Chapter 45 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I watched as they entered my core room. Things got awkward as they just continued to stand there, with some of them glaring at each other, obviously wanting to kill one another. "We shouldn’t linger here so long; it's not proper," one of the more muscular humans said.

"You're absolutely correct. I was just a bit too mesmerised by the splendour of this dungeon core," said a sneaky-looking elf. Some of the others rolled their eyes, but the compliment would've worked on me if he was able to see my real core. Instead, it kind of felt insulting that he would think that small thing would be me.

"We are here to plead for your help. You must be incredibly busy, but unfortunately, we have need of you. Your radiant magnificence obviously doesn’t need to change anything about your dungeon, but your humble delvers are in need of your grandiose help."

It was at this moment that someone interrupted the sneaky elf. "Stop your blabbering and get to the point!" I had to agree with the dwarf, who was wearing so much armour that I think his weight must've doubled. "I was getting to it, and now you’ve ruined everything. I must start again; this has to be done properly."

Oh, shit. I saw other people cringe at those words, and I kind of wished my core could make the same expression. I was somewhat grossed out the first time, and the second time wasn't any better. Luckily, he was interrupted sooner this time by a woman with fiery hair. "We need a way to claim territory and keep others out of it without triggering a kill quest in the waystations."

I liked the direct approach better, but I didn’t really understand why I should care about this. Why should I limit how many adventurers can go to someplace inside my own dungeon? The sneaky elf started once again, and luckily this time no one interrupted him, although I was barely listening.

I was going to dismiss the entire thing, but one of the ants had a good point. Every other creature in my playrooms wanted to have their own territory. The most complex example would be the ant nations, but even the goblins had territory that they claimed as part of their tribes.

Adventurers belong to one group, but just like in the ant nations, there are different factions within the same nation. The same is happening here, as the adventurers have their own groups who vie for territory, at least some of them do.

They don't fight constantly, but I often see enemies occupying waystations that are deep within a particular group's territory. Because of this, everyone needs to be constantly on guard. Leaving the safety of the waystation could mean a possible fight to the death with other adventurers.

You can never feel completely safe, even in the seat of your strength, but you shouldn't have to constantly feel threatened. The sneaky elf continued to talk. Even if I wanted to answer them, I couldn’t, because we didn’t have a contract, and none of them had a dungeon fairy with them. I think I could use a goblin to speak for me, but I didn’t want to reveal that much about myself.

Setting aside the question of whether I should do this, the real question is how could I do this? It will require a lot of thought. Fortunately, the group left, so I felt more relaxed since no one was near my core.

So, did I want a way to own territory? This sounded very complex, but I kind of think we need it. After discussing with my advisors, we came to a short answer: yes. There was a trend of adventurers staying longer the deeper they ventured, even though the surface was just one gate jump away.

The ants predicted that eventually, there might be adventurers living inside of me permanently, and it would be logical for them to want something they could own. I tasked some ants with testing out the necklaces to see if some sort of functionality could be developed that would allow for territories. But I will probably need to create some permanent structures that connect to the necklaces.

We needed to develop a system that lets people claim territory while also allowing others to take that territory from them. An even better question was how I could profit from it. Before diving too deep into developing a completely new system, an ant brought up a need to consider what the end goal should be and what we can gain from it.

I was feeling stretched out. I still needed to complete the 15th-floor playroom, where I haven't yet decided exactly what kind of creatures I want for the land portion. However, I'll probably opt for a mix of evolved creatures that aren’t too strong, giving them, perhaps a second chance at getting to the top.

The dungeon rooms were coming along nicely, but there was still quite a lot that needed to be done. At first, the large area rooms were looked at with fear, as there were so many monsters inside. But now, they are quite popular, especially among stronger adventurers who like to gather multiple packs of monsters before defeating them all quickly. This strategy improves their rank-up speed significantly.

I've also noticed many resource gatherers here, searching for wood and other standard materials. Because of them, I introduced a few respawning trees, rocks, and even some minerals that they could use, unlike the rest of the decorations that would not just break down after being collected, with the mana returning to me.

The 15th-floor dungeon rooms will have more of these places, but there are still kinks to be worked out, so there won't be many of them. One of the ants, however, had the brilliant idea to design large rooms more like the floor guardian rooms, possibly even more challenging, requiring more than the usual five members needed to conquer dungeon rooms.

These places won't have just one or a few strong monsters; instead, they would house many more standard monsters. This idea was partly inspired by the large adventurer battle that occurred and the need to provide training for similar encounters.

I agreed with that thought, but implementing such a concept would be much more challenging. The current scenario we're working on involves a goblin war party consisting of 50 goblins that the adventurers would encounter.

If there were only five adventurers, the goblins would not engage unless provoked. However, we'd ideally want about 30 adventurers to tackle this challenge. We're struggling to determine how to set such limitations without allowing adventurers to exploit them, as they do with the floor guardians up to the 14th floor.

A few days had passed since the adventurers came to visit me, and we were still deliberating on what to do. One of the ants posed a good question: why now? Why did the adventurers come now and not when the quest was given, or a few months after that when they figured out how things were going to work?

I began to observe and sift through what I had noticed about the changes in adventurers during the course of World War Ant. It became clearer that many new adventurers, who were quite strong, had been showing up. It took a bit more digging through my memories to figure out what was actually happening.

I hadn’t paid much attention to the difficulty of individual floors as they related to adventurers; I just did what my memories told me was correct for the difficulty. It seems that the 15th floor marks the end of the steel rank, and the silver rank begins. For many, this is when an adventurer truly starts to gain strength. Some even indicated that this is where the true adventure starts; everything before that is just training.

It also seems that my dungeon is becoming more and more popular. While there are many steel-rank and below dungeons, silver-rank dungeons are rarer, especially ones that aren't too easy or too hard. Everyone had high hopes that I wouldn't mess up the strength ratio of the floors.

As a result, many more adventurers have been showing up. When I reach the 16th floor, even more are expected. This means that the current dungeon guilds, or as some call them, ‘shadow guilds,’ will have a tougher time maintaining their current territories with the influx of new adventurers.