Chapter 58 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

As time passed, I was surprised how peaceful the upper floors remained. Extra space was claimed slowly, but there wasn't even a hint that a large-scale fight would happen, not even on the ant floors.

The Ant nations were surprisingly reasonable, and their new organization that governed war managed to keep everything quite civil, and when disagreements needed a fight to resolve them, it ended up as a fight between champions.

While that was a bit disappointing, I was quite glad that my creatures were mature enough to handle difficult situations honourably. Now, there was one war on the orc floor, but it was small-scale. Otherwise, chieftains were the ones to fight whenever there was a disagreement.

It was an honourable fight to the death between the two of them, mimicking what happened with the ants which was quite suspicious. This might require a bit more investigation, as the coincidence seemed too similar to me.

I already checked, and I hadn’t given them any orders, and they shouldn’t have been influenced by my will, like what happened when I first started to make playrooms for other creatures, and I wanted them to keep evolving as fast as possible.

There might be something at work that I don’t know yet. It would be really important for me to find that out because I wouldn’t want future civilizations to be influenced by me so much.

Time goes by fast whenever I am having fun, but I did check, and there didn’t seem to be any time manipulation, just an effect of having fun, I guess. The time had finally come to open up the rest of the dungeon rooms so the adventurers could have access to the entire 50,000 rooms of the 16th floor. Now, while I still watched how the adventurers reacted to everything, it was also time to start with my new project.

Finally, I would have the time, as it will take quite a while for adventurers to reach the end of my dungeon, so I will have the time to make my core floor. I started by claiming land and then wrapping it with my space expansion skill. I claimed quite a big area in the real world.

As I started to do this truly, I felt a bit of resistance, which went away as I felt my sub dungeon skill activating. That was really interesting. I could have made my core room more bigger than it currently was, but I wouldn’t have been able to complete my plan without that skill.

Usually, when I expand the space of the floor, the stone in it expands with the space, but this time, right at the very start, I ran into a problem. As the space expansion started, my dungeon stone began to expand instead of being filled with regular rock.

The problem corrected itself almost immediately as I started claiming territory in the normal world. I had almost claimed 20 metres of space when my expansion stopped because I realised that something really weird had happened.

Why would the rock be my dungeon stone, and why would it take so much more mana? I know dungeon stone is a lot more expensive, but. shit. Why did no one tell me this? Actually, this hurt so much. It couldn’t be my fault, right?

Just in case, I went through my inherited memories, but there was no mention of it. I didn’t considered the inherited memories completely reliable, as I knew there might be gaps, but who would have guessed something so important would be left out?

So much wasted time, oh, I was so mad right now. It took an entire day for me to calm down before I properly started to expand my core floor again. I tested this so many times during the past day, and it still worked.

When I used space expansion, I could just choose to expand it into emptiness; I didn’t need to expand so the entire area would be filled with rock. Every time that I started to remove rock from the upper portion of my playroom was completely wasted time.

I was still a bit numb, but after I had claimed the territory I wanted in the real world, I started to expand the space and experiment with it a bit more. Not only did it take a lot less mana if I wanted to just expand the space where nothing would be in it, but it was also so much faster.

With a few calculations, I actually figured out that it would be cheaper and faster to just expand the entire space so it would be empty and then fill it in afterwards. When the space expansion was finally finished, my bad mood was starting to disappear, and a few days later, it was completely gone when I was able to witness a raid room fight.

This was a new design where 50 adventurers needed to defend a mountain pass against 500 different kinds of monsters that acted like they were in a horde. Lucky for them, I had spent quite a lot of time adjusting the difficulty, and the people who were fighting were actually veterans of raid rooms, so only three of them died when they finished the first clear condition.

They decided not to pursue the monsters, which lowered their reward, but if they did go after them, they would find that the dark forest had a lot more monsters than the surviving horde that retreated.

They were a cautious bunch, not like the speed runners who were currently madly fighting to gain the first clear of this floor. They were even a bit reckless for my taste, but they never disappointed in how they found ways to defeat my monsters and traps in an extremely cheaty way. I absolutely didn’t mind that, and one thing was for sure: I would never want to face those adventurers if I was an adventurer.

Now that my mood was better, I truly started to build out my core floor. First, I made my actual core room a lot bigger and made the walls even thicker. One thing that was also interesting about dungeon rock was that with every breakthrough, it continued to get stronger and stronger. After that, I felt a lot safer, but I also had a lot more room, so my core could continue to grow bigger without having to worry about the walls crushing me after a breakthrough.

My core room in the real world wasn’t at the lowest point of my dungeon for a few floors now, as I was now connected with the gateway, which fortunately seems to work as a proper connection between the different points of my dungeon, so I wouldn’t actually need to be physically connected.

Now, if something were to destroy that gateway, or if I would limit access to it, it would be a different story, but I wasn’t doing such stupid things because I wanted to live and of course I did still have a direct connection to my playrooms. A second entrance I could open up just in case would also be a good idea.

Around my core room would be a huge area that's going to be circular and with a diameter of 25 kilometres. It will also slope uphill towards the centre, where the entrance to my actual core room would be.

Within this large room, I would actually be able to leverage the number of creatures I have in my dungeon, and whoever reaches this far would need to fight through all of them to get to me. There would be only one connection to this room, and that would be a huge boss room where I would carefully assemble a team of my strongest creatures after pushing their patterns to the very limit.

I would probably need to update this encounter quite often, but that would be necessary time consumption if I wanted to keep myself as safe as possible. The first pattern, of course, would be from the woolly rhinoceros, who was incredibly good at air-type skills.

The second pattern was of an alpha wolf who was incredibly good at giving boosts and coordinating others. She had died quite a few years ago, but after pushing her pattern to its limits and actually creating the creature, I was glad to once again see it.

When I made monsters, I could give them a general mind like I do with every monster in the dungeon rooms, but I could also use the original mind, basically bringing the creature back to life. It was a bit confused as it remembered its death.

It recovered incredibly fast and started to learn its new body while eyeing the woolly rhinoceros on the other side of the room. With a pulse of intent, I informed them both of what I wanted from them, and only about 10 seconds later, they started to fight each other, informing me that they needed practice.

I wasn’t going to stop them, but it was going to be annoying if I needed to continuously heal them. That being said, I would also need a healer in this team, as the adventurers who had one usually did a lot better in every fight.

For that, I really didn’t have a top-tier candidate, and from my knowledge, healers were usually the first ones targeted in a real fight. After going through my patterns, I found something that had potential. It was a now-extinct beetle variant from the bug floor. It had incredible defences but also a slight ability to heal others.

Jumping into the pattern, I started to see how much I could push it and how much I could extend that healing ability. It was really quite inexpensive to add even more defences, but the pattern really didn’t have much room to expand its manoeuvrability, so instead, I moved in another direction. I took away even more mobility, basically making it so it would stay in one place, keep its defence up, and continue to keep the other members of its team alive.

It also had a kind of stink cloud defensive/offensive feature. Now, this was completely natural, and it didn’t have a skill governing it, but after a bit of modifying and some creative changes, I was able to make it so an ability would change this stink cloud into more of an acid cloud.

Now even before anyone got close to it to start attacking, they would need to take quite a lot of damage. Its mind was quite simple, and while I did add to it so it could grow more intelligent, it would take some time.

After making and introducing the new creature, others stopped fighting so they could actually start teaching it. That was a surprise to me, as I hadn’t expected them to be so intelligent. After a bit of investigation, I understood where this came from.

With every rank, around half of a creature's breakthrough goes to general improvements of the entire body. That also meant the mind. I could currently push these patterns almost to the end of the silver rank. From the books, creatures beyond the silver rank usually had intelligence rivalling adventurers, but that wasn't a guarantee and would depend a lot on the species.

Now I had three members of the team: a leader, the healer, and an offensive tank. Now I would need some serious damage dealers who could punch through even the strongest defences. The question was, did I have a pattern that would match that need, or perhaps I could change one enough so I could make it work.