She spent almost the entirety of the rabbit’s mana to infuse their warren, claiming it as her own. The creatures didn’t seem to notice, but she definitely noticed the steady intake of their mana. They let off as much energy in every second that they slept as she got from killing a maggot.

Of course, she couldn’t help but wonder if she’d get even more mana, if they were hers. The fly experiments had suggested that it might be possible to take over them once born, but she figured it’d be costly. Better to kill them and recreate them, probably. She already had the necessary material and knowledge, but she’d expended too much just taking over the warren.

For now, she would rest. With the steady supply of mana the rabbits provided, resting was a viable option.

That didn’t mean her hunters would stop their task. The ravenous flies worked through the rest of the night. They were able to scavenge perhaps a full dozen feet from her cave before the drain became uncomfortable. The treasures they brought back were worth it.

Grass - and more importantly, grass seeds. Moss. More varieties of beetles and ants. They’d grown large enough to carry very small twigs. She spent a portion of her precious mana to make them even larger. More… she needed more of everything.

In the meantime, she planted the grass seeds and moss. An ecosystem would be ideal. She could figure out what to do regarding sunlight, but water was a more immediate concern.

She could wait for rain, but that might take a while. She thought about it, and realized that surely, if she dug deep enough, she’d hit the water table.

Grinning, she started digging a well. Stone slipped into her reserves as easily as dirt, and she laughed to herself at how much easier she had it than her ancestors. It would take a while to get enough mana to hit the water table, but she could be patient.

As the sky grew brighter, she watched the hunters more closely. She wanted to see exactly how the sunlight inhibited her.

Her control started to wither before the sun emerged, but direct sunlight had the strongest effect. To her surprise, it was much less powerful of an effect than it had been before.

Previously, it had seemed like the drain not only inconvenienced her, but also harmed the beetle. This time, it felt like the fly itself was completely fine in sunlight. The only problem was that her connection to it was more draining.

It warranted another test. She sent out her stone beetle. Like the previous day, the drain was almost immediate, and powerful. She withdrew both the beetle and the flies.

Hypothesis one: beetles were, for some biological reason, more susceptible than flies.

Ants seemed like a good third candidate, so she created a few. On exposure to sunlight, they withered exactly as much as the beetle did.

So, either flies were exceptionally resistant, or there was something else going on. She thought about what other differences existed between the beetle and flies.

Hypothesis two: creatures she created were more susceptible than creatures that had been born.

That one was easy. She created a new fly, based on the template of her mutant hunters. She also created a brand new beetle, just for thoroughness. She sent both of them outside.

Aha! Both creatures immediately struggled under the sunlight. She’d have to breed more species to confirm it, but it seemed like the best theory.

Of course, the question was why. She took one of the hunter flies and made the new fly match it perfectly, down to the atom. There should be absolutely no difference between them.

Both went outside, and quickly returned.

Nope. The new fly suffered under the sunlight, whereas the old fly was just a little more costly to stay connected to.

But why?

Physically they were the same. So, the difference had to be magical. She tried to figure out if she could see the difference.

Her vision expanded, and she marvelled. Physical objects disappeared entirely from view, replaced by a wispy awareness that was as beautiful as it was bewildering. Minutes passed as she tried to gain a better understanding of what she was seeing.

As the awe subsided, she sighed. She could have kicked herself. She’d been playing with magic all this time, and it hadn’t occurred to her until now to see if she could actually see it?

The difference between the two was extreme. The created fly was tethered to her with a beautifully glowing thread. Other than that, there was absolutely nothing in it - it was one hundred percent her. More than merely belonging to her, it was her.

The enhanced fly, on the other hand, had a speck of mana that was clearly its own. Its “soul,” she supposed, though the flimsy thing seemed unworthy of the word. This soul-thing was its own, though it was so full of her mana that it was entirely under her control. It, too, was tethered to her, but the connection was more nuanced.

Even so, they were both only flies. There was just so little to work with - their magic was so faint that the very process of looking closely at it was almost enough to kill them. She couldn’t get much information from souls this weak.

She thought of one test she could try. She cut off the connection from the flies. The born-fly staggered in the air, confused, but then went off to go feed on more earthworm corpses.

The created-fly, though? It collapsed to the ground, instantly dead.

Interesting.

She tried to reconnect. It took a few seconds, but she regained control of the born-fly with no trouble. The created-fly remained dead. Reconnecting wasn’t good enough. She pushed harder, focusing on making it live. It worked, but to her surprise, it took almost as much mana to reanimate it as it did to make it in the first place.

Last thing she tried was to make a soul for the created-fly. She couldn’t seem to figure out how to do it. On one level, she’d been gaining a deep confidence in her magic - it really seemed limited only by her raw power and her comprehension. So, either this was a hard limit, or she didn’t understand something.

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She gave the rabbits a greedy look. She could only imagine what wealth of knowledge they might provide, if she could examine them. Once they had babies, she’d try her damnedest to acquire one, even if it was expensive.

That was for the future.

For now, her hunters cost too much during the day. They couldn’t gather enough living things to pay for their own maintenance. She withdrew her hunters with a wistful sigh, and gave them an instruction to do their own thing, as long as it remained in her dungeon. She didn’t want to pay them any attention at the moment.

While they went off feeding on the various corpses, plant matter, and rabbit poop, she started playing with her senses. She wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

Her first attempt was as perfectly successful as almost everything else she’d tried. She was able to see infrared with a passing thought. Next, she saw ultraviolet. Hearing worked just as well, with hearing subsonic and hypersonic sounds with ease.

This is so cool!

She’d already known that she “knew” everything that was in her dungeon - this was just another way of perceiving it. She figured that her default was human-type vision simply because that’s what she was used to. Every other type of vision or hearing was equally accessible.

The thought made her realize it might be more than vision or hearing. She tried to smell, then taste, then feel - each of those worked, too.

It was quite firmly established, then. If something was in her dungeon, then it was hers to know.

As much fun as it was to play around with her senses, the itching desire to protect her core kept her mind on her mortality. More strength was needed.

She tried cultivating her plants. They, too, responded to her magic as naturally as breathing. Sunlight was just energy, so realistically, she should be able to replace that with mana. In that way, she’d be trading mana for organic material.

Likewise, if she used mana to create light directly, it might work. Problem was, it’d likely be even less energy efficient than powering the plants directly.

Better to not waste the mana, if possible. She considered her sunlight-harvesting options.

Idea number one: she could open a hole in her roof, and let the sunlight come directly in. The problem with this idea was that the sunlight would only light up a small area. It shouldn’t wither her magic, since the sunlight coming in through her entrance didn’t weaken her at all. It only affected her magic when it was outside of her dungeon.

Idea number two expanded on the concept. If she made a combination of mirrors and lenses, she could get a bunch of sunlight from above to a wide area inside her dungeon. The problem with that, though, was that bending light was all about angles. The sun would be at a different angle throughout the day, which meant she’d either have something inefficient, or something that required constant adjustment. It also had the problem that nothing she could create was either reflective or transparent.

Idea number three was to see if she could recreate fiber optic cables. She remembered the Christmas tree she’d gotten the previous year - it had light coming from a bulb at the bottom, which went through the little wires, and emerged in pretty patterns. The problem with that was that she didn’t know anything about optics. She didn’t know if she needed special material, or specific sizes, or what. Like idea number two, she didn’t have anything transparent to work with.

She wanted to kick something.

Fine. Maybe she’d take another route. If she couldn’t get the sunlight into her dungeon directly, then she’d get the energy from the sunlight into the dungeon.

Her latest idea required a plant bigger and hardier than the grass or moss. None of her insects could manage it.

A rabbit, though, could.

Rabbits also required a lot of plant matter to sustain themselves. This would have to wait until evening, when she could send it out foraging. She might as well get prepared in the meantime.

Half an hour later, she’d killed a second rabbit with the same setup as she’d used to kill the first one. The mana infusion was as delicious as the first had been, and she found herself tempted to kill all the other rabbits in the warren.

Not yet, not yet. They could forage during the day, whereas her creations couldn’t. Best to let most of them live.

By the time she returned her attention to the main room of her dungeon, she was met with a surprise. Her female hunter flies had mated and laid eggs. The crazy things had completely finished the reproductive cycle before the mana-born maggots had even managed to emerge from their pupal shells.

To her delight, the eggs seemed to be developing with similar degrees of maddening haste. Did her enhancement pass on to their children?

There were too many things she wanted to pay attention to! She wanted to study the development of her various experimental groups of flies. She wanted to dig her well for water. She wanted to get more rabbits, for more mana. She still had an annoying itch to hide her core deeper into the earth. She wanted to see what different effects she could put on the flies. She wanted to breed different creatures. She wanted to see if creatures that she created could breed.

Priorities. She had to prioritize.

What mattered most was survival. For that, she needed mana. Long term, killing all the rabbits wasn’t the best plan. Having a viable ecosystem, on the other hand, probably was.

The key ingredients for life were in two categories. One was energy; namely, sunlight. The other was raw materials - this amounted to mostly air and water, combined with stuff in the soil. All life started from that basis, and all energy came from the sun.

Energy was the biggest factor, for her. Killing stuff had the biggest payoff, but wasn’t reliable. Slow and steady wins the race.

That decided her. She drew on the ambient mana from the various living things in her dungeon, and resumed digging her well. She finally hit water about thirty feet down. She sucked some up into her reserves, and fell back into the crystal to rest.

Shortly before sunset, she emerged again, startled to discover that the hunters’ eggs had already hatched. She had nearly five hundred of the enhanced maggots chowing down, quickly catching up to the control group maggots, who still hadn’t entered their pupal forms.

They weren’t her immediate concern, though. She created her rabbit, and was delighted with the lovely creature. So much more strength, more complexity! And the senses were amazing, compared to the bugs. Its mind wasn’t what she’d expected. It didn’t seem to have any thoughts or feelings at all. It was just a mindless puppet, with only the faintest presence of instincts.

Huh. Either rabbits are profoundly more stupid than I’d have guessed, or creating them has effects that the flies are too simple to reveal.

Rabbits didn’t have great nighttime vision, and the effect of the daytime drain was strongest in direct sunlight. She hoped that in the hours of twilight, she could strike a balance. As soon as the dungeon entrance was shaded, she sent her rabbit off.

The pain made her wince, but she pressed on. It wasn’t bad at all, really - about on par with a sunburn. The little legs ran for all they were worth, as she looked through the rabbit’s eyes for her goal.

It was the first time she’d really seen outside of her dungeon. The flies’ vision was almost useless, and she couldn’t get close enough to her own entrance herself to see much past it, other than a little expanse of green hills.

The rabbit’s eyes weren’t nearly as sharp as humans’, but they still worked for long distances. She was able to make out so much more detail. Her dungeon was on a large hill, on the eastern side. In the distance, she could hear what must be a river flowing. It was mostly hilly grassland, but a forest started only a few hundred feet away, to the north. To the south, a good distance away, she saw some strange shapes that she couldn’t quite make out.

Hopefully not important. In any case, she wasn’t in a position to investigate. Her objective would probably be in the forest. The rabbit’s legs launched the furry body at a delightfully fast pace.

She crossed into some direct sunlight between the dungeon and the forest line, but she endured it. Even though it was only for a few seconds, the rabbit was a little hurt. The fur was fine, but the skin underneath was badly burned.

Amy ignored it, and focused her search through the forest.

There!

Some kind of ivy was growing in the shade of the trees, and her rabbit dug in a frenzy. She started gathering up the length of vine into a ball, so it could be carried.

“Oh, Maya!” she heard, and she froze. The voice of a little girl? The rabbit became as still as a statue. “Look! It’s a rabbit!”