I was the happiest I’ve ever been, and all of it was because I finally finished expanding the 100th floor to the new size it could be. This floor, before I reached my new rank, was 27,000 kilometres in radius.

  It took me a whole year to expand, which was significantly longer than I wanted to take, because my plan was to have all of the top 10 floors meant for planets expanded—or at least as many as I could manage.

  Now, thanks to my Space Expansion skill and, more importantly, my new trait Expansive Space, my floor radius was now 1.2 billion kilometres.

  It’s a number that I didn’t fully understand—how I could be capable of making a floor so big. I could understand why I didn’t get this trait sooner. Even if it synergized so well with me, I would have been simply too weak to support it. But now... now I could.

  It was amazing. And in the end, I could expand all my floors like this. Of course, not to the same degree, because the size of the base floor was as important. What this did do was fix absolutely everything—but also brought a few problems.

  Mainly, we didn’t have enough teleportation devices to steal a sun. But I was so going to do that, because now I could easily fit one. In fact, thanks to my dungeon rules and my Gravity Control skill, I should be able to fit into this floor an entire solar system.

  Of course, my scientists did say that there are huge solar systems that are beyond me, but normal ones like the one we just left should be able to fit—even if the orbits were going to be a bit tighter. And to my surprise, you could even add two planets to the same orbit with them being relatively stable.

  I was already slowing down as fast as I could because we were approaching our first new solar system. I wondered if it was going to like its new home inside my floor.

  It was going to take us a bit of time to capture every celestial object that was big enough to have its own celestial core. This also sped up our timeline quite a bit, and I was pretty sure we would only have to steal about two solar systems for me to be fully supported.

  But I already had ten spherical floors, so why not capture ten of them. Should give us plenty of leeway, and I would have plenty of new floors by the time I reached the next rank.

  That was another thing that took time to figure out, but I finally did—it would take 50 new floors until I could reach the next rank. That was more than I expected. With my current size, I could only barely fit 200 floors, so I would definitely need to expand myself so I could fit more floors.

  This would mean that the outer defenses needed to be cut in a way that I could expand myself quite a lot, and then we needed to start designing new outer defenses from the very beginning. This was going to be a bit annoying, but it was better done now, before we had more layers built than we currently had on the outer defenses.

  All of this was going to take a lot of time, so first I would need to steal the 10 solar systems, then we can go into hiding so I could increase my size in peace.

  We were still a few weeks away from reaching the solar system, but I could already see the planets. This solar system was remarkably similar, although it had one less gas giant and one more rocky planet. All of them were going to be mine.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  The Academy, a lot of adventures, and every civilization who could help were constructing teleportation devices. I also made many, many, many monsters to help with the construction effort, and by the time we have captured the rest of the planets, we should have enough to capture the sun.

  We started from the very edge of the solar system when we reached it. There was a small planet here, even smaller than some of the moons, but it had a celestial core, so it was coming with me.

  Millions of my monsters swarmed outside when my territory covered the entire moon. I specifically designed them for this purpose, so they were extremely efficient at delivering the teleportation devices into the correct positions.

  When the teleportation devices were in place, I channelled mana through all of them, powering them up and then pulling the moon into the 100th floor. It looked so incredibly tiny here, but I was already using my gravity manipulation to bring it to the correct location. Right now, it would sit still, but when the sun was finally in the floor, it would be time to make them start orbiting the sun.

  The next planet was a small cold gas giant. While capturing the moon only took a week, it took two months to do the same amount of work on this gas giant, and it was the smallest here. Yet every time I captured a celestial core, the burden and the feeling of mana slipping through my fingers, as Rafe put it, slowed down just a bit.

  This was an all-hands-on-deck situation, so there wasn’t much adventuring going on, but everyone understood the need for this. The craftsmen were the happiest, because they received an endless supply of free materials. While this job wasn’t going to make them rich, the experience of working with such materials would help them immensely.

  Also, people were asking if these new planets could be territories accessible or even winnable by the organisations and nations. I wasn’t so sure about that, as I really wanted to start experimenting with this myself.

  But there was going to be ten solar systems, so I couldn’t see why there couldn’t be one accessible to the rest of the dungeon inhabitants, even if these new places would be incredibly hostile and would kill most creatures and adventurers almost immediately.

  One by one, more and more planets were teleported into my floor, until two years later—after having picked up three gas giants, four rocky planets, and nearly 400 moons with celestial cores—we were finally near the sun.

  I needed to stay quite far away, but unfortunately I couldn’t be too far, so every moment of staying so close to the sun was a struggle. The shield of life was barely keeping us from being cooked and keeping myself in one spot with the massive gravitational pull the sun was difficult.

  I couldn’t move because I needed to expand my territory, and even this was tough. The problem was how big the sun actually was. For a bit there, I wasn’t sure that I could actually expand my territory to cover the entire sun, but just a few days ago, the entire sun was finally encompassed.

  The problem now was, no matter how much I tried to push, I couldn’t push it further, and with the current size, my territory wasn’t far enough away from the other side of the sun for the teleportation devices to survive being so close.

  Once again, I was so incredibly grateful when my creatures and adventurers—the ones in diamond rank—all got together, and each of them went to protect one of the teleportation devices. Because even with the amount of monsters I made, there simply weren’t enough of the strong ones to protect all these teleportation devices. I will fix that problem for the next time.

  It was a true struggle that took nearly a year, but when I felt the final teleportation device completely powered up, I pulled as hard as I could, and the sun was inside the 100th floor. For a moment there, I thought that perhaps it was going to pull me and my entire dungeon into it, but it slowly stabilized and, to my complete surprise, started to feel comfortable inside my floor.

  We had done it, and I needed some time to relax, because this was the toughest thing I had ever done. This took way more mana and concentration than I ever thought it would, but it was immediately helpful.

  Because even though I spent a lot of mana, thanks to the reduced effect of the mana slippage, thanks to so many celestial cores, especially the sun’s, we still had about 10 years before my core ran empty.

  All of my monsters, creatures, and adventurers were returning, and I was starting to pull back my territory once again. In the meanwhile, I finally started to move all of the planets and moons I had in my 100th floor, so they would develop orbits.

  I didn’t have as much room as the real solar system had, so everything was squished down a bit, but even doing this, there was definitely room for more planets to be added to this solar system.

  Perhaps I could do that myself, although it would take a lot of mana and time, and there was the problem of me not being able to make celestial cores. Perhaps in the future that will change, but this wasn't the case for now and I believed it wouldn’t be for quite a while.

  Well, there was nothing else to do but start expanding my 99th floor so it would be almost as big as the 100th, so I would have room for another solar system. And of course, it was time to start heading towards our next target.