Chapter 116 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

Pov Dungeon Core

I was incredibly excited. Everything was done. My 21st-floor playroom and dungeon room were finally at a point where I was happy to move on. But before I triggered my breakthrough, it was time to watch how everyone reacted to me opening up the 21st floor. First, the adventurers.

I didn’t give any notifications; I simply opened up a path that would now allow them to enter the 21st floor. Even without me having to notify anyone, the news spread immediately. It seems that a lot of the adventurers had taken breaks from delving when they had defeated the 20th-floor boss room a few times and weren’t chasing any new rewards into the 20th-floor.

So, while usually madness followed in every hub station after a floor was opened, now even the surface city was consumed by this mad rush to get deeper into my dungeon.

They would not find things to be so simple as on the 20th floor. Everything is now more difficult, and, in all honesty, I do not know if I would have wanted to face the silver-rank monsters that are on the 21st floor or the gold-rank ones because they are equally as dangerous.

I did leave some easier paths, and not every room was so deadly. Overall, however, this floor was a step up. If an adventurer wasn’t able to fight the paired monsters, it would honestly be a better idea not to delve into this floor. What also changed was the intricacy of the traps and overall challenge of the environment.

While there weren’t any magma rivers, waters that could freeze you in an instant, or areas with no air, I felt that sometimes the environment would be the true danger in certain regions. Everyone would need to prepare not just to fight monsters but also to survive the environment. Certain areas also have fewer waystations, making getting deeper into them even harder.

One thing that I learned from the 20th floor was that adventurers didn't like dead ends. I usually added a good reward at the end of a path, but few adventurers were willing to take such a challenge simply because they would need to walk all the way back. For that, there was a simple solution: I added a one-way gateway that they could use to get out when they reached a dead end.

On this floor, there was also a quest that would give an amazing reward personalized for the person who visits every dead end. It's also a secret quest that only shows up when 50% is completed.

Speaking of quests, this is also the first floor that has 1,000 unique quests. In all honesty, when everything was done on the quest front, the count was only about 900, but it wasn't hard to fit in an additional 100 quests so this floor would get the achievement of posting 1,000 unique quests.

Because of this, and the number of adventurers inside my dungeon, and my plans for my creatures, it was also necessary to upgrade the quest crystal.

It was a brilliant design by the Ant researchers. While I still needed to do a lot to keep it functional, it was able to keep track and help me manage my whole quest system. The crystal was the size of my earliest dungeon room, but it was slowly getting to a point where it was too small.

With my last breakthrough, I was also able to expand my core floor once again, but this time some of that expansion went into making the room where I was bigger. Not just bigger, but I made it massive so I could fit underneath me a new quest crystal.

Well, technically it was still the old one; I just made it bigger. Its volume now was larger than the largest apartment buildings in the surface City, and it should be enough for basically forever.

On this floor, the quest Tristan started would truly kick into high gear once again; however, it will not end here. The plan is to make the ending on the 24th floor and finally give them access to one of the playrooms.

They will be able to enter the 19th or perhaps 20th playroom. I have yet to decide that. I want to kind of make the 19th, the 20th, or perhaps even both of them a place where all the different creatures from all my playrooms, and even the adventurers, would have a chance to meet.

Perhaps it's too early, and if people found out, I would be shattered, but I think it will be alright. It's not like I'll be giving access to the playroom to absolutely every adventurer. No, they would need to complete very hard quests and, of course, if I don’t think they could keep secrets, I just won’t give them the quest.

It’s as easy as that. Eventually, I believe the secret will come out, but they might just believe that this playroom is just another secret dungeon room.

During all of this time, I have gotten a lot of patterns. Some form the new creatures I get from Ace and our deal. Some from the bug guy who has not been here for a while. I hope he’s okay. Mostly, I get new patterns from evolutions of my current creatures.

There is one other way I am getting patterns. While I have not yet gotten a full pattern, I am compiling them slowly. The closest one to be completed is the human one.

More and more adventurers are having children inside my dungeon, and while they’re always afraid that I might claim their child, with every birth, that fear lessens. From my calculations, I was only about 100 births away from gaining both the female and male pattern for humans.

The reason it took longer than I originally expected was because of the slight differences in humans. They were varied, and a lot of humans had parts of other races in them as well, and vice versa.

The second pattern that was the closest was the dwarves. Because of this, the 22nd-floor playroom would need to be a more normal area so I could start experimenting with adventurer patterns and so I could see how they would form civilizations. It was really exciting getting the chance to see how more species developed their civilizations.

The 21st playroom, however, was going to become a part of the Ant world. It was not going to be connected with just gateways but also be physically connected.

If you looked at the playroom from far enough away, it would look like a small island, but in fact, it was a large continent-sized representation of a small ocean island. The ocean itself was barely there, but the mountains were impressive enough.

The same way, like with adventurers, the news of a lower floor sped through the Ant world in a rush. At first, they would find a place that didn't have much normal terrain, but I believe eventually they will start digging into the mountain and then find the secrets that lie inside.

Both the moss and the fungus have spread throughout the mountain, creating magnificent and interesting microbiomes. It will be truly wonderful to watch how everything unfolds.

Now, however, it was time. Gathering the necessary mana for a breakthrough was laughingly easy. When I was so full that I didn’t think I could manage even a speck more mana, I triggered the breakthrough.

Making the floor guardian was easy as I had everything prepared. It was going to be a gold-rank buck with light-based skills. It was going to be a decent challenge, and I did make sure I made it bigger so it would be an appropriate challenge for anyone who wanted to get to the next floor.

During the skill part of the breakthrough, I was sincerely hoping that I was going to be able to get my dungeon modification rank A+ skill to the S rank. That would help me so much and would speed up the time between my floors by a lot.

When I started to add the percentages towards the skill upgrade, however, nothing changed, and I was closing in on the maximum mana allowance I had towards skills during every breakthrough.

Near my limits I finally saw the skill ranking up, I wanted to vibrate in excitement, but currently, I was disconnected from my core. Everything, however, was now done, and I finally finished my breakthrough, getting access to the 22nd floor.

Six days had passed since I started my breakthrough, but nothing major seemed to have happened. Time to start making the next floor.