Chapter 194 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I finally finished expanding the 39th floor. It was a big one, and I think on the next floor I will reduce the size but increase the height. Currently, the height is just 3400 meters, and while that’s plenty big, I have some vertical floor plans and perhaps I would even mess with the direction of gravity, but I think it might be a bit too soon to push myself so far. Whatever the case, it was time to start making this playroom and the dungeon rooms above.

With a length of a little bit more than 107,000 kilometers and a width of over 90,000 kilometers, this oval-shaped floor was incredibly massive. For some reason, it made me feel incredibly happy to be so big.

Perhaps I should ditch the oval shape, but I quite like it, and I definitely didn’t want a completely round floor or even a square one, as they seem too basic. Yet from my understanding, a lot of other dungeons were just like that—round or square.

Now came the question of what I will do with this playroom. I wanted undead here, but that just wouldn't be enough, would it? While expanding, I did some experimentations with this small pattern. It was beyond interesting.

What it did was consume life energy, which it used to breed, but by doing so, it also created undead energy, which it had a little bit of control over. That was why the corpses started to move—they were following the simple need of the small pattern to take more life energy so it could continue to breed.

It was so much simpler than I thought, but the underlying mechanics of how it worked were magnificent. It was complex yet simple enough for these small patterns to make happen, but the results were beyond my wildest imaginations. Everything that had died had some of what I’m calling undead energy, which this small pattern could somewhat control.

This meant that the dead who were so old that there was no flesh left behind could still be somewhat controlled by this small pattern, although by itself a singular skeleton of a creature couldn’t do anything. That’s where the second part of this small pattern's brilliance came in. It could share the undead energy between each other even without being in contact.

It was simply so fascinating, and I really need to stop saying that because it’s getting on my nerves, but damn, I never expected anything like this.

One of my experiments was in a tomb that had six skeletons. I introduced the small pattern here, and it did breed a little bit, but it was barely able to sustain itself from the ambient life energy. That changed when I introduced a dying corpse of a medium-sized creature.

I had to make sure that this creature touched one of the skeletons, but since it was so weak, the small pattern had no problem surviving in this host and starting to consume it.

That was another interesting fact: if an organism was healthy enough, it could actually fight off this small pattern. Although it wasn't 100%, the healthier and stronger you were, the better chance you had of beating off this small pattern.

In a day, it had consumed a lot of life energy and killed the creature. Its corpse soon after that started to move, seeking more life, but all of the skeletons in this tomb also started to move, doing the same. The possibilities were endless, but that also meant that I couldn’t do the playroom like I usually did because there wouldn’t be any dead bodies it could take over, at least not at the start.

So, while that would be good enough, I wanted to see what this small pattern could actually accomplish. That’s why I needed to make a whole history in this playroom so there would be tombs full of dead, from weak to the most powerful creatures I could make.

There needed to be a lot of life as well. I was also going to use adventurer patterns because I wanted to know everything this small pattern was capable of. Not giving it a whole living world where it could stretch itself to whole new heights would be sad.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to do everything from the ground up. We had done so many scenarios for our quests, dungeon rooms, and even our playrooms that I had many designs to pull up. I could also mimic some of my creatures' creations like the orc nation or even the ants.

One thing I was still sure of was that there was going to be no creature on this floor, only monsters. It would help me control the outcomes better, and it kind of felt wrong to let creatures onto this floor just to watch them die.

Now, I had no problem with death, but I didn’t like unfairness. While my playrooms were places of death where only the strong get to rule, they are also places of fairness where everyone gets a chance. Here, I had a feeling that this small pattern was too strong. In the end, I think it will conquer all. Even if I’m going to use some of my most powerful patterns here, in the end, I think even they will lose.

So, I got to work creating a huge world with multiple continents, smaller islands, and a thriving underwater world as I wanted to see if it could even conquer that. There were many civilizations here that were seemingly old, some even 1,000 years old.

They had built great monuments and respected their dead. A lot of the land was filled with graveyards because of that. Some were barely what could be called a graveyard where the truly poor would be buried, while others were monuments to the glory a person had achieved.

All of this I built, and while it took longer than I normally did with other floors, I felt it was right. It was a drain on my resources as I made so many monsters, but all of these monsters will be turned into creatures when the small pattern takes over, turning them from a negative impact on my mana to a positive one.

If the small pattern didn't do that, I would have most likely just used a section of my experimentation playroom for this experiment. But since it would create new beings that are creatures because of its life cycle, I felt this small pattern truly deserved the whole playroom.

Before I released the small pattern, I finished the dungeon rooms for this floor and advanced to the next floor, boosting my Dungeon Rules skill and getting it to S rank. While I started to expand the 40th floor, most of my attention was turned to the 39th. Fortunately, just before I was about to release the small pattern, I remembered that I should fake my breakthrough, which I did, and then it was finally time.

On one of the continents that wasn’t doing the best in the civilization department, as a few wars had ravaged their kingdoms, on one of the uncleaned battlefields, I introduced the small pattern.

It took a little bit to get started, as the first corpse didn't move for two days after I introduced the small pattern. Two days after that, more and more zombies rose from the battlefield, spreading the small pattern to more corpses that continued to walk away in all directions, searching for life.

They had no mind, only a basic need to find life and to breed. What was even more interesting was how this small pattern was affecting nature and the plants. Most of the plants died, but some did mutate enough that they somehow found a way to live, although they were still undead. Would this small pattern start to create a whole new biome? Damn, that would be awesome.

There are now a few hundred corpses shambling about, but it seems like they were able to somehow track concentrations of life, which in most cases were villages. A few of the zombies managed to stumble onto the territory of animals like wolves and bears. They defended themselves and their territory, and while they killed the zombies and destroyed their bodies so they wouldn't move anymore, they themselves got infected.

It seems that animals were better at fighting off this small pattern, but they were exposed so much that it didn’t matter. What was curious was that they seemed to have kept more of their instincts.

Was that because they were turned undead while still alive? That was interesting. What was also nice was that they didn't suffer, so to say, the turning process wasn't painful, although it was still a bit unpleasant.

One of the corpses reached a village and was quickly killed by arrows. What the people did wrong was to go and check out this body and even retrieve some of the arrows. All of them were infected, but only three of the ten men who went to check out this zombie succumbed to the small pattern. Once again, it seems that the zombies were better than the ones that were turned when they were corpses.

It seems that zombies could be quite vicious, liking to scratch and bite their victims. Their families didn't expect anything like this and were quickly infected. In one of the three families, they actually managed to escape the house to inform others. They were still infected

It didn’t take long for them to go and check out the houses of others who went to check the corpse. When they discovered what had happened, panic started to take over the village. They tried to escape, leaving everything behind, but every time they rested, seemingly one of their own started to bite them.

Like this, they fled to the nearby town with only half of them making it. Some were still infected by the small pattern and while they were isolated, the townspeople watched them all die. In their culture, burning people was a sin, so they buried them all after they dismembered them. This started the cycle over once again.

Not every place succumbed, as there were people who were able to recognize what happened, mostly healers. Still, by the time the kingdom was informed, seven towns and dozens of villages had fallen to the small pattern.

It also seems that the more of it there is in a small region, the more powerful the small pattern gets, using that strength to power its hosts. An army was assembled and I was sure they could overpower the small pattern at this early stage if the wildlife wasn't being infected as well.

Three months in, the army arrived and started to clear everything while now knowing how this small pattern spread. Yet, they didn’t know about the wildlife, and that was their downfall. It also seems like, while it was completely random, some undead kept more of their mind than others, so there were wolves that could lead other undead wolves. The results were deadly.