Chapter 69 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

All of the hundreds of coin designs were ready. I did even add to all of them 017, meaning those coins were dropped when I was 17 floors deep. The numbers were small so no one would mistake them for the bigger numbers representing some of the larger coin values.

Unfortunately, while everything was ready, I still needed to wait almost two weeks before I could begin giving them out as loot drops. The reason for the wait was quite obvious: I needed the annoying person to be inside my dungeon, fighting monsters, and the proper ones that would drop them.

I don’t think that I have ever felt so much anticipation before. I watched his every move. He was an impressive fighter, and I think he could have been a part of the Runner Guild if he wasn’t so busy running the city up above.

He was so serious while fighting. It was hard to keep myself composed. Then the moment came. I interrupted the loot drop to change the coins he got to be the new design and to have an image of his most embarrassing moment.

On that coin, the image of him looked like someone had just pulled down his pants in front of his crush. Of course, the situation actually wasn't that bad. He had just been clearing a large room when he happened upon 2 adventurers sharing private time.

They didn't even know he had seen, and he was only embarrassed for a moment. While no one would know the story, I bet the imagination of adventurers could conjure up a lot worse things than what actually happened.

At first, he didn't notice when he grabbed the coins, but then he stopped, his face starting to show confusion. Then he opened his hand and looked closer. My core vibrated from the amusement I was having from the look his face was currently making.

The realization, and then absolute dread, when he understood what was really happening. “No, no, no, no, no, no,” he continued to say, shaking his head. “This has to be a dream, this is not happening,” he then slapped himself quite hard and then understood that it was real.

"You son of a bitch!" he screamed and continued to endlessly curse at me, and I had to admit he was quite creative. Oh, I was so going to use some of those words to mess with Tristan and change one of the quests a little bit because he was really annoying me by not being back already.

Let him try to figure out some of the text when someone took the time to chisel in curse words. I didn’t say anything to Ace, but I continued to be amused by his absolute anger. I had already changed all of the drops, so now everyone was getting the new coins.

It was absolute madness, and then Ace finally stopped when his emergency bracelet started to vibrate. "You do understand that all of the coins are now changed?" I said to him, and absolute silence followed.

"Don't worry, not every coin has your image on it." My words comforted him a little bit, but then I said, "Only about 50% of the drops will have..." The cursing continued, but this time he was heading back towards the closest gateway.

The rest of the dungeon was also in chaos as more and more adventurers figured out what was going on. Some were worried that the banks and the rest of the world wouldn't accept these coins, but that shouldn't matter as they could just melt them down, and they should have about the same value as other coins. I was a bit disappointed in myself that I didn’t realize that might be a possibility, but if it is, I could just change the coin drop patterns back.

Days started to go by, and things went back to normal, but there were a lot more adventurers in the sections where more intelligent monsters were, the ones that dropped coins. I had hoped that some of the adventurers who were collecting different coins before the change would recognize right away what I had tried to do. Almost immediately, a lot of adventurers created new quests that they put all over waystations to buy all the different kinds of coins.

It didn’t take long for others to follow, and I was surprised how many started to collect the different coins. Some were quite rare, but I saw a mistake. I knew that those coins were rear, but how would anyone else know that they even existed?

So, I made a new quest for anyone who was holding 100 different coins from my dungeon. They would get access to a special quest that displayed all of the coins available and what was the current count of them dropped. The adventurers could see only a black representation of the coin, but when they had collected that type of coin, the display would be filled with the correct colour.

I did some tweaking and even asked some of the ants for their opinion before I released it. The quest was a great hit, and only a few days after adventurers could get it, quite a few found themselves a new hobby.

What was interesting was how excited adventurers were for this change, especially the quest. It felt like some needed to do it no matter what, and to my surprise, were willing to spend enormous amounts of capital to acquire the more rare drops that had appeared.

I smelled opportunity. It was similar to what was happening with the different kill quests. For some reason, adventurers were almost as excited for those as they were to actually train and rank up. This was something requiring further research, but I would need to do it slowly; doing things too fast would probably bring trouble.

Nevertheless, this should help a little bit with my plans to expand the loot drop table after the 20th floor. It was time to add some more materials, like the different kinds of plants I have gotten from the annoying person or that have evolved in the playrooms.

I liked that a lot more adventurers lived inside me, making things from what I dropped. It's different from the fights or actually making new floors, but it's not like watching civilizations rise as well. It's more intimate, but still about creating something from something else.

Of course, why I wanted to add a lot of the plants with special properties was because they could be used for alchemy, which was an incredibly complex but also interesting process to watch.

Why did I want to see all of these seemingly unnecessary things instead making my dungeon deeper? With the knowledge I learn I could accelerate my civilizations so they wouldn't have to start from nothing?

Who knows how the ant nations would have developed without the Academy and so much knowledge that they got from the outside world. They still missed a lot as my parent didn't have an endless amount of books on every subject. It was necessary to give that knowledge and choose what knowledge to give, as I was quite certain that what knowledge a civilization gets will influence its development hugely down the line.

All of this time, I still continued to expand the 17th floor space, but at least now I wasn’t so foolish as to fill it with rock from the beginning. Expanding empty space was so much easier. I also had a plan of what I was going to do, and finally, I will make the frozen playroom I had dreamed about for quite a while now. There will be some changes, but that will need to wait for when I actually start to terraform the place.

Then, of course, there was the 16th-floor playroom, the endless caves. Honestly, sometimes the things happening there even scared me. None of the kobolds I introduced are alive; none of them could contend with the absolutely deadly poisons, all the bugs, and some of the other creatures have developed. It was an absolute madhouse where no one had an upper hand, but slowly there were zones emerging where different types of creatures dominated a large area.