Chapter 9 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

It seems that this breakthrough came with a lot more knowledge. There was constant influx of knowledge that I didn’t know before but I did now. More of the world made sense to me. There was so much more that I knew now, from different environments to the planet itself. This information was probably out of date, as who knows when my parent dungeon made my seed, but most of it should still be relevant.

The most interesting thing was the gateways. I could now make gateways between the floors so people didn’t have to go through weaker floors if they didn’t want to. I was also now more free to decide where I wanted to make the next floor. I didn’t just have to expand my territory downwards.

Now I could go sideways which makes sense as if I kept expanding I would reach the core of the planet eventually which would be bad. My new floors will also take less space in the physical world as I will be somehow layering more space into a smaller area. That sounded strange but incredibly useful.

I made the gate room after the Boss. It was small but I was constantly expanding it to the other gate I put into the first room. But I also started to expand the first floor to make two extra rooms, one an entrance room and the gate room that would connect to it. But I wasn't really satisfied with it.

People could just go through the gateway without even being able to defeat the boss. One thing that I could do, and I did, was limit the gate only to copper rank delvers. But I wanted something better, I just didn’t know what or how I could make it so.

This was all so interesting and I just spent days going through the new things to learn, like fish, there were so many different fish species out there. I also knew a lot more creatures and monsters but unfortunately, I didn’t have many more patterns to use which was troublesome.  Normally a dungeon didn’t gain a lot of new patterns when delvers have shown up, but I wanted to collect more. Another problem that I needed to overcome.

After claiming the new floors territory, I decided to make new rooms at a normal pace as I didn’t want to alarm anyone with my weirdness. From the empires of ants, I learned that weirdness can get you killed so I decided to be careful.

When I finished my first room on the 6th floor, I decided to use a Mountain Lion, the last creature pattern that I had gotten by myself. I needed to make it bigger and a bit better overall so it will be at an appropriate strength level. For the first time in a long time, I also changed what the monster could drop.

A piece of meat dropping was still at 100%. I left the cut of meat choice the way they were originally dropping. What I did add was a chance to drop copper coins but a low amount as I didn’t want people to just start delving because they wanted to become rich. I wanted them to delve because they wanted to become stronger.

The reason that I even added that coin drop was because I now knew what coins represented. They were about how to buy things that they needed to become stronger so they were important but if there were too much, they would become lazy so I needed to find a good balance.

However, they also needed weapons and defenses. So I also added the appropriate pelt and other materials as drops to the Mountain Lion but also only at a low chance. I also fixed the boss monster drops as currently it was only dropping a few copper.

The challenge there was good enough that I made it drop silver and also dropped the highest value meat cuts that my dungeon produced. The rest of the goblins were good but for the rest of the creatures, I also added their belts and other materials as drops but also only at a low chance.

POV Ace

As I walked through my village, I saw many buildings that were left abandoned. The heyday of this village was long over. While the dungeon couldn’t keep a large adventuring crowd, the lack of copper rank dungeons in the area did mean a large influx of adventurers at the beginning.

This helped me expand the village quite a lot at the start. It didn’t last long as adventurers reached the iron ranks in a year or two. When that happened, they moved on to find dungeons that could help them keep growing and provide them with more wealth.

A lot of the establishments that catered to a large crowd of adventurers were now abandoned. There were only about 30 active adventurers left in this village. At least this seemed to be a stable number. Every year, new teenagers reached the age of sixteen when they could sign up as an adventurer, and this place was still quite good for them.

It provided a good place to level up from the beginning to the iron rank. The cost of living here was also cheap as there were plenty of building materials and food was also quite cheap with the constant supply of meat coming from the dungeon.

Other foods were a bit more difficult to acquire. But over the years, enough of the surrounding forest had been cut down that this wasn't a problem anymore. The biggest problem instead was the dungeon not advancing. Six years without anything happening was a bit too long. Some were saying that the dungeon had already reached its limit and some of the arguments were quite good as the number of rooms was quite small.

Then I heard a commotion near the dungeon entrance. Apparently, a couple of adventurers were quite excited about something. When I approached, I finally started to hear what they were talking about.

“The rooms were not so uniform anymore, there were places where monsters could now ambush us.” The dungeon had changed? The conversation continued but my brain short-circuited. The dungeon changed, I had to wonder if there was a boss now.

"Everyone, is there a boss?" I asked. That silenced everyone and the group that had delved into the dungeon turned to me and shook their heads. I felt like cursing at that but I held myself back. At least it was something, but why would it spend mana changing stuff? It just didn't make any sense. New orders were given and people were warned that there might be changes.

The next few days were busy as merchants wanted to renew their current contracts. If the dungeon did make another floor, it would mean this village would start to grow again and having the current low prices for longer would mean better profits for them. I didn’t mind them extending the contracts. Just in case this dungeon continued to not grow, it would give me a few more years of certainty that the few hundred villagers who lived here would have a good life.

Then it finally happened on the 4th day after the changes. One of the solo adventurers came back up and announced that the 5th floor had a boss and a gateway connecting to the beginning of the dungeon.

I was so happy that I wanted to cry but I pulled myself together and pushed through the crowd. "Adventurer, come follow me. The Guild leader and I need to hear your report." The man nodded his head and we pushed through the small crowd that was gathered.

They didn't like it as they also wanted to know about the new boss, but they couldn't say anything as they didn’t want to lose their delving slots. The Adventuring Guild leader here was an old man whose strength I still didn’t know. I believe that he was sent here as a punishment which I could believe.

Luckily, he wasn't bitter and was quite a good drinking companion the few times that we happened to run into each other. When we reached the Guild house, we just headed upstairs and I knocked on the Guild leader’s door. We used to have a receptionist but there were too few adventurers to justify the cost of a receptionist. At least we still had a Guiding Crystal.

"Guild leader, it's me, Ace. Can we come in?" I only needed to wait a moment when I heard the gruff voice say, "What's with the formalities, come in." When I entered the door, I found the room to be in perfect order like it always is, and a man smoking a pipe while reading a book. He looked towards me and said, "What's got you so excited?" And then he saw that I was dragging someone behind me.

"Is there trouble or has something happened in the dungeon?" I pointed to the person that I was behind me. "He just finished the dungeon and apparently there's a 5th floor boss." This made him put the book onto his table and point us to the chairs across from him. "Chris, was it?" asked the Guild leader and Chris nodded immediately. "Well, come on," the Guild leader asked and Chris began.

"I am still learning the new monster behaviors and the environment but I made it safely to the last room of the 5th floor. To my surprise, the next room wasn’t a dungeon core room but a was a boss room."

"I wasn’t stupid enough to actually fight the boss but I did get a good look. It was a fat goblin, a bit taller than me. It had a bloody leather apron and a large meat cleaver like the butcher does. There were also two other goblins with spears but they had iron spears instead of the stone ones. The room was quite big with the boss sitting on a stool. That's about it. They did feel strong but not overwhelmingly so," finished Chris.

We asked some more clarifying questions but eventually, we let the boy leave. "They really are young now a days?" I heard the Guild master mumble. He was indeed right, the boy was only 17 but already a copper rank and a better fighter than I remember other coppers being where I trained. This dungeon truly was good for actually learning how to fight. "I guess I will go and kill the boss and report back," I said to the Guild master and he nodded.