Like usual, when I wake up I check my mana pool, a bit bigger than the day before, the growth as slow now that only the bats are unclaimed, but it replenishes far faster. Then I check my creatures population, almost all of them have gained in size, and I can note that my first two crabs are doing well, they grow faster than the other crabs. When I want to accelerate the growth of the plants I notice that since I claimed all of those I don’t need to do it as often as at the beginning. After doing my morning routine I go on with my new task, claiming at least one bat a day.

Now that I own two bats, I’m ready to do a little experiment. I focus on one of them and try to feel what it can feel, I’ve already managed to do it with fishes and crabs but what I can feel with those isn’t interesting. I infused my mana in the head of the bat, and focus on feeling what it can without trying to control its body. Wow, that was surprisingly easy, I managed to do it on the first try. And what I can see now is strange, the bat has a sense I didn’t get to taste in the fishes or the crabs, is I recall correctly it’s ‘echolocation’, it grants the bat an ability to ‘see’ in the dark thanks to sound waves it produces and listen when they come back, allowing it to make a mental map of the place. I focus on the second bat in the same way and manage to link its senses to mine too.

Ok, first part of the experiment is completed, I can now proceed to the second part. I send the bats out of my domain, giving one of them the order to come back 5 minutes after exiting my dungeon. The other is ordered to fly around for one hour before coming back.

I look at them flying to the limit of my claimed area not knowing yet if I will be able to stay connected to their senses, I feel a bit of stress. When they reach it and pass it I feel joy in my core as I’m still able to feel through them, but as soon as they fly farther than 5 meters from my border I lost the connection. I can still feel they are part of me, but its weak and I can’t see with their eyes or connect with their other sensory organs.

I wait a bit for the first bat to come back and when it does I don’t even have to connect to it, it’s done automatically. I decided to try something else and connect to the full brain of the bat, searching for its memory and what it has seen outside. Why didn’t I search in its memory before sending it outside? Well, I tried that yesterday and I couldn’t access its memories from before I claimed it, same for my creatures. It seems they can still access it, but I can’t, one new reason to claim all the bats in the dungeon.

Once I connect with the memory I start to review them and I’m a bit disappointed. It only flew in more corridor under the earth, following the other bat until it was time for it to come back. All I learned about my surrounding is that I’m still underground for a 5 minutes bat fly. But at least I could gather information on the outside, I could just not see it for now.

I let the bat free to do whatever she wants and as the bats will soon leave the area to hunt outside I don’t have the time to claim a new one. Instead, I decide to do a little house management.

I make some stone grow in the middle of the river into a pedestal for my core. The pillar is 1.5 meters high, 50 centimeters wide at the top and bottom and 30 at the middle. On top of it is a spherical receptacle for the small ball that is my core, it is formed by 20 small stone arcs that form a grid around the receptacle and reunite at the top in a small rig that will protect my core from bat poop.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

After finishing my pedestal I move my core from its current room to it and let it radiate mana into the air at the same time it absorb it. That’s a thing I noticed, my core emits some refine mana around it at a slower pace than it swallows the rough mana from creatures that die and born in my dungeon. Hopefully, that refined mana will help me to claim faster the bats and made sure that they don’t poop on my pedestal. Bat poop may be a good fertilizer, it’s not a nice looking decoration.

Once I finished my new place I wait a little bit more for the second claimed bat to come back so that I can read its memories. The exact moment I sense the bat crossing the limit of my influence I connect myself to it and see a lot of things.

The bat saw a lot of things during that little hour. I see through it that the exit to the outdoors is only 10 minutes away through a maze of stone corridors. Once outside the bat made a first circular fly around the exist giving me the information that it’s on the cliff of a small mountain, it then flew right to a forest at the foot of the cliff and pass its time hunting for bugs and drinking juice directly from fruits. Then it comes back to the dungeon and starts eating my bugs while I read its memories. I’ve seen all it has seen, so I let it free to fly outside the dungeon if it wants, and it goes back outside.

There is one other thing I saw in the bat memories. The night sky. It was dark, pitch black, like my core. But it was sprinkled with the stars, an infinite amount of little sparkling dot that gave it a peculiar beauty. I want it. I’m not completely stupid, and I know I can’t claim the sky and the stars, at least not yet, but I can make my own in the cavern.

For my night sky, I need a way to make some things glow brightly on the roof. I don’t have it in store, so I need to make it. I start by focusing some of my mana on a little bit of stone, I focus more and more and look the stone starting to change. It’s becoming more and more dense and hard, it’s good to know and I reinforce the stone of my pedestal like that, but that’s not my goal now.

I try again to gather mana in a stone, but this time I try to make it glow, I know mana can glow, I glowed purple when I nearly lost my mind some weeks ago. I don’t want to relive that experience, but I keep it in mind as I use my mana on the stone. It’s starting to work, I see a little glow starting to appear in the stone, but it’s purple… The stars are glowing white.

I go again and focus my mana on a third piece of rock, I focus it the same way, but I keep in mind I want it to glow white. White, not purple. White, not purple. White, not purple. White, not purple. White, not purple. White, not purple.

Success! Victory dance with all my creatures! Wow, that’s too much, next time I will only do it with some of my creatures. Maybe I will select a few to do it each time, that’s an idea.

Anyway, I need to continue working on the stars of my roof. I put a lot of them all around it and even play with the arrangement forming some fishes swimming around two crabs fighting each other, there are one normal crab and one asymmetrical crab looking at the fighting crabs like judges. I also put some bats flying in the middle of the swimming fishes. I made some other experiments while doing so and managed to make stars shining in all the colors on my roof.

I’m going to take my first sleep under my starry roof.