Jacob watched with strange fascination as a large ant ripped from the body of an animal like a xenomorph. Back on Earth he would have begun gagging from the gore, but here he didn’t feel any repulsion. Maybe this was because he lacked a physical body, maybe becoming a dungeon lord had changed in ways he hadn’t noticed.
Only one of the ants had survived, the other’s hosts died before they fully developed. He commanded the ant to start eating the corpse that spawned it and the other corpses too. He had hoped to have multiple ant queens as there was a chance they would die from the future waves. In the end, he could only make due with what he had.
He had only forty soul points left after creating ant queens, though a few magic beasts died since then and gave him more. The ant needed the characteristics [Sharp Pincers] and [Strong Exoskeleton] just to defend itself, it would need other more expensive attributes to be able to control its young and create value for the dungeon.
Two characteristics together cost over thirty soul points, which was more than a little expensive for an ant that was so small compared to the bear. Size or usability didn’t matter when it came to mutation. Mutating the bear or a small worm cost the same amount per characteristic.
Was it worth him spending this money here instead of elsewhere? No, Jacob decided. The small starting size for the ant was used by him to reduce the cost and strain of spawning. It would take much longer than the time before the third wave and maybe even the fourth wave before the ant queen was ready to fight.
It would be better for him to enthrall the magic deer. Plant magic was connected to health and growth, which was one of the reasons it had some healing spells. This magic could also be used to speed up the ant queen’s growth. This had been his plan, but it was thrown into question when only one ant was successfully born.
There was the problem of the deer being a magic beast though. The bear that he had gotten wasn’t a magic beast, instead it was a mundane if strong animal. This allowed him to enthrall it for relatively cheap, especially after weakening it first. This wouldn’t be the case for a magic beast.
It was hard for him to weaken the monster through attacks when it can heal itself, and it would take far too long to starve it. Even if he brought it safely to death’s door to get the best discount, its naturally stronger stats—specifically the resistance stats—made it as costly as the bear at half energy.
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He sighed as he realized he would need to use…more extreme techniques. This game wasn’t new and there were a number of strategies to minimize cost for expensive acquisitions. Starving was his preferred method because of its slowness, as it allowed him to not need to pay as much attention.
If he were to, say, seal off the cell the deer was in so that there was no fresh air? A difference of ten seconds could mean the difference between a new minion and a corpse too expensive to resurrect. However, the damage caused by suffocation was difficult to overcome except for creatures with exceptional regeneration or immunities.
The deer didn’t have any of that. Its magic would help it endure longer than most, but eventually it would run out of mana to strengthen itself. If he planned it right and used [Enthrall] while the deer was unconscious, he might be able to pay 12 soul points to enthrall it with a good chance of success.
This was going to be difficult though. The dungeon fairy was slow, meaning that if something went wrong and he didn’t have the right foresight, there was nothing he could do. This was going to be a delicate operation.
He marked the front of the deer’s cell to be closed up. Slowly, the dungeon fairy appeared and started to bend and warp the stone and cover the cell’s air holes with stone. He watched through the rock walls the state of the deer and kept the dungeon fairy close.
The oxygen in the air didn’t disappear immediately, and for what felt like a minute the deer didn’t seem to mind. Then it started to struggle to breathe. It started wheezing and floundering as there wasn’t any air near it.
Then its horns glowed with magical power and leaves grew out of them. Jacob realized that with plant magic, the deer probably had a way to create its own oxygen. There were two ways this could go, either the deer was able to both enough oxygen and mana to sustain itself, or it would run out.
From what he remembered from the memories of biology class that were covered in dust in his mind, the leaves on the deer wouldn’t be enough. This was, however, magic. There was also the possibility that due to the beast’s magical nature, it might not need as much oxygen as he would think.
More likely, the deer would run out of mana. Mana was a hard thing to keep track of. In the game there was a mana bar above an entity’s head, just below their health bar, but here that information is in their aura. The volume of the aura of a creature seemed to be connected to how much mana they had.
Mana was also something that was hard to recover. This was why so many of the spells used by the magic beasts were weak, anything stronger would drain them too fast. As he watched the deer’s aura dissipate as it tried in vain to break out of its prison, he saw that mana was its weakness.
The deer ran out of mana and the green glow around its leaf antlers disappeared. It only took a few more moments for it to start panicking. The deer started to use its own life-force as mana, harming itself in the process to create some more breathable air. It didn’t have enough life-force though.
The deer fell on the ground and started to black-out from suffocation. Jacob waited just a little bit to ensure that the deer had gone unconscious before he commanded the dungeon fairy to unseal and he used the [Enthrall] spell.
The cost was higher than he liked, but he didn’t have time to be picky. While the deer was at its weakest, its mind was assaulted and it lacked the strength beyond its natural resistance to fight it.
