Chapter 98 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

POV Dungeon Core

It was finally over. Things could get back to how they used to be, the way I liked it. Not to say that the war above wasn't interesting to watch; I just couldn’t appreciate it the same way I could when something happened inside my dungeon.

The city above also needed quite a lot of work, and from the meeting Ace had with his department heads. The positions he just created to help him run his nation, they were saying that it would take a few years to get the city back to its previous state.

They needed to do a lot of rebuilding, as basically 80% of the city had received some sort of damage. 37% had been completely destroyed, mostly because of the large fire. Also, the surrounding woods were quite damaged, and those were the places where the city farmed the berries that were needed to make its main export.

What I did like about what they discussed was their expectation of how many people, especially adventurers, were going to come here in the following years. The numbers made me really happy because if I had more adventurers, it would mean more interesting things would happen.

Speaking of the adventurers, since everything was finished, I triggered the completion of the quest. Because of that, many things happened at once.

Now, no one would be able to gain contribution points. Up until this point, I was still counting contribution points if anyone with the quest was cleaning up, although it was a low number of points. In the quest text, it also now said that quest rewards could only be gotten from quest stations and it also said that it would be like that moving forward.

Previously, people couldn't buy everything from the contribution shop as many of the most expensive things were greyed out, but now they became available. All of these things would start at really low points cost, but all of them had a timer of one week. When the timer ended, the person who offered the most points for that specific item would get it.

There were in total 127 items that people could get like that, but there were also more items people could bid on. With those additional items, they could pool their contribution points.

In the raid rooms, I had to implement a similar thing because sometimes different shadow guilds participated in the same raid. If that happened, they could bid on the few items that dropped and were truly desired.

This time the same happened, but I didn't want to make all items like this; otherwise, the individual people who truly gave it their all and achieved great things would not gain anything special.

Everything below legendary rank people could just buy in unlimited quantity, although just in case, I did add a limit of five for each person. Setting limits just seemed a good idea, just in case someone found a way to exploit something.

The last thing to happen with the quest ending was that the platinum coins were now available to be got at the reward station. When they claimed them, they definitely didn't expect to see their own face on the coin, and especially not a mocking face, but something that showed their bravery.

I could see people looking at the coins, mesmerized, and some even had teary eyes. That was not all that was on the coins; there was also a number of how many contribution points they gained, along with other markers indicating that the coins were from this dungeon.

The coins were in class boxes, similar to those that the fervent collectors of the different coin drops. These protect the coins as I don’t expect many would be willing to use them as just coins to be used for purchases.

However, there was a problem. I made coins for every single defender, and quite a lot of them are now dead. "Ace, have you heard the news about the platinum coins already?" I asked him through our connection, and while he did answer yes, he wasn't actually able to communicate through the connection because he wasn't in my dungeon.

I didn’t want to reveal that I could hear him like this. "I can’t hear you; come and enter my dungeon." It was nice to see how he reluctantly got up and then started to walk towards my dungeon, but still did want I asked immediately.

"What is it?" he said when he finally made it to the entrance room. "I also have platinum coins for every adventurer who died. If you could, I would like it if you could give those coins to their loved ones or relatives."

Ace didn't say anything for a little while, but eventually, he spoke up. "I will try my best, but give me a few hours to organize everything so it would go smoothly."

A few hours later, I saw Ace returning to my dungeon, and he had quite a lot of people behind him. He approached the reward station and then spoke in a loud voice, "We need the reward station cleared out, please do so immediately."

Everyone was quite confused. The reward station was really packed, but everyone did what they were told. That surprised me a little bit, but I guess none of them had anything too urgent going on.

When everything was cleared out, Ace gave me a nod. What followed was me filling up the tables with platinum coins inside glass boxes. The amount of wealth on the tables seemed to entice many, but as soon as everyone figured out what those coins were, Ace made an announcement.

"When the dungeon gives a quest. The texts they contain have very specific wording. This time, whenever someone accepts the quest, no matter if they live or die, it seems that they will still receive their platinum coin. We will try to give the coins to relatives or loved ones, but if we can't, we will be making a memorial out of the remaining coins."

It took a moment before a person started to nod their head, and more and more people joined agreed with the announcement. Many also wondered if their lost friend's coin was amongst those on the tables.

The images on the coins were really realistic, and in some cases, it was the first time people saw an image of themselves. I was incredibly glad about how everything worked out, but now I could get back to making my dungeon.

The 19th-floor playroom was coming along. Already I had plants growing, and it wouldn’t take me too long before I felt comfortable starting to add creature patterns into this floor. While most of the creatures that would come to inhabit this floor would come from other floors, I still wanted the lowest creatures in a food chain to be already present.

For that, I did have to tweak the patterns to make sure that even the weakest creatures were still strong enough to at least survive and start to breed. After that, it was time to turn my attention towards the dungeon rooms. I was going to need to make 90,000 of them. A lot of them already had the basic structure built out.

I also had a few creatures who had achieved gold rank inside my dungeon. It was incredibly interesting to see the process of what happened during this breakthrough.

A creature changed; not just partially, but its entire being changed during this breakthrough. While before they generated mana and were strengthened by it, now it almost looked like mana was a part of their body. I could also see how they developed their talent.

While skills were attached to their mana signature, the talent came from the body and was enhanced by the mana. They had always had potential for whatever talent they received; it was just that mana and their experiences seemed to shape it into something very similar to a skill, but it was more intertwined with that person as a whole than just skills.

For now, I couldn’t add any talents to my patterns, but I was quite certain it was because I myself wasn’t gold rank. The better question was what trait I was going to get, because mine was a bit different than a talent, but I didn’t know why or how.