Chapter 185 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Time was acting weirdly. It felt like years just went by without me noticing them, which was strange. After investigating this phenomenon, I learned that older adventurers had a similar problem of time simply moving so fast. It seems that the older you get, the more used to time passing you get, and the less you notice it. So does this mean that I’m finally getting old? That was a strange thought.

It was time for another breakthrough. The last floor turned out quite nice. There were now 21 tribes living on that floor, but I think things will slow down. It's just that most creatures go with a more individual power structure instead of tribal communities.

For this floor's guardian, I’m thinking of using one of the tribes. After thinking about it a little bit longer, I decided to use one of the rat tribes. Although they no longer looked like just regular rats and could easily walk on two legs, almost coming to shoulder height with some of the shorter adventurers.

Normally, they wouldn't be powerful enough, but this particular tribe did have a few interesting skills and features. The strongest of those was their ability to control lightning. I think it would be a fun fight, and I’m guessing that the cooperation these monsters could achieve would surprise most. For skills, I was able to get my ever-expanding mind matrix from rank B to rank A.

It was time to start expanding to the 33rd floor. When I was done with the expansion, I faked the breakthrough, giving adventurers access to the 32nd-floor dungeon rooms.

They have been quite busy, but were still two floors behind, having not reached the boss of the 30th floor yet. They were also quite stretched out with most of the floors barely explored. Activity was concentrated on the path that would take them to the next floor.

The mass of adventurers had finally reached past the big room and were slowly getting closer to the 28th floor. There was a massive difference in population between the groups that were pushing forward and others who were making slow progress. With how the dungeon has changed after the big room, the political situation inside the dungeon has also changed.

The frontrunners, as the adventurers called them, were the groups who were pushing forward and were most renowned and respected. They had a lot of influence, but there have been a couple of instances where a large guild has collapsed because they supported their frontrunners too heavily, which made their weaker members quit.

That's why there are only a small number of people from those large guilds who are pushing forward nowadays. Mainly, it's the small but really powerful guilds made up of only 30 to 100 people. The exceptions were the two most powerful guilds: the Runners and the Explorers.

Those guilds, however, were a bit different as they didn’t require their members to only be a part of them. Although if you wanted to truly get the best benefits, you still had to join them fully, but if you wanted to leave, most of the time they didn't have any problems with it.

The biggest shake-up happened about two years ago. I didn’t expect them to actually be able to pull it off, but it seems that they have. There were a lot more of those guilds that were similar to the Runners and Explorers, but they were smaller ones like the Healers, the different types of mage guilds, and crafters' guilds.

With the dungeon changes, they found themselves in a position of having the required expertise and knowledge to help adventurers acclimate and learn how to delve in the new dungeon.

Still, most of them were really weak, barely having any territory to themselves. Some didn’t even have any territory and only existed in hub stations. Some of the larger ones, like the Healers and the Fire Mage Guild, pulled all of the heads of the different guilds and invited them to a huge gathering.

There, they outlined and offered a different path. They wanted to unite all of those guilds into one singular one. The entire thing took nearly two weeks, but by the end of it, every single guild of that type signed the charter, and they became what’s now known as the United Guilds.

Almost overnight, they became one of the largest guilds in the dungeon, and while their start was quite rocky, they have gotten their shit together, as adventurers like to say. They are now counted amongst the three biggest and most influential guilds. I wonder if any other guild will be able to get to the status of the big three.

Another power that’s emerging are the clans. Most of the smaller guilds, especially the ones who are pushing the front lines, have moved away from the guild structure to a more clan-based one, but only the guilds who are truly united are doing so. Those clans usually have a few individuals who are truly remarkable, and because of that, most are gaining power quite fast even if they are not gaining members as fast as guilds are.

All of this was quite fascinating, and it would be interesting to see what becomes of them in the future. My upper floors are also getting quite crowded, but that's to be expected as I’m well past the 1,000,000 adventurer mark, which is honestly quite crazy. Nowadays, my dungeon rooms are not just net neutral in mana generation, but they are actually starting to make a decent amount of mana for me.

Normally, this would be a good thing for any other dungeon, but I’m starting to get a little bit tired of spending my mana so I wouldn’t advance as fast as I would otherwise.

Speaking of mana expenditure, the 33rd floor is quite large, and there would be a lot to build in it. It’s over 46,000 kilometers in length, a bit over 35,500 kilometers in width, and 2.8 kilometers in height. In the playroom, I think I will make a regular area and just use the different kinds of patterns I have gotten to give them a chance at advancing.

On this floor, there would be 330,000 dungeon rooms, which were already designed by me and my design team. There wouldn't be anything special about it, but over the course of the last few previous floors, we have really started to dial in the difficulty and the excitement so adventurers won’t get bored. Because that has actually been a bit of a problem.

There are now more kinds of scenarios, so monsters won’t just be waiting in the room. It was a bit difficult to figure out, but I think we have a good mixture of different scenarios now, and we will be adding new ones constantly, which will help in their training.

Our missions in the outside world were going surprisingly well, even if a bit slowly. Yet that was what I wanted, and my creatures were more than willing to comply with my wishes. The Academy itself was now massive, having nearly 30,000 creatures living there, with about 1,000 out on missions. In the coming year, that number should decrease by quite a lot as we were ready for the first major expansion of the Guild operating inside the dungeon.

We were also getting a better idea of the underwater world and their species. I wanted them all, but for that, I would need to do a lot of building. Another problem was getting them here, which would be quite difficult as I didn’t want to use my dungeon gateways. All of this required a lot of things and a lot of planning, so I classified this as another project.

Currently, I was already building out the underwater versions of my upper floors, but I didn’t quite know how to deal with the lower ones that got really big. Not only would it make things a bit too tight in the middle floors, but most of the rooms would go unused as I didn’t think that I would get many underwater adventure species delving into my dungeon in a short time frame.

It didn't take me long to figure out what I needed to do. Quite a while back, I designed my dungeons in sections, so I think I will just make smaller sections of the regular dungeon rooms. So much to do and so much time to do it. It was wonderful being a dungeon as I got to watch so much. In just two short years, the 33rd floor was finished, and it was time for another breakthrough.

For the floor guardian, I chose a particularly interesting fish creature who had learned to swim in the air. She was quite the menace, and only the strongest birds were able to contest with her. She was now already in the 20th-floor playroom as it didn't take her long to get too strong for the 19th.

If I used her current pattern, she would be way too strong, but fortunately, I had the habit of saving almost every creature's pattern when they reached a certain power level. The reactions adventurers were going to have to this particular floor guardian were going to be quite fun to witness.

For the skill, I continued to advance, ever-expanding mind matrix and getting it to an A+ rank. When it was over, I didn’t wait long before starting on the 34th floor. This one was also going to have a regular playroom as I still had a lot of patterns I hadn’t had a chance to use, thanks to my creatures bringing back so many new patterns.

My latest experimentation playroom has also gotten a few more sections filled. One of the ones that I made almost immediately after the first four was to make a one with higher gravity. This has been a particularly successful section, and I might even change an entire floor's gravity in the future as it seems that higher gravity makes stronger creatures.

After that, it took a little while longer to add a few more sections, but the ideas came to me thanks to the labyrinth project. Sometimes I had more vertical space in my labyrinth than I expected, and sometimes that vertical space was quite large.

So instead of filling it with multiple levels of ruins, I instead made it so there were ways to get into these areas through broken walls and stuff like that. In some of those areas, I also added a skybox.

It didn't take me long to realize that it would be way too nice inside those areas, and while I did keep some of them like that, in others, for the first time I actually changed the output of the fake sun to make it hotter. But that wasn't the only thing that changed. It seemed like the sun was a lot more complex. After that, I did a bit of research and was quite dumbfounded.

In the simplest of terms, the sun wasn’t just a source of light; it was a big ball of fire. It wasn't regular fire; that's just a simplification. There were still a lot of opposing theories amongst the books I had access to, but all of them agreed that the stars in the night sky were all like our sun, which was hard to comprehend.

I still remember when I figured that out and spent weeks watching the night sky, wondering if those stars had similar planets around them as our sun did. I wondered what those planets would look like and if they had interesting creatures that are not on this planet. It was interesting to think about, but I couldn’t just let so much of my mind ponder on unhelpful things.

So some of the sections now had suns that had different levels of output. The results have been mixed but I am hopeful for interesting results. In one section I needed to dial the output down as it was just killing everything.

It was time to get back to building. Yet, it didn't take long for me to be completely interrupted. Ace was finally back, but when I focused on him, the first thing I noticed was that his core was shining. He was now diamond rank. How? Why?