*Tum* Another book joined the pile on the wooden table beside Aella. By now the stack of books that Aella had read was pretty impressive, but considering that she had spent most of this day in the library reading books and learning about this world, it made sense.
Looking at the wood cover book pile Aella felt drained, but it had to be done. Reading all those books helped Aella learn a lot about this world, or more precisely this dimension, and herself. One of the things that she learned was that she didn't need sleep or food to survive or function because all Safury, including herself, can survive on mana, but it's recommended that she still eats and sleeps so that she doesn't slow her mana absorption rate.
So what she learned about Safury was that they need mana, it's essential to their survival and power. Every Safury absorbs mana passively and the more mana Safury absorbs the stronger they get, now if a Sufary doesn't eat or sleep some of that absorbed mana is spent to replace those things, slowing down the Safurys growth a little bit.
When Safury absorbs enough mana they advance. Advancement grants Safury new ability, a leap in power, and can somewhat change their form. Well, there is more to it than that but it's the basics. Another thing is that Safury don't age, making it so that they can live indefinitely as long as they aren't killed by something external.
Another thing that got answered by reading these books was what happened to her mind. Aella found out that when Safury are born they have 3 days of something like protection, which is one of the reasons she didn't find any dangerous life forms in the forest. In those 3 days, something protects Safury in many ways.
The protection manifests itself in different ways, one such example is that anything hostile to the Safury instinctively avoids them, there are exceptions like the mana gobbler, but usually, the hostile party avoids the recently born Safury. Another way Safury is protected is through their mind. Aella didn't really fully understand how it works, but one of the given examples was that if Safury was traumatized by a spider, in those 3 days, then instead of gaining trauma and getting scared of spiders, the protection makes so that the Safury's mind is more resilient against spiders. So in short instead of getting more scared of spiders, Safury gets more calm around spiders. So this protection is responsible for Aella's lack of mental turmoil.
Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.
Knowing that her mind's situation is somewhat normal made Aella relieved that there was one less thing to worry about. Now the next thing that interested Aella was some information about this world.
The original world or the core world was inhabited mostly by mortals like, humans, beastkin, dwarfs, elves, and other races, but all of them have life spans even if some were much longer than others.
Now the question is where Safury live, well the answer is, another plane or dimension. Yes, Safury don't live on the core world with others but in their own dimension that is connected to the core world.
When Aella was reading this she was a little disappointed about this fact thinking that she won't be able to meet other fantasy races, but she was wrong. You see the people of the core world know about Safury, but they call them differently. There are many names mortals call them but the most commonly used one is summons.
Safury could travel to the core world through summoning, there were many types of summoning that are used but the most popular are contracted or general.
Contracted summoning is usually when one of the mortal make a contract with Safury and then the mortal is able to summon that specific Safury whenever they need, and the general type is when for example a summoner wishes to summon a Sufary to help with farm work, in those cases, Sufary that get summoned are those who specialized in farming or are physically fit or have abilities that somehow involve the plants. There are more nuances to all that but that's the gist of it.
But there is one thing to take in mind when summoning Sufary, the summoner needs compensation. Because for some reason Safury aren't able to absorb the mana at the same rate in the core world as they are in their home dimension. So to compensate for their wasted time Safury ask for compensation.
Usually, it's in the form of summoner's mana, but it could be other things like mana stones or gems or some Safury ask for delicious food, it varies from one Safury to another. But usually, one way or another the summoning is beneficial to Safury.
''Fuuu... I should go eat something.'' It took a while for Aella to read all those books and she still hasn't read all the books she selected, but it was time to eat. Although Aella didn't get hungry and she wasn't able to tell if her mana consumption has slowed down, she still was sure that normally someone would be hungry after this kind of reading session.
But all her plans were thrown out of the window when suddenly a dimly glowing white circle appeared next to her, the circle itself was made out of runes that Aella wasn't able to read, but she still knew what it was.
''Summoning.'' Aella murmured under her breath, while somewhat surprised. Slowly the magic circle grew large enough that it was about 3m in diameter. When the circle stopped growing Aella didn't hesitate to step in the circle because she didn't want to miss this opportunity.