Argul’s mana regeneration and mana pool had grown by a tiny bit and he hoped the growth was by a percent rather than a small linear amount, which would certainly be disappointing. He would have to check again in the future to figure that out.

For now there was something that pissed him slightly off. “So humankind got punished with me and is going to live on that planet, if they survive the chaos that is going to descend on them.” 

He didn’t like that. He was okay with himself reaping what he sowed, but mass punishments were something Argul hated. “I feel kinda bad for them as this is basically my fault.” Not that he remembered doing what he had obviously done.

The chat box before him flashed once. “Yeah, but it’s not like you can do anything for them right now and if you are honest you don’t want any attachments to your last life either, don’t you?”

She was right and now Argul also felt bad, because honestly he didn’t care about the people, he cared about himself not being responsible for so many deaths. “You don’t sound like someone who has known me for only a few hours, Alyra and not wanting any attachments doesn’t mean I would like to be the reason for countless deaths.”

 The box winked at him. “I have known you for all of your life mom!”

Argul groaned to himself. 

He really wondered how she managed to make the box wink. It was a mystery for eternity.

Argul ignored the fact that one's daughter knowing one for all of one’s life was super weird and opened his skill menu.

His passive skills were more or less self explanatory, but Argul still wanted to have a description. What his active skills did though, he had no idea.

This time he decided to ask Alyra instead of the system. Argul liked it more when a person explained something to him and Alyra was somehow connected to the system so she should know. “Hey Alyra can you help me with the skills for a second?”

The chat box appeared nearly instantly, which Argul found to be a bit irritating. “And please stop reading my thoughts or I’m going to have to ground you!”

The chat box rotated around its own horizontal axis. “As if you would ever do something like that.” 

She just knew Argul too well already. “Hehe”

He would glare at her if he could. "Hey!"

That little– “Okay I will stop. Back to your question. Uniphone is your ability to call the universe, you may praise me for my naming sense!”

Argul grinned in his mind, time for revenge. “Maybe in your next life, dear.” 

The box pouted again. She did that by shading it differently in one of the bottom corners so that it looked similar to a pout. “You’re mean! Hmph!” It must be really hard to convey her emotions as a box.

Argul wanted to get on with the next one. “Please continue, would you?”

Alyra’s chat box moved slowly from the left of Argul’s view point to his right. “Fiiine.”

The box slowly got larger again. “The next skill allows you to push mana as well as intent into one point, causing a rapid mutation of an organism that would be able to survive in the chosen environment.”

She changed the form of the box to that of a bird. “It takes 100 mana for a level 1 organism and then follows what the development of your Mana capacity would be without quests, achievements and evolutions. Organisms on your first floor can normally only attain level one without doing anything else.” 

The bird got a bit bigger. “To get them to a higher level you would need to pump more mana into them or somehow get them to go to a lower floor. It is in my opinion only worth doing so in an emergency and even then I would question its usefulness.”

Argul thought that a lot could go wrong with this skill and got solemn. “I hereby vow to try not to create some horrible abominations, that sounds like a skill that could go incredibly wrong and isn’t very exact.”

He could see the wriggling mass of flesh he would create one day. If creatures would level passively depending on the mana concentration, he had to agree with his daughter about creating higher leveled organisms. It just seemed unnecessary.

Alyra’s chat box turned deep blue and small images of waterdrops appeared at the top side of it. “Jinx it a bit more would you? I can already see it, some kind of weird walking rock grass.”

Argul immediately took notes for future creations. “And that is one for my not to do list.” 

Now that Argul knew that he could create plants and animals, he only needed to fill the nothingness around him somehow. Before that though, there were still two skills to check.

The box dimmed a bit. “Ahh, well. Core regeneration is a passive skill that heals you continuously. Knowledge domain on the other hand makes it so that all knowledge used, spoken or otherwise communicated inside your domain you will learn.”

The second skill was nice, but Argul had to agree that you could guess their functions. He proceeded to the next topic. “Hey Alyra, how do I work exactly? Like am I a dungeon that creates monsters and traps to protect its heart from filthy and greedy sapients or not? Also how do I level?”

The box lit up. “Oh! Finally you ask about something important!” 

How a box could look this excited he would never know.

Alyra narrowed her communication device. “Hey, let a lady have her fun!” 

Argul sighed. “You are not even a day old…Not that I am any older either.”

The chat box made a weird up and down motion. “Ahem! Anyways, you get environment templates from the planets and other objects in space your portal is on, as long as they are somewhat natural, so no going to space stations for now. There will be an indirect way around that later on, but I will let you know.”

The box became elliptical. “Your portal represents your sphere of influence outside of your domain.”

It wasn’t a portal, but Argul decided to stay silent.

The ellipsis grew into a circle. “Normally you could grow your domain, but then you wouldn’t be able to create floors and an environment like right now.”

The circle formed into the shape of a wolf. “Portals will appear everywhere where a somewhat intelligent creature, like a wolf, that has incorporated Mana, lives for at least a month. As you, your mana and your creatures can’t leave your prison, that is going to be rather difficult for now.”

The wolf changed into what looked like a planet. “Back to the templates, for now you only have a moon template with gray ground and craters and such. Also not a lot of gravity there, but enough that it would be somewhat hard to leave.”

A few more boxes appeared and layered on top of each other with a bit of place between themselves. “As for your level, you level with each new floor you build. A floor is ‘finished’ when it is inhabited by at least 5 plant types and 3 animal types, one small, one herbivore and a predator.”

All the screens molded together and formed a rose. “One of the plants has to be dangerous in at least a small kind of way like having thorns. I know it doesn’t sound like an ecosystem, but the rest will likely evolve in a natural way from the existing organisms that are already there to fill in any gaps.”

The layers formed again, only this time with a rose emoji on all of them. “Also, your inhabitants can move between floors, so they might later settle somewhere else than where you created them at first. You are always free to create more than required.”

The layers formed something similar to a pitfall that then collapsed. “You don’t do traps.”

The collapsed pitfall changed into a random map. “You provide an environment that is a lot more dangerous than one without mana, but also has resources that would be impossible without mana. So it is more like you give any would-be adventurers something else than you to focus on.”

On the map a red point appeared and then moved outside the boundaries of the map, which slowly grew until the red point was on the map again. “As for your safety, your core will always be on the lowest floor, the furthest away from the entrance, while also being surrounded by rock or earth or something else, one never knows what is possible.”

Argul let all the information settle. He really would have loved to raise an eyebrow. “That was quite an infodump there you know?”

He didn’t really want to complain as this was really important information for him, but a bit of nitpicking should be allowed.

A normal chat box appeared again. “Yeah, but it would have been annoying to do it step by step and I might have forgotten something that way.”

He had to agree. “I have just one problem with this right now before I want to try it out. Will I still be able to vary what I do with the template like only caves?”

That was important, as Argul would hate to only have surface moon floors.

The box nodded. “That should still be possible.”

It got a little bit bigger again. “Oh, I almost forgot! Every floor will be in somewhat of a new plane of existence, so that they don't impede one another.”

Alyra made the box back up. “I would recommend that you start with trying to manipulate Mana and then go with a normal surface and ground for now and start slow. You should also check your quests, they will help.”

Argul mentally nodded with a smile. “Okay, thanks for the tip! Who makes quests and achievements anyways?”

The chat box circled in the middle of Argul’s field of view in response. “Ahh, well mana is based a lot on intent. The quests and achievements are created from mana and your subconsciousness, to motivate mortals to discover new knowledge and to strive to better oneself. Be that good or bad, mana does not judge.” 

Good to know, Argul would bet there were achievements for resentment and similar things. But that again was a worry for later, as he had quests to check and floors to build.

How Argul would manage to hurt a universe with sharp shiny things would likely remain a mystery for eternity. Otherwise he seemed to have long term quests and quests for the immediate future.

Argul just hoped sensing and manipulating mana wouldn’t be all that hard as he started to focus on himself.

Something clicked pretty much immediately and he could sense mana as if he was always meant to be able to do it in the first way. It was everywhere except on the other side of the portal and if Argul focused enough his mana would slowly do what he wanted.

It was not like seeing a different color, as is often described in Lit-RPG novels, mana was more of a feeling, a bit like spatial awareness but still different. 

Argul might have started playing with mana without noticing the passing of time. He at first made it move randomly, but then started to weave it into formations. This action sometimes stabilized the mana a bit and as he continued the formations more and more resembled what looked like a 3 dimensional motherboard of a pc.

He tried a few more times and then willed it to stop changing. It was by no means perfect, but it worked so Argul was satisfied with himself.

A tennis ball-sized purple sphere formed in front of the rip in space and then shot away to the left side of the portal. After a rather small distance it fell into itself and dispersed.

Argul’s interface was trying to test his patience once more, so he opened his annoying notifications to make it stop. Seriously…

 Congratulations 

• You created the skill Mana Manipulation

• You can control mana.

• This skill will help to make it somewhat easier to control and command mana.

Congratulations

• You created the skill/spell Magic missile

• You can form mana into a sphere and command it to shoot away from you at a rapid pace.

• This skill will help you improve and use the spell.

These two skills Argul had anticipated, though it seemed he had done something wrong while sensing the mana.

Achievement made: Skill Creator (1)

You created a skill unknown to the archives and enriched the universe. Skills will be a bit easier to learn and you understand some information better. (skill learning (1) acquired)  INT +1

Quest completed:

•  Mana is power!

• You have learned how to manipulate mana. Would have been embarrassing if not, I mean you are basically mana.

• You can now build floors. Floor menu unlocked. Moon (unnamed) template unlocked. You can set rules for how finished floors should grow if your INT increases.

The achievement surprised Argul a bit. “You can create skills?”

Alyra’s chat box rolled in from the left side of his field of view. “Well of course you idiot!”

A book formed above the box. “Mana and I are new and as the representative and operator of the archives I might know everything that has happened where mana is, but I can’t invent things myself.”

A few pages were turned, on one of them was a crossed out idea lightbulb. “There are only a few skills that I acquired from your memories of your first life and yes I have those memories too. All the other skills someone else will have to create.”

A screen with a lot of binary code formed underneath the box. “Me being new is also the cause of your status sheet changing a bit here and there, I am still working on optimizing this system.”

Argul lowered his imaginary head a bit in shame. “Sorry Alyra, I should have thought of that.”

Another mystery solved, Alyra was creating the system.

All screens except for the chat disappeared. “And of course you apologize, not like you could give yourself some slack for getting thrown in this situation and not going bat shit crazy!”

Argul had no idea what was wrong with him apologizing for asking stupid questions, as he himself hated getting asked those. In the end he just put it down to Alyra having the need to complain about something. 

Argul wanted to start with his first floor, but checked his status again first.