Reincarnated as a mana core

The wagon tracks left behind by the trader hugged the edge of the forest, much like the village road did and formed a vague border between the forest and a piece of grassland that was cut off by another forest in the distance.

The forest itself looked pretty young to Argul. Most of the trees were barely as tall as her and quite thin, making them more akin to bushes compared to her size. Only much further into the forest proper did some trees become visibly older and taller, though they stuck out like sore thumbs.

Argul followed the tracks for the next one and a half days, leaving the forest behind at some point when they swerved eastwards and led to another village. Overall the group came across 4 more villages in that time, none of them even close to as prosperous as Halfwhich, and they were slowly getting closer to the trader. 

Aside from that however the journey was uneventful. It had rained once and Argul had introduced the others to Yahtzee, a relatively straightforward dice game her grandparents had enjoyed a lot.

Because these two days were Argul’s self appointed holidays, she had to find ways to alleviate her boredom without work and settled on watching her domain whenever doing nothing became too much. Her focus there lay especially on the village on her 6th floor that had become the pet project of her daughter.

More than a month ago Alyra had introduced the beginning of the Sapient Support System (SSS) to Doombluff. At the time it wasn’t really clear what the System was supposed to do; how it was supposed to achieve its goal of helping sapients however and the village thus served as Alyra’s whetstone to polish her idea.

Now, the SSS consisted of three main parts.

The first part is the settlement system, which serves as the foundation of the SSS and allows the local government a quick overview of important data such as resource statistics and population numbers, both legal and illegal. How accurate the data was depended wholly on a corruption stat the system assigned the government. The stat was shown as a percentage, but only to governments with less than 50% corruption and declined over time. Corruption only rose through illegal activities by the government, meaning if bribery was legal it didn’t count towards corruption.

Alyra had also told Argul that some kind of district sub-system was planned for larger settlements, but Doombluff remained too small for now.

Another function of the settlement system was to passively increase the mana density in the settlements territory, which was determined by the system, the larger the population was. Argul had argued against this at first, concerned that too much help would hinder people. She came around however when her daughter pointed out that increasing the mana density would not only strengthen people, but also serve as a beacon to monsters, drastically lowering the chance of them remaining undetected and becoming unreasonably strong, which seemed like a good idea. Even animals might be drawn towards the higher mana density, so sapients would be forced to protect their boons.

The second part of the SSS was the country system, which is meant to help governments that rule over more than one settlement. As such this system was superordinate to the settlement system and allowed the country insight into the subordinate system. Aside from that, the country system remained largely similar to the administrative functions of the settlement system.

The third and last part of the SSS was the organization system. Organizations were by default lower in rank than settlements, but a country’s government could invest in them the power to be above settlements inside of their territory, which could be beneficial for things like military or information agencies. The organization system too was primarily for administrative ease, the exception being “system sanctioned” organizations, to which the system was allowed to give directed quests such as monster extermination. The best example for this was the slowly forming adventurer guild in Doombluff.

Independent of those three systems Argul’s daughter had also added classes to the SSS. Classes lowered the threshold to gain class related skills and further increased the ease of progression for said skills. In addition classes also supported the overall progression of people up to 5 levels above the local mana density with class related quests. 

The limitation was that a person could only have one class at a time however and, if the class was changed without the completion of a special quest, class related skills would be deactivated for up to 5 years depending on how much time has passed between taking and changing the class. During this time the skill progression and acquisition benefits of the new class were suspended.

With all those new things going on, watching the village’s progression was intriguing Argul to no end, but what she found the most entertaining was the reaction of people towards her daughter’s obvious eagerness to increase the village’s population level. She only wished she could watch the area outside the portal too, as that was where most of the newcomers seemed to be staying for now.

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Ronald (Village head) PoV

Ronald sat inside of his cottage at a desk, pouring over parchments full of maps and proposals for how to build and expand the village. It had taken a while to survey the entirety of their island and collect all the data. So long in fact, that buildings for all the early refugees were already finished. Yet, some projects that would determine the settlements future growth such as a town hall hadn’t even begun since they didn’t have time for the luxury called plans until now.

A knock on his door interrupted his musings and he let out a sigh before standing up to go greet his guest. On the other side of the door stood a bored man with blue scales, a slightly elongated mouth and a lizard-like tail. His name was Rash and his presence could only mean one thing. “There is more of them?”

Rash nodded absentmindedly, clearly bored out of his mind and gestured towards the portal. “Yeah. There are 12 new refugees and the others need you to handle the situation”, he stopped for a thoughtful moment, a rarity seldom seen by others, “more diplomatically.”.

Ronald let out another sight and thanked Rash before dismissing him to do whatever his smooth brain directed him to. A second later he dismissed the thought. It was needlessly mean and he was just annoyed. Letting that out on Rash, even if only in thought, wasn’t fair.

Ronald then made his way to the portal, hoping things hadn’t escalated yet, something that wasn’t a guarantee when desperate people met wary guards.

He did the math and 12 more refugees would bring the total number to 67 since the SSS was established. The first of them had arrived about 2 weeks ago and he doubted wholeheartedly that it had anything to do with chance. They knew there were beings with strange powers around, they were living in the domain of one after all and it wasn’t too far-fetched that one of these beings had a hidden agenda, not that he could do anything about it.

The problem with the refugees though was that he and the rest of Doombluff didn’t know these people and there were so many of them they could threaten to take over if they were led in, but so long as they stayed outside of the spirit’s domain the vastly superior stats of the villagers promised them safety.

On the other hand, they couldn’t just not let the refugees in either, because all of the villagers had been refugees just a few months ago and they couldn’t help but empathize with their plight. The compromise was this to watch the refugees for a month and assess their personalities before deciding whether to welcome them or not. As a result a second village was formed around the little fort protecting the portal, though the system still counted it as part of Doombluff.

It took Ronald a few minutes to arrive at and go through the portal. There he was greeted by two of the village's hunters, who escorted him to the new refugees.

The group was made up of 5 men, 4 women and 3 children, funny that, and were arguing half heartedly with another villager when he arrived. All 12 of them were dirty, malnourished and seemed understandably desperate. They also, much like the rest of the refugees, all had aspects of different bird species and Ronald’s eye twitched a little when he saw that.

Some of the lizard-kin women in the village had started laying eggs instead of carrying their child around for months on end. The process, while still exhausting, was apparently much less painful to the point that, and he will quote here, the consequences of enjoying oneself were not enough to even consider not doing it. To put it differently, the few pairs that had formed in the village had a lot of sex and very loud sex.

The result was 7 laid eggs in the last 3 months and 6 more that would join the menagerie sometime during the next few days and, on his urging, the eggs were cared for by the whole community. Ronald could see the writing on the wall and didn’t see the point in not adopting some of the things he had read in fantasy novels to deal with this.

That it just so happened that all the refugees that found them were egg-laying kin too however, was incredibly on the nose. Who- or whatever was pulling the strings and his rubies were on it being the system, wasn’t even trying to hide it.

Ronald stopped ranting in his head and concentrated back on the situation. He quickly inserted himself in the argument and took hold of the conversation. Then he explained what was going to happen to the group of 12 while he showed them around. They told him their own story over a warm meal when he was done with the tour and left towards a small creek to clean themselves in afterwards. Much like himself they had to flee from the Meran cultists, but they didn’t have the luck to be guided by the system and were forced to travel and scavenge around the last few months to survive.

Ronald watched them go for a moment before he stood up and went back through the portal. On the other side he stopped for a moment and shook his fist angrily at the sky. One day he would somehow annoy the being responsible for this as revenge.

Feeling much better, Ronald went back home and continued drafting plans for the future of the village and their nation. The mana knew they would need it if the young ones continued like this.