Chapter 80 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

It took a while, but I was starting to reach a point where I could begin adding plants and creatures to the 18th-floor playroom. Adding the sand was now completed, and the first rain for this floor had ended.

I had carefully ensured that under the sand, the bedrock would have large, gentle valleys, so after that rainfall, water would gather at the lowest point and would make natural oases. Just in case, I also added a water spawner to every one of them, but that was just to keep the water from completely disappearing; it could still get quite low.

The cave systems were quite interesting, as most of them were completely isolated from one another. There were small sources of water in every one of them, as life needs it, unless you're an elemental.

I learned about elementals from an adventurer who was quite fond of telling stories. Apparently, to make an elemental, you needed a magic crystal big enough and surrounded by a certain element like sand or water. With enough magic, a primitive consciousness would consume the crystal and the element around it, becoming a new being.

In the desert and inside the oases, there were now multiple of those crystals, and I hoped that eventually, I would gain some new creatures. Of course, this floor wasn’t the only one where I made such crystals, but I was missing a few types of elemental areas that I would need to add later on. I wasn’t going to start terraforming places as I didn’t even know if this would work.

Over the course of building this floor and even before this, I’ve also discovered a problem with my floors. The playrooms were starting to get out of balance. Some of the creatures were just lucky or good enough to get so strong that only a few other creatures could no longer challenge them.

No single one could hold dominion over the whole floor, but eventually, they might get this far. The problem also is that the current rulers kill off anyone who has potential, as they might rival them.

This has stopped me from gaining new patterns that I could use. I could do some work and make those patterns stronger if I upgraded them but there will be a limit that I could not get past, but they could with enough luck and talent. I have come to learn individuals are sometimes even more important than the species they are born to.

Fruit flies are a perfect example where one individual, lucky enough to make their entire species stronger, but now they’re dominating the floor and the mutations for the other species on that floor have lowered quite a lot.

The problem was obvious; it was like an adventurer who suddenly found themselves on the 5th floor while they were still only supposed to delve to the 17th floor. They were simply too strong for where they currently are.

Now, at least, I knew what I needed to do with the 19th floor and probably a few ones after that. I need to make playrooms where the average rank and strength of creatures was higher. Of course, this was just a temporary matter; eventually, these floors would have the same problem, but the stronger you get, the more time it will take you to get even stronger, so perhaps I will be able to get ahead of this problem.

For now, the solution is to take those creatures out of those floors and to make a place for them in my core floor. It can only be a decently sized area as I didn’t have much free space on the core floor, but it would be a nice place for them to be, and of course, I would need to order them not to attack each other.

This was just a temporary solution until I can finish with my 19th-floor playroom. For some creatures, however, I did make special rooms where they can be all by themselves and wouldn't hurt others, like the fruit flies.

The chaos when I started to move the kings from different playrooms away, was amazing to watch. At first, there was a scramble to become the new king, but everyone soon figured out that there would no longer be any kings, as none of them could hold on to so much land as their predecessors.

If a creature was close to achieving this, they would disappear, but I didn’t want to cause confusion or frighten them, so I did announce to everyone that they were the chosen ones that will go further down.

Apparently, this was an even better motivator for creatures to get stronger than my actual command to get stronger, which I gave a while back that I didn’t even know I had issued it. It didn’t take long for me to see an uptick in genius creatures who had only started to climb the ladder of power. Well, currently, this change didn't do too much, but I believe, over time, it will prove to be invaluable.

For the desert playroom, there were too many creatures that I couldn’t see surviving easily, so I did change quite a lot of patterns a little bit to make it easier for them at the start. This floor, compared to the others, had a lot less vegetation and creatures, so I was done sooner than I actually expected. Now, I could fully concentrate on making the dungeon rooms for the 18th floor.

I was quite thankful that I decided to get ants to help me with the design work. While they weren't meant for this kind of work like I was, they still had a good design sense, and the number of them continued to grow.

Of course, it helped that I didn’t let any of them die, as I changed their patterns whenever they started to get too old. And of course, the huge room they were in was quite thick with mana. They also had their own personal sub-dungeon so they could rank up.

They weren’t eternal slaves; if they wanted to leave, they could, and some had returned back to their home floors, although they often didn't stay for long. It seems that they needed some time off every once in a while.

They weren’t able to worked like me; I’ve never felt that I couldn’t keep working, although I did get bored when I was doing one thing for way too long, like making sand to fill up a stupendously large floor area. There was still a lot of work to do before this floor was done.

The raid rooms on the 17th floor worked like a charm, and I was going to continue with that amount on the 18th floor as well. To my overall surprise, the territory system was actually quite well managed.

I do not know whether it was the runners guild or the adventurer guild, but the main route through the floor always stayed clear and neutral. It seems that the shadow guilds just simply didn’t dare to challenge those two entities.

What’s most exciting for me are the changes in the hub stations. Not only were there a lot of people living in new towns created by them, but there was also a lot of crafters. Mainly, the crafters were the ones who worked with leather and monster parts, but the 18th floor will change that.

Not only will monsters start dropping alchemy supplies, there will also be specific rooms that have mining themes. And those monsters would also have a chance at dropping resources like iron or copper, and every other material of that type I had access to.

Why was I doing this? Well, it was fun to watch such passionate people craft, but I was also able to capture the patterns for the things they made. Turns out that I might be a collector of patterns, as I have so many variants, not just from my creatures and plants, but even for rocks, metals, and even items made by civilizations.

It was just so interesting to collect them all, and it also helped me to learn what kind of ingredients these items needed, and with that, I could adjust what I was dropping.

I knew that other dungeons mostly dropped completed items like swords and even health potions, but I felt it would be better and would make even more people live in my dungeon if all I did was drop the raw ingredients needed to make those items.

It was also so fascinating to see how adventurers figured things out and found the best ways and locations to get excellent drops. Even to me, the skill veins were a surprise. I could get rid of them, but they were so interesting that I decided to continue that pattern on the later floors.