Unchosen Champion

Coop continued to admire the newly claimed treasure at the bottom of the Coral Forest while his health and mana passively recovered. He was fully engrossed in the rough, unpolished jewel, musing to himself with his fists on his hips, as if he was appreciating an unparalleled work of art. The patterns that flowed through the large gemstone were endlessly fascinating. It was like the depth of an entire galaxy was hidden inside, perpetually swirling in colors that had spread throughout the mana well. While the mana was pure, the stone itself had clearly been touched by the abyss on its way down.

Echoes of the power held within reverberated through its surroundings, carving a physical aperture in the world. The air warped in its presence and the bedrock literally crumbled, falling apart like a neglected castle of sand, as if thousands of years of erosion were occurring every second. The pure mana that it emitted was immediately influenced by its surroundings, shifting in hue as it transitioned, giving the Coral Forest the distinctly abyssal feel that the residents had come to know while it rose into the air.

The way the mana seed consistently made progress, expanding the domain little by little, felt symbolic of Ghost Reef. Coop, in spite of his inclination to hoard such a resource, felt it was wrong to remove the relic from its place in the ground. Derailing its slow but steady march would be an interference that shot his own settlement in the foot.

Coop knew he wasn’t much of a sophisticated person, but even he could recognize the origins of a natural wonder. To him, that’s what the mana seed appeared to be. Despite being categorically alien, it was like the spring that became the source of a waterfall or the core of a mountain that had taken millenia to form.

He wasn’t really sure if he actually could take it, but he decided that even if he could, he would leave the seed alone. The mana well was valuable as it was and he’d rather not meddle with what had already been a beneficial resource, even before it was under their control.

The residents of Ghost Reef were continuing to progress, and more and more of them would end up relying on the Coral Forest to temporarily sidestep the diminishing returns that limited the experience they gained from regular variants around the islands and elsewhere on the surface. The longer they could maintain such a resource, the better.

More importantly, if the mana well supplied pure mana directly to the settlement itself, it would insulate them from one of the most worrisome negative impacts of being disconnected from the system during the Eradication Protocol. The Coral Forest might be a lifeline for the actual mana-powered services that they expected to be cut off when mana turned on them. He wouldn’t bank on such a thing working, but it was certainly better than hoping the current passive regeneration to continue.

“Hmm…” Coop hummed as an idea came to him.

Rather than influence this mana well, could they artificially create more? It seemed like it would be possible, but they would have to establish a source of pure mana, then let it naturally develop over time. The Spectral Relic was as close to such a treasure as they had produced, but it appeared to be more of a conduit than an actual source, and it obviously wasn’t pure, though maybe that was all they needed.

Despite all the different designations throughout the assimilation, he had a sneaking suspicion that literally every development was more or less the same. Infestations, Hives, settlement territory, and mana wells all seemed to operate under similar fundamental rules. Even the personal domains created by individual skills like Fog of War were surprisingly comparable. They all had a source of active mana at the center that was able to become the dominant influence on a portion of territory defined within the atmosphere of mana. The main differences were in scale and what was at the center. He thought it was kind of incredible how simple everything seemed to be once exposed to a broader picture.

Actually, now that he considered the idea, he realized they already had created what seemed to be the equivalent of a mana well, if inadvertently. The destruction of the Yucatan settlement’s civilization shard had established a dungeon-like domain that the Jaguar Sun had been contending with ever since.

The remnants of the Cult of Chakyum and the minions of the Lich had transformed into respawning undead creatures that claimed the ruins of the former mega-settlement as a sort of open air dungeon. It wasn’t too dissimilar to the Coral Forest. The Jaguar Sun had continued to level through their efforts to keep it under control, worried that it might spread across the entire Yucatan Peninsula.