The goblin scout was a few thousand feet out, so I had some time to prepare. Quickly setting the goblins to work I had them bury the flowers under some dirt. Then I took a few points of mana to make grass grow over the pile, leaving a still noticeable mound of dirt, just one that didn’t look recently made.

With that preparation made I called all my nearby monsters back into the dungeon, the 4 goblins that were too far out to make it back were ordered to hide in the tall grass and I ran through my first floor's traps.

The pitfalls spikes were sharpened, classic swinging blades were ready, the arrows had poisoned tips and all the monsters were hidden and ready to ambush. Even a weak monster like a goblin can push you into a trap, or just activate a trap and get both itself and you killed.

Not my favorite strategy but I was under no obligations to fight fair. The first floor was just the standard ancient ruins that most people thought of when a dungeon came to mind, Mainly because a dungeons ' early floors tended to be a bunch of hallways and rooms, and the only thematic options were caves or ancient strongholds.

Sure I could have remodeled it into something more deadly or unique, but back when I actually had the mana for it nothing I could actually put on the first floor would have been worth the effort, And the first floors were the few things that remained from my early days, back when I had nothing but some goblins and rats armed with pointed sticks.

The fact that I was basically back in those early days was not lost on me.

My preparations hadn’t taken long but I could already see the invaders from the dungeon entrance, they had moved fairly quickly and it wouldn’t be long before they crossed into the clearing my goblins had made.

The realization that any ranger or scout with the group would immediately see the footprints in and out of the dungeon wasn’t something I could do anything about though. And it immediately became a lesser concern when I tried to focus my attention on the intruders.

A dungeon's sight is based on mana, meaning I can only really see things that emit or have mana, and I can see things that don’t have mana by seeing where there is a void. An adamantine sword has no mana signature, but the air around it does, meaning I can still see the shape of the sword.

The people approaching my dungeon however? They were blurry. It wasn’t that the mana inside them didn’t exist, it was that it was wrong and warped. The edges frayed.

Even the goblin had seen more detail at a distance, I couldn’t even tell if they were holding anything or how many limbs they had, just a vague idea of where they were. It was with that that I noticed they had stopped once they reached the clearing.

Instead of trying to peer through whatever that mess of mana was I turned my attention to the mana around them, if it was anything like a mana void I could take my clues from how the mana around it behaved.

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Every living creature took in mana overtime, from the smallest microscopic life form to the greatest beasts, and the longer you lived the more you accumulated. This meant that the older you were the more mana you had, and that every living thing got stronger as it aged. This wasn’t enough to counteract aging, or how mortals would weaken overtime, at least not without more mana than the average mortal would ever intake. There was even a whole path of immortality that some mortals walked, talking in more and more mana until they passed a threshold where their cells were strong enough to not age, or to even revitalize themselves. I had only seen this happen twice in my long existence though.

It was why anything immortal was so dangerous, gods, dragons, and dungeons. We would just keep getting stronger, not indefinitely as there was a limit to how strong one could grow on mana alone, but we would reach peaks no mortal could ever see, just by not dying.

These mortals however weren’t taking in any mana, if anything the mana around them was being pushed away.

I had seen rogues and assassins that could blend their mana signature into the ambient background mana, And I had seen cursed items or restraints that could cut one off from their own mana supply, but nothing like this.

Looking closer I could even see wisps of mana rising from them, only the barest trace and barely noticeable but they were losing mana without taking in more. Mana usually flowed in and out of people, and some of it would stay inside of them, but the majority of mana left. Here it was only flowing out, if these creatures worked anything like creatures from my plane of reality they would steadily be growing weaker, in the reverse of the normal order of things.

A few more seconds of staring and I realized that they were speaking, I couldn’t actually understand what they were saying, even if they spoke a language I was familiar with it would still have thousands of years of linguistic drift, but speech only implied so many things.

Until I could translate or understand the speech I couldn’t actually eavesdrop on their conversation, and anyone who knew of dungeons knew not to talk about anything sensitive once they were within its halls anyway.

If my sight couldn’t make them out I would just have to use one of my creatures as an intermediary. The walls of my first floor were filled with small tunnels that my rats and slimes could crawl through, so it wasn’t long before one was in a hidden position observing the entrance.

It was a few minutes before the mana anomalies seemed to reach a conclusion, and then they were walking towards my dungeon.

I was waiting anxiously for my first clear picture of the invaders, or at least as clear a picture a rat could give, when they entered my dungeon and walked into my monster's view.

It was a group of starving humans, orcs, and elves. Specifically 2 Humans, 3 orcs and one elf. They were filthy and obviously malnourished, wearing ratty clothing and holding old and worn weapons or repurposed farming tools.

It was the collars and shackles that really drew my attention though, even besides the fact that they were the shiniest and cleanest things on the humanoids the rats eyes could see that the skin under and around the shackles was more worn and less healthy looking than the rest of their bodies.

Coordinating between my vision and the rats I could see that the thin wisps of mana were coming from the shackles. I was being invaded by what had to be slaves with mana draining items on them.

That complicated things.