Chapter 129 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

Pov Dungeon Core

It was basically finished. The floor was a huge one, with a length ever 11,500 kilometres and a bit under 9500 kilometres in width. Once again, I increased the height by another 100 meters, taking it to 1,800.

I was still a long way off from making truly deep oceans or huge mountains while still keeping the floor's length and width. Perhaps I should stop making them larger and focus on height for a while. I guess I will decide that after the next breakthrough.

The landscape was done for a while and there was already a lot of life living in the 23rd playroom. It was interesting to see monsters and creatures interact. Nowadays, I no longer needed to populate the entire ecosystem with monsters, as I had plenty of excess creatures I could pull from my other playrooms.

It was always interesting to see the same species of creature and monster figuring out they're not exactly the same. It was always the creatures being the ones who were creeped out a little bit.

It was good that the adventurer species didn’t seem to have as good of instincts as most other species; otherwise, I think most of their children would not have turned out as normal as they did.

This playroom was filled with lakes and perhaps small oceans, as I did make saltwater bodies as well. There were two creations on this floor I was really proud of.

One was a salt marsh. Now, the plant variety there is quite limited, but if you look at it from far away, it still resembles a normal marsh, except of course, that it’s filled with saltwater.

The second did take some doing and a lot of creative use of my dungeon rule skill. I created a decent-sized river network with a few lakes and a large end lake that were all saltwater.

I have accumulated a lot of books, especially because now adventurers are living inside of me permanently. Nowhere in the books were mentions of saltwater rivers. What tempered my excitement was that this saltwater network took 1/4 of the entire mana upkeep of this playroom.

While briefly, I was able to actually use my entire mana regeneration, that time however has long passed. A lot of the monsters of the 22nd playroom had died and been replaced by their children, who are now increasing my mana regeneration.

I have no idea how I could have missed this, but now it was super obvious adventurer species were really good at generating mana that I could easily use. Looking into this felt like going ever deeper into a rabbit hole.

It seems that just having a powerful creature didn’t mean that I would be getting a lot of mana regeneration from them. They needed to be compatible with my core. The memory from and the knowledge I have about dungeons have helped me understand why dungeons are so heavily focused on whatever creature type they resonate with.

We would simply get more mana from them. It also seemed to go even deeper than that; they would be easier to upkeep, you could have more of them, and so on and so forth. The more I searched, the more I found, and in the end, I just made it a long-term project; otherwise, I think I would just spend too much time focusing on this.

Adventurers are a complex topic; you get more mana from them anyways, for some reason, but if a creature is more intelligent, well, it just means that I resonate more with them. It made me think of the last part of my trait and wondered if I resonated with whatever meaning it has. All of this combined meant that I was getting a lot of mana generation from adventurer species.

When I counted all the adventurers who were roaming my dungeon rooms, I was a bit surprised. There were just under 600,000 of them.

It was a curious number because I now had about double the number of adventurers who weren’t monsters in my 22nd playroom. The number could have been higher if I had helped them, but like with any other creature, I left them to their fate.

It was a dangerous world, but with every passing year, it was getting safer and safer because of the previous generations building up their civilizations. Having cities with walls, having people who knew how to fix a sick person, it all helped so much. They still lived in a dangerous world where the dangers didn’t only come from the environment.

Among all this death and struggle, there was one singular human who stood out to me and to whom I was strangely attached. It was a weird feeling, something I had never felt before, but to my surprise, something my instincts even approved of.

They usually didn't like anything I do nowadays, and most of the time, they were just background feelings, but it was still nice to rely on them every once in a while, especially when I didn’t understand what was going on.

Still, I was really careful, but it didn't cost me much to simply observe this human. Its survival was incredibly lucky, but it also seemed to have its talent manifest quite early.

Adventurers often talk about talents and how the best ones manifest early and even if you are not gold rank, you could already see their influence. Now, I was completely certain none of them had actually seen that or seen any proof of it, but they were in fact correct.

I did not know much about adventure talent, but they seemed to be basically the same as any other creature's talent. Because of this, I have seen this phenomenon before, multiple times. Creatures who just seemed to be really good at something, while barely having lived at all. This human, however, had its talent appear when it was about one year old.

He was one of the earlier humans in the first 10,000 born. He was born to a tribe that was still moving around, using tents made from animal bones and skins as shelter.

They had quite the misfortune while walking on the edge of a mountainous area that was hit by a huge rainstorm that caused a massive mudslide. Some of the tribe members survived, but the young boy and his mother were separated from the rest.

His mother was truly a strong one, surviving for three months in a danger zone, and she was so close to getting out. Unfortunately, she ran into a lone wolf. Its pack had been killed by a rival wolf pack, but she was still strong enough to fatally wound the mother of the child. So, while both the wolf and the mother died, the boy still survived.

It didn't take long for it to start crying out in hunger. He was already underfed, so only 8 hours later, it crawled its way towards the wolf and started to lick at the wounds it had, trying to get some kind of sustenance.

There was no way that should have worked. The blood should have made the kid sick. Instead, about an hour later, it was biting at the flesh and actually tearing out small pieces of it.

Somehow, it had grown proper canines. The more meat it ate, the stronger the young boy seemed to get. This was the point when I fully focused on him for the first time. Everything before that was the information I got from the parts of my mind monitoring everything that happened in my dungeon.

Immediately, I made a copy of the pattern. It took some time, but I figured out what its future talent would be. It was some sort of chameleon absorption talent. It could absorb beneficial physical traits from other creatures and incorporate them into its own physique. Perhaps it could do more. I have learned that creature talents grow and change with them.

Still, its survival should have been impossible. The wolf, who was killed by the mother, was eventually tracked down by the pack who killed its original pack. When they found the baby, at first, they started their normal hunting tactics, but those soon changed their approach when they found that there was no danger here for them.

They approached, sniffing all around, deciding what to do with the last living creature. It was at this point that one of the other wolves decided to take a nibble of the boy’s mother.

The young boy roared its defiance and immediately moved to protect his mother. The wolves were obviously surprised by all of this, but none of them attacked the young boy.

They sniffed him, walked around him, and then finally, one of them even licked him. Then, the most bizarre series of events happened as more and more of the wolves decided to lick the young boy, eventually lifting the boy up by biting into his clothing. They then proceeded to take the young boy with them to their own den while leaving the wolf and the mother untouched.

It has been years since that event. The boy is no longer a boy, but instead a young man, at least if you go by delvers' standards. He has never stopped growing stronger, but I think he will soon leave the den he has grown up in and the wolf pack that took him in.

He’s one of the oldest pups they still have in the original pack, but it also seems like the boy is interested in the outside world and finding out who he actually is.

He is one of the few who is marked with the highest priority. That means that nothing he does escapes my attention. Time, however, still marches on, and I was soon about to finish the 23rd playroom and all the dungeon rooms for the 23rd floor.

There was, however, so much going on, and it just kind of didn't feel right breaking through just at this moment. Also, it seems that my sub-dungeons were going through an interesting phase, and I kinda wanted to observe that.