Chapter 30 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

----

This story is also now on royalroad so if you have time please go an and give a follow and a rating it would help a lot.

----

It has taken quite a long time until the ant scientists were finally able to make devices that acted sort of like keys. With them, they had their gates secured from other nations. They received the resources I promised, but unfortunately, those keys still needed some work if I wanted to use them. So, I made another promise of resources and gave them the list of functions that I needed. They assured me that it was possible, but it would still take a little while longer. That, however, didn't bother me as I had so much to look at.

The adventurers were having a tough time on the new floor because I decided to add puzzles. Most of the adventurers were just 'hit things until they're dead' kind of adventurers, but now the weaker fighters, and those who had more utility, were also being picked for parties, which made things a bit more fun in my opinion.

I also stopped making rooms one by one that said adventurers could progress in. Instead, I did it in sections of 100 rooms that would all be simultaneously connected, so it would be fun to see the rush when everyone tried to find a good path forward.

They still only had access to one main section, and I was currently working on eight at the same time. There were already close to 1,000 rooms for every main section, and while it was easy and fun to make these rooms, I started to feel that they were getting a bit repetitive.

Because of that, I've started to work with height, sometimes making a room more like towers than an actual room. Placing them into my floor wasn't a problem; even when I made tower-like rooms, there was still a stupid amount of space left before they even touched the highest mountains I had in the 12th-floor playroom.

Things inside the playroom were honestly crazier than I expected. At first, things were as I expected, but as every creature continued to breed as much as possible over the years, the population spiked and slowly started to stabilize, although there are huge swings both ways as sometimes feeding frenzies happen. The life expectancy of any creature alive is quite small, most not even living 1/10th of their life expectancy. This is unfortunate, but the constant evolutions have made it so.

Every new generation is just better than the last. They are tougher, smarter, and they have stronger skills. And while there are a few older creatures who have been able to stay alive against stupendous odds, most, however, fall to their children or grandchildren, who just have a better starting point to use to grow stronger.

This isn't only the case for creatures but also for plants as well, who are also trying to survive the best they can. For them, things are slower, but I can still see how they're trying to survive and thrive in their own ways.

Most interestingly, on this floor, the bees are actually thriving and are starting to form proper kingdoms like ants before them. They keep their territories and resources safe from others. One of the losers of this floor are the goblins, who simply couldn't keep their presence on the ground floor.

They're still surviving in the caverns, but even there, their life is quite hard, and they're constantly being hunted. They do seem to have developed quite good vision to see in the dark, and since they are physically weaker, they have started to turn to traps as their form of defense, and they are slowly starting to gain some breathing room.

The larger birds find this environment tough; they're not really that good in the forest environment, but they have found a different target for food. Now, they mainly hunt the lakes for the large fish who reside in them, but it's not an easy battle as there are truly monstrous creatures now inside the water.

Apparently, fish don't stop growing, and of all the creatures on this floor, they are the ones who have the highest life expectancy—if they reach adulthood. Before that, absolutely everything eats them, even some of the bugs.

Surprisingly, some bugs have also climbed the food chain a bit higher than I thought, but they're simply too small to do anything against the larger creatures. But I can see the potential they can have, and I am truly contemplating making the next floor solely a bug floor so I could see what they would truly be capable of. Like that, I continue to observe everything when finally, I was notified that the device with all the features I was looking for was finally done.

Most of my mind gathered on that spot where I saw a trembling ant starting to explain the device. I understood and pulled back my presence a bit, which allowed them to relax. The device looked like an oblong crystal, but it had four different kinds of crystals, all of which were differently colored.

The crystals were secured by a silvery-looking metal, and it would be perfect to be made into a necklace. I gave them materials, plus a few huge ones, so they could make something that would fit an adventurer.

When they finished making the big version, I absorbed it to get the pattern. Now it was time to upgrade every gate so that whenever someone wearing the key necklace would go through, it could save that gate so they could always return.

They would not be able to give the key necklaces to anyone else once they bonded with it, and if you aren't bonded, it will not save any of the gates you go through. But there was one more important piece of function added to this device. I could give quests, and they could actually see what the quest is and what they need to do to complete it.

I got that idea from the 11th-floor ant who started their own form of an adventuring guild for their champions. There, unaffiliated champions could take quests to go hunt down dangerous creatures in certain areas, but there were also some other kinds of quests they did.

This inspired me, and while I wasn't going to use this feature immediately, I had some interesting plans for a different kind of challenge for the dungeon rooms, and perhaps like this, I would have a safer way to communicate for the things that I need.

The key necklaces I added to the loot table on the 10th, 11th, and 12th floors. They would be extremely rare drops, but with so many adventurers continuously fighting, it only took two days before the first key necklace dropped.

The adventurers were so surprised that they actually debated leaving it behind because this was technically my first non-meat, non-coin drop. Eventually, one of them was brave enough and decided to pick it up. As soon as he picked it up, he knew what the necklace was and that he could bond to it.

This, however, was a close-knit party, so he actually told everyone what it was. They decided to do something that I wouldn't have. I personally would have bound myself to the key necklace and been done with it, but I could understand their decision, and in the long run, they made the correct choice.

They headed back out of the dungeon and were planning to sell this for as high as they could, as quickly as possible, because they correctly assumed that everyone now had a chance to gain these. Whatever happened up there, three hours later I was flooded with a lot more adventurers, and while even before there were wait times between different waystations for the creatures to respawn, now those wait times were quite ridiculous.

There was, however, an interesting thing that happened: usually, some parts of the dungeon rooms were less used as they weren't the optimal path for progression, but now people weren't trying to progress; they were trying to farm for loot.

Every waystation had multiple teams waiting for their chance to clear the section before them, but they usually returned back to the same waystation and got in line to wait once again. Because of this, the key necklaces started to drop more often, but at least for the first 50 drops, no one actually kept them, and they were all brought outside the dungeon and most likely sold at a high price.

There were, however, some people who weren't chasing the key necklace drops because they already had one, and one of them was the annoying person who was currently actually progressing through the dungeon and was midway through the 11th floor.

He was finding it incredibly tough, but I was impressed by his fortitude and desire to continue. He also didn't progress through the fastest way possible, but I soon figured out he wanted to record every waystation gateway, which I guess kind of makes sense, although it most likely wouldn't be of any use to him.

I quite enjoyed the different kind of entertainment this produced, and the most interesting fights were between adventurers themselves. While this was a rare occurrence before, now it was quite common. Parties turned on each other immediately when a key necklace dropped; those fights were satisfying to watch.

There seemed to be two different kinds of builds amongst adventurers: ones who focused on only one or two skills, and others who had more flexibility with their skills—I think they called themselves mages. They were quite fearsome but usually quite weak up close, so when you could survive getting to them, you usually won, but it was quite fun to watch how the different styles of fighting interacted with each other.

One of the types of builds that, even while the entire party turned on each other, were left alone were healers. They were among the rarest kind in my dungeon, but I could see their value. They kept the others alive and even helped against poisons and stuff like that. Incredibly useful skills, but not seen among my creatures.

While some bees do have it, it's extremely limited, and no ant champion has ever learned healing, at least if you discount their own bodies' regeneration. I can understand why they haven't; they just don't have that kind of fighting style. But hopefully, they will develop them someday, because I could see quite a lot of uses for them in the future.