Chapter 167 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

It was time to fake my breakthrough. Some of the adventurers were getting close to reaching the end of the 25th floor. Everyone was quite surprised about this breakthrough, as they hadn't expected it to happen so soon. It was quite fascinating to see how people acted when they thought that I wasn’t conscious.

It seems that adventurers who were frustrated waited for this moment to finally voice their complaints out loud. The cursing and accusations were a bit annoying but also quite creative. While most of it was just them being frustrated about themselves not being able to complete something, I did find that there were some nuggets of wisdom that would actually help me improve my dungeon a bit.

The surface was also quite lively, but when most figured out that no adventurer had even reached the end of the 25th floor, things calmed down a bit. Instead, secret meetings between powerful people were where the fun was really happening. Many were concerned about how fast I was advancing and many tried to run calculations to figure out how much mana I was making.

Now, no matter how much I despised Pixies, at least they were able to get accurate numbers. I don’t think there was literally anyone who called themselves a mathematician that got a number even similar to each other. All of them, of course, were way off, and even the wildest figures that no one believed to be true were actually shy of the real number.

It truly put into perspective just how much mana I was generating. Without the playrooms, it would take me decades to gather enough mana from the adventurers, but that was only because most of them lived constantly inside of me. Other dungeons didn't seem to do that. That just seemed like a flawed design, which brought the problem back to Pixies.

There’s no way dungeons are supposed to be the way they currently are. Something was really wrong in this world, and I really wanted to know what. Fortunately, I had literally thousands of creatures studying to be my eyes and ears in the outside world to figure all of this out for me. What I needed to do was be the best dungeon I could be.

Currently, I was close to finishing the 27th-floor playroom's terrain and the dungeon room's skeleton. Yet one of my secret projects finally had a breakthrough. Now I could begin with my project that I have labeled the labyrinth. It seems like, in the future, I would not need to turn mountains into precious metals or crystals as I have plenty of other more pressing projects that need attention.

I might even prolong my labyrinth project as I think the fortress project is more important right now and would actually take longer. I have claimed the entire territory that is underneath the Eternal city-state. Only about 10 to 20 meters to the surface remains unclaimed except for the numerous dungeon entrance spots.

Another awesome thing about having so many entrances is that I could feel that I could breathe so much easier. It was a nice benefit but also highlighted how reliant I am on entrances to function properly.

There is also quite a big difference between my claimed area and actual floor space. Inside the floor, my control it absolutely, but inside my claimed area, that control is lessened by quite a lot.

Currently, it also serves as good protection as the claimed area contains actual real materials which would not be damaged by melters. The problem is that most of it is just regular rock that is broken easily enough.

From what my strategist tells me and what I’ve observed about war itself, no fortress is unbreachable. The goal of the fortress and, in fact, any defense is to delay your enemy while you hurt them as much as possible before they can break through.

So making a simple layer of dungeon stone around my claimed area would only slow them down and make them use up only one dungeon melter.

What I need is layered defenses while making sure that I could continue to harass and damage whoever wants to breach my defense. This will require a tremendous amount of dungeon stone and moving of actual real material, which I cannot do.

While I could perhaps move real stone a bit, the more I push it, the more it would become me until it ceases to be what it was, and the dungeon melter would cut right through it.

Fortunately, I have an answer to that, and they are my favorite form of patterns. The answer was ants—billions of them. There was an interesting quirk with claimed territory: my monsters could survive there. So currently, underneath my floors, there were mazes of tunnels dug by monster ants who will continue to dig deeper and then outwards to help with the fortress project.

The next biggest problem is entrances. I need tunnels out of the floors I have, and they need to be connected with the outside world beyond my claimed area. For that, I will need the help of the ant nations and other creatures who are excellent at digging. They will go through the tunnels the monster ants made deep into the earth and start to carve out huge open spaces outside my claimed territory.

It will be a long project that will take quite a while, but hopefully, they will be willing to do this because that way, I would have relatively safe and hidden entrances. This means that if my entrances to the surface are closed off, it would not affect me at all.

Of course, it would be sad if no new adventurers came, but I no longer need them to continue advancing. All of this is possible because my floors take up quite little real space, as they have not gotten much bigger since my fifth floor. It should be like that with every dungeon; otherwise, the entire underworld would be filled with dungeon floors.

As more and more advisers are brought in on this fortress project, the scale of it continues to rise. We now even have a layer that uses the new water-creating crystals I got. Basically, I would have a huge amount of them in a layer between two dungeon stones. What I will do is continue to pump them full of mana until the entire layer is filled with water, but I won’t stop.

Now this came as a surprise to me, but that’s why I have the Academy to figure these things out. The more water you create in a confined space, the more pressure will build. They ran some tests and were able to easily get the pressure to be deadly.

So if a dungeon melter is used to punch a hole in this layer, pressurized water would immediately escape and kill anything that tried to come through. I can’t wait to finish this layer, and while it would be bad if attackers get so far, I still kind of want to see what would happen.

I didn’t actually need to claim territory so deep down, as I would never actually need that much space for my floors, but I already started to slowly move my floors downwards.

It was difficult to do, it was time-consuming, and it took ridiculous amounts of mana, but for the fortress project, being so close to the surface simply wasn't feasible. It felt like I was out in the open being so close to the surface.

This was all possible thanks to the gateways, and now I even had access to a new version of them thanks to the labyrinth project, but I did not know if I needed to use these for the dungeon rooms just yet.

I should be able to do this without anyone knowing and move all the floors quite deep. It will take some redoing of the connecting tunnels, but I want to make sure that I could even bring down my original first floors, as it would be unacceptable to leave it in the hands of anyone who wanted to destroy them, even if it was strategically a better move not to do so.