Chapter 126 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

Pov Dungeon Core

It was finally time. A week from now will be my 100th birthday. I wanted the celebrations to go on for longer than one day, and the things I had planned required a longer timeframe than just a singular day.

Just in case, I rechecked everything once again, especially in the quest system, so nothing would go wrong.

The first and arguably biggest event would happen in the arenas. Any challenger could step up, be it alone or in a group, and accept the gauntlet.

They would be fighting progressively harder monsters and even multiple ones at the same time. The further you get, the more reward points you get that you can turn in for special rewards only available during this week.

Everyone would only get one chance. One chance to prove themselves and see how they would rank amongst the other participants. There are 7 different tiers of difficulty in the gauntlets. This way, people who have yet to reach the gold rank could also participate and win in their difficulty tier. It will be interesting to see how far people could get.

The second event I came up with was a large quest that everyone had access to. In the quest, many monsters were listed with hints about where they currently were. They would have a different drop table for the week, and those rewards would be quite incredible if adventurers could find these monsters and kill them.

This should disperse the population nicely throughout my dungeon and be an interesting challenge to overcome both from the combat point of view and the knowledge needed to know how to find these monsters.

Up to this point, raid rooms have been the dominion of the powerful. They were incredibly coveted, and the shadow guilds, no, they were now just called guilds since they no longer needed to hide themselves.

The guilds always occupied the way stations connected to raid rooms, not letting anyone in they didn’t have to. Because of this, most of the adventurers currently in my dungeon have not been able to experience a raid room.

There were rumors, of course, but most adventurers weren't going to start messing with the guilds just for a chance to participate in one. I decided to change that fact. For the next week, a lot more raid rooms would be opened and accessible from every hub station and way station.

Once again, people could only complete them once, and the rewards would only be reward points, but I think it would be interesting if everyone got the chance to experience these kinds of rooms.

I looked at the adventures excitedly as I activated all the quests needed. Immediately, every adventurer that was still awake looked at their necklace, which made multiple sounds indicating new quests.

The adventurers looked at the quests, and I could see so many astonished faces. Some who were close to the reward stations immediately went and checked on the new rewards section for the celebration of my 100th birthday event.

There were some juicy rewards, even some drops that could easily be classified as legendary drops by the adventurers of my dungeon.

Some items had static point costs, so whenever someone reached those points, they could immediately buy those items. Some of the better items were limited. If an item had a limit of 100, only 100 could be purchased. Any drop that was limited to 10 or under had a little bit of a different system.

These you couldn’t buy immediately but had to wait until near the end of the event when they would be auctioned off. While all the items had an initial point amount, I suspect that many would be willing to spend many times the amount of points listed just getting these kinds of items.

It would be interesting to see how many points people were willing to spend and how many points people were willing to gamble to raise those prices so their competition would need to spend more.

Usually, when someone says that people were drooling over these rewards, they would be exaggerating that for effect, but there were literally a few individuals who were right now drooling while looking at the reward list.

Those were some excellent images for some coins. Speaking of coins, this was the last special thing for this week of celebration, at least for the adventurers.

All of the coins currently dropped would be special ones that would only be dropping during this week. There were some unique quests, and I wondered if any of those coins would be claimed or if they would forever remain out of the hands of the coin collectors.

It only took 5 minutes, just 5 minutes, for the entire adventurer population to be driven into a frenzy. Happy celebrating to you all.

Of course, I couldn’t forget my playrooms. For the intelligent races, there were also many quests and, of course, the same challenge the adventurers were getting in every arena.

The biggest thing, however, that will happen in my playrooms would be the constant spawning of mana crystals of all the colors I currently have access to.

They were concentrated sources of power for any creature, and while the intelligent beings weren’t willing to spend such resources for minor gains, other creatures happily absorbed the mana to grow stronger.

Usually, it wouldn’t do much, but I was spending a lot of mana in making a lot of crystals, so if they were to constantly hunt, they could see some real benefits, and who knows how such concentrated mana would affect their evolutions.

It was wonderful, truly wonderful, to see everything so active. The fights were amazing, especially whenever the arenas would be challenged solo. So many incredible fighters; unfortunately, it was a little bit too early for the humans and dwarves of my playroom to participate.

While there were now many who weren’t monsters, they were still young and needed time to grow before they could start truly getting stronger. Still, they had some new quests to take for the celebrations, and of course, the crystals that constantly spawned.

I would have never guessed that on this floor, I would actually be able to consume more than my current regeneration can handle, even if it's only for a week. It felt incredible having so much mana circulate through me.

A portion of that went into my new skill that ever so slowly continued to improve me. I would need to increase this skill's rank to truly see the effect it could have on me.

Yes. Because of the crystal spawn, I hadn’t expected it but should have. Many ant groups were now venturing into the mountains of their new floor in search of more crystals. This means that they should hopefully discover the secret of these mountains and what lay inside them.

The ants got organized real fast and quickly figured out ways to best use this week to grow stronger and gain more resources for their nations. They were a lot more efficient than the adventurers, but they weren't the most excited about this week, nor were the adventurers; however, some came close.

No, the most excited were the orcs. While most of the ants did team challenges in the arena and the adventurers were split more towards the teams, the orcs only did solo challenges.

Since their leader challenge was in just a couple of months, apparently all of them decided that whoever got more points in the gauntlet would be the next leader.

This came as a complete surprise to me, as I never expected them to change their current tournament style of choosing a winner. I guess they were more flexible than I originally thought.

That also meant that they were keeping their tribal way of governing because they simply liked it more than any other. That was different from any other civilization I had seen. Now, I was even more happy about this entire celebration.

I still didn’t care much that I was turning 100; it was quite meaningless to me and only showed the passing of time. I do, however, enjoy the celebration aspect of it. Perhaps someday I will change my mind and care about my age, but I did not think so.

I was a different kind of being than almost all of the creatures and adventurers inside my dungeon. Currently, the sole exceptions would be the elementals; they also seemed like time would not take their life. Currently, however, they are purely instinct. We shall see what happens in the future.