I began to cycle through my vision modes.

Normal: The normal view. Nothing special and is the same as everyone else have. Except my point of view is from the ceiling.

Heat: Discovered this one while trying to figure out ways to change my vision. Shows every heat signature in the dungeon. Allows me to see how hot the rooms are and if we are digging into lava. Can be useful, I guess?

Mana signatures: Formerly known as 'soul view', but I don’t actually see their souls, only the mana inside their bodies. Instead of a ‘cloud’, like I said at first, it’s now more like the mana moving throughout their body, traveling inside the veins and organs and so on. However, for unknown beings, it still shows up mainly as a cloud. It’s only possible to figure out how their bodies handle the mana when I got one of that kind under my control.

Zoom: In and out. As my dungeon expands, my zoom out does as well. While it gets less detailed, but as time moves on, and my workers takes over the vast majority of the small tasks, there should be little need for me to get involved in the small details. The main benefit of the zoom out, is that my movement speed increases drastically, and I get a good overview of my dungeon.

Rotate: Not really a view, but might as well list it here. Allows me to see everything from whatever direction I want.

None of these worked. I must find a way to detect the natural mana. The dirt in front of me, was the only thing that filled up my vision. No sign of anything special. Time passed and my experiments continued.

Haha, think I got it now. I combined two different vision modes, zoom and mana signatures. This should make it possible to zoom in really close and observe the mana.

Hmm, no, not what I wanted. It only allowed me to zoom in really close on the mana of living creatures. No sign of mana inside the dirt, even after extreme zoom. This is slightly different from the old method of zooming in separately, and then turn on the mana signature vision mode. Now I can do both at the same time, allowing a constant view, instead of zapping between them. Helpful, but not what I need. Back to the mental drawing board.

Ah, maybe like this? I combined the heat with mana signatures, allowing me to do an extremely wide search that looked for even the smallest amount of mana, instead of only looking for living signatures.

It worked! Everything got a faint glow. Similar to the heat vision. Stronger mana sources are a mix of shades of red, while weaker mana sources have a blue tint. Natural mana is more like heat, than a lifeform. Hm, maybe you can control and regulate heat with mana? Who knows how much this ‘mana’ really affects the world.

Now for the hard part. How does one absorb it? Grab the dirt with my hand? No, that only moved the dirt around. But the dirt seems to disappear from the world when I grab it. Hm, maybe I should try with something bigger first.

Don't need two male moles, so come here. Where are you? The male mole sat outside farm one and munched on a big bug, a juicy earthworm. Next to the mole laid a half eaten beetle bug. Apparently, they eat the other bugs too. Good, I guess, since I got endless of them. I grabbed the mole after he finished eating the earthworm. A last meal.

He struggled inside my hand. The fur and claws tickled me as he moved around. He even bit my thumb, however, it seems I can only feel small things, not actual pain. Or more accurately, my senses in the hand are severely dulled, in a good way. Any strong feelings, like spikes of pain, gets removed. If someone slashed my hand with a sword, it would not affect me much. How they managed to slash my hand with a sword, in the first place, is an entirely different matter.

The mole was still completely fine, even inside my weird hand dimension. Good, this makes moving creatures around easier. Another idea that popped up in my mind was: Is it possible to make my hand visible, and if so, how? Perhaps that’s for another time. Though, it would be good to maintain order with my floating hand, always flying above their heads, ready to slap at a moment's notice. Maybe if I... Hmm... No, focus, I was doing something else.

Okay, little mole, time to give me your mana. Mana drain!

...

Nothing. Except the mole looked scared; it rolled up in a ball and trembled in fear. Huh, can it understand me now? Doesn’t matter, he can’t talk back anyway. Not that I care much for what he would say.

I turned on mana signature vision, allowing me to see the mana moving inside his body. It was much more detailed now, when I held him in my hand, compared to when I watched them from the ceiling.

Should I stick a finger into his body? To drain the mana directly from his insides? My clawed fingers would easily penetrate his skin, but it would most likely just kill him. Maybe modify my hand? Hm, a suction hole in the middle of my palm perhaps? Yeah, sounds good. I remember something like that working quite well to suck out someone’s life force, in this case mana. Not sure from where, though.

The hand changed as I thought about it, and about a minute later, I understood how the new addition to my hand worked. Well, good luck, Mr Mole. The mole was given a name, to celebrate his sacrifice. The first, but not the last, minion that would die by my hand.

“Squeee!” Mr Mole squealed in pain. The suction force pulled him towards the hole, making him unable to move. The skin on his back got stuck in the small hole, stretching the skin to the extreme. His four limbs squirmed around in the air, trying to get a grip on anything to help pull him out of there. Unfortunately for him, no one can hear you scream inside my hand dimension. All sounds got muted, both ways. I’m obviously not affected, only the thing in my hand.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The mole slowly turned wrinkly, and even started to shrink a little. Luckily for Mr Mole, death was quick, but there still remained some more mana to absorb.

Huh, quite good, but the corpse remains intact. There are still some mana left that binds together the body. They are too small for me to remove, but this is a good start.

Now for the snakes. With a flick of my hand, I threw the used up body of Mr Mole, to the side, and picked up a snake. This one was smaller, but it should still work. The results were the same after I sucked the mana out. No problems with that size, since the body was still bigger than the hole. What about a bug?

I threw the snake to the side as well and picked up a big bug. It was four centimeters in size. Hm, getting close, but still big enough.

The bug died quickly, the whole ordeal only lasted a few seconds. The body didn’t change as much as the others, since it got a hard exoskeleton and shell covering it. Got barely anything from this one. I allowed the bug to join the mole and the snake in their pile.

Now for the smallest bug. It was half a centimeter in size but the hole was one and a half centimeter. Yep, couldn't get a lock on it. It was just too small, and therefore the dirt will be too.

I flicked the bug away with my finger, like a booger, and it splattered into a wall. Smaller holes, I need smaller holes. The hand surface, the skin, changed into something that looked like an old pincushion; one used for way too long. Countless tiny holes, smaller than one millimeter, spread out inside the palm and even covered the fingers.

Hooh, this thing should work quite well. A new tiny bug volunteered, and this time it worked fine. It crawled around in my hand as I slowly drained it wherever it went. No escape!

The new version was slower and not as forceful as the old version. The bug received a reward for his bravery; a swift death, crushed between my fingers. The tiny corpse got wiped off my hand, when I dug down to grab a handful of dirt. Holding the dirt in my hand, I slowly drained the miniscule amount of natural mana inside each grain.

Hey, it worked. Worth the same as half a bug, the smallest kind. I have near infinite amount of this dirt. However, it still left behind a small dust pile, about one tenth of the original size.

Making even smaller holes are not worth it, because modifying the hand has a large cost as well. I should drain these dirt piles when I got a spare moment. Looking at my current workload, that is almost all the time.

How much time has passed? The imp said he would work on the mushrooms, but must have just taken a small break, because he is now sleeping. Maybe two or three hours?

Let’s take a quick look at the dungeon. Farm One has finished the part of the mushrooms I spared from the bugs, the other part is pretty much eaten down to the roots. Thankfully, these are some tough plants.

They can regenerate as long as there is at least one centimeter of the root left. I forbade them from eating the root systems, just to make sure they are safe. Soon, the mushrooms will mature and release a cloud of spores, that will cause them to grow everywhere, even the walls and ceilings. This can cause them to spread to unwanted areas, but I’m sure the bugs can clean it up for me if asked. The bug nests are full, but there are plenty of homeless bugs crawling around. The snakes coil up together when they sleep, to keep warm and for protection.

The dungeon is getting warmer and warmer. It started at a few degrees celsius, don’t know the exact details, since I only recently learned how to measure the temperature. It’s now around ten degrees in my chamber and fifteen degrees in the farms. Closed space together with thousands of creatures body heat, is a recipe for global warming, except, it’s not really global. I did a quick count of my creatures and there are about three thousand of them now, of course, ninety-nine percent of that is bugs.

Farm Two is the same as Farm One, but younger, and will take some time for the mushrooms to grow.

The two moles are cuddling inside their small nest. They could dig out more, but they apparently likes it small and cramped. Natural instinct perhaps? Normally, expanding needlessly in the wild, is just asking for trouble.

I also got an idea for a new combined farm and nest design.

Something like this: Shaped like a large square, with three layers. By building over the old layers, it’s possible to expand any layer as needed.

First layer: A big mushroom farm on this outer layer. Bug nests on all the corners, even the inner corners, and a snake nest in each of the four directions.

Second layer: A mole nest on this middle layer. They can dig it out and design it themselves. More bug nests on the corners, but not the inner corners this time.

Third layer: Another mushroom farm in this inner layer. Bug nests on the corners and a single snake nest in the middle of the farm.

The moles can hunt in both directions, maybe even build underground tunnels, for hidden movement, to the other sides of their layer. The snakes have easy access to bugs and plenty of space to live in. The bugs have more than enough mushrooms to eat, and if they feel brave, they can try their luck with a snake. The mushrooms have plenty of space to grow in, and the bugs will keep their numbers in check. Life in perfect harmony. With killing and slaughtering going on non-stop.

Other than that, we got nothing special going on. Sometimes new bugs and snakes crawl into my range and I take them over.