Chapter 188 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

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no chapter tomorrow

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Pov Dungeon Core

It took a while, but things started to settle on the surface, though they never completely returned to how they used to be. More and more powerful people were arriving, establishing their own presence in Ace's nation.

While for the larger masses there are a lot of dungeons you could call free, for the elite there were only seven. So, when the news started to spread of an eighth one, well, I never guessed that the population of my dungeon and the nation above could experience another exponential growth.

Things were getting so out of hand that for a few moments, I considered perhaps making a few instances of my middle floors, the ones that already had hub stations. But seeing how fast adventurers were moving past them, I decided to let them deal with the overcrowding themselves.

It seems that the news has now properly spread amongst everyone that my dungeon is literally the best place to train yourself to become stronger.

I think I would have started to run into trouble keeping track of everything if I didn’t have my ever-expanding mind matrix skill. While I couldn’t push an endless amount of mana into it and improve myself to a scary degree overnight, it still helps me manage everything.

As I grew stronger, it seemed that it could also handle giving it more mana, which was also good news. Otherwise, I think the skill would help me too little. Overall, I’m extremely pleased with how this particular skill turned out.

On the other hand, the dungeon gateway skill, while incredibly useful for keeping track of all the gateways inside my dungeon, was created mainly to connect to gateways away from me. However, I have not used this feature because of the entity I would need permission from to establish a proper connection.

Now I’m pretty sure that entity used to be a dungeon, or perhaps it has always been the will of the planet itself, only strengthened by consuming dungeons that had reached the limit of this world.

Why did I think of that? That’s a bad thought. Let’s hope that I will still remain me if I ever reach the end of the diamond rank. Perhaps it's best to get back to work and stop thinking so much.

The 34th floor was coming along beautifully, and I would only need a few more months to finish it. Then it would be time for the next floor. That would require more thinking, but at least I had a few months of just working.

Those few months didn’t last long, as I was now finished, and it was time for another breakthrough. As I was gathering mana, I once again looked at Ace. He wasn't doing the best but also not the worst. It seems that managing his manager took a lot out of him, but he seems to be getting better every month, and his core seems to be strengthening, which seems to be giving him the strength to continue.

Don't worry, annoying person. The problem of your head being blocked off—I will find a way to fix that. For that reason, there have been a few missions sent out to find patterns that are especially good at messing with minds.

What I’m hoping for is a creature that would be particularly talented in mind magics, one that would eventually grow strong enough to be properly intelligent and want to join the Academy. It's a tall order and will take some time to hopefully succeed, but there are no easy and fast solutions for the Ace problem.

Triggering a breakthrough always felt amazing, but it was now time to get to work. For the floor guardian, I decided to go with a lizard. It wasn't anything special, at least not its base pattern, but this particular individual whose pattern I was going to use was almost unique.

It wasn't the strongest; in fact, it had some glaring weaknesses, but it was the only lizard-type creature I have who has gotten truly good at using cold-type skills. Usually, lizard types like skills that gave them warmth, as they are cold-blooded, yet this one went the opposite way.

It would be a nice lesson that getting too used to how things worked and expecting situations to turn out how you expect them to would lead you to a quick death. That was also the reason why the floor guardian wasn’t in a cold room but instead in a hot one.

It was also a nice coincidence that this particular floor guardian would once again not be a good match for fire-type mages. Now, I know I’ve been messing with them for a while now, but it seems like recently almost every floor guardian was a counter to them. Perhaps I should ease off of them on the next floor.

It was now time for skill selection, and fortunately, I was able to get my ever-expanding mind matrix to rank S. With that done, I once again started to reestablish control over my dungeon, fortunately nothing has gone wrong.

I was gone for nearly a week, and it seems that the time between my advancements continues to grow longer, even if I’m trying to make them as short as possible. It was now time to start expanding the 35th floor.

It took me nearly two months to finish it, but it was once again one of my largest floors. I guess I could say that about every new floor. It was also time to open up the 34th-floor dungeon rooms, so I faked a breakthrough. The new floors' length now was a bit over 53,500 kilometers, width being close to 45,500 kilometers, and height being 2,900 meters. If things continued like this, my floors might start to get a bit unwieldy.

For the playroom itself, I have had an idea for a little while, but this would be the first of this type of playroom. Recently, I have gotten a few proper wyverns and many other lizard-type patterns. So, I think it would be a wonderful experiment to see what would happen to an ecosystem if it basically only had one type of creature.

Fortunately, lizards have every corner of the ecosystem covered, so they will be flying, burrowing, and living in water. Everything would be covered, which not every such type could manage.

It would be harder to control the difficulty level of this playroom as the creature base patterns would be so different in how powerful they were. So I think a little bit of environmental design was needed to make sure that the powerful patterns would want to stay in certain locations, as it would be perfect for their environmental needs. While it wouldn't be ideal, I think this would help others grow stronger.

Now I was quite excited about all of this. Let’s also make it so there are only a few cold areas. I can even use patterns from my dungeon that have already grown. This would help fill out biodiversity even more.

Let’s also make some deeper water and perhaps even a few oceans—no, a big one that's connected with a few really deep areas. While currently I don’t have many lizard-type patterns that like to live in water, it would be an open space, so I think many would try to claim the resources there.

There was one exception I decided to make for the patterns of this playroom. I decided to also use bugs as they were kind of necessary for the ecosystem, but I specifically used some of the better bugs that were really nutritious and even the ones that would live in the water.

This would mean that there would eventually be a lot of food in the water, so I think that would help a lot with getting water-based lizard-type patterns. I could already feel how I could add thousands of new ones to my pattern library.

This was so much fun, and I wonder if every dungeon felt so amazing creating such worlds. The only thing I could argue was better was observing how creatures lived in the world I made and, of course, the adventurers as they struggled in the dungeon rooms.

My excitement was extinguished when I remembered how it would all end. I'm pretty sure if I had eyes, one of them would be twitching right now from anger.

There must be another solution. It was time to start another project. Letting my dungeon get destroyed when I reach the limit of this world sounds stupid, so finding a way to fix this is required. Sounds like a perfect name for the project I have in mind.

I’m starting to hate projects. They're only necessary when there’s something I can’t obtain immediately, and that's starting to piss me off. It’s been a while since I’ve felt so weak, but the only way to fix that is to continue to advance. So it's time to get back to work, which is at least incredibly fun and exciting.