Chapter 171 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

So full of yourself, so arrogant, thinking you could do anything you want. Only an idiot can be so self-centered. Just make an environment that’s perfect for higher rank creatures—such simple words that I knew no meaning of.

So much failure in this playroom. It was full of pockets of life teeming with power and crumpled heaps of failed experiments. Yet those few examples are just fake ones. The moment I stop supplying them with extra mana, they revert back to, well, something better than they started out, but nowhere close to where I need them to be.

This is my first proper failure, and it took me way too long to accept it. Fortunately, the adventurers helped bring me out of this self-destruction I was going through. So much wasted time doing the same thing, hoping for a different result. Thankfully, their discovering the large room on the 26th floor made me concentrate on something else other than my failure.

Things didn’t go in that room as I expected them to. There should have been a few parties at least that braved the sands, trying to be the first to get to the other side. Yet no one did for quite a while, and that was because of the runner and their friends. There is a reason why they are one of the strongest groups in my dungeon. They have something most lack, common sense.

Of course, the party that unlocked the playroom figured out the secret of this room quite fast, but they weren't actually the first. It also didn't take long for others of that first arrival group to figure out that they needed to make airships. It was actually quite funny when all of them started to figure out that all of them had the same plan and were all doing it secretly, trying to be the first.

There was a tense moment there, then they all laughed, and as is common to their kind, made it a competition to see who would be the first to finish a ship and take to the skies of the desert.

If it were any other group, I would suspect that sabotage would have become a real problem, yet they never took it too far, once again showing that while they will compete with each other, they would never actually try to do anything malicious to stop another from winning.

Of course, there have been such individuals among the runners. It's just that they don't usually last too long, as those people are usually also arrogant, and when you are pushing yourself to your very limit, going where no one has gone before, well, arrogance is as dangerous as a broken blade.

Thanks to Vinny and his quite reasonable design for an airship that didn't need to be too large for this place, they were the first to finish, only six months after they started building the ship. By that time, the runners were no longer the only ones in this room, and I finally got to see what happens when adventurers tried to push on foot through the desert.

If I were to discount the runners, then everything went according to plan. When there were about ten parties not associated with the first to arrive, there was one that dared to brave the desert.

That's not to say that they weren't prepared; they even made something that they were calling sand shoes, something that originally was called snowshoes. It did its job quite well, giving more surface area so they wouldn’t sink into the sand.

They were not weak fighters, but the cliff had quite a lot of people watching this party slowly get deeper into the desert. Then they all watched as they disappeared into the mouth of a large snake that swallowed their party whole. On the cliff, some coins exchanged hands, but literally everyone had expected that outcome. That's not to say that someone didn’t try something.

A particularly good archer wanted to test how strong these snakes are, and thanks to his build, he was able to shoot from quite a long distance. The arrow hit the snake, and everyone who could watch saw it look around, searching for an opponent, and when not finding one, dive quickly back under the sand.

Now, I do not know what the adventurers were thinking, but I suspect they were calculating how hard it would be to kill such an opponent who could dive who knows how deep into the sand.

My break from my failure also helped me figure out a few things. First, there's no point in continuing to try the same thing and failing; another approach was needed. From the information I was getting from the outside world, I knew that there were areas that would fit what I wanted to make.

Now, some of those patterns have already been brought back, and the only conclusion I have come to is that the way I was doing things was not at all the best way of getting the results I wanted.

Slowly letting plants and creatures evolve themselves might be the only way to get what I want, but unfortunately, that would take a while, and I would need higher difficulty playrooms sooner rather than later.

As I watched the maiden voyage of the airship called Desert Prowler, crewed by 12 people and captained by Vinny, I came to a realization that all of those powerful environments were almost perfectly suited for one or a few of the strong creatures living there. Why was that?

Vinny and his crew didn’t immediately try to reach the other side. They had decided to take the safer route. They would start making outposts on the rock pillars where there was enough living area and clean drinking water to resupply and make any repairs necessary.

It didn't take the people living in this room long to realize that while the desert was a proper desert, there were a few differences compared to a normal one.

First were the storms that I made so adventurers would actually have to struggle to cross this great desert in airships, and with those storms always came a downpour of water. Normally, if such things happened so regularly in a desert, it would not be a desert for long. The water, however, would be gone as quickly as it fell.

The plankton-like creatures required a lot of water to keep breeding as fast as I needed them to, and they would soak up everything they came into contact with. This sort of environment was needed so that the snakes would get enough food to support their large numbers and their ever-growing size.

In the Academy, in one of the many classrooms where my current problem was constantly being discussed, someone finally brought up a question that I fully focused on.

"Perhaps the monsters are changing the environment. They are most likely doing it unintentionally but that would explain why those environments are so suitable for them." It was an interesting idea and something I could check up on in my own playrooms. It didn't take me long to figure out the truth of that statement.

It seems that if a creature got strong enough, its very being started radiating outwards, influencing its surroundings. That started to cause mutations in the vegetation and creatures that were able to live around it. While the process wasn't fast, it wasn't slow either. The only reason I hadn’t noticed this before was because there were very few creatures strong enough to stay in the same relative area for long.

What I could probably do easily was to mimic this sort of reaction, but even that was a slow thing. What I should be able to do is mimic the same effect if I had enough patterns to get a basic stronger environment made. Then I could use this principle to make it even stronger.

This called for a lot of experimentation, gathering even more information from the outside world, and changing the purpose of this particular playroom I was currently working on.

No longer will this be for creatures whose combat power exceeds the current strongest playroom that is located on the 20th floor. No, this will mainly be an experimental playroom where I could advance the basic strength of the first links of the food chain.

It will take time to gather the proper amounts of information needed, and while I can already start with small-scale experimentation, I think I should focus on the dungeon rooms, then advance and start making the next floor's playroom ready for a stronger overall environment that should be a bit more suitable for the stronger creatures who are continuing to push forward every day.