— POV Mathias —

I feel sooooo drained, damn that took a lot of energy to heal her back together. I had to focus 100%, well, 90% of my concentration on managing the healing process for her. That 10% I kept ignoring - I don’t need to merge my fear whatever though process back in yet, I think I’d go insane having to think about all of that stuff at once. Thank goodness for my soul-splintering ability - I don’t even have to know what my final though process is doing, nor do I really care. Eventually I’ll take care of it, but for now I don’t want to, besides, everything’s been on the up’n’up lately - no need to rock the boat.

I still can’t believe how long it took to heal her, not to mention how much total energy it took. It took me a whole week of providing my massive mana regeneration, natural energy generation, and that gigantic whirlpool of mana absorbing the elements from the world. It was pretty scary - I thought she wasn’t going to make it, like there was something missing! Haha, like that could stop me! I’m a fucking scientist!

A normal person would have stopped, maybe would have just let her die, but I decided to attempt to fill-in the missing details with my own! A lot of it was psuedo-science, or stuff that was only hypothesized, but at least part of it I was entirely sure of what I was doing.

The first day was fairly intense, but mostly it was just me getting used to managing the healing process and wielding those massive mana and natural energy streams that were entering her body. I had to wrestle for control to stop them from eroding her body away instead of healing it. Then I had to bring forth all of my biology class knowledge to stabilize her organs. First the heart, then her brain, then her lungs, liver, and other organs. She was pretty badly damaged in some way in every part of her being. After she was stabilized, I started to think: why stop here?

I drained a small portion of her blood, and sank my consciousness down into my . Here I have my scientific equipment, and can try to develop some abilities to help her AND me. First, I checked out her mana reactors. Man, they were fucking pitiful, but they were distinctly different than my own and the tiger cubs’ mana reactors. I had drained some blood from the ticks that were on them when they first showed up so that I could compare my blood with theirs. There were two big differences - they were animal cells, were extremely resistant to damage, and had less mana reactors than I did. I’ll have to wait until they grow up for me to tell whether I want to integrate their blood with my own.

But back to the small elf’s blood and mana reactors, while they were few, warped, and small, they still stored mana better than my cells could zzzzz. I think I’ve stumbled onto the reason why monsters have mana stones, but humanoids don’t. Monsters can’t store very much, but instead their mana regeneration is off the charts. To make up for that deficit, these guys developed mana stones to store their excess mana. Humanoids, on the other hand, developed the other way. Their mana reactors store mana very well, but they develop slower and don’t produce as much mana.

But these samples I have were really pitiful… so of course I thought that it was time for some experimentation! Her wounds are still healing, but I went ahead and slowed it down a lot to give me some more time to plan her healing out. She had already passed the most crucial step - she didn’t die when I first injected her with all that energy.

First, I started out by cross-breeding her mana reactors with my own and the two tiger-cubs. I even bombarded some of them with radiation to create mutations to increase the genetic diversity that I had. Initially the results weren’t that promising - many were even worse in every single way compared to their predecessors. But there were were a few standouts that excelled in one field vs another. One that produced even more mana than my own! But only fire mana, and it had a short lifespan before it wore itself out, withered, and died to lack of energy. Another absorbed all the mana around it before exploding, another produced mana of all types, but couldn’t store even a little bit. I’m saving this particular one for later study…

Generation by generation I bred these little things before finally generation 546 I saw what I was looking for. I managed to develop a generation of mana reactors that could 1:Utilize each type of mana, 2:Store mana in the mana reactors, and 3:Generate the mana at a reasonable pace. I created a scoring metric for each quality that is based on a logarithmic scale. I made a table to compare my mana to Generation 546’s mana.

Mana MetricMy Mana ReactorsGeneration 546Nature10*0*Fire108Earth08Water08Wind08Lightning08Dark08

Light08

Now I know that for me it’s not a HUGE deal that I can’t generate other types of mana because I can create mana circles and use the mana around me to cause the effects that I want. It does decrease efficiency for the mana circles by about 50% if the mana types don’t match, but I can’t make myself give up my perfect 10 score for fire mana just yet. The difference between a 10 and a 8 is just too huge of a loss currently. Even if I don’t switch over my mana reactors my mana circles will cost a much smaller percentage of my mana than with these mana reactors. I was a little confused though, from what I gather from my previous experiments on my bugs the girl should be able to use my nature energy now, but maybe it’s a little different for her since she won’t have a mana stone. Maybe even my bugs don’t really generate nature energy and instead absorb it from… nature, or me. I still leak a shit ton of that stuff. Alas, I won’t be able to tell until she wakes up and tries to use the natural energy anyways. Maybe she can absorb my leaked energy and use it, whatever, I’m not too concerned with it.

I’ve already fixed her to my definition of an elf, I think. She can use a ton mana, I made her body lithe and graceful without really changing her facial structure, and increased her eyesight to be like that of an eagle. With the massive amount of mana and natural energy pouring into her body, I didn’t even have to use my abilities to changer her, I just tweaked her cells according to what I thought of.

I was then stumped for a while, should they be vegetarians? I was really conflicted - I could force them to be by giving them the inability to break down animal proteins and instead increase their ability to break down plant proteins, similar to cows etc. I could alter their gut bacteria to violently react to meat as well, really the changes I could make were limitless to make them vegetarians. But I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t force them to avoid the taste of meat! I love meat! Well, I loved meat - can’t really taste it anymore, and I feel like I wouldn’t like the taste anymore. The sun is my ultimate food now.

After that was the bone structure. Before her bones were really messed up - I couldn’t really tell what they should be like on the inside. So I borrowed some knowledge from my past life and made them a type of hybrid between bird and human bones. I made them less dense than before, but I created a rigid honeycomb inner structure with a relatively thick outer shell to prevent easy crushing of the bones. I also threw in some reinforcing metals - it served two purposes. One, to slow down their growth, and two, to give them a little more resilience. I mean, elves age slowly, right? Might as well give a reason for it instead of crappy genetics. Might as well clear that up as well. This poor girl must have been something like a half-breed or a low class elf, and as far as I can see only inherited a slightly longer lifespan than a regular human. I could fix that by increasing both the length of the cell telomeres and by decreasing the rate of cell-growth and death, so I did both and increased her lifespan to thousands of years. I can always make her immortal, but I dislike the thought of a true immortal being. It might make them stagnate too much culturally and cause trouble in the long run.

She should be back to being a proper full-blooded high elf! If she’s going to be staying here, might as well top off her potential so she can protect me in the future. After those changes started to be implemented, I was slightly bored, so I went ahead and increased her flexibility, made her hair a perfect golden-yellow color, increased the relative number of slow-twitch muscle fibers, and increased her inherent intelligence. IQ is 50% environment and 50% DNA, so might as well provide her what I can as long as this spell is running. I also didn’t know exactly how to allow her to speak with me in the future since my ability doesn’t allow me to, so I left that to the spell, it should work by the end. Speaking of the spell I cast, it was fucking amazing! But it took sooooo long to finish fixing her back to her optimal state (+some of my own changes)! I could guide and choose what it changed for the most part, and once I got my intention through to the spell it started to work towards the goal. I am a genius for devising this spell if I do say so myself!

Which brings me to this moment, she’s waking up. Her body is much more appealing now that she’s not malnourished, abused, and genetically defective. Her skin is blemish-free, and her body will always shed her scars over time after they’ve served their purpose. That was something that I always hated back on Earth - I burn myself, permanent scar. Scratch, permanent scar. They even have the potential to scar and bind up your internal organs. All of this new healing did come at a cost though - again it slows their aging. Overall I believe it’s worth it.

Hmm, she wants to move around, but are her bones healed? Looks like it. Ok, I guess I should remove my restraining leaves. OOPS, forgot to take out the IVs I placed in her arms, a little tug and an indiscreet amount of nature energy to heal the small holes and voila! She seems a little confused, but at least she’s not terrified of my roots parasitized her. I know I would be!

Uh-oh, haha, she realized that her skin is bare. I guess I could spend about 100 more of my Growth Points, or nature energy, to grow some covering leaves. It’s not much, but if I do more than the bare essentials, I’m pretty sure my leaves would be more irritating than helpful. Grass isn’t really known for making comfortable clothes, well, at least Bermuda Grass.

Sigh, it looks like I’ll have to shove her out of my enclosure. Scoot, move! I need to verify if all of the various changes took place! Go do stuff! Run around!

There we go - it looks like everything actually worked out! She’s looking around a ton - just like when I got contacts for the first time, that means that her eyesight is probably improved. She should have the capability to see mana too, but I actually don’t know if she would have to practice using that ability or if she already has it. But I guess it’s the first, since she’s not overwhelmed by my mana violently running amok.

Hmmmm, it doesn’t look like she’s noticed her mana capabilities yet. She hasn’t even noticed my two little pets peeking at her from behind my tree, not even my mana. For sure I know she can’t see it, but any being that contains mana should be able to feel other large concentrations of mana, right? At least that’s what I overheard from Jard and Torgue when they go hunting. Maybe she needs a spark to jump start her mana-sensing abilities. Hmmm… she’d probably react badly to me suddenly shooting her with mana haha, time for some social engineering!

A little root to trip her… Awww, she’s tearing up. But it’s for her own good, now that she’s a little hurt I can heal her and send a spike of fire mana into her at the same time, and she’ll never suspect me muahahahaha! That did it, she looks fearfully towards Jard and Torgue then swings her head quickly from side to side, looking all around my field. And she’s off to the cocoon!

‘Pffffffffffft!’ This is hilarious! It looks like she’s trying to hide beneath my leaves, but she doesn’t realize that I’m the one sending over my two pets. I’m sending them warm feelings and their natural curiosity is leading them along. Just a little bit of help, lifting the leaf by her feet, and contact! Hilarious contact! I could never stand my cat licking my feet, and it seems like it’s the same way for her.

And it seems first contact went well, they are now sleeping cuddling against each other. Damn it, these are my two pets! Don’t think you can take them away from me! They’ve already been brainwashed by me! But I guess you can help me take care of them and let me focus on other stuff.

Shit! First contact! I forgot I should be able to speak with her! Drat! Well, when she wakes up I’ll talke with her. And I guess I should go ahead and increase my ability . I was fine not speaking with my two pets, since I would feel a little awkward doing that, I mean, I’m so used to talking to my pets without them really understanding what I’m saying, it lets me be less restrained that way. But people are different, I’d much rather have the ability to talk with them in the future. I should just be able to talk with her via an ability of hers, not mine, but for others I’ll need to upgrade this ability. Let’s see what upgrade I can evolve it by? I guess there are three different paths to go about this. One is the physical solution, by obtaining the ability to vibrate my leaves quickly I can create sound waves. This can also be extended or simplified by having a root touch the person who I want to talk with and vibrate their bones, like how musical toothbrushes work, to speak with them. The second path is to do it as truly an ability, or extension of . This would allow mind-to-mind communication, it is secret, magical, BUT makes the two minds have a connection with each other, potentially opening me up to weakness. The third path would be a combination of physical and magical, that would allow me to transmit messages directly to a person without a need to touch them by directly influencing their inner ear. This ability can be blocked, is magical in nature, is not reciprocal, and may be changed en-route. Ok, let’s see what I can cook up, and what they will cost!

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Genetic Modification: Vibration

Allows one the ability to rapidly vibrate their leaves or roots to different frequencies between 0 Hz and 5 GHz.

Cost: 100

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Genetic Modification: Telepathy

Allows one the ability to create a mental link with another to converse both ways.

Cost: 10000

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Genetic Modification: Ranged Private Messaging

Allows one the send a message one-way to another without affecting the air between the target and the user.

Cost: 1000

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I think I just need both the first and second options, no need to really deal with the in-between. The first one could seem mystical since it doesn’t register as magic, but seems like it. The third one will be really helpful for my minions and close confidants. The last one I’ll just deal with later. For now I won’t even need to use these abilities until another person shows up. And I also want to keep the innocence of my pets intact.

And she’s waking up, now let’s see if her ability to speak with me telepathically with her ability works.

“Hello there.”