Even when whatever bits of my mind finished sorting the various inputs were done, everything I could see was full of bright, shifting lights. Ansae herself was actually painful to look at, and the multitasking I had been musing over before was shot entirely to hell by a thousand colors going every which way. And then I felt like an idiot because I could just turn it off.

Suddenly I could actually comprehend what was going on, and found I’d missed a great deal. Shayma was outside the city, headed up along the river, and as she glanced back I could see there were some twenty or thirty people with her. So she’d managed to convince Iniri?

And Ansae was sitting on a chair on the porch of the cottage, whittling at a piece of tayanten wood. [Wisdom] told me that it would be an incredibly bad idea to let this continue. Either she’d wait until Shayma and the rest arrived, and who knew what would happen then, or she’d get bored. And given that she could probably blow the entire dungeon to kingdom come, I didn’t want that either.

But she seemed interested in staying. To be fair, the lake cottage was nicer than the blue-lit cave from before, even if it did lack gold and jewels. Which gave me an idea.

What good was a dungeon without a dragon?

My mana income was maybe barely enough for a test of the spatial manipulation effects, so I figured it’d be worth trying to make a very, very large room for her.

I cleared out a fairly significant room to start, and dumped spare experience into the Expansion spatial field, which claimed it’d let me make a room bigger on the inside. In fact I maxed it out, taking up half my banked experience, but apparently it couldn’t turn into the next tier without something else to merge with. Probably its companion, Compression, which was meant for shrinking the size of a room. But still, that meant that the space inside improved to a ten-to-one ratio.

I put it rather far down from the cottage, since I didn’t want to overlap the ‘human’ and ‘dragon’ areas, and I had no idea how much room they’d each end up taking.

The field began to draw on my mana income, then actually surpassed it, but with nearly five thousand banked mana after my level-up I wasn’t that worried. I was, however, fairly annoyed as the expansion drew on stone resources, which wasn’t covered by the description of the field. At least I had plenty to spare.

I wound up with a room five hundred meters on a side, and no doubt due to the spatial shenanigans it showed no signs of collapsing. As a bonus, once the final size was reached the field...flexed, then solidified and stopped drawing mana. It was permanent now.

Time to turn it into habitation.