Chapter 193 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

It seems that I have found a problem. It was a little noticeable on the 36th floor in its playroom, which I have nicknamed Magma. Its extreme temperature and especially its sun are taking up a lot of my mana regeneration.

On the 37th floor, that problem was made more apparent. It’s playroom I am calling Frost Storm. It's a horrible playroom with barely any sunlight and horrible storms that make the freezing temperatures even worse to bear.

My dungeon rules up to this point have been quite good at mimicking natural phenomena like storms, but it seems like I have been pushing it too hard. Still, back then I could accept the mana cost, but I couldn’t on the 38th floor. In this playroom, while it looked normal, the gravity was a lot higher. I wanted it to be five times heavier, but I’ve only managed 3.8, as dungeon rules simply couldn’t push it anymore.

The mana cost was also heavy, with this gravity rule becoming my most expensive mana sink. While I could accept this cost, it was a little bit uncomfortable, especially because now I had all the other adventurer species patterns.

I even had two underwater adventurer species. I added them all to my adventurer playroom where the elves, humans, and dwarves already lived. It came with a heavy mana upkeep for a while, and that would mean cutting down on some of my projects, which I didn’t want to do.

The solution was quite easy to find. I needed a new skill to handle the extreme conditions I wanted to achieve. While now I could barely manage it, what if in the future I wanted a place that had 20 times the gravity? I would never be able to do it. Or perhaps the opposite, to have no gravity? I suspect that would be as difficult. So that was an easy answer, but the question was, what other skill should I get?

Of course, I could always just use the other half of the mana allowance to boost another skill of mine. But I had always done skills in pairs, so why not keep with that tradition?

There would be a lot of things that I would need a skill for. Messing with time would be nice, but well, there are things that even I couldn’t do. I wondered how strong I could be if time didn't fight back against anyone trying to mess with it. In a blink of an eye, I could see a civilization rise and fall, but I must watch civilizations rise and fall the old-fashioned way.

It took a little while, but I was finishing up with the 38th floor and finally figure out what I wanted my other skill to be. In my experimentation playroom, I had quite a lot of crystal pillars that were carved by my Academy personnel to radiate the aura of powerful creatures.

This has been one of the biggest helps in making patterns that are suitable for extreme environments or more specialized ones. They are a great tool, but they are quite fragile, and normally only the most powerful creatures with specific skills could radiate such an aura. What if there was another way?

What if I could make a new sort of crystal similar to the different kinds of mana crystals but for auras? What if there could be blank ones that living beings could bond with that would help them increase their own power but also project it into the world a lot sooner than they normally would have access to? I feel like this would be an excellent addition to my dungeon, so I might as well try it.

When I finally finished up the 38th floor and gathered the mana needed, I triggered a breakthrough. This floor's guardian was going to be a heavy beast, a mammoth. Surprisingly, it could handle heavy gravity quite well, and I did have a pattern available to me of this species that was powerful enough to be this floor's guardian. When that was done, it was time for the skill section of the breakthrough.

First, I imagined all different kinds of powerful weather effects, then different environmental effects like high gravity, a burning sun of different colors. I did that for quite a while before I felt a skill click.

Immediately, I moved on to the next skill, picturing the auras and mana crystals, what they did, how they interacted with the world. I tried to focus on making a new one, a new creation. It took longer, a lot longer, but I managed it, and when the skill finally clicked, my breakthrough ended.

When I came out, I immediately reestablished control over my dungeon and found that I had been gone longer than I was expecting. So the time I spent during a breakthrough could vary depending on how long I took—that was good to know. Immediately, I looked into myself to see the skills I had.

Pattern Strengthening: Rank B+

Creature Making: Rank B

Creature Quantity: Rank S

Dungeon Modification: Rank S

Space Expansion: Rank S+

Dungeon Rules: Rank A+

Sub Dungeons’: Rank A

Outer Vision: Rank A

Creature Advancement: Rank S

Ever-expanding mind matrix: Rank S

Planned Evolution: Rank C

Dungeon Gateway: Rank F

Extreme Environment: Rank D+

Aura Crystal: Rank E+

Now that was an impressive list, and I do wonder sometimes if I’m missing something crucial, but if I haven’t thought of it, perhaps not. The last two ones I was pleased with, as they were exactly what I wanted.

Then I was interrupted. "Father, I wanted to wait until you responded, and I’m glad that it didn't take too long for you to finish your advancement. I will be leaving, and I do not know when I will be back," Rafe said.

He had wanted to leave for quite a while, but with his goals, he needed a more robust past that no one could question, and that took a while to set up. We also set up quite a few of those pasts, and I made quite a few rings for him that would change him into different people. That way, he would have the perfect disguise for his many aliases. This should allow him to do the many things that he wanted.

"I wish you a good travel and hope you’re not gone too long," I communicated back and then watched him as he slowly said goodbye to everyone and finally left, most likely for decades. My mood wasn't the best after that, but it picked back up when I started to change the environments from the dungeon rule skill to the extreme environment skill.

The difference was night and day. My mana cost was significantly lower, and I could easily manage five times the gravity. I kind of wanted to test out how far I could push it, but I didn’t want to kill everyone living in the 38th-floor playroom. Now everything was working as I wanted it to, and while it wouldn't happen immediately, I knew that eventually, I was going to push even this skill to its limits.

While I didn’t have active control over my dungeon, I still managed it even while I was going through a breakthrough. So I always spent some time going through everything that happened to make sure that I didn’t miss anything. This time, it seems that if I hadn't done that, I would have missed something major.

Small patterns were things that I usually didn’t mess with, but ever since some of the missions came back, especially from the Blue Lagoon, I have been paying more attention to these kinds of patterns.

Normally, I would eradicate them all immediately if they mutated too much, but ever since I found out that there might be interesting small patterns that could develop, I’ve not been eradicating them immediately and letting them spread a little bit before determining if I wanted to destroy them or not, while still keeping the small pattern in my pattern library if I wanted to use them later on.

This time, a small pattern had developed that was quite curious. I had never seen this effect be so natural, and I was kind of excited. Currently, there were many adventurers who were doing a similar effect with their skills, and from my understanding, in the outside world, only mana made it possible for such things to happen, and only in certain conditions where powerful magical effects had gone awry.

Dungeons usually didn’t mess with these kinds of beings, but I think it’s mainly because of the cost. I had a few patterns now, thanks to the adventurers, of different skeletons and other undead creatures, but they were still constructs made by magic. But this small pattern, I do not know how exactly, but it consumes living energy and transforms it into undead energy as a byproduct.

It started out in a plant called a corpse eater. It was in one of the swampy areas I had made in the adventurer playroom on the human continent. There was a big battle there, and for the first time in its life, the corpse eater couldn’t eat everything even if it tried. Eventually, those corpses, half dissolved by the corpse eater, decayed so much that even it didn't want to eat them anymore, so it left them there to fester.

Of course, that was a breeding ground for small patterns, but that wouldn’t be enough for such a huge change. What eventually made this small pattern develop were also the enchanted and artificed items on these elite soldiers. They had been broken, but they still radiated power that wasn't as pure anymore.

All of these things combined made one particular small pattern change drastically. It started to consume what little life energy was still left in the corpses and changed it to undead energy, which was basically a really specific type of mana that was incredibly complex and that I would actually call a magical effect instead of just mana.

I watched from my memories how this small pattern took over a corpse and then that corpse started to crawl towards the other corpses. It seemed like it needed a direct connection to spread. What was even more fascinating was that it could even affect the plants. They were mindless creatures with the only goal being to spread the small pattern to more hosts.

The pattern itself was eliminated soon after as it continued to spread too much, but I still had it in my library. I guess my plans for the 39th playroom were scrapped as I kind of wanted to see what this small pattern could do if it had a whole playroom at its disposal.

There was one change that I was going to make while making this playroom: I wasn’t going to let creatures come here or even be born from the monsters I created. It kind of felt that would be a bit too cruel, but letting this small pattern mess with the monsters I made—now that I was excited about.