Chapter 26 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The annoying person had just left, and from my understanding, he's the person in charge outside my dungeon. But why he thinks he knows things about my dungeon is beyond me. Thinking that I need to go a floor down, and that I'm making too many rooms.

And you can shut up, instincts. My instincts have been getting a bit more annoying as of late. The person that bothers me, and my instincts are kind of correct, I should really break through and make a new floor.

And I guess I could, as I won't miss too much, and I don't have to push so hard with the next floor that I won't have a chance to observe my inhabitants. The ants will take years and years until they are able to significantly colonize the new land.

Currently, I would say that they only have about 10% under their control. If they worked together, they could achieve dominance over their new floor a lot sooner. But they are already fighting amongst themselves even before they have discovered the truly wondrous places of this floor.

Stopping channeling my excess mana into making my floors bigger and creating materials that required a lot of it, immediately my mana reserves started to fill. And with how fast it was going, it was only going to take a few days for me to store as much as my crystal could handle. But not long after, the annoying human returned once again, which sent me into a panic.

Why was he already back? Had I spent weeks of time thinking about if I wanted to break through? I checked all my timekeeping stuff and came to the conclusion that only a few hours had passed. Fortunately, this wasn't the same situation where, about a year ago, I lost an entire month because I focused on one ant and was exploring a dangerous area on the 11th floor alone.

I was so distracted that I almost missed what the annoying human wanted. He was offering new creatures in exchange if I would try to break through and start the next floor. As soon as I figured that out, I wanted to scream "yes," but I had observed ant diplomacy long enough to know that that would have been the wrong thing to do.

If this was a negotiation, I needed to start off strong. But I couldn't show that I can communicate well. And he’s already waiting for an answer. I pulled as much mind power together as possible to come up with a satisfying answer quickly.

"All animals smaller than a dog that live on land, sky, water. Ten animals bigger than a dog. Two animals close to or bigger than a bear." I hadn’t communicated like that before, but it was good that I haven’t, as it helped sell the idea that I wasn't too smart.

The annoying human was making a weird face with his mouth open. I wondered if he was hot, and just in case, I checked the temperature of the room. But it shouldn't make him feel so warm that he needed to cool down by keeping his mouth open. Eventually, he answered back.

"There are so many animals smaller than a dog. Wait, if you can break through within one year, I will get you at least the local area animals, but it will take some time." His voice wavered, then he sounded like he was panicking, but it didn't matter to me. I could wait. Another year was good enough.

I sent a grunt of acknowledgment back, and the human fell to his knees, seeming incredibly happy. I could understand this sentiment because I was also really happy. I was going to get more creatures. Although they weren't going to be that strong, I was going to have plenty of space for them to live and evolve in.

This was such an incredible day. I wanted to celebrate with others as well, so I boosted up my drop rates so the adventurers would be happy. Then I did the same for my other creatures, and especially for the ants. I gave a lot of really valuable materials, but it seems that my happiness spread to everyone. For some reason, the ants wanted to make this into a special day. I wasn’t against it and was quite interested in what they would come up with.

All that spending helped me lower my mana accumulation. The rest of my regeneration I once again directed towards the previous things I was using to keep myself from accumulating too much. I also stopped making new rooms. Usually, my instincts would be quite mad about that, but I guess even they understand what getting new creatures could mean for us.

To be honest, I was preferring this because now I can focus on ants even more. They were doing so many wonderful things, but I especially liked how the one on the 11th floor started to seem bigger than the rest of the ants. It looks like that paper about the oxygen level was correct, and the bigger percentage does help make larger ants.

I hadn’t even gotten settled in to start watching when I felt creatures dying inside of me that weren’t from me. Adventurers did that quite often, but other creatures were an extreme rarity nowadays. Focusing on the spot, I found the annoying person, and it seems that he had just killed a mouse and a rat.

I mean, I already had them, but I guess the mouse is a female, so now I have a breeding pair. At least it’s a start, and he was keeping his end of the deal, which I was appreciative of. I think I would have smiled right now if I had a mouth like the adventurers. I wondered how mine would look like.

As I was going to focus back on the ants, I happened to overhear a conversation that my adventuring listening part of my mind was focusing on. I would've gotten this information later, but the word 'evolution' piqued my interest.

There were two adventurers speaking in a waystation on the 11th floor. It seems they were speaking of evolution, but something different as well, something about something called 'genetics'.  I've never heard of the term before, but it seemed to be closely related to evolution, so I focused even more on those two adventurers.

"No, that's a different kind of evolution. I’m not speaking about magical ones; I’m speaking about natural evolution," one of them said, to which the other just looked confused.

"Listen, there are many things that cause evolution, but what I’m currently talking about is environmental evolution. It's the process when a species adapts over time, through multiple generations, to a new environment, like for example, from a forest to a rocky hill. Are you following me?" The other one nodded, so the first one continued.

"Now, I understand that dungeons are one of the best magical sources of evolution, but what I’m telling you is that these mutations we are seeing, while I do acknowledge would be too fast for completely natural evolution in the normal world, I feel like what we have been seeing uses more environmental evolution than just a magical one."

It seems the other guy finally understood what was going on, and they continued to talk. I was incredibly interested. It seems that lately, I’ve been using something called environmental evolution, but thanks to the high concentration of mana in my dungeon, I think that helps creatures adapt faster than they normally would.

As they continued to talk, apparently, genetics are the things that make creatures, or at least that's what the patterns I have been using suggest. It looks like when a creature is born, as I see with many of my dungeon monsters, the pattern is a mix between two different sexes. So every time, you would get something slightly new.

This was so interesting. I dived deeper into the patterns than I ever have, and slowly the intricate chains of genetics revealed themselves. I was in awe at what I was seeing. There was so much information, and none of it was labelled or anything. This would take so long to figure out, even just for one creature.

This was simply amazing. Are creatures really this complicated? I moved towards the upper layers of the patterns. Everything was so much simpler. I changed things, and while it was hard and took a lot of effort and mana, I was able to change the patterns to what I wanted them to be, but there were limits, as always.

Now, I dived back in to see so much had changed. How was this happening? Every gene had six different points that I could change, and I could even change the pathways between them. There were too many different things, and probably even more than I could see right now. I changed a few things, and when I went to the surface of the pattern, I found the rat to be sickly with half its fur gone and barely any life left in its eyes.

Obviously, I changed the wrong things. I literally just made like 10 small changes that I believed would affect the creature's overall strength. I guess I was trying to change too much. I quickly tested if I only changed the eye colour, and for that, only a few things changed.

When I went back and manually did it, I was able to successfully change the eye colours to whatever I wanted them to be. But it seems that even small changes can make things go wrong. Most of the time, when I changed the eye colour to something strange like purple, the rat simply couldn't see anymore.

It seems that I won't just be spending time watching, but also contemplating this new discovery. I wonder if I would ever be able to design a creature from the ground up, starting from nothing. It was a tantalising idea, but I also figured that it would probably take me a long, long time.

But that was okay; I'm immortal, and for the first time, I was glad that I wouldn't have to worry about dying of old age like other creatures I have seen. But now, I was distracted by an interesting ambush. Two different groups of ants were about to fight to the death, and there were a few champions there, which meant that it would be quite the showdown.