Reincarnated as a mana core

Argul gazed upon her 13th floor, her winter wonderland. It was white, very white. It was in fact so white there were only a few spots on the entire planetoid that weren’t, the region where the native plants were spreading and some of the mountain peaks. 

She didn’t want to talk about the moongrass. Needless to say, it was there.

Anyway, Argul wanted to create her next floor and had decided to go with a glacier theme. It just fit in right with her 13th floor. Of course, having an endless glacier was boring as hell so there will be hot geysers of varying size and intensity to spice things up a bit.

Before she could actually let her new floor grow though, Argul had to create the entrance to it. If she were to use any of her previous entrances she could just let the system, aka her daughter, do her thing, but this time she wanted to do something new.

Up until now Argul had used a variety of entrances, many of them normal and boring like a simple cave or her water connection. Others however had some mild space shenanigans going, like the entrances to her 8th and to her 11th floor. The former had two planes of space overlapping and depending on which direction you were moving in you were in one or the other. The latter had space distorted in a way it looked normal, but if you were to move inside anyone else would think you were upside down.

What Argul wanted to do this time was similar, but also more difficult in a way. She wanted to add another side, another direction without it being noticeable or, to put it simply, she wanted to create a 5 sided square.

Doing this would normally be impossible - though maybe in the far future it could have been done, provided humanity didn’t kill itself, but Argul would never know now that humanity was here in this universe with her mana - and admittedly, she didn’t really know how to do this herself. She could see the space matrix, that was a good name for it too. She would use it from now on.

Anyway, Argul could see the space matrix more or less depending on how she looked at it and even shove it around to affect it, but she didn’t have the technical knowledge to do what she wanted to do. Mana was potential though and if she threw enough of it at a problem, the problem should go away. 

With that in mind, Argul began to channel mana into the space above the glacier with the intent to take a part of the 4th dimension, diminish it to the 3rd dimension and shove it where it didn’t belong. Thus adding a 5th side to the square without actually making it a pentagon.

She watched for a time that felt like eternity but was more like 2 minutes as a river of mana poured out of her core in the center of the floor and streamed through the rock and ice to accumulate above the glacier. Nothing really happened after those two minutes however and she didn’t have much to do aside from directing the mana there and keeping it there, so she directed the majority of her focus to the form that the system gave her for each floor.

The form for her 13th floor, her winter-wonderland, looked something like this:

[13. Floor]

 

• Winterland

• Temperature: -25°C to 3°C

• Daytime: 8 hours

• Nighttime: 16 hours

• Events:

• Natural catastrophes

• Spring
  Every 1 to 5 years temperatures will increase to up to 15°C for 30 to 90 days and the snow will melt

 

It wasn’t very descriptive, but enough to give a rough idea of what to expect.

Argul quickly filled out the form for her 14th floor and added a little extra on a whim before she compared the two.

[14. Floor]

 

• Glacier world with hot geysers

• Temperature: -40°C to -5°C

• Water (l) temperature: 50°C to 350°C

• Daytime: 5 hours

• Nighttime: 19 hours

• Special: All water no earth

• Events:

• Pressure relief valve
  As geysers freeze shut on the cold surface, pressure mounts in the hot core of the floor. To release that pressure, boiling hot water worms itself through the icy crust of the surface and opens new geysers in massive devastating explosions.

 

The two floors followed the same theme of coldness, but went in different directions. Argul’s 13th floor was managed eternal winter. 

Her 14th floor though, would be a natural hazard, very noisy and probably unstable. Like, if a few geysers opened all at once and somewhat close to each other, releasing shock waves through the ice and creating fault lines, it could very well happen that entire sections of the surface sunk down into the core of her floor. And that would be disastrous for humans and a lot of other things, so Argul had to create the creatures and plants of this floor with that in mind and if even that should fail then she could take solace in that moongrass would be jolly good and happy with an entire floor just for itself.

With that done, Argul still didn’t have enough mana to divorce reality from the way it should be, but it was getting easier to hold the mana inside the square-ish 1 km² large area. The mana density difference between inside and outside had gotten so large by now, that the pressure was enough to combine the mana at the edge of the area with her intent to contain the mana inside the area into liquid mana and now, ever so slowly, a dome of said liquid mana was forming around the area, simultaneously taking over her job.

Argul watched fascinated as single drops of mana became larger and combined with other drops, forming little puddles that ignored the artificial gravity of the floor and fazed through matter without interruption until a full sphere of liquid mana encased the area of her planned new entrance. 

It would also be the only land entrance to this floor, though she would connect her new floor to her growing maze of water connections that she had between floors.

It took another one and a half hours and what Argul estimated to be millions of units of mana, before the mana finally reacted, adding a new slice of space to the 3rd dimension that shouldn’t be there. At the same time the system, which was also kinda her daughter, began forming a new plane of space around her core and quickly attached it to the newly formed entrance which would serve as the anchor until she had a portal on her new floor.

The sphere of liquid mana remained around the entrance to her 14th floor and Argul let it be, not really caring about it more, but hoping that something interesting would come of it at some point.

Instead, she focused on the entrance, which gave her a bit of a headache of the “what I’m looking at shouldn’t be possible, yet it is there and I can’t wrap my head around it” sort. It wasn’t strong and more of the low background type pain that made one easily irritable.

From a 4th dimensional perspective the entrance still looked wrong, a bit like someone added a wall in a house where it wasn’t planned, but it didn’t hurt to look at it.

Satisfied with what she had created, even if her method was somewhat crude, Argul changed her point of view to her new floor and core and watched as water bubbled into existence all around her true body. On the other hand, high above her core, frozen clouds formed, marking the edge of this floor's atmosphere.

A few hours and an unholy amount of water later, the constant stream of new water slowly ceased to be and Argul was left with a small planetoid that was nearly entirely made of the life-giving liquid. Hot water rose from the depth of the little planet everywhere right next to cold water streams that sank back down, always at the edge of becoming giant whirlpools.

Only some of the water froze at the surface, but these small frozen kernels were enough to serve as seeds for more crystallization, becoming larger and larger until countless icebergs floated on the surface. Some of these icebergs collided with each other as they were carried around by water currents, breaking off pieces which then served as new seeds and sped up the freezing of the surface water.

The entire process was incredibly noisy and even once it looked like the surface of the planetoid was frozen solid, the different ice shelves were grinding each other down, never really connecting but at the same time keeping each other up just enough that one shelf wouldn’t sink should enough warm water accumulate beneath it.

Still, these fault lines were weaknesses that could not impede the lighter warme water that wanted up and in especially weak places where three or more ice shelves connected to each other hot water exploded outwards, throwing rocks of ice everywhere and leaving hail to harry the world before the holes left in the wake of the geysers quickly froze over again.

Argul watched the happenings for the rest of the night, hoping that the floor would reach an equilibrium and, although it became much more stable, although the crust of ice thickened considerably, every few hours a piece of ice would break of after a geyser eruption and sink beneath the warm water. Since the floor was about the size of a small planet, these pieces were comparably small, but Argul didn’t want to create a new species just for it to go extinct because of bad luck and, as such, let the floor cook for a bit longer before she would introduce some life.

Focusing back on her avatar, Argul awoke to the sounds of breakfast being prepared inside the house, She opened her mouth to taste the air, but nothing particularly interesting stood out to her, no delightful smell of warm bread or scrambled eggs wafted to where she lay next to the extinguished campfire. It was a reminder that she needed to start enchanting their little house, or there wouldn’t be anything warm without her. Not now though.

Argul craned her head back, muzzling Mia’s sleeping bag to wake the girl and Aina up, before she gave her daughter a long lick, both gestures earning her a few grumbles from the girls and a loud plop from Aina.

Not long after, Luna and Arthur came outside and set up breakfast, over which the group discussed the plans for the day. Argul and her daughter abstained from eating since they didn’t need to to survive.

They decided they weren’t really in a hurry after yesterday's escape, if one wanted to call it that, so they took their sweet time with cleaning up after breakfast.

For the next three hours or so, Argul then pulled their house along the river at a, for her, relaxed pace. She had to turn northward every now and then when another river merged with theirs and it was too difficult to immediately cross the branch river to look for an easier crossing.

It was around noon at one such crossing a few kilometers away from their river that they made camp and enjoyed a warm soup, Argul and her daughter both changing forms temporarily to join the others. After lunch the group broke apart, each of them doing their own thing.

Argul used that chance to lay down and focus back on her 14th floor. There were a few stable regions by now and she didn’t want to wait any longer.

She chose a random geyser in one such region and collected a bit of mana to create a new plant with [ribm]. Argul immensely enjoyed what happened next and didn’t think that she would ever not like this act of creation, even if some of them ended up being rather weird.

After a second of waiting, at the edge of the geyser where falling water was slowly freezing upwards, encircling the geyser in a cliff of ice, a different kind of ice started to burrow into the cliff until it reached a few centimeters deep. Somehow, both types of ice were easily distinguishable, even though they looked the same.

After the second ice stopped borrowing inwards, it began to grow outwards in erratic, sharp turning and branching lines that glittered in the sun and tinkled softly in the wind.

The growth stopped after the plant, for that is what it was, reached a few dozen centimeters high, small snowflakes grew out of the ice-like tubes before they puffed away, slowly drifting on the wind. Where the snowflakes landed new growths started, so it was probably safe to assume they were the seeds.

Argul dubbed the plant [winter moss] and watched for a few minutes as snowflakes were continuously puffed outwards.

[Winter moss]
Winter moss is a plant of frozen water with snowflakes as seeds. The only thing that differentiates it from actual ice is the life the plant bears and the leaves are thus easily broken. Winter moss surrounds itself with coldness.

Magical in its origin, magical in existence;
A delight for the eyes, yet cold like winters deathly dance;
To see you must bow,
Behold! A mossy carpet of icy snow.

Argul blinked at the result of her combined [analyze] and [identify], giving the poem a raised eyebrow before she turned away with a shrug.

She watched a bit longer, as some of the snowflakes floated away peacefully, while others were caught in the eruption of the geyser and violently ejected out of the caldera, the cold aura the only thing stopping the little seed from melting.

Satisfied with her first, if somewhat random, plant, Argul moved on to the next. She had decided earlier during lunch that all plants on this floor would be on the smaller side and this specific one she wanted to be a flower that floated around on the winds of this floor.

One quick ribm later, the flower that came into being supported itself on the air with 4 green leaves and where the leaves connected in the center, a violet blossom opened up.

Instead of seeding like Argul had planned though, a thin white root snaked away from the flower and after it reached around half a meter distance, a new flower began to grow from the other end of the root. Shortly after the second flower was fully grown, the root fell off and the two flowers were carried away by the wind, both already in the process of reproduction.

[Jet glider]
Jet gliders are small flowers characterized by their violet blossoms and such a light wat that they can easily float in the air. They reproduce by creating offshoots that are then cut off.
Jet gliders are dependent on constant movement as they can’t survive solely on their mana and thus die in areas of still air.
The plant's name was inspired by the Jet stream winds of earth.

The three plants that followed were relatively uninspired compared to the first two and Argul couldn’t be bothered with naming them. One was a fern and one a fruiting vine, both of which grew around geysers as only their seeds could survive the cold of the rest of the surface indefinitely. The two only differed in that the spores of the fern were spread by air, while the fruits of the vine fell into the water and were carried away by currents until they were one they shot out of a random geyser.

The last plant, which wasn’t really a plant at all and should get its own category, was a mushroom with the purpose of decomposing any dead organic matter. They were pretty resistant to harsh temperatures, but didn’t have any notable characteristics beside that.

Once she was done with the plants, Argul busied herself for two hours with planning a suitable enchantment for the stove and to give the plants, and mushroom, some time to spread. With the mana density of her 14th floor, the lack of competition, all the free real estate and her skills combined, the speed at which the plants spread was quite obviously visible and thus it should be enough time before she introduced her animals.

The first animal species Argul created was a fly-like bug that sustained itself by eating everything plant, though it preferred the nectar of the Jet glider.

The second animal was a worm about the length of a finger and of white coloration. The worms had two belt-like black rings around their midsection and were somehow innately able to manipulate ice. An ability they used quite efficiently while they burrowed through the ice.

[Ice worm]
Ice worms are white thin worms that can grow up to 13 cm in length and have the innate ability to manipulate ice for barely any mana cost. Their preferred food is roots and dead plant matter.
Ice worms reproduce by rubbing the two black belts around their midsection against each other. Who gets to carry the burden of the eggs is determined by a fight for dominance beforehand.

Argul watched for a while, making sure that both species produced enough eggs that their species would survive with a predator around and once satisfied, finished her floor with one last [ribm].

A few minutes later a family of birds the size of a great tit fluttered around. They had a mixture of gray and white feathers and a pair of nasty sharp claws on each foot that they used to pierce the ground to keep their footing even upside down or on a wall. The claws also made a soft chime with every step of theirs, which they used to great effect when they danced around each other.

[Flutter step]
Flutter steps are small birds adapted to extremely cold environments. Their primary food source is small prey animals such as insects and worms.
Flutter steps have a pair of magically enhanced claws on each foot which they use to keep their footing pretty much everywhere provided there is solid ground. The clear chime sound the claws make every time they hit the ground combined with their chirping make for a unique scene to behold when the Flutter step do their fast paced dance around each other.

It was fun to watch the birds' antics for sure and Argul would have liked to be able to say that she watched the birds for longer, but alas, her status called and after that there was dinner to be had.

[Quest rewards]
Str +7, Int +6, Wis +6

[Level up!]
All +1