If zooming in is possible, then zooming out should prove little difficulty for someone as smart and creative as me. I forced my ‘presence’ upwards and lo and behold, it worked. I could see the entire dungeon area. It was still small, of course, but much better than the old 'one room' view.

I could see three blocks away from my edge, but everything else was black, total darkness. Hmm…

I sent out my ‘presence’ out into the outer walls, and used my ‘soul view’, as I have come to call it. Many tiny green dots. Bugs. Oh, what is this? A larger one. Long, but thin? A snake?

Hnnnnrgh! That was the sound of me focusing hard, trying to capture it.

Got him! It was harder than the bugs, by quite a lot. Well, come in, little one, so I can see you.

The snake slithered through the dirt, seemingly unhindered by the mass of dirt in his way.

Oh!

The snake suddenly burst through the wall and fell down to the ground. With a ten centimeters long, three centimeters wide body, covered in brown scales, it looked... small. Its tongue flickered wildly, trying to sense its new location. The snake noticed the wild bug right next to it, and snapped the jaws around the bug, swallowing it whole.

Excellent! I need more of your kind, so we can breed you. For now, crawl around and eat some wild bugs, until you feel full. Then do whatever you feel like. It hissed in response and slithered off.

After I had dismissed the snake, I returned to the soul view and searched for more. It took around one second to take over a bug. Smaller than one centimeter bugs were almost instant, but the one to three centimeters ones took around one second. Bigger than that, I only found one of; a five centimeter long earthworm. They can expand and stretch out in size, so I measure them at their smallest.

I decided to take over all the bugs I could see in the surroundings, to clean my walls up. I would no longer allow these freeloaders to feed on my mana without submitting their minds to my will.

Two hours passed, and I started to feel the drain on my mana. My current force consisted of over a thousand bugs, from dozens of types, and ten snakes. I had cleaned up my surroundings, or so I thought, but the area I started at showed signs of green again. Well, it’s better to have more than less. Don’t wanna run out of bugs, which I think is impossible, but you never know.

Thanks to the unlimited appetite of the bugs, the mushrooms were hard pressed to survive, so I had to order the bugs to stay away from half of them. This was so they could grow up, and start releasing their spores, automating the mushroom production. This was also a large part of the mana drain. To super accelerate their growth speed, I invested massive amounts of mana into each mushroom. But the bugs swarmed and could chew the mushrooms down faster than they could grow.

Wonder how I can increase my mana regeneration? Hm, time to wake up the lazy one.

*Smack smack!

“Ah! I’m up! I’m up, mom!” He shouted and waved his hands around in front of him. “I’ll go to school!” He awoke with a start. "Ah, where am I?" He rubbed his eyes.

“Uh, hello?” I don’t even know what to say.

“Ah, you? It wasn’t a dream?!” He laughed loudly. “I’m so happy!” He quickly got up and faced my crystal.

“So, mom, huh? She normally wakes you up?” A mom? Imps are born? I always imagined them to simply... pop into existence or something. Though, kinda odd to think that, when I have only met a single one.

“Uh, yeah. When I get thrown out of the noon class, I usually go home and take a nap.”

“Sounds like you made it into a routine.” How often can it happen for him to react like this?

“Yeah.” He said in a sad voice as he looked down at the ground. “It was flight training class…”

Ouch! “Anyways… I need more mana. How do I get it?” Let’s just change the subject.

“Hm? Why? You should have plenty to spare with just a hundred bugs or so, and me here?” He looked around, but couldn’t see anything different.

“Oh, but while you were sleeping, I worked hard. I got over a thousand bugs and ten snakes.”

The imps eyes bulged out as he heard me. “W-what? So many, huh. I understand. I guess the mushrooms aren’t feeling so good either?” He nodded in approval of my hard work.

“Nope, but I spared half of them, so they can grow up.”

“Well, the fastest way is to simply reabsorb some of the mana you release. But that is a very short-term solution.”

“How do I do that?” Might be good to know anyway.

“You know how you continuously release mana into the air and ground? Well, there is a limit on the mana density in the world, the amount of mana you can squeeze into a meter sized cube. So after some time, you naturally stop doing it, however, you will stop quite a bit earlier than the actual limit. It gets harder and harder to contain the mana as you approach the limit and it makes the air and ground poisonous, even for us begins that lives on mana. Don't worry, you need to force the mana inside a small area to even get close to such dangerous levels."

"Good to know." Let's just say I was not very worried about such a thing as accidentally poisoning the air he breathed.

"Just like there is a limit on how much you can compress the mana, there is also a limit on how much you can stretch it out, how thin the density in the air and ground can get. By absorbing the mana back into your mana reserves, you make it thinner in your surroundings and starve the creatures that lives in that area. Perhaps more importantly, it also causes your domain to weaken, shrink and finally disappear. By that I mean, your vision and control in the areas where your mana is gone. You can get blocked off from parts of your own dungeon if you are not careful. Another way to gain mana is to simply kill off some creatures and absorb it from their bodies.”

“Well, I worked hard to get all my creatures, so I don’t want to kill them yet.” No, really. It was hard work.

“Correct, that is a bad idea. Now is the time to build a proper nest area for them and collect rent from them.” Rent? Rent from the bugs? He is joking right?

“Rent?” Might as well ask him.

“Yes, in mana. They will give you a small and harmless portion of their mana that they gather during the day. May not sound like such a good idea right now, when you are the one feeding them with mana, but consider this; you give them zero mana and receive four in return.” He held up a closed fist, next to an open fist with all four fingers raised. I think he might be underestimating my math knowledge. Or maybe he is just proud that he could figure it out himself.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Oh! Passive income!” This is genius.

“Indeed.” He nodded. “Payment for sheltering them. Such weak creatures like this have no mind to resist your demands, but when smarter ones move in, they don’t like to see you extort others. So, might aswell do it properly from the start.” I could only agree. Don’t like those that preys on the weak. Well, sometimes I might do it, but I can assure you that it’s for the greater good.

“However!” The imp suddenly exclaimed. Huh, what now? “When strong fighters arrive, whose job it is to defend us, they will demand a payment. Gold or mana, or even both.” Ah, of course, everyone wants a piece of my mana.

“Gold? Where can I find that?” Do I just dig it out?

“In the walls, of course! Dig out metals and such things. There are more things than dirt walls. More on that later.” He waved that topic away.

“Okay, but how will anyone come down here? It’s walls everywhere?” I doubt everyone would enjoy digging through the dirt to arrive here.

“A portal. I got the ritual and magic circle to make one. It will connect us to the monster world!”

“Monster world?” There is more to life than my, dozens of meters sized, dungeon?

The imp grinned, apparently enjoying my ignorance. Any chance to teach is a chance for him to show off. “Indeed. Did you think there were only weak imps and bugs in this world? Hah! It’s a gigantic world and there are countless dungeons, like yourself.”

"More like me?" Well, now that I think about it, seems obvious since he went to a school to train himself to serve a dungeon Heart.

The imp turned serious and said: “And countless heroes waiting to destroy you, and the others.” Oh, I forgot about them.

“After we set up the portal, we will get traders and even tourists and people looking for a safe place to live or work. Of course, letting the heroes invade us deep enough for them to kill all the non-combatants is a bad thing. We won’t get many visitors if that happens.” The imp shrugged, seemingly more concerned about the loss of profits than the loss of life. I approve of that attitude.

“Yeah, I can imagine that.” If there is anything left of us to visit in the first place. I can't imagine the heroes leaving empty-handed if they killed our military forces.

The imp moved towards the mushroom farm as we spoke.

The imp stopped in the doorway in shock. Even though I say doorway, we didn't have doors yet, but I'm sure you understand what I mean. After a few seconds, he finally recollected himself enough to speak. “Okay, we got a massive overcrowding problem.”

What he saw were layers upon layers of wriggling bugs, crawling on top of each other, trying to reach the mushrooms. In the other side of the room, however, there were a bunch of mushrooms that looked just fine, and the bugs avoided them like the plague.

The imp entered the room and began to inspect it more carefully. “Let’s extend this area by double and put a few nests in here.” The imp could barely walk around, afraid of crushing the bugs underfoot. As he walked in further, that 'fear' seemed to lessen.

Some casualties were unavoidable, and they made crunching and squishing sounds as he stepped on them. However, some casualties were definitely avoidable, yet the imp seemed to go out of his way to step on large piles of bugs from time to time. Think I even spotted a hint of a smile on his face. Either he got some sadistic personality, or the bugs were just funny to squish. Looking at him, I believe the second option is more likely, mainly because he only targeted the juicy bugs, that exploded from one end when he applied pressure to them.

“Let me design it first… There, done.”

With my command sent to him, he got to work. He quickly dug out the new area and the bugs flowed naturally to the new empty space. Now they didn’t have to crawl upon each other all the time. I could even sense they were happier. Somehow.

“Now, let’s put a bug nest in each corner and a snake nest by the entrance.” The imp pointed at each location as he spoke.

“What are you using to make the nests?” Don’t see any building materials around. Actually, what kind of nests does a bug need?

“We can upgrade them later, but for now, I thought about simple dirt nests. If you use mana to harden the nest, it will be just fine.”

“Hmm, stupid question maybe, but where will you get the dirt from? Seems like it disappears when you dig it out.” It vanishes like... magic?

“Oh, yes, that is thanks to a special racial spell we imps have. You see, since we are practically born to dig out the dungeons, we developed a special spell that allows us to store the dirt and rocks we dig out, and only leave the useful parts, like ores, behind. It was later found so useful, that the Clan head, from a long time ago, spent large amount of resources to figure out how to brand the spell into our very being. It took many volunteers and lots of experiments, using hired mages and other experts, to succeed, but they did it. All imps are now born with the knowledge to use this spell.” Wow, who knew.

“I was wondering what was going on. That is very useful, otherwise it would be hard to expand. We would merely shuffle the dirt around.”

“Yep, the early dungeons had it hard. They had to send their dirt and rocks out through the portal, by special traders that specialized in 'wall waste' removal, as they called it. Well, the discovery of this spell destroyed that thriving industry. Later, people found or invented ways to turn the wall waste into pure mana. Not much, but you got rid of it and got a small thing in return.”

Ouch, poor traders. I imagine some never recovered from the unfortunate destruction of their once thriving industry, that they had spent their lives to become experts in. Instead, they jumped from part-time jobs, doing jobs that were unworthy of their education and spending the rest of their days complaining about how the good old days were better.

“I can store quite a lot, thanks to magical compression, but we have to do something with it soon. We can dig out a few other rooms for sure. Another nifty thing about this spell, is that I can shape the dirt the way I want and then simply let it out in that shape.” Into anything? That seems overpowered? But then again, if it's just dirt, perhaps not. Probably comes with a mana cost anyway, to balance it out.