Chapter 96 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

It was the night before the large battle, the last one before the first peace talks were to happen. Ace seemed quite worried, and I could understand why. Was there a chance that they could survive the next battle?

I would say it's 50-50, but they would also lose quite a lot of people, and I really didn’t like losing my adventurers. So, I needed to do something about this. If they could defend better during the next battle, they would also have a stronger position during the peace talks.

Fortunately, I had been listening to the people talking above ground as much as possible, and someone did give me a good idea. What if the defenders could already access their accumulated points that they had gained through their quests?

I still didn’t want to make items like weapons and armor, and they actually didn’t need them. What they needed were consumables. Different kinds of potions, most of all, but also grenade-type items.

I was willing to compromise my desires a little bit and give them access to these kinds of items. Of course, there would be the traditional items as well, like hides and other monster parts all the way to the best quality I can provide, that the adventured self-named legendary rank.

Then, of course, came the question: how do I handle giving out the items? Currently, I have been just appearing quest items near them, but there have been instances where sneaky adventurers have tried to steal someone else's rewards.

There are probably a few other bad things that might happen if I continue to do things like that, and of course, it takes a little bit to find all these people and then make those items near them.

So, I needed places where they could get their quest rewards. They would be a little bit safer, so stealing couldn't happen so often or easily, and I wouldn’t have to constantly search for them all over my dungeon, which continues to get bigger. The solution would be a quest reward station. I will be making them in every hub station and in the soon-to-be-made new entrance room.

The entrance that I currently have is not representative of my majesty. So, what I did was start claiming land on the same level as my first floor and a bit higher. I also wanted to test out a building method like I can use during the rank-ups.

There, I can make an entire plan for a room, get every detail just the way I like it, and then it will be built almost immediately. That will take a lot of mana, but that’s one thing I don’t need to worry about.

I could just make the entrance larger and add another room where I would have a reward station. But I could think about my adventurers’ requirements as well.

They had some different needs, and while there were quite a few portals that connected to the surface, there were usually long queues to use them. It was awfully crowded. I could also see how much they struggled getting the large pieces of lumber out of the dungeon. So, let’s do this the way I know best; let's go large.

Multiple first floors would fit into the room I was going to make. This large room will also be basically open on one side that faces the city and where my old entrance was. I was going to make large arches 40 meters tall and 10 meters across.

Between every arch was about 2 ½ meters of smooth stone. Like that, I was able to fit 12 arches that opened up a way inside the entrance room for basically anyone and anything. The middle two arches, however, I did combine, making one large one that was 20 meters across.

It looked magnificent. The room itself was about 60 meters tall. I couldn’t make it any taller; otherwise, I would start to compromise the airship port. There were, however, a few exceptions, as I purposely made shafts that they could use with the current lift designs that they were using.

That way, they could bring up and lower heavy loads without having to transport them needlessly. The room itself did have pillars supporting everything. Now, I didn’t need to do this, as the surroundings would be made out of dungeon stone, but if I didn’t, the room just looked wrong.

I also added many gateways, including gateways that only worked one way. They could use one to get into hub stations or ones to get to the surface. That also required me to add a similar type of gateway pair into every hub station, but that was easy enough. Adventurers could already see this change unlike in the entrance room, but the gateways didn't work right now, so they were quite confused.

In the entrance room, I also left a lot of free real estate as I already knew adventurers would want to make places where they could sell stuff here. Then, of course, I made the large area where they could get their rewards.

I took inspiration from the city auction house for that. In the center of the wall that was across from the entrance was the original cave entrance that I wasn’t going to change, but I changed this into a special gateway. It was going to take people into the different first-floor floors whenever someone entered.

I didn’t add any extra lighting as I will leave that to the adventurers. I also tweaked the rock to be a little bit darker to be more ominous. Then I spent multiple hours making sure that everything was decently smooth, however, I made sure not to make the floor too smooth.

It was something I learned accidentally, but it was a good low-effort trap. Who would have guessed you could make rock so smooth that it would be like stepping on ice? It is a hilarious trap, but if you tilt the floor a little bit and put spikes on the other end, it can also be incredibly dangerous.

None of these changes to the entrance have been made in reality, but I could see it just waiting for me to let go, and it would start changing everything. So I waited for a good moment where only two people would be inside. It shouldn’t hurt them, but they would be quite disoriented. Then I let go and started to pump mana into the change.

It wasn't as fast as the floor guardian rooms, but it wasn’t much slower. The panic the people experienced was humorous to see, and it seemed like they were quite dizzy from the changes happening.

Currently, the entire space looks like a mix between black, white, and blue, and it is constantly shifting. It had only been going on for a minute before Ace tried to contact me, but I couldn’t answer as I needed to concentrate.

Altogether, it took 11 minutes, and the entire 1st floor was changed. Now, the entrance room dominated the place with a high ceiling and numerous pillars. The entrance arches looked dominating yet somehow inviting. I nailed it.

"What in God’s name is going on? Please tell me everything is okay?" I finally heard Ace pleading. "Calm down, I just needed to change something," I sent back, which finally made him stop trying to use the contract to communicate with me.

"Oh, before I go back to making my dungeon, there is a reward station in the entrance room, and I made it so every defender can already start spending their points." There was a moment of silence before I could hear the yell through our connection, "What?"

Then I tuned the annoying person out. So many questions, so annoying. Fortunately, he left me alone eventually. I started to add similar reward stations to the hub stations and a few waystations.

It was, however, hilarious to see people's reactions to the list of things they could get, and I made sure to capture the most embarrassing and funny faces. If they only knew that I could now capture faces outside the dungeon as well.

I think I will never tire of making new embarrassing coin designs. The coin they get for defending, however, will not be embarrassing; it will show the bravery of every single person who accepted the coin. They didn't know it yet, but all of them will be unique.