I didn’t even bother with looking into what the interface had done with my ‘bedroom’ tent. I was still reeling from how violent my last death was, leaning my head against the bark of the tree. The rivulets pressed down onto my hair, and I decided the next thing I would print from the fabricator would be a hair brush. It probably wouldn’t be very nice to use, what being made out of steel, but it would be better than nothing. And its small enough of a time waste I wouldn’t feel that bad about it.

…No, I would feel terrible. I needed to get out of the trial, and like everything else, I would worry about the health of my hair once I was out. I hated how repetitive the thought was becoming, but I didn’t have another option.

I took some time, sitting there, to run my left hand through it. It was longer than I remembered, probably some side effect of the trial. The gray sky above didn't let it shine, and I was silently upset about that. A couple minutes were spent getting the big tangles out, and I let my eyes close. It was almost therapeutic, reminding me of home in a way that didn't send my thoughts plummeting. My hair was one of the few parts about me I could confidently be proud of, and I would have to imitate it somehow when I... replaced my scalp.

I stood up, stretching a moment, shaking my left hand while repeatedly closing and opening my right. Hopefully the ‘Materials Expansion’ would get me some more maneuverability. I needed to start considering my next project, and thus, I let my feet guide me to the workshop and its expanded inside. I would really have to learn how to imitate whatever Tartarus-like magic the interface was using to get the expanded effect. It would be necessary for rebuilding.

I opened the tent flap, and squinted at the changes inside. Thankfully, I saw another rack of metal, and from a cursory glance I could only come to one conclusion. The interface either had one really sick twisted sense of humor, or, it just really hated me. It was probably both, because it decided the metal I needed most after one of the most refined alloys humanity had been capable of making was gold. Honest to God, gold.

I was going to get robbed the moment I stepped out of this trial. I picked up an ingot–a fucking ingot of gold–and simply pushed some of my mana into it. It absorbed it almost greedily, some of it dissipating harmlessly into the air from excess. The metal had an upper limit, but it was hard for me to find. Which made me realize something else. After my last death my reserves weren’t restored.

That paused my examination of the gold brick, and suddenly my willingness to throw all my mana away earlier was re-examined. If I had died due to mana exhaustion, would I just die on loop, over and over again?

I decided to be significantly more careful going forward, and went back to the gold. Normally, mana I expelled into nothing would threaten to spontaneously combust, but because it was the gold tapping off excess, it seemed to just harmlessly perpetuate around the ingot in a very faint green haze. I had ideas for what I could use that for, especially as an upgrade to the H-TIG, no longer requiring me to ‘invocate’ to shoot. And of course, an artificial nervous system that gave me increased dexterity and speed.

The next resource the interface had given me was more interesting, however. It was… a giant trashcan of LED screens of various sizes, some bending and curving uncomfortably. None of them were broken, or even scratched, but they all looked refurbished. Why the hell was the interface giving me screens? I couldn't think of a single use for a LED screen that didn't require eighteen more Neophyte rewards from the interface. I kept note of it, and sighed with relief as I noticed the entire rack of steel was refilled. I would need it if I wanted to expand the H-TIG like I thought. It needed a solid base, like my shoulder blade, to where it couldn’t just be pulled off the moment the attachment point was damaged. Next life, I could upgrade the caliber.

What if I just had a bunch of guns hidden all over my body instead? Get another H-TIG on my left, maybe replace my jaw with a gun down my throat, hell I could probably put one right over my core. That’d be kinda cool, now that I thought about it.

Not practical. I needed a bigger toolkit. Which, humorously, brought me to the new machine that occupied the workshop. A giant pod. A cylinder, held up by supports, sitting right next to the fabricator. I swore, for a solid second, that it looked like a cryogenic chamber that would be right at home in a billionaire's basement. Maybe I could turn myself into Walt Disney.

I ran a hand over the glass window on the front of the pod, trying to remember if The Basics said anything about suspicious looking pods–or if there were any convenient instruction manuals sitting around. Unfortunately, both searches came up empty. But remembering The Basics made a lightbulb go off in my head. Not literally, yet.

I didn’t see another book on the desk–The Basics was still there, thank God–so I opened the drawer I had earlier found the sketchbook I used to supply the designs for the fabricator. Sure enough, there was a small little packet, with scratchy little letters that read ‘Mana Conduction, and its Uses.’ It had a glossy, fake looking cover, but blinking revealed the way dust seemed to settle in runnels.

I opened it up, and the mysterious stranger was back.

‘Mana Conduction -

To Jona -

Hi again! Nice work on the Hand That Is a Gun. It was fun to see you build it with what I had them give you!

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Once again, before we get into the glory of Mana Conduction (and its uses), there is a new machine in your workshop. And you must be wondering, ‘creepy stalker paper, how do I use the weird pod thing that invaded my home?’ Well bub, have I got the answers!

That is the HARP, or the Harmless Automated Removal Pod, or as it’s colloquially known as, The Pod. Call it whatever you like, you seem to be keen on names and acronyms.

You see, in the same way you can print out designs you’ve drawn up, you can make diagrams of parts of your body, and the pod will HARMLESSLY remove them.

We decided this would be a better reward than anaesthesia. It can even get inside you! But actually putting the enhancements in is another matter you’ll have to figure out yourself, for now, anyway. WINK WINK.

Also, PLEASE, I bargained for you to get those screens. As much as I love the H-TIG, dazzle it up? If you do, I’ll talk with the boss and get you a scrap on Elemental Mana. You can’t be using what I have gotten you for something that looks like you put it down the garbage disposal.

Anyway, stay safe! That was a really good fight! The Shade was totally impressed.

Talk again soon!’

People were watching me. I anxiously looked around the room, checking the corners, bad memories welling up in my head. I didn’t like having my privacy violated. I should have realized that sooner, but everything else was crashing around. Was there some cabal of aliens watching my every move? Some kind of spirit that hovered over my shoulder following every move?

I shivered, feeling suddenly violated.

I threw away the thought, suppressing the urge to tear apart the room looking for cameras that likely didn’t exist, flipping the page and starting to read through the meaningless garbled text. It was more clear than before, more to the point. And, almost blessedly, it explained to me more esoteric uses for mana conductivity.

The most obvious–at least after I read the scrap–was creating a sort of bowl, with a lid made of something incredibly conductive, and the bowl itself made of something almost dull to it. Mana would pour in, getting absorbed by the conductive material, with the excess bouncing around inside and pouring out a hole in the bottom. The property of the mana would change, pushing off thin air instead of blasting through material. .

Another idea it gave me was a similar design, but significantly smaller. Attached to the conductive lid was an expanding one. The user would push their mana below, and through some mechanisms, expand the second lid inside the bowl and trap the mana in a confined space bereft anything that would absorb it. Then, the user would perform the metaphysical equivalent to shaking it up in a much more violent manner than the repulsion, and let it stir for a while.

Eventually, it would homogenize, turning into a fat egg compressed into sheer power. Where before the mana steadily leaked, the mana was forced to stick to itself. And, once released through a newly opened hole at the bottom, it would explode furiously against whatever it would first come into contact with. It had to be launched at a decently high speed, and because of its almost sticky nature to the rest of itself, you could store the doom-pellets. But a doom-pellet wouldn't last forever. Only really able to last for two to three minutes from what the book described.

The last, less immediately useful possibility, was making the mana, mana conductive. It was, however, far simpler to do, simply repurposing the mana leaked by mana conductive materials, and leaving it alone for a couple of hours. I had… two ideas for how to use this.

Simply increasing the efficiency of expenditure by putting emergency batteries on my weapons, which would take the mana and save it for later. The scrap didn’t tell me explicitly what sticky-mana would do if I threw it at someone real fast, but I imagine having a hole in you of mana that sucks up other mana isn’t the best.

The next one is creating a system where the cores of the explosives were made of the sticky mana. Do I know how that would work? No, but sticky mana seemed to attract other mana sources, so I imagine it would work pretty well.

I set down the scrap, having finished it in a couple minutes. It didn’t feel like anything more than a primer, and it gave me an idea of what my next projects would be.

How would I fight the Shade successfully? I had a long-ranged weapon that I couldn’t use long-range because of how much faster the Shade was than me. I needed speed. Not enough to outpace her, but enough that it takes her longer to get me. But I did not have enough to just completely replace my legs.

No- I would cut off my feet. Technically the pod would be doing it. I would be replacing my toes and tootsies with gold. The bottoms would have a dispenser-hole-thing, henceforth called a mana dispenser, that led into the repulsion bowl with another manually activated mana dispenser. Which would repel me off the ground. I didn’t know how high, but either I would glide above the grass or I would use it to fly. And promptly die, but hey, if I died enough, eventually I would get the resources to stop doing that.

I would, with the H-TIG, be doing two smaller upgrades, and one big one. I wouldn’t be able to attach it to my back–and likely wouldn’t until the interface gave me the auto-assembler–but I could secure it further. Firstly removing the rest of the flesh inside of it, and then extending the attachment cup further up my bicep. Which was technically the second small change, going purely material.

The last big one was the revolver design. It would be cool as fuck to have a revolver on my arm. It would be further up on my forearm, basically replacing the entire segment with a collapsing design. It would be designed a bit awkwardly, with it popping up with the barrel. While they were down, I would fill each chamber–which could theoretically be modified to become explosive later–with small gold cylinders at the back to channel the mana. I could, because the gold would become a part of me, expend it freely without invocation.

If it didn’t work, I could just let the mana pool into each chamber. Bit more crude, and likely more prone to failure, but it would work, and work well.

I did take a moment to reflect that the fabricator, and now the pod, were likely not going to come with me after the trial. This would all just be building bad habits that I would have to unlearn later. I found myself picking up my sketchbook and getting to work anyway.