Reincarnated as a mana core

Argul zoomed in on Doombluff until her point of view was a few metres above Jack, who was carrying a bowl of fruits composed mostly of blueberries and raspberries towards a small cottage that had been built for him. Ever since the Meran cultists had been driven away the villagers had started hunting and gathering outside of her domain to supplement the admittedly lacking variety on the island and she was happy that they didn’t hole up in fear.

“Hello Jack.”, she whispered into his mind and watched in amusment as he jumped in surprise, the bowl full of fruits slipping out of his hands. He looked around for a moment before his eyes widened and he shot an annoyed look at the sky. It took him a while to collect everything again, which he punctuated by grumbling about godly spirits and how they kept contacting him in the most annoying manner possible.

Argul waited patiently, choosing not to comment. She kind of deserved it after all.

Only once Jack was done and stood upright again did he greet her. “Hello Argul, how can I help you?”

Having had ample time to formulate an answer while she waited, Argul posed his own question in reply. “You remember how I told you and the rest of the village not to pray to me because I’m not a god?”

“Yes.” Jack nodded in acknowledgement.

Now came the part Argul was unsure how best to explain. “Well, I have come up with a much more fitting term, Focus and I need your help to test a few things.”

“A Focus?” Jack wondered aloud, looking a bit lost.

She nodded in her mind, hoping that the gesture was transmitted over the mind bridge between them. “Yes, I’m a Focus not a god. People send a special type of mana to me and I do the magic for them, much like an enchantment would. I’m the focus of their desire so to say.”

His nose scrunched up in thought and he started walking towards his home again. “That special type of mana is faith mana, right?”

Argul had told him about it back when he had prayed to her the first time so he knew, even if he wasn’t aware of all that entailed. Still, she could see where he was going with the thought and wasn’t in the mood for it right now. “Yes it is. Look, I don’t have a better term for it and really don’t want to be tested right now.”

Jack ignored her though and continued his thought out loud. “And faith mana is created by prayers and the genuine belief of people in something?”

Argul glared at him and this time she knew the feeling got through because he hesitated for a moment. “Yes and now stop it.”

“So,”he started after a moment, ignoring her again, “people believe in and pray to you, which results in you gaining an unspecified amount of faith mana that you can then use to bless your believers in turn.” And as if that wasn’t already enough, he had to give his opinion too. “That sounds awfully god-like to me.”

Argul had to force herself to take a deep breath. He was just a teenager, don’t give in to his needling. “No.” She wouldn’t give ground on that point. “People pray to me, giving me faith mana, that much is true and I should then be able to use that mana, which may include buffing people.” Not calling it a blessing was once more deliberate to drive home where she stood. “There is nothing godly about it though. It’s a simple transaction, a trade or a service and if a person doesn’t receive anything in turn then I would suggest they look for a different service provider because they are clearly getting scammed. It’s quite literally like calling a call centre only that you do it with mana!”

Her mental voice got louder as she built up steam, though she managed not to get worse. Screaming was a bad method to use to win an argument. “The only thing godly to this process are your own misconceptions, ignorance and overeager imagination, which is why I must insist on being called a Focus to prevent that from happening!” Insults shouldn’t be used too, but she was only huma-, ah, she was only a person and not perfect. Not a god and all that.

Argul didn’t necessarily need Jack to understand, but she did need him to comply, because changing any misconceptions at a later date was exceptionally hard and very avoidable. Not giving people the room to form their own ideas based on faulty knowledge or a lack thereof was much easier. Most myths were the result of creative minds that were unable to comprehend something as far as she was concerned and she would not stand giving people the room to declare her some higher power by being inactive.

Jack had stopped in front of his door at some point during Argul’s rant and was looking at the sky with wide eyes, sweating all the while. Served him right, after she warned him multiple times. It looked like he needed a moment to gather himself and Argul was content to let him stew for a bit.

Then he turned towards his door and shrugged. The gall! “Alright, Focus it is then and no funny business, just the good old boring kind.” 

At least he was smart enough not to contest her any further. She knew she wouldn’t do anything to him, but it wasn't an invitation to test her self control. Usually she wouldn’t be petty either, but in this case she wasn’t sure if that would hold.

Jack used the short silence to enter his home and sat down on the table that served as the centrepiece of the main room. Aside from the chair he took, there were three more, as well as a hearth and a variety of shelving for his cooking tools in the room. There were two smaller empty rooms to the side of the main room and a bedroom opposite to the entrance that was a bit larger than the two rooms combined.

For once he didn’t look up to signal he was talking to Argul and simply leaned back on his chair, throwing a blueberry in his mouth. “So, what do we do now?”

Argul was still miffed, but thankful for the topic change. “I just need you to tell me if anything feels different.”

She ignored his protest at being the obvious test subject and began. Argul would start testing with the unattuned faith mana, unsure what to expect, but her instinct told her the attuned mana would be more useful and so she decided to get the less fun experiments first.

She also had less of the unattuned faith mana. All the prayers larger than a simple feeling of the person they came from made a hell of a difference. The small prayers varied between 10 and 40 units of mana while the larger prayers went all the way to 130 units of mana, though she was sure that was bound to change as people got stronger. All in all she had a bit more than 2k unattuned faith mana and quite a lot more than 5k attuned faith mana, seeing as around one fourth of the prayers qualified as large. 

That was at least 20 tests for the unattuned faith mana and 50 for the attuned faith mana. She was much more confident she could improve what she did with the latter, so it would probably be more.

Thinking the whole name out loud so often was kinda bothersome in her lazy ass opinion, so she decided to shorten unattuned faith mana to ufana and attuned faith mana to afana.

With that out of the way Argul gathered a bit of ufana and started moving it, but stopped when she noticed her own intent replacing the faith intent. She forgot she had to go about this differently or she would purge the faith intent.

On her second try she told the mana where to go rather than moving it herself and urged it to do what it did best. Once she had about 150 ufana attached to Jack she asked him if he felt a difference to before, which he denied. He could see the ufana around him though and wondered what was meant to happen.

“I’m not going to tell you.” Argul wasn’t going to admit that she didn’t know yet, this was just too different from normal magic for her. “Just try a few things, walk around or something and remember to tell me when you feel something.”

Jack did that for a few minutes, but Argul couldn’t see anything different and the only thing the ufana did was stay close to Jack. After a few minutes he seemed to have given up and just guessed. “Am I a bit faster?”

He wasn’t, but as he said that the ufana around him shifted just a tiny bit and Argul ignored him to observe the change with her complete focus.

Jack waited a few moments before he nodded to himself. “That has to be it then, it makes me faster.”

The ufana shifted more in response, moving closer to his body and as he started walking again he sped up. His every movement was faster than before and when he noticed the effect strengthened even more.

Argul urged him to try sprinting and he was far faster than he had any right to be even with stats. It lasted all of 12 steps before the ufana was used up and he slowed down to his appropriate two times as fast as a pre mana human.

Argul kept testing, using more of her ufana. She tried to modify things here and there, sometimes telling Jack what to expect despite not changing the setup and other times she left him to figure it out on his own.

The result was fascinating. Her ufana seemed to either do what Jack believed it should do or what she believed and whenever their beliefs aligned the effect was the strongest. When they contradicted the ufana was used up even though nothing was happening.

In conclusion ufana magic was one giant ugly placebo response and Argul hated it. She couldn’t reduce the ufana cost either. It was completely dependent on the effect and how strong it was, which could only be influenced by manipulating the target or herself into believing something and she wasn’t that easily fooled by herself.

At least she got a shiny new skill out of the whole thing. She doubted she would use it for the aforementioned reasons and because it was kinda rude not to read the prayers, but having the skill on her status page made her happy nonetheless.

[unattuned faith magic]
Use mana touched by faith and unclaimed by a focus to force your belief of how the world should be onto a target or enable the target to shape the world with their own belief.

Despite her dislike though, Argul had to admit that ufana magic had the potential to be extremely powerful. This went in both directions, helpful and malevolent. Healing a grievous wound in the blink of an eye wasn’t out of the range of possibility, but so was crippling a person in the same amount of time. Slow effects would require a lot of trickery, especially harmful ones, because the cloud of ufana around the target was difficult to overlook and once seen pretty straightforward to remove, if not necessarily easy. So long as a Focus had enough customers, stuff like that shouldn’t hurt their magic purse too much.

Sadly sending a message with the ufana wasn’t possible. Whenever Argul tried she would force her own intent upon the mana and she was forced to give up on that.

When she was out of ufana she switched to testing afana and repeated the earlier experiments, though she quickly discovered that she could be much more direct with the afana. It helped a lot, because afana was a bit less quick on the uptake on doing stuff and needed the directions to act.

Overall afana had much more narrow applications, but was in turn a lot less expensive. Much like the ufana though, it was difficult to reduce that cost and the only way she had found was by optimising the direction she gave.

Anyway, there were mainly 4 things Argul discovered she could do with afana. Applications outside of those 4 became impossibly expensive pretty fast, making them an unappealing prospect.

The first thing she discovered and what had given her a direction in which to experiment with was that she could boost the mana sight of a target. The cost depended on the usage and strength of the buff, but strengthening the buff also reduced the relative duration due to an  increase in the rate of consumption when mana sight was used. Thankfully the cost increase was linear, which allowed her to figure out what a reasonable buff would require. If she were to grant a 20% increase to the target's mana sight for 24 hours, she would have to invest between 300 and 400 afana or 30 to 40 prayers at maximum, but most likely less.

There were some caveats to this buff however. For one, as long as mana sight wasn’t used the duration of the buff wouldn’t decrease, so it wouldn’t be wasted. What she had yet to test but kind of expected, was that the buff would do less for those more skilled. Even without that though, she wouldn’t recommend the buff for anyone but beginners. Getting better at mana sight shouldn’t be too difficult with the help of the system, making her other buffs much more appealing.

The second application of afana she found, was that she could sort of increase a target’s mana regeneration, which incidentally led to her getting distracted and figuring out what the mana pool was and what mana regeneration meant in that context.

You see, the mana soul of a being had a pull on the mana around it, but usually didn’t let outside mana inside. For humans and Argul that pull increased with a higher [wis] stat. As a result though, a varying amount of mana got trapped against and around the mana soul where it slowly attunes to the being, the process her daughter called mana regeneration. The mana pool was just a quantification of how much attuned mana was around the mana soul and how much could maximally be trapped in the pull. 

Argul had never really noticed though, because the difference between using attuned or unattuned mana was minimal for her and she created an endless amount of mana attuned for her. For humans at least, using unattuned mana was insanely difficult and mentally exhausting though, but it was possible.

The buff, then, worked by replacing unattuned mana around the soul with afana that would turn attuned at a moments notice. Argul could regulate how fast that happened all the way from very slowly to nearly instantly, which was kind of the equivalent of increasing a being’s mana pool. Whether gradual or instantaneous was better was situational in her opinion, so she would let people decide for themselves in the future.

The third and last buff and the one Argul liked the most increased the responsiveness of mana towards the target, making any kind of magic that much easier. A bit different from the other two buffs where the ufana or afana surrounded a being like a cloud, Argul had to infuse the afana into the mana soul of the target for this one. 

Without the consent of the target doing so was difficult and got more difficult the more intelligent the target was. She had to look into this when she noticed that the buff seemed to stress the mana soul of Jack and got worried.

To test what was going on, she had chosen a random fish to buff. The fish was not willing to say the least and after Argul struggled to infuse its mana soul with a bit more than 150 afana, it kind of ripped. The fish started to absorb mana continuously after that and quickly expired when it attacked an apparently toxic sea urchin. Argul was pretty sure she had created a monster with her experiment and was determined not to do it again.

The buff itself seemed to fade slowly away as the mana soul cleansed itself. How long it would last and whether more afana meant a stronger buff would require stringent and careful testing. Argul had to test how long the mana soul needed to recover and how resistant it was at different levels too, but it would take a long time. 

The danger of overdosing necessitated a lot of test subjects and she promised herself to only do so with consent in the future. The Doombluffers wouldn’t be enough and the lack of level 1 to 5 people in her domain meant she had to search outside, which would be difficult without her near omniscience.

The fourth thing Argul could do relatively easily was to use the afana as a bridge to transfer knowledge directly into the mind of the target. This too put a burden on the mana soul, but it was much lighter than that of her responsiveness buff and the soul recovered relatively quickly. The mind didn’t however and excessive and repeated knowledge transfer was extremely painful according to Jack, making her feel increasingly bad. 

As a compromise the transfer could happen over time, but that was a bit more expensive. The… blessing of knowledge and she was reluctant to call it that, needed increasingly more afana the more knowledge and the more complex that knowledge was too.

Still, Argul had plans for this in the future. She wouldn’t throw around her knowledge, mind you. Using the blessing for that was a waste in her opinion, especially because she already had plans to do so through other channels. That would also force people to work for their skill, making them appreciate it much more and helping them build self confidence. 

She had gained another skill for this as well, increasing the length of her status a bit more.

[attuned faith magic]
Use faith mana claimed by and attuned to you to dispense blessings in tune with your nature or to spread the gift of knowledge.

A quick look at Jack told her that she had thoroughly wrung him out and couldn’t continue without damaging something. He should rest and so Argul said her goodbyes to him. 

Then she turned to the avatar of her daughter, who had watched the whole time. Argul wasn’t proud of how she treated Jack and wished Alyra had stepped in, but could also see why she didn’t. Argul had gone a step too far today and had to learn that she needed rules for experiments on people. Hopefully her daughter would at least help with that.

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Jack stumbled to his bed, holding his head with one hand. Every step sent a blinding pain through his head and down his spine. He nearly fell three times on his way through the bed room, every close call inching him further into unconsciousness. It felt like hours before he arrived at his bed and he slowly and carefully lowered himself into blessed stillness. No matter how much he would have liked to throw himself onto the straw mattress, that would hurt even more.

His head just wasn’t made for instant knowledge infusion and he wasn’t sure if the spell matrixes for [cleaning] and [increase heat] and all the related details were worth it. Right now they definitely weren’t!

The spirit, no, the Focus had been unusually inconsiderate today and he was suffering for it. Perhaps he shouldn’t have confronted her like he would his delusional great grand aunt, Jack wondered as exhaustion he hadn’t been aware of claimed his mind and he fell asleep.

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Rules for experimenting on sapients:
1. The experiment has to first be vigorously done on non-sapients!
2. Sapient experimenting is only allowed once comprehensive testing on non-sapients concludes that minimal risk comes to the sapient!
3. The sapient has to be informed of all risks and of the goals of the experiment!
4. The sapient has to agree to the experiment. It has to be verifiable that it has done so of free will and not under duress or compulsion!
5. Medical oversight has to be provided for the entire duration of the experiment!
6. The sapient has to be compensated fairly and generously for their time!
7. The sapient test subject has to be included as a participant of the experiments in any official and unofficial documents!
8. In the event of harm befalling the sapient further compensation has to be given and medical care has to be arranged!
9. Should the sapient die despite all rules having been followed, an investigation by a neutral third party is to be done. The family of the sapient is eligible for all compensation and half as much as the original sum annually for a duration of 20 years!