Chapter 90 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The talk with Ace was a little bit worrying, so just in case, I rechecked all my defenses and started to claim more real-world territory. The goal for that would be so I could open up more exits, so if anyone decided to close up my primary one, it would not cause me to suffocate.

After that, I really couldn’t do anything more proactive, although I did increase the population of infernal fruit flies in my core floor labyrinth. It was my own name for the truly terrifying creatures that continue to be the most dangerous things in my dungeon.

Usually, when I started to terraform my playroom, time went by fast, not this time. The reason was quite clear as the adventurers and the citizens above me started to get more somber. It was a gradual thing, and there were a few arguments with people still denying the reality, but slowly more and more understood that war was coming.

It was the first time the adventurer population declined. There had been times when the growth was quite slow, but never have I lost so many adventurers before. In the city above many were leaving as well, although trade seemed to still be happening, and I’m pretty sure that not even the attacking army was going to interfere with that.

If I understand correctly, trade was one of the main reasons for their attack, the second main reason being myself. I wondered truly what the situation would be if I used the entirety of my mana generation to give out drops. They would be having a hard time transporting just the gold coins out of my dungeon, not to speak of everything else.

While the somber mood of the adventurers slowed, or at least made me more aware of the time passing, I was still going at a good pace making the 19th-floor playroom. I also started making the framework of the 19th-floor dungeon rooms as I needed to make 90,000 of them. I did like that I was able to just use the ceiling of the playroom and make all the rooms up high away from the action of the playroom.

I always wondered what the adventurers would think about if they knew that their hub stations and all the other rooms were just suspended from the ceiling and the only thing that allowed them to stay like that was the incredibly strong substance called dungeon stone.

The playroom will have two different water areas in the lower half of the continent. At this point, I think I should really start calling the landmasses continents as they actually are that big.

Anyway, in the lower half, there would be a narrow stretch of land connecting the upper and lower half, or perhaps I should call it northern and southern. I think it's good to get terminology fixed because I’m pretty sure my creatures gain some innate understanding through me, but how that works will be an experiment for a later date.

The western side will have a freshwater sea, and the eastern side will have a saltwater ocean. The difference between the two would be the depth, as the freshwater will barely be more than 40 metres while the ocean will get to about 250.

Still a long way off from being true bodies of water, but it will still take me quite a while before I can have a large surface area and depth for my playrooms. Currently, I have to choose one.

There was, of course, a good reason why I wanted the separation between the two land masses as I wanted one to be a more temperate climate and the other more tropical. The reason why I wanted a stretch of land to connect them was not just to have two separate bodies of water but also so that the creatures from either climate could choose to go to the other one.

In many cases, I’ve learned a creature’s appropriate environment could change with just a single skill. This will inevitably slowly start to change the creature itself, especially if the skill will become something inherited by the next generations.

Usually, I just used dungeon rules to separate the different biomes, so technically a cold and hot environment could be side by side. In just a few steps, you could go from scorching heat to freezing, but I didn’t want this to be the case here.

I want things to be more natural. That required some experimentation and setting up some more subtle dungeon rules that will mimic a proper environment, not just force it.

In the midst of this experimentation, something happened in my dungeon that even my forgotten instincts rejoiced at so strongly that I could properly pick up on them. In that desert playroom, one of the seeds I made to hopefully get an elemental finally worked.

It was weird to see a creature come into being. Some of the aspects reminded me of when an adventurer was giving birth, and if I didn’t claim the emerging creature, it would be completely free and out of my influence.

This time I didn’t want that outcome, so I observed and let the dungeon mana infect the new elemental. What was good about this process was that I didn’t have to start off with making a monster and then waiting for the next generation so they could start generating mana and having their own mind.

Doing this also gave me a pattern which I could use to make more of them. Its intelligence was quite low, but I could feel that as the sand elemental continued to live, it would continue to get stronger and more intelligent.

It started out really small, barely alive, but I could see how the crystal core changed into a mixture of crystal and sand. It then slowly started to gather more sand, and about half of the creature was just mana, the other half sand.

As the sand gathered, it slowly changed it. The sand started to become saturated with mana. Like so, it slowly grew. Eventually, it started to gather into a small floating ball of loose sand, and in the middle was the core.

Then it moved. I was a bit curious as to where it was going, but it seemed like it was going to a more mana-rich area that wasn’t too far away. When it got there, it continued to grow, and every so often, it needed to scare off some curious creatures who had come to see about the interesting mana concentration.

This was such an interesting thing, but once again, I was interrupted after having spent a few days simply observing how this creature went about its life. Up in the city, there seemed to be panic, and I could see how it slowly worked its way through the adventurers as they started to get the news.

It seems that an army had been seen about 200 kilometers away, and after a more thorough scouting, six other armies were also found a bit further away. Altogether, there seemed to be about 180,000 soldiers marching this way, and while not all will stay for the siege, it was still a terrifying number for most.

It will be a different kind of experience to watch the battle and what will happen outside my territory, as my vision was different, but I hope that things will go well because I really didn’t want to use my creatures in this fight.

I looked for Ace to see that he was arguing with the scary Adventurer Guild master. The person just screamed danger, even through my poor vision skill. I couldn’t even imagine how he would look if he was inside my dungeon.

Apparently, he was confused and angry as to why Ace wasn't calling for the adventurers to help and defend. I knew why he wanted to leave that to the last moment, and I believe that with my quest, they would come and help.

That reminded me I had to design a new coin, a platinum one, for anyone that will accept the quest and complete it. Of course, I plan on giving a few more rewards, and I plan to do it similarly to my raid rooms, as technically they were training for this kind of a fight.