Setting up [Electrum] was more annoying than the Core could have guessed. The process of slowly cutting it out into exact dimensions while also making sure not a single piece was left unused was… very stressful. The Entity did fully understand that any minor mistake would be impossible to fix yet it also knew that being quick would allow it to move onto other important matters. For example, the dead bodies in its Domain. Those furry creatures had sat there dead for quite a while and the Core had desired to study them for just as long. Yet, it was saving that experience for when they would be usable. And that moment had yet to come, according to the Queen.

‘These creatures will die if you don’t allow them to be outdoors,’ the Queen had said back then when the Core had first started to overlook their bodies a second time. ‘Studying them now would be useless since you can’t use them without wasting immense amounts of resources.’

And while the Queen did speak the truth, it did not help to alleviate the current mood. The Core had to finish its current task before it could start on expanding its repertoire of creatures, yet that was likewise a task that seemed positively endless. Why oh why did anybody decide that using [Electrum] as a physical connection would be a good idea? Not that it wasn’t, of course. The ability to connect it without tethers was extremely well done, and it seemed that the ability to mesh Mana together upon contact would allow the Core to have a Dome-Like domain outdoors. And that was the part that it needed to focus on.

Instead of having one big slab and then letting it be just on that, the Entity would instead outline the parts where its domain would be, and then use Mana-Panels to make sure all the Energy inside would remain. Yet that still required the [Electrum] to be connected, even where the Core had cut it apart into longer beams and put it in a specific fashion. That was the truly hard part. Through a smaller experiment, it seemed semi-possible to fuse two ends of two beams together, though it required several thousand Mana to do well enough to work. When that was put up in a tally of there being nearly twenty connections that needed to be made, it suddenly got a lot harder to work with quickly. Any mistake on any level, be that in the form cut out or the sizes being wrong, would require so much Mana that the Entity wasn’t sure it would be able to fix it within the current months. Which was a terrible experience to be sure, it preferred the thought of being able to move on.

Even worse was that the positioning of the beams had to be perfect. The Queen has assisted in making sure where the Domain would lie, yet the Core was still finding it hard accepting it. The beams of [Electrum] had to be a certain width lest they wouldn’t work right, creating a hard limit on how large the outside could be for the Core. It had about fifteen meters to each side of its entrance and just as much forward. A small part of the river was inside its domain as well, though it was barely enough to be noticeable. The Entity had initially wished for a whole section of the water to be its own, yet the Queen had shown the impracticalities of such an idea quickly enough. When having flat beams inside a powerful current, something would break very quickly, making it impossible for a connection to be made more than a meter out. The part that the Core had access to at the current moment was pure luck on its part, a smaller section of the river not having much of a force inside. It was more of a small dent in the thing rather than a real part of it. Not that such a thing mattered, the Core just being happy that it could set one of the beams down there and not fear it being eroded in mere minutes. Magical Water was scary like that.

Because that was something that had been noticed. The water had Mana inside it. Not enough to truly be classified as such, but the Queen had mentioned it during her walk back to the Domain. There was nothing special about the fluid itself, but the Intelligent Ant theorized there to be some Mana-Source longer up the current. There was no real clue what it could be, however, since the place was so barren of civilization that no Enlightened would have reason to set such things up.

When the time for it came around, the Core would try and expand upstream so that it could get a look at the thing itself. The Queen had not been able to find it through her days of exploration, leading the Entity to think that it was very far away. Though, the ant's survey of the nearby grounds was also more around the Domain instead of just a specific direction. And the Queen had mentioned that she was wary of travelling far away, needing to be able to return in mere minutes if an emergency occurred. Even the [Electrum] had been an unintentional find when her [Mana-Sonar] had been triggered on the edges.

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That was quite the information to have, though the Core was unable to use it for many things. When it got ahold of more intelligent creatures, it was sure that it would attempt some exploration further away. Or maybe it could even get a [Enlightened] to do such things without it needing to worry about the person having Mana-Deprivation. For that was another thing to worry about, the elongated time away from the Dungeon slowly killing its creatures.

So many things to worry about yet so many likewise only being the distant future. The Core didn’t think much about it after that knowledge, knowing it just had to continue its current duties. The cutting of the [Electrum] beams had been completed, though some parts were rather rugged. Splintering had also occurred at some points as well. While it didn’t seem too bad from the Core’s perspective, it would likely need the Queen’s observations as well if anything seemed to go astray. For now, it could move onto the actual placement of the things.

The first place was, as expected, the small part of the river that the Core desired. That beam had been the hardest to cut of all, needing to bend down the middle. It needed to go alongside the sand at the bottom, after all, since being above would lead it to be pushed lightly in the future. Such a fate could ruin the entire thing, so having it slightly below the natural layer would make it possible to relax a small bit.

Since the Core didn’t have any ant outs to help carry the things, Physical Arcane was used as the tool for all physical labour. That included digging, separating, and placements. It was rather to get right but it needed to be done perfectly. Even worse was that the sand would change the location slightly after being put down due to it being very soft. And to make it that much less of a fun activity, the separation of water from where it naturally was made the entire thing unstable.

For that was the hardest of all. When the Core was working to place that initial beam down, it didn’t want any water there. This meant it had to create a wall out of Physical Arcane to keep it out while also shovelling all the liquid that had been there originally out as well. It was safe to say that it was quite an annoying experience to go through.

Yet the pay-off was a beam that could be connected perfectly to the [Electrum] that would be beside it. And since those pieces were much easier to place right, it all just became a waiting game. Since the Core had a limit on how much Energy it could spend each second, each piece being fused took more than a few minutes to do. While there should technically have been no limit at all, since the Core could simply use Manual Regeneration to regain all lost Energy, it was quickly becoming apparent that such was not the case.

How did the Core overcome its natural limits of only relying on [Natural Mana-Regeneration]? Well, that was through the power of forcing the process with higher speeds. Instead of allowing the Energy to passively gain entrance into the Core’s Mana-Pattern, the Entity would instead force the Energy inside through the use of [Mana-Manipulation]. It was faster than the natural version by a margin that was higher than most could even fathom. Hundred could be taken in each second.

Not that the Core could just grab random Mana or anything. It wasn’t like the pure form was floating around, ready to be used for its purposes. No… it was instead stored inside physical matter. Stone, water, and air all held massive amounts of Energy, every part able to be stolen by the Core with enough effort.

Yet it wasn’t like water or stone was good to take from. Neither came back after they were removed from the area. Air, however, filled itself in as quickly as it needed to, always coming along in due time. The gas did not like to leave a void, after all, and the Core had been quick to exploit that.

While that technique did seem infinitely exploitable, however, there was a point where the Core couldn’t… take it quickly enough, however. Or maybe the right way to phrase it was that the movement of air hit a point of Equilibrium where it was just fast enough that it couldn’t be interacted with by the Entity but was still moving inside. There was a definitive limit on how much energy could be gained with Manual Regeneration with the current amount of Mental Capacity. If allowed to think faster, the Core could perhaps take in more, yet such a thing would require serious stat-increases that just weren't possible at the current moment.

Instead, it had to live with the amount of Mana it could currently take in, that being somewhere around a hundred and fifty Mana at the absolute maximum. Or, if the Core ignored all other tasks and instead focused entirely on the process of bringing in Mana, it could likely get up to two hundred Mana. Yet that wasn’t the greatest point to reach seeing as its container would be bloated within mere seconds, the act of filtering it out into the domain requiring time as well.

Another way of thinking about it was that the Core could technically take in upwards of three hundred mana each second if truly pressed. Stone was still there to take from, and it had more Energy per cubic meter than air could ever hope for. Not that it would ever be used as a method of gathering Mana since any more damage would likely create massive fractures in the structure and make the tunnels experience a cave-in. The Core did need to put up pillars to make sure such things didn’t happen naturally.

But that was for later. Instead, it looked upon its work yet again and became slightly tired. Two of twenty beams had been set up yet there were still eighteen more to get through before the next step could be started. While it wasn’t a hard job, it required some form of constant thought.

Yet the Core supposed it should have expected such. It was doing the impossible and getting the full benefits. A few minor annoyances would be accepted no matter what. If only it could go a bit faster, though.