Reincarnated as a mana core

Leveling

To level, one has to absorb enough mana in his body. It is not possible to absorb anymore mana passively if the density of mana in your body is higher or equal to that on the outside. There are various techniques to absorb more mana, but the most commonly used is to absorb the mana of killed creatures. The higher your level the more mana your body has to absorb.

 

—

 

Argul felt great! 

That is because he already felt great before the level up, which he really didn’t notice. No godly feeling of being empowered or some other nonsense. 

Argul opened his status to see its level two glory.

Status

He did some quick math for his stats. “So a level up gives 3 stats?”

Alyra’s avatar hovered into his view in a lying position. “Yes, even though you are a bit of a special case in things involving mana.”

She looked really relaxed and was even having a stalk of weed in her mouth. “Your core is built of pure mana and mana has it a lot easier to enhance and build on what is already there. I think that’s also why you only have three stats as they got somewhat combined.”

Alyra really took her acting seriously, to Argul’s great amusement.

The avatar sat up and looked at him. “Normally you would have 6 stats and 3 of them would get enhanced. So compared to the average organism you get 3 stat points more per level up.”

So Argul got preferential treatment. “Let me guess one can not choose where the stat points go?”

Alyra laid back down, put her hands behind her head and crossed her legs. “Yup! I made the system to balance things out, because you may have all the strength of the world, but if you can’t control your body it’s just useless and I really don’t trust people to be able to do it themselves.”

He smiled in his mind. “You sure are nice to the common potato.” He would really like to be able to express himself more without his voice.

The avatar waved him away haughtily. “Yes of course! I’m a strong supporter of equal starting points!”

Argul couldn’t help himself and immediately had to point out how that was not the case. “Sure, sure. That’s why hereditary evolutions are a thing.”

The avatar spluttered. “...” 

Making Argul aware that she had spluttered without using her speech bubbles and not being able to communicate verbally sure as hell was impressive.

Now knowing that he did not have to put his thoughts to his stat build, Argul told his floor to continue growing like before and waited for his mana to regenerate. 

It was time to conduct his experiment with his sense space.

Once he was ready he tried to view his dungeon like one of these 2 dimensional games.

What Argul got was weird as hell. His second floor was inside his first, but also not? 

He had no idea how to describe what he saw, but not wanting to get a mindache from looking at it for too long, he activated his space sense. 

He did in fact not get a headache as he lacked the necessary head.

What Argul saw made some more sense now. 

If he had to describe it, space is entropy given a structure and his two floors were two different structures in the same, well, space, that had a connection at one point, his entrance to the second floor. 

His problem was that the structure constantly changed in a way that made him think going 4 dimensional might give a conclusion to that. 

Argul changed his perception back to 3 dimensional and wow. 

Now he could make some sense to what he saw. His skill seemed to agree, as it got a lot easier. Argul could see a bit more of the structure now and how it turned and twisted. 

Still, sometimes parts of the structure appeared or disappeared in a weird fashion, as if sinking in or rising to the surface of an ocean. Argul concluded that his problem was at least 4 dimensional, but didn’t believe it would stop there. 

In a sense Argul would never be able to perceive the entirety of space.

Quest completed: 

• Space mage (2)
  • You made some sense of what pace is, but now you realized no matter how much you ever know about space, you will never know all about it. INT +2

New Quest: 

• Space Mage (~)
  • Requirements: Space Mage (2) | realization to never know it all
  • Who said you should stop if you wouldn’t ever be able to know it all? Isn’t that what makes life even more exciting? You are immortal and now you have found something to spend your eternity on. Depending on the information you learn about space or the things and skills you create related to space magic you will be rewarded.

Achievement made: 

• Purpose for eternity
  • Immortality always brings with it the possibility to lose one's purpose in life or to lose oneself to time. You found yourself a possible purpose for eternity. As such your mind holds even in the darkest nights and the strongest storms. It will be harder to influence your mind through skills/spells and to affect your mind negatively. May your mind be your last bastion to withstand any coming onslaught and grow ever stronger. (skill: Mental fortitude) STR +1, WIS +1

 

The new quest was a surprise for Argul. “You have endless quests in the system?”

Alyra was still lying in her chill position, but seemed to be distracted by something. “Yeah, but they are really hard to get. You only got one right there because becoming a space mage and being immortal is already hard enough.”

She did have a point there.

Argul read through his notifications again and had to admit that it was good that endless quests were a rarity. They sounded really rewarding.

As for the achievement, honestly he hadn’t put much thought into being immortal, but he could see the skill becoming a great boon and a necessity later on.

Now that Argul understood how his floors worked somewhat, he made the only reasonable thing one could do. 

He designed the entrance to his next floor as inconspicuous as possible. People wouldn't notice that they were on the way to the next floor until halfway through, where the temperature would start to get colder. 

His entrance to the next floor would again be in the outer 10km reach and looked exactly like all the other tunnels on his floor. 

His third floor would be a cave system again, but this time it had a mild temperature and mid-sized to small caves. He checked his floor options once again and then let the floor start growing.

Floor 3

• Natural caves
• Cave size: small to medium
• Eternal night
• Temperature: 0°C to 15°C
• Events:
  • Tunneling
    • Caves form randomly with a minimum distance of 50m and a maximum distance of 1000m between each other. Each cave has to be at least connected to one other cave.
  • Earthquake
    • There is a chance of 5% of small localized earthquakes to happen each month.
  • Cold wave
    • For 5 to 15 days the temperature will decrease to -5°C. This event has a chance of 10% to occur each month.

Argul really wanted to call the last event Ice Age, but it just wasn’t long enough for this in his opinion and he didn’t want to carry it too far on the first few floors. 

He knew that his floor settings were really similar to his second floor, but he followed a motto. There really wasn’t a lot he could do with his Luna template, at least as long as he didn’t actively create new environments and doing so with caves was a lot easier than on the surface in his opinion.

He mentally left his floor to grow and started training his sense space again.

Argul trained for 10 days. At the end he was nearly able to hold the skill indefinitely, so he took a break on the tenth day. 

When he looked - or more felt as there wasn’t really any light there - at his third floor he was flabbergasted. How in the hell Lunagrass got there he had no idea, but it enabled the cave crickets to spread there too. 

Argul looked at the maze that was his second floor and noticed some batches of Lunagrass here and there. It wasn’t dominant, but used every place the other plants didn’t grow in.

Whoever managed to make a map of his cave floors would get Argul's congratulations and pity the moment it changed because of an earthquake.

One of Alyra’s chat bubbles popped up in front of him. “Hey mom there is going to happen something interesting in the portal room of the second floor in a few minutes!”

That got Argul’s attention as this was the first time Alyra wanted him to look at something. 

One of the diggers was currently eating in the portal room, while one of his cave stalkers crept up and got ready to kill its prey. 

The spider jumped and injected its venom in the worm. After a few seconds of wriggling in agony the worm died and the spider waved its pedipalps in happiness. 

That moment a slime wobbled into the room. It most likely looked at the spider and copied the movement of the pedipalps. 

Argul had no idea how to discern where something without eyes but a special sense of sight was looking.

The spider noticed the slime and stopped. It slowly turned to face the slime while making creepy clicking sounds. 

The slime answered, making wet slop sounds by forming bubbles of air in its outer membrane and bouncing up and down, which seemed to greatly confuse the spider. 

Unsure about its opponent and unwilling to give up the corpse, the spider took hold of it with its pedipalps and jumped away, vanishing in the darkness. 

The slime, now allone, fully entered the cave and moved in the direction of the portal. Then it jumped through the portal, only to jump back a moment later to do it again. 

Argul had to laugh and it took him a few minutes to calm down again.

Alyra’s avatar appeared again and stared at him accusingly. “Why did you have to create such damn cute slimes?”

Now, Argul could answer by telling a story for hours that had nothing to do with the question, but why would he? “Do you remember Rimuru from That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime?”

Alyra thought about it for a second and then nodded. “That’s a valid point. Now I have to ask if you thought of Rimuru while creating them?”

He could only hope he had done nothing stupid again. “Maybe. Is that a bad thing?”

Alyra just shrugged. “No, not necessary, it just means that the slimes will probably have a high chance of reaching sapience upon evolution.”

He sighed relieved. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

Argul didn’t think of it as a problem. What could possibly go wrong? 

For other sapients a lot, but for him it hopefully didn’t really matter that much and sapient slimes sounded interesting. 

Now, you could call him a pervert right there and would be completely right, but at least it wasn’t his main reason and you can’t fault him for it as you thought of the same thing yourself if you are honest.

Argul moved to his third floor and got ready to create a bunch of plants and animals.