Chapter 21 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The 10th floor playroom was technically complete, but it required some maintenance and a way to get ants down here. I created a myriad of different environments, including lakes, rivers, forests, mountainous areas, snowy regions, and even some deserts. Until now, the ants had lived in a perfect environment for them, so I wanted to see how different environments would affect their evolution.

For maintenance, I had to expand my core room as it had grown quite a lot and I needed more space. I also needed to move some store placements and a few deranged features in my other playrooms so I could have a way to bring my ants down here. For that, I was going to use five large tunnels that ants could use to traverse through the other playrooms and reach the 10th floor. These tunnels would be connected to neutral ground on the upper ant floors. Could different empires fight to keep others from entering this tunnel? Absolutely, but with only five of them, no singular empire could claim dominion over one.

The more interesting part was where those tunnels led. I wanted to simulate the expansion and exploration that happened when I opened the second floor, so I carefully selected and modified where the tunnels led and how they did so. One of the tunnels ended halfway down the floor with no other way of getting to the ant floor than jumping down. I wondered what they might figure out to solve that problem. This tunnel was also the one that was connected to the Academy, the most neutral and most visited place in the ant world.

The second tunnel I was most proud of led to a smaller island that was surrounded by a lake. If ants wanted to explore further, they would need to brave the waters. However, there was a river running through the lake, so they would also need to be careful about the current, otherwise, they would risk entering the river system. I was curious to see how they would tackle this problem as they had been making quite a lot of progress with their water systems on their current floors.

Two of the tunnels led to different sides of the 10th floor, and those ones had multiple exits that would lead to areas not accessible to one another as there were rivers or impassable terrains between them. The last tunnel came out in a mountain valley that was absolutely filled with resources and fertile ground, but the only way out of there was to brave the multiple large rivers that led outwards or try to dig their way through, which would take a long time as I made the rock quite dense and strong. Technically speaking, all of the obstacles could be passed, it would just take a lot of time and work.

When I opened up the tunnels downwards, ants were confused, but that was because most of the older generations that had experienced this were long dead and only a few ancient ants were still around. It brought me so much joy when they started to realize what that meant. Empires and governments tried to keep the news from spreading, but it didn't work. Many ants who were ready to fight empires to gain their freedoms took the opportunity and gathered in small and large groups and rushed the tunnels. It happened so fast that empires hadn't had time to properly set up defenses or send their soldiers, who were quickly overrun.

The tunnels downwards were long and because of that, the journey was arduous. But for the ants who made it there, they were able to experience a feeling long forgotten in the ant world - the feeling of new discovery, of lands to be claimed, and new riches to be found. The empires still tried to suppress the news, but as the first ants reached a new floor, I declared to everyone that a new age had arrived - the age of exploration and colonization. It was so interesting to see how the empire pivoted and quickly funded expeditions. In only a week, frontier colonies were being established for further exploration. But when word came back about how big this place might actually be, it almost felt like the entire civilization stopped after everyone processed what was going on. It almost felt like the entire place was preparing for war, and perhaps to some extent it was, but mainly it was to start preparing to send even more ants downwards to discover what new land they could colonize.

Watching this all happen was so interesting that I actually slowed down my dungeon room creation. But I also made a few changes to that. From this point on, I wasn't only going to grow the dungeon rooms from one side but from the other side as well, so when they meet in the middle, the entire floor would be finished. I felt that this created a nice combination of knowing half the floor but still having half completely unknown, sort of similar to what was currently going on with the ants.

Still, I was thoroughly annoyed that so much of my mind was occupied by something that I didn’t even understand. This should have been my most glorious moment as I could see everything that the ants were doing and enjoy myself thoroughly, but now I could only focus on the more interesting things happening. It would take so long before I could make another ant floor as it would take them a long time to properly explore and colonize this floor.

I almost felt that I would crack from happiness when some of the ants used some sort of a contraption that allowed almost 500 of them to safely descend from the tunnel that was open to the air and land in a completely unexplored area where they were going to start establishing their own colony. Not long after that, the first floatable barges started to be tested in the lake island so they could make it to the other side where once again a large open space, never touched by ants, lay. The first couple of attempts were failures, but one of them was actually able to keep a few ants alive that ended up going down the river.

Eventually, one of them reached the shore, but a part of the parts did break off, so they didn't have as many supplies as they originally thought. But there were plenty of opportunities to find food in the vast wilderness they found themselves in. Slowly the overpopulation problem was solved, and when fresh food and resources started to flow back up through the tunnels, a new population boom started. More ants were needed not just to keep colonizing, but I also made the 10th floor a lot more dangerous, so ants needed to fight more predatory bugs and even a few bigger creatures.

I added those creatures and even a few spawners for them, so the Champions would have more to do. Of course, those creatures were in the more resource-heavy areas, and it was terribly interesting to watch an ant ten times smaller than a lizard fight and actually win against it. If you put it on the floor, it was the most dangerous and feared enemy as it was hard to catch them and anticipate their next attacks. But that made sure that the ants didn't expand too rapidly without securing their area of influence.

It wasn't long before conflicts between different ant colonies began, but they were mainly just skirmishes. But it didn’t take long for the empires to figure out that this place was a perfect opportunity to have proxy wars where their actual champions and soldiers could join in without disturbing the balance on the upper floors. After that, colonizing, or how many ants called it, "going down," became more dangerous than some of the wars from the previous ages.

Like this, I sat back, made my dungeon rooms, kept the rest of my dungeon functioning, and just enjoyed looking at how ants innovated, explored, and fought on the new floor. I had never felt so alive, even if most of me wasn't properly focused. I also noticed that more and more different adventurers were showing up, but I barely had any time to observe them.