Chapter 175 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

I was a bit disappointed in my adventurers. It has been over five years since they discovered the large room, and while they have made some progress after crossing it, it has been little, mostly because the big organizations chose to start learning how to deal with the changes that I have made in the dungeon.

This is partly my fault, as I never expected them to be so dedicated and so unwilling to learn as they go. Perhaps they thought that the new dungeon, as they’re calling it, is significantly more dangerous than the old one, but that's not true.

The difficulty curve is still the same; the only difference is the more realistic gain of loot. Yet beyond our estimation, especially the runners were unwilling to advance with the potential of lost loot.

They are so behind that not only did I need to reignite their drive to push forward by faking a breakthrough and opening up the 27th floor, but I actually already managed to finish the 28th-floor dungeon rooms and advance to the next floor.

While I’m currently not working on the 29th-floor playroom as I still need to wait for my experiments to grow and mature. But that doesn’t mean that I have not also been able to make significant progress on the 29th-floor dungeon rooms.

When the adventurers finally make it to the end of the 28th floor, they will find a swampy floor guardian room and will meet a particularly interesting enemy. Perhaps they would not understand the symbolism, but I purposely picked one of the oldest freshwater crocodiles that currently lives in my dungeon and made its pattern a floor guardian.

The symbolic part of it was that she looked incredibly old, with moss growing on her back and her usually greenish coloring now a lot more greyish because of her old age. She was still a fearsome creature, and I needed to lower her difficulty quite a bit so she would fit the power requirements of the 28th-floor's floor guardian.

This time around, I didn’t increase my previous skills but instead made two new ones. Planned evolution was not something I was aiming for, but it worked well enough for my needs.

Previously, whenever I made a monster, I selected a pattern and that was it. Now, however, I could give it something to strive for. It’s an interesting system that I’m still experimenting with, but the current results are quite pleasing.

The problem is that it takes time to test this particular skill out as it takes time for monsters and creatures to evolve. Yet the fact that now my monsters could evolve was incredible. The even more fascinating part was that their offspring seemed to inherit this evolutionary path that I could add to the patterns.

That's not to say that an evolution path wouldn't be a failure; I have seen plenty of those. But the way this works, I think it would help me solve my problem of needing stronger environments in the long term.

It also works quite weirdly. When I make a pattern now using this skill, I could add a destination for it to evolve into. As I’ve tested, without a doubt, I could give a mouse a destination to become a fish, and then the monster or its offspring would slowly try to achieve it, but not consciously. Those are like instincts, as these mice would prefer to live around water and hunt food whenever possible underwater.

Still, it’s such a difficult goal that I think it would take them many, many generations to actually achieve it. There are better ways of doing things, and if I have a variant pattern of the same creature and put that as the destination, the changes could be quite fast and relatively easy to achieve.

So, while it will take time, this has already fixed quite a lot of the problems I was having. And while not exactly the skill I was going for, as I wanted something more direct, this was good enough and perhaps in some ways even more preferred.

I was able to get it to C rank immediately thanks to the amount of mana I needed to put into this skill creation. My other skill, on the other hand, was only able to achieve F rank with the same amount of mana invested.

This skill idea came to me because of one of the more impressive creatures I’ve sent out for missions. It had one of the more important missions, and that was to infiltrate and find out about the underwater world.

Well, he delivered on every part of his mission and even beyond it. By his own request, he would continue with a similar mission, that’s expanded so we could learn even more about the underwater world.

Just recently, we were able to get a few more of my creatures into one of the regional capitals of the underwater world, and Claw even returned for a bit so I could make a copy of his pattern and get all the information he had been able to gather in memory form, not just in reports.

While we could get a few members back and forth between this underwater city, it was dangerous work for our only teleportation mage who was strong enough. The problem was that these kinds of teleportations were hard to mask, and we couldn’t risk getting caught. So I had an idea: what if I could fix that problem with a skill?

Up until this point, all the gateways, both the old design and the new one, were maintained and made by me without the help of any skill. I now had quite a lot of them, enough that I was using 8-character codes to keep them unique and so I could keep track of them better.

I couldn’t make gateways outside of my territory, but perhaps with the skill, it would be possible. So what I wanted to achieve was combining the two different gateway designs and the whole gateway system into a skill that would perhaps help me manage it easier and be able to make gateways outside my territory.

The resulting skill was called Dungeon Gateway. It was F rank, and it was beyond my wildest dreams. When before my gateway network was a huge, almost unwieldy monster, thanks to this skill it felt like I only had a few gateways that I could perfectly manage.

There were so many more options and, more importantly, all of it was managed through my skill, and thanks to that, a large portion of my mind that was focused on every gateway to keep each individual gateway's preferences working properly was now no longer needed.

It felt so good, but that wasn't the end of it. All of my gateways were made of dungeon stone, but now I could adjust their durability even more. If I wanted to, I could choose any number of gateways and basically connect them so only if you can destroy all of them can you damage one. This was a feature that I currently decided against using, as nearly indestructible gateways could raise some alarms if ever tested.

The truly magical part of the skill was that I was now able to make gateways outside my territory. What I had expected was that my creatures would need to go out to build a gateway and then I could connect to it, which we could do; that was completely possible, but that wasn't the main part of it.

While this feature didn't have pinpoint accuracy or basically any accuracy, I could think of a region, even while only knowing it on a map, and slowly a gateway would be built that would be like an entrance to my dungeon.

I was so excited, but I had to agree with my advisors that currently it was not time to mess about with something like this. I also felt that this gateway would be a bit different in appearance to my current ones, and more importantly, even only in F rank, I could feel that I could basically build a gateway most of the way to the other side of the world. This was simply magnificent and so exciting, and I couldn’t wait to become strong enough that it didn’t matter where I put my entrances.

I was also so happy that in the 28th-floor playroom, my experiments were finally starting to bear fruit. Most of it was thanks to my new skill and the device my Academy was able to build. They looked like crystal pillars, and while supplied with mana, they gave off a similar aura to an apex creature who’s very being changes the environment around themselves.

This gave another way to direct mutations and eventual evolution, but more importantly, it gave the power needed for these creatures and plants to advance without having to constantly kill.

Almost all of the playroom was filled with plants. Only the sides of the playroom were filled with stacks upon stacks of rooms, some large, some small, but all of them environments for creatures so they could also go through this process.

With the current estimates, I believe I will have a general environment fit for creatures of a power level of 40 or above in a year or two. This means that I would have a better environment for the creatures that have outpaced their competitors in the 20th-floor playroom and have become territorial kings who rule with an iron fist. Their only competitors are the other kings.

While I have some other playrooms like that, their domination keeps the others from advancing, and I cannot have that. Sacrifices, however, must be made, and I’m not quite ready to start teleporting them out of the 20th-floor playroom, as I haven’t even started making the 29th-floor playroom that would be their destination and their new playground.