It took me a while to fill the wash tub. After that, I continued to add rooms as I gained enough world energy. The next room was to the north of the previous room. Once the core moved out of the previous room, I again placed four rats only this time I made one of them a level 2 rat. Of course, I also continued to add the empty supply crates. Don't want the room to feel too open. I continued this trend of replacing a level 1 rat with a level 2 rat in each room going north, east, then back south. Next up I planned to slowly replace them with level 3 rats as I added even more rooms. My plan was to continue this trend until I had a room with 4 level 5 rats with the room immediately after that being the boss room. I also decided to redistribute the coins and add a few more. I planned to add more rooms later using this same trend of slowly increasing the difficulty of each encounter making the path to the boss much less obvious. For now though, I felt like I should get the boss room established sooner rather than later.

Clyde POV

I had thought that it was easy money. After all, how hard could it be to cross the sand sea with a water mage that can summon water out of thin air. Just a leisurely stroll across the sand sea to collect a huge payout. People cross the sand sea all the time. It can't be that much harder to cross it on foot. How arrogant I was. The others tried to warn me that there was a reason nobody had ever crossed the sand sea on foot. All I could see was the free money though. How was I supposed to know that there was hardly any mana in the sand sea. Now my arrogance has doomed us all.

I'm barely standing, Darrel the water mage is having to use the staff that he just bought as a walking cane to keep himself upright. and Cole our tank has been literally carrying Lily our healer for over a day now. I honestly have no idea how he's still going. What I do know is that if we don't find a way out of the sand sea soon none of us will be going for much longer. Why did I have to choose something that is literally impossible as our first task. Honestly if I hadn't let Darrel talk me into bringing so much water with us, we'd have died already.

Suddenly, I saw something on the horizon. It looked like a tear in the air itself. I said nothing because what would be the point of discussing a mirage that only I can see. As we got closer though I heard Cole ask, "what is that?" while pointing directly at it. This got the attention of Darrel who like me said that he had assumed it was a mirage. As they described it, it became obvious that what we were seeing was likely not a mirage. After all what are the odds, we'd all see the exact same mirage.

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With nothing better to do and no real reason not to we decide to head towards whatever it was. Whatever it was it was now our only hope. Lily had completely lost consciousness and the rest of us weren't far behind. It took us another two hours to actually reach it. Once we did though we knew exactly what it was. Not that it was exactly hard to tell being the only real source of mana within several hundreds of kilometers. At this point though, we were too far gone to care about caution. If the huge wash tub in the center of the room was a trap, well then at least our suffering would be over. Thinking this I ordered Cole to set Lily down and begin filling our waterskins. Darrel on the other hand opted to drink from the wash tub directly.

While that was happening, I began stripping Lily's cloths off. Normally I wouldn't even think of doing something like this. This was an emergency though. I intended to place her directly in the tub. She needed to drink some water, but I was afraid if I poured water in her mouth while she was unconscious it would just cause her to drown. Plus, even I could tell that we desperately needed to get her temperature down. This room was cool, at least compared to outside, but it wasn't cooling us off fast enough. After removing the last of her clothing, I had Cole help me to lift her up and lower her gently into the water.

After several minutes of being submerged up to her neck, during which time I feared she had already passed on, she finally began to come to. Seeing this I offered her a now full waterskin which she eagerly took and began gulping down water. Once she'd had her fill, she returned the waterskin to me and began to look around. No doubt wondering where we were. The realization that she was now naked came as quite a shock. Once she realized we were the only ones in the room she soon calmed down though. Not that she was exactly comfortable being naked around us. It's just that having grown up together she trusted us. Still after soaking for a while she was glad to be back in her cloths.

The rest of us opted to just splash water on our faces. After that we decided to take a nice long rest. Normally It wasn't a good idea to lower your guard inside a dungeon. We had all agreed however that if the dungeon wanted us dead, we wouldn't still be here. We might have just barely qualified as wood rank but even we knew that most dungeons would begin sending stuff to attack you as soon as you entered. This one however was different. We knew it had monsters because we could hear one of them in the next room, but for some reason it wasn't coming to attack us.

Once we were all good and rested, we decided to see how far we could get. With any luck maybe one of the monsters will actually drop some food.