It turned out that he didn’t like it. The conversation didn’t exactly get heated — we were both aware that we had to keep our voices down — but he wasn’t happy. Getting what he wanted — including revenge on his father’s killer — didn’t seem as sweet if it meant giving up on justice for his father.

I didn’t try too hard to persuade him. I didn’t even use [Persuasion] on him. That would wear off by the next day, and I didn’t actually have any evidence for him to use. Better to let the notion sit with him, while I tried to come up with my end of the deal. I did agree to listen to any better ideas that he might have, but he didn’t have any. So we agreed to… revisit the discussion when I was closer to having some evidence.

Not that I had any idea of how I was going to get that evidence. Right now, I was more concerned about some of Duke Finley’s other activities. Like organising a military coup in Talnier, which was… not treasonous? I wasn’t sure. It seemed treasonous to me, but no doubt there was some Ducal right to three coups a year, or something.

“I just wish I could be there,” I complained to Felicia as we discussed it. “If Finley’s decided to try something…”

Felicia just smiled sympathetically, but Kyle had some advice. “It’s not like you’d be on the front line,” he pointed out. “Cloridan, the guard, the Guild, they all knew before we left that this was coming.”

“Best place for a councillor when the knives come out is outside the town,” Janie put in. “That way they can’t get you all.”

“That’s true!” Felicia agreed. “In fact, doesn’t that mean that Duke Finley won’t do anything until she’s back?”

“Eh, maybe.” Janie looked a little awkward. “I’m sure the guy has at least one more assassination attempt in him. But that’s our problem. You should be focussing on… this.”

“Right. This.” I looked over at Issey. “Last chance to say no.”

She looked at me in surprise, “Are you crazy?” she asked before remembering that she was scared of me. “I— I’m sorry ma’am, I—” she stopped herself, blushing. She wasn’t actually that scared of me. It was just a habit.

Even if I wasn’t a noble, learning that I moved in noble circles had triggered a nervous reaction in her that she just couldn’t control. I’d learned not to get angry at what that implied, as that just made her more nervous. Negotiations over the use of her ballroom had tempered that reaction, slightly.

Negotiations might not be the right word, really. Our first interaction had established that she would accept any payment if that meant that she didn’t have to sell her grandmother's legacy. Which was fortunate, because my funds weren’t unlimited. Our main store of wealth was in the form of mana stones, and unless Felicia could get accredited as an Alchemist, we would be selling them at a steep discount.

There were some issues that needed to be discussed, but really the negotiations were just a pretext for Issey and me to get more familiar with each other. She needed to stop bowing every second, and I needed to be sure that she wouldn’t go blabbing to the authorities. We wouldn’t be able to keep this a secret, but I wanted to control how the information got out.

“Okay then,” I said. There was no point in putting it off any longer. I stepped forward into the ballroom, leaving the others behind.

We had spent some time cleaning up. The tables and chairs that were still good, we had removed and put in a dusty storage room. The majority of the furniture was rotted through though, so we had reduced it to sticks and planks and piled them up in the corner. Kyle had said that the dungeon would find a use for it all.

It felt appropriate to place the Core at the centre of the stage, so I strode across the empty room and made my own, much less graceful, leap onto the raised platform. It didn’t feel right to just place it on the floor, so I used [Phantasmal Object] to summon an ornate ivory plinth. The blue box popped up as soon as I took out Rhis’s core, but I waited until it was in position before I addressed the notification.

Sufficient mana detected. Instantiate mana construct? [Y/N]

Yes.

Suddenly, I was back in the white room, Rhis standing beside me. I was also still standing on the stage. Managing multiple points of view was a headache, but one I was almost used to by now. Thank goodness for enhanced [Intelligence].

“As we discussed, Rhis, expand out to this room only.”

“As you command, mistress,” Rhis said, grinning. There wasn’t a change in the real world, but a ripple went through the white room. In its wake, the white room became a match to my outside perception. The effect stopped when it reached the edges of the room. In the real world, I could see my companions looking through the door. In the white world, there was a blank white expanse where the door would be.

Now that my two senses of vision were in sync, it was much easier. Rhis was still only in the white room version. I could have rectified that, but I chose to do something slightly different. In the real world, I pulled out Rhis’s amulet and activated it. Now there were two of him, independent entities rather than synced copies. He must be having his own double vision now, I thought with amusement.

“Let the others know how it’s going,” I said to the real-world version. He bowed in response and walked over to the door.

“Can we start with the spatial expansion?” I asked the other.

“Of course, mistress,” he said. “In all directions?”

“Just… up,” I said. “I think I want to build a tower.”

“I see… that will reduce the costs — I should be able to manage eight times quite easily. Given the height of our base room that should mean sixteen floors in all?”

“That sounds fine, but just four floors for now. Let’s see how this works before going that far.”

He bowed. “It should take about fifteen minutes, my Lady.”

With that sorted, I turned my attention to the entrances. With a thought, I cast [Static Image] on the four doorways that led into this room, facing outwards. They were all the same thing, from different angles — the room as it had been before the cleanup. From now on, anyone who came looking for us wouldn’t see anything different until they were actually in the dungeon.

My friends outside jumped to see the room change, but they’d been expecting something like this, and Rhis quickly walked straight through the image to reassure them.

“Everything is proceeding according to plan,” he informed them with satisfaction. “It may take a while before the first floor is completed.”

It was interesting that I could hear him, and the responses of my friends, quite clearly even though they were all the way over there. Of much more interest though, was what I had just done. I’d cast four spells — four different spells — simultaneously? Without even thinking about it?

What’s more, I realised after some quick checks, the mana for them wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from the dungeon. And it had much more mana than I did.

“[Dungeon Status].” I said it aloud, because why not?

Dungeon Name

[Unnamed]

Level: 7

XP: 38,045,236

Next Level: 100,000,000

Floors: 1

Current Mana: 126

Mana Cap: 225

Mana Regeneration: 22.5

Upkeep: 0.096

Dungeon Traits

Name

Rank

Effect

Spatial Control

10

Teleportation, Portals, Expansion (8)

Monster Classes

5

Lizards, Goblins, Insects, Mammals, Fish

Treasure Classes

5

Coins, Gems, Ores, Mystic Crystals, Crafted Items

Trap Classes

5

Simple, Advanced, Natural, Magical, Lava

Environmental Classes

5

Desert, Jungle, Swamp, Forest, Mountain

Mana Efficiency

5

10% bonus mana regeneration per rank

I frowned. Most of this made little sense to me, but the Mana level felt too low. I sort of had an intuitive sense of the pool I was drawing from, and it felt much bigger than 126. The rest of it…

“Are these all from your time at Oakway?” I asked.

“Indeed. All my constructions and my stores are gone, but I am left with my experience,” Rhis replied.

“Why is the mana so low?” I asked. He raised an eyebrow but brought up his own version of the window. I could see this one as well, in my vision of the white room, so I dismissed mine and looked over his shoulder.

“It seems normal?” he said.

“Why have I got upkeep already?”

“That would be the four spells you cast,” he explained. “They are being maintained by the dungeon instead of by you.”

“Four [Static Image] spells shouldn’t have such a small upkeep…” I mused. Automatically, I divided it by four and then made the connection. “They should be one mana every hour, which translates to twenty-four every day. And then that becomes… So one point of dungeon mana is equal to one thousand points of personal mana!”

“I wouldn’t know. I just know that the illusion spells you allow me to cast have an impossibly low cost. Can we proceed? Once we get additional levels we should get an increase in both mana regeneration and cap.”

“Right, so how do we start?”

“Normally, one would build out the basic structure with either Construction or Excavation,” he told me. “But using Phantasms will be much cheaper.”

“I never got around to getting [Phantasmal Structure],” I admitted.

“No need. [Phantasmal Object will do well enough for our purposes. If you can sketch out how you’d like to lay out this level, it would be easier to show you than explain.”

“Well…” I gave it some thought. “Wall off the stage, we’ll have that only accessible from a higher level. For the rest, if we have a central corridor, with four rooms, and the stairway up being from that room… Oh, and each of the rooms should have a window on the outside wall.”

“Ah, yes. Because this is a tower, not a dungeon. We should indeed have a view.” Rhis snapped his fingers. Individual blocks of stone appeared, walling off each of the rooms I’d mentioned. It seemed like it happened all at once, but I could somehow tell that each event was separate, just following on from the previous so quickly that it was all over in a flash.

[Illusion Magic] Level 6 acquired through use

For gaining a skill level you have been awarded 1 XP

“Did you cast, like, five thousand [Phantasmal Objects]?”

“To be precise, you cast the spell forty-two hundred and thirty-one times, for a cost of just under sixty-four mana,” he replied smugly. “There is an upkeep cost, but it amounts to only a fraction more than one-tenth of a mana.”

“Wow…” I quickly checked. Upkeep had ticked up to 0.237, and mana had gone down to 62. That was… wow.

“I’m starting to see the benefits of being a mage with a dungeon,” I said. Rhis smirked, pleased with himself.

“What did you want to do with these rooms, Mistress?” he asked. “I should warn you that monsters have upkeep as well and that it takes fifty mana to define a second floor.”

“I’ll keep that in mind. Is it OK to have the Core room inaccessible like this?”

“Right now, it’s fine. It’s currently accessible, with a little climbing.” Rhis glanced at the current lack of a ceiling.

“Hmm. We should at least have a ceiling,” said thoughtfully. “Can you make it using construction? A Phantasmal floor will take just a bit of damage as people walk on it, and eventually fail.”

Rhis looked genuinely disappointed at losing the prospect of sudden floor failure, but took it with good grace, summoning wooden beams out of the (real) walls and covering our four rooms with a wooden ceiling. We then made some real staircases leading up from the corridor and down to the core room. With that done, I could walk out of the Core room and have a look at what Rhis had done with my own eyes.

He had covered all the basics, not just the walls. The doors were all in place, there were ‘windows’ that overlooked blank stone walls, and now that there was a ceiling, he installed light panels reminiscent of fluorescent lighting back home.

“Right,” I said. The first thing I did was cover the wide alcoves with more [Static Images]. On one side, I had the windows overlook the Blue Mountains. My memory included a tourist shot of the Three Sisters that was probably taken from a helicopter. I used it anyway — we were supposed to be in a tower.

On the other side, I reproduced the view from my boss's old office. It wasn’t the highest spot on the building, but it did have a good view of Sydney. I’d been asked about my world lots of times, but I’d never shown them a good view of my hometown.

Then I got started on the furnishings.