Chapter 70 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Finally, the 17th floor space expansion was done. I did experiment a little bit and found that the floors didn’t have to be oval-shaped or even uniform, but right now I continued the way I have been doing things.

I now had a huge empty space that I could fill with anything I wanted to. I kept the height at 1.5 kilometres as I needed the extra space the 500-metre height just couldn’t give me. The length of the floor was now just shy of 5000 kilometres and width almost 4000 kilometres. It was still a huge area of land that could hold multiple different biomes without any problems, but this entire place was going to be cold.

The reason why I wanted it this way was because I wanted a huge underground area to have frozen caves and I also wanted mountains. I will probably have to continue to increase the height in the following floors so I could eventually do a proper mountain floor.

I started to add rock from the bottom up, leaving empty spaces where the caves are going to be, and when I started to get closer to the surface, I began to properly design the terrain this playroom will have.

Now, while everything here was going to be frozen all the time, I still wanted a lot of different features like the right edge of the floor being a smaller version of the ocean. There will also be a river system with a huge river that bisects the entire floor and flows into the ocean. I needed to make a few dungeon rules so the water's saltiness wouldn't get diluted and the river would have the proper flow speed.

It was at this point that Tristan finally returned, looking incredibly miserable. It didn’t take him long to find Carl, who was celebrating another solo victory against the 16th-floor guardian. He's only one of the 237 adventurers who had been able to kill the guardian solo. It didn’t take long for Tristan to tell his tale, which was quite disheartening for this scholar.

Apparently, everything was going smoothly at first; others reviewed his paper and then started to confirm his findings. He was then given a reward and a stipend from the Kingdom and the university.

Apparently, his findings were quite relevant to deciphering quite a lot of old books with lost knowledge. Then, however, one of his rivals – apparently, he had rivals – found out where Tristan had been and made some connections that turned out to be quite true.

When the news spread that he had written the paper on the things he found, a dungeon had made, and not some old ruin threw in to question his qualifications and absolutely every other part he was proud to possess.

It took him quite a long time to get everything disproven, but his reputation was destroyed even if he was proven right. They even stopped the stipends that Tristan had hoped on so he could continue to fully devote himself to the mysteries of this dungeon.

Carl comforted him, saying he had done well before, and reminded Tristan that he still had the large lump sum they gave him before. While they had stopped his stipend, they couldn’t take away the coin they gave to him as a reward because he was found not guilty of the charges.

That cheered Tristan up a little bit. Then it was Carl's turn to tell Tristan what had happened in the dungeon. Tristan, of course, was incredibly interested in the coin collection quest and the coins themselves. He was less excited to find out that on one of the more common coins was quite an embarrassing face of his.

It cheered me up to see his panicked face when he saw his own coin. It seems that in the future they would split their time gathering some of their own coins and doing the quest, but at least they were finally starting.

The quest chain Tristan had started was quite long and would take them through four different floors, and in the end, they would find quite a stacked treasure room. Of course, if they can survive the traps and get there, but if they're careful, there's a chance that they might find an even longer quest chain, which isn’t even finished as I haven’t built the floors the quest will take them through.

I am a bit nervous about it, and of course, I could cancel it anytime I wanted to, but I wonder about how Tristan and Carl would make of the revelation and how it would change the adventurers' view of me. But there was no need to think so much about this right now, and who knows what information I might have collected by that time. I focused back on making the frozen floor.

Currently, it wasn't even cold here, quite warm, but that was necessary because to start off, this floor was not going to be cold; it was actually going to be temperate. But it will slowly, with every season, get colder, and the winter is going to last longer and longer.

The cold time was already going to be quite long, half a year, but there was going to be a brief summer, at least at the start. This should give everything a chance to adapt and evolve, and those who can't, well, they weren’t meant for this floor.

I found it a lot easier to make and grow out the vegetation needed, as I could just take the starting plants from other floors, making the process a lot quicker. Of course, like with every floor, I mostly used the beginning patterns, but I found myself using more and more patterns that have evolved a little bit.

I suspect that this trend will continue as I get deeper and deeper. Sometimes I wonder what kind of landscapes I could make later on with the ever-strengthening dungeon rules. Could I make a floor where there’s no gravity and everything's just floating around?

"Don't dream, work," I reminded myself as I continued to make the 17th-floor playroom. I also started to make the dungeon rooms with the goal of making 60,000. There will still be two hub stations.

Of course, I could add more, but the number of rooms didn't indicate that there was a need, as the adventurers were barely using their current hub stations. Slowly, however, they were being inhabited. Unfortunately, no one was still having children inside, which was a bit of a shame because I kinda wanted the different patterns of adventure races.

When I was happy with how much vegetation there was on the 17th-floor playroom, I started to introduce creatures. This was even easier, as a lot of them I could just take from the other floors, but I needed to be careful so that creatures that were too evolved didn't end up on this floor.

Like always, I also made a lot more then was needed, as I knew a lot of them were going to die from the fights that would ensue. But after that, it was time to leave the playroom alone and let it develop.

My focus shifted onto the dungeon rooms and the designs we wanted to make for this floor. The biggest change, of course, was that there were going to be a lot more raid rooms, but also this floor would introduce orc and kobold monsters as enemies.

I think that adventurers will be pleased with the added challenge of fighting creatures that could use similar weapons and armors to them, and of course, the fact that they will not be dropping meat pieces or monster parts from their bodies. Mostly, they will be dropping coins. That should make them quite the desired opponent.

Another good development that has happened is that my coins are now recognized in the outer world. It was a bit touch-and-go for a moment, as apparently kings didn't like for some reason when coins didn't have their faces, but I had seen plenty of coins that didn’t have people’s faces, so I was a bit confused about that.

Nevertheless, I was quite glad that everything worked out, but I did have to actually start filtering out faces that people made on purpose in the hopes of getting on one of the coins.

It also seems that the largest guilds are planning to secretly open a new bank on the surface. It seems that the main reason is to make purchasing things easier if they didn’t have to go through other banks. It was quite complex and involved a lot of bureaucracy, but I wish them the best.

What I was proud about was that they were going to call it Eternal Bank, honoring my name. I was a bit surprised that the name hadn’t been taken before, but it seems that there was some sort of rule that a bank could only take inspiration for its name from around the place where it's first founded.