Chapter 39 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Removing the stone from the upper portion of the floor always took the longest. For this floor's terrain, I was mainly going for forest and grasslands with a decent-sized water network. But I still wanted a bit of variety, so while this place was going to have all four seasons.

Also, the top portion of the oval shape was going to be a more permanent cold zone, and the bottom portion a more permanent hot zone. It also wasn’t going to be that flat, as I wanted many smooth hills but only a few larger mountains.

This was going to be a very special floor. As I started to place plants, I once again started with the original patterns - the ones that hadn't been enhanced or evolved even once. It takes quite a while and a lot of mana to grow everything out. But even during this process, I learned something new about my dungeon.

On the other floors, every creature and plant strive for evolution and to get as strong as possible, but it turns out that it was my will that made that happen. Because on this floor, I didn’t want them to evolve or get stronger as quickly.

It didn't take long for me to notice this, and I took a quick break to investigate further. I tested it out on the 13th and 12th floors, and there was an immediate effect. It was almost like someone rang a bell and silence descended.

Everything was a lot calmer, but that only lasted a little while before everyone, once again on those floors, continued to strive to be the best they can be. It seems that getting stronger had been built into their instincts over the course of the floors' existence, and I wasn’t going to change that.

However, I didn't order them to go back to endlessly pushing themselves to get stronger. Instead, I stopped that for every other floor as well, except for the ant floors. From the very beginning, there weren’t any of those orders on the ant floors, as I had always just observed them.

Basically, nothing changed, but there were a few older individuals, those who had reached the pinnacle, who stopped pushing as hard. This was because they had already reached their limits, and continuing would just shorten their lives.

There seems to also be another cost to this order I was keeping up. Apparently, a lot of my willpower had been diverted into this, and now that it was free, I could do a lot more things at the same time. I guess I can finish this floor even faster than I thought. I went back to work, and it didn’t take too much longer before I could start adding creatures. I once again used the basic patterns as I couldn’t make this place too hard.

It took me about a year and a half to get the place ready for its main inhabitants. The goblins have not had the best time in my dungeon. On the 12th floor, they were driven underground, and the creatures that now lived there, while they were now the masters of the domain, they were no longer goblins.

They were a completely different race that couldn't even handle sunlight for long periods of time. I should really think about a new species name for them, but I also needed to think of another new species name for the goblins on the 7th floor.

This floor was too small for a goblin civilization to continue to advance. And with basically no other enemies besides other goblins, the tribal structure of their civilization didn’t change. They certainly, however, did.

No longer the small goblins that once inhabited this place, their natural evolution long ago reached a limit as they couldn't push any further because they didn't have anyone to challenge them. This, now I know, was partially my fault, but they did find a way to keep getting stronger.

They started to use shamanic rituals to change their bodies, and from the scrawny goblins, they are now towering green creatures with more muscles than multiple original goblins put together. All of them are now taller than humans, and while I have seen some buff humans, they are nothing compared to the creatures the goblins turned themselves into.

Now, their patterns could survive even in the most dangerous environment I have made, but the problem is I’m quite certain that they would never get past their tribal inheritance, and I wanted a goblin civilization that could advance and catch up to the humans and ants. Perhaps I will still test if they could create a more sophisticated civilization on a later floor.

Still, the goblins on this floor did quite a lot before they turned to shamanic rituals. I started to go through the different patterns I had and was a bit shocked at how many I had kept. I had 87 different versions, and every one of those had multiple different subversions. I went through them all and found that pattern 42 was best for what I was looking for. There are many subversions of 42, and almost all of them will be represented.

There was so much room on the 14th floor that placing just one group of goblins in one starting location was a bad decision. It would mean that it would take a long, long time before their population started to truly grow.

I planned on using a slightly different tactic. I started by making a starter group that consisted of 12 goblins: one leader, one shaman, two hunters, two warriors, two builders, two gatherers, and the last two would be a random subversion that was good for, for example, mining or metalworking and so on. Half would be male and the other would be female randomly picked.

I placed those groups in clusters of 20 groups, and I ended up making 140 clusters. There truly was a lot of space, and while not every one of these groups will survive, over 30,000 goblins should be a good start.

Now, while they're all monsters, all of the descendants will be dungeon creatures who would start producing me mana. This was actually crucial because if I kept going like this, even with my skill Creature Quantity A+, I would eventually reach the limit of how many creatures I can have, and then my mana upkeep would start to go up once again.

Fortunately, this shouldn't be a problem for quite a while, especially because I have so many things that produce mana. The adventurers don’t need upkeep and are only giving me mana, and with the number of them in my dungeon that's constantly growing, I really shouldn’t have any problems for quite a while.

Now, this floor was set up, and I wouldn’t have to constantly keep plants and animals from evolving too fast and killing all the goblins. I could turn my attention to the dungeon rooms. There were quite a lot of them already finished as we reached the 15,000 mark, so halfway done.

Originally, I just wanted to make about a thousand more rooms than the last one, but it just felt good to make exactly 30,000. The question was how long it was going to take for all of them to be found because the ants were quite busy thinking up interesting areas that might be quite hard to reach.

I liked how they started to add some made-up histories into areas using their different languages from the many cultures of the old ant city-states. Some areas would have ruins with interesting markings, but they also meant something and would lead to secret pathways and undiscovered areas if someone took the time to start investigating and deciphering the language and what the stone carvings were telling them.

I wondered if anyone would start to examine them or not. I kind of hope they did because the ants had put a lot of work into those designs. This was also the floor where I started to make a different kind of dungeon room. It was a big open area, even bigger than the waystations.

There were a lot of monsters inside, but they all had limits and weren’t going to attack anyone if they didn’t go into their territory. It was an idea I got from the bug floor, and what this allowed me to do was design a bigger, more complex environment where larger puzzles could be placed, different encounters designed, and secrets hidden that would be a lot harder to find.

None of these rooms would be close to the recommended or shortest path and would be more difficult to find, as I wanted to test them out before starting to place more of them on the next floors.

I was quite excited because if this worked, I could envision an even larger dungeon room design. Perhaps I could make even more interesting environments like islands that would drift on a lake, or where adventurers would need to jump from cliff to cliff to continue progressing.

It took me around 8 months to finish the remaining rooms, and I did rush a bit at the end because I was running short on time. I wasn’t hurrying because of the contract; I would have had plenty of time to advance to the next floor where I would be only one floor short of reaching the silver-ranked floors that old adventurers were hoping I would soon reach.

No, the reason was because of the Ant nations and the current tensions in the entire ant world. It felt like one event could set everything off, causing an ant war, but this time on a scale never before possible. So I started gathering all the mana I needed for a breakthrough.