The Villainess Is My Cute Daughter

A narrow but deep river of fresh water was carved directly down the middle, perfectly splitting the two zones.

The density of cows per acre was calculated and set to exactly twenty five cows for every single acre of the grazing land.

Adrian did the math again.

Twenty five cows per acre multiplied by twenty thousand acres.

He had the capacity to comfortably keep exactly five hundred thousand cows in this single dungeon room. That was basically half a million cows.

And twenty five cows per acre gave them a massive amount of open space to freely roam around and do their own thing. They could lazily graze on the natural, low level grasses that automatically spawned across the plains because Adrian had specifically chosen a fertile grazing biome preset for the terrain.

But the vast majority of their daily food would come from the harvested three meter super grass grown on the other side of the river.

Adrian also commanded the system to carve multiple small, shallow ponds filled with fresh water across the twenty thousand acres so the cows did not have to constantly walk all the way back to the main river just to get some water.

He then spent a tiny fraction of mana to instantly seed the entire five thousand acre agricultural zone with the new super grass. The system only asked for about five hundred mana points to do this. Because the grass seeds were incredibly light and small, their creation was incredibly cheap even if they eventually grew into massive three meter tall plants.

The real problem was the cows though.

The twenty thousand acre grazing zone was fully set up but Adrian needed to populate it.

Because this new cow was officially registered as a recognized entity inside his dungeon database, he could technically just use the standard monster spawning ability within the dungeon to populate the fields.

But there was a massive flaw with that method.

If he used the dungeon’s monster spawning mechanism, he was not going to get real, biological animals. He would only get magical projections of the cows. They would look real, they would feel real, and they would eat real grass.

But any offspring they naturally reproduced would also be fake, temporary dungeon constructs. He would not be able to permanently extract their meat or harvest their magical horns for the real world. The animals would just dissolve into useless mana particles when killed.

So he had to use his trusted method of creating things using mana. He had to pay the exact mana cost per kilogram of weight to physically manifest real, permanent biological creatures.

And because these cows were technically magical monsters with mana dense horns, the creation cost went up by a lot. Spawning half a million magical cows at 1500kg each would instantly bankrupt his entire mana reserve before he could even each the goal.

So he thought for a while and asked the system a very specific question.

’Can you make these creatures have no mana inside them?’ Adrian asked. ’Will spawning them completely empty of magic cause any negative biological implications?’

The system processed the logic.

[Negative.]

[The monster will retain its exact genetic code and anatomical structure. Because you are creating it directly from base organic matter, it can be spawned completely devoid of internal mana. Only the horns will lack magical properties at the time of creation.]

Adrian grinned.

He knew exactly how magic worked in this world. Ambient mana was constantly consumed and transformed by magical plants and monsters. Magical herbs sucked up raw mana and gave this mana different properties. The mana stayed inside the plant, just in a transformed state.

But for this specific cow, the only parts of its body that actually required mana to function were the outer hide and the dark horns. The flesh did need mana to make itself tender but Adrian wasn’t going to just bring these cows out and slaughter them.

That would just make everything much more expensive. He just planned to bring out 250k cows and make them give birth to the rest. The original 250k did not need to have tender meat since their only job was to give birth, but even with that, they would slowly absorb mana from the surroundings and their meat would eventually get tender. It was the same with the horns and hide since the horns would begin accumulating unstable mana and the hide would get reinforced.

The system confirmed his theory. The animal’s core DNA would remain perfectly intact and it would just be born without mana. It would still be able to absorb mana after it’s creation even if it wasn’t created with mana inside it.

And because this dungeon room was packed with naturally generating ambient mana, the cows would simply breathe it in. They would slowly absorb the dungeon’s mana over time, naturally filling their empty reserves and growing their magical horns and reinforced leather exactly as their genetics dictated.

This natural absorption process would have zero negative impact on their health or their reproductive capabilities. It was a perfectly safe, highly efficient loophole.

’This is great.’ Adrian thought.

He prepared to spawn the first group and spent 4,500,000 mana just to create 3000 cows but since he had the genetic information needed, they came inseminated. Considering the time boost in this location, the number of his cows would double in 3 months but this small number still annoyed him.

’500,000 capacity and I can only fill it up with 3000...’ he thought and then, he screamed.

”AAAAAHHHHH!!! Hell!! All that mana just for three thousand cows, ugh... okay, let’s think long term. Damn it!”

He knew that he wouldn’t be able to get this much mana every single month since he planned to take his knights with him to Draven’s territory.

”Whatever, my head hurts... I’ll think about this later.” he muttered and walked out of the dungeon before going back to his mansion.

But unfortunately for him, the moment he walked in, Damian handed over an envelope which had the royal seal.

’Ah... those taxes... I completely forgot about them.’