Chapter 183 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

While I would like to more actively witness everything that's happening in my dungeon, the need for progress makes it so a large portion of me has to focus on advancing. It was a sad fact for me that I’m most likely to miss some interesting things and will only learn about them after they have happened. It was something I have accepted as of late.

Ace was still gone, and I had a feeling that if I stopped advancing, there would be trouble down the line that I wouldn’t be able to handle. So, when I finished the 30th floor completely, it was time to move on.

It will take time for the ants of the 30th playroom to properly start to build their civilization, as currently, they’re just trying to survive, but I had no doubt in my mind that they would succeed like many others before them.

The Ant Nations, my first civilized creatures, were doing remarkably well. The population boom had slowed down quite a lot, but they were still steadily colonizing the rest of their land. A large portion of their workers were also currently hired by me to work on my fortress project.

We were about to finish the second layer, but it will still take an enormous amount of time to get that project done, and perhaps it will never truly be finished, as you should never stop improving your defenses. At least that’s what I’ve learned from my own civilizations and from the various books we have been collecting.

The bees have finally started to use tools, but they are slowly getting there, mostly because they're actually too hardworking and a bit stubborn, so they don’t like to change the way they do things.

While they still have a presence in their original playroom, it's more of a nursery to them and where the old go to live out the last of their lives. They are doing decently well in the 19th-floor playroom, but every civilized species has at least one safe area claimed, so it was nothing special.

They’re doing much better in their other playroom where there is so much more space, and of course, the endless forests of fruit trees have made their lives quite pleasant, even if they have a lot more enemies there than in their original playroom.

The kobolds have finally gained dominion over their playroom surface, having lost it near the beginning. It took them a while, but they’re slowly getting there.

The orcs were the second-strongest civilization. They are thriving in the 19th-floor playroom, having an even bigger presence than the ants, although the ants aren't really focusing on it.

The Arden goblins were well into their Kingdom Era, constantly warring with each other, but some of the more isolationist kingdoms with strong leaders have been able to get some settlements built and defended on the 19th floor.

There are other creatures showing signs of starting a civilization, but they're still in their tribal phases and often dependent on one individual who is pulling them forward. Sometimes they succeed, leaving a lasting legacy; sometimes they don't, and the ones who are left behind revert back to what they were. While some are close, I wouldn’t call them proper civilizations just yet.

The better question is what I would do with those barely started civilizations. I wouldn’t want them to just die out because a stronger creature came along and wiped them out, as has happened a few times.

Perhaps I will push my experimentation floor down a floor once again. After a bit of thinking, I decided not to do that. I will just make the next floor after that a place where I could bring communities of creatures who are starting to properly build a civilization.

With my thoughts gathered, it was time for a breakthrough. But when I started to gather mana, I realized I didn’t know what boss I wanted for the 30th floor. Perhaps it should have something to do with ants, as this floor's playroom is a new start for them.

A horrible idea came to me, and of course with it I remembered the most dramatic event of my life—the day when an anteater came and destroyed the ant colonies that lived next to me.

I would have to get over that fear and those feelings. Because of Ace, I actually had a few different species of anteaters, but I had never actually used the patterns.

They would, of course, be way too weak to be a 30th-floor boss, but I kind of wanted to flex my pattern-making skills. So while I continued to gather mana, it was time to start messing with the pattern of the biggest anteater species I had available to me.

First, I removed their desire to just hunt ants. They needed to be proper predators to be a boss. They had amazingly strong claws, and their front legs were surprisingly long. Should I go in the direction of making this an even bigger creature but slowing it down, or keeping its size and making it faster? When I tested both directions, I found that making it too fast seemed to make it a bit too powerful, so big it was.

Its fur was interesting. Perhaps ‘fur’ would be the wrong word; its hair was a lot straighter and more like fingernails than fur. It offered perfect defense against ant-type bugs, as it would be hard for them to shift those hairs aside and get to the skin underneath. Yet for adventurers, doing this shouldn’t be too hard as they would have piercing weapons. That needed to be fixed.

While thinking about that problem, I was giving it a few defensive and offensive skills, and then I made it to its tongue. It would be a nice change in pace for the fight if I made that its only way to attack quickly.

For that, I needed to strengthen it, but a grab with its tongue seemed a bit too powerful. Let's make it so that it would only fling the adventurers far away, hoping to damage them with the throw.

When I was done with that, I also figured out what to do with its hair. For inspiration, I used a few lizard species that had interlocking scales. Adventurers also called it scale mail. It was quite a popular armor.

I flattened the hair out a bit but still kept its long nature. It now had barb-like extensions and holes close to the edge of the flattened-out hair. With a little bit of work from the anteater, it could make them interlock, and with a few layers of them, it would make an excellent armor that still had enough flexibility for it to move properly.

With that done and me full of mana nearly to bursting, I triggered the breakthrough. It was easy enough to add the boss and the final room of the 30th floor.

For my skill selection, I went with creature advancement, which I was able to get to A+ rank. When I get it to S rank, I would move on to other skills. Hopefully, in time, I would come up with new skills I would need, as I would only get so many chances to add new ones.

When everything was done, after a week of settling down, I also made a fake breakthrough as I was annoyed that I wasn’t in sync. There were too many floors between my current one and the one adventurers thought was my current limit.

If some truly remarkable individuals came and figured out that they could actually reach the 30th floor while they still believed that the 28th floor was the deepest, it would bring a lot of trouble and reveal that I could hide breakthroughs.

Perhaps to slow things down just a little bit, I could start with my labyrinth project. What I wanted to do was to make the playrooms have an almost uniform ceiling, unlike the current one that was filled with dungeon rooms breaking apart the smoothness of the sky. It kind of messed with the skyboxes, and while I compensated the dungeon rules a little bit, it still created weird distortions.

It would have been an easy fix just to make a layer of dungeon stone, but that seemed too boring, so instead, I would make a thick layer of dungeon stone that was filled with endless ruins in the form of a labyrinth.

This project was one of the reasons that I ordered the reachers of a different type of gateway that was always functioning and looked like just another passage, indistinguishable from a normal passage, and you wouldn't even understand that you had been transported to another place.

With this, I could give the illusion that there was no end to this labyrinth. It would not only go into one of my playrooms but all of my bigger ones. At the start, it would also be devoid of natural life, only being filled with constructs.

It will be connected to the dungeon rooms and some playrooms, but those connections won’t be stable. That was thanks to the other unique aspect of the new type of gateways, as they could also switch the locations they were connected to.

I would make that random, and there would be no set time for when that happens. So when you go into the labyrinth, you might never leave it. That is why they would be designated as 2 and a half skulls.

This, however, wasn’t going to be a priority, and I suspect it will take quite a while before I open it up to the rest of the dungeon. It will also be fun to see how life will find a way to live in this desolate labyrinth, as I know it will find a way.

The 31st-floor playroom will be split into sections. Then I could mess with the fundamental environment of the sections without having to worry that I would mess up my experiments in others.

With the size of this floor, I could probably make a few dozen sections and still have massive areas to experiment with. The first two were easy to decide: they would be extreme heat and extreme cold. But I also wanted one that would have higher gravity and one that would have less air.

I recently got an interesting biography of a mage who lived nearly 2000 years ago. He was a gravity mage, the first to discover that if you go high enough, eventually there will be no air. To my knowledge, he was the only person to have actually gone to one of the moons.

"It was a beautiful yet dead place. There was no air, the gravity was disappointingly weak, and I’m still getting the fine dust out of my robes. Would not recommend visiting." That was the direct quote from him used in the book. He seemed like a fascinating sort and decently mad to achieve greatness.