Chapter 29 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

After I claimed my territory for the new floor, I decided to do things a bit differently. I was tired of making the floor and then having to lower its height; it just felt like doing the same work twice. So this time, when I started to expand the floor's space, I made sure to keep a tight hold on the 500-metre height while letting the length and width expand like it normally did.

It took quite a while for the basic shape to be done, but I ended up about 2000 kilometres in length and 1000 in width. That was quite literally a stupid amount, but I guess it just shows how hard work can truly help you achieve great things, and of course, the skill being S-rank didn't hurt either.

This time, as I started to clean out the upper portion of the floor, I also started to make Dungeon rooms. At least a few parties of adventurers were close to reaching my guardian room, so giving them a new challenge would be a good idea.

No, I haven’t decided if I want this floor to also have so many rooms, but it might be necessary so I could get another deal with the annoying person and get a lot more plants. But unfortunately, for this floor, I needed to work with what I already had.

With another breakthrough, my overall capabilities were expanded once again, and I found making dungeon rooms to be quite easy. So, I decided to start making them a bit more complicated, and a great help towards that were the different evolutionary patterns of creatures I now had access to.

I also started to give some of the creatures more skills; otherwise, they just couldn't keep up with the powerful adventurers who would otherwise kill them with one strike. I especially liked the idea of making the dungeon room sections have different environmental types, which should once again be a great lesson for anyone challenging my dungeon.

With so much space on my 12th floor playroom, I decided to do a bit more planning. I didn’t have much information about the outside world, but I did have a few books that had maps in them. From those, I chose an interesting valley that was surrounded by high mountains.

The valley on the map was a lot smaller than the space I have, but I have enough imagination to fill in the blanks. It would mainly be a forested area with a decent amount of rivers and lakes and should fit every creature I have easily, so everyone would have enough space to evolve and live.

All of this will take years, but I wasn't in a hurry and I had so many other things to watch as well. The idea of only focusing on one thing gave me the shivers. How could anyone live like that, not seeing 100 different things at once? It was nightmare fuel.

Sometimes it was a bit annoying, constantly having to respawn dungeon room monsters, especially the ridiculous amount that I have. But most of the time, I don't even realize I am doing it; it's just so natural.

I didn't know any creature inside of me that was like me and could do so much at once, but I could also understand why it was necessary for them to be so limited. If I only had my crystal, experiencing so much outside of me would probably break my mind.

But then again, all of my creatures have smaller creatures inside of them that help them function, but sometimes also make them sick. Although I still haven't seen anyone getting sick inside me, so I didn't know if that was just some wrong knowledge I inherited or something I was doing unconsciously prevented it.

I liked how the new dungeon rooms on the 12th floor were challenging, and everyone who got here was slowed down by quite a bit. But there was also a problem. Adventurers were starting to get tired of constantly having to be down here or risk losing their progress.

Fortunately, the ants were working on this problem as we speak. I had previously thought that this would take longer, but when they started to get their prototypes working, they soon figured out that other nations could use other nations' gates and launch attacks.

Now, they haven't worked on making the prototypes better for over six months; instead, they have been working on finding a way to safeguard their own gates so no one else could use them. At first, they did something similar to what I did and bound the two gates together so no one else could use them, but their nations were just so big and they had too few resources to constantly make so many gates. They needed a more cost-effective way to travel without losing security.

At first, all the nations worked alone, but they soon figured out that whoever invented this first would probably be attacked by everyone else to get that technology. So a joint task force was made, and I did encourage that a little bit by promising to give out quite a lot of gate resources if they managed to do what they set out to do.

They were now quite close to achieving what they set out to make, and I couldn’t be prouder. The real question was, could I somehow profit from the annoying person by adding this feature to my dungeon?

The short answer turned out to be no. None of the ants who have been helping me with deals think that it’s a good idea to approach the annoying person, as it could lead to too many questions being asked.

I accepted that, and I will just feel good helping the adventurers, who are now becoming quite a good source of mana regeneration. With so many of them being inside of me and then constantly leaking out mana, I have reached an equilibrium that they can actually support all the dungeon rooms they are currently delving into.

This, of course, has proved to be a different kind of problem. I can only hold so much mana, so I constantly need to make things that cost a lot of it. On the 10th floor, there is actually a small mountain that basically has a core of gold. Not to speak of the other kinds of materials I have had to create.

This for a moment made me worry about how heavy I was, but I was glad to learn that I was not making the area heavier because of everything that was inside of me. I don’t know why, but I was incredibly happy about not being as heavy as I should be.

The 12th floor was finally starting to take shape as I was adding the dungeon rules to create water springs that will eventually form into rivers and lakes. For this floor, I shouldn’t have to worry about the underground area or make any extensive cave network, but the floor felt kind of empty if I didn’t do it.

So while everything filled up with water, I monitored if the water system worked properly, I also worked on making caves. As this floor was also going to have goblins, I added minerals to this floor so they would have something to mine and advance their technology with.

For the weather system, I also wanted there to be a few times when truly strong storms happen just to stir things up. When I was satisfied with that, it was time to start adding plants. Like always, I spent quite a lot of mana so I could accelerate the growth of every plant, so they wouldn't just be copied dungeon patterns but living creatures.

This probably should take forever for a dungeon of my depth, but the simple fact that I had so much regeneration meant I was well past the hump where I couldn’t kick-start another floor with the amount of mana I had.

Slowly, nature started to make the floor green. There still wasn’t a lot of variety, but luckily even plants seem to evolve over time, especially if they were in a more difficult environment, so I did have some variety I could use for this floor.

After the plants came the bugs, and so many different kinds of them. I was incredibly glad that the bug person didn't just bring me male bugs but every sex, which was probably against his orders, but I think he cares more about his goals than others.

It took me longer than I expected to finish this; after that, it was time for larger creatures for land, air, and water. This floor felt incredibly alive, and there were only so few creatures still inhabiting it. It was going to be interesting to watch them all live here, but I also couldn’t wait until I got more floors so I could make environments that would be a lot harder for unevolved creatures to survive in. Just imagining how they might adapt made me giddy.