Chapter 307 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

With my latest breakthrough, I managed to get Aura Crystal, Hold Location, and Extended Sight all from rank A to S. That would help me a lot, but I hoped that with the next breakthrough, I would be able to make a skill that would help me in my future plans.

Hopefully, they will have this spell to travel through space worked out, and hopefully, it will be enough to actually get across the distances between stars.

Of course, I started to expand my 80th floor, but as I looked over everything that had happened during my breakthrough, I found that we had a new diamond rank—but this one was a bit special.

Finally, another dragon had made it to diamond rank, and currently, Ismael was conversing with it. This one did seem a bit prickly, but they had their whole world to do what they wanted with. However, I certainly wasn’t going to let any of those dragons out if they couldn’t behave.

When I looked over all the worlds I had, I thought I needed to make a few new classifications. Some of them would need to go under early development—those would be worlds that still had a lot going on while large portions were still completely unoccupied.

Middle development would be the ones that had more established communities, possibly civilizations already started and going strong, with large portions of the world being occupied.

Late development would be well-developed civilizations, basically every corner of the world known and inhabited. A perfect example would be the ant worlds.

That reminded me that they hadn’t gotten a new world to work with in quite a while. I had seen some grumblings about Ace being given his own world—the same with the dragons, although to a lesser degree, as people were kind of glad that those terrors were in their own world.

With everything going on, if I don’t spend too much effort at one time on making a new world, I should manage to fit one in every few floors or so. But then came the question—who would get that world? I think I’m seeing an interesting opportunity.

What if I made it a competition? Every organization, group, or civilization could participate. Of course, there needed to be some checks and balances; otherwise, I’m guessing the ants would always win.

I should make a list of goals and achievements, and everyone who achieved or met those would gain points on the leaderboard. The prize would be a whole world, and the more points they had, the more changes they could enact.

That being said, a world on one floor didn’t have to be just one world. It could be multiple ones—some bigger, some smaller—all depending on what position they managed to get on that leaderboard. Yes I liked that more.

That should stop those pesky little plans of conquering other worlds that those large civilizations have started thinking about. Time to give them some other goals and a way to expand that doesn’t mean taking from others. I wonder what people outside my dungeon would make of this. Would new adventurers come?

It took me about a month to finish classifying every goal and achievement. My design team helped me a lot, especially with balancing everything. What we also did was make two brackets.

One was where only civilizations could participate. Those leaderboards and their rewards would offer the biggest pieces of land that could be won.

The second bracket was for smaller organizations. While those pieces of land wouldn’t be incredibly large, they would still be about ten times the size of hub station at minimum.

Any organization that won something like that would have a home base that could support their every desire and give them plenty of opportunities to continue expanding. I’m certain that most clans would like something like that.

It wouldn’t be something that happened every year, but I think I could swing one of these competitions that would last for a year and happen every five years or so. However, I’m not going to commit too much to a certain timeframe, as everything is a bit too volatile, and I don’t exactly know what tomorrow might bring.

We started working on the basics of the world. I decided to use the 75th floor since it had the largest land area. While the newer floors were bigger in terms of volume, most of that was due to their increased height, and most adventurers and creatures didn’t care much about that.

I was actually looking forward to this. I wonder how everyone will react. There’s still some time until I can do this properly.

Time passed by fast. The effect of living longer seemed to start taking more and more liberties, as days seemed to go by so quickly. I was nearly at the point where I needed to do another breakthrough when they finally figured out the proper spell for space travel. I decided to push my breakthrough back just two days so I could see the results of their first test.

They had built a small airship out in the satellite outpost. Perhaps ‘airship’ was no longer a proper name, as out there, there wasn’t any air. Well, that's not entirely true—the airship itself was pressurized with air. So I guess it still worked.

I instructed them to do the test at the time of day when this world would be in the correct position so I could see them moving across towards one of the moons.

It was amazing to watch as the airship accelerated so fast. It was pushing on space itself—something incredible—as they reached their target a lot faster than any other propulsion system could. There was a problem.

I didn’t take into account that it would take me time to properly study the spell to make sure I got the right skill. So instead of doing something stupid and rushing, I decided to just upgrade my talent study skill.

During the test, it also became apparently clear that I needed to somehow dampen the forces of acceleration; otherwise, I could risk killing everything that called me home. Most likely, I would need a few other skills to make surviving outside this world possible.

I also hadn’t quite figured out how to properly create the skill that would allow me to treat anything inside me as if it were outside of me. It was difficult to imagine, and I couldn't guarantee I would get it right.

It was still strange to be able to enter a breakthrough basically whenever I felt ready, as I already had plenty of mana stored up. This also meant that I couldn’t push myself to the breaking point any longer to get that little bit more mana with every breakthrough. At least I didn’t have to feel that pain any longer.

The breakthrough went by quite fast as I had already prepared what boss I would make. This time, it was five individuals, all different types of creatures, but when you combine them, they are scary. Most likely, the first target should be the healer, but I have a nice twist this time—the healer is actually also the tank. Yeah, good luck killing that one first.

Can’t wait to see what happens when adventurers finally make it this far. Although that will take quite a bit of time because I’m currently not actually doing any diamond-ranked dungeon rooms. It would simply take too much mana generation.

Turning to the skill portion of the breakthrough, I increased Talent Study, getting it to A plus rank. That should make getting good talents from adventurers a lot easier. I already had a few, my favorite being from Carl, simply called More. It was a stupidly powerful talent, but you needed the right personality to truly make it shine, which Carl had.

I wonder if he made it to the next rank, would this one simply upgrade once again into an even stronger version? Now that was a scary thought.