Reincarnated as a mana core

Argul was taken completely by surprise when Aina tried to take over her spell formation and nearly lost control to the slime. 

A moment ago she had been trying to figure out how to secure her light spell formation in the pole of a lamp that was pretty useless without electricity and now she had to compete with Aina over her experiment.

Heck! Argul hadn’t even known that the slime was able to manipulate mana or what she was trying to accomplish, but she had chosen the wrong enemy.

Argul put up her defenses and pushed Aina’s attempts to overtake the spell back. That she had enough power to even take over Argul’s mana was already quite impressive.

The slime stopped her assault for a brief moment and changed targets. Now Aina was trying to isolate the spell from any intent and Argul had to defend that in addition to keeping up her defense of her mana.

Isolating the mana from any and all intents would make it solidify and that would make the metal pole unusable to Argul. Her core grew in the same way and the solid mana couldn’t take on any form of intent anymore which in turn meant you couldn’t use it to cast spells. Well, there was something different going on with the solid mana of her core afterwards that likely was also the reason she was able to cast spells.

Aina wouldn’t be able to achieve that however, because you had to take away all intents and doing so was extremely difficult. Argul was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to do it if she didn’t know how her unconsciousness was doing it. It would still be difficult for her and take a very long time.

All that didn’t mean that she would let Aina do her thing though, because it would still destroy her spell formation and adjusting it to the pole was annoying.

Argul poked the slime that was sitting between her legs. “Could you please stop, little miss?”

Aina jiggled and shied away from Argul’s finger. At the same time she stopped all her attempts to take the intent away from the mana.

Argul hadn’t expected that anything would happen because of her little poke and kept her pull on the intent for a second longer. What should have been a framework of intent for the mana collapsed inwards and the spell formation collapsed.

Argul let out a deep sigh and looked at Aina. The slime was pressing itself against the ground and slightly against the ground. Not only had she understood what Argul had sayed, but seemed to be quite aware that she had done something bad too and even looked like feels guilty.

Maybe Aina was a lot smarter and aware than Argul was giving her credit for?

She shook her head. That was going a bit too far already.

Argul smiled kindly and slowly moved her free hands towards Aina before she petted the slime gently. “It’s okay, just don’t do it again.” 

She wasn’t really angry at Aina. The slime was able to manipulate mana and intent. Argul hadn’t been aware and consciously able of the latter some time ago so what Aina had done was, simply put, amazing.

Considering this Argul felt like she should acknowledge Aina more. 

She hugged the slime and continued her petting. “What you did was amazing, but the way you presented your skills was questionable.”

Aina wobbled weakly in response. Now Argul was considering that Aina was able to understand her. She did react more often to words and language lately, but how would she even do it?

The only thing Argul could think of was a slime's innate vibration sense, but she didn’t know how easy or difficult it was to learn a language based on the vibrations in the air. In the end she should just check with her daughter if Aina had reached sapience or not. If she had it would be really embarrassing for her due to the way she treated Aina, but that was a problem she could deal with then.

Argul put Aina down. Now that this was done it was time to continue her experiments.

She picked up the metal pole and was about to cast her spell inside of it when she noticed something inside the metal. There were a few spots where the mana hadn’t dispersed and looked somehow different. Except for their size these spots all looked the same however.

A curious phenomenon.

Argul increased her perception of intent and creased her brows. That was extremely difficult to look at, even for her and she was able to see 4 dimensional. 

The weird spots were a blend of her mana and the intent of the light spell somehow. Now, normally intent and mana were like the two sides of a coin, but here it was like you were looking at both sides while only seeing one and looking at one side but seeing two. It created a really disorienting effect.

Argul scratched her head with her free hand. How and when did that happen?

She looked at Aina, but the slime obviously didn’t have an answer for her.

Thinking about it, it could have only happened during or after her spell formation collapsed, because she hadn’t been paying attention to the metal pole then. There was only one way to find it out and that was to repeat what had occured before.

Argul created the spellformation for her normal light spell outside of the metal pole and kept it like that for a moment. Then she pulled the intent inwards to make the spell collapse and watched intently. 

Most of the mana instantly dispersed and the intent lost any form and structure that Argul had given to it. Nothing particularly special happened however so she figured it either was a thing of luck or her pull hadn’t been strong enough.

Argul repeated the same thing multiple times, but increased the pull of the intent with each try. It took until the 5th round and a pull twice as strong as in the metal pole before something changed.

In the center of the spell formation a tiny amount of mana and intent collided and fused with each other. If she had to describe it, it looked like the mana had tried to evade the intent, but the intent had been too fast because of her.

During the fusion the volume of the two shrank down to maybe a 10th of the original value and Argul could only barely see the result of the reaction. 

A small drop of some kind of yellowish white liquid condensed in the air before it fell down very slowly. Argul reached out and catched the drop in her hand. Not the smartest thing one could do with an unknown substance, but she didn’t care right now.

The drop hardly adhered to Argul’s skin like a drop of quicksilver and it didn’t cause any violent reaction. Hopefully it stayed that way.

She cupped her hands around the drop to prevent as much light as possible from reaching it and took a quick peak. The drop glowed very weakly.

Argul opened her hands again and carefully threw the drop into the air. It flew quite a few centimeters upwards before it came to a halt and began to slowly hover back towards the ground.

She watched the whole process before she caught it again. Her theory was that she had just discovered the liquid form of mana and if she was right that was kind of funny, because solid mana was the mana that was completely or at least mostly independent from intent, liquid mana embraced one intent and the normal state of mana was the one that couldn’t decide which of the two things it should do.

Interestingly the drop of mana wasn’t influenced by the other intents around. The question was-

Aina interrupted Argul's thought and pulled herself on Argul’s leg. Then she stretched herself and reached out for the little mana drop.

Argul moved her hand away from Aina and looked at the slime sternly. She would not allow her to eat this and she was busy right now.

Argul picked Aina up with her other hand and sat her down on the ground between her legs. “That might be dangerous for you. Don’t eat it and let me experiment with the mana drop in peace.”

Aina made a cute little pop sound and Argul had to smile. That was weirdly similar to a pout. She petted Aina once more before she focused on the mana drop again.

What she had wanted to test out was if the drop was influenced by intent with a purpose and if she could channel mana through it. If the latter was the case, she had accidentally discovered her method of enchanting.

Testing this out was rather easy compared to creating the drop in the first place. Argul created a new light spell formation, but channeled the mana through the drop before she created the light. The mana went through the drop easily, but the intent of the spell didn’t do the same. Instead it got absorbed by the drop and the strength of its glow increased the more intent it absorbed.

Argul stopped after a moment of this. The question now was if the intent increased the glow or rather the strength of the mana liquid.

She repeated the experiment with her water conjuration. The liquid's reaction to other purposeful intents might already answer her new question.

The mana of the spell once again moved easily through the drop and then into the spell formation. The intent she sent with the mana however reacted differently from before. A small part of it just bounced straight off of the drop and lost its connection to Argul’s spell. Half of the water conjuration intent tried to move past the mana drop, but also lost its connection to the spell in the process. She could connect it back to her spell of course, but that wasn’t the goal of this experiment.

The rest of the intent pushed into the drop and the liquid mana began to slowly darken the more that happened. Argul continued this until the last bit of the light intent had disappeared from the drop and the mana dispersed into the ambient mana.

To conclude things, liquid mana got weakened by another intent that has a purpose, but had some natural defenses against this. Intent of the same kind that had formed the mana liquid had a strengthening process.

Argul looked at the pole with a bright and excited smile. Things were about to get really interesting for her.