Chapter 20 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

I now had a better understanding of what was supposed to happen after the breakthrough, but I still had no idea what it truly meant. A large portion of my mind was on refining something inside of me. I couldn’t stop this process, but I found that I could add a little bit of mental power to make it more efficient.

However, as soon as I did that, my instincts wanted to take over again. After a bit of time, I found that I could also withdraw some mental power, but it was hard to concentrate, and the current equilibrium seemed the best.

Now, I could focus better on what my instincts wanted. They were quite focused on making the strongest creatures possible, but at least they weren't trying to mess with my upper floors. Still, I wondered why we needed this. I didn’t find it too necessary as my playrooms were making creatures better and stronger by themselves, so I wouldn’t need to push the patterns myself.

It was also interesting that my instincts were trying to combine different patterns, but it was doing it inefficiently. It was an interesting idea that I will definitely experiment with later on, but right now, I couldn’t spare the mental power for that.

It seemed like time making the 10th floor was going to be unpleasant because if I wanted to keep my dungeon running, I couldn’t keep observing at the same level I used to. Now, I couldn’t find out what interesting things my ants were doing or what my other creatures were up to.

I still had enough mental power left over to monitor everything for emergencies, but that was about it. I could have also reduced my dungeon room repopulation time, but I don’t know if that would actually be necessary. I think I could spend some time being bored.

With the breakthrough, I also got some new nuggets of information. The most interesting and relevant one was that from this point onwards, dungeons started to be a lot more different. The standards that I was following, like with the room amount and the breakthrough speed, weren’t there anymore. That should mean that I don't need to spend years faking how slow I am. That made me happy, and I wanted to get this haze over with as I was quite certain that after my next breakthrough, it would disappear.

Like before, I started by claiming as much territory as I could, but it felt a bit weird, like it was a bit more flexible this time. It seems that nothing was going to be regular. It turned out that I was able to extend this floor size from the last 48%, which was an incredible amount, but I also felt that my usual expansion pushing the maximum floor size, which usually only gave me meters per month, now did so a lot faster.

I once again squished the floor down from a bit above 80 meters to only be 50 meters in height. This made my tenth floor, which was in the real world about 42 meters in height, 380 meters in length, and 240 meters in width, to actually be over 37 kilometers in length and just above 20 kilometers in width.

What a truly amazing amount of space! This was going to be an ant floor. I was also going to give it some subfloors, but not going through the entire floor. Some places will have the full height available for this floor. I immediately started to work on removing the stone, but that will take some time, even when I’m pushing myself.

But the question is, what am I going to do with the dungeon rooms? I could use the same kind of design I used last floor as I do like it, but there's a huge problem with that: the time it takes for delvers to clear the floor. This needs to be addressed.

Nothing good came to me, so my mind started to wander a bit, and I once again found myself observing the ants. Their civilization was on the brink of collapse as the current governments couldn't feed the growing population, and how they were handling the situation sparked outrage and talks of revolutions.

Attacking infrastructure was starting to become more common, which hampered the empire's ability to keep control. It was quite fascinating to observe, and I was a bit disappointed I wouldn’t be able to do this constantly like I used to.

The world of ants was more interconnected than it ever was before, and I honestly marveled at the magnificent works of infrastructure that allowed ants to travel quickly from one side of their world to the other. It was there that I found my spark of inspiration.

Regular ants wouldn’t be able to make the journey in one day, and they would need places to sleep and regain energy. For that, there were many waystations. Could I make something similar? A place safe from my creatures and traps where delvers could wait until the next section is reset so they could try it as well, even if there are other delvers actively fighting in the same floor.

I liked that idea a lot, so much so that I actually stopped clearing out the 10th floor and moved back to the 9th, something my instincts thoroughly didn't like. But I completely ignored them. But now, I needed to figure out how this would actually work.

From my memories, it seems that I would need to make three waystations, just in case, so that anyone should be able to finish their section of the floor before my standard reset time for creatures and traps. In these waystation rooms, I will add the gateway to get out of the dungeon, I will add a place for fresh water, and a night and day cycle. It will be a dirt floor to make it a bit nicer, but otherwise, anything else they will need to bring themselves.

I placed them in the intersections where every possible path needed to go through them, but I made the rooms secretly, and when I was finally done with all of them, I chose a time when no one else was on this floor and removed the tunnel walls to revile the new waystation rooms. I also made a red and green indicator with color crystals, some of the delvers were using to indicate if the next section is ready for the next party.

I was incredibly pleased by this and did enjoy the absolute confusion when the first party reached it. It was so funny, but they tried to figure out what was going on, but it might take a while before they actually figure out what's going on. But they did seem quite surprised and happy about the gate out of the dungeon that was in the room. They also tried to take the color crystals, which was rude, but they weren’t able to as breaking dungeon stone, which held them fast, was impossible for them.

I was about halfway done with clearing out the 10th floor, which took me about two weeks, and I did feel that I was getting faster at doing this. But finally, the delvers, or as they called themselves, adventurers, figured out what was going on and started to use this new feature of mine.

While I could see that some were concerned about this, most were absolutely happy, and I now constantly had multiple parties of adventurers just staying in my dungeon, camping as they called it, in tents, which was a bit weird as there weren’t any rain in those rooms. But I did make a note that perhaps on later floors when the waystation rooms became a lot bigger a real weather pattern might be needed.

I also found that this change might have brought a benefit I didn’t think about. Adventurers were now bringing more things with them, things that I didn’t know about, like the tent. But the tents were made from a different fabric I did not know about, and I hope that maybe eventually they would also bring some more creatures into the dungeon. I was hopeful for the future, but I had barely done anything with the tenth floor dungeon rooms, and it was time to focus on them as well.

They were going to go into the roof of the tenth floor, like in the previous floors, as I no longer used the pillars I used in the first few floors to support the dungeon rooms. In fact, the tunnels themselves actually floated and were connected only to the dungeon rooms and a few support pillars that connected them to the roof. I debated quite a lot on how many rooms I wanted, but with the new waystations, I was thinking big, and I had plenty of room to use.

In the end, I ended up coming up with a design where 300 rooms would be the desired path through the floor, but like with the last floor, there will be a shorter path that will be harder with only 230 rooms. But altogether, I think I would have about 600 rooms, and unlike the previous floor, I will even make a few dead ends where you could fight a stronger creature like a mini floor guardian, which would drop a bit more than the regular creatures. I think that this might be an interesting choice, and I would like to see how the adventurers will respond and if they choose to go and try to defeat them.

But now, I need to focus more. I dived into clearing out the rest of the floor and starting to make new dungeon rooms where the main creatures would be upgraded wolf patterns and high goblins who will work together like in one of my upper floors. This should give plenty of different ways I could set up a room and be a proper trial for any adventurer prepared to challenge me.