I mean, the guy wasn’t wrong, at least not fully. From a certain perspective one could clarify what I wanted as sacrifices but I wasn’t looking at it from such a perspective thankfully. Hopefully it was just a translation error, and he doesn’t mean actual human sacrifices, that wouldn’t be great. I mean the massive influx of soul essence would be nice, great even, but I felt like that would go downhill very fast. Plus, it didn’t align with the type of dungeon I wanted to be. A murder pit was boring, but a cunning and beautifully designed murder pit that gave you stuff occasionally was way better!

From the way the man was grinning though I wasn’t feeling too optimistic, and my intuition told me that I would have to intervene soon, somehow. He flipped around to the crowd of adventurers who were looking at him with a myriad of facial expressions, from manic excitement to outright fear.

“My dear people! The dungeon needs sacrifices! Gather the lamb, gather the cows, gather the birds! Gather them all! Bathe that stone basin in their crimson essence!”

I mean, that wasn’t so bad, that was exactly what I wanted but the way he worded it gave me a bloody image, which wouldn’t be ideal but I could always just clean up the blood, as long as it didn’t manage to get past the range of my domain. I was glad he didn’t mention any human sacrifices, phew, I dodged a bullet there.

The adventurers looked much more relieved as well, clearly some of them thought he had darker intentions in mind that didn’t sit too well with them. Some still looked disturbed and even more horrified but those were very few and didn’t really matter much, there would always be people like that.

I felt a surge of mana brushing against my ambient soul essence as some people started casting their various magical abilities. Some vanished in splashes of water while some simply vanished from my sight, the rich young masters at the back sent out servants to town with storage rings to buy animals.

I honestly didn’t expect storage rings to be able to store living things but oh boy was I wrong. The strange thing was that I couldn’t feel the storage rings, I could see them but my soul essence couldn’t interact with them in any form which was a huge downer. I knew mana was doing this, just not how as yet.

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Mana was becoming increasingly annoying as I saw its capabilities, it seemed to be the energy tailored for flashy and magical things, which was exactly what I needed in my dungeon. Soul essence was immensely useful, but it had its limitations. One of those was its inability to interact with mana, I could still replicate everything mana did with it but that would take a lot of system runes and a shitload of enhancement threads that I wasn’t confident in supporting.

There was only so much soul essence to go around at any given time, after all. That would change eventually but I didn’t feel like that eventually was anywhere close to now.

But anyway, mana was cool and I wanted to use it to enhance my coolness further. I felt like it was the missing piece I needed to unlock spatial expansion, which would save me a lot of time and space.

Anyway, people started to move about rapidly, some didn’t though and I was amazed when I saw a grizzled mage in deep green robes with powerfully glowing green eyes walk up to my door and conjured a pair of strange wolves with a wave of his hand.

After that he went on his knees and cupped his hand before bowing down completely.

“Mighty dungeon, I offer these: a pair of forest wolves blessed with nature aspected elemental mana.”

Oh? This was mighty interesting, my first tribute was a magical creature? The crazy man who started this looked shocked, Pal and Sero as well. Were natural magical creatures very rare in this world? From the looks of it I’d say yes but the shock could be from something else, best not to make any assumptions about what.

In one fluid motion he waved his left hand and went through a bunch of hand signs, each one resulting in the manifestation of a rune. Well, not exactly a rune, more like a hybrid. The symbol had both runes and glyphs, I could also make out hits of characters within them, all composed of visible mana.

When he was done mana manifested before him in the form of a hazy cloud that rapidly formed into a textureless piece of wood, then with another wave it took on a life of its own, rapidly shaping itself into an ancient-looking piece of wood with spiky and twisted edges.

I’ve never seen mana being used in this manner before, not to mention this close. I noted down everything, even the seemingly nonsensical bits and bobs here and there. The man looked severely tired after that little magical show and simply blinked right after. There was a flash of green light and the wicked-looking piece of ancient wood was suddenly embedded in the wolves.

Green tinted blood mixed with small leaves gushed out, pooling below them as life rapidly drained from their eyes.

Seeing such majestic creatures die right before my eyes was…not ideal, but hey, at least they’ll get to live again! With a thought my soul essence shifted, moving out and over their fleeing souls and locking them down with ethereal chains before dragging them back into my domain.

Next, I sent out a wave of soul essence that washed over their bodies, they rapidly dissolved and information flowed into me, enriching my pattern database as a new entry was added. Excitement washed over the entire dungeon as I digested their information, it was so different from the usual biology that it made my soul hurt. Who the hell thought it was a good idea to design magical animals this complex?