Chapter 153 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Finally, the terrain of the 24th-floor playroom was done. Overall, it took less time than I was expecting, but I guess with every advancement, even if I don’t enhance my skills, I got better at doing everything. The 24th floor ended up being a bit over 13,000 kilometres in length, a bit over 11,000 in width, and 1,900 in height.

Now it was time to start bringing over plant life. About 50% of the plant life would be coming from the other playrooms, while the rest I would be making fresh from patterns. I found this to be a good middle ground so plants could also continue to keep evolving. They were a lot slower, and only a few have evolved properly compared to the thousands upon thousands of creature evolutions I have seen.

That's not to say that they aren't evolving, or perhaps ‘mutating’ would be a better description. In the end, it didn’t matter what terminology I used, just that plant evolutions were a lot less radical than creature ones, at least with the timeframe I have currently been working with.

When I was close to finishing, it was time to start using dungeon rules to split this playroom into isolated zones. All of this took time, but I also didn’t stop working on the dungeon rooms. The largest distraction during all this time was me working on the Academy. It had evolved way past something that could be called an academy, but I liked the name, so I kept it.

While there will still be an academy part where creatures who volunteer to explore the outside world will be taught how to survive it, it will now also serve as a base of operation for the entire operation. Large areas with many facilities meant for information gathering were already built, and there were already a few hundred volunteers currently living in the large area meant for the academy.

Just a month ago, I basically doubled the space as we will also be adding a place for properly developing new inventions. Using the Ant Academy simply isn't fast enough for my liking.

There I could only give limited amounts of resources, and the ants are constantly working on their own projects as well. It will still take them a while to get my new gateway design properly tested and worked out, but they have at least gotten close to finishing it.

There are, however, a lot of things that I wanted developed for the future, and having dedicated scientists, engineers, and mages with all the resources they could ever want working on what I need just sounded too good not to pursue. None of this will happen overnight. We do have our first steps planned out.

Slowly, I will be bringing more creatures who volunteer into the Academy, who will be taught by their predecessors. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use my monsters for almost any of the tasks. That didn’t mean that I couldn’t use them at all. The unfortunate part was that almost everyone who wasn't me found it creepy to have a clone of themselves walking around the Academy.

I could make perfect copies of my creatures with every memory they had, and have them function almost exactly the same, although there was a slight difference.

Monsters couldn't leave my dungeon as they would quickly die; creatures could, even if it did make them weaker. This meant that when someone went and left the dungeon, they could still keep teaching what they knew thanks to me making clones of them.

These clones will also help with the next phase. Before coming out of the dungeon, we will also be establishing an adventurer guild inside my dungeon. This will help in so many ways like practical experience of interacting with real adventurers and a better way to connect to the outside world with fewer questions asked.

Currently, there are only a few parties active in the dungeon rooms, but they will slowly work on starting to create a proper guild. Like this, time passed while I continued to make creatures for the new playroom and finished up their 240,000 dungeon rooms. It took me from the moment of breaking through to finishing the 24th floor a bit over six years, which was a year ahead of schedule.

Adventurers had mostly recovered by this time with only a few marks of the war still left, although the population was still a bit less than before the war. We are also close to establishing our adventurer guild.

To keep our secret, the monsters made to help with the guild needed to be changed in appearance so no one would ask why there were three of the same people walking around. A nice surprise was that when I changed the appearances of the clones even a little bit, the originals were less creeped out.

This solved one of the larger problems I’ve had. Things were moving forward. The population of the Academy was now nearing a thousand. If I were to accept everyone who wanted to volunteer, that number would easily be 20 times more, and those would only be the ones who actually qualified.

A lot of the creatures, based on animals, wanted to join as well, but even the smarter ones were a bit too controlled by their instincts, so most of them—in fact, 99.9% of them—didn’t qualify. They most likely would not be able to keep a low profile.

Even the bees that were quite civilized were almost entirely rejected, as they needed each other's presence too much. I would have thought that perhaps ants needed that as well, but their civilization had long ago passed that point. Although a lot of them still required a structured community and would not function well without it, there were many who would have no problem being exactly like adventurers.

It was now time for a breakthrough, but this time I would be doing this in secret. It didn’t take me long to gather everything needed. A breakthrough always felt amazing.

For this floor guardian, I chose five squirrels. They were one of the best patterns to develop in the 23rd playroom. They were able to harden and manipulate their tail hairs. Something that I have noticed more and more non-predatory mammals doing.

They used those tail hairs to shoot at their targets, and with a few proper skills, these were truly devastating attacks. There was a singular creature that started a sub-branch for that upgraded pattern of a regular squirrel. It was the matriarch and currently the strongest one, even if its offspring, a few generations later, possessed the same skills, albeit weaker.

It was the largest individual of all squirrel patterns. It could harden and shoot its tail hairs faster than any other. Despite its size of a large dog, its claws and musculature still enabled it to climb trees like its smaller counterparts.

Those weren't its strongest features. It was the skill to manipulate and control wood. That wasn't too powerful in an environment that wasn’t the forest, but I was most definitely going to make the guardian room a forest.

Its offspring mostly could only bend small branches a little, but this individual could easily split a tree in half, jump through it, close it behind itself, and continue to do so multiple times in a row. Still, it would be a bit too weak on its own, but five of them using the same base pattern of this incredible creature would be a true challenge, worthy of the 24th-floor floor guardian.

In the skill section of the breakthrough, I decided to advance my creature advancement and ever-expanding mind matrix both to C+ rank from their original D rank. With that done, I came out of the breakthrough without anyone finding out I actually advanced.

I waited for about a month, but by that time adventurers started to pick up on stronger mana coming from the next floor, although they weren’t completely certain what it was. Some of them were also getting close to the end of the 23rd floor, so I faked my breakthrough so everyone would know that I had advanced.

Time to start working on the 25th floor, but before that, I did maintenance on the rest of the dungeon and upgraded everything that needed upgrading. I didn’t have a plan on what I would do with the 25th-floor playroom until Ace came through with a huge surprise.

“In the following month, I will bring a lot of new animals and plants. They are mainly from the ocean. It took a lot to set this up, but I would ask you to not reveal these animals for quite a while, otherwise we might get caught. It would be annoying and would make getting you new animals tougher.”

For the next month, I received hundreds of new creatures and plants, all of them from the ocean. I was most fascinated with the sharks, but the last shipment was a creature similar to the few other whales they brought me. This one, like the others, was still young, but its potential was incredible. Its species name was a simple one: giant whale, but it also was a perfect description.

The other biggest, the blue whale, was an average of eight times smaller than this one. So now, I have 14 different whale species, 24 sharks, and so many others. I was incredibly excited by all the new creatures, but there were also so many new plants. One of the more interesting types was the different kinds of coral.

Now I had one proper water playroom, but I kind of liked how the freshwater creatures slowly evolved to live in the salty water. The saltwater ecosystem was still quite sparse, but I liked it like that.

Perhaps I would still add a few plants to that playroom, but I wouldn’t be adding more creatures. It seems like it is time to make a new water playroom that will be almost entirely an ocean.