As much as I’d love to launch straight into the construction of new biome rooms or settling the enormous ravine, I must take care of my own security first.

Though I see no reason not to go ahead and start imbuing the new territory with my domain. My multitasking capabilities have burgeoned in the past few weeks and with Mr. Normal’s latest communique, it’s become trivial. So much so that I can essentially treat domain acquisition as a passive process.

So I do exactly that, this way my job will be easier when the time comes to develop the new environment. Of course, it could take weeks or even months to complete because I still don’t know just how long the canyon really is. That’s ok.

Right now my number one priority is making my dungeon more defensible. If I’m going to be establishing a new point of entry into my home, I want to be prepared to deal with the possible consequences. Furthermore, those strange rat-shark-bat-human people (I really need a better name for them.) know where I live, and that doesn’t sit well with me.

Disregarding the population growth of my defending animals, I’m already in a much better position than I was when the mage attacked me. First, my dungeon is much larger and elaborate, making traversing it a days-long ordeal for a humanoid.

Second, my latest additions have been intentionally designed to inhibit human movement, with jagged outcroppings, difficult to scale cliffs, and other treacherous terrain. I could have taken it to the next level with flooded regions and other water features which I’ve been neglecting, but I haven’t gotten there yet. The bog at the lowermost region of my dungeon is more of a fluke than anything else, a product of my indifference to proper drainage.

And third, I’ve densely perforated my surroundings with branching passages, the extremities of which are much too narrow for someone to crawl through. Before, the mage was able to cast his fire spell at the two ends of the tunnel he was fighting in, thus incinerating the onrushing waves of bottlenecked defenders. Now, however, my access network thoroughly connects with every open space at many points. The result: I can send ants and other small attackers into chambers and large tunnels through frequently placed holes, thus forcing invaders to defend from all sides.

This is good, true, but it’s not enough. Previously, a single mage was able to inflict a devastating number of casualties. What could a coordinated group of mages do? An army?

I need traps, barriers, decoys, fail-safes, and other similar tricks. And I need them now.

Barriers are trivially easy for me to construct; I already use an extremely simple and practical design for my block depot.

Implementing dozens of these throughout my halls will not be hard, and the utility gained will be immense.

Could a mage use the compressed air explosion spell to bust through them just as the mage did with my fortifications? Certainly. Luckily, doing so requires a lot of mana, something which is a limited resource. As I’d learned from “Hilda Davy’s Mana Flowstence,” mages who don’t also happen to be dungeon cores, replenish their biological mana reserves by eating food. Some food is more mana dense than others. I don’t know how it’s done, but based on my observations, nearly every living organism stockpiles mana to some extent. Especially arcanasynthetic plants, which is every plant I’ve seen so far.

Mages get around their low mana capacity by carrying charged magicite crystals with them. The more they bring, the more mana they have available. But even this is limited, once a mage depletes all of their magicite crystals, they are powerless until they can recharge or replace them, an extremely lengthy process when using their own reserves to do so.

Essentially, a mage is unable to replenish a meaningful quantity of mana in a short time frame. Depending on the size of a mage’s collection, their diet, and their skill in mana manipulation, it can take weeks to months for them to fully refill their magicite crystals with mana they accumulate through their diets. For this reason, many mages find employment doing nothing more than recharging other people’s magicite. Either by doing so themselves, using costly/complex mana accumulator arrays, or with other more questionable methods, like soul magic; which I’m led to believe is synonymous with ‘necromancy,’ even though the latter has nothing to do with ‘raising the dead.’ What is soul magic good for, anyway?

The revelation that souls exist and are easily verifiable to boot rocked my world-view, but because I don’t yet know what they are fundamentally, I’m unable to leap to conclusions. Learning more about souls is on my ever-growing list of long-term priorities; perhaps it will shed some light on why or how I came to this world in the first place? Or maybe even the meaning of life, the universe, and everything? Yeah, not likely.

Back to barriers; if I put enough rolling stone vault doors between myself and any invaders, I can force them to waste much, or even all, of their precious mana trying to move forward. Additionally, it slows them down, giving me more time to prepare other defenses.

Now that I have the dead man’s wand, I can even use the spell at maximum capacity to destructively test the cylindrical slabs to fine-tune their thickness!

I have no issues with them remaining manual for now as I only plan to use them during incursions. I do love free-range migration, open gas exchange, and the hydrologic cycle. Oh, and mana, lots of yellow-flavored mana!

I shall set to work on it right away, it shouldn’t take too long to carve a few doorways, after all.

…

Well, I was half right, it certainly didn’t take long to construct a few doors.

But I may have gotten a little carried away…

You see, I’ve been at this for five days now. Nothing crazy, all things considered, but because of how easy it is to make these doors, it’s extremely overkill.

Though it bears mentioning that I didn’t get completely absorbed in my work as I’ve been known to do, I still made time to manage my stone shipments and even respond to inbound mail from Wes and the governors. Nothing of major importance there though.

Though they are about to start constructing a city wall and prison. That’s neat, more money for me I suppose.

In the future, I expect to have surplus fungiwood to export as well.

So how many doors did I build? Well...a little over two hundred.

But hey! The more the merrier, right? I don’t even plan on stopping there, I just have more urgent things to take care of now that this basic need has been met.

Namely traps. But I wonder which kind will be most effective in my situation?

One thing is for sure, there is no reason for me to waste my time on fiddly little things like crossbow traps, dumb spear thingies, and other such nonsense. Why bother with non-lethal or barely-lethal measures? I mean, come on, anyone trespassing in my dungeon won’t be pulling their punches, so why should I?

The best trap is one that works. That means lethality and reliability are king. On reliability, my design should be as simple as possible. Oh sure, I love complexifying things for no reason other than entertainment, just look at the large rope-drawn carts I’ve been building if you don’t believe me. But right now I’m in a time crunch, the longer I wait to fortify myself, the greater risk I’m in. I could get attacked at any moment, including now!

Naturally, I’ll have plenty of free time in the future to invent the most convoluted, roundabout, and silly weapons I could possibly fathom.

I have a few options. The first two are simple and easy; concealed pitfalls and targeted cave-ins/falling objects. I’ll take care of these first and then move on to my more...creative ideas.

Pitfall traps are so simple, yet so effective. If I litter them across my entire dungeon, not only will they likely claim a few lives, but they’ll also significantly slow down enemy advancement. Constantly checking your path for dangers is extremely tedious, and if I design them right, they’ll be undetectable!

As I’ve said before, these need to stay simple. Additionally, I want them to be both automatic and triggerable even within a mage’s control exclusion range.

I have a possible preliminary solution, though I’ve no doubt a superior design will come to mind at a later date. That’s fine, I can always make more!

A sturdy slab of stone held directly over a pit by four or so weak fungiwood pegs serving as standoffs. That is, the four pegs will horizontally poke out from the sides of the pit. Resting atop them will be the otherwise unsupported slab. When someone puts their full body weight onto the platform, the pegs will snap, causing the slab and whoever’s standing on it to plummet to their deaths. In natural bottlenecks, I can build even larger versions that require the combined weight of a whole group to trigger!

As long as I perform the necessary experiments, I can design the pegs with a thickness perfectly calibrated to snap at the desired stress.

Yeah, I know it’s a roundabout approach to a basic weight-sensitive pitfall, but this design has an important intrinsic property; a simple manual remote triggering system can be easily integrated.

Magic is out of the question simply because I don’t have enough wands for every one, but biological and mechanical triggers are still on the table. I will attach individual lines of hemp rope to each peg. The four lines of hemp rope will converge at the center of the pit where they’ll be tied to a central line running through a hole in the bottom of the pit.

This hole, and the rope running through it, will extend straight downwards for quite some length to exceed the inhibition range of a mage. The pegs will be mounted into the pitfall’s walls by narrow holes of a diameter slightly smaller than their own. This interference fit will keep them from popping out randomly but should allow me to quickly yank them free with a firm tug to the rope, thus causing the no-longer supported slab to plummet downwards.

The rope hole at the bottom of the pit will serve another purpose; it will be linked to my access network so that small dungeon helpers will be able to use it to enter the pit. In every pitfall, at all times, I will have four dungeon helpers stationed on rotation near the pegs under the trap’s upper rim. In the event my rope is not long enough to exceed the range of a highly skilled mage, they will be able to quickly cut through the pegs with their robust leaf-cutting mandibles. In fact, they don’t even have to cut all the way through for it to work, they merely need to weaken the fungiwood standoffs to allow the load supplied by the thick stone slab to do the rest!

The pitfalls don’t really even need to be terribly deep, eight meters combined with the bone-shattering impact of the heavy stone slab underneath the victim should be enough to, at the very least, cripple them.

Wouldn’t it be unfortunate for them if there were primed archer pods and venomous cave centipedes hidden in recesses along the walls at the bottom? That’s definitely happening now!

Ah, but why stop there? I should use some of these as staging grounds for surprise attacks by linking the pit interiors with wider access network tunnels! Then my minions can swarm forth from the previously hidden danger to overwhelm the victim’s peers who didn’t plummet to their deaths!

Actually, imagine this; you’re marching with your group through a beautiful and glorious dungeon on a mission to wrongfully slay it. You are being constantly harried by superior life forms and then one of your fellow trespassers takes a step forward...only to fall into a perfectly concealed, absolutely ingenious chasm. Before you even have a chance to admire the sheer cleverness and remarkable craftsmanship of the trap, swarms of clattering arthropods rush out from the fresh hole to annihilate your sinful selves!

Brilliant, the design is ready; it’s time to test it.

After that, I’ll modify my anchor-crushing mechanism to trigger falling object traps and destabilize select portions of my dungeon to facilitate controlled cave-ins.

Only then will I implement them.

Then it’ll be time to implement my trump cards.