Chapter 181 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

It has been a truly wonderful time. While expanding the 30th floor, I had plenty of time to observe what happened in the 29th-floor playroom. For lack of a better word, it was wonderful. Only a small percentage of the previous floor kings died. It was less than I expected, but I should have expected it from creatures who had climbed their way to the top.

Their presence also changed everything on the floor, and while before things had started to settle down a bit, now it's like they’re all accelerating, bringing the rest with them to higher heights.

Some of the battles that have happened have been among my favorites I’ve ever witnessed, and the fact that at this point most are intelligent enough to understand that sometimes you need to cooperate has led to weird alliances. I’m sure these alliances will bring the most wonderful creatures to life in the future.

All my worries have been alleviated about the rank 3 playroom, and instead of being scared of what the rank 4 playroom would look like, I am now actually excited. Speaking of that, my experimentation room is continuing to grow, but it will take time before the basic building blocks of the environment will get to a point that I would say they have reached the platinum rank.

During all of this time, the adventurers have made steady progress on the 27th floor, and while they have yet to reach the first hub station, just a few months ago I faked a breakthrough so I could open the 28th-floor playrooms.

There was a lot of cursing as the adventurers were feeling a bit frustrated. They’re used to reaching the end of the floor and then having to wait, which would give them an opportunity to relax, but they haven't gotten that in a long while.

Some of it is my fault, but mostly it's them taking so damn long in the large room. Not my fault that they wanted to do things so properly. Sometimes you just need to learn as you go, but on the other hand, caution is what keeps you alive if you do it properly.

I’ve listened to some of the more intelligent adventurers talk about this problem, and from my understanding, you could argue that almost any point you want to make would be the wrong one. So, I take it as every choice you make is the correct one if it's the correct choice for you.

Now, however, it was time to set my eyes on the 30th floor. The expansion was done, leaving me with a floor with a height that is 2,500 meters. The length was a bit over 35,500 kilometers, with a width of almost exactly 26,000 kilometers.

It was a massive floor, and if things continued like they were, things were going to get a lot bigger. I was kind of excited about that, and in only a few floors, I will have a bigger floor size than this planet's surface area. For some reason, that was really exciting.

The real question was what I was going to do with the playroom. The dungeon rooms were going to have 300,000 rooms, and this would be the first one to have four hub stations. Otherwise, it would just be more of what has been.

For the playroom itself, I am in need of another experimentation room, as I want to start experimenting with some extremes. In one of the playrooms, I have caves, and at the very bottom, some of them have lava. Because of that, there are some wonderful species of creatures and plants living there.

The problem is that there are so few who have adapted properly to that kind of environment. What I need to do is the same as what I did for the rank 3 playroom.

I needed the beginning steps of the ecosystem, and for that, I needed a lot of room to experiment. But I don’t need as much space as one playroom can give me, so I think I will section them off completely into smaller spaces that are still incredibly huge to give me the space needed to work in.

Another easy section to fill would be proper freezing temperatures. Right now, I have ice floors, but their temperature fluctuates and never gets too cold. I really want to know if life could thrive below -100°C.

While I was quite intent on making this experimentation playroom, I didn’t know if it would be appropriate, as this was the 30th floor where another one of my boss monsters would be and where the difficulty would increase a bit sharper than on floors with floor guardians.

It took me a bit of thinking when I finally landed on one word: ant. I had a lot of species of ants thanks to Bug Guy, who was basically the director of the Academy right now.

I've tried to start new ant colonies, but with other creatures around, they don't really survive long enough to develop a proper civilization. It will also take another month to finish the ancient ant pattern changes to make them a lot less aggressive and so they would have a similar mental capability like my other ants have.

Making another way for the ant nations to get down and have another playroom to explore when they haven’t even fully colonized the two previous ones was not something I wanted to do. No, a different approach was needed.

Perhaps they would start from zero once again without any knowledge of the ant nation before them. It was an intriguing idea, but how would I go about it? Just making monster ants and letting them start over would result in the same problem of them constantly warring at the start. Was there a way to fix this?

My musings were interrupted when there was a disturbance in the Academy's information-gathering wing. A moment later, I was informed of crucial information that had been received. Immediately, I focused on it.

"Father, I have received an important information packet. The agent involved has gone into hiding, indicating that they might have more information but can’t get to us right now. The response has been quite explosive, so we are laying low for a while."

"We didn't get much, but we did get the names of the ages before this one and their approximate lengths. The first age is simply called the First Age and not much is known about it. It's said that it's the longest age there ever has been.”

“The Second Age is called the Monster Age, only lasting about 1000 years. The Third Age is called the Age of Civilization, lasting about 3000 years. The Fourth Age is called the Age of Heroes, lasting for about 2000 years, and currently, we have the Fifth Age which is unnamed for some reason. It has lasted for almost 4500 years."

My puppet made it there right after the information was read out loud. "Is the agent alright? Do we need to send backup?" I directed it to ask. There was a short pause before there was an answer.

"She's one of our best, so if she said that she can keep herself hidden and then get away, then I think we do not need to send anyone to help her." I was still worried; they were my responsibility, but they were also their own persons and could make decisions even if I didn't like those decisions.

"Very well. Now about the information, it helps clear up some things, but it brings up so many more questions, does it not?" Absolutely everyone seemed to agree with that.

The discussion continued, but after a week, we still didn't know much. It was weird that they had lengths, and from the knowledge we have received from the ruin sites of this world, it doesn't indicate that any civilization existed further back than 4000 years. Why would there not be ruins that are older?