I considered my options. Thinking was easier with a full - not stomach, but close enough. Did I use stored impurities for processing? I made a note in my ever growing "to do" list to consider it.

  First, I wanted to know if I could relocate my minions. Not the animals - I already knew I could just tell those to move and they would - but the plants.

  I inspected one of the edelweiss minions in the first room and pulled up its menu. I could mutate it, I could upgrade it (an option that was greyed out - no upgrades available), and I could check its status (happy and healthy) or toggle its availability to dungeon native pollinators (currently available). There was no "move" option, but that didn't mean I couldn't move it.

  I selected it, then changed its location one foot to the side. The plant shivered and strained, swaying in an intangible wind, and I felt its roots spread and grow to the side, toward the new spot I'd picked out for it. As it strained and grew, unnaturally quickly, I felt a bit of strain myself, as though I were working hard. I started to feel tired, but I didn't put a stop to the experiment. Slowly, slowly, but fast enough to be visible, the plant's root system grew and stretched, and then began to recede on the far side of it.

  Then the plant's stem shifted along the new roots, moving a few inches, before it began again.

  I took a close look at the slowly creeping flower. There was a loading bar with a timer on it. Twelve hours for a plant to move one foot to the left, and its dungeon mana consumption had skyrocketed from zero per day to five per second. I checked my stored dungeon mana. It was near full, but my two-thousand dungeon mana cap wasn't anywhere near enough to keep that up for an hour, let alone half a day, and this process was using more mana than I was producing.

  I told it to stop. It didn't. I tried to move the target location closer to the plant. It was locked. I focused in on the loading bar, the speed at which the plant was moving, and told it to slow down.

  Obligingly, whatever subconscious process let me adjust what my body was doing provided an interface. The "speed of movement" slider was turned all the way up. I turned it all the way down. The "time to completion" changed from twelve hours to two weeks and the dungeon mana consumption changed to something reasonable.

  I left the flowers to do what flowers do, ignored the urge to mutate more of them, and got back to work on more rules for my dungeon. Guidelines, logic, self-preservation!

  If an action will result in negative dungeon mana production, provide a warning popup. If a process will result in negative dungeon mana production and end after all dungeon mana has been drained, provide a warning popup and the interface to change the process' settings.

  Much better.

  Next, I designed myself a tool for managing processes with end states, so that I could see what I had going on, how fast it was moving, when it would be done, and adjust all in-progress actions from one window, instead of having to dart my consciousness all over the dungeon to check on everything. While that was manageable now, it wouldn't scale.

  As the sun went down, I tested my new tools.

  I selected the glowing edelweiss from the second room and directed it to move to the first room. As expected, I got a warning popup about that taking more mana than I had and a menu to adjust the process. Not as expected, I got two warning popups - I needed to fix that. I slid the speed around, and found that there were multiple stages to this movement that weren't there in the first plant I'd tried to move.

  There was a slider for how brightly the flower should shine, not just in general, but while it was moving, and another that controlled how much energy went to refilling its attack capacitor, and whether that should be taken from the energy it needed to move itself to its new home. I adjusted them, checked the projections for how long it would take, and adjusted them again. Eventually, the power drain looked manageable.

  It was going to take three months for the plant to get itself to its new home, but that was - not fine, but it was good data.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  I now knew that it wasn't reasonable to move plants from one location to another in a timely manner.

  I took another look at the new rooms that were being dug out. That was going to take a while - even if it was going faster than I'd expected. Maybe core upgrades were good for more than just more storage.

  Instead of watching my next pair of rooms dig themselves out, I tried my hand at art. Specifically, I focused on a patch of wall in one of the new halls, the one leading to the room I was planning to grow at least one tree in, and started carving. I focused on a "dig" tool - a three dimensional shape that I first imagined, and then controlled with my mind - and slowly and carefully shaved away bits of stone until I had a flat oval.

  Then I carved into the stone, practicing. A line here, a curve there - I wasn't much of an artist, and carving with an imaginary tool that floated in the air wasn't anything like doodling with a pen on a piece of paper, but I was able to make a recognizable picture.

  It was a bee. It wasn't even a very good bee, just an oval with grooves in it for the stripes, and a couple of blobby wing shapes at the top, stick-antennae, and a line out the butt for a stinger.

  It took me an hour.

  I filled it in and went to watch my next pair of rooms dig themselves out.

  ---

  Greyex added another piece of wood to the fire. It crackled and spat, and something went pop, and fat sparks jumped out, but that was what fires did. They crackled and spat and went pop and sparks jumped out, and if the ground wasn't clear, sometimes those sparks made new fires.

  The ground was clear. He'd made sure of it.

  "Do you really need that?" Taaku asked.

  Greyex turned his head. The kobold was hunched over itself in the shelter. The shelter wasn't very close to the fire at all. Unlike some of his former neighbors, Greyex learned from mistakes.

  "It's warm," Greyex said. "And it makes food taste better."

  "It's bright," Taaku complained, "and it makes food smell funny." Its tail lashed behind it, swishing against the ground and hitting something with a crunch.

  "Do I need to fix the bed?" Greyex asked.

  "...yes."

  Greyex added another piece of wood to the fire. Then he scooted some of the rocks he'd found a bit closer to the flames, and took the sturdy stick he'd been using to dig things up and cleared some more space around it.

  Then he went into the shelter and fixed the bed. By feel. Because it was dark.

  The leaves were scattered all over, but the sticks were still mostly where they should be, so it didn't take long.

  "The fire makes you happy?" Taaku asked. Its voice was slower, slurred, and it lay closer to the ground.

  "It makes me feel safe," Greyex admitted. "You tired?"

  "...yes."

  He pointed at the bed. The kobold slunk into the leaves and curled up into a tight ball. Greyex shoved some leaves over it to trap heat and then went back outside to continue enjoying his fire.

  He toasted some grubs, just because he could, and they tasted so much better that way, all hot and crunchy on the outside and warm and gooey on the inside. Eventually, though, his eyes grew heavy and he pushed his rocks up right against the fire, then waited for it to go low and lower and lower, but not out, and went to bed.

  ...

  The fire was still there when Greyex woke up in the morning, and he used a stick to move the rocks farther apart again, then stirred up the hot ashes, then put some grass on the glowing bits until the grass glowed, too.

  Then he put some wood on the fire.

  Then he walked off to go hunt for food and building materials and firewood.

  Assorted food bugs, including some that weren't food unless they were cooked, went in his bag. Moss and lichens and other dry (or dryable) things went in the basket that hung next to it, off the rope he'd tied around his waist to hold things bags (and his loincloth) on him.

  He found a nest of baby rabbits by literally stepping in it, and those went in the bag (and the basket, and his hands) and he rushed back to his hut with them.

  One went into Taaku, who claimed to be full with just one, and the rest went onto the fire, after he twisted their heads so that they stopped moving, in one way or another. He experimented. Greyex had never been one of the better cooks in the village, but there was no one here better - Taaku wasn't going to cook; it wouldn't even go near the fire, and besides, it was sleeping and still sick.

  He left the baby rabbits to cook and went back to searching for materials. As he dragged bits of plants, and the occasional useful looking rock, back to the fire, Greyex let himself look forward to a hot meal. Every time he came back, the meat smelled better, until finally, three loads of stuff later, it smelled so good that he had to take it off the fire and set it on a cold rock to cool enough for him to eat.

  There was so much, he couldn't even finish it. It was a little burnt on the outside, and a little raw on the inside, and some of the animals had cooked unevenly (maybe because he hadn't been turning it around while it cooked?). He put the rawest ones back on the fire, maybe a little farther away from the heat, and sat and watched them cook while he mashed plants with rocks to get at the stringy stuff inside, then spun that stringy stuff into cords.

  Every so often, he used a couple of sticks to turn the meat around so that it heated more evenly.

  When he got hungry again, the food was a lot tastier.