Chapter 31 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

POV Ace

Currently, every leading member of my town and the dungeon is in my office. I look out of the window while others continue to argue. What I see is a bright moon that is almost full. The town is now quite huge, but that's to be expected as every adventurer whose main goal is to get stronger is coming here to train. Thankfully, not everyone wants to come here because they won't make much money ranking up, and for most of the adventurers who dive dungeons, that's their main goal.

Things especially started to get crazy when the 11th floor turned out to be so big, and when the 12th floor was under construction, the dungeon started dropping real items. Fortunately, they're only useful here, but that made this location even more desirable for people who want to train.

The opportunity to fight so many monsters in such different environments is something rarely seen, and now you can visit whatever waystation you want if you have been there before. This, of course, has allowed adventurers to find the best spots to grind, and most are keeping them secret.

They're starting to call them dungeon guilds. At first, it was only a few different groups of adventurers, but now we know that there are more who keep knowledge to themselves about the best places they have found to grind, and they probably even know more secrets than we do.

No one is admitting to these secret organizations, as otherwise, they couldn't be a part of the Adventurers Guild because they are supposed to report everything. Unfortunately, the Adventurers Guild charter wasn't meant for a dungeon like this, and from what we can tell, everyone is still giving out all the information they are required to.

That discussion didn't take long. There simply wasn't anything we could do to change this. The hunt to find the person who helped the dungeon also didn’t go well as no one seemed to have betrayed us amongst the adventurers who are currently here. That discussion didn't go anywhere as well. It has been quite an awful few weeks since the hunt began, but whoever did it was incredibly careful.

Now, the discussion that's been happening for half a day is what we should do to fix the current dungeon situation. The dungeon once again continues to just make rooms, but this time when I approached it, its demands were incredibly clear and something we couldn't skirt around like the last time.

Someone must have given advice to the dungeon so it wouldn't be screwed over once again. Of course, we all knew that last time when it wanted animals, it wanted both male and female, but it wasn't that clear with its demands last time. So, we were able to simplify the demands for us and make sure that it couldn't do anything weird. There are rumors that when other dungeons have gotten breeding pairs of animals, things soon get too tough, as the dungeon seems to be able to make stronger monsters because of that.

We haven’t seen any of those problems here, as the difficulty curve is as expected, but who knows what might happen. Fortunately, this time it didn't ask for animals; instead, it wanted plants. But we needed to get both female and male if the plant had that distinction, and there were quite a few more demands, making our job a lot harder.

But what were we supposed to do? No one had an answer because we could see the writing on the wall. The first time, we all truly believed it was necessary. This time, I got the gut feeling that it’s doing this on purpose, and perhaps we could wait out the dungeon so it would need to break through before we need to accept this deal, but waiting out an immortal being is foolhardy at best.

That’s why everyone's here, because we know that if we give in now, it will probably start demanding stuff from us every floor. Currently, it won't be that expensive because it wants the plants from around our current area, but what if it wants something from an exotic area half a continent away? We couldn’t keep that hidden like we can currently, and if someone finds out what we're doing, getting a swift death will be a blessing. Whoever this bastard was that taught all of this to the dungeon, we wanted to strangle them.

I looked back at the people, and while they were still arguing, I could see the defeat in everyone’s face. The only person who wasn't bothered was the Adventurer Guild master. Honestly, I wasn’t that worried about it as well, at least this time, because we can accomplish what it wants easily.

I was more worried that we had only seen a few of the animals that we brought be made into dungeon monsters that we faced on the 12th or 11th floor. No one had an explanation for that, as usually dungeons would use everything they had, and by this time we should have already seen combined monsters that are made from two or more animals, but there isn't even a hint of them.

Now, I'm at least sure that the Dungeon Pixie Guild didn't give up on this dungeon because it lacked potential. Something else must have happened, and not knowing that might lead to disaster. But it’s been made clear to me that trying to find out anything would be even worse.

"There's no point in arguing any further. If we don't accept it, this place will shrivel up and die, and the dungeon doesn't seem to care about that fact. We will do what it wants. But as for the future, we have to figure out something so we can keep giving it things that it wants, and that would most likely be more animals and plants."

There were defied sighs and reluctant grunts of agreement to my words. The meeting continued, but now we were discussing how to do this quietly and figure something out for the future. We still need to figure out who gave this information to the dungeon.

POV Dungeon Core

I was so nervous, but they finally accepted the proposal after a few weeks of contemplating it. The last time the annoying person came, I almost gave in because he told me that if I don't make another floor soon, adventurers were going to start leaving, and I would have really missed seeing them fight. But now they were bringing me more plants.

I will wait at least a month before breaking through; that way, I would have more stuff for the next floor that I was going to make into a bug-focused floor. That's why I want all the different plants, because they would probably need that for a food source, and I would also be able to put more plants into my other floors, which sorely need the variety.

The time went by quickly, but I was enjoying the huge war that was happening on the 11th floor between seven different nations. They were all fighting for possession of the sugar water fountain. They had finally found it after a group of explorers stumbled upon it when they lost their way.

Only two survived, having reached different nations and sold the information for quite a high price. But because two different nations reached it at about the same time, it sparked a huge conflict, and soon everyone else in the area also found out, and an even bigger war began.

This is the largest conflict since the huge independent wars that happened on the 10th floor. This time, even air and water battles have happened, and I have to say I quite enjoyed them. Technology for those mediums is still quite basic, but their potential has been recognized, especially with air combat.

A huge amount of resources have been put into it, and already other nations have started to follow as they don't want to stay behind. However, they have been having a harder time progressing as they don't have the constant battle to test their prototypes properly.

This probably won't progress into an even larger war, as there are signs that it's starting to slow down. And I have been hearing rumors amongst the seven different nations that perhaps they will compromise, creating a tenuous alliance to share the sugar fountain. But we will see if they can make that happen and how that will affect the other nations neighboring them.

These are certainly interesting times, but progress must happen, and I should start to gather mana for my breakthrough. I also think I have definitely gone overboard with the dungeon rooms; currently, I have almost 16,000.