem was that she had no idea what happened if you reached the end of a floor and continued to travel out of it. There was nothing holding you back physically so you could just do it if you wanted.

A few animals had of course already done so and disappeared afterwards. They hadn’t reappeared on the other side, like Argul had expected and this concerned her a bit.

The only idea she had to solve this was by connecting one end of the floor to the other. Argul activated her space sense and got to work on the first floor. Doing it here was the easiest and once she had done it one time on this floor her AI could do the rest.

To start she looked at the connections between her floors. She would have to do something similar so it made sense to learn from something that was already there. 

Argul kept the image of the connection in her mind and focused on the space at the edge of the first floor. She slowly began to drag the space backwards, gritting her teeth in her mind. This was really difficult and demanding, but she nonetheless tried to see it through.

Argul was about to reach a stretched distance of 1m when her mana ran out and things were about to slip out of her control. Dammit, she had forgotten how mana intensive this was!

There was no time to think about possible solutions however and a possible way to resolve this problem had to be found. Argul became a bit desperate and tried to take control of the ambient mana on the floor. To her surprise the mana responded as if it was her own, which was very much the case.

The fact that she had never even considered that the mana inside her domain was still hers was so mind boggling that Argul’s mind stopped for a moment and she completely lost control of the space she had stretched. 

She had this much mana at her beg and call and she always waited an hour or more when the mana her core could hold was empty to regenerate it. All those hours just because she had never tried, no, never even considered the possibility of the mana in her domain still being hers. 

Argul had the urge to slap herself. She could be really oblivious at times and this time it had cost her a lot of time. Well, technically speaking time wasn’t worth that much to her so it wasn’t a problem in the end.

Argul sighed and focused her mind back towards her space problem. There was no point in dwelling on little errors like this.

What she saw once again baffled her. The space she had stretched out had snapped back to its original spot, but kind of wrong. The space Argul had pulled on had connected itself without fully returning to its original length. This resulted in a U-turn of space and if you were to walk out of the floor you would find yourself suddenly walking towards the center again.

Argul scratched her imaginary head awkwardly. This solved her problem, but it felt like it was too easy and she hadn’t done enough for it. Not taking an easier and more efficient solution would be dull though so she copied what had accidentally happened. 

Once she had done it her mana AI began her work and started to use the ambient mana to bend space on all the floors. With that one of her problems was solved.

Argul changed over to the 9th floor again to add some fish to her water. Now that she knew she could use the ambient mana she wouldn’t have to wait anymore.

She initiated the ribm process and watched the fish grow. They were pretty thin and reached a length of about 10cm. Their scales were of a brownish green that would make them difficult to spot in murky waters.

They scattered into different directions and Argul focused on one of them. If she understood what her domain told her right then these were catfish. They had four bottom fins, the front two of them were parallel to each other, a single tail fin and a large fin on their back.

The back fin started short after the head of the fish and went all the way back to the tail of the fish. It was also slightly curved to the right and as was normal with the fins of fish, quite sharp.

Argul had never seen a catfish like this, but the sharpness of the blade was a pretty interesting feature so she decided to call them blade fins. She watched them grub through the floor of the lake for a bit before she took care of her other problem.

It wasn’t much of a real problem and more an efficiency issue that bugged her. During one of her lessons with Mia she had calculated the surface area a surface floor would have if she made them little planets of their own with the atmosphere taking a quarter of the max radius. Argul had done it out of curiosity and it turned out that doing so was a mistake, because the surface area of the first floor alone would more than double if she did this. Now she couldn’t let things be as they were and had to change this.

Actually changing the floor wouldn’t be that much of an issue and the inhabitants wouldn’t even notice as long as the volume of matter already there wasn’t larger than that of the new little planet. Of course that wasn’t the case and she would have to get creative creating solutions for the unrequired matter.

Argul changed to her first floor and looked at the entirety of it from above. The easiest way to deal with things on this floor would be to let the superfluous rock break off on the planet side that was uninhabited and orbit the planet afterwards.

She changed her floor settings according to her plan and watched as the ground slowly began to rise and curve itself around the rest of it. The whole thing was quite fascinating to look at.

The spare matter broke off and the ground shook a bit as a result. It wasn’t some world changing earthquake, but it still made Argul wince. Her floor continued to change into a planet and half an hour later it was over.

She added a little spin to the planet and looked at it and its asteroid in their new beauty. More than half of the surface was still gray and quite void of any life, but that would change in at least a month. Argul also modified a few of the rules to make them work on the different setup and more entrances to the second floor formed.

Satisfied with her work she went to the 6th floor. Argul altered the way she would turn this floor into a planet a bit compared to how she had done it on the first floor. All water that was too much would flow to the 7th floor and get turned into mana there. The matter would lead to extreme earthquakes on the side of the planet that was uninhabited and create spike-like mountains that peaked out of the water. This would create a special environment on the floor and Argul liked the idea of leaving behind a few traces.

She additionally made the area around the portal a safezone to make sure the little village didn’t get mixed up in this catastrophe and then put in the new floor setting.

This time the changes were a lot more noticable for anyone not in the safezone and even there you could hear some of the extremely loud cracks. Argul kept an eye on the village while tsunamis and earthquakes haunted the rest of the floor, trying not to feel bad about scaring the Lizard-people shitless.

The mountain spikes that grew because of her planetification were quite magnificent. They reached up to 3000m above the water surface and formed seemingly endless mountain ranges and oceanic trenches under the water surface. There were a lot of entrances to the 7th floor here.

Argul added a little spin to this planet too, relieved that the AI was managing things like day and night time or gravity. Doing that would be a pain in the ass. She would have to create some sophisticated spells for gravity management however, to reduce the mana maintenance cost of her floors.

The 8th and 9th floor's changes were quite a bit more impactful than the other two had been. For both of these floors the current matter had to be more than halved. The 8th floor had a few very tall mountains with a height of up to 30km as a result of this now. Argul had only made sure that her Hebiwashis were safe.

On the 9th floor though, she had only closed her eyes and went through with her changes. Luckily the area with her lake and jungle had survived. She couldn’t say the same for the rest of the planet however and it looked more like there had been a nuclear war in the past.

Argul looked at her work and it truly made her realize just how much power she wielded over those in her domain. Without much effort she could just vaporize whole civilizations and that scared her. 

Would she do it if she was angry at them and lost control?

How much would it take to make her use these methods?

Argul shuddered and thought about this for a long time.