Evelyn was enjoying a rather normal day. She had woken up early in the morning as the sun shone through her window, bathed and dressed. Feeling clean and ready for the day, she prepared to eat breakfast. As she wasn't exactly rich, and thus couldn't afford a proper meal, and was uneducated in the uses of mana, the sacrifice to the goddess Valeria came easily for her. So long as she was prepared for a little pain.
All Evelyn needed to do, was walk the short distance to the city, where she would sacrifice a bit of her blood in prayer to the goddess, and recieve a decent meal for it. After all, Valeria gave much to those who couldn't afford to live in the city. It did form a weird sort of cycle, where the poor people didn't have to spend any money to live, and so they became rich over generations, until someone decides to go live in the city, or Valessa. And at the same time, most of the people living in the city slowly get poorer, until they're reduced to beggars, and choose to live outside the city walls to reap the benefits. Evelyn's own grandfather had lived in the city, until his mother had gambled their house and money away.
Only after a short walk, when Evelyn was about a mile away from the city, she noticed something out of the corner of her eye. There was a large murder of crows sitting on top of the trees near the road she was walking on. With a closer look, they were surrounding a small nearby clearing. It might be nothing, just a coincidence, or there could just be a large dead animal in the clearing, blocked from her sight by all the trees in the way. But crows were notoriously smart, and with that smartness came the abilities to use and feel mana almost as well as the average human could, even if they had much less of it. Evelyn had been taught what it meant if one found any large collection of intelligent animals, and it was her duty to make absolutely sure that this wasn't it.
The sight Evelyn saw in the middle of the clearing was one she would never forget. There were all kinds of animals eating food, burrowing in the ground and lazying about in the middle of the clearing, in a circular area about twelve steps across. That in itself wasn't anything too abnormal, but it was a definite sign of a spirit in the area. But in the center of the area there was a large collection of some oozing red goop filled with chunks of meat, and an entire crow dissolving to dust. The sight of the poor bird breaking down almost made Evelyn puke, but she managed to hold it in.
For a brief moment Evelyn wondered how the bird had died, until she saw the thin needle sticking out of the birds left eye. Deciding to risk a closer look, Evelyn took a few steps towards the spirits domain, mentally preparing for the potentially lethal spirit to attack her with mana, but the painful pressure she had felt the one time she angered Valeria never came. Feeling slightly more confident, she took the remaining small steps to reach the dead crow, and picked it up. A sharp pain in the back of her hand made her drop it and flinch backwards. Sticking out of her hand, there was a needle just like the one in the crow. A second later, she started to bleed through the needle, with the few drops that came from it dissapating away before even hitting the ground.
The needle had to be hollow, which meant that not only was the spirit a dangerous one, killing animals and attacking humans so that it could grow in power, but it was also smart. The center of the domain had what clearly was food, the dead crow had a piece of gooey meat sticking out of its beak, and the spirit had killed it when the crow fell for its trap. Evelyn had heard stories of spirits like that. Ones that would offer food and treasure to people and animals, only to do their best to then kill them. Different spirits had created everything from elaborate dungeons to trapped gold coins in the middle of roads. Some people liked the challenge, or were desperate enough to seek the riches within, but that didn't make the spirits any less than pure evil.
If the clearings spirit grew bigger, it would come across the road that so many used to travel. If it grew even bigger, then it'd come across the goddess Valeria, and the two deities would fight for the space to grow. Nothing good would come of it. Evelyn quickly grabbed the dead crow, and quickly ran out of the spirits domain. She would report its existence to the priest's of Valeria, who in turn would recruit a guild capable of removing the spirit, but it could wait till after breakfast. She didn't mind having a dead bird next to her food.
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I was ecstatic. I had come up with the ingenious plan of creating and using hypodermic needles to make creatures bleed. With a quick test on a furry rodent, I found out that the needles hollow point would get filled with the creatures skin, so I made a second iteration of the needles that had a hole on the needles side instead of the front. It would puncture skin without blocking the hole, and then through the hole, blood could flow out of the back of the needle. I had just managed to test it on a rather large bird by accidentally hitting it in the eye, but it worked.
As I was celebrating my recent success, a huge creature entered my space out of nowhere, and then it tried to steal my dead bird. I, of course, didn't like that, so I threw a new needle at its hand, only to realize that the creature actually had a hand. It genuinely had a hand, attached to an arm, with a upright body, walking on two feet, and a large brain with a hundred times more magic than I had ever seen in a creature. Even the few drops of blood it had dropped had more magic in them than the whole bird. Wait, no. What was I thinking, the creature was a genuine human being, and I already wanted to take their magic. I had spent a long time thinking about what I would do if I ever met one, and I had attacked them with a needle.
Thinking back, I decided to go with the best plan I had so far come up with. I took the molecules infront of the human, and rearranged them to form large words, only the person didn't react. Only then did I realize that the polite greeting I had written, was written from air. But before I could make visible letters, they took the bird and ran away, which was fine with me. They gave more than enough payment for it with the blood, and I could wait a few more days to talk with a human... Probably.
Anyways, humans had a lot of magic, and I really wanted it. I'd discovered that I really like playing with atoms, and I wanted to play in a larger space. And now that I knew humans existed in whatever place I was in, I could try making something that they too would enjoy. Maybe I could make them some precious metals. I knew gold had about 80 protons, so I ripped apart the atoms in the air around me, and formed new atoms from them, hoping against everything that they had enough neutrons to be stable. I didn't want to give radiation poisoning to anyone. I then collected all the atoms in five inch wide cubes. The result was four cubes on the ground, each one made from a single type of atom with a proton count ranging from 78 to 82. The fifth cube made with 80 proton atoms didn't want to stay a cube, since for some reason it was liquid. Maybe it was mercury.
If I were still human, I would be easily able to see what, if any, of them was gold. But unfortunately for me, I wasn't human anymore, and I couldn't even figure out what speck of my vision range was what humans could see. In other words, I could see so many differences between the metal cubes that I couldn't tell what were the differences that humans could see.
The only reason why I knew where was the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen and the few other elements was because I happened to remember the first 19 elements in the periodic table, and knew where they could be found in nature. For example, small bits in the ground had a bunch of silicon in them, so that was probably some sort of stone.
I decided to create a nice pedestal to keep my cubes on out of said stone, only to realize that two of the cubes had become different. They had oxidized a bit, which meant that neither of those were gold. I was left with the 78 and 79 proton cubes on my perfectly cylindrical pedestal. It was a gift for the next human to stumble across me, in hopes of a better second contact. After that, I could draw a picture of someone cutting their hand with a knife, or stabbing their finger on a needle, with an arrow pointing to a picture of treasure. People would get their riches, and I would get their blood... No wait, that didn't sound good.
Having finally managed to make something that may or may not be gold, and that may or may not be slightly radioactive, and maybe forgetting the reason why I had started to make them, I decided I had done enough experimenting for the day. I continued taking care of my animals after that, with a joyous mind excitedly waiting to meet the next human. Then I remembered that diamonds were made from carbon, and I could easily have tried making them.