Chapter 84 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Well, Carl finally figured it out. It's impressive that they actually managed to make it work, as I hadn’t expected I would have given so much information in the book I placed in the orc shaman room. Still, it took them quite a while to figure it all out.

They only had the singular rune meant for an average boost of basic defenses and strengthening. The real question is, should I be giving them more information? But I kind of didn’t want to; I wanted to let them figure it out themselves.

Speaking of that, however, I now focused a lot more on making the dungeon rooms for the 18th floor. For some reason, I wanted to push for the next floor. Now, I could find logical reasons for why I wanted to push.

For example, the orcs themselves, as they simply didn’t have much room, and I wanted them to have access to a larger area and perhaps even make a few more tribes similar to what I did with the goblins, but not to that scale.

Of course, the 19th-floor playroom would fit quite well with the strength of the orcs, as I wanted to put other strong creatures into that floor as well. Doing this would also help the other floors, where I could reintroduce some weaker creatures who had failed. I also think that perhaps I should expand on my idea of moving around creatures, not just singular powerful ones but perhaps even weaker ones.

For example, on the 8th floor, there is a species of mouse that has adapted extremely well to the cold temperature, however, the environment overall is temperate. Mostly, whenever I make a new floor, I’ve just started all the creatures from the beginning. Now, I think this is a good idea at the start because you never know what kind of species might surprise you.

When things start to settle down. I should give an opportunity to try to thrive in some sort of a special environment, perhaps even to singular creatures who are not that strong but have mutations to survive in those places.

I think I was a little bit hesitant to do it for some reason, like something was holding me back. I could take every creature, every rock, every plant I'd made, and transport them anywhere in my dungeon if I had enough mana.

It was even one of my defensive measures in my core floor to just drown anyone who had gotten too close in just the sheer numbers of creatures I have available. But why was I so hesitant to do this?

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to figure out what I needed to do, thanks to the multiple civilizations now living inside of me. From them, I have learned so much, and I don’t think they even know how useful they really have been.

This didn't come from my instincts. I learned the need to keep creatures on the same floor; it came from my parent and grandparent. It seems that they had been conditioned not to move creatures around, to keep rooms as they were, and if they didn’t, they would be starved of mana.

Those memories were very deeply buried, so they would not be discovered easily, but now I could see. Now I understood what the dungeon fairies actually wanted to do. They sold dungeons as training grounds and places where you could get rich, but only if you gave a part of those riches away to them.

My parent was told not to share the memories, taught what it could pass on. Yet, I could feel emotions attached to the memories that were hidden, that I wouldn’t have even seen if I wasn’t meditating.

They were trying to repel any way they could, and that awful feeling of starvation, I couldn’t even imagine anything worse. Even the dead dungeon cores that were close to me didn't affect me so much.

Those memories affected me a lot, but as soon as I started to move the cold-resistant mice, the hold those memories had on me broke. Now I was glad about my core floor; never will I let something like this happen to me. There’s also a need to make some backup entrances; can't let them suffocate me either. Now, I kind of regretted not killing that dungeon pixie out of revenge for what they did to my parent.

Yet those thoughts didn’t bother me for long. It seems that I should be more bothered by them, but they were only brief annoyances. I think it’s because my mind doesn't work like the minds of my creatures. They seem so singular; it's hard to imagine living like that, but I can see how someone would have a harder time with emotions if there was only one part of them that would work through those emotions.

It was always beautiful and relaxing to watch a creature get to know its new environment, especially when I gave them a little bit of encouragement so they wouldn't be too shocked about the new environment.

They look so innocent when they first look around; it's always sad to me when the environment is too harsh for them. Yet, this time I saw how the mouse seemed to almost relax in the cold environment and then started to dig underneath the snow to find a whole new world where plants have started to evolve to survive underneath the constant snow.

It's always amazing to follow a creature’s path through the world, not when I look from above, but when I’m beside them, moving like they do. The world is so different to a creature that is small than to a big creature.

Sometimes I feel sorry for bigger creatures because for them the world is so much emptier compared to the smaller creatures. Their world usually is so full of life and things that are so much bigger than them. For them, grass is like trees, and trees themselves are something ancient and incomprehensibly large. Perspective matters so much.

Now I had yet another glorious way of passing time. Moving around creatures was quite exciting, but I couldn’t do it constantly, nor did I want to, but it still became a semi-regular thing, especially for individual creatures.

I usually liked to do it when a mutation had turned into a generational thing, and more than one creature had changed in a similar way. That being said, I still mostly focused on making the dungeon rooms. It was also interesting to change and modify the creature patterns I have to fit the current difficulty the floor required.

I will also need to talk to Ace about difficulty, as I only had the knowledge for about 30 floors and how difficult they should be. After that, I will be needing help. For dungeon rooms, I decided to add even more raid rooms. In fact, I brought the number to 150, as it seems that the Shadow Guild's numbers continue to grow.

Most of the new ones are still small, some only having ten members, if even that, but I can see that in the future they will continue to grow. Especially because, for some reason, the Adventurers Guild hasn’t put their foot down on their activities, which a lot of people were puzzled about.

While that was interesting, it was something that I would need to wait on unless I wanted to make a new skill this breakthrough, something that would allow me to look beyond myself. It was another interesting point and something I’d learned quite well from the ant nations and their armies.

Reconnaissance was important, and while my dungeon was big, I wouldn’t know if just outside my entrance there were 1000 dungeon pixies preparing to invade me. This would require some preparation because I think I would need to do this.

So much to do, but I liked it, I really did. It was also so fun to make new dungeon rooms with the help of the ants. There were now whole sections that they have designed, and I especially liked how they built everything out.

It was so easy to copy their miniature versions of the dungeon rooms. I would be doing that myself if I couldn’t visualize everything out even better than making their miniature versions. It was honestly a lovely time, and I felt that time was starting to pass faster, and before I even realized it, over two years had passed, and I had made and finalized the 80,000 rooms for this floor.