Chapter 59 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Going through the patterns, I found some excellent choices. One of my top candidates right now was a centipede evolution that was incredibly good at piercing damage. Another choice was a spider evolution that also had an incredibly dangerous poison. Of course, some of the bears were incredibly dangerous, but this wasn’t a solo fight, and while a bear was quite well-rounded, the other top choices weren’t.

Then I came across a particularly interesting variant of the Mountain Lion that was incredibly well-rounded but also had a few skills that made them incredibly good at dealing damage, even against armoured opponents.

What was interesting was that the same pattern had two saved patterns for the exact same variant. Then I remembered. This particular variant had two standout members who were twins and could coordinate their attacks incredibly well.

They were unlucky and died in a large fight after ending up between two powerhouses. They never reached their full potential, but I think they could have made it really far and perhaps even become kings of a large area.

Their coordination was exceptionally good, and combination attacks were even better, so I decided to take a chance and see how well they could do. Of course, I could always change out the team members for this boss fight.

Unfortunately, if everything goes right, no one was going to reach this far as this core floor wasn’t meant for anyone to enter and challenge it. It's meant to kill anyone who tries. I pushed the twins patterns as much as I could, but they would need to work hard to get their skill ranks to the same level as the other members of the team.

Unfortunately, I can't push the skills higher for them as I don’t have the knowledge needed to make that happen. Well, I could push a few skills higher, and I did, but that was because other creatures had the same skill that they had been able to get higher.

For now, I didn’t change the room from its plain box as I would like the input from the team on how they would like the room to look and what features it should have to make their victory guaranteed.

Now it was time to make another huge circular area that would cover a large portion of this floor's space. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to make this floor as big as I wanted to, and I’m guessing that’s because my sub-dungeon skill simply wasn’t high enough rank.

For some reason, what I was doing wasn’t normal for a dungeon. My instincts were trying to inform me of that quite constantly, but nowadays, they are having even less effect than when I first awakened.

This circular area's cross-section was almost 300 kilometres, yet it would be filled entirely with a maze. After some testing, I was able to come up with the measurements I could get away with. If I made the tunnels of the labyrinth too small, it would mess with my necessary functions, and I would begin to suffocate slowly.

Fortunately, I was able to mitigate this and keep my original design by just making the tunnels a lot taller. When an adventurer makes it this far, they will see an elaborate entrance, and beyond that, a tunnel only one metre wide but also 50 metres tall.

All of the walls will also be 1 metre thick, and there would be from the floor to the ceiling. Whenever I will be able to expand this floor, I would continue to add to this maze to make getting through it even longer.

I split the circular area into 3 equal sections. This way, if they wanted to reach the end, they would need to circle this entire place three times. The circumference of the outer edge of this room is a bit over 2000 kilometres; just normally walking that distance should take a really long time, not to mention trying to traverse the maze.

The place will also be filled with traps, but I will do that a bit later, and they will be the deadliest I can think up. There will also be a huge amount of smaller creatures, especially the ones that are incredibly poisonous.

It should be an incredible challenge to anyone. Just in case, I also started to layer in a few dungeon rules that would make this place incredibly dark, no matter what the adventurers would try to do. I even added a shifting function so that, over time, the maze will continue to change.

I will also be making a few dungeon rules to make this core floor even more impregnable, like ensuring that the dungeon fairies won’t be able to teleport here, or any other skill that would help people get here without going through the floor. Doing this for the entire dungeon would be way too expensive.

After the maze, I had enough space for about 400 big rooms. 399 of them I made so they would be completely underwater and would be filled with my most dangerous water creatures, whose patterns I also pushed to the very limit.

The one room would be the last chance for someone to turn around. It would be a small room, completely empty except for the tunnel that led onwards, and you could already see that it was filled with water. On top of that tunnel was a sign with three skulls. I also added another dungeon rule to make this room have a feeling that anyone who pushed forward would die.

The maze will take a while to complete and a lot of mana to make all that dungeon stone. The dungeon rules also took a lot of upkeep and wouldn't be possible without my playrooms supplying me with so much regeneration.

The upkeep for this place would be almost equal to all of my dungeon rooms, and I hadn’t even added all the creatures and traps to the maze room. Nevertheless, this should make me a lot safer and give me enough time to find solutions to anyone who would actually try to destroy me.

It will take a lot of concentration to continue making the maze, but I did slow it down enough so I could continue making the 16th-floor playroom at a reasonable speed and still continue to observe everything necessary, especially now since I was paying more attention to everything going on so I wouldn’t have the same incident that happened in the bee floor where there were so many excellent patterns that I didn’t know existed.

The adventurers were doing quite well exploring the new floor, but even though they have had access to it for over six months, they weren’t anywhere near done exploring even half of it. There were too many adventurers who haven’t been in the silver ranks for a while, so every room posed a danger, and adventurers who had made it this far became a lot more careful and took things slower.

It seems that the death rate peaked around floors 12 and 13, and if an adventurer made it past, they had a much better chance of living. There was a small peak for adventurers who just reached the silver rank, but that was only at the start. If they survived a little longer, the death rate plummeted incredibly fast, but I think that’s mostly because the idiots would already be dead by this time.

What was also interesting was that some of the adventurers started to bring their families to the hub stations. I listened in a bit more to learn why they were doing this, and it turned out that the city near my dungeon entrance was starting to get crowded, so the living costs were going up.

However, here in the dungeon, especially in the hub stations, you had free resources, as everything in the hub stations was real, unlike the dungeon rooms, so building a home was cheap, and food was also quite plentiful.

Before this started to happen, almost all of the population was around the different gateways, especially the center of the hub station, but now a lot more buildings started to be constructed away from these centers of population. The adventurers' families also began to plant crops. It seems that those places were called farms, similar to what my ants did for the various fungi they cultivated.

That didn't change the fact that these adventurers scared me quite a lot when they started escorting small children deep into my dungeon. I even thought that perhaps they were some kind of mad cult trying to sacrifice young children to me.

Fortunately, it seems that that particular book where I found that information was just a made-up story. Just thinking about so much wasted potential made me sad. How could it ever be a good idea to kill your young ones?