Chapter 166 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

More and more of my creatures were returning, having completed their missions. Looking through their memories, I slowly started to understand what the outside world had to offer. It was somewhat disappointing yet also exciting.

There seemed to be so many patterns I could get that, for the first time, I was starting to think that perhaps I would need a few thousand playrooms before I could see them all shine.

There are two standouts. One being an ecosystem from a place called Blue Lagoon. It seems absolutely every single one of the patterns was unique yet were similarly affected, changing most of them into different hues of blue and, for the creatures themselves and plants, even giving special properties.

The notes were very well written and the memories confirmed everything, that no one had been able to replicate this environment anywhere else.

So I was cautious and went through everything without leaving a single grain of sand unexamined. I found the cause to be a small pattern.

Those I usually didn’t mess with. This was one of the earliest dungeon rules put in place straight from my ancestral memories and mostly done by my instincts. It made it so that these small patterns would be used everywhere and I have come to learn that they are necessary for life.

They also bring misery. They are the main reason why wounds fester. They pretty quickly go from being monsters created by me into being creatures, but without them, I don’t think life could survive that long. They are absolutely everywhere, and some can be quite dangerous. So, with time, I had to eradicate a few of them, but that was done easily enough.

This time, it seems that this particular small pattern needs quite specific conditions to thrive and seems to affect everything a lot more and quite differently from its brethren.

It seems that the area around there has a modified pattern for a mineral called cobalt. It looks like this small pattern needs to be around it to be able to survive, and because of that, it has found a way to create it. It's quite fascinating how it does so, as I didn’t believe small patterns were capable of such complex things.

I would have more than enough time to see how this small pattern interacted with its environment, as I was definitely going to make this biome in many different playrooms. Just in case, I made this small test area in the new playroom and observed if this environment would support the small pattern.

It took a bit more adjusting, as it really was quite stringent in where it wanted to live, but I was successful in the end. This also opened up some new avenues of research that might make my already numerous list of patterns even larger.

The second standout was the easiest-to-get wyvern pattern. It was the smallest and weakest of its kind, occupying a small island chain with their main source of food being fish. They were the size of a large dog, yet they were still quite dangerous. Their bodies, however, were the strongest rank 0 bodies I had seen.

Their muscles were incredible, their scaly hide so resistant to damage. This one didn't have a natural breath-type ability. Well, that wasn't entirely true; it was just so underdeveloped it didn't work. It was a fascinating system of a few different organs. The fact that they didn’t need the skill to have something so extraordinary was beyond exciting.

They were true terrors, and if I didn’t know better, I would say that they were the apex predator. The fact that, compared to dragons, these things were supposed to be weaklings was actually a bit concerning.

At least I now had confirmation of my suspicions. While a lot of the pattern for these creatures was natural, there were extensive modifications, and as more and more patterns were brought from the outside world, I have slowly been able to start identifying the handiwork of my brethren. Here, those modifications are quite easily seen, but most of the time it's harder to identify. I think it’s because of time.

As I have gotten better at that, those modifications are now better identified. Only some of the simplest creatures seemed to be completely natural; otherwise, there are minute changes in almost every pattern, even the adventurer patterns.

The humans seemed to have it the least, the dwarves a lot more. The original goblin pattern that I have falls somewhere in between those two in the amount of modifications done.

Of course, for adventurers, there's another layer of modification, the same with the rank one ant species. Those modifications are on a whole different level. The way those modifications connect to the original pattern has actually helped me make another connection.

The changes to the adventurer patterns happened before the other layer of modifications was added. That meant that these patterns were changed before and after this change they are basically the same.

Was that the goal, I wonder? To make it so that dungeons couldn’t simply change the adventurer patterns or get them from simply killing them? This secret becomes bigger and bigger as I continue to uncover more. Only a few missions to start gathering the history of this world have gone out, but as this first wave has started return and give their experience to the next one, more and more missions will go out soon.

The more missions go out, the more information I get, and while each mission might only get a small piece of information, I should be able to piece them together even if they come from different ends of the world. One of the saddest discoveries I have made of the outside world was of my kind and how seemingly dead they all seemed.

Only a few seemed to have life in them, but almost all of my creatures reported that most of them felt so cold. I think it’s because all of us have our own passions like adventurers do, and if you can't express that passion, it makes me shiver just thinking about that horror. There were some exceptions, but most of those my creatures could not enter as they were quite heavily guarded by tax officers.

I was surprised to find that out because of how things were run here. No one examined an adventurer who left my dungeon. I decided to find out why this was so different.

Apparently, Ace didn’t decide to tax the adventurers coming out of the dungeon but instead taxed whenever they sold something. That seemed to be a lot less invasive way of collecting tax, and I wondered why every place didn’t do the same.

A new mission type has been created because of them. Now, whenever such dungeons that are marked interesting are discovered, a group is going to be sent out without the special bags and a lot of resources. They will mimic regular adventurers who will simply go to scout this dungeon so they can gather information from the inside.

Another concern brought up was that even the simple-looking rings, the shape-shifting rings, were sometimes targets of greedy individuals. Because of this, now a lot of the creatures have those rings buried inside their fingers, not on them. It was an unpleasant change but unfortunately a necessary one.

One of those dungeons I was particularly interested in was what adventurers were currently calling the Water Maze. The crystal example that was brought from that dungeon is quite useful. I just need to supply it with a steady stream of mana and it will create tremendous amounts of real water, not dungeon-made water.

This just added another layer of defenses for me, but it will take a while to set everything up. Basically, because this water is real, dungeon melters would not be able to do anything to it and it would protect anything behind it from the melter's beam. It would be another layer of defenses. Over time, it seems like I was building myself out to be a proper fortress from anyone who would want to destroy me.

Which I guess was something that I actually needed to spend even more time on. Ace had been quite weird for a bit now. He hasn't said anything directly, which my advisors are saying is on purpose.

Perhaps it's because of the growing number of diamond-ranked individuals up above. There are also more shape-shifters coming to my dungeon. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be too long before I started to get information about the political situation of the outside world. I would have asked Ace, but perhaps it’s better to not show such interests just in case.