Chapter 159 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

My design team was scrambling. From my estimation, we needed nearly 2000 instances of floor one and a lot more instances up to floor 11. After that, I would like to keep the number of rooms the same as I currently have.

There were so many way stations not occupied by guilds but by parties with five members or less. With the number of new adventurers projected to come, this should be fixed in the next few decades.

Currently, I have yet to finish expanding the 26th floor, which means that I’m going to stick all the new instances of the upper floors into the ceiling of the 25th floor. Even with 250,000 rooms already occupying that ceiling, there would still be plenty of room to add everything.

The biggest problem was trying to make all these new instances different enough that adventurers won't mistake them for other instances, at least observant ones. I knew plenty of adventurers who were so oblivious to their surroundings that they have literally walked into monsters. Most don't live long, but there are a few exceptions.

It didn't take long for me to start working on the first few instances, and after that, my design team was fast enough that I didn’t have to wait for them to finish.

I had noticed a lot of work around the land Ace owned, but I had not paid enough attention to figure out what they have been doing. It appears that they have been busy expanding like I was. I now knew there were so many new locations for adventurer settlements. Ace's nation's population was about to rise sharply with all this new land to live on.

Time went by fast as I focused a lot of my attention on this problem. Since I had claimed all of the mountains and all of the land below Ace's nation, it was easy enough to extend tunnels of my influence to the locations specified in each of the settlements where an entrance to my dungeon was going to be.

It would be tricky to start making entrance rooms for every single entrance, so I decided not to do it for any of them. Let's just have one grand entrance.

Every single new entrance would be a cave entrance that was too dark. When entering, you would have a random chance at what kind of instance you will get. The same would be true when an adventurer advanced to the second floor.

Thanks to the gateways, it was easy to make everything work properly with my mana circulation. While all of these instance locations were on the 25th floor, they were completely isolated from the higher mana density.

This means that everything should function properly, and I was glad that I didn’t have to make physical connections, sparing me a mess of long tunnels that would be quite tedious to manage.

I was ahead of schedule, so I popped up to see what Ace was doing and to inform him that I was done. When I found him, he was dressed really well and was kissing that platinum rank while a lot of people were watching. It took me a moment to understand, but this was what the adventurers were referring to as a wedding.

I had seen a few done during a desperate battle, but I guess this was how they normally were held. Looking back on my memories a bit, I figured out that he was using the time I gave him as a deadline as free time to get married.

Well, I guess I don’t have to tell him everything is done and let him enjoy this important moment of his life. Wait, wasn't there supposed to be something after the wedding, something called a honeymoon?

Currently, they would only have a week. I’m still quite pleased that he brought me so many water-type patterns, and I guess it's appropriate to make a gift for the newlyweds.

I strengthened our connection, which shocked him a bit. "Ace, I have bad news. It will take me two weeks longer to finish the new floors and the dungeon entrances." There was a moment of pause while he processed that, and I could see a small smile come back to his face.

"Completely understandable, take your time," he answered. Just before I ended our connection, I congratulated him. There was a bit of surprise, and I saw the platinum rank look at him curiously.

"Our honeymoon was just extended by 2 weeks," Ace said to his wife, who immediately smiled brightly. I left them be as I focused on the 26th floor to start planning.

It was going to be quite different from my regular floors. But before that, it was time to start expanding it. That took me a decent amount of time, but I was getting faster with every advancement. More importantly, I was getting faster relative to the floor size, which meant that I should be able to start completing floors faster and faster.

When I was finished, the 26th floor was almost 17,500 kilometers in length, nearly 15,000 kilometers in width, and 2100 meters in height as I was keeping up with the 100-meter height increase increments per floor.

With so many new bug patterns, making this floor's playroom the second bug room was obvious. In fact, I will probably make the next floor's playroom a bug playroom as well.

There were simply too many new patterns to put into a singular playroom. So many of them would lose in the climb to the top, but there are simply certain bug patterns that are a lot more efficient in the madness that is my playrooms.

There is also the question of what to do with the ant pattern. Currently, it would be too domineering wherever I put it, and it would be too wild to join the ant nations. I should probably change its base pattern a bit so it would be more in line with the current ants I have.

When I tried to do so, I found that even changing the base pattern, not the improvements, seemed to be difficult. They were, however, a lot easier. After running the calculations, it should take me about eight years if I focus a quarter of my regeneration on it.

That was actually something positive, as I was quite tired of changing mountains into mana crystals. At least mana crystals were more manageable than making gold or platinum mountains. Constantly having to make mana-dense resources to not burst my core from the overflow was annoying.

It didn't take long for Ace to come calling after the extended deadline ended. Everything was set up, and I only needed a moment to activate all the new instances. "It is done," I informed him and immediately went back to work. There was a lot to do on this floor. The biggest difference was how much space the dungeon rooms were going to take up.

Well, more specifically, only one room was going to take up a tremendous amount of space, but it was needed for a few reasons. First, there was a need to separate this floor. One section connected to the 25th floor was going to be set up like the upper floors. The second part of the 26th floor, however, would be a lot different.

From that point onwards, monsters will not simply despawn, leaving their loot. Instead, adventurers would need expertise and knowledge on how to harvest these monsters, and only then will the loot appear.

It's a huge change and something I know most won’t like, but if they don't like it, they can simply stop progressing. There’s plenty of dungeon left for them. The reason I wanted to do this was because of how wasteful Carl and his party had been while they were on the 19th-floor playroom. So much waste material simply because they didn't know how to harvest it. That needed to be fixed.

Speaking of them, they were now a proper party and easily the strongest one in the dungeon. What helped them progress so fast was that they periodically went to the 19th-floor playroom to clear out their safe zone and slowly start to build it up. It was fun to see them work.

The second main reason for this large separation room was to make the adventurers start building airships inside my dungeon so I could actually figure out how they built them. I have some designs from the ant nations, but I also wanted complete designs from the adventurers.

For that, I would be making a really large room with only a few spots that are habitable, the rest being deserts filled with a lot of huge snake monsters. This room, or more specifically the desert part, will be the first to have a designation of two skulls.

No gold adventurer should be able to cross the desert on foot, but the air is safe, so hopefully, they will figure that out. But just in case, I made a few obvious quests as well.