Chapter 24 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I began by claiming my territory. The expansion to define the area for my new floor was straightforward, but I felt compelled to make myself whole, so I filled all the gaps in my territory between the floors I had.

I pushed myself to the very edge of the mountain, but I didn’t extend my territory beyond it. The primary reason was that I didn’t want to encroach on the adventurers' territory. Another reason was that doing so would blow my cover because dungeons that signed the original contract wouldn't be able to expand in that manner.

I could keep expanding my territory, and I believed I could make myself significantly larger, but I decided to hold off. I wanted to see how expansive I could make the 11th floor. In the real world, the 11th floor was roughly the size of my fifth floor, which intrigued me. It probably meant I could create a much larger space inside.

However, before I could start expanding that space, something unexpected occurred. I heard a voice through the contact bond and wondered why the dungeon fairy would reach out. From what I understood, he thoroughly despised me.

"Hello, dungeon, this is Ace. I hope I’m doing this correctly. The dungeon fairy transferred ownership to me, and I was quite concerned about a few things he mentioned. As we understand it, you have mana issues. So, perhaps if you don’t create so many rooms and monsters, you could continue building new floors for a while?" Ace paused, likely waiting for my response, but I chose not to talk back.

Why would he think I was running low on mana? I hadn't checked my mana production, but I shouldn't have problems. A quick check confirmed he was mistaken, but I was also wrong. My mana production had surged significantly, and I needed to investigate this anomaly. It would be rude not to respond at all, so I grunted back through the connection.

"I’m going to take that as affirmative. Now, I don’t know if this is possible, but a lot of us up here would love if there were gateways to the different waypoints so people who have made it that far could continue their exploration." Ace once again spoke, but this time I didn’t acknowledge him in any way.

Eventually, he ended the connection, and I just hoped that he wasn't going to be annoying and try to constantly talk to me. I had things to do. As for his request, I mean, it’s not a bad idea, but I had no idea how I was going to record someone's progression and then allow them to reach their latest waystation.

I still gave the relevant information to the academies. I went back into expanding my 11th floor. My ant monitoring part of my mind brought my attention back to them. Apparently, they had no idea about the gate concept; it wasn't in any of the books, and they were now furiously trying to make this concept work.

There were currently five academies. Into everyone, I made a pair of gates that was meant for the size of the ants so they could have something to study, and they didn’t have to start from only an idea. I also made some more of the gate materials so they would have something to test.

Now, I started to finally work on my 11th floor. At first, I was incredibly excited as I believed I would be done with this space expansion quite quickly thanks to my dungeon modification skill being at A plus rank, but that wasn't the case. I continued to expand and expand, but I never reached the edge. Days went by, and then weeks.

During this time, I have been able to observe how the skills work. They were somehow boosting the actions I took that the skills covered. Currently, my skills, dungeon modification, and space expansion were in constant use. One helped me expand the space of the 11th floor quicker, while the other made it possible for me to continue to make this floor larger.

It took three weeks and two days, during which I dedicated a large portion of my mind to the task. The end results were honestly scary. It didn’t initially make sense, but after some calculations, it began to.

Without the skill, the normal expansion of the 11th floor would be around 50%, which was decent. However, my S plus rank space expansion skill increased that by about 13 times. This made the length of my new floor just above 780 kilometres, the width almost 420 kilometres, and the height a staggering 1040 metres.

What was I going to do? I had no idea. This was too much space, way too much. If I tried to reduce the height, as I had done before, how much would be added to the width and length? The space still had an oval shape, but that was less noticeable due to its sheer size. Every other floor I had paled in comparison, but I guess that made sense.

I also discovered that S rank skills multiplied the actions covered by that skill by 10x times. The plus gave me 3x times more. If I filled the entire floor with dungeon rooms just travelling this place would take years. My instincts, which were now weaker, but they seemed to quite enjoy that idea. But deciding what to do with this floor would take time.

In the meantime, I began creating dungeon rooms. This time, I made them bigger. To start off I decided to use my Mountain Lion pattern, but I enhanced it to match the floor's new strength requirements. I delegated the work of making new rooms to a part of my mind as I pondered what to do with all this space.

I definitely didn’t need so much height, so I reduced it to 500 metres. This extended the length to about 1000 kilometres and the width to over 500. I planned to divide the floor in half, with 250 metres being the standard surface level. This way, half would be an underground area and the other half an above-ground area.

Now to actually do it was a different animal altogether. When I was about a week in, I was able to get a good timeframe. I would be finished with the basic shape of the room in about a month. Another eight months to clear out the stone from the above-ground area and some of the underground area.

But that was if I also concentrated on making dungeon rooms from four different spots. But I thought that it might be a good idea to do it like that. I still liked the idea of having a stupid amount of dungeon rooms, so I needed to make plans to make this work.

I won’t be making direct connections through the four different dungeon rooms areas, and I will only have them connected through gateways. So if an adventurer wanted to get to the next floor, they would need to complete all four different areas in order and then perhaps I will make a 5th area as well or possibly just a floor guardian room.

The adventurers will only have access to one area, and I will make them all simultaneously, which means that when I’m finished, they would have three extra areas of the same size as the first to explore.

The designs will be like the last floors, and every area will have 250 rooms, but of course, the shorter path would be around 170. The design work needed for this will probably take two years, but I wasn’t in a hurry. Upgrading older creature patterns also sounded quite fun, and I did have some new ones from my playrooms to upgrade and modify to make a truly wonderful variety of creatures the adventurers could fight against.

With the bigger rooms, environments could also be a bit more complicated, but I didn’t want to make them too much so, although a few would be acceptable. I also think that on this floor, it would be a good idea to start putting a few traps into the rooms and not just the corridors.

With everything running and most of my mind working on making or maintaining my dungeon, I started to think about why my mana regeneration was so high. The answer was my skill, creature amount, which was at an A-plus rank.

It made my upkeep a lot more efficient, so every living thing in my dungeon was giving me a larger net positive than before. I liked that the answer was so simple, and I enjoyed the idea that I could probably have an endless amount of living things in my dungeon without causing me to run into maintenance problems.

With everything working smoothly, I finally had time to observe everything correctly, and what fun it was. While watching the adventurers was interesting, it was nothing compared to the ants. The different nations, all the interactions, the wars, and the new inventions were incredible to watch.

The 10th-floor was slowly being turned from the unexplored wilderness into something more tamed and fully a part of the nations that occupied it. They still seemed to be quite far away from making gate technology, but every once in a while, I gave every Academy more materials to experiment with.

The most interesting discovery to come out of the academies was that air is actually composed of different things. It made sense when I looked at the research paper that one of the ants wrote. On every floor, I had a dungeon rule to keep the air clean, and when I dug deeper into that rule, I could see what the ant had written about.

The most important thing was something called oxygen. If the ant was correct, a higher percentage of that in the air should allow the ants to evolve to become a lot bigger than they currently are. It was an intriguing idea, so on the 11th floor, I was going to test it out as I was also going to make this floor an ant floor as well. But it was also time to announce a new age, the age of innovation, that will last until the new floor is finished and opened to the ants.