Chapter 101 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I don’t think I have ever pushed myself as hard as I did during this breakthrough. Now I can take things a little easier, and messing with Carl helped with that quite a lot.

The timing was just too perfect, and I only needed to wait about 10 minutes after I finished all the dungeon rooms before I could open them up at the perfect moment. Ace was already trying to contact me, but currently, I was ignoring him as I just wanted to relax.

He wanted to know if I was going to break through or not. There was nothing stopping me from breaking through, but I wanted to wait and enjoy how the adventurers reacted to the 20th floor.

Normally, I would have only been out for a few days, but this breakthrough was going to be a big one, and I didn’t know how long I would be out. Because of that, I also made sure that my core floor was stocked up on all the nasty things that would make it tough for anyone to reach my core.

There were also a lot of other things happening. Some of the ant nations were making a proper effort to establish a beachhead on the desert floor. The orcs were also finally starting to construct a proper outpost around the gateway that allowed them to go to the 19th-floor playroom.

There has been one problematic snag. That being gold rank intelligent creatures. None have accepted my offer of bringing them into the 19th-floor playroom.

Mostly this has been happening with the ants, but there are a few Arden goblins who have reached the gold rank and a singular kobold. The ants don’t want to leave behind their close ones, as not even the Champions are truly alone; they are a communal species, after all.

The goblins and the kobold have a bit of a different reason for not going. They have finally gotten strong enough to protect their tribes and be a truly legendary leader. If they left, they would leave a huge power vacuum, and for the kobolds, they would lose their best chance at climbing back towards the top of the food chain.

I’m also contemplating giving the bees access to the 19th-floor playroom. Currently, they don’t have anyone who would qualify, but their queens have enough subjects to be able to survive long enough, at least I think so, to get stronger and defend themselves even better. They are also currently quite pressured by the fruit flies.

The most interesting thing, however, was still the adventurers as they slowly made their way into the 20th floor. It was a different kind of exploration because a large portion of the population still hadn't finished the 19th floor, so currently there weren’t the large land grabs by the different shadow guilds as was normal.

They also came to find that the loot table was no longer the same. Of course, I kept the pieces of meat that so commonly drop and the coin drops, but now in specific rooms, if you killed some or all of the monsters, either valuable plants or ore deposits would be spawned.

It was quite fun to set up those dungeon rules. I didn’t just want to give them chunks of ore or cut plants that they could instantly sell or use. No, I wanted them to collect them themselves, which would allow some who had skills for them to do so a lot more efficiently.

There are so many varieties of plants that the list of possible spawns was so high that I actually had to categorize to keep track of the list a little bit better. For ores, it was a lot simpler. You had your standard metals and then your mana variances. There was also a chance that inside the ore there might be some gemstones, but it was a really low chance, similar to the more unique and powerful plants and ores.

There was, of course, the more normally occurring plants and ores, similar to the upper floors, but they were comparatively less valuable and useful than the more specialized spawns. The hub stations now also had larger underground areas, which allowed me to add a bit more of a natural environment and a larger amount of resources. Each one of the hub stations was designed to be completely self-sufficient if people were willing to work for it a little bit.

Way stations still remained on the smaller side, but I decided to add some special features which would make them somewhat useful and not just resting spots. All of them could be developed to produce something, and if you combine them with the hub stations, you could make a really prosperous economy.

This was to prepare for the future, as I could see more and more adventurers setting up houses and bringing their families here. There have been a few more births in my dungeon, and I’m quite certain the numbers will just keep going up.

This all meant that in the future, there would probably be proper nations inside my dungeon rooms, and I honestly welcomed it. The more adventures I have, the more mana I make. But more importantly, I would have more to see.

I have come to learn that if you have more creatures, while you have more of the same things happening, you also have more unique things happening, and those are the fun things.

While as a dungeon, it's in my nature to make such environments where people could push themselves, I have always enjoyed watching how they do things a lot more than just making myself bigger, like my instincts always wanted to.

I did have to thank them because otherwise, I would have been stuck and just enjoyed watching ants that I had at the time. I would have never been able to see such amazing things. So, the only thing to do to make this even better is to continue to grow myself and make myself even bigger.

It immediately made me want to break through to the next stage of my life, but I still had so much to enjoy and that I didn’t want to miss. There was also that nagging problem that when I got a little too full of mana, I got a light-headed and floaty feeling.

That has never happened before and it's not the same as what happened during my last big breakthrough when I was just 10 floors deep. Then, everything was so hazy and my mind was clouded. This time, that didn't happen.

If I wasn't certain before, now I was sure that something big was actually going to happen. There should be a qualitative change, similar to the way adventurers evolve, but there wasn't any concrete information.

I tried to go through all the memories my parent gave me, but all I could find were blocked-off ones that I couldn’t access. At least I could find them, but I think that’s because I’m so close, and after I break through, I should be able to access them. I think those are the last of my inherited memories, because my parent never made it to the next stage after this one.

There is actually one thing that I need to do before my breakthrough. Because I was in such a hurry to finish the 20th-floor dungeon rooms, I actually didn’t expand the 20th-floor to its absolute limit. I think it might be a bad idea not to do so, because I think it somewhat affects how large my next floor could be, and of course, constantly expanding the floors does use up a lot of mana generation.

While I do have a lot of extra mana regeneration, it has started to slow down a bit because of the number of creatures I have. Getting quantity past the rank of A+ as it currently is, might become a necessity in the future.

I still think that even if all of my floors were filled with ants, I could still reach about floor 40 before I would not have enough mana generation for another breakthrough. However, that was quite far away, but I need to be careful because if I don’t upgrade it before that, I might never get the chance to upgrade that skill again and would actually be stuck, or be forced to eliminate a huge portion of the population. That thought made my core cold.