Chapter 35 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The bug floor has turned out to be way more interesting than I ever expected. It’s even so interesting that I have had to divert my attention between it and the ant floors, where something of a skill revolution was going on. Their world was changing fast, and it was incredibly interesting to watch, but so were the unexpected changes on the bug floor.

At first, everything went normally. I released numerous different bugs, and slowly they started to breed and evolve. There was so much space that this process took quite a while, but even then, quite a few species just couldn't survive the competitive nature of the floor. Even when I tried to reintroduce them, they simply couldn't compete. At the start, colony bugs did the best, but in about a year, none were left as they simply couldn't keep themselves fed or defend their egg-producing members well enough.

Instead, more individualistic bugs were the ones that started to do the best as time went on. They simply had the mobility to escape from dangerous situations and attack when they had the advantage. And as time marched on, the bugs that were able to grow bigger were the ones who were able to stay alive the longest.

For a time, there wasn't a difference between plant-eating bugs and bugs that ate meat. However, this changed as the entire terrain of the floor had been torn up and destroyed so many times that barely any plants still existed.

The destruction that dog-sized bugs were capable of was impressive, but even more impressive was the appetite of everyone on this floor. Basically, the plant-eating bugs got so powerful that they even ripped out trees and ate them all.

This caused a huge die-off, where only a few plant-eating bugs were able to evolve enough to survive on meat. Now, the entire place was just blackened dirt, sand, or snow. Basically, the floor didn’t look like the one I made. Even the numerous streams that covered the surface weren't in the same spots and were highly contested territory.

The second die-off happened, or perhaps the third, because smaller bugs only had one food source left, and that was the eggs of the other bugs. Any that were still using the ‘make as many eggs as possible and hope some survive’ strategy quickly found out that that strategy no longer worked. If you couldn't protect or carry your eggs with you, you were no longer able to produce offspring.

One of the arguably most successful species has been cockroaches. Now, while there are still a few species of the less successful ones alive, the ones who take care of their young for longer are the ones still alive but even now if they don't adjust more, they will also cease to exist.

For the title of ‘king of the bugs,’ it's left to two other species who are above the others by quite a large margin. They were still behind cockroaches, but since the strongest species no longer exist, they will be the ones fighting for the top spot.

One of them is the many species of centipedes, and the other is a few surviving species of beetles. Both have incredible defenses and attacking power. While there are different bugs that are individually stronger, they are more the extraordinary individuals who have survived against all odds and are extremely good at fighting.

Some of the bugs now, especially beetles, are as large as wolves and would be suitable for monster patterns for my dungeon rooms. The problem is they're actually too powerful, and the smaller and weaker versions might also prove unsuitable.

These would be too small, and I would need to make too many to balance a fight properly. Perhaps I should tinker with those patterns and make them a bit bigger myself, but I will need to think about that. In summary, I was incredibly happy with how things had turned out on the bug floor, and I couldn’t wait to see how they will keep evolving.

The 13th floor, in terms of dungeon rooms, was doing quite well. The first section that was open to the adventurers already had over 1500 rooms, and the other 12 sections had similar numbers. The annoying person still hadn’t come and bothered me, so I was just going to keep making them. After a bit of thinking, I did decide to tinker with a few of the bug patterns and put them in as extremely rare enemies at some hard-to-reach rooms will have.

As adventurers seem to like the secretive rooms and areas, I decided to lean into that even further. In the currently hidden sections, I started to add a few quests that you would need to accomplish to get access to more areas.

They were simple quests: killing a few mini guardians, as the adventurers were calling them, or completing certain puzzles in interesting ways. I had also noticed how many of the more interesting adventurers were hunting monsters that had skills which could produce skill-enhanced materials.

I hadn’t even known that was a possibility, but when I learned of it, I adjusted the drop rates a little bit and made sure that if a beast had a skill that affected their body - which basically every skill did in my dungeon - the dropped material would have a chance to be of certain grades.

Most drops were just of poor or average quality if skill-enhanced, but now there was an incredibly rare chance of getting pieces of material that were extremely influenced by the skill, and these should be something every adventurer would want to get.

Only three of those pieces with the maximum quality have dropped, and one of the parties actually killed themselves over it. None of them survived long enough to take that drop out of the dungeon, and I actually had to reclaim it because where they got it, no one was going to find it for a long time. One of the other pieces left my dungeon, but one still remains, and it's quite interesting to watch its journey as it’s heading to a pop-up market that some of the adventurers have started to make.

On the ant floors, things are starting to get more and more tense. From the Fountain War, a new technological revolution started that I’m calling a skill revolution. For quite a while, skills were something only truly exceptional ants were able to learn, but now that was no longer the case.

It was kind of my fault because one of the resources that can be used to build gates can also be used to store skills, and learning from them is a lot easier than developing the skill on your own. With the help of these crystals and champions to teach the newly skill-enhanced ants, a lot of things have changed in the ant nations.

While everything is still at the starting phase, I can see what the future will hold. The battles will become a lot more brutal, more like the few battles during the Fountain War, and I couldn’t even imagine the destruction this might cause if an all-out war started.

The ant leadership was also able to see the writing on the wall, and everyone was working extra hard to keep this from happening, but none of the nations could stop innovating because if they didn't, another nation that did would have a significant advantage over them.

POV Ace

Every even slightly influential person was gathered to see the first airship come into our newly built airship port. The view up here was incredible, but I still felt so much better that I actually had real solid rock underneath my feet, instead of the traditional airship ports where you needed to walk on narrow walkways, and one wrong step could mean your death. For that, I had to thank the many noble children whose connections were able to get us one of the best architects in the world to design this grand airship port.

The original plan was to build the standard design for an airship port that could support eight large vessels at the same time and would be towering over the town. No citizens liked the idea that a lot of the sunlight would be blocked by them, and that was the main concern when we announced it to the residents.

But all that soon changed when the architect had another plan. He took one look at the huge rock face that faced the town and where the dungeon entrance was, and decided to build the airship port halfway into the mountain face.

There were still huge walkways extending away from the mountain, similar to a normal port, but now there was room for at least 20 huge vessels, a much better system for cargo management, and everything cost just a little bit more than the original budget.

We were able to complete that one year ahead of schedule. It was an incredible accomplishment and actually made this port the second-largest airship port on the continent. We also had one of the best ways to bring up and down cargo in large quantities, so we would probably become a major trading port quite fast.

Now, airship travel and transport was extremely expensive and catered to silver-rank adventurers and above and the nobility of the world. While the dungeon was still only good for steel-ranked adventurers, we believed that soon enough that was going to change.

This meant a lot of change for the world economy, and just that thought made me shiver in fear, as I never expected that my little land could affect anything as big as the whole world’s economy. Though this place was quite remote by land travel, it turned out that for airship travel it was quite well positioned to be a resting spot between long hauls.

Land travel will also get a lot better as the king has already ordered new roads to be made to this location. A few other kingdoms to the north, west, and south have also expressed interest in being connected to this new airship port by land. But that discussion was way over my pay grade, and I will just have to wait and see what they decide and do whatever my king says.