I’ve been watching this group of 200 people like a hawk for the last month. It’s super stressful and if I didn’t literally have SP that can do anything I’m pretty sure I’d have broken down by now. But we need them to be ready. I’ve been using magic to improve their bodies, similar to the one that I used on myself, but a less advanced one. It’ll just bring them to the peak of regular humans instead of super humans. I also have to manage all of the trainers and build and manage all the equipment and buildings we’re using. I do have companies on Earth for all sorts of stuff, but I didn’t want to involve any of them in this.

Me and Andrea decided that the magic that we can do is too powerful for all of humanity. We have contingencies in place so if we get killed or trapped or something terrible happens and we’re not there it will reveal the secret of the soul and how to astral project to the Astral plane in order to awaken, but we’re not ready for that yet. Even with that contingency though, we’ve felt that magic is too incredible not to share. So we came up with an idea. We’d make and test some magic systems that we would share with the world. It would allow some of the best parts of magic, like perfect health, but with a system that is more controlled, we won’t have to worry about someone going nuts and turning their own body into antimatter and blowing up the world.

We have a few different styles that we’re going to test, but this is the first one. We’re calling it the Human Mana System. Obviously Human means it’s for humans, and System implies that it’s a system. The mana part though is what’s different, and for the record we want to try a system with Qi, and another one called Magic Material. The basics is that with mana you have a magical energy called mana that is used in spells to create effects. It’s got a lot of complexity in it so that people can get a ton of different effects, but some things are locked out of being possible. For example nothing will let them astral project to the Astral plane, and nothing will let them awaken and connect with their soul. The System is designed to actually interface between a person's body and mind, and their soul. It’ll help grow their soul and make them more powerful in that way, but with the equivalent of training wheels. I think that eventually if someone gets powerful enough in the System it’ll actually allow them to connect to their soul anyways, but they’d have to get towards the end of what we have set up. They’d be able to destroy planets anyways at that point, so we’d be watching them closely and if they were able to be trusted we’d probably just awaken them ourselves.

The Qi system is probably the second experiment that we’ll do, and it’s really similar to the mana system, but it’ll be less numbers, and more feel and mysticism. I don’t think people will like it as much, but there’s no way to know for sure. The last version we have planned for now is called the magic material system. In the magic material system you gather materials that are magical and basically do magic through them. I think it’d be the easiest to introduce to the world, but it’ll be really hard to test because we’d need to have very highly trained and educated people experimenting with it, and then need a large industrial base to actually make enough stuff with it to make a difference in the world. Plus there’s always the chance that the super wealthy just hoard it and unless you have a factory in your basement that can print an integrated circuit out of this magic metal, you won’t be as good as the rich guy who can.

Anyways, I’m getting off topic. Today I’m dropping them off on planet HMS-01, or Human Mana System 01. I know I’m terrible at naming stuff, so as soon as they have a name for the place I’ll just use that. The planet is orbiting a star very much like our own and I have already seeded it and created a stable, if simple biosphere and ecology. There’s only like a hundred plants and a dozen types of insects. There’s some small and medium sized animals as well as some fish. Besides that, there’s also monsters. Yeah, what’s magic without monsters. I didn’t make them too hard I don’t think. There are about a hundred different types of monsters and they use the System too, although most of them are too dumb to use it conciously.

For now, people's souls provide some of the energy to run the System. We of course use some of it for the people themselves, but we need to be able to provide physical rewards and create and sustain the monsters. There are also dungeons which are huge sinks for SP, but they provide great training places and lots of rewards. Also, I’m providing about 99.99999% of the energy that goes into the System for these two hundred initial people.

Even if they all get strong enough to beat level 100 of the world dungeon, I’ll still be providing about 99% of the energy in total. In the far future when all of humanity is integrated with one of the Systems, if we decide to even use one, I’m hoping to be able to siphon off a small amount of it for myself. I can already do insane things like fly through space without any physical objects to help me. I can move faster than the speed of light, although creating small wormholes or teleporting is generally faster and safer. I can create literally anything I can think of and have techniques that are so complex at this point, that I just need a vague idea of what I want or need and it’ll take care of the rest.

I’m actually not even tied to this body anymore. I’ve got a couple hundred bodies throughout the galaxy, mostly on Earth. And I’ve always got one consciousness in the Astral with my soul.

There are a lot less scary horrors out there than I thought there would be, but the ones that I have found are pretty bad. There was this one creature that could manipulate space time and actually lived inside the event horizon of a black hole. It reached out and ate one of my clones as soon as I was close enough. Straight up looked like Cthulhu had a child with a space whale.

Also, the Astral isn’t very populated, but there are things that live there. They’re mostly benign. Mostly. One of them ate a couple hundred people's souls before I stopped it. I think it would have stopped and not done anymore, but it set a bad precedent to let it live after killing so many people. Even if it didn’t really understand the harm it was doing. Now I’ve built structures in the Astral plane that cover the whole planet. The space doesn’t really line up one to one, but it’s a close enough fit that I’m happier having it.

Anyways, I’m off to basically kidnap a bunch of people and strand them on another planet. I really wish I could think of a better way to do this, but for various reasons, this is the most ethical version I can come up with.

After my speech, Andrea left to go do her own projects and I pretended to go through the portal as well. In reality I’ll be here watching them every step of the way. I want to monitor the System to ensure it works as expected and fix any issues that crop up. I also need to make sure that nothing super unfair happens, like an ancient dragon swooping down and killing everyone before they can defend themselves.

Oh, it looks like one of them is going for the crystal while everyone else is arguing. I think his name was George.

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I just accepted the System. I feel an incredible rush through my body that’s unlike anything I’ve ever felt before. It rushes through my body. I feel part of it absorb into me and I feel better than I ever have in my life. The part that doesn’t absorb diffuses throughout my body and I can feel a connection to it. Before I have time to do more than feel these energies in my body I am presented with another message in my mind.

Congratulations on integrating with the System. You now have access to the System and mana. Mana is a magical energy that will allow you to do incredible feats. You can cast spells with mana, and it can do anything you can think of. But you’ll need to grow stronger to use and have more mana. You also have a second energy called Body Energy, or BE for short. Body Energy is similar to health in your games. It functions a little differently though, it will diffuse in your body and spend itself to heal your body when it doesn’t match what your body stats are. You probably felt the energy absorbed in you. This is because when you integrated with the System your body didn’t meet your base level of stats, and so this energy was spent to improve your body. This energy will continue to do this until your body matches its stats. After that, the energy will build up to the point that your stats allow. If you take an injury your BE will spend itself to prevent or reduce the injury, and will heal you.

Your mana is refered to as MP or mana points. Each point is not a discrete unit and can be split almost indefinitely, it’s merely a unit of measure. You will start with a low amount of MP which can be spent on spells as was mentioned earlier. After this message you will be given a small amount of experience, and the option to spend that experience. You gain experience by collecting experience shards from monsters and by doing things that are recognized by the system as worthy of experience. The experience shards are physical crystals that are a similar color as this System Crystal. Some experience awarded by the system is stored as energy in your body. When you have experience shards in your position and touch a System Crystal you can break them down and use them. You can convert a small amount of your experience into experience shards as well.

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You currently have 10 experience points.

It then goes on to show a huge amount of things that I can spend experience on. There’s a bunch of options for my body, things like increasing my strength, dexterity, agility, endurance, balance, speed, reaction time, intelligence, neuroplasticity, short term memory, recall speed, long term memory, eye sight, immune system and more. I have a score of 1 in all of these bodily options. The next main section contains things like mana regeneration rate, capacity, density, control, control strength, precision, accuracy, manipulation distance and more. I also have a score of 1 in all of these.

The next section is a list of spells. They run a huge gambit and are sorted into categories, as well as searchable. As soon as I think that I want a fireball there’s a few spells that match that category. There’s too many to look at them all right now, but the ones I look at are firebolt tier 1, fire spell strength, precision, accuracy, max temperature and more. It looks like I could take the firebolt tier 1, and take some of these other spells like max temp and accuracy. I’ll have to experiment to see how they work.

The second to last section that I see is a list of classes and skills. It looks like I can spend experience to gain these things and they will give me different things. For example there’s a mage class that takes 100 experience, and it will start at level 1. The short description says that it’ll improve my spell casting and improve the way I manipulate mana. The skills are interesting because they cover a ton of different topics. It looks like you can spend experience in them and they give you knowledge about that skill. From the description it’ll even improve things like muscle memory. So a skill for swords will actually make you instantly better with a sword. I imagine that you still will want to practice a little to know what you’re capable of, but it’s pretty incredible that that’s even possible.

The last section is a sort of store. You can spend experience getting physical things. Some of these things are regular stuff from Earth like a backpack or cell phone or food. Other things are clearly magical though, like a literal potion of healing. Simple things like food and water are pretty cheap, but anything magical or complex like a cell phone or other electronics are super expensive.

I decided that I need to get some actual magic because… it's magic. I spent 5 points getting firebolt tier 1, waterbolt tier 1, stonebolt tier 1, fast cast tier 1, and accuracy tier 1. I also spend 5 points on strength, eyesight, intelligence, mana regeneration, and BE regeneration.

I take my hand off the System crystal and step back. This all took a couple minutes, so only a few people noticed that I had my hand on it earlier. They quickly walk up and I explain what happened and what I saw. After explaining that I didn’t get hurt by it I try out some magic to help explain what happened. Also because I want to see what I can do with it.

I know from when I bought the spells that they are all considered spells. Spells like accuracy are their own spell, but I do them either before or after other spells and they’ll modify the whole thing. I try out a fire bolt first, there are words that I can say to make the spell happen and they’ll make the whole spell more likely to succeed, but I don’t have to say them. In fact with simple spells like this I should be able to eventually cast them super fast without pointing or saying or doing anything. I do say the words though and complete a short hand and finger movement that are part of the spell and then I feel the mana in my body stir into action. It goes through a quick but complex shape and most of it moves to up my arm and out the tip of my finger. It manifests a small orb of fire about a half foot in front of my finger and shoots off into the distance.

Then I realize that I just sent a super hot orb of fire into a grass field. Luckily after a quick moment of panic and stomping on the grass it’s out.

I show other people what I did and how, and after only a few more spells I’m out of MP. I’ve also been completely out of BE, I can’t even feel any of it in my body, but I can feel small bursts of things happening in my body as it’s improved and “healed” to my new baseline stats. We find out that about 6 people can touch the System Crystal at the same time and people are exploring their new abilities. Some people suggest that we should have people take certain skills and spells based on roles, but that’s shut down pretty quick by most people. If we end up having a large missing gap in skills or something like that in future, then we’ll incentivise people to take skills and roles that are needed instead of forcing anyone. We also had a few people test creating an experience shard. It cost them a decent amount of their mana, but they got a purple crystal that materialized in their hand. They then were able to convert it back into experience in their body for free.

Small groups split up and I joined the team I completed the final test with again. We were in charge of exploring one of the directions, directly away from the mountain range in the distance. We were looking for food and water, shelter, and anything else out of the ordinary.

We found some small mammals like rabbits and squirrels, and saw some signs of larger predators, but didn’t see any of them. We also found some wild grains, vegetables, and fruits. We used the lessons from before to test if they were poisonous by handling them with our hands first, then breaking them open and handling them with our hands again, then rubbing a tiny amount on our lips, then on our tongue, and finally eating a very tiny amount. All of these steps are with a wait in between.

One of the berries turned out to be mildly poisonous, but the rest were edible and we ate our fill and then carried as much as we could back to the group. We didn’t have any packs or anything so we had to just carry them in our pockets or by creating a basket with our shirts.

As we were cresting a hill on our way back we got our first look at a monster. It was a creature about the size of a medium sized dog, maybe 80 pounds. It had 4 legs with large sharp claws on the ends. The head was also generally canine-like with sharp teeth and four large slightly curved fangs at the front. It had tiny ears, and a tail with a sharp blade like bone. It also had blue fur that covered most of it.

We thought about trying to sneak around it because it didn’t seem to have noticed us and the eyes and ears were small and we thought they were poor. I argued that we should try to take it out now though. We didn’t know how tough it was and if there were more around and we couldn’t kill even one, then we needed to know. We left two people behind and they would sneak around it and run away if the fight went really poorly, the other five of us would try to sneak up and attack it.

All of the five of us that were attacking had taken at least one spell. We were lucky because it turned out that the “prize” for us completing the final test was also another five experience points. Most people only had 5 or 6.

With the five of us creating a round semi circle we all leaned out of cover and unleashed our spells. What we failed to take into account is that some spells took a lot longer and so the first spell lashed out and shocked the monster first. By the time the second spell was flying through the air the monster had already started running towards the person who cast the first spell.

The monster slashed their arm and I finally got my fire bolt with added accuracy cast. It was lucky for my teammate that I had the added accuracy because the monster was on top of them and without it there’s a good chance I would have missed. The fire bolt splashed against the tail of the monster and burned it so badly that it was unable to move its tail anymore. After that we were able to close in and kept casting small spells at it until it finally died. It had clawed up another person pretty bad, but everyone was alive, and with BE they would heal up fully eventually.

After a few minutes of debate we ended up casting a few more spells at the base of its tail to separate it. We then used the bone blade at the end to cut the monster open. Supposedly there was going to be an experience shard, but the body didn’t conveniently poof into dust with nicely piled loot. After a little bit of digging we found the shard in the center of the creature's torso. We also figured that we should drag it back as well and try eating it if we can. We used some leaves and moss from nearby to stuff the cut we made in it so it wouldn’t create a convenient blood trail back to our clearing and then we all headed back to the rest of the group.

When we got back we shared what had happened and shared the food that we had found. We also explained about the poisonous berries we found and tried cooking up the monster. I’ve never eaten dog, but it was nothing like what I imagined a dog would taste like. It was actually the best tasting meat I’d ever had. It also seemed to increase the rate of my BE and MP recovery.

As other groups came back we started the process of creating shelters. We created a small settlement, using magic to cut down and process nearby trees. Over the next couple of weeks we continued to build up until we had what resembled a small village. No one wanted to spend the amount of experience it took to get the really complex stuff from Earth, but people contributed a little bit every day to get us essential tools like axes, shovels and saws. We could use magic for a lot, and all of us used it, but we were all pretty new with it and didn’t have the mana to use it for everything. We set up walls and guard rotations. Most people were what we termed explorers. Explorers were the people that left the settlement for food, to hunt monsters and animals, and explore the surroundings. There were also the settlers, which were people that didn’t really want to leave the safety of the settlement and so they were in charge of processing materials that we brought back and of guarding the settlement if it was attacked. They ended up taking more utility skills usually. Things like metal working, tanning, butchering, and cooking.

On the 27th day of our arrival on Maginum (the name we gave to the planet) an explorer team found the first dungeon.