Chapter 38 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I felt how the contract was signed. At this moment, I wished I had a body like the adventurers or the ants so I could let out a loud sigh of relief and then start jumping around. I still celebrated how I could, and my core started to pulse with light. I even vibrated a little bit.

My ant advisors were the first to learn of this, and they began to celebrate as well, as this was a momentous occasion and something they helped bring about. They were incredibly proud that they could assist their creator, and I could feel the sincerity in their words and actions.

Like the previous time, I wanted everyone to feel my joyous mood, so for my dungeon creatures, I gave lavish gifts. Mostly, they were high-grade food items, but some got different items, like the ants and some of the goblins.

For the adventurers, I opened up all the other sections of the dungeon rooms. They now have 27,700 rooms to explore with many secrets to find. Going by adventurer standards, their recommended path should be around 7,500 rooms, but I wonder how long it will take for the shortest path of 4,333 rooms to be discovered.

The adventurers who looked for, challenged, and tried to complete the shortest path as quickly as possible were some of my favorites. They had the spirit to push themselves and were the strongest fighters amongst the adventurers.

Most had already ranked up as much as possible from the 13th floor, but they still continued to push themselves, continuously learning new skills, upgrading them, and studying how to use them better. To me, they represented how adventurers should be, but the ones who explored and hunted skill veins were my second favorite and something I also approved of.

After a few hours of celebrating, it was time to prepare for a breakthrough. Where I was lavishly spending mana before, I now went into a tight mana budget, and all unnecessary spending was halted.

Immediately, my core started to fill with mana, and it only took four days until I reached the absolute maximum that I could bear. I took a few moments to just enjoy the feeling of a breakthrough and then went to work designing the floor guardian room.

This time, I had quite the devious plan. Last time, they had a floor guardian scenario where they could get the help of one of the creatures if they were observant enough. This time, there would be three creatures: one moose and two mountain lions.

They'll run into a scenario where the predators were hunting the prey. Now, they might think that they could get the moose on their side, but in fact, all the creatures will work together to defeat the adventurers and then resume their fight if they win.

This should teach everyone not to expect the same thing if the scenario appears the same, and that you should always be on guard for the situation to be opposite to what you expect. I have also heard quite a lot of adventurers complaining that the dungeon is too easy, so I made this fight harder.

This meant that I needed to make the patterns stronger, which wasn’t hard because the base pattern I was using was already quite powerful. I marvelled at how fast the guardian room was made and then I moved on to the skill selection.

I discussed it with some of the ants, and did my own research by observing how the ants and adventurers chose and upgraded their skills. Usually, I should have had fewer skills and had them of a lower rank, but because I pushed so hard before, I received more skills and received quite high ranks from the very beginning. This was a common strategy, so I unexpectedly had made the best choice possible, but I wasn’t doing that when allocating my mana to upgrade my skills.

The more floors I had, the bigger I grew, and the more mana I could store. In the last few breakthroughs, I have not made the best choices. From my understanding, the strategy I’m currently using is rarely used, and for good reason. The higher the skill rank, the more mana it requires to strengthen, and the amount I have currently is only advancing my S rank skill by a few percent.

The strategy I was using was meant for someone who had a skill that was their main source of strength, and focusing on any other would just be the worst choice. But there's a limit to how far you should push that strategy, and technically, I had already reached it when I was able to upgrade my S rank skill to S plus. Currently, as I needed my other skills to rank up as well, I should focus on that, and only when I had enough mana per breakthrough should I start focusing on it again.

So, I put all my mana into my lowest rank skill, Pattern Strengthening, and was able to get it to rank B. From now on, I will focus on my lower rank skills and perhaps even open up a new skill slot, but that requires some thinking. I need to decide if I want to invest in a new skill and if I would need a boost in some area for the expenditure to make sense.

I came out of my breakthrough to find that five days had passed in the real world. I hope this doesn't keep happening and especially won't get longer the deeper I go. Who knows what could happen in five days? Quickly, I rechecked everything, but nothing seemed to be amiss. It was time to start claiming new territory and start making my new floor.

It took me half a year to finish shaping the new floor, but I was already working on the dungeon rooms as they didn’t take up much space. Experiencing my improved capabilities was always amazing, but before I started to prepare the floor for new inhabitants, I wanted to work a bit on my plans for the dungeon rooms.

From now on, as I need to breakthrough as fast as reasonably possible, I will no longer be making so many more rooms than the last floor. In the previous floors, I have pushed the maximum quite far. From now on, I will probably only make around 1,000 more rooms per floor.

But that would still be a lot of rooms to design, and even more importantly, create a larger overall theme for different sections. For that, I assembled a new team of ants who were quite creative and wanted to help me.

For them, I made a large room on the 14th floor close to my core room. I made this space incredibly nice for them and then left portions of my mind to work with them. It took a little while for them to understand the scope of things, but when they did, they were quite excited.

I explained to them all about adventures, the difficulty levels required for this floor, and about puzzles, secret rooms, and everything else. The more I explained, the more excited they got, and I could just see their brains endlessly creating new ideas.

Now that that was taken care of, I could focus on the 14th floor and my plan for it. I already had everything planned out; I just needed to start working on removing all this stone and then shaping all the terrain. This was going to be a lot of work, but my expanded capabilities would make this faster even though the land area I was working with was bigger than previously.

The height was still the same, 500 metres, but the length was over 5500 kilometres and the width a bit over 3000 kilometres. It was a huge area and for quite a while would require a lot of attention so I could keep the creatures that will inhabit the floor in check.