Reincarnated as a mana core

It took Argul three long days to debug her enchantment, which was perhaps the most interesting boring work she had ever done. The whole process was only middlingly engaging and basically came down to ‘find mistake, fix it while creating a new problem, fix the new one and something else doesn’t break, repeat’. So very boring and frustrating.

Argul did learn quite a lot while she worked on the hotplate however. For one, this would have been much easier if she knew anything about computing technology. Sadly, her non-knowledge was almost scandalous. Computing theory would have allowed her to convert most of the data into ones and zeros, save that data somewhere, translate it back into something useful and all this would have included the tasks the enchantment had to fulfill, saving her a lot of space that could have been used for mana storage.

Why would this save space?

Well, this tied into another discovery. If the liquid mana of an enchantment got too close to another part of the enchantment, they would start to interfere with each other. This could happen in two different ways.

One, if the intent of the two liquid manas was roughly the same, then they would try to combine, even if they weren’t meant to move or change, making the enchantment nonfunctional. A perfect example would be two mana channels that lay right next to each other.

And two, the intent of two different liquid manas was not the same, then the two different parts of the enchantment would try to move away from each other, slowly breaking the enchantment. An example for this would be a mana channel going by right next to a mana storage enchantment.

The range of the interference was in both cases equal to the volume of the liquid mana. A 1x1x3 cuboid would have a 1x1x3 interference area around itself for example, though the corners always became round. Because of this, mana storage and mana channels had actually the smallest interference fields.

That the different liquid manas of the enchantment worked together in the first place was only possible because Argul subconsciously added the intent for this to the connection points between different parts, making the mana in those places compatible with both liquid manas and immune to their interference.

Argul had tried to make more of her enchantment of this transitional liquid mana, but had found out that it started to create its own interference field if its relative volume got larger than a 10th of the volumes of the other liquid manas combined.

As a consequence of the mana interference, as she called it, Argul was forced to make each part of the enchantment as small as possible or she would have to remove a lot of mana storage, making the runtime of the hotplate untenable for level 1 humans. There was a limit to this however, as a smaller size meant less mana could be channeled at once and some enchantment parts like the temperature increase enchantment needed a lot of mana to function.

This then tied into Argul’s problem with computation. She didn’t know how to do it, but the changing of zeros to ones and back theoretically required so little mana that she should be able to miniaturize such an enchantment to the point that others could barely perceive it as a point of liquid mana and this would make at least 70% of the hotplate enchantment useless.

Argul couldn’t do it though and had to try to work around it with other, and, for the time, partly unsuccessful ideas.

The first thing she did was to increase the density of the liquid mana she used since she didn’t hurt for mana. Higher density liquid mana had a stronger and larger interference field against lower density l-mana though and while that wasn’t much of a problem for her it would be one for everyone else considering that nobody else had managed to create liquid mana aside from her. 

Argul could just make the whole enchantment of higher density l-mana for now and worry about adapting it for everyone else later. This would have allowed for the channeling of more mana with the same available space. Sadly though, the higher density l-mana slowly flaked off pieces of itself into the lower density surroundings, which then untangled back into separate intent and mana. The process wasn’t fast by any means, especially for lower density differences and a level 2 enchantment would probably be able to function for years in level 1 mana density zone. Others may find this acceptable, Argul could practically see CEOs of large corporations rub their greedy little fingers against each other with glee, but Argul didn’t want to have to do maintenance. It was acceptable if some outside influence somehow damaged the enchantment, but barring such incidents she wanted to be able to come back in 40 years to look fondly at the horribly outdated stove while making herself some pasta and all that without having to work on it one single time. Maybe she or someone else would discover how to make higher density enchantments work indefinitely in the future, but for now the problem would remain unsolved.

A similar, second method she tried, was to condense the mana inside of the enchantment, hoping that this would increase the amount of mana that could be sent through the channels and held inside the storage enchantments. This experiment had overall mixed results.

A level 1 enchantment could hold and channel higher density mana without damage, but much less than mana of equal density so that the amount of mana remained roughly the same in the end. However, the higher density mana moved much faster than lower density mana, to the point that, for larger differences in mana density, the transmission became almost instantaneous even for large distances. While this wasn’t very helpful for drawn out effects such as Argul’s hotplate enchantment, it could prove to be a large boon for instant high cost effects like shooting a spell or transmitting a large amount of data or energy to a different location.

The only annoyance was that for this to work the enchantment had to remain under constant pressure, which not only meant it had to at least be partly active at all times, but it also had to keep some mana unused inside of its mana storage. Otherwise the pressure would get too low and the density of the mana inside of the enchantment would decrease. To put it differently, the larger the difference in density between enchantment and used mana, the less mana the enchantment could actually use without threatening its own operation.

The interference problem and Argul’s growing need for computation theory were of course not the only things she had learned about, just the major issues. Aside from them, there were a lot of small things she had learned that helped her streamline this and future enchantments, but they didn’t really change how she approached enchanting as a whole.

The biggest utility project, or at least the one she had had the most fun with, was configuring the interface. During the first working version, a person had to put their thinger encased in mana into the button, move it away and repeat the process, all to increase the temperature by 5°C. Now, a person could hold their thinger in place and temperature would increase by 15°C every second and if they only wanted to increase or decrease the temperature by 5°C they could pulse mana over their finger once. She had to teach the others how to do it, but it wasn’t very difficult and not much different from showing a person how to use a normal stove.

During the three days Argul was busy with her enchantment, the group had still traveled on towards the Munzumira Republic. According to Alyra the annoyances of the Meran church had actually been somewhat close after the second day of their journey before they gave up and turned around. It didn’t matter though, because the group had been seen by quite a few people from the other side of the river, so the church and kingdom would know the area they were in in a few days either way.

Some of the random people tended to stop doing whatever they were doing and stare blankly at Argul as if they had just lost all faith in their world, much to her amusement. She had grinned at some of them, showing them her dagger-like teeth. After a middle aged man fainted because of that though, she stopped, feeling guilty about it.

On the fourth day of their journey and the second day into Argul’s enchanting work the group had to make a somewhat large detour westwards, coming closer to the impressively large mountain range that blocked that direction. They needed to resupply and so, they followed Alyra’s directions until they came close to a small town. Argul made sure to stop a good bit away, but even still she couldn’t help but frown.

The area around the town was mostly empty with only a few sorry-looking fields here and there. A section of the outer town looked as if a tornado had torn through the houses, leaving only destruction and debris haphazardly strewn about. She couldn’t look all the way into the town, but there was an eerie lack of people in the parts she could see. The whole thing screamed of mismanagement and disaster and like a famine in the making, depending on how many people actually lived here.

Argul wasn’t happy and so she stayed back with Mia while the others went into town hoping to trade some hare pelts and meat for other food. She was reasonably sure that the adults could handle themselves and that Alyra could protect them if push came to shove, but she didn’t want to risk Mia.

When the others came back an hour later, they did so with a surprising amount of canned food and worrying news. The town had apparently been mostly abandoned and only a few hundred people were left. The majority of those who fled did so before the mana wave arrived, leaving only the stubborn, infirm and poor, who didn’t have the means and hope to escape. 

A few months later, there had been a second exodus where people left even if their survival wasn’t guaranteed. This exodus had been the direct result of a man who went crazy and started killing everything in sight. The same man had also been responsible for much of the destruction in the outer section of the town. Of course, there had been some resistance, but nothing organized, which wouldn’t be a problem normally, but nobody had been able to hurt the man, even guns weren’t able to do more than give him a few scratches. The tales started to diverge from there, but one thing the people agreed on was that some kind of explosive ultimately killed him. The damage was still done and many people wanted to get away from the pain.

Alyra gave her own comments to the story every now and then, explaining that the man had tried to cultivate mana so he could lord over the town as a tyrant. He had failed though and shredded the mantle of his mana soul in the process. According to Alyra, that was all it took to become a monster. Had he not been killed, he or rather it could have become strong enough that even Argul and Alyra wouldn’t be able to do anything about it in a few months.

They didn’t linger and continued to travel south, all of them eager to leave the sorry place behind.