Chapter 113 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

It was really fun to watch how all of my creatures reacted when their floors became larger. The effect was obviously more noticeable on the smaller floors. Of course, ants were the first to start expanding into the new space, but to my surprise, the second were the bees. It seems that they wanted to take back their playroom.

From the looks of it, they wanted to expand fast so they could increase their numbers and essentially use mass warfare, exhausting the number of fruit flies and especially making sure that every fruit fly that had the devastating skill combination, would die out.

If they did things right, I think they will succeed, and while I will no longer make new ones like that in this playroom, there are a few colonies of fruit flies on the lower floors that are truly dangerous.

The Kobolds were close to being united under one ruler. I have always enjoyed watching extraordinary individuals every species seems to create, but even these special individuals have different classifications of how special they are. This one that was currently ruling them was of the highest order I have seen.

Just the perfect blend of ruthless and kind. With plenty of strength to fight any fight, yet with enough bravery and wisdom to truly make it count. He was the first kobold in my dungeon to get a statue made of him without the person in question ordering it to be made.

He has led a few successful excursions onto the surface, and I have no doubt in my mind that when he finally rules over all the kobolds, he will bring them back to the surface as well.

The orcs have a different kind of dynamic. They are currently the only species who can use a gateway to the 19th floor without any restrictions. They have already been able to establish a large outpost on the floor and defend it. The outpost works quite interestingly.

In their home playroom, there are multiple different tribes who are not in the best of terms with each other. They, however, soon realized the dangers of the 19th floor, and if they wanted to expand, they would need to work together. I was expecting them to change their tribal ways, but instead, they doubled down.

First, they combined the tribes into a nation, but each individual tribe was still its own entity, just a part of the new orc nation. Also, new tribes could be made, or old ones split or combined, and all of them would still be a part of the nation.

The leader of the nation was decided by who was the strongest. Every four years, they would have a tournament, and the winner of the tournament would be the next leader of the orc nation for the next four years.

They called this leader War Chief. The main responsibility of this leader was to expand into the 19th floor, and having land there meant constant war. Their homeland has transformed into a paradise for young orcs as they are taken care of, taught, and trained so they could bring glory to their tribes.

The Arden goblins were still in the city-state phase of their development. While some city-states now had multiple villages and towns under them, I would still call them city-states as their rule was quite limited. What was different was the population. With more stable food sources, a lot of new goblins were being born.

There, of course, have been a lot of wars, but currently, they don't have the technology or infrastructure to wage large wars or even nations who could fight large wars. So, the population continues to grow, and the more of them there are, the more interesting stories are happening.

So overall, I am happy about how things are turning out in my playroom. They were already an endless source of entertainment, but like always, I was going to make new floors so I could see new interesting things happen.

The 21st-floor playroom was going to be a huge version of a small ocean island. It will still be plenty of time before the playroom truly starts to look what I wanted it to, but the framework was already there.

The edges of the playroom would be an ocean ring, then would come the beaches and the thousands of rivers that would flow into the ocean. A dungeon rule that I’m going to make to keep the ocean water saltier is going to be a difficult one to pull off, but I have some plans that will hopefully make it doable.

After the beach will be a more normal area with forests and grasslands. Yet, that elevation will quickly rise, leading into the massive mountain ranges that will dominate most of this playroom.

To make them truly mountains, the sea level will only be 20 meters above the bedrock of the floor, so not much underground activity will be happening except inside the mountains.

What I'm also trying to make on this floor is something I read about. Apparently, there are some natural mountains that expel molten rock called volcanoes. I kind of wanted to try to make a few of those as well.

There was also a problem in the dungeon rooms. The 21st floor was going to be the first floor that will have gold-rank monsters. What surprised me was when I started to add them, how much mana upkeep they needed.

At first, I panicked quite a bit because even with my mana generation, it was going to be tight. That was no longer a concern because I found out that gold-rank beings simply had better mana than lower ranks.

What that meant was I just needed to use that mana to make the gold-rank monsters so they would use that rank of mana before they used the lower-rank one. Once again, if I didn’t have my playrooms, I would be screwed. What helped me was the amount of gold-rank creatures I had and, of course, the gold-rank adventurers who are spending so much time inside of me.

If I were to make every monster in the dungeon rooms gold rank, I would still run into problems, but with the current plan, I should be able to easily accomplish what I set out to do and by the time I make it to the next floor, there will be plenty more gold rank creatures in my playrooms to support an even larger amount of gold rank monsters.

There’s also another big problem. Making the dungeon rooms themselves and overall just making stuff in my dungeon takes so much time simply because of how big I am. This needs to be addressed as I can’t be spending too much time on every single floor. I mean, it won’t be too long before I reach my first 100 years of life, and I don’t want to be still under 40 floors when I reach 200.

So, a more efficient way needs to be found, and not just using better-ranked skills, but I will also be doing that. Once again, I took inspiration from ants and their large workshops. At first, like me, every individual ant had a project; they started it, and they completed it. Now, however, in the largest workshops, every ant does one part to make the whole.

At first, I didn’t expect it to be faster, and at the start, it wasn’t, but over the course of a very small time frame, each step was made more efficient, and eventually, it started to outperform the old way of doing things.

So now, I tried to do the same thing. A part of my mind was only making the framework of the dungeon rooms, and like with the ants, constantly doing the same thing allows you to see how you can do things faster.

Now, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel where I could possibly even do an interesting plan I came up with. That also called for the academy's help. I needed a new kind of gateway, and hopefully, they can figure out how to make it.

They were also getting quite close to making the safe arenas where the fighters inside would be teleported to safety if they were about to die. When completed It was going to be an amazing upgrade to my dungeon.