Chapter 180 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

Rafe was still not ready to make contact with society, but I guess it was his bad luck or perhaps good luck to run into those particular individuals. I was happy to see him flying around and being so happy, but he was quite close to getting himself into trouble. Now, I don’t think that they would have been able to kill him, but exposing him was a possibility.

Whenever I get volunteers to the Academy, they go through an assessment where it is determined what their roles in the future will be. Rafe failed the infiltration assessment quite miserably.

While he would be able to keep himself hidden remarkably well, he's not suitable for basically every other aspect. Yet, we still needed to put him through that training, so he went through the same course as everyone else, which seems to be the problem.

I’m sure his training will be adjusted, and I will check up on this later, but right now I really needed to concentrate. The 29th floor was completely finished, and the adventurers had only reached the end of the 26th floor quite recently.

Everyone was getting used to the new way things worked, and while there was still grumbling about the changes, it was something I didn’t take too seriously as that would be normal if you changed something so fundamental all of a sudden.

There was a reason I hadn’t gone through a breakthrough just yet, and that was the playroom itself. I feel like I have gone overboard. Never thought I’d actually feel something like that.

This playroom is now ranked three, which is just my designation for the third room of this kind: the 19th-floor playroom being the first, and the 20th-floor playroom being the second. This playroom’s difficulty ranges from about level 33 all the way up to level 45. That means that this playroom is ahead of my latest floor difficulty by four floors up to sixteen floors.

I have no doubt in my mind that the difficulty will keep rising as time continues to march forward, but I should have at least a decade before I need to make a rank 4 playroom, which would have actual platinum-rank creatures. Yet, I can’t even imagine what that kind of environment might look like and how scary it would be, as even this one is too much.

While before, the difficulty was because there was a creature in the area that would be at the difficulty level of, let's say, floor 35. Now the entire environment is at that level.

There are now places that are completely dominated by plant life, and they do not like anyone intruding. Yet if the plants are weaker or have less control over themselves, they are mainly just food for creatures that should be just food for predators but are now as dangerous.

It's a place where anything and anyone could kill you if you just make one wrong move. If you can, however, survive this place, you would not only continue to grow quickly in your rank but in combat experience as well.

What's even scarier is how normal this looks. If you were to view these areas from a bit further away, it would look like any other forest. Yet if you were to enter it, every moment you would need to fight for survival.

In fact, I actually thought for a while that this might be too much, but I made some monsters to test things out. A lot of them died, but the ones who survived were eventually able to make areas that they could actually relax in. But it took a while and a lot of fighting.

So overall, I am happy about how things turned out, even if this place is a bit tense. It was now time for a breakthrough, and then it was time to allow creatures who have grown strong enough to come to this floor.

The breakthrough itself was simple enough. Gathering up the required mana was laughably easy, and when everything was done, I made sure that no one would realize that I had advanced. The floor guardian for this floor would be from the playroom. It took a bit of doing to make it appropriate for this floor's difficulty.

This will be my first plant-type floor guardian, and I was quite excited. The plant itself started out as a pattern called a water lily. It was now a dangerous opponent that could easily manipulate almost every part of itself. It especially liked to drag creatures under the water, settling them underneath its roots in the mud so it could take their nutrients and continue to grow stronger.

It didn't have a proper mind yet, so I tweaked the monster pattern a little bit more than I usually do to give it some proper attack moves and to know how to counteract some known tactics. Not to make this fight too difficult, I made it a quite large lake, but it was quite shallow, only three meters in depth. If I were to make it like ten meters, it would basically be too hard for almost all of the adventurers.

The best thing about this arena and this plant is that fire doesn't really affect it, so the pyromancers who like to burn down everything would once again have trouble and would need to think about other solutions than just burning.

When the skill part of the breakthrough came, I added almost everything to the creature advancement skill to take it from B rank to A rank. With that done and my advancement over, I was once again stronger.

The amount of control I had was increasing every time, and I couldn’t even imagine how strong I would be when I reached past the 75th floor. After a few days, it was finally time, and I started to move creatures who weren’t intelligent but were strong enough to the rank 3 playroom and gave others who were intelligent a chance to move forward.

Pov A King of the 20th Floor Playroom

The rock I was on was particularly warm this day, but I have noticed how I had lazed about more and more as the days passed. The only excitement I have is whenever another king gets bored enough to want to fight. I should really let some others in my territory get stronger, but they always challenge me too early, or I have to fight off another king who wants to kill someone strong in my territory.

It has been a bit annoying, and my advancement has slowed down to a crawl. They are also quite annoying, fighting constantly, and I have, on more than one occasion, killed them all just because they were annoying me too much.

Now my territory is suffering, and I have to eat more and more because of the bad quality of meat around here. It seems like another day doing absolutely nothing is necessary. The more days I can be like this, the better my food supply should get.

Then I heard it, a challenge from another king came. It was toward the south, so it was that damn dog. I particularly didn’t like fighting it as my claws had a hard time getting past that scraggly and dirty fur.

I started to stretch myself, getting ready to go and meet it, yet then I felt the presence of the father. Once before, I had felt it when I was offered the chance to advance to this playroom, and when I got the same choice once again, I didn’t even think twice before accepting.

One moment I was on my warm rock, the next I was in an unfamiliar forest. Immediately, I went into high alert, knowing what advancing meant, but when I advanced last it wasn't as soon as the new playroom was opened. Instead, it was a bit later on when things had calmed down a bit. So even when I was mentally prepared for chaos, I wasn’t prepared for this. Everything felt dangerous. Then I saw a rabbit, or more specifically, one of its variants.

I was surprised when I noticed that it noticed me at the exact same time I did. For a moment, we just looked at each other and I could just feel the power coming off it. This was going to be tasty.

At the same moment, both of us moved. It started to escape, and I chased it, using a skill to get it fast as I really wanted to taste meat. Yet to my complete surprise, it kept evading using a skill. My moment of surprise allowed it to get away.

That hadn't happened since I had been really young. Would hunting once again be a challenge? Perhaps it was a mistake to come here, but after a moment, I felt myself shiver. This would be dangerous.

Once again, my old instincts that had gotten dull sharpened up. It was time to start pushing myself once again. There was no way I was going to become food for something else. I was the one who hunted, not the other way around.