Chapter 49 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Everything started out great. I began to make a mini-dungeon near the Academy that I made for them that would be perfect for ants. It took me a bit to dial in the correct size I wanted, but I did have to guess a little because I wasn’t completely certain what size would fit the ants best.

When I started to make the tunnel and the second room, it wasn’t exactly how I wanted it to be; the room was a bit bigger than I wanted, but I adjusted it a bit to make it perfect.

This weirdness continued, and when I wanted to add detail to the rooms, things got even worse. It felt like I didn’t have the control I wanted, which was weird because I had made even smaller adjustments to other things before.

I decided to test it out and made rooms exactly the same as the mini-dungeon, but I didn't have the intent to make it a mini-dungeon, and I was completely able to control it perfectly. OK, that was super weird, and my instincts agreed. I kind of wanted to stop, but now I was so curious.

I examined the mini-dungeon and the identical version of it that wasn’t a dungeon. At first, I couldn’t see anything different, but after a while, I felt that the mini-dungeon had a slightly different feeling to it. However, that was so minute that perhaps I was just imagining it.

To test it out even further, I had an ant approach both of them, and to my complete surprise, it immediately could tell which one was the mini-dungeon, explaining it had a completely different feeling, like something dangerous.

The scientists in the Academy, of course, wanted in, and I allowed them to test everything out. They think that the feeling detected is what adventurers get when they first enter a dungeon. This was incredibly interesting, but I didn’t feel like the mini-dungeon was a different dungeon to me. However, I guess it was different enough for the creatures of my dungeon. This was incredibly complex, and I didn’t really understand it, but at least it didn't seem to be nefarious.

Continuing, I found it even harder to make creatures for this mini-dungeon as they didn’t spawn exactly where I wanted them, and many of them died simply because they appeared halfway inside the wall or the floor.

To fix that, I made the spawning point in the middle of the room and made the rooms a bit bigger than it needed to be. Choosing the creatures was also difficult, but I was able to shrink down some patterns to test everything out.

The ants were more than happy to fight in the dungeon, and I did make a replica version that I didn’t classify as a mini-dungeon, which was a lot easier to make. But the ants reported back that something felt off.

It seems that advancing their rank and skills was harder in the fake dungeon than in the mini-dungeon. This turned out to be quite fun, and I continued that small-scale test while adventurers continued to progress through the 15th floor.

It was quite funny when they finally reached one of the raid rooms and the confusion that followed. Still, I had made everything quite clear, so it only took them four days to assemble a 30-person team and challenge the raid room.

The fighting that followed was embarrassing for the adventurers, who only managed to pull out a victory with few losses because they knew how to fight in five-man teams. When the fighting started, they immediately split up, but the goblins stayed together as a whole unit, giving them the advantage.

It was a desperate fight for the adventurers, but they were quite good at adjusting to new situations, which allowed them to pull out a victory when they started to band together for a more cohesive defense and attack instead of their split-up tactic.

They tried to keep the place secret, but since it was directly connected to a waystation, they were only able to get out one more clear before others found them. When the others found out what kind of loot you can get from this place, they almost fought to the death.

But instead, they called the second meeting of the shadow guilds to discuss the situation, the first meeting of theirs, of course, being them asking me to make the territory system. They made some sort of a lottery system to see who could get the next clear, and the people who found it had an advantage with more tickets, but I wondered if that kind of system was going to work long-term.

It took another month for the two other raid rooms to be found, and I finally started to get a decent amount of data for my territory devices. I continued to mess around with the mini dungeon, but the floor was quite small, and I didn’t really have enough room to make many floors.

I at least wanted to make three, but half of the third floor would be outside the bounds of this floor. Damn it, and I had such an interesting design made. Out of frustration, I pushed the space to make more room, but I knew that I would only be able to move it a minute amount.

So, it came as a complete surprise when I found myself having enough space to add a few more floors to my mini-dungeon if I wanted to. My entire mind froze for a second, and out of confusion, I started to test it out. The space of the floor quite easily continued to expand. What's going on?

I tried it on my deeper floors to find the response I knew should happen: the boundaries of the floor moved only so slightly. Of course, it came to me in an instant of clarity. My skills affect me entirely, so of course, my space expansion skill affects my earlier floors as well. I could expand them as well. This was so exciting, and I wanted to start working on it immediately, but I stopped.

This was going to take a while, longer than I wanted to take with my next breakthrough, which I actually wanted to do right now. I took a few hours to relax myself. I can always do it after the breakthrough.

Not wanting to waste a moment, I started to gather mana for the breakthrough. As soon as I reached my absolute maximum, I triggered the breakthrough and started to adjust mana percentages and then design the boss room.

It was going to be a proper challenge, as I was, for the first time, going to use a woolly rhinoceros. It was a powerful creature, but only a few were left in the playrooms. Their population was so large simply because I had just recently added a bunch of them to the latest playroom otherwise only one would still be alive.

They, unfortunately, as a species, weren't that quick to evolve and were a lot more vulnerable to more social species like the wolves. However, there was one notable exception. He was the last of his kind to survive in his playroom, but not only did he survive, he's currently the strongest creature in that playroom.

Many have challenged him, but no one has succeeded in taking him down. This woolly rhinoceros was the first generation to be born from the monsters I created, and he was the last generation to survive the trials of the playroom.

Normally, he had a gentle soul, but provoke him, and he would completely annihilate you. Woolly rhinoceroses typically developed earth-based skills, but I have seen fire and water-based ones as well. However, this one was a singular example who used wind-based skills.

It was because, from an early age, he liked to stand on a cliff and feel the wind on its fur and face. With the multitude of air skills he has, he's basically invulnerable to long-range attacks, and whoever gets close without being sliced into pieces still has to get through the defenses of a woolly rhinoceros.

The current pattern is actually way too strong to be a boss for the 15th floor, even if I did the same difficulty jumps as I did on the last floor. Fortunately, I could just pick a pattern earlier in its path to dominance and use that.

It took a while to get everything set up the way I liked it, but in the end, I was incredibly pleased with how it turned out. I found myself hesitating before advancing to the skills section as I was a bit nervous about making a new skill.

Gathering myself, I prepared and moved forward. I had 20% of my breakthrough mana to use on my skills and took 10% to create a new skill. What rank it turned out to be depended on how much total mana went into it and how much I knew about the function of the skill.

Unfortunately, I would find that out after my breakthrough, so I took the 10% and concentrated on everything I had learned and knew about dungeon rules and how to strengthen them. The process was quite relaxing, actually. When I was done, I was left with 10% that I was going to put into an existing skill before an idea came to me.

I should wait for the next breakthrough; sometimes taking a risk can pay off. Well, I just talked myself into this in an instant, but it sounded so good. I used the rest of my mana to make another skill, this time concentrating on the mini-dungeons, how they felt, and how I made them.

With that done, I finished my breakthrough and reconnected with my dungeon. It felt so good to feel the flow of mana and everything happening inside of me. There was so much to do again, but it was going to be so much fun. And before I started to test everything out and see how much I improved during this breakthrough, I just took a moment to appreciate all that I had.

End of book one

What do you think if this was the end of the first book?