Using their newly renewed mana string, the child continued expanding into the first island and towards the second island. They also started on their fifth floor as they were passively doing this.

They wanted to do a maze that would cover the whole bottom part of their sub-dimension. They had 33 metres to work with, and they got to work.

First, they started by creating five central rooms. These rooms are three to five metres wide and three metres tall. With the rooms dug out, they now had to create the maze.

From the starting point of the maze, the child made long, winding corridors leading to the second room to the first room, then the third room, fourth room and fifth room. They made the corridors one point ten metres tall, tall enough for someone to walk comfortably and 50 centimetres wide, just wide enough that they could move but not enough to be comfortable.

The corridors went up and down, had many dead ends, and were interconnected with other halfways. Once they were happy with the maze layout and rooms, the child closed up most of the tunnel connecting the fourth floor and their core room and diverted it to the tunnel they designated as the start of the maze.

As water came flowing in, the child made sure that they controlled the water levels of each of the rooms and within the hallways. In rooms one to four, the child made sure that the water levels only went to about a metre to a metre and a half high. This was different, though, in the fifth room. In the fifth room, they made the water go all the way to two and a half metres tall, leaving only 50 centimetres of free air.

The hallways, depending on their position, had around 75 centimetres to a metre in water height, but in some of the hallways that went downwards, then it was completely filled with water. Only a couple of hallways connected the rooms had underwater portions, but the child liked that. It would make traversing their floor more difficult and allow for better ambush spots.

Once the initial layout was complete, the child went looking for the swamp mana string that was circulated throughout the fourth floor. It had grown from the ten-centimetre string to fifteen centimetres within the fourth floor, and the child did not want it to stop growing. They took the brown-green mana string, the swamp mana string, because that was what it was turning the water of the fourth floor into, and cut it in half.

Each piece of the once whole string became seven centimetres long, and the child placed the first half of the string back into the fourth floor and the other half into the fifth. As the swamp mana strings started circulating within the two floors, the child turned their attention back towards the newly expanded area within their territory for the fifth floor to become more swampy.

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As they have been working on their fifth floor, the child has also been passively expanding their territory. By the time they reached their limit in their passive expansion, the child had gained an additional 20 metres on all sides of their territory. Their territory was now 109 metres wide, and it reached further into the first island and was almost at the second island.

They went through the new areas and found many new additions, both in plants and animals.

Of insects, they gained: kenoda ground beetles, loxomerus ground beetles, tormissus water beetles, and elachista moths. They found a tiny spider, only a couple of millimetres wide, that they called a crystal dwarf spider. They also added the cold water bee species and frozen earthworms. They gained the aquatic animal species: longnose spookfish, shortnose chimaeras, sawtooth eels, red-tentacled box jellyfish, orange mottled sea squirt, and wandering anemone.

The land plants that they added to their territory were bird ferns, black dripping mushrooms, dancing bells, and string moss. The aquatic plants that they found and added to their territory are bubble weeds and swollen short weeds.

As they went over all of their new acquisitions and fitted them throughout the already-made floors, the child checked in on their fifth floor.

The water was already being affected by the swamp mana string, and the child decided that it was time to start creating the environment of their floor.

POV Alexis Miftern

When Alexis and his small crew arrived at the newly built dungeon town without a name, he knew that he had struck gold.

As soon as his ship docked and his crew went to go get settled into the town, Alexis and his right-hand woman, Mareian, went to purview what had already been harvested from the dungeon.

Going through the local market, they discovered a surplus of different types of small mana cores that he immediately recognized to be found in monsters.

Walking up to the nearest adventurer selling the stones, Alexis struck up a conversation.

“I’m new in town, but are those monster mana cores?” He said, pointing to the basket of milky cores around a centimetre tall and wide.

“You haven’t heard,” responded the adventurer gruffly. “Every monster in that dungeon has a mana core. They are extremely annoying to kill and harvest from, but they all have monster cores. Never seen a dungeon that has mana cores in their monsters right off the bat,” he said before he turned away from Alexis to respond to a customer.

“How much for one of these cores?” He asked, pointing back to the milky white one-centimetre large core.

“Five silver coins.”

“Deal!” Said Alexis as the amount of the core sunk into his head, and he passed over five silver coins.

Alexis knew that it was very rare to find monster cores from dungeons to be priced so low. They usually were at least one gold coin, which is worth a hundred silver coins. But, it seemed that this dungeon put mana cores into every monster that they had.

Seeing that this dungeon was already producing a great wealth through the monster cores, Alexis wondered what other profitable aspects the dungeon had through their fauna and flora.