Apparently shapeshifting is a thing.

　　I had expected the dragon to blow fire breath or whatever, but instead it rolled to its feet and padded over to the tunnel, peering in with one enormous eye. I didn`t dare try to close it up at that point, since I got that same sense of near-pain from it as I had from the knights. Something with a lot of power.

　　Then it just...shimmered and turned into some sort of scaled amazon. Just under three meters tall, muscled, armored, wide-hipped and big-breasted, still with wings and horns and muzzle. The form wasn`t even trying to be demihuman, fully embracing scales and other such dragonlike features. She - at that point it was clear this was a she - climbed into the tunnel and began casually sauntering up.

　　Ansae Ziir, Level ??? Primal Dragon

　　Health: 173,580/275,000

　　Stamina: 583,212/760,000

　　Mana: 212,615/335,000

　　Depletion 6687/6689

　　Those were big numbers. Those were very big numbers. This Ansae was an entity several ranks above my previous bar for horrifically powerful people, and I was pretty sure that dropping ten tons of rocks on her head would just annoy her. This narrative has been purloined without the author`s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

　　I didn`t want to annoy her.

　　But she wasn`t trying to hurt me. In fact, she was just wandering through the tunnels I`d made without any hurry whatsoever, horns nearly scraping the ceiling. It drove home how large I`d gotten, because at her pace she was wandering for hours before she even got to the first farms.

　　By that point I`d fairly well gotten over the initial terror of disturbing something nigh unto a god, and it`d faded into a low-grade wariness. I was also somewhat nonplussed that I could pay attention to her, to Shayma`s idle conversations with her fellow refugees, and to the continuing expansion of my real estate at once. Somehow, it seemed, I could spread myself out that much without losing focus.

　　Well, it wasn`t like I was actually human, so I could blame that. And level-ups, maybe.

　　Interestingly, Ansae seemed fascinated by the farms, though honestly they were fairly boring rooms full of various chrystheniums and grasses, some with lava and some with ice. I`d just gridded out a lot of room for pure resource creation, rather than trying to make it at all appealing. But she still prowled through the lava and ice, completely unaffected by either, plucking a flower here and there.

　　The dragon had a full bouquet by the time she made it up out of the tunnels and into the lake room, looking around at the building fronts I`d started. Something flashed out from her, not a physical thing but a sort of flickering sensation, and I tried to focus on it, chasing it as she scanned the buildings.

　　[Mana Sense] learned.

　　150 experience gained.

　　Suddenly everything I could see blazed at once, and the fugue took me again.