Here's how I reasoned. During my first attempt with cheats enabled, Dessa was running, and on day 6 after capturing the castle, she had around 1200 mana points left. I thought that wasn't challenging enough and started planning. After several attempts, I was just a few squares short on day 5. At that moment, I considered that I might have to fight the dragons without the Earth book, but that didn't scare me because I knew I could solve this task. After the hero finally reached the castle (this happened probably on day 3 of scouting!), I moved on to solving other tasks. Even after I knew the hero would reach the castle, I still had thoughts that 5 days were impossible due to a lack of money/heroes/monsters, etc. But later, everything worked out beautifully. I'll also add that this was probably one of my most successful tournaments.