Fifty mana for a completely normal useless slime? That was twice what Avery has gotten from this ball of goop, and according to this tutorial it was over two days worth of starting dungeon's mana regeneration. What even was this nonsense.

A dungeon was supposed to have the ability to generate monsters at a rate greater than their natural occurrence rate, and with more powerful creatures to boot, with mana left over to constantly expand and excavate rare minerals. Instead of mindless, harmless, pathetic goop, there would be a variety of multicolored, easily distinguishable variants of slime working to expand the cave structure the dungeon was based in, eventually reaching a critical mass of monsters to begin sending the weaker ones out into the world to collect materials for further growth. Rather than simply inundating the location with basic slimes, an equivalent dungeon would release the normal green slimes, but support them with yellow sticky slimes, acidic orange slimes, and the actually dangerous blue hunter slimes. The appearance of base quantities of pallet swapped monsters would allow the people living around the new dungeon to find out they were in fact near a monster spawning ground, at which point they could post for adventures to show up and, depending on the severity of the monsters, either clean up the patrolling outliers or delve into the depths to cut off incursions at the source.

For a dungeon that made the mistake of becoming a slime nest, one sufficiently skilled adventure with a greatsword would be enough to completely clear out a large nest of five hundred, even taking into account the far larger and more dangerous variants that would show up in such a dungeon. Other than an evolved Queen Slime, none of the monsters would have any sort of advanced cost capabilities to surprise an experienced fighter. From brown, hairy slimes to giant rolling rock slimes to cowardly purple splitting spitter slimes up to crystalline spiked slimes, there was nothing that couldn't be dealt with by stepping to the right as they attacked and then stabbing them.

Those were the kind of monsters Avery could accept having a high cost in mana. Basic slimes multiplied more than daily though! If she wanted to get close to matching that kind of reproduction rate, Avery would need a mana regeneration of at least five per hour, significantly more than what the tutorial was suggesting she reach before it would go on to the next stage.

On the other hand, maybe it was set up so that each action undertaken in the category would be enough to make significant progress toward completing the goal in question. If increasing the sized of the cave made the mana regeneration rate increase by a significant fraction of one per hour, depending on how much removal it took to get to that point it was entirely possible Avery was overreacting slightly to the massive difference between her goal and what she currently had.

Mentally nodding to herself, she reactivates the ‘demolish’ option, and pans the map over to the entrance. If nothing else, she could square off the rounded edge of the tunnel and make it so the entire place didn't slope invested to the center. If she remembered her geometry correctly, just modifying the cylindrical tunnel from a circular gap in the unworked stone into a solidly cuboid structure would increase the total volume of the excavated space by approximately twenty-seven percent. If she then used that fraction to reverse engineer the mana gotten before the rounding had taken place to determine how much that hallway was providing, she could further use the volume of the cylinder to find the amount of mana provided for each square meter of cavern. Lots of math, but wizards were made for thinking.

Pressing her will against the side of the tunnel, a cubed meter of stone is ‘selected’. Somehow, she can feel how deep she would be demolishing into the rock if she used the option, and could tell that attached to the cube she would be removing were four other completely generic squares of stone. Checking the demolition cost for this one block of stone, Avery finds that one cubic meter costs ten mana to excavate. That might be huge.

A wizard required quite a bit of magical energy to manipulate rock. Judging by the value of her mana and soul, which Avery had no particular qualms about quantifying as the same material as mana, given that it was fairly well established academically that they were in fact made of the same thing, the spells a wizard would need to cast in order to manipulate rock would be about eighty percent of her soul’s composition, minus mana, so 1600 of what the core system was using as points of mana. That, depending on the power of the wizard in question, would manipulate anywhere from half a cubic meter to… still less than a cubic meter. Now that Avery had stumbled into this possibility, taking over a dungeon core with this spell was a one way ticket to unlimited terraforming capabilities.

Curious, she shrinks down the selected area to one tenth the depth, and pulls the selector up to the surface of the stone face. The new meter by meter by .1 meter rectangle sits up against the stone surface, showing a different ‘color’ feeling section in the flat air, with the sections below and above feeling as it did before as the area melted back into the stonework. With that working, she decreases the thickness even further, to one centimeter thick. Unfortunately, it appears the demolition has a minimum cost of one unit of mana. Avery could work with this.

Back when it was in the gem, the slime had eaten a circle around the gem. It hadn’t gone into the ground, fortunately enough, but the chamber at the end of the tunnel was odd enough to throw off any basic calculations that assumed it was a cylindrical object still. Avery figured that was about three meters worth of space. That left the fifteen meters ahead of the gem to the cave entrance.

Floor to ceiling, the tunnel was about two meters high, and as it was circular it was the same in width. Avery could use that as a radius of one meter, and then take the fifteen meters for an easy calculation of fifteen pi cubic meters as the base volume. To minimize mana expenditure and time wasted, she shaped the demolition to be a centimeter by ten meters by two meters, making it a two mana cost cut she could use four times before cleaning up the remaining stone by whatever means the demolition system would allow her. Eight mana later, the left and right segments of the roof hang on by nothing but the stone on either wall, entrance and back of the cave. Forming a two meter by two meter by quarter meter chunk, the demolishing segmenter pulls out enough rock that as the ceiling breaks jaggedly in the back of the cave, there is enough room in the front that the blanket covering the entrance isn’t even ruffled, much less the now-thin border between the tunnel and the canyon itself. That cost Avery another point of mana, and she spends one more to even up the back portion of the ten meter long corridor covered in broken, jagged rocks.

For completing a standard corridor, you have gained an additional point of Mana Regeneration. Continue to expand for additional upgrades.

Hm, at least that was only a minus C to her previously established equation.

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o

Uldem was a tracker. He wasn’t the best at it yet, but when the kebab seller kicked up a fuss about someone stealing all of his chicken and offered a reward for retrieval of the merchandise or the thief, he was nearby. It also didn’t take much skill to notice the clearly unlocked back door, or the scratches on the cobblestones where claws had recently gone over them. Two others had joined in on the hunt for the mysterious thief, and though they were simply following him as he followed the tracks, he did not begrudge their company. In all likelihood, one human alone was not enough to subdue any manner of monster, as these tracks indicated they were in pursuit of. Barring those who dedicated their entire lives to combat, a monster would be more agile and more deadly than even those who trained to fight them. Uldem had spent time training to hunt regular animals, and was a fair hand with a bow, but a monster could power through a direct strike with an arrow to maul a hunter in moments.

It had been less than a minute since the theft, and the group was quickly reaching an open area wherein they would be able to spot their quarry. Uldem stopped before a narrow choke point between the church and one of the businesses that had built itself in the shadow the cathedral to form a strategy with the two others. A dwarf named Thackam was apparently a cleric of the god of Hierarchy, with a focus on, unsurprisingly, earth magic, and an elf named Ravavan, which sounded ridiculous to him, who also conformed to racial stereotypes and fought at close range with a longsword. Uldem suggested that the elf confront the thief first, as dwarves tended to be slow, only keeping up with Uldem due to him moving carefully so as not to lose the trail, while he stayed back to provide support should the ‘elegant combatant’ require assistance.

Arrangements established, the new adventuring group moved out to confront a monster on a bridge.