"...If you can make yourself my kind of mage, I wonder if you can make someone else my kind of mage, too... that would be the kind of game-changer that might make everyone like metamancers a whole lot more," she says. "Maybe."

"Maybe," he says dubiously. "I mean, technically metamancers could be super useful even as they are. There's a bunch of lost artefacts no one knows how to replicate and people say it was the gods that made them but I'm sure it was a mage with a metamancer's help. Golems, floating cities, enormously complex spells. Your kind of mage is really interesting without the mana thing, though..."

"The thing that makes it different is... making people able to do things, instead of doing things for them. Even if you make golems and floating cities, you're still the people making the golems and the floating cities. If you go around giving people their own magic... it's a lot harder to think of you as scary and evil and powerful."

"...I bet they could still spin this to make us evil but I like that idea."

"So we spin first."

"Have I mentioned I like you? Because I like you."

"I like you too!"

"Giving other people magic might not be possible even if I can give myself magic, though. If I try to give nonmages magic of my kind it usually just slides right off."

"Well, if giving it to yourself works, we can test if giving it to someone else works too!"

"Yeah! Borrowing my kind of magic is pretty easy, I don't even need to understand a lot—can I try?"

"Sure."

So he looks again, there's that one bit the other bits seem to be rooted in, he'll try to start with that. Very gently, he tries to see whether he can get a little wisp of it without damaging the whole.

And... yep! Actually, if he pulls a little bit of it away, the gap fills up immediately and now he is holding an extraneous wisp.

...huh. Interesting. So if he tries absorbing it for himself, as if it was mana...?

...it settles in very similarly to how its parent magic-bit was settled in with Ruava, and takes root and grows. A single basic manipulation power, different from either of Ruava's, with two and a half unformed clusters of assorted magic attached—

As soon as the manipulation power finishes coming in, it's immediately obvious what it is. Life manipulation. Wood. He can sense all the living things within twenty feet or so of him, and if he focuses on one he can see how he might tinker with it.

"Whoa," he breathes. "Whoa whoa whoa this is cool I'm a Wood mage!"

"Great!"

"No wait but this is so great I can feel everything all the living things—"

And the first thing he wants to focus on is himself. If he can manipulate living things...

He could cause himself all kinds of horrifying injuries if he felt like it. He could also repair those injuries, although it's a little trickier to get that right. He could make his hair grow rapidly or make it all fall out. He could change the shape of his face, make himself taller or shorter - if he wanted to be really tricky about it, he could alter not just the shape and construction of his body but the plans written in his cells that make him turn out this way or that. The more complicated the intended change, the more he has to study himself in order to figure out how to make it happen, but there don't appear to be limitations per se - as long as what he wants to turn himself into is a biological organism, and as long as he doesn't kill himself or render himself unconscious or anything like that while he's at it, and as long as he's willing to put in the time to learn how, he could turn himself into anything.

"Bet I could use this to shapeshift. Bet I can use arcanism or elementalism to cheat." Can he do the same things to other organisms, like Ruava or the grass around them?

Yes he can! Although the changes do have to be more or less incremental, so the grass has fewer options than a person. He's not going to turn a blade of grass into a bear all in one go. He's not going to do that to Ruava either but in theory if he tried really hard and studied her very closely he might be able to pull it off in a few hours of active magic use after six months of preparation.

"I have intuition for this it's amazing!"

Ruava giggles.

"And I'm thinking of something... I saw your magic refill itself once I got some. If I could convert a bit of mine into mana..." He tries doing just that, a tiny amount of it as a proof of concept.

Now he has exactly the same amount of being-a-Wood-mage, but a tiny bit more mana.

Theoretically this is an infinite mana hack; in practice, with the quantities involved, it's more like a 'generate as much mana as a normal mage, maybe, if you do nothing else with your time' hack.