Chapter 74 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

The last month or so was quite exciting, but now, with the final fight over and Carl and Tristan having won, it was finally time to open up the 17th-floor dungeon rooms. Especially because ace was actually able to bring me quite a lot of plants and creatures from the sea.

Some of the fish were quite large, especially something called a giant tuna. They could weigh up to a ton. But there apparently was a problem with bringing in larger creatures; stuff that weighed tons and couldn't even fit through the entrance, even if they were in specialized storage.

I immediately called bullshit on that. They could bring me the animals inside the dungeon core fueled pocket dimensions. The excuse he gave me about that was that it was incredibly expensive, and the dungeon cores were regulated items, and getting one was incredibly difficult.

When I told him that he could bring me young ones that weren’t fully grown. Well, that shut him up permanently. He was quite nervous when he walked out, and I could understand why. The size of the body mattered how strong the skills you could use. Now, there was quite a lot of variation even with the same size of body, but in general, the bigger you were, the more dangerous you were.

Of course, inside my dungeon, there was a perfect example of the opposite fact. On the 6th floor, the floor of the apple trees, there used to be a lot of bees. Now, they only held about 30% of the territory of the floor.

Why the change? Another more powerful species conquered the rest. These battles were a lot more... I can't call them normal, as skills were used, but they looked more like fights between regular bugs.

When the bug guy started to give me different bugs, one of them was an incredibly small and, at the time, completely useless bug named fruit flies. The only thing going for them was their incredible speed of reproduction, but they also died quite fast.

Everything was normal, but on the floor named for apple trees, during autumn, there were a lot of them. A few of them had been able to get skills even with their small and weak bodies, but most of those skills were useless, mostly meant to help them reproduce even faster or eat more.

Of course, there were exceptions. Another more standard ability for these creatures was an explosive self-destruct to fight off predators. It seems self-sacrifice was quite common for species that were small but could breed fast.

One was, however, able to get a second skill, but not only that, the second skill was quite a powerful one. It made it invulnerable for a short time, only seconds at the start, but when it now used its first skill, self-destruction, it didn't blow itself up or make a small explosion that it could survive.

No, it made it invulnerable but also able to, for example, crash through an apple, leaving a perfect hole which it flew through. It could do the same to bees and even go through smaller branches. It only was able to activate it for a few seconds before it ended, but that was good enough.

Now, of course, its offspring didn’t all get these skills, but as time went by, more and more of them were able to get both, and well, they did like the taste of honey.

If they were smarter, I think they could dominate this entire floor and probably the rest of them if they had longer lifespans and were even smarter. I tested their potential out while pushing their patterns.

They were incredibly dangerous, and I actually classified these monsters, whose patterns I pushed as hard as possible, to be the most dangerous creature in my dungeon, especially if there was more than one.

If a swarm of them got close to you, you would be riddled with perfect fruit fly sized holes, even through metal armor and your defensive skills. Fucking terrifying.

On the cave floor, there were some creatures with horrifying toxins or poison, even some with acid that could rival them. But those creatures actually looked terrifying and dangerous, unlike fruit flies that seemed completely harmless until they started flying through your hand.

Over the years, the cave ecosystem has finally started to settle down, with specific areas where different creatures held dominions. To my other surprise, one of the fungal species that had grown quite large seemed to be starting to move, and I think there is a spark of intelligence in them.

It’s not the only place where I’m finding intelligence, and it seems that if a creature is particularly successful and has a long enough lifecycle, they seem to be growing more intelligent. It's something that I found weird because, as I understand, in the outside world evolved creatures don't always get more intelligence, at least not so early in their development.

The conclusion I’m currently leaning towards is that it’s my fault. Not something I’m doing consciously, but from my understanding, I’ve always been a lot more intelligent than a dungeon core should be. Perhaps I’m influencing my creatures somehow.

At least in the Cave floor, I was correct about one thing: bats were one of the dominant species. And some of the skills they had were downright scary. A few of them have actually been able to develop a skill that does not only rupture your eardrums but also melt your eyes.

It just makes me imagine how adventurers would shiver when they were up against something like this. It was hard to gauge on what floor this creature should be put in, as their bodies were still quite weak, but I’m pretty sure some of them should only start appearing near floor 35 or so.

It was actually hard to know what the challenge rating should be so far down because I’m pretty sure that my parent was only 27 floors deep, and the memories my parent had of its parents only indicate that none of them were deeper than 32 floors.

That made sense because dungeon cores only produced offspring when they died, which were scattered and aimlessly followed the flows of mana until they could latch onto a crystalline structure.

It was interesting that not every one of my playrooms had a similar danger rating and that it didn't go down linearly. The caves overall were the most dangerous, and the perfect example was the 17th-floor playroom, which was at the lower end of the danger scale.

It was still quite dangerous, especially because of the weather. The cycles that I did of summer, becoming shorter and shorter, were working wonderfully. I saw many species, especially plants, were able to adapt to the changes.

Bugs did quite badly with the extended winters, and only a few were barely adapting to the changes. One of them was, once again, a beetle. It seems that they were doing well overall, and I wouldn’t have guessed that they would be able to adapt so well.

Of course, mammals with lots of fur were doing the best. Only one type of lizard had been able to survive, but that was because all of them had a skill to keep them warm that they were constantly using. I think if things go further, the skill might just become a passive part of their bodies, and I wondered if something like that could actually happen.

Birds were also having a hard time. They could certainly survive some time in the cold, even months at a time, but if the floor is completely frozen all the time, I think without a skill to help them survive, there won't be any birds in the long run.

Fish were surprisingly not affected by the colder temperatures, and it seems they quickly evolved to adapt to the changes. Perhaps things would be different if they were constantly under the ice, but there were still times when the ice melted, and it will take a few years before it never will.

The adventurers, of course, were incredibly excited at first, they believed I opened a huge section of the 17th floor, but in the coming weeks, they will find out that the entire floor was finished. They already wanted to fight over the few raid rooms that they had found.

What I was glad about was that there was a constant supply of new adventurers fighting in the different versions of the upper floors. This meant that there were new adventurers challenging the lower floors constantly, so even with many of them dying, there were always adventurers to keep pushing forward.

Now, I will wait for a few months and see how things work out, and if there’s anything I need to change with the dungeon rooms, or if anything else needs to be changed inside my dungeon. But if not, I think it’s time to prepare myself for a breakthrough so I could start working on the 18th floor.

For the playroom, I have no ideas, but at least the dungeon rooms will have a nice theme that will extend all the way to the 20th-floor boss room. Just thinking about it all got me excited.