Chapter 157 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Hiring bug guy has been the best decision for the Academy I’ve made. In just two weeks, he has advanced the purpose of the Academy by about two or three years. We were doing things so slowly before, step by step, as we didn't have any reference points on how to actually do what we wanted to do. But now we had perhaps one of the only experts in this field that existed.

He had been retrieving and observing patterns his entire life, and for quite a while, working on getting me patterns from the wider world. His vast experience was like rain in a desert. He didn’t know much about creatures other than bugs, but a lot of what he knew could be adapted for other creatures. For now, I pulled back a little bit from the Academy as I didn’t need to focus so much on it.

Currently, my 25th-floor construction was halted as I was mostly focusing on the new pattern I got. To make it easier to distinguish its changes, I decided to call these rank one patterns, while the normal ones would be classified as rank 0. To my current knowledge, only two species have this rank one pattern, and that would be the ant pattern the bug guy brought and the pixies.

This also led me to examine the current adventurer patterns I have. To my surprise, I found them also enhanced in a similar fashion, although they did not get any enhancement other than more resistance to dungeons, so getting their patterns would be a lot harder. I never had a reason to examine that part of their pattern before, as there was no reason for me to want to add this part to my other creatures.

Adding the rank one enhancement was something that I wanted to do, but just five minutes ago, every creature who was good with numbers confirmed my own findings. It's still funny how they hate me for how easily I could instinctively do mathematics, but unfortunately, this ability of mine was also correct this time, although I didn’t want it to be.

If I used every ounce of my mana regeneration and the current mana I had stored up, it would take me almost 57 years to add a rank one improvement to any other pattern. So much time and mana just to enhance one pattern was insane.

There was also no way the Pixie species had only one common ancestor for every single one of them to have that rank one upgrade. Whatever happened, happened to their entire species, and that amount of mana was something even I couldn’t imagine.

What was the most frustrating part was that it would be quite trivial to create rank one monsters if I already had the pattern. I could make billions of them, and they wouldn’t cost much more than any other ant species I currently have.

The upgrade that the adventurer species had was a lot cheaper, but it would still take me over a year of my current mana regeneration to add their changes to a new pattern.

The more I examined these changes, the more I was convinced that a dungeon must have done it, but while I could see a way to copy the changes, I had no idea how to make such changes myself or even how much mana it would take to start something like that. There were some hints in my memories that were buried deep that seemed to know the answer, but I could not make them clear.

The thing that puzzled me the most was why there were no protections like the Pixies and adventurers had in the ant pattern. Thinking more about all of this, I decided to add another task to the Academy, and that was to start finding out about the history of this world. I did not like not knowing something, but I had messed about for long enough; it was time to get back to work.

The 25th floor was going to be another milestone, for one, it was a boss floor. Every 5 floors, the difficulty was raised sharper than normally. So this floor would be the last of what I’m calling the beginner gold floors. This means that the 25th-floor dungeon rooms will be mostly the same as the 24th, only that the difficulty is raised by a bit.

The 26th-floor dungeon rooms will be quite special as they will begin at basically the same difficulty as the 25th. The change will happen when they reach that floor's first hub station, which will be like no other. Before all that I need to finish making the 25th floor.

For the dungeon rooms, things wouldn't change much, although there will be a bit more variety of ambient critters. This time the bug guy also brought me a lot of bugs that actually lived inside the water. I was so happy to add them to my new water floor. Not only would these patterns get the chance to join everyone else in climbing to the top, but they also made all the water so much livelier.

Like this, I continued constructing the 25th floor. Of course, I also knew what kind of playrooms I would want for the next few floors as I had so many new bugs to test out. Time passed quickly and eventually I was once again done, with only five years and three months spent making this floor. It was time for another secret breakthrough.

While I was quickly gathering the mana needed, I was struck with a realization. Most dungeons collected what I could in a few days for years before they could advance. That seems so inefficient. I wonder if other dungeons could do something similar to what I have accomplished. Well, eventually I will find out; the secret of mine couldn’t be kept forever even if I wanted to keep it a secret.

I wished that I could breakthrough more often as it just felt so nice. The 25th-floor boss was going to be a strange one. I have noticed that one thing my training lacks is deception. That will be fixed in later floors, but now is a good time to begin, even if it will soon be made known to everyone.

The 25th-floor boss will be a sheep. It won’t be a giant sheep or a burning sheep; it will literally look like a normal sheep that hadn’t been sheared in a while, so almost its entire body was covered in thick wool.

The only problem I could see was that perhaps this particular pattern was a bit too strong for this floor, but with a little bit of tweaking the pattern, I was able to make it weaker. Now this sheep might look like just a regular animal, but this particular pattern is capable of happily living in the 19th playroom.

Like many other mammal patterns with fur, especially the ones who aren’t predators, they have learned to use that fur as a way to attack and defend. This sheep pattern is just the best at that tactic, and this particular one has actually developed magic that is based on wool.

In all honesty, I didn’t even know that was possible, but somehow this particular individual managed this remarkable feat. Anyone who comes to challenge this particular boss will not find it an easy challenge, especially fire mages. I suspect they will hate this boss, but they deserve it for burning so many of my rooms.

In the skill selection, like always, I started by testing out my current higher-rank skills to see if I could advance them. This time, to my surprise, I was able to get the creature quantity from its current A+ rank to S rank. Immediately, I did so while putting the few percent left into outer vision, but it didn't rank up.

As soon as I got out of my breakthrough, I reestablished my control over the dungeon and stretched my enhanced capabilities. My mana regeneration had jumped up by a tremendous amount, as I now didn’t need to spend so much upkeep on so many of my creatures and monsters.

Eventually, the maintenance will once again start to tick up, but with the maximum skill rank being SSS+, I think no matter how many creatures and monsters I will have in the future, I should have no problem maintaining them all.