Chapter 75 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Enn had done quite well for herself. After she realized what the ruins meant, it was quite fun to watch her form her own team and how they, over the years, slowly grew in number. Even after all this time, they were still quite far from repairing the structure she found in the first ruins.

I was a bit disappointed in her and her team, but I understood why they were taking it slowly; they didn't want a huge nation to come in and take away their fun. They had less to worry about than they thought. No nation wanted to take these lands because it was one of the places where strong creatures continued to spawn.

Even if this place was full of colonies, they would still continue to spawn, and it would be quite devastating to any normal ant living here. So the nations left this place alone, even if there were valuable things to take, just buying them off the Champions who risked their lives to gain those resources was easier.

This particular quest chain required them to find 8 ruins where they would find pieces and information about how to fix the special gateway I had placed in the first ruin. It was actually kind of funny that Enn found the main ruin first, but that actually did make things a little bit harder for them.

Still, they were doing great; they had found five of the eight ruins and were closing in on the 6th. Unfortunately for them, there were more ruins than just the 8, so sometimes they found false leads.

Overall, I was quite impressed by their progress. They were the head of the adventurers, mainly because I still hadn’t finished the floors where the next quest would take the adventurers, or more specifically, Tristan. Although the next quest could be found by more than one person, unlike the one he had, that would never be accessible to anyone else.

Speaking of Tristan, I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or impressed. Carl had gone to fight in the front lines and challenge the new floor, while Tristan had stayed back to examine the ruins they found themselves in.

I had expected him to go and work on his findings in the Explorers Guild Headquarters like he usually did, but instead, he started to take stuff from there to the room where they defeated the boss. When Tristan was able to activate the gateway that was in that room, so they could easily get out, I was surprised that he was hesitant to go, as he was afraid they would never get back here.

So, Carl, the test subject, jumped back and forth through that gateway and many other gateways. I decided not to close down the gateway as Tristan had yet to find the next quest. Now, however, they even talked about using this as a secret base as they knew they could be safe. Originally, I didn't plan this place to be a reward, but since this was a quest no one else was going to do, I decided to leave the gateway open.

They complain about not being able to bring others here, but I’m sure that they will figure out they could use the original entrance to teleport to the ruins, as they still had the key to make that gateway work.

Thinking about this a little bit more, I also decided to start respawning large bug-type monsters in the lower area of this ruin, but I made the respawn rate quite low, so there would be a 75% chance that a singular monster would respawn in a day. I didn’t want there to be too many respawns, as large bug-type monsters were rare, and their loot was equally as rare.

I wonder how long it will take for them to find that out. Everything else, however, had gone as expected. The adventurers were coming to the correct conclusion that the entire floor was open.

They were quite pleased about the increase in the number of raid rooms, but none had found the special ones yet. More and more adventurers, however, were starting to stumble upon longer quests with excellent rewards. Overall, I would say things were going exceptionally well, so I felt it was a good time for a breakthrough.

The only problem was I didn’t know what the floor guardian should be. I already knew what kind of a floor guardian I wanted for the 18th, 19th, and 20th floors, but this one was a little bit more difficult.

Should I do something like I did with the last floor guardian and give them a hint about what was to come, or should I end with something that was from this floor? Giving a hint was going to be hard as they wouldn't understand it for quite a while, so I guess I should focus on this floor's uniqueness.

This was going to be quite hard to find a proper balance for. If I wanted the floor guardian room to be more like a raid encounter, the number of monsters inside would need to fluctuate quite a lot.

Fortunately, it was going to be easy to scale it up for the hardest difficulty as I could just add more numbers, but I started to imagine the fights and it actually took me about a week to finalize the design and the different encounters I wanted.

If an adventurer was going to go solo, he was going to have to face 7 monsters, a mix between goblins and orcs. The numbers continue to go up until you reach the 20-plus difficulty, where there will be a huge jump in numbers all the way to 300. The room itself was going to be really simple, just a moderately large area where the ground was going to be sand and the temperature quite high, simulating a desert environment.

When I was finally finished with the design, I started to gather mana. This part was incredibly easy and I found it funny that something dungeons would take years to accumulate, I only needed a few days.

As soon as I was filled to bursting, I triggered the breakthrough and once again felt the wonderful feeling that followed. Just this feeling honestly made me want to continue to breakthrough as fast as possible, but I pushed those thoughts aside and started to allocate mana.

Making the actual guardian room was quite easy as I had everything planned out, and when I was finished, it was time for skills rank up. I had a few ideas of possible new skills I might want, but I still needed to work on the two newest skills. After messing with the mana allocation a little bit, I was able to get dungeon rules from B to B+ and sub-dungeons from C to B rank.

When I came out of my breakthrough, I had grown once again, and wondered how large I was actually going to get, as my core was now a bit over 10 metres in diameter. It felt good to be this large.

The first thing I did was start to test my new expanded capabilities and make my decoy dungeon core a little bit larger. I could once again expand my core floor, and this time I added space so I could make the underwater area even larger. I was about halfway done with growing out the labyrinth. During this breakthrough I was certain I was going to finish it.

The adventurers seemed quite shocked as they could feel my breakthrough, but slowly they started to understand how my dungeon was going to work in the future. Many weren’t happy that I would not be slowly opening up more rooms and would only give them access when everything was finished or close to finishing.

Most, however, didn’t care or were happy about this change in how things worked. Ace came to confirm this, but he didn't look like he was against my decision, although even if he was against it, he couldn't do anything about it.

It was now time to start expanding my 18th floor. I didn’t have anything special planned for this playroom, so I just decided to do the opposite of what I was doing on the frozen floor. So, this one was going to be a desert floor.

I was also going to do the same as I did with the frozen floor: I was slowly going to make it hotter and hotter, although there was already going to be a lot of sandy areas, as it would take quite a lot of time for dirt to actually become proper sand. I was also going to make plenty of oasis areas, as I still wanted plenty of life on this floor.