Chapter 19 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The 9th floor turned out to be more interesting in every possible way. I never expected that with so much extra room in the playroom, regional specialties for evolution would start to develop. It was on a small scale, but I could see it easily. I couldn’t wait until I had access to even larger floors and where that could lead my creatures.

I was now even more excited about the 10th floor and what it could mean for the ants. I also liked the change of weather, and while it took a while, plants and animals were starting to better evolve to fit their environment.

The biggest change was to some of the flowers and bees, who at first were struggling tremendously. I even had to restart their populations multiple times, but eventually, some of them got lucky evolutions which made them a bit smaller. They, however, looked bigger as there was more fluffy hair on them, which helped them protect against the cold. There was also a mana evolution that made it possible for them to survive and even thrive, and I couldn’t wait until I made an even colder floor so I could transfer some of them there and see if they could survive there.

Wolves were the undisputed boss of this floor. They had formed into packs that started to evolve separately, and while there were some exchanges of individuals, mostly they stuck together by themselves and even fought others who approached their territories.

Some of them were now powerful enough that with enough teamwork, they were able to bring down bears, but currently, only two different packs have been able to do that, and they were the ones who were truly focused on power and deadliness.

Even stealth wolves were doing quite well. But for me, the most interesting evolution had to be the pack that held territory near the collection of smaller lakes and rivers. They often needed to go into the water to continue chasing their prey or escape, and slowly between their form of fingers with flaps of connected skin that helped them swim through the water faster. It made me wonder how much more they would go down that path of evolution if I had fish that I could but into the river and lakes.

That made me a bit unhappy. I was once again reminded that I had nothing that lived under the water. Those stupid delvers should bring in more animals, but besides the dog and something called a ferret, they haven't brought anything else down here. It was a good middle-ground predator as it hunted rats and mice and a few smaller birds that I had access to. I felt it had a lot of potential, and that made me even more disappointed that the delvers didn’t bring me more promising animals.

At least they were entertaining me. I was getting close to being finished with the dungeon rooms for my 9th floor, and I liked the madness that followed when they found out they could find shorter paths through the tunnels and rooms. I liked that they figured out how the opponent count meant that they were closest to the future floor guardian room, but I most liked how some of them were trying to find the quickest paths to get to that point, which was my original goal.

I did decide to make an even shorter path that would only be 128 rooms, but to take that path, you would need to fight two rooms that had bears in them, and they were definitely a tougher fight than the rest of the rooms.

Still, speed was the name of the game as the delvers were calling it. I didn’t reset the floor until the current occupants left. Apparently, the faster you can finish it, which on average took between four and five hours, you could receive some kind of a reward from the organization that delvers were a part of.

I didn’t have a lot of my mind focused on the delvers, especially when they weren't fighting, but I was slowly getting more information about the outside world. However, I decided not to put more resources into that part as it was soon time to start on the next floor, and I had still so much to think about.

One of the things I was most worried about was that my inherited memories indicated was that something was going to happen after the next breakthrough, but there was nothing concrete to indicate what was going to happen, and it was infuriating.

I also kind of missed that my instincts were being so quiet. It being quiet gave me anxiety, or was that part of me finally accepting how I was doing things. But the most immediate concern was the floor guardian.

At first, every delver hated the 8th floor guardian room. It caused quite a few deaths, but slowly the sentiment turned in its favor. But it was still a hard floor guardian and perhaps even a bit harder than I intended it to be, and because of that, it was still not as liked as the older ones. I still kept it the way I made it as I still think it’s an excellent training tool that will keep people alive outside my dungeon and further down it.

That being said, I didn’t want to do something similar, and it also didn't fit with the rest of the floor. From my memories, I also know that creatures can get quite big, especially in the wild, but currently, everything has been pretty standard. I had gone more of the route of adding more than making creatures bigger, so perhaps supersizing one of the mountain lions would be an interesting challenge.

I also had a perfect pattern candidate as one of the mountain lions in the mountain playroom had become quite big over its long life. I remembered a copy of it and continued to make the few last rooms so I could trigger my next breakthrough.

I waited until the absolute limit of mana accumulation and then started. Allocating the proper amounts of mana was something I barely had to think about, and as for the floor guardian, I used an image of a large circular cave where water was constantly dripping. It had bones all over that were chewed, and the smell was quite rank. And there, sleeping, was a giant of a Mountain Lion that was almost 4 meters tall.

I had to make it slower; otherwise, it would have been way too powerful of a floor guardian. But after a bit more messing around, I felt I found a good difficulty for the delvers and locked in my decisions, which activated the final stage of my breakthrough.

Immediately, as soon as the breakthrough finished, I felt something was wrong. My mind was kind of hazy. My instincts were once again screaming at me to make bigger, stronger monsters, but a large portion of my mind was focused on something new, something inside of me, something that it was refining to make it better. I consolidated my mind, ending some of the unnecessary observations I was making, which cleared my mind a bit and allowed me to struggle against my instincts.

This familiar struggle helped me center myself, and so I could start to figure out what was going on. Apparently, I had been in this haze for a little while as the first 10th floor dungeon room was close to being completed. I didn’t like the look of it; it was so boring, like the rooms I had at the start, and somehow it felt depressing.

It also seems that almost all my remembered patterns were messed up. I let out a non-existing sigh. It was going to take quite a while to put everything back the way I liked it. The most frustrating thing was that I hadn’t even claimed the whole 10th floor. I had just claimed enough for a few dungeon rooms. Man, my instincts could be stupid sometimes.