Chapter 168 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Another secret breakthrough was finished, and I once again reestablished control over my dungeon. No one noticed what had happened, and I loved that no one did. Adventurers were taking their sweet time as they had only reached the 1st hub station of the 26th floor while I was done with the 27th floor.

It will take them a while longer to reach the large room, but that was one of the reasons why I wanted to advance as soon as possible. I didn’t want to miss a second of adventurers discovering this room.

With this breakthrough, I was able to advance both creature advancement and ever-expand mind matrix to B rank. I had a feeling I would need creatures who were stronger than me so no direct assault could win against me.

I also felt that I needed to continue to improve myself and that last skill of mine. While doing so slowly as I could only put so much mana into it at a time, was still making me better in almost every way.

It might be that I should focus on this skill for the next few breakthroughs and hopefully get it to S rank. That way, I should be able to continuously improve myself as time goes on. Even if the time between my advancements grows longer, I would still have a way to continuously improve myself.

There's no doubt in my mind that I’m so strong while only just getting to my 28th floor, was because I was pushing myself to the breaking point before every breakthrough. While at the start that was a minuscule amount of more mana, over time I think it has started to grow into an enormous increase in my capabilities. This has also brought up another interest or need in me, and that’s to conquer other dungeons.

It has been a truly long while since I felt from my instincts anything but a small annoyance when I’m not doing things like my instincts are telling me. But as I continued to grow stronger, those instincts of mine started to flare up, wanting me to expand my territory and seek out other dungeons to crush them and take what’s theirs. There is one huge problem in that want: I can’t expand my territory endlessly.

While going deeper is not that much of a problem, that's because I haven’t actually gone that deep, at least when you take into account the traveling distances between places on the surface. On the surface, things are a lot farther apart, and even the closest dungeon to me is still quite far away.

Of course, if you consider what a world actually is, the closer I get to the center, and if other dungeons are doing the same, then it won’t be too long until we’re quite close to each other as the distance continues to shrink the deeper we go.

While I could possibly push deeper, I do not want to get close enough to dungeons that should be diamond rank, as I’m certain that they would destroy me with a flood of diamond-rank monsters.

It will be a long time until I am able to make my own diamond-rank monsters, although I should have creatures that are at the diamond rank a lot earlier. That’s all thanks to a skill of mine.

Right now, if I get a little bit deeper, my creatures should be able to get to the platinum rank. After floor 50, I can make platinum-rank monsters. A few floors after that, my creatures should be able to reach the diamond rank, and after floor 75, I will be able to make diamond-rank monsters.

That also means that I would have two breakthroughs similarly impactful as my breakthrough when I finish the 20th floor. Not only will I grow a lot stronger, but I will also get another trait or an existing one would be changed at the end of floors 50 and 75.

The same goes for adventurers; they get their talents upgraded or new ones are manifested along with the huge general improvement they will receive. There is a reason why diamond ranks are said to live forever.

Now, I don’t know if diamond ranks actually believe that, but that’s not actually true. While it's really hard to tell and I really wish I could confirm this, since no diamond ranks have stepped inside of me, I actually can’t. But I’m pretty sure that they will still die of old age; it’s just that it will take a really long time. Unlike me, who is actually immortal.

There are a few interesting books I’ve read that describe different types of immortality, and while I’m a bit disappointed I can’t classify myself as the best kind, I can still be destroyed. But in that book, it spoke of immortalities that even death couldn't claim.

But I could also argue that being immune to death is also a curse because what meaning does life have if you cannot die? Yes, I’ve changed my mind—I still have the best immortality.

Of course, when I learned of this book, I tried to find what kind of creature had that kind of immortality, only to find out that not everything written down had a basis in reality.

It was a good find, as normally these kinds of books didn't find their way into my dungeon. That all changed when people started to live inside of me, and since then quite a few of my ideas, including the labyrinth project, have come from stories made up by adventurers.

Right now, however, it was time to start expanding the 28th floor. The plan has not changed; for this floor, we will be making it into an even higher difficulty area for those extraordinary creatures who continue to push themselves closer to platinum rank or are simply so dangerous that they should not be among weaker creatures.

There is another problem with making such a floor. Well, I don’t think this time it would be a problem, but. I noticed how the ecosystem couldn’t really properly support the truly strong, especially creatures who aren’t predators. They simply can’t get enough nutrition or calories to support their enhanced bodies. Because of this, a lot of them turn predator just so they can stay alive.

Even then, they need better sustenance than what regular patterns could support. Currently, it wasn't a problem as my playrooms were filled with strong patterns, but those ecosystems were barely holding on.

Plants are evolving simply too slowly to keep up with the needs of creatures. It seems that this problem is also happening in the wider world, and that is one of the reasons why the outside world isn’t flooded with dangerous monsters.

Adventurers have the same problem, although to a lesser degree. I think it’s because they don't actually use a lot of their body strength all the time, but if they are fighting or doing something strenuous, their appetites are quite monstrous.

This is also the reason why a lot of my stronger creatures spend a lot of time simply sleeping or even hibernating. If they were to constantly be on the move, they would simply starve themselves.

That did not sound that exciting to me, so things needed to change. It was time to make the start of the food chain a lot more energy-dense. That meant I needed to pack into plants a lot more nutrients, different kinds of nutrients, and a stupid amount of calories.

The easy answer was to just make plants that have more of those things, but even if I could do that, those plants would soon suck up everything in the earth, leaving it barren.

What most don’t understand is that while I’m counting the plants as the start of the food chain, even by loose definitions, that's not true. Of course, I could make a dungeon rule that would continue to supply the dirt with what the plants would need, but that seemed so inelegant.

My trait had two parts, one that I had barely used. I think it’s time to start messing around with combining patterns so I can start building an ecosystem that would be the basis for even stronger playrooms down the line.