Reincarnated as a mana core

Before Argul could do that, of course, she had to get out of her clothes. Did she nearly forget that? Absolutely! Was the only reason she remembered that her clothes felt kinda itchy after she walked around in her fox form for most of the day? Maybe.

Anyways, once Argul was a 4 meter tall, 4 legged predator again, she lay down next to the camper and had a good think.

The stove, oven, refrigerator and freezer were all necessities the group needed to be able to eat well and store food for longer. From that perspective they were all important, but Argul valued them more as practice opportunities to be honest. Especially when the only enchantments she had done until now were simple light enchantments that got to work the moment they were provided with mana.

The plank of [analyze] she wanted to create for her daughter on the other hand, was much more complicated. Not only did the enchantment have to be able to [analyze], which was in and of itself already much more difficult than creating a light, but it also had to be able to store, distribute and passively absorb mana to reach Argul’s self imposed requirements. There were also a few utility functions she had to create such as the enchantment only activating on command. Then, after she had done all that, she had to combine all the different forms of liquid mana into one cohesive functioning whole, so it made sense that Argul experimented and practiced on a few things that were less important to her.

Back to the four house appliances, the relevant theme that connected them together was temperature control. Since Argul only had a spell to heat a solid material, the first thing she needed to do was to adapt that spell into a more generalized one. 

Creating spells dedicated to one effect each would possibly be more efficient, but Argul couldn’t be bothered when it came down to single digit decreases in mana consumption per few minutes and such that was not even taking into account that such specialized spells would be useless for most of her daily life. The only reason she gave this a bit of consideration was that it would be different for humans, something she should remind herself of every now and then.

Argul played around with her [increase heat (solid)] spell while she thought. The spell functioned by transforming mana into heat energy in a solid medium, thus increasing its temperature. It was possible to use the spell on liquids and gasses, but it didn’t work all that well. She solved this problem after a few minutes, adding a few more checks into and increasing the complexity of the spell matrix.

Now, if increasing the temperature meant transforming mana into heat energy, then decreasing the temperature of an area should be as easy as turning the process around. Of course things were never easy and the spell matrix quickly ballooned to double its size as Argul worked. She wasn’t really satisfied with that though and continued to try to find some way to reduce the size of the spell for a good 15 minutes, before she pawed the ground in annoyance and added a switch to the part of the spell matrix that handled the transformation of mana into heat, subsequently making half of the spell matrix obsolete.

[increase heat (solid)] -> [adjust temperature]

adjust temperature
Manipulate the temperature of an area to your liking by either transforming mana into heat energy or heat energy into mana.

With her spell in order, Argul switched her focus to enchanting the stove top. Stoves, she was thinking about the electric kind and not the blasphemous gas stoves utilized by environment hating savages, generally had multiple levels of heat a person could choose from. She herself was mostly familiar with stove settings that went from 1 to 9. 

The temperatures the levels represented could change from model to model, not that it really mattered, but they often started at something like 135°C and, in the case of modern stoves, could go all the way up to 600°C. That meant that Argul could either create her own levels based on randomness as she didn’t know much about cooking or she could be lazy and let people choose the temperature themselves. Argul decided to be lazy.

With that decision out of the way, she ignored the wall between her and the stove, looking at it through her mana sense and grimaced. While she could start enchanting right away, that left the question of controls, of a way to interact with the stove and tell it what you wanted it to do. Plainly put, the stove needed some kind of interface.

The most difficult part of this was probably to get the enchantment to recognize when a person took an action to change a setting. What came after and what would tell the heating enchantment what to do Argul could do with a series of if then queries, which would be supremely annoying but not all that difficult.

All that meant however, that the whole enchantment would have to be made up of multiple part enchantments that had to work together to function, so it was probably better to compartmentalize the different parts based on what they did. That should hopefully allow her to adjust things without having to change the whole enchantment. Considering all the different intents Argul had to liquify it would be a nightmare otherwise.

The stove as it was right now had 4 hotplates, a small one, two medium sized and one large hotplate. Argul decided to give each its own enchantment, not only to make it easier for herself but also to make it easier to use.

That left only the interface to consider. She thought about using the existing control knobs and buttons, but came to the conclusion that that was not fancy and magical enough and totally beneath her. The decision had nothing to do with the fact that she needed to project an illusionary hologram to display the settings no matter what and might as well use that for the controls.

With all the planning out of the way, Argul chose to enchant the large hotplate first and got to work.

To begin with, she decided to create an on button of sorts. There was already a control knob for each hotplate, which made for as good a starting point as any. Since any physical action had been judged to be lame, Argul decided a person would have to inject 5 or more mana into the knob to turn on the interface instead.

She grabbed some of her mana with her mind and moved it on and into the surface of the control knob before forcing her intent on the mana, liquifying it and making it so that the surface would collect any purposefully infected mana but not ambient mana. She would have to make sure to add an intent filter later or the enchantment would slowly deteriorate with use.

Argul inspected her work for a moment to check that the liquid mana was properly bound to the solid material and nodded satisfied. Since liquid mana was still incorporeal, if closer to the material reality than normal mana, it was best to always make sure that there was a bit of intent mixed in that kept the mana in place. In this case, Argul had to purposefully add the intent before she liquified the mana, but in cases such as the liquid mana around her 14th floor entrance the mana stayed because it was meant to contain something in a specific area.

Behind the input of her button, Argul added a short channel that would take the supplied mana and move it to a dedicated holding place about 1 cm behind the surface of the control knob. The mana would stay there for a minute and, once added some mana storage for the enchantment, then move on into said mana storage.

Adjacent to the holding space Argul created a sensor that constantly checked how much mana was inside and, if there was 5 or more, would then send a signal in the form of a small mana pulse to the part of the enchantment that was meant to project the interface, telling it to boot up. 

With the first part of the enchantment done, Argul took a short break before she started to work on the interface. The enchantment for the interface would be above the control knob, so that it could project the hologram right from the edge between front and top of the stove. To do that, she would have to define or rather create a coordinate grid for the stove and the area around it, or the enchantment wouldn’t really know where to put the hologram.

First things first though, Argul added a receiver for the signal from the start button. The idea here was that upon receiving the signal the mana supply would be opened for half an hour, activating the rest of the enchantment during that time. This way, she could later implement a second signal that would refresh the timer every time a person interacted with the hologram. Whether it would work or not remained to be seen, but she had to start with something.

Next, Argul implemented her coordinate grid as all of the projecting and perhaps even the heating would build upon this. To do that she had to liquify her mana at the 0x0x0 coordinate and define 3 axles that were locked in space relative to the stove, so that the whole thing didn’t become useless the moment the stove was moved. Each grid was then a 1x1x1 cm³ block, but coordinates could be determined up to 100th of a centimeter. Anything smaller was pointless for the purposes of this enchantment. The maximum range of the grid was 1 meter in each direction.

Now came the hard part of doing the interface itself. Argul was stumped for a bit, until she realized that doing anything before she had even designed the looks of the interface was stupid. She took a few minutes, before she had something that was passable and went right back to enchanting.

Taking inspiration from the departure boards in old train stations, Argul created three rows of numbers. The first went from 0 to 6, the second from 0 to 9 and last only had zeros and fives as everything else would be an affront to the tism. Only one number per row would show on the hologram of course.

Next came the arrows above and below the number display and then everything else. She only needed the numbers and arrows separated from the rest of the hologram as they were the only things that would change or could be interacted with. Everything else was just beautification.

To tell the hologram which numbers to show, Argul created an enchantment made of rows of mana holders right behind the number rows. Each mana holder represented one number and they would pass signals to each other, thus highlighting which number should be shown. There would be one signal in each row, one signal from the second digit row to the first and one from the third to the second. The latter two signals would only work in concert with signals from the arrows and determine whether the numbers increased or decreased. Of course there weren’t any arrow signals for now.

After that, Argul worked on the projector, an enchantment that was relatively straightforward after all the prep work and basically an application of her [mirror image]. The projector had three inputs, one for low priority and two high priority ones. The low priority input she connected to the background of the hologram, which was a subtle blue glow meant to outline the screen, a rectangle in the center and the °C letters.

The two high priority inputs she connected to the arrows and number rows, making it so that they would be depicted on top of the screen. This only left the connection to the coordinate matrix and something that told the projector the exact coordinates of where the hologram was meant to be, which wasn’t all that difficult.

After the projector Argul switched to two sensor enchantments, one for each arrow. The two sensors would look if an arrow was disturbed by something solid that had a controlled layer of mana around itself. The second condition was there to prevent random and accidental triggering of the sensors.

The two sensors then connected to the number row for the third digit, the one with only fives and zeros, from opposite directions and depending on the direction the signal came from the number rows would know whether they increased or decreased. All that concluded the second part of the hotplate enchantment.

The third part was the heating enchantment. Argul considered heating the ceramic plates that had once served for this exact purpose, but dismissed the idea. Even though the enchantment would be a lot more efficient that way, Argul simply didn’t know if what she was doing would damage the plates and she couldn’t risk that. Instead she would make the enchantment radiate heat away from the stove surface, thus decreasing the risk of breaking something.

The heating enchantment consisted of two important parts. One part that would transform mana into heat according to the given instructions and a second part that would interpret the numbers based on a library of intents, before telling the first part how much mana to use.

Argul was able to do the first part relatively quickly, but the second was just tedious. Not only did it require copious amounts of math to figure out how much mana was required to create a specified amount of heat, which she could only do because of a few numbers her daughter had given her before, but she also had to record 121 different conversion for all the different number constellations and the worst part was that she had to be careful with the intents or things could go very wrong.

To keep her mind fresh, Argul worked on the 4th part of the enchantment intermittently. Namely, the mana storage and distribution. For this she tried to convert as much of the stove top as she could into mana storage enchantments without getting in the way of the other three hotplates, a future oven and the mana channels. Then she connected everything with mana channels, implementing some limiters here and there as things like the projector didn’t need a lot of mana to function and converted some of the surface into passive mana absorbers, all with their own intent shielding. When she was done, the enchantment was able to hold a few thousand units of mana, giving it an estimated working time of 25 minutes under full power and without extra injections.

All in all the whole thing took her a bit more than half a day and she finished long after everyone else had breakfast. Way too cautious to celebrate early, but too excited to wait for the others, Argul injected 5 mana into the start button and watched with shining eyes as the signal was sent, received and mana released. Then it entered the projector and a square of gibberish appeared way too high above the stove while the rest of the enchantment glitched out, powering down again. Argul let out a deep sigh.