Matthias had to actually recover from the deluge of mana he received from the dragon’s death. It left him feeling bloated, like going from an empty stomach to painfully overfull far too quickly.

  “Well, damn,” he muttered. “You got your wish, Lucy. All the lurkers are dead.”

  “That… that should not have happened,” his fairies said in unison. “How did you get attacked without warning?”

  “I honestly think the dragon was just passing through,” Matthias admitted. Even as he spoke, he spent some of the excess mana neutralizing the acidity of the water and restoring it to its natural pH before it could spread too far. He’d been working to contain the damage even during the fight. “I think the dungeon that sent it thought they were being cheeky by pathing a dragon over our dungeon. So both sides probably saw a dragon get deployed—and then watched it vanish here.”

  “That could make things complicated,” Chloe noted.

  “I mean, it’s definitely going to raise questions,” Lucy agreed. “More scrutiny, at the very least.”

  “I don’t think ancient dragons will be the real threat in this war,” Matthias said. “That monster was wildly inefficient.”

  “What do you mean?” Lucy asked.

  “I got nearly enough mana from it to tier up my rarity,” he confessed. “They overclocked it—artificially made it stronger.”

  “What?” Lucy asked again.

  “They kept infusing it with magic,” Matthias explained. “They created a creature that could soak mana like a sponge, then just kept dumping more in until it couldn’t hold any more.”

  “So you think that dragon was a failure?” Chloe asked.

  “I mean, look at how fast my hydra killed it,” Matthias pointed out.

  “Point taken,” Chloe conceded.

  “I mean, the hydra has more experience,” Lucy added. “You had it on a floor built around giant beasts fighting. It’s used to battling things close to its own tonnage. That dragon probably never faced a real threat.”

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  “Valid point,” Matthias admitted. “Still, I just checked—I can make a copy of that hydra for a tenth of the mana I gained from killing the dragon. That should tell you the difference between a creature built for combat and one built just to absorb mana.”

  “Well,” Chloe said, “if it had been capable of flight and hadn’t started the fight in your hydra’s jaws, things might have gone very differently. Dragons aren’t just big and tough—they’re magical artillery. Your hydra is a brawler with almost no magical potential by comparison. Versatility matters.”

  Matthias sighed as he studied the blueprint he’d salvaged from the sea dragon’s remains. It wasn’t quite enough yet for him to experiment with dragon creation, but he could at least unwind its genome to identify the base species.

  With another sigh, Matthias prepared to move his Primeval Hydra back to the third floor—only to pause and laugh.

  The hydra was playing.

  As Matthias rebuilt the coastal ecosystems, the massive creature watched the explosion of color from new fish and coral with childlike fascination. It clearly enjoyed being submerged. Despite its dense bone structure, it was just barely buoyant, occasionally sinking before slowly floating back to the surface. It wasn’t hunting, and it didn’t see the smaller races as food—though it did seem to enjoy chasing turtles.

  “I guess I can leave it for now,” Matthias allowed.

  With a mental sigh, he pulled back his focus and took in the dungeon as a whole instead of fixating on individual sections. He basked in the ebb and flow of life and energy for a while.

  “I think I can leave the rest as it is too,” he mused. “It’s all chaos and competition, but nothing feels out of sync.”

  He turned his attention to the Forbidden Garden and watched quietly for a minute.

  “What do I do now?” Matthias finally asked.

  “What do you mean?” Chloe replied.

  “I mean… everything’s running smoothly,” he said. “For the first time in a while, I don’t need to tweak anything. I can just let it run.”

  “So you have free time?” Lucy asked.

  “I guess,” Matthias said. “All I can really do is wait until I hit capacity and rank up. I’m pretty sure I’ve done everything I can within my current limits.”

  “Good,” Chloe said. “You finally get to take a break.”

  “Good thing that wasn’t a real ancient dragon,” Lucy added with a sigh. “Just an elder dragon. Ancient ones are twice the size.”

  The peaceful mood shattered as the implication landed.

  “…Okay,” Matthias said slowly. “First thing I’m doing when I rank up is making a bigger monster.”

  “Or,” Chloe countered, “a smaller but more potent one.”

  “Or lots of little monsters that act like one big monster,” Lucy suggested. “Just not bugs or crabs. Please tell me you didn’t put lurkers back in the ocean. They can stay extinct.”

  With a defeated sigh, Matthias slipped back into blueprint mode, planning for the future while he waited for his mana capacity to fill.