Reincarnated as a mana core

 Argul did not celebrate her success in enchanting any further than the time she had spent with Luna. Doing so would have been the opposite of hiding it and she wasn't a party person either. She did have a bit of time with her daughter during the night, but that wasn't exactly what you would call a celebration.

Over the next one and a half weeks she then continued practicing and experimenting with her skill. Argul used more of the coins for that and thanks to the way the system worked she got pretty good at enchanting after the first few days of the week. She wouldn't call herself a master in the art yet, but she did skip a long time of training. 

Despite her new proficiency however the method she had discovered first didn't offer a lot of control to the caster and had an abhorrent accuracy. No matter how accurately Argul tried to make the enchantments, she couldn't control where the liquid mana would be created which turned the whole thing into a game of luck. She did consider herself quite lucky at times, but really preferred to have full control over things like this. Making a gacha game out of something she enjoyed doing wasn’t her style.

The solution to this problem led to her experimenting a lot the rest of the time. There had to be a better or rather more accurate method for enchanting. She wasn't confident in finding something that was both faster and more controllable than her current enchanting process.

The first thing Argul tried out was collapsing multiple spell formations at the same time, just to find out what would happen. As it turned out she wasn't able to hold more than 6 formations at once, despite her inhuman ability to kind of put them onto some sort of random access memory (ram). If she tried to do more than 6 she always got a core ache and the feeling was worse than any headache she had ever had. 

Without being able to do all of the 10 required formation breakdowns at the same time Argul couldn't really tell if the method was better in terms of precision or not and put it aside until her mind was a bit more capable. One thing was for sure though, the method was even faster than what she had already had.

The second thing that came to her mind was trying to do the fusion of mana and intent in a controlled manner. For that Argul had to somehow devise a method to only make a part of the formation collapse while the rest had to stay intact. She worked on this problem for a good 24 hours without much success. 

It did make her change how she defined mana however. Until now she had alway called the energy her core was spitting out mana, but that wasn't necessarily true. It was rather how Alyra had formulated it half a year ago, her core was creating unbound potential. This potential however was unused and it wouldn't do anything by itself. Here, intent came into play. Intent was the way that potential could be utilized. 

Mana was the combination of the two that naturally occured when the potential came into contact with something, it didn't even have to be a living being. In its normal state mana was like a mixture of two gasses, similar to how the atmosphere of a planet consisted of different kinds of gasses.

Argul followed that analogy after that to continue her experiments. Her theory here was that increasing the pressure on the mana would make it liquify eventually. To do that she didn't collapse the spellformation, but instead began to channel potential through it while simultaneously adding more and more intent, forcing the other intent inwards. This resulted in a continuous creation of liquid mana and the enchantment was a lot better in the end, but the process was more mentally straining and took longer. 

The method took away the luck factor of her previous one, but still lacked the kind of control Argul desired. She still couldn't build up the enchantment step by step and fix up irregularities, but had to do the whole thing at once. If the liquid mana didn't stay exactly where she wanted it to have, she had to live with it, because she couldn't move it inside of other materials. 

In the air Argul had perfect control over the liquid, but inside of her solid test subjects it didn't even budge. The question was if that was because there was no place for the liquid mana to move through or rather because it somehow bonded with the material. Argul tended more towards the second option. No matter how small the space between atoms was, the liquid mana should still be able to move through that space without influencing the normal physics in any way, like it did before it got liquified.

She didn't want to let that question wait for long and experimented inside of her domain because of that. Thankfully there was a village of people that had been so kind to provide her with the smithed metal she needed. 

Argul could enchant other things like stone or dead wood too, but she was currently the most confident with metal so choosing that for experiments made sense. 

Her knowledge domain was key for this test and she wouldn't be able to do it without that skill. Sadly, her wisdom wasn't high enough yet for the knowledge domain to work on an atomic level. The skill was still able to tell her that the liquid mana did indeed bond with the material, just not how and why. This could be essentially important knowledge for the way she did enchanting though, so Argul would definitely have to check that out in the future.

During the last two days of enchanting experiments she ran out of coins and secretly used Luna's spoons instead. It was risky to do because everyone who was observant enough to use their mana sense and notice that something was off with the spoons might discover that they could use them to light up the room, but after keeping an eye on the villagers in her domain Argul was sure that would take some time. These guys were using their mana sense nearly nonstop while hunting and guarding and still hadn't discovered that their spear tips were enchanted with light spells.

The last thing she tested during her enchanting rush was related to her pressure theory again. Argul wanted to have control and she was determined to get it.  

Compared to the last time she only added intent pressure to a small section of the enchantment and constantly funneled more of her potential into it, but not enough to activate the spell. 

This time the mana got liquefied only in this small part of the formation and the potential could still pass through there. When she was done with the section Argul was able to take that part out of her formation and the spell still worked. 

This method was even more exhausting and might take a bit longer, but if Argul trained a bit this should give her the control she wanted. Utilizing a formation that was a lot smaller as the planned enchantment could even give her a lot more precision and was likely even more difficult, but that wasn't really a problem for her.

Argul placed the spoon she was holding on the little table in front of her and leaned back on the couch. The last week had gone by really fast and she felt a bit strained. Building the next floor might help to rest her mind a bit.

Argul sighed and closed her eyes. She would just take a break from enchanting tomorrow and build the floor afterwards.