He sat at the pool's edge and turned his attention toward the eastern wall.

  He pushed his perception at it the way he pushed it through the floor — expecting it to pass, to deepen. It didn't. His awareness arrived at the stone surface and stopped. The wall gave him its face and nothing behind it. He held the pressure for a time, then released it.

  He stood. Crossed the chamber. Placed his palm flat against the stone.

  He tried to extend himself into it.

  Not push — extend. The way his awareness extended through the floor when he pressed his hands down, the way the corridor existed in him as a felt space rather than a remembered one. He reached toward the stone and tried to make it his the same way.

  Something moved inside him.

  A slow drain — not painful, not alarming, but present and continuous, something leaving him in the direction of his palm. And at the same moment: the wall deepened. Not visually. In his perception, the stone developed interior. He could feel the grain of it, the fault lines, a pocket of trapped moisture three finger-widths in. A thickness that hadn't been there a moment before.

  He lifted his hand. The depth remained.

  [SYSTEM: Territorial Expansion — Active. Mana saturation required.]

  He stood still and held what had just happened.

  Then he closed his eyes.

  He turned his attention inward — not to the pool, not to the corridor, but to the dungeon as a whole, the full volume of it held in his awareness. He felt its borders: floor, ceiling, four walls, the seam at the threshold. The exact limits of what was his.

  He pressed.

  Outward. In every direction at once — a slow, even expansion of mana against every border simultaneously. He pushed and felt the drain begin — faster than before, not a trickle but a steady bleed, his field dropping as the mana went into the stone and the stone received it.

  And the dungeon grew.

  Not physically — the walls did not move. But his awareness moved through them, centimeter by centimeter, the stone converting from exterior to interior as the mana saturated it. He could feel the depth accumulating. The dungeon thickening around its own edges, taking in what had been adjacent and making it present.

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  His.

  He kept pushing until the drain became significant — his field dropping below half, then further. The dungeon was larger. Not dramatically. But the difference between before and after was precise and measurable and he could feel every centimeter of it.

  Except one direction.

  The entrance had taken his mana the same as the rest — but given nothing back. No depth. No new border. The mana had crossed the threshold and dispersed, lost in the exterior field before it could bond to anything.

  The stone was his now. He could feel the difference — the same as the floor under his palms, the same depth of presence. He pressed both hands flat against the surface and pushed.

  The stone moved. It had give.

  [SYSTEM: Ability Unlocked — Stone Shaping.]

  He pushed a section outward and it came, slow and continuous, the material maintaining its coherence as it displaced. He tapered the pressure toward the center of his palms and the protrusion narrowed. He pinched it between thumb and forefinger from both sides and it narrowed further, pulling to a point.

  He looked at it.

  A spike extending from the wall at chest height.

  Roughly the length of his forearm. He pressed the tip with his index finger — firm, dense, not crumbling. He pushed it from the side and it flexed slightly, the base absorbing the pressure, then held.

  He tried a curve.

  He held the arc's geometry in his awareness — the intended shape. The stone moved into the curve slowly. He could feel exactly where it wanted to crack: a fine stress line forming in the grain at the tightest point of the arc. He concentrated mana into that section, softening it, and the fracture closed before it opened.

  A thorn. Curving downward at its tip.

  He pressed it back into the wall and smoothed the surface.

  Made a ridge next — a long horizontal line raised from the stone, running the width of his outstretched arms. Then a groove beside it. Then a shallow bowl pressed inward from above, the ceiling dimpling under his palms like something soft.

  He made each thing and then unmade it.

  He was learning what the material would and wouldn't do.

  The drain continued throughout. Steady. His field dropping in small increments with each new working, each new section of wall he saturated before shaping.

  He pressed his awareness outward from the center again, feeling the full extent of what was now his — the thickened walls, the deeper floor, the ceiling with its new interior. More than when he had started, but not enough.

  He pushed further. Past his own saturation boundary, past the stone he had already claimed, into the undifferentiated rock of the hill beyond.

  His awareness moved through it slowly. Dark. Mineral.

  Then it stopped.

  Not the stone. Something in the stone — a zone in the eastern wall, dense, roughly the size of his torso, that his awareness arrived at and slid around without entering. He pressed against it and his attention scattered. Not inert. Not empty. His mana reached the boundary of it and simply did not pass.

  And it began to move toward the pool.

  There were others — smaller zones, scattered through the floor and walls, each one too faint to hold his attention.

  [MANA absorbed: +0]

  [EXP acquired: +1 (Passive — Microbial Absorption, territorial expansion)]

  [Status: Depleted, Territorial Expansion Active | LVL: 1 | EXP: 4/10 | MANA: 3/10]