Chapter 182 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

I finally had a plan for what I wanted to do with the 30th-floor playroom, but it will take a bit of time to finish all the building before I can get started. There was a lot to do, and for the first time, my design team was actually helping me with my playroom, not just with the dungeon rooms.

It’s going to be amazing, and just thinking about the way this should work out was so exciting. This also opened up so many avenues later down the line.

On the other hand, everything is not going as well as I would like in other aspects. While I am getting a steady supply of patterns, trying to get proper information about this world's history that seems so well-guarded is kind of annoying. Even in the underwater world, things are going so slowly as everything needs to be managed incredibly carefully. Then, all of a sudden, Ace was also gone.

It was incredibly concerning when I realized that, but his wife was still here, and no one was worried about him going away from the protection of his nation. Everything was going so slowly, and I wanted to speed everything up as I felt the need to know, especially about the history of this world. I was feeling kind of connected to it in a strange way.

After a bit of thinking about everything, I took a step back, so to speak. Hmmm, it seems like I have been infected by my creatures' desires to learn things fast. I could see why I would get affected—they were so fervent, and every little setback made them feel like they were disappointing me.

Now, this won’t do. "Everyone, take a second. We are starting to rush things. We must take a few moments and reorient our priorities. Our main goal is not to do things fast but to do them properly. Is that understood?"

Everyone who was in my range and heard my words stopped for a moment, processing my words, and I got sharp notes from almost everyone while others voiced their agreement.

This was the first time that I had so directly spoken; otherwise, I would more often communicate with feelings of what I wanted. It was difficult to do what I did. Speaking in mortal languages was hard, but it was possible thanks to them being my creatures, and I think reaching so deep also helped.

Everything started to stabilize in the following months, which was good news. Our training plans were changed, with everyone now getting more training in every field, so even if they weren’t experts, they would have a better overall understanding, which seemed to have increased efficiency by a surprising percentage.

We also added refresher training, as I had forgotten to factor in that biological brains had a bad habit of misremembering or straight up ignoring things that were not used often enough.

Sometimes I imagine having just a singular biological brain. I could not see myself functioning like that. That’s most likely the reason why dungeon cores are so different from other creatures because we couldn't function the way we do if we were.

Fortunately, we are really good at mimicking what we see, which has helped me understand my creatures and adventurers even better, which in turn will help me make an even better dungeon for them.

More and more adventurers were coming and going as many have started to reach the limit of what they could achieve. It will be interesting to see how the world will be changed by so many new and powerful gold ranks. More importantly, as they go out and spread what they have learned here, more would come, and I would be able to see and witness even more wonderful moments.

Just a day ago, another one of those wonderful moments happened when, to my complete surprise, Bug Guy and Rafe finally met. Why it took them so long took meet took me a bit of figuring out, but it seems that the bug guy was constantly going out into the dungeon to train himself and others. Rafe simply didn't qualify for those lessons just yet, but now things were different, and it seems like they were becoming good friends, which was nice to see.

Even though the 30th floor was quite a lot bigger, it still only took me a year and a half to finish building the basics of it. Not only was I getting stronger, but I was getting more efficient at how I was doing things.

It was now time to start adding the finishing touches to both the playroom and the dungeon rooms. While there was nothing special about the dungeon room, the playroom itself was going to be the first of its kind.

At the start, it will basically be like a scenario of a play. For that, however, we needed to build the set. First, we needed a lot of ruins, and they needed to be from species even bigger than the adventurers.

Fortunately, I didn’t need to make such a species, as there would be nothing left of them except ruins. What I did need to do was create new languages, multiple ones with different cultures and building styles, but that seemed to just excite my design team.

What we were depicting all happened on a large island-like continent, the only continent in the playroom to have civilization. The others were different flavors of kind of normal environments.

On this island, multiple different nations were in constant war, leading to many layers of ruins, which was kind of fun to make. And, of course, the final ruins depicted the ruins of the war that destroyed their entire species and civilization.

They were quite magically advanced, but they also had a subservient species in the form of many different ants. In fact, a lot of different ants because right now I had nearly 30,000 different species of ants, which was almost 95% of all the species of ants in this world.

They were, of course, also destroyed, but they foresaw the destruction of their masters, their slave owners, and devised a plan on how to save one a queen. That plan was used by all of the different species. Of course, there would be fake ones that looked like they failed but a lot will work.

For those starting queens, I didn’t want to use monsters, so I went through all of the species of ants I had and made a monster queen with workers that had memories of the world and how it was in this scenario.

While not every memory could be given through inherited memories, some were, so I needed to be really careful about how things were seen. They would still be aware of me and that they were living inside a dungeon, but that shouldn’t matter much as it’s still their world, their playroom.

These monsters only had one task: to make the best and strongest queen egg they could. Whenever those eggs were close to hatching, they were placed in a spell that suspended their life and placed into the playroom in very specific locations. The spell would only be broken if it felt safety or was broken forcefully. That was important for the start of the scenario.

Like that, I did it to every species and placed them all over this large island continent inside the ruins of the destroyed civilization. Not everyone would be awoken at the same time, and when everything was ready, I kicked off the start of the scenario in one of their ruins that used to be a magical school.

I watched as one of the towers collapsed, triggering a shield spell that encompassed the entirety of the ruins. Inside, in sleeping eggs, the 29 different species of ant queen woke up and started to break through their eggs. Nearby, they found the prepared food bars that they could eat for sustenance.

It took them a bit, but eventually, in all of these hideouts, there were fully grown queens. Their food supply running low, they needed to emerge into the dangerous outside world, but the shield was still protecting them.

Of course, when the queens noticed each other, there was a lot of tension, especially from the more aggressive species and even the old ant species. If I hadn’t changed them to be less aggressive, I am sure fighting would have followed.

Yet all of them had memories of a time long gone, and as I had hoped, this fact and the surrounding ruins reminded them all of what was the cost of endless war and animosity. While things were still incredibly tense, I was glad to find that they somewhat worked together to figure out their surroundings, more of the history of these ruins, and to start their own colonies.

I finished with the dungeon rooms when finally the shield that protected the city came down. They all had workers now that they sent out to explore the world around them. It didn't take them long to find more suspended queens, and as I had hoped, they didn't kill them but instead started to nurture them.

Now, I had no illusions that battles between the different species would happen. The world that they found themselves in, however, was dangerous enough that they should want to use every resource they have access to.

More queens mean more population, which means safety. I left kind of obvious clues that there were a lot of queens in a similar situation to theirs, so hopefully, in time, they will find them all. Only when they started to leave this continent would they start thinking about war. At least that is my hope.