Reincarnated as a mana core

There was not much purpose in watching her cute Krakens so Argul used the rest of the night for her current enchanting project. Thankfully Jack left her in peace for the time being, because she didn’t really know what to do in regards to that situation. On the one hand it would be rude of her to ignore him after she had answered once, on the other hand she really didn’t think of herself as a god and she could do without her own cult.

Back to the enchantment, she was getting off track. There were two problems left Argul had to figure out for enchanting in general. One was the passive mana absorption and the other the intent filter.

She pondered a while about the former. Having a passive mana absorption in the enchantment wasn’t strictly necessary for the identify plate, but Argul still wanted to include it in preparation for future enchantments. As she created all these skills and enchantments as a gift for Alyra the spells and the knowledge themselves were obviously part of the present too.

The main problem for the mana absorption was to get the mana into the enchantment. The nature of the liquid mana kept the surrounding mana outside, except for the bit that actually came in contact with the mana input of the enchantment and once it was inside of the enchantment Argul didn’t have to worry about the mana anymore. The liquid mana would lead it to where it needed to be.

Following that thought she could create large mana input areas to resolve the passive absorption problem, providing larger surfaces mana could passively enter the enchantment. If she did that however, she would also have to create an intent filter that spanned over the area of the mana input and in a low mana density area as Erod was and at the moment the maintenance cost for the filter enchantment would definitely be higher than any passive absorption.

Argul didn’t cast the method away immediately though. While it was indeed unsuitable for a small item such as her plate of identification, she imagined it to be a rather good method to collect mana for larger operations such as a factory. 

She could see turbines being used to collect the mana out of the wind and channel it to somewhere else. That way a lot more mana would come into contact with the input than when it stayed somewhere calm. Similarly one wouldn’t have to worry about exhausting the local mana since the mana attached to the air was independent from the ground mana and would move a lot faster than unbound free mana or ground mana, at least that should be the case once the whole of Erod was suffused by Argul’s energy. At the moment mana was still moving quite fast due to her large production and the absence of it in most parts of the universe.

The second method to passively collect mana Argul could think of was to apply mana manipulation as enchantment somehow. That way she would be able to assign an area, most likely in the form of a sphere, around the tool that would move all mana inside of it to the mana input.

The tradeoff here was that the enchantment would have to constantly create intent to keep the manipulation zone intact so again there was a maintenance cost to consider. The intent filter could be kept considerably smaller than with the other method, but depending on the diameter of the absorption area of the manipulation enchantment the overall maintenance cost could quickly skyrocket.

A second problem Argul found likely was that since there wouldn’t be a sapient mind behind the mana manipulation it could be a lot weaker. Sure, you could try to strengthen the enchantment, but then the maintenance cost would rise drastically again.

With a weaker mana manipulation the mana could be ripped outside of the enchantments control by wind or water currents if you tried to use it like a turbine with large mana inputs. Since the air currents near the ground were usually weaker than the ones higher up in the atmosphere, mana also moved a lot slower near the ground which would mean a mana manipulation enchantment on a large scale was bound to empty the area of mana pretty fast. The rate of mana absorption would then be reduced to the trickles of the mana’s own movement caused by Fia’s laws. Argul doubted the one would receive mana in that case anymore.

Looking at the two ideas for methods it was pretty clear that the former was better suited for large scale operations and the latter for smaller items such as the one she was trying to create.

Having determined the enchantment she wanted to use, Argul only had to create and improve them for a bit. Neither the manipulation, intent or storage enchantments were spells or skills in the sense her magic missile was for example so the only skill that was left to create was the mix of contract and identify, but Argul would do this one after she was comfortable with the other stuff.

She took a look at the time and realized it was about to dawn. A quick check through her knowledge revealed that Jack was going to bed at the moment and had kept his mouth shut, which was good. Had he told any of the villagers Argul would have definitely ignored him in the future.

With a mental sigh she moved her consciousness to her avatar and went through her daily dawn till noon routine of feeding Aina, having breakfast and teaching and playing with Mia.

It was only after they had lunch and Mia went off with Arthur that Argul and Alyra got some time for each other. They went to their room since the stuff they would speak about wasn’t meant for Luna’s ears.

Argul sat down on the mattress and let herself fall backwards into the soft mess of blankets and pillows. Allyra stood in front of the bed, crossed her arms and smirked. “So, the first one finally came through, huh?”

Argul looked up for a second before she fell back again with a groan. “What do you mean the first one? There can’t be more people trying to pray to me!”

Her daughter raised an eyebrow, still grinning from ear to ear. “Of course there are more. With the sudden appearance of mana it’s only natural, their prayers only never reached your core because the intent was unable to enter your domain.”

Argul sat up, her tail swaying in agitation. “I’m not a god.”

Alyra chuckled. “Oh, but you are.”

Argul threw a pillow at her daughter. “I don’t want to be! Getting all these messages would be super annoying!”

She looked questioningly at Alyra. “How does that even work?”

Her daughter shrugged. “The message is part of the praying intent and you answer the believer by sending back part of that intent with your message, at least that is how the two Meran’s do it. The intent moves extremely fast, but the more and the stronger other intents are between the faith cloud and the target, the weaker the prayer's intent becomes until it ultimately dissolves and vanishes. That is actually why nothing has reached you yet.”

Argul sighed, thinking it over. The communication method was actually quite intriguing, maybe she could recreate it with a spell?

She shook her head. Focus on the problem at hand! “What do I do now? I don’t want to play goddess, but I don’t know if I can ignore the prayers.”

Alyra pointed at her. “You can actually, Meran the first does it too. It would only require a bit of training from your side, not that you will get many prayers so long as you don’t change the intent settings of your domain.” So, it was safe to say Argul wouldn’t do that in the near future, even if it was regrettable.

She furrowed her brows in thought. “Okay, but what if I don’t want a cult even in like 100 years or so?”

Her daughter shrugged. “If you don’t want to ignore the people then find somebody who manages that stuff for you and create some kind of complicated quest series that one has to go through before they get the right to meet you or something. I would put that into the system, it makes things more interesting.”

Argul looked gratefully at Alyra. “Thanks dear.”

Her idea was pretty good, especially since Argul didn’t want to ignore all the prayers. Not because she cared, but because there could be a chance somebody presented an interesting idea or something.

Alyra waved her away. “It’s not a problem mom.”

Argul’s expression became a little conflicted. “Are you a god too, Aly?”

Her daughter grinned again. “Yeah and I got plans.”

She winked towards Argul, who wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that her daughter was a goddess or the fact that she had a plan for her religion. 

That aside, the two of them had to be different from the Merans and there had to be something they could use the faith for. Argul was painfully aware of the intent that was lingering around inside of her core.

Alyra nodded again. “I can’t tell you much, because I myself don’t know enough about the topic, but we are different from the other two gods on a fundamental level. Since you are a bit of an anomaly, everything else then we don’t need faith to survive would be guessed, so I’m out there.”

Argul nodded and let her daughter continue. She would need another sample before she could tell what the differences were and how different Argul was from that. A small smile formed on her face at the thought.

Alyra sighed, annoyed by her limitations. “As for what we can do with faith intent, we can give out blessings, but they require quite a large amount of the intent if you are unskilled.”

That wasn’t really useful for Argul as long as she didn’t want to do the whole goddess and blessing thingy, but she just guessed Alyra didn’t know anything else about the topic, which meant there was stuff to discover for her.

Argul’s eyes glittered in excitement for a moment until she remembered the lizards. “What about Jack?”

Her daughter shrugged. “That’s really your decision. I would take him in, it could end up being interesting.”

Argul appreciated her daughter’s advice. She would have to think about it herself a bit more and right now she was more inclined to not take him as a student. Then again she could consider it training for the future since she definitely wanted to change her intent settings.

For now they might be cool and all, but her flushing all intent out of her domain also meant that no natural phenomenon based on intent can occur and she didn’t want to miss out on that.

Argul took a quick look at the sleeping form of Jack. Hmmm, what should she do?