Chapter 46 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Population - that was the key. My advisors and I had been looking for a reason to invest more time into this venture of creating territories for the adventurers. There wasn’t anything else we could gain, but if we introduced the territory system and made population an important factor, adventurers would want to bring more people here.

More adventurers meant more mana production. The population of adventurers has grown significantly recently, now surpassing the mana cost of all the dungeon rooms and their maintenance by a decent amount.

In fact, I didn’t really need more mana. I had plenty and could already run 25 floors with my current production. However, it was something that allowed me to do anything I wanted, and who knows what I might want to do with it or how it might help me in the future.

With that knowledge, we moved forward. It took a lot of work and testing to make this viable. Once we had our first prototypes finished, it was time for testing, and the Ant nations were quite willing to do this in exchange for some precious resources.

If they only knew that I literally had mountains full of those resources and that they were just bargaining for scraps. A large area was designated where ants made markings similar to the dungeon rooms and waystations.

They all wore the necklaces originally created by ant scientists, tailored to their size. Every waystation received the prototype device. The ants testing this system began making organization through the necklace. I didn’t want to label them ‘shadow guilds’ or ‘dungeon guilds’ because I was certain some didn’t want to be called a guild.

Every necklace would have this function after I implemented the quest that enabled this functionality. Initially, they wouldn't belong to any organization and would be marked as independent. This was a crucial point, as I didn’t want pathways to be blocked by different shadow guilds. I wanted there to be free territory. So, anyone could register their necklace to the territory device. At first, it would do nothing, but as more and more members registered, things could change.

The first threshold is at 100 adventurers. When that amount is reached, the waypoint is declared ‘Inhabited.’ Now, if all 100 people are from the same organization, it triggers a territory claim timer of one week, and if not challenged, that waystation's area will belong to them.

The ants figured out a proper mathematical curve, so when more people are registered at the same waystation, the 100 people you originally need will grow to be a larger number depending on the current population.

People can register at multiple waystations, but they would need to re-register every three days if they are registered in more than one, and we did put a limit of 10 in as well. If neutrals are the majority, nothing changes in the waystation and its area, but if an organization is in charge, they can do a few things.

They can limit incoming gate travel but not outgoing. They can reduce the drop rate for anyone not in their organization and see if there are anyone not of their organization nearby. They can also declare war on any other organization except for the neutral one, making the territories of those participating declared as contested space.

They would be open to kill anyone in those waystations without triggering the quest I made. Territories can also change hands peacefully simply by having the majority-owned organization lose that majority.

Now, there might be changes that need to be done, but I guess we will see after this system is implemented into the larger dungeon. The testing has gone quite well, and while we did need to adjust the numbers a bit for territory claiming, especially when the populations got larger, everything seemed to work quite well. But there was still a lot to do to make sure that nothing can tamper with this system.

Some time had passed, and we were starting our second testing when an event happened that I hadn’t seen before. One of the adventurers was about to give birth. They were all quite panicked about it, trying to get through the current section they were in and reach the waystations to get out of the dungeon. But the person who is having a child is the mage, and while the rest are making progress, the monsters they are up against are quite troublesome to deal with without the mage's help.

They finally gave up, and now I was watching how a human was born. It wasn't anything special; I had seen thousands and thousands of births. But I guess it was interesting to see a creature that wasn't mine and that I couldn't create, give birth.

The process seemed slow and took about 7 hours before the small human was born. But something happened; it was weird, but I could see the child like I could see my own creatures.

I felt that moment starting to end. If I didn’t act, it would gain the same protection as the adventurers, and I wouldn’t be able to see into it any longer. I felt that I could mark it, claim it as mine, kind of similar to my own creatures.

There was only a short period where I could do it. But did I want to? It wouldn't be able to survive long without being inside of me, and I would decide its future and bind it with mine.

The moment passed, and I didn’t do anything to claim this child. But what I did do was get a small portion of the human pattern. They were still panicking, but with a health potion, the mage started to recover quicker, and I’m guessing they wanted to get the child out of here.

They probably knew that children born in dungeons would have been marked by the dungeon. The look in the mother’s eyes as she held the small human was like she had already lost her offspring.

I took some time to think more about it. But, like with the ants, I enjoyed them having their freedom, and from other lessons, I’ve learned that taking someone’s freedom away usually makes them resent you a lot. It would also mean that future adventurers wouldn’t want to have children here, and that would be inconvenient if they wanted to fight here for the rest of their lives.

I can see why other dungeons would want to do this, to gain influence with intelligent beings, but I had entire nations of intelligent beings. I didn’t need adventurers for that, and if they gave birth to more humans, I would be able to finish the pattern regardless if I claimed a human or not.

POV Ace

Once again, I was in the meeting room with everyone here, listening to the latest report. It took quite a while, but we eventually needed to run our own tests on what this new quest does. We have been able to get reports from a few adventurers who had completed the quest, and we were able to confirm the quest rewards, but not the extent of them. I still wasn’t completely comfortable with this experiment; those people were going to die anyways.

"The waystation kill quest has been something we haven't been able to understand fully. That changed when a plan was brought forward to wait until we had more criminals who were to be executed. An executioner was hired who would not go into the dungeon after the experiment. And with the coin we were offering, we were able to get someone quite fast."

"Immediately after the first kill, we could confirm that everyone else who wears the necklace would get notified that a person who has killed in a way station was near them. You would even get the location every few seconds of where they exactly are.”

“The monster aggression was more difficult to observe, but thanks to a group of volunteer adventurers, we were able to do it safely. It seems that the monsters aren't always aggressive towards the people who completed the quest. Instead, they change targets to this person at random moments, which is actually quite brilliant."

It was obvious that the ‘quite brilliant’ part wasn't in the report of the person who was giving it, and he honestly seemed quite impressed about the entire thing and quite excited as well. I wasn't that excited, knowing what else that mad thing could think of that would cause me to endlessly be in this room where I already knew how many planks of wood the walls were made out of. He continued to read the part that we knew least of the drop rates.

Someone crashed through the doors. "Guild master, we need you right away! A group of adventurers from the 14th floor just returned. It seems that they had a baby there." "Shit!" was simultaneously said by almost everyone here. Even before we understood what happened, the guild master was gone, but I did catch glimpses of a few others leaving extremely fast.

I was one of the weakest here, but not the only one, so a group of us rushed out together. If the guild master can't remove the dungeon marker, the baby will have to be killed. At least that's what was normally done, but we had an agreement with this dungeon, and I didn't know how that would affect it.