Reincarnated as a mana core

Argul was now three times as strong as when she had woken up as a mana core. She admittedly didn’t feel stronger, but rather all around better. Her mind’s and core's increased capability to process information was a lot more pronounced than the rest. She used them a lot more in contrast to say her physical strength as magic required a strong mind and not a strong body.

Her being more powerful also meant the effect of new stats would be better. It wasn’t at a point where things would escalate, but Argul figured she should be able to play around with her space magic more easily in a bit. While it wasn’t as difficult for her to manipulate space anymore, she still couldn’t do much more and for her experiments, especially for storage devices, she needed to be able to do more.

Argul spent another minute playing around with her spells to determine her new limits before she gave Jack a hand in whatever he was doing. The growth of her stats was very subtle and she had the habit of overlooking it. That left a lot of her power unused and that irked her, which was why she tried out how far she could take things every now and then.

With that done Argul saw to teaching Jack and slowly got back into her rhythm of teaching Mia in the mornings before training her enchanting prowess in the afternoons and nights for the next week. Things stayed relatively slow and unexciting during that time, at least in her opinion.

The plants on her new floor were showing a far superior growing speed than those on her earlier floors thanks to the Evergrowth trees trait of growing extremely fast. The smaller plants couldn’t quite keep up with the trees, but still grew faster than things in less mana intensive environments. Argul guessed it had something to do with the plants having more mana available they could use to grow, even if next to the trees nothing else evolved. 

The Evergrowth’s insane growth led to large parts of the ground of the expanding forest being bare for now, safe for the occasional leaf falling to the ground. If the floor kept the pace it would be overgrown long before the grassland of the 11th floor had spread around the small planet there. 

Argul wasn’t too worried about the floors. People hadn’t even started to explore her sixth floor and as things stood they wouldn’t begin in the near future either so the newer floors should have enough time until people got there. Her villagers just didn’t have the manpower for large scale operations, they hadn’t even explored the whole island yet and were forced to focus on the army outside of the domain.

Speaking of the army, Rash and the other fighters were preparing an assault on the 500 or so lunatics to rescue the last surviving prisoners. Argul’s enchanted pots gave them an edge that would help them in a surprise attack, despite the overwhelming disadvantage in numbers. Argul was totally neutral in the conflict and the pots were surely just an accident. No way she would favor the poor villagers…

That being said, the group was still holding back, because Jack had started to teach others Mia’s version of the light spell after having learned it himself. Argul had to make sure she didn’t let that slip to Jack or the guy would demand her version of the spell, which was fair but it wouldn’t help him with the added dimension in depth and difficulty. 

That he spread the knowledge she taught was good, she only stood to gain from that in her opinion. There were only so many things she could research herself in a short time frame and she wanted those to be the things she was interested in.

The one surprising thing happening in Argul’s domain was the appearance of a sand covered scorpion. She had admittedly no idea how far mana had already spread, but it seemed like it was far enough for another portal to open on land. That meant she wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the mana zone anymore during their travels.

While it would be interesting to see what happened when others discovered the new portal, Argul tried to keep her hopes low for that to happen. The scorpion had been a single case for the time being and might for some reason originate from the birch forest. She couldn’t rule out that the other universe had put things down on Erod randomly. In addition, even if there was a new portal somewhere, it seemed to be situated in a desert and finding it there would depend entirely on luck. It was just unlikely for there to be a large human population nearby and those that saw the portal might just think that it’s an illusion.

Outside of Argul’s domain in Newport, pretty much everyone who had attended the sermon was now back. The mandatory church visits luckily didn’t come to play and despite the surge in popularity of christianity people left others to their own devices. There were a few here and there that gave Argul a look of pity as if she was a fool for not believing in god, but that was it. Definitely better than the whole oppression she had expected and she had to admit that maybe she had looked at religion a bit too harshly. At least for now that is, she wasn’t ready yet to acknowledge a fault as long as modern morals still held somewhat strong.

Apart from her inner conflicts about stuff she couldn’t influence and didn’t want to influence, the light spell of Mia also made an appearance in town, though in a largely different way than in the village.

People didn’t know where the children learnt the spell, but one evening a bunch of orphans appeared at multiple inns and offered their services as lightmages in exchange for food. Some of them were turned down and those establishments learned their mistake the next day when not a single orphan came to them. The others though were having a blast, finally being able to contest with the wooly sheep in their opening hours. The kids brought live to the evenings of the city that until now had always ended with dusk, due to there being limited supplies and ways to light homes. Most houses didn’t have a fireplace and there were only so many candles left.

Argul of course knew that it was likely Mia’s work and she absolutely approved. It might paint a target on the kids, but it was a risk in exchange for honest work, in exchange for independence from having to beg. She only hoped that the kids wouldn’t sell out Mia and couldn’t help but start worrying about her foster niece everytime she left with Arthur and Alyra.

That Mia hadn’t talked about this with her worried her even more. Was she doing something wrong that made the girl fear talking to her?

Maybe Mia thought she wasn’t allowed to teach others. Argul had always been pretty open minded and always answered the questions of someone genuinely curious though so why would Mia think that way. The one shady merchant dude was an exception and she was still very happy with her decision.

That Mia just wanted to surprise Argul was also an option, an unlikely one because her niece should have long told her what she was doing if that was the case. The girl wasn’t so stupid as if to think Argul wouldn’t know that she was teaching homeless children by now so it really had to be something else.

Argul could only sigh everytime she thought about this. The worry was unnecessary, she knew, but it hit right into her anxiety and let it flare up. At least it wasn’t distracting enough to keep her from enchanting and playing around with mana so she kept to it, enjoying the calmness she always felt when doing magic.