"Stop wiggling," I commanded Novi. "If you don't want to apply your soul yourself, then at least don't make it any harder than it has to be."

"But it huuuuurts! Why does it hurt? It doesn't make any sense," she whined, no longer trembling like a leaf in a hurricane because of the order I gave her.

"Just writhe around with your other body. I'll be done soon, I just have to loop the soul through the [Distributive Astral Core Network] and connect it to you properly," I replied.

"It's not the same, you wouldn't understand. It feels like this body is real now. It never used to feel that way, and it's so weird!" she said as she grew a piece of wood in her mouth and bit down hard on it. The piece of wood splintered into pieces from her bite strength. "I can't even do anything to make it better. Why do we have no painkillers?"

"If you can find a painkiller that works with our bodies, then sure, go ahead and use it," I said while using my aura to loop a piece of the fish's soul I had shoved into her body through her Artificial Core. As I felt the piece of soul appear within my actual Core right next to the Network component, I pulled it over to her section and tied it off, attached to where her consciousness resided. "There, all done. You can do the rest yourself."

I picked her up into a hug and squeezed her until I felt her little lungs collapse. As I let her back down onto the table, she held her arms motioning for another one. I just shook my head, humouring her once for being a big girl was already enough.

"Fine… this feels really weird," Novi said, looking over her body. "I think my Mana regeneration has gone up as well."

I couldn't actually see any difference with my eyes, and could only feel the difference with my Authority when aided by a ritual. There was supposed to be a way to add soul sight to my eyes, but I'd be lying if I said I actually understood how to do that. The fact that interacting with souls was so diametrically opposed to Nature really didn't help.

"So what happens when this body gets destroyed?" she asked me as she hopped down from the table. "Do we have to go find a new soul?"

"Well, hopefully you won't intentionally break your Artificial Core," I replied, eyeing her as she refused to meet my gaze. "But if it happens on its own, then the soul should snap back into our primary Core. Then, when we're regrowing your body, we'll just have to put it back in place, doing exactly what I did just now, but in reverse."

Hearing that we'd have to redo the procedure, she snapped into a salute, "Right! Not a single scratch will be allowed to contact my Core!"

"Alright, now you just have to figure out how to attune yourself to 'Aspect of White Silence' or whatever your Strand is called. I found letting myself drift down into Argent Bastion allowed me to figure out how to do that for my own Strand," I said as I pulled the knife from her back.

The rest of the day, I spent growing and powering ritual pentagrams at junctions in the wall Novi built. I debated going with something defensive to play into the strengths of Argent Bastion, but in the end chose not to. I already had a shield generator within myself. If that failed, well then, we were screwed.

Instead, I inscribed all of the cannons that Novi built to bring them into the Domain, because I had an idea for how to incorporate them beyond just enchanting the shells.

All of the Domain Nodes I inscribed on plates of Rimeshrouded Cambium to allow easier conversion of atmospheric Mana and connected them with wires grown into the walls and cannons themselves. At the top of a control tower, which I spent at least an hour putting together so that it would be able to practically resist anything they'd throw at us, I placed the Primary Node.

I had focused the Domain on repelling 'beings of the sea' or at least that was my primary targeting symbol, making a bet that the merfolk wouldn't start throwing land creatures at us. If I saw a boat approaching the shore laden with some kind of land merfolk, I just had to sink it before it arrived.

Just had to come up with some kind of chant now to claim the land.

Once everything was in place, I placed my hand on the Primary Node and allowed my Core to sync with it.

"Hey, what should I name the Domain?" I asked Novi through our connection.

[Uhhhh, how about Tidebreaker?]

"That works," I replied. As I was about to apply the name, I realized I had forgotten the chant to claim the land. I didn't know how much that actually did for me last time, but in the end, it prevented a mage from being able to escape for at least one hundred years.

Until I poked it.

Even with the help of narrative weight, that was still an accomplishment. After a while in contemplation, I cleared my throat and began.

"Waves rise high and crash in vain, Foam and fury, all the same. Roots stand fast, and walls remain, The tide shall break upon my trunk.

Currents break on silver spires, Depths recoil from argent munitions. Let storm and snakes in fury come, Their scales shall freeze before the Bastion.

Tidebreaker wakes, and I claim what's mine."

It didn't really rhyme all that well, but that was fine. It made it feel a little more Natural.

I opened up my Domain Manager to check the result.

[Tidebreaker (Wrought I-46)]

Size: 0.5 km²

Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings. Primary Node Integrity: 100% Primary Node Mana: 92.2% Primary Nodal Feed: +21.6% / Minute Primary Node Alignment: Landbound Nodes: 26

[Locations added to Imprinted Soulmap]

Total Node Mana: 74.3% Total Node Regeneration: +24.1% / Minute Aspects: Fortress, Ammunition, Frazil, Scaleshatter Dominion: Nature (Argent Bastion) Dominion Subsumption: 99%

Functionality:

Selective Freezing

Scaled creatures within the Domain will have frost build up on their scales over time. This effect speeds up the longer they remain within the Domain.

Fortress Defense

Those manning the fortress within the Domain will find themselves protected by the Argent Bastion and, in return, will provide strength to the Domain.

Argent Ordinance

Defensive structures marked by a node will have their ammunition enhanced with increased inertial weight.

Ammunition may regenerate automatically within the domain at the cost of Mana.

Rules:

The Fortress is impenetrable.

On Rule Break:

Domain Collapse.

[Active Commands]

Fortress Control

The Domain owner may exert direct control over defensive structures connected to the Domain via a Node. Cost: Inherent

Tidebreaker's Wake

The Domain owner may cause all Water contained within the Domain to freeze. Cost: 15% Primary 10% Distributed

Upcost effect: Frozen water will explode into silver shrapnel shortly after being created. Upcost: 20% Primary 25% Distributed

Argent Defense

The Domain owner may activate the silver spires, converting the walls and defensive structures into enhanced argent variants. This will increase the durability and effectiveness of projectiles launched from the Fortress's walls. Cost: 75% Primary

The Mana regeneration of the Domain was insane. I didn't realize the Cambium would affect it that much. Or was it the fact that I connected all the nodes together in a root network? Whatever the case, we could probably actually survive an extended siege with this amount of Mana regen.

The Active abilities were fairly interesting. This was the first Domain I'd actually synced up with, so I wasn't sure how those would work. It looked like they pulled from the theme of my chant to create various effects.

I wondered how this would work if I didn't have [Covenant of the Unbound]. That Skill probably made the whole process of creating a Domain far easier. I wouldn't even know how to claim the land itself without it.

The one problem with this Domain was the rule: if the walls were breached, the 'Fortress' would no longer be 'impenetrable' and we'd lose all the benefits of the Domain in an instant. Given that the walls weren't even close to being impenetrable, that was a glaring weakness. Activating Argent Defense would probably help with that, but it didn't tell me how long that would even last.

Reaching out into the Domain with my aura, I felt where the active components resided. Just as a test, I activated Fortress Control, which immediately disoriented me as I was suddenly much larger than my body could inherently understand. Each cannon provided individual lines of sight, despite there being no cameras built into them.

Attempting to move my hand off the Primary Node caused one of the cannons to fire. With an internal sigh, because actually attempting to sigh rotated all the cannons downward, I began mapping out the controls. If I ejected my Core and attached it to the Domain directly, that would probably also work, but I didn't really want to leave myself that vulnerable.

By building a miniaturized control circuit within myself, I was able to remap controlling the cannons onto a better schema than using my whole body to control them. Tying Intent in with the circuit made it a lot more intuitive. Instead of having to individually control every cannon like limbs, I just intended what I wanted them to do, and they followed my will.

Once I was done, I was able to throw a wooden ball manifested out of Nature Mana out over the wall and hit it with a cannon while it flew through the air.

It was interesting. This was a way to surpass my biomass limit in a certain way, wasn't it? Sure, I couldn't manipulate the cannons like I could my own body, where my flesh was malleable. But I didn't really use that feature for anything except shifting the location of my Core around because it was incredibly awkward.

I could technically act like a plant-based slime, it was just I'd need to reshape my circuitry to match my new form every time I made even the tiniest change. Which meant redesigning it from the ground up, and I couldn't quite think fast enough to do that mid-combat.

Whatever the case, why wasn't I building myself a larger body to pilot from the inside like a mech suit?

"Fucking finally! I was wondering how long it would take you to figure that out!" Novi said from the top of my head. "You could easily store them in your Inventory and deploy them on the fly."

"And you didn't feel like informing me of your idea?" I asked as I pulled her off. She started kicking and hissing as she clung to my hood, but eventually I got her off and dropped her on the railing next to me.

"Well," Novi said with a cough. "I thought you'd have to use Kinetic Mana for the joints, which would kind of suck with the poor conversion rate. I was trying to figure out how to fix that issue, but it seems like you managed it. Just shove a Domain into the mech suit and say a prayer over it or whatever that chanting shit you do is."

"You know exactly why we use a chant, we were the same person when we did it the first time," I replied, flicking her forehead. I knocked her off the tower.

Well, I had the rest of the day before the merfolk arrived. Might as well get started on a new project. A full ritual-powered suit of power armour that acted as its own self-contained Domain.

With the Rimeshrouded Cambium, I had a material durable enough that it wouldn't be single-use. Hopefully. We'd have to see how the merfolk invasion went tomorrow.

Opening a simulation, I got started designing how I wanted it to look.

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