Reincarnated as a mana core

Ultimately Argul decided to let Alyra’s incursion in the local politics slide. It didn’t really change anything for their plans, they either left in 3 months and or earlier. They were prepared for that.

Argul also didn’t care about what would happen to all these people too much. She had done her part during the mana integration, had put right what she had done, at least somewhat. The politics and wars that now happened had nothing to do with her anymore in her opinion and she wanted to have nothing to do with them. 

Argul would go as far as to say she despised the way politics worked. She was not one for sweet smiles and endless lies. It was disgusting, but sadly something that naturally came to be when rulers with big egos couldn’t take criticism well.

So instead of annoying her daughter Argul decided to focus on her work, especially the 6th floor of her domain.

In the last week or so the village had been having a hard time, not physically but mentally. She didn’t exactly know what was happening in the birch forest, but she knew what the villagers talked about.

The traps outside of her domain had pretty much stopped the advancement of the small army. They had lost a good dozen soldiers or so, not to the traps directly but to the festering wounds that came afterwards.

In response to that the fanatics had started to use their prisoners to free the way, something that disgusted the village even more. 

Argul was disgusted too, but it didn’t impact her mind as much. For her it was more like having seen a picture on the internet and the sensation of disgust was only fleeting.

The prisoners or demons that stepped into a trap and became useless were left behind, after the soldiers had fun with them for one last time of course. For most of the prisoners that was a death sentence, the brutal games that had been played with their minds and bodies before becoming even more horrendous. 

In a strange twist of fate this meant that some of the non-human women were lucky however. After being thoroughly used the soldiers just left them behind, thinking that they would die in a day or two anyway.

The villagers collected them and brought them inside of Argul’s domain. From the few survivors they managed to save maybe 50%, the rest succumbed to their wounds after two to three days and those that didn’t were so mentally broken that Argul doubted they would ever be able to reach a semblance of sanity again. Maybe a stat increase in willpower would help them, but she didn’t know.

Nonetheless, the villagers cared for them. After all it had been their traps that injured the prisoners even more. Against the high numerical advantage of the Meran fanatics they didn’t have the freedom to pity those not in their care however and installed more and more traps in the forest.

It was a cruel thing that happened there and a show of what was part of human nature. 

News and historic events like this were part of why Argul had been depressed in her last life. She had had no idea what to do in a shitty world like that and she didn’t have the illusion of being able to change anything. 

Now though, Argul wasn’t a human anymore and felt strangely detached from all of that. Sure, she cared about norms and morals and wouldn’t do these things to others, but that pressure that this was her race and she would be a failure if she didn’t do anything was simply not there anymore. It was a silly mental problem, but it could become oppressive if you weren’t able to stop yourself from thinking about things like world war two for example.

Argul sighed. She wasn’t here to think about depressing stuff, she was here for work and maybe to take a look at the bright and warm light that had appeared inside all of that darkness. Actually she should just do that first.

Argul changed her view into one of the huts and looked at the small clutch of large greenish eggs that had been carefully placed in some kind of fur nest. Yes, the lizard people laid eggs. 

She smiled and wondered how long it would take for them to hatch. They had been carried in the womb of the mother for about 3 months, the villagers weren’t too sure about the exact date of time since they had noticed the woman was pregnant so Argul added roughly a month to their estimate.

With that done it was time to get to work so she changed over to the crude smithy with clay furnaces of the village. 

Argul was still searching for materials that could hold a lot of mana she could then use for her enchantments. Her domain had already helped her quite a lot with that, but some materials just needed special conditions she couldn’t provide yet or simply more time to form. 

Still, she had discovered that stone was okayish at mana storage and the more molten together it was the better. It was the most available resource for her identification plate she could get her hands on on Erod at the moment so she would have to use that, despite the generally bad mana conductivity of stone. 

Additionally she had discovered that materials with a crystalline structure like salt, diamonds and other kinds of gems were almost always amazing in their ability to endure high mana pressures and thus ability to store mana. Some of them just weren’t viable options due to their brittle nature or other characteristics such as salt dissolving in water.

Then there was also a small discovery Argul had made during her enchanting practice. She had already been aware that most actions produce some sort of intent, but she hadn’t investigated that any further. Due to her enchanting however she had gotten quite a lot better at seeing and noticing intent. 

It was then that she had found out that the intent produced during crafting processes often infused the item somehow. Argul hadn’t yet figured out what that actually did to the item, but it had to change something.

So to solve that problem she wanted to enchant the hammer of the smith with a one time contract, one that they would have to notice unlike her light enchantments. 

The contract was very simple. The person who accepted it was responsible to process a raw gem into a sphere in a time span of two years and the payment was the knowledge of a few locations of gems on the volcano on the island. After that Argul could then check and compare the processed gems to raw ones. It was a win-win situation.

She focused on the hammer and threaded her enchantment into the tool. It took her quite a bit to figure out how to transfer the information, she couldn’t just do the same thing as the system for now and settled on a small hologram of the volcano in the end. She had to add a secondary enchantment for her skill [mirror image] because of that.

With that done Argul only had to wait for the smith or someone else to notice the contract and accept it. She looked for the smith and found him cutting down trees at the other side of the village. It didn’t look like he would go back to smithing anytime soon.

The question was, what should Argul do during that time?

Well, the obvious answer was to relax underneath a White isolia until it was time for dinner!