Chapter 22 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Months flew by as I continued to develop my dungeon rooms and maintain the floors, all while enjoying the drama unfolding on the ant floors. I had forgotten how rapidly ants could multiply. The population of the new floor soon started to approach that of the rest of the ant floors. The pure chaos it brought was incredibly satisfying.

When the first colony declared independence, a huge war began. However, the journey to the tenth floor was not a simple one as it took quite a while, and there really wasn't any good place to resupply. This home field advantage allowed the new nation to defend itself and eventually be recognized as its own nation.

The problem for this nation was that they didn't have access to the Academy, so they made a smaller one just for themselves. It would probably never be as useful as the one I made, but it should help them continue their education. It didn't take long for others to also start declaring independence, but not everyone succeeded. So far, there have been 17 independence wars, and only eight have resulted in a new nation.

One interesting thing about the new floor is that ants were in a more dangerous environment, so they started to grow a bit bigger than the ones on the upper floors. I wanted to keep track of this phenomenon, but I simply didn’t have the mind power to devote to this task.

It was even more annoying that I would probably have to spend more time with this breakthrough than I originally thought, as whatever was happening to me was starting to consume a lot of mana. Of course, the growing population was helping to offset that, and in a few more months, the population boom will help me reach my mana targets.

The tenth floor was still over half empty, and a few places were still unexplored or too dangerous to visit regularly, but ants were extremely good at exploration and colonization, and I kind of wished I would have made a bigger playground for them. I still continued to expand the floor, which was a bit easier for the tenth floor, but that also consumed a lot of my power and mana. But I've always done so, so stopping seemed wrong somehow.

When the floor was finally almost entirely colonized, I had already been done with the dungeon rooms for a few months. The look on the adventurers' faces when they realized how much more they had to explore was priceless. Only a few have reached the end, and even fewer continued to explore the more remote corners of this floor. I found it interesting that in the previous floors, all information was shared with everyone, but now people started to keep information for themselves, and I actually liked that.

A few more new nations have arisen among the ants, and surprisingly enough, one has already fallen to another new nation - the first war between the tenth-floor nations. It was a brutal one, but their expansion was too close to each other, and they were originally from different empires, so there was already friction between them.

I might want to call a new age for my ants, but I think I will also make the next floor for ants as well, so calling a new age might be premature. It will take me another month until my mana is sufficiently full, and to me, that time flashed by, and it was time to initiate another breakthrough that will hopefully fix my hazy mind.

When I triggered my breakthrough, it was nothing like I’ve experienced before. It felt like I was being reborn, completely changed into something better than I was before. I don’t know how long this lasted, but eventually, this part of the breakthrough ended, and a more familiar one started.

But now, 40% of my accumulated mana went into general improvements for myself, another 40% was split between territorial gain and the boss for the tenth floor. I wondered what happened to the remaining 20%, but I couldn’t think about it too much as I needed to focus on making the boss.

At first, I planned on creating a pack of wolves and goblin riders, but I found it easier to make the pattern stronger, so I went in a different direction. I only made two wolves and one goblin who all worked as one team. But the jump in difficulty that was required was more than I expected.

To fix that I added some skills to them. I found it easy to do but I made the skills simple and added them to all the three creatures to finish off the boss room. It was quite curious that I felt I had a lot more room to play with in terms of difficulty, but I just went with what felt right.

Finishing that should have ended my breakthrough, but now I know where the rest of the 20% will go to and why my mind was so hazy during this breakthrough. I should have figured this out earlier as I actually tried to do the same thing I did naturally. My mind was working on creating skills. I tried to follow the old ant's instructions, but nothing worked. It seems that I was simply too young, and I think now I should be able to do this without my mind being so hazy.

I refocused on the breakthrough and saw representations of my new skills:

Pattern Strengthening: Rank C

Creature Making: Rank B

Creature Quantity: Rank A+

Dungeon Modification: Rank A+

Space Expansion: Rank S

I'm pretty sure that having five skills at once is not regular, but I now understood why my instincts wanted me to strengthen the patterns. It would have allowed me to get that skill to a better rank. I felt that I could put mana into any of the skills or choose multiple ones if I wanted to. I could also create a new skill slot, but currently, I didn't know enough, so I started to test out putting different amounts of mana into different skills. When I reached 17% of my mana, I was able to get my Space Expansion to Rank S+, which sounded quite good, so I did that, and the rest I put into my Pattern Strengthening skill.

With that, my breakthrough came to an end, and I had access to the next floor. But things were so much different now. I felt so many restrictions that were there before completely gone or just barely there. For one thing, I could now expand upwards from my first floor, something I couldn't have done before, and I could properly fill in my entire territory, so the small gaps of unclaimed territory between floors would disappear.

My mind also felt a lot more expanded, and I now figured out that dungeons were supposed to start being like me only from this floor, not from the first moment they awaken. My mind was still on improving the skills, but it was now only a small part, although it still took up the same amount of my mind power as before.

I was at least 10 times, maybe even 100 times, more capable than before, at least for the thinking part of me. A quick test, however, showed that I was around seven times better at clearing out rock and modifying my dungeon, probably because of that Dungeon Modification Rank A+ skill.

A quick test of pattern modification showed that I was around 50% better than I was before if I take into account my stronger mind. Creature making seemed to be around two times better than before, giving me a better understanding of how the ranking system worked.

Just an A ranking probably meant five times better at that thing, and the plus meant that you could probably push that further. To test out my only S rank skill will take longer as I would actually need to claim territory and then expand the eleventh floor to find out how much larger I could make it.

The very next moment, I felt something weird in my core room. It was something similar to the gates that transport the adventurers between my floors. I was so taken aback that when I figured I should probably stop this, a creature I had not seen before appeared in my core room, but I knew what it was - a dungeon fairy.

My instincts immediately screamed at me to kill it immediately. Agreeing with it, I tried to make a creature, but I couldn’t – its presence here was blocking me. Before I could do anything else, the dungeon fairy did something, and my instincts now thought the dungeon fairy was my greatest ally and I should do anything it wants.