Chapter 64 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I was incredibly frustrated. There wasn’t much left for me to do that required a lot of concentration, so most of my mind was busy watching and waiting for that stupid adventurer to get on with it. But apparently, the quest wasn't the most important thing to him; it was that stupid language.

What was even more frustrating was that he was not progressing because of me and the mistake that I had made. I know about dialects, as I've heard multiple of them, even of this kingdom's language. But I thought that I had checked with the books and my inherited memories of the three languages, and they all seemed like the proper version.

Well, I was not correct, apparently. One of the languages was a bit different, like literally two of the words had a different letter than the language that the adventurer, whose name is Tristan, had access to. I should really start using their names.

He was able to translate enough to get to the next part of the quest, but apparently, he was a perfectionist or something like that. He needed to decipher the language fully, and not to mention, he also was writing some sort of paper so he could publish his findings.

I just wanted him to go to the next part of the quest. It was at this moment that there was an actual knock on his office door that he was renting. It shocked me as much as it did Tristan. He was panicking because for some reason he didn't want others to know what he was doing, probably because he wanted to publish his findings.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to worry like he did because I could just look to see who had come. It was quite a tall and wide man, and for some reason, familiar. Then I remembered, he was a part of the runners' guild and actually quite good. Did they know each other?

It was an interesting development that I watched quite excitedly. "Tristan, it’s me, Carl," was heard from the doorway, and I could immediately see how Tristan relaxed. What followed was quite a friendly discussion where apparently Carl wanted help learning to read in exchange for information.

Unfortunately, Tristan wasn’t that interested in that information, but in the end, they came to a deal that Carl would help Tristan with his quest after he was done deciphering the language fully.

A week went past and my attention started to wane, but it seems that Tristan teaching Carl actually helped him figure out the mistake I had made, which meant it shouldn't take them too long to actually continue the quest.

I was quite glad that Tristan got such capable help, as this quest—not the next part, but a bit later on—actually had some dangerous unique monsters to fight, which would have most certainly killed Tristan.

It will still take a few more floors until he reaches the end of the quest chain, which he could stumble upon thanks to this quest chain, and if he does, things will get a lot more interesting if he gives out that information.

I kinda wanted to start pushing downward, but I felt that I shouldn’t be too fast and let the adventurers build up. My creatures could also continue to evolve, so I will have stronger patterns for the later floors.

I haven’t only watched Tristan; I have also been playing around with my sub-dungeons. But they are a lot of the same, and while the fighting never truly gets boring, I need to progress them slowly, as I don’t want them to get too deep, otherwise, it would mess up the floor balance.

Things take time to properly develop, and while it's awesome to get to the goal, it's quite lovely to just watch how things progress.

That’s why I’m so grateful for the shadow guilds' information networks. Fortunately, they don’t just focus on what’s going down here but also on what’s happening up above. I had many plans that I didn’t really want to execute to learn more about the surface, as I wasn’t sure if they could be detected, but now there was no need.

The city there continues to grow at a rapid pace thanks to the airship port. That was an amazing discovery, but I was quite curious to find that they didn't have the flying devices that ants used mainly for war. Instead, they had their large air-filled sacks that were above a platform where people and their cargo were.

The ants were also using this kind of vehicle, but their propulsion was still mainly with a skill engine, unlike the human ones that had mana engines. But it was a lot less resource-intensive than the aeroplanes.

The city was growing fast, and Ace was its leader and the surrounding area. That brought up an interesting point: there was talk about how long the queues were for the upper floors, which were quite small. Apparently, this was holding back the city's development.

It was something that I kind of wanted to fix, as I would like more adventurers to develop and not just come from other places. I find that the adventurers who start by delving me are a lot more respectful and stronger than the ones who come here from other places.

A perfect example was Carl. It took me a while to go through all my memories, but he had been here from the very beginning of his journey of seeking power. He didn't have any advantages; he came in here with clothing that was barely holding up. Yet now, there were few who could contest him.

There wasn’t the space that I needed on the appropriate floors, and I didn’t really want to take space in my playrooms. Now, in the later floors, I had a lot more space, but the problem would be mana density. Wait, was that actually a problem?

It was something that my inherited memories told me: that mana density needed to be lower on the higher floors and then get denser the lower the floors go. Was there a reason for that?

After almost four days of searching, I only had conjectures made by humans that I knew mostly were not true. More mana density didn’t do anything to humans, at least in the concentrations that I had, but it seems that if the concentration got truly bad, it could affect lower-rank adventurers and everyone else.

I was far from that, like a stupid amount away from that density. Still, I didn’t want to seem too weird, and I read that it was actually quite normal for dungeons to start adding more alternative paths that were completely separate on the upper floors.

Of course, I didn’t want to just add one or two; that would not fit with my current design elements. That was the reason why I was currently testing if completely isolated rooms, even on my 16th floor, and only connected through gateways to the first floor, or the 2nd, and so on, would affect mana density.

The answer was actually straightforward and quite simple, although I did need to make the walls a bit thicker to keep the ambient mana from seeping in. They simply counted as extensions of those upper floors, which meant I could make basically as many extensions as I wanted without having to worry about anything.

This meant that I had a similar project to do to the sub-dungeons, and I quite easily stole most of those ideas as I worked on these proper dungeon rooms. It was quite a good distraction, and it was interesting to go back to simplicity; there was a certain beauty in it.

It was a nice side project, but I still had a lot of my mind open and not being used. Tristan and Carl were getting closer to going out and doing their first quest, but even if I kept track of their every movement and even how much air they breathed in, a large portion of me was still a bit bored.

Almost a day of contemplating what more I should do, I was alerted that one of the longer-to-complete quests actually was finished. It was to kill 10,000 of five different kinds of monsters; someone actually did it.

Well, the reward was quite nice: five different pieces of loot from each of the monsters that the quest finisher could decide for himself, and access to quite a difficult but lucrative section of a previously closed section that only the quest finishers will have access to.

Of course, he picked the best pieces possible quality available, which they were calling epic loot drops. I wasn’t going to give what adventurers were calling legendary drops that anyone could complete with enough time. I wasn’t that generous.

Checking the adventurers' progress for this quest was quite surprising; quite a few were close to finishing this quest, as it seems a lot of adventurers were tackling this one. Now, at least, I knew what I should be doing during this downtime I have until the next floor.

It was time to properly get to know the adventurers and gather as much information as possible about the current dungeon rooms and how they are completed. It was not like I hadn’t done that; I had focused on certain areas before where I wasn’t totally sure of the results, but who knows what I might have missed.

For future dungeon room development, it would be quite interesting to know on a deep level what the adventurers like and don’t like, and how much they’re willing to push for what kinds of rewards. I still think that any adventurer's first goal should be to get stronger, so learning how to push them so they could train harder would be delicious.