“Vola, stop releasing the bunnies! If I catch you letting the small ones out one more time…” The small girl cowered in front of her mother. The woman looked down on the frail girl with an imperious gaze. The girl simpered and nodded with teary eyes. Felicia had to work very hard to keep herself from sighing. So much wasted effort, so little results… She swore to herself once again that she would never have kids.

The moment the girl turned around, her sad and repenting expression turned into conniving glee. Her mother transformed from an ice queen into a doting mother hen, smiling at the girl as she walked into the animal pen. Felicia thought about saying something, but seeing the girl stuff a small rabbit under her blouse the moment she reached their habitat, she just gave up. The two boys trundled by, their arms filled with large bundles of grass and leaves. Sue excused herself as she carried heavy buckets up the stairs. Felicia rubbed at her nose. The pungent stink of animal faeces was a smell she really couldn't get used to.

So she walked up the stairs again. “Hey Agren, what’s the number?” she whispered under her breath.

“Ninety-four. I still don’t understand, and I still don’t like it, but your methods are efficient, I guess.”

“Aww, look who is a big baby. Grown-ups can freely admit they are wrong, you know. You are growing nearly a hundred times faster than normal, why do you refuse to see this?”

“I do see it. I just don’t like it. Or understand it.” Agren then started ranting again. The stone had been elated and depressed in equal measure over the past few days. The fact that the amount of mana he was gathering had skyrocketed with the implementation of a rather simple mass breeding project did only lift the stones mood temporarily. He was happy occasionally, but then he kept being hung up on the fact that none of this was how he was meant to grow. But he liked to eat and grow, this aspect of his simpler mind was as unchanging as he developed, so the massive amounts of power he was accumulating made him happy. Then he seemed to realize his own dungeon was an abomination and he was all mopey again.

“Then stop grumping.”

“Then allow me to make badgers,” was his biting reply.

“No.”

“Then I won’t stop grumping.”

Taking in a deep breath of air, Felicia strode through the lush forest. The past few days contained a lot of hectic business that did a great job of distracting her, but a small spiteful part of her soul still resented the green badger for chewing on her arm. She idly rubbed the rows of nearly vanished scars while striding through the cleared underbrush. Instead of recreating the forest in its previous wild appearance, the entire hexagonal prison had a much more cultured feel. She felt the growing layer of traditional ground cover under her feet as she emerged into one of the many small farms. Rows of fast-growing leafy greens swayed in the breeze, making for a rather lovely sight. Agren held his mouth, despite their relative closeness to the wall that he seemed afraid of still. The small and waifish boy running his hands through the plants while smiling serenely finished painting a picture that struck a sensitive nerve in Felicia’s heart.

Determining that she has done enough useless moping for the next few months, she snaps her thought processes back into work mode. “Right there, I think.”

“Stop walking. Just don’t get close to the wall, okay? I’ll do what you ask, just keep me away.”

Felicia cast another questioning gaze at the innocuous-seeming wall before nodding and giving concise directions. The farm below their feet had been growing as all of her employees got used to the workload. Efficiency was increased each day as she optimised schedules, merged similar tasks and reprimanded the kids. Sue had been a model employee. Her offspring had not. The stout woman had been a midwife. Her husband had been the towns baker and local handyman during the afternoon. The tough village life had formed Sue into a no-nonsense woman with a will of iron. Her husband had died not a month ago during an Empire pacification action before they were carted far from house and hearth only to be dumped inside this odd place. Felicia had nothing but praise for the way the woman had kept her kids together, showing none of the trauma and listlessness that would have been expected after traumatic experiences like this.

Felicia had heard occasional bouts of silent sobbing during the night but had decided not to comment on it. Her own suspicious lack of sleeplessness and the massive amount of work that still needed to be done kept her from pondering facts like these apart from using them in her own clinical calculations.

These calculations had led her to stand outside, looking over the relatively small field of growing crops. “Yuuk, come over here. Bring the basket.” Waving the kid over, she quietly ordered Agren to finish their latest project. The ground shook slightly as a round stone pillar emerged from the soil at the edge of the field. The top of the smooth structure vanished, leaving a dark hole in the middle. “Throw the fully grown crops in here. This connects to the feed bunker below.”

The small boy’s eyes lit up. He had been complaining about sore legs for days now, to be specific, he had complained about the number of stairs he needed to climb every single day since they arrived four days ago. “Thanks, miss Fel.” The boy’s bright and thankful smile didn’t really do much for Felicia. She just nodded and walked to the other fields, silently discussing with Agren how much new field they needed to clear up with the expanding battery cages. Any form of humane animal society from Earth would have had conniptions at the way the magical stone and businesswoman kept trying to squeeze more animals inside every single square meter. The only reason they hadn’t gone full evil overlord mega-farm was that happy and moving animals seemed to be producing more mana than paralysed bio-batteries. A small room under her own bedroom contained an array of contraptions and animal-specific restraints that she wasn’t proud of.

On the one hand, she had been brought up to think needless animal cruelty a crime. On the other hand, she simply had to know if there were more efficient ways of mana harvesting available. All in all, the optimal mana generation habitat seemed to be a cross between free-range and mass producing battery style animal keeping. The only thing she could optimise after these ratio’s had been perfected through experimentation, was the way food could be supplied.

The initial process had been pure hard work. The masses of animals in the underground pens consumed and shit immense amounts of plant matter. More experiments had shown her that Agren materializing and dematerialising the plant and excrement pretty much cancelled out any mana gain he got from the wild animals. So she had hauled large bundles of leaves and grasses down the narrow stairway at first, letting Agren absorb all the shit. Having five helpers allowed her to optimise mana generation and minimise mana spending even more.

She nodded at Sue and the two boys as they scattered manure across the freshly emptied fields while she walked by. Felicia visualized the multiple levels of farms below her feet and ordered Agren to make another feed chute. “Throw the harvested plants inside this one. This leads directly to the insect pens, so no need for further distribution.”

“Yes mistress,” replied Sue.

“Yess miss Fel!” replied both boys as they hurried over to the large pile of iceberg-lettuce-like-crops, obviously fleeing from the task of having to spread animal shit. Seu cracked her back and huffed at the two kids, but couldn't help the smile that stole across her face. The two kids first peered down into the narrow well. They started yelling and shouting the moment they noticed the distinct echoing effect happening inside the smooth stone tube. She coughed once, which shook the boys from their play. They started throwing the pile of lettuce into the feeding tube with gusto then, making it another of their games.

Felicia was about to reprimand the woman for being too soft, but something stopped her. Instead, she just nodded to the mother of four and made her way over to the other fields, installing more feed chutes. She then spent an hour updating the spreadsheets on her phone. She adjusted her calculating model with the updated information that harvested feed no longer needed to be carried down. Cutting the required amount of hours down to one-tenth, she concluded that they could add a few more floors of animals to the current farms. The fields would need to be enlarged again, but Agren could do that task without costing her precious work hours. Planting the small and fast-growing seeds could be done at minimal mana costs. The fact that the plants grew to full maturity in days, if not hours, seemed rather strange to her at first. Then Agren had told her that he was helping them along, his very aura somehow allowing the plants to grow at speeds multiple factors above their non-dungeon influenced counterparts.

Walking back to the stairwell going down into the underground complex, she caught sight of Vola. “Come here,” she commanded with a snap in her voice.

The girl shook as she startled, her youthful face immediately showing a guilty expression. Felicia didn't even need to see the suspicious wriggling beneath the girls' oversized blouse to know what she was doing. Her head hung low as the girl followed behind Felicia, pouting hard. “I don’t wanna.”

“You don’t want to what?”

“Help the animals anymore.”

“Why don't you want to bring to animals to the park anymore?”

“I heard one squeal yesterday. It did it for a long time. It was screaming.”

Felicia had been feeling on top of her game again. The same sense of power and accomplishment she used to have when seeing the fruits of her management blooming vanished in the face of this little girl. The problem of having to kill the animals had stumped both Agren and Felicia when they first started this breeding farm. Agren could forcefully kill the critters, but that would once again cost about as much mana as he would have gained from absorbing them. Killing all the animals one by one was something Felicia was not keen on either. The exhaustion-fueled mice murdering spree she had gone on not a week ago was still fresh in her mind, and she wasn’t keen on having to become some form of an animal executioner.

Then Felicia had remembered hearing about traditional magical dungeons. She didn't know a lot about the books, stories and games these beings had come from, but she did remember that they used to employ traps. Pitfall traps with spikes at the bottom, for example. So she had gleefully ordered Agren to make an automated animal killing machine. It consisted out of a long well with a lot of sharp spikes at the bottom.

Felicia laid a hand on the thin girl’s shoulder as she crouched in front of the sniffling girl. “Look here. When all the animals grow up, they want to go see their grandparents. Do you have grandparents?”

“Yeah. Pops and Gran.”

“Would you like to see them again.”

An unknown emotion came across Vola’s face then. Something Felicia could not empathise with. “Y-yeah.”

“And all the animals below us would also like to see their grandparents again. You’re helping them meet them, isn't that good?” The confused crinkling of the girl's brow wasn't acceptance yet, but at least Felicia was making progress with this rambling attempt at soothing the child. “When those bunnies are all grown up, they also want to go see the world. They can’t do that here. So you need to help them see the outside world.”

“They are going outside?”

“Yes. The noises the animals make when you put them in the release tunnel means that they are very happy.”

Vola sniffled some more as she rubbed at her eyes. “R-really?”

“Totally. Come, there are a lot of animals that would love to go outside. Will you help me set them free?”

“Okay,” was the quiet reply.

Felicia and Vola spent the rest of the day putting fully grown animals in the release chute. Vola kissed each one on the forehead, waving them goodbye as the critters fell to their inevitable death and subsequent absorption by dungeon core.