The two sent to scout the orc camp said that the orc settlement was currently being attacked by the goblin kingdom and although they will likely survive, they will likely blame the goblins for all of their recent loses since it is common knowledge among other races that humans don't have enough numbers much less resources to raise an army capable of standing against that many warriors. "There aren't even any human sanctuaries left as everyone knows." He laughs meekly. Relieved that they won't need to worry about orcs for the foreseeable future.

Logan just hoped the other scouting team would come back with news that was at least half as favorable to their survival. No, actually he just hoped that at least the original 8 made it back even if they didn't manage to rescue anyone. He would just have to wait and see since it was going to take about a week just to get there and they had only been gone a few days.

He decided to focus on his core which by now was slightly larger than a basketball and likely wouldn't be able to fit through the doorways he made very much longer. Seeing this he goes to the southern area of his territory. Then he creates one really big room by absorbing the walls from around smaller rooms. After that he has a couple of his dino chickens come down and move the core while it is still moveable. He gently fills in the recess to make it easier for the core to roll, then makes a similar recess in the new big room. This way if he ever needs to, he can simply expand down and lower the core by absorbing the stone beneath it a little at a time. The dino chickens he then sets to wander the second-floor area. Now that the core isn't right there as you come down the stairs, they should hopefully be able to drive away or kill anything or anyone before they find it. On the surface he plans to have his troops patrol between the inner and outer wall so that his residence have plenty of room to use the area in the middle however they see fit. Finally, he wants to start using traps, but the question is how to set the traps so that only invaders trigger them? He knows that things he spawned will not set off the traps but he doesn't want humans setting them off either.

For the first time he wishes he could properly communicate with his residence. Focusing on the core he sees something he had been overlooking but now wonders if it has more meaning than it seems. He can contract a human. They would gain the ability hear the will of the sanctuary, his thoughts basically, to see his territory boundaries, gain partial control over spawned creatures, and have a vastly extended life span do to some of his mana going towards them. The downside is they can never leave the sanctuary ever again. Also, they have to accept the contract it can't be forced, not that he would ever try to force it. All through the rest of the day he studies how to actually initiate a contract. The procedure is remarkably simple. All he has to do is pick someone then reach out and touch them with his mana, they can then either reject it or they can accept it into themselves linking them with him permanently. The question is who should he offer the contract? After a lot of internal debate, he decides to go with Cid as he seems the most knowledgeable and would be most likely to understand what he is signing up for. He waits until just before they turn in for the night. When the days work is done but they aren't quite ready to go to bed yet. At first Cid seems startled then he hesitates for what feels like an eternity, probably going over the pros and cons of it. Finally, he just shrugs and accepts but chooses not to tell anyone, at least not tonight anyway.

While everyone is sleeping that night, he expands to the north yet again. He still doesn't get the northern part of the mansion wall but what he does get is a spider spawner. Per usual by this point he spends the mana to immediately bump it up to at least level two. The spiders though could almost be mistaken for normal Tarantulas. there was absolutely nothing special about them aside from the fact that like his other creatures they crawled out of the spawner fully grown.

The next morning over breakfast Cid finally tells the others about his new arrangement with the sanctuary. Through Cid Logan is finally able to tell them about his plans to reclaim the city and beyond, and about his plans to have everyone hide in the underground area during attacks. They are reluctant at first but after he explains that they will be in charge of guarding the core they go along with it. then he talks about the stairs and his plan to make them disappear if the time comes and enemies ever make it that far. He goes on to explains that he also wants to add doors to their private rooms but doesn't have any spare wood at the moment to which a few of them say they'd be happy to collect wood if they had an ax. Then he takes the time to ask if there is a leather worker or blacksmith in the group but there isn't. As they wrap up the conversation, he also informs them about his plans to use traps. The plan was to place them at regular intervals just past the inner south gate, even though the outer south gate was still more of a hole than a gate. Although Logan would obviously wait for the team that was sent out to get back first. In the meantime, he makes a couple of crude axes for chopping wood. He briefly considered actually reading the mountain of text the core tries to throw at him whenever he focuses on it, but he's always been more of a doer than a reader.

The next day he decides to go ahead and upgrade the spider spawner at least once. Of all his creatures spiders should be the most intimidating but instead they are among the least intimidating. This upgrade grants him spiders that are about 60cm which is a lot better but still not the heart stoppers that he was hoping for. Sure back on earth they would be nightmare fuel, but here they're barely worth noticing.

Later on that day he uses the wood to begin working on some doors as promised. He has gotten so good at it each door only takes a few hours including making the hinges and placing it. It still takes two full days due to the sheer number of doors and because he doesn't want to work while they are sleeping. Surprisingly the expansions have gotten so expensive that it takes yet another full day before he can expand again. when he does, he finally gets the rest of the wall surrounding the mansion, and part of the stone path outside.

Now that he has the entire outer wall of the mansion, he shifts gears just a little and begins repairing the wall. He doesn't repair the hole in the south wall but does straighten it up to give himself a place to connect the stone doors he plans to add later. As he works on the stone doors, he thinks back on how far he has come and wonders just how big he will get. He tries carving some images into the door. Nothing too fancy, just a pair of shields, but as he does so he wonders why it never occurred to him to make signs. Well, he supposed it was partly because he didn't know if their alphabet was the same as his. It would have been the height of arrogance to assume that it was. Still, he could have at least tried. Another thing he noticed during his self-reflection is that he has become extremely rectangular. Not a bad thing really but he made a conscious decision to try and even it out.

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The problem now was that the amount of mana needed to expand east or west had skyrocketed due to all the northward expansions. Once again all he could do at the moment was wait. Eventually another day passed, and he finally had enough to expand east. What he got was a whole lot of nothing. He noticed the wall in the north and south continued on past the mansion, making it likely that those two sections of wall were shared between multiple buildings. The next expansion was to the west, and it was almost a mirror image of the eastern expansion. The only real difference being a huge chunk of the southern wall was destroyed. He sent a large number of his snakes to patrol the western edge of his property. Mainly because the number of snakes was starting to get ridiculous seeing as none of the snakes had participated in a single battle yet.

Late the next day the team that had gone out finally returned and it seems they were successful as there are around 18 people with them bringing the human population in the sanctuary to 51. The group is mostly women with only six men in the whole group. The women were all naked with the men having barely a loin cloth covering them. They all looked malnourished which made Logan once again consider how to add variety to their diet. Despite what they had been through though, and in the case of the women he didn't even want to imagine, they had a spark in their eyes that said that their spirits had not been crushed. Logan was thankful for that. Among this group was a blacksmith and tailor, not quite a leatherworker but she could at least make some new clothes out of the cloth that had been so generously donated by the orcs. The blacksmith needed an actual smithy to do his job but luckily, he knew how to build a makeshift smithy until the city's smithy was brought into the sanctuary. With his passive mana generation increased by just over 50% of what it was before those eight left to try and free more slaves he feels like reclaiming the city won't take nearly as long now.

The blacksmith is allowed to turn the second building into a makeshift smithy and Logan trusts him to sort out armor and weapons for the new arrivals. Once that is settled, he allows the tailor to set up in one of the underground rooms for now. He even gives her a needle and some pins that he made from some of the iron. Then he gets to work making more bedrooms, well specifically bedroom doors since he had the foresight to make the rooms earlier. Now though he realizes that he will need more bedrooms soon if his little community continues to grow. It takes them a few days to get settled in but eventually they settle into a normal routine.

Logan meanwhile goes back to his main goal of trying to reclaim the entire city by expanding to the east again this time getting part of a building. He is ecstatic to have a smaller goal that he can actually accomplish in a reasonable time frame. He immediately sends a few rats, snakes, and even some mantises over to that new area to patrol in preparation for when he finally finds a way for them to get in. The building for its part was a lot bigger than the mansion, although the mansion likely had multiple floors whereas this building he guesses only had the one. As he waits for his mana to regenerate, he watches the tailor Maribel work. She isn't really worried about fashion or a perfect fit at the moment and just seems to be creating clothing to cover what needs covered. She did create a makeshift pin cushion using some fabric and a bit of feathers but that was likely just so she could keep track of her pins more than a decoration choice. Speaking of feathers after everyone is clothed, he will have Cid talk to her about making some primitive bedding using the feathers.

As he watches over his domain taking it all in for a change instead of bits and pieces at a time, he realizes that it's because he finally stopped thinking like a human. He had used his dungeon sense before but that was instinct. This time he chose to turn it on. It was amazing he had to admit, he also had to admit that no human mind would have been able to process that much visual and audio information all at once. He knew he was holding himself back by not embracing his dungeon side scared that if he embraced it, he would lose his humanity. He had no idea how much he was holding himself back though, and he apparently didn't need to worry about becoming any less human. He vowed right then and there that he would find time to go through "the dungeon manual" as he took to calling that info dump that threatened to overwhelm him whenever he focused on the core.

just as he was getting ready to knuckle down, Cid asked if he could make a pickaxe or two for Carver the Blacksmith to actually dig out the rocks needed to build a smithy. Logan gave him the pickaxes and also threw in a crude chisel and hammer to help him shape the stones better. He also gave him around two and a half kilograms of clay from his inventory for creating basic molds. With that taken care of he once again starts to try and get through the boring stuff when he suddenly has the sensation that the number of humans in his territory increased by one. Wha ...? That can't be right. ... can it? He knows for a fact that nobody new entered his territory ... at least he's pretty sure. To make certain he does a quick head count and everyone who should be here is here, but he still doesn't find anyone else. Puzzled and slightly alarmed by this he lets Cid know and asks him to keep quiet about it and just be on the lookout for anything odd.

Now he can finally get back to ... TRAPS how could he forget traps. With another quick word to Cid to have the people avoid the area between the two south gates he sets to work on making traps First he creates 12 holes 2 meters by 1 meter by 3 meters deep. Then he takes several iron poles sharpens them to a point at one end and molds them to a single lattice structure at the other end before placing them inside one of the holes. Then he creates an Iron trap door and hides it under some dirt. The trap door is designed to trip if anything over a certain amount of weight is placed on it. He then repeats that entire process for the other 11 traps. To help hide them even more he spends a little mana to cause some grass to start sprouting from the soil on top of the traps.

Ok, now he can get to work going over all the stuff the core keeps trying to shove in his mind. He thinks for a minute and looks around some more but no, there is absolutely nothing to distract him from this. "Might as well just get it over with" he says trying to encourage and motivate himself. With that he dives in focusing on the core as it spits out mountains of data. Most of it doesn't really apply to him since he isn't a normal dungeon. Some of it is stuff he figured out through trial and error. Some of it though is very interesting. Apparently, he can learn to replicate any none living thing in his territory provided he has the resources. He just has to study it first, learn it inside and out, all the way down to the atomic level. He can already create anything he can imagine but perhaps this way they won't turn out so ... crude. One more thing that he should probably consider doing is creating torches that never burn out. He isn't sure how they work but apparently all dungeons are able to make infinitely burning torches from the start. It won't be as bright as the glow stones but will have the advantage of not needing their magic reapplied every day or so. Another thing which might be good to keep in mind is the temperament of his spawned creatures is directly linked to his. This of course means that he will need to avoid going into a blind rage at any cost, not that he is prone to doing that but still. He also learned the more territory he owns both above and below ground, the more influence he will have over his creatures. At the moment he can only give them basic commands but eventually he will be able to, for example, tell his spiders to weave a silk shirt. As he finally looks up from his core he notices that more than a full day has gone by. To be honest though the only reason he knows this is because of the amount of mana he now has.

He has enough to expand again and once again chooses east. This time he gets enough of the building to reach a doorway and waste no time in sending in his rats and snakes to start clearing out the invaders. The building he is realizing was probably a library at some point because there is a lot of empty shelves. He hopes that at least a few books survived somewhere in the rest of the building so he could get some idea of what the city and human culture on Thana in general was like before it got to this point. Assuming he would be able to read it at all that is.