Chapter 68 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

It was now time to start expanding the new floor. It was going to be a lot of work, but I was going to enjoy it. I could also mess with my dungeon rules and sub-dungeons. But there was no hurry to do that right now.

I also didn’t want to stretch myself too thin, as I still wanted to observe things happening inside my dungeon as much as possible. I had only just started when already there were adventurers challenging the new floor guardian.

Of course, they were a part of the Runners Guild. There were five of them, each one stronger than the other. They were usually the ones who fought my dungeon rooms alone, but they did team up quite regularly against unknown threats.

So when they walked inside the floor guardian room, they were fully alert and prepared for anything, except for what happened. The bear didn’t do anything more to them than make them start discussing plans, but when the roar was stopped by an unknown voice and language, even they looked a bit afraid.

When the orc finally appeared, their faces were priceless. I was glad that I seemingly had an endless amount of memory and the perfect recall of even the slightest details. That gave me an interesting idea, but I continued to look at what was about to happen. If they were lesser adventurers, the surprise stone thrown incredibly fast would have at least injured, if not killed, one of them. It was dodged, and the battle could truly start.

The orc and bear gave quite a good showing, but this challenge was not meant for the caliber of adventurers they were facing. My floor guardian was able to hold on for almost 2 minutes, and I was decently impressed by that. The adventurers, however, were a bit worried.

"What the hell was that?" one of them said, obviously talking about the orc. "It kind of looked like an orc that had worked out for half a century." There was only a small pause before another one spoke up.

"Let's put aside the fact that there are seemingly a new intelligent species inside the dungeon. There are way too many differences to normal orcs to count them as the same species, perhaps a subspecies, but even then I feel it’s a stretch."

They continued the discussion for a little while but didn't come to a clear conclusion on anything except that they needed to report this to the Adventurers' Guild, which none of them actually wanted to do.

While they now weren’t compelled to do that because their oath tattoo had long ago worn away, thanks to them never leaving the dungeon. They still wanted to look like they were properly a part of the Adventurers' Guild, as they didn't want anyone hunting them down.

Only a few hours later, the annoying person was back and didn't take long to start screaming. "Who gave you this new monster, and why is it so different from other orcs?" It was a pretty expected question, but did he really need to scream it so loudly and so that spit would fly everywhere? From what I knew, adventurers sometimes used spit as a form of insult. Should I be insulted? Then again, it’s not exactly the same as I have witnessed before.

"I got the pattern from my parent, and I changed it myself," was the answer I gave that finally shut him up. Now, could I have been more precise and explained that they were actually just goblins? Certainly, but the ant lawyers often said technically true is better than the whole truth.

I could see why because the annoying person left after receiving that answer, and I was quite certain if I would have told the whole truth, there would have been a few hundred more questions that he would have tried to get out of me.

Well, I was just happy to continue to expand my 17th floor. The new floor guardian had quite a low adventurers' kill count, but that was because everyone who had been in my dungeon long enough were as I called them 'rank appropriately strong,' didn't die as often.

A lot of the newer adventurers, the ones that came from who knows where, they died a lot more often. The reason was quite simple: They had fewer skills, their skills were of lower rank, and their overall quality was just lesser.

There were exceptions, of course; not everyone new was like that, but it was obvious that the amount of rooms and monsters in my dungeon meant that they got a lot more chances to rank up their skills.

This was something I enjoyed very much; it meant that the training that I provided to them worked better than in other dungeons. I also guess another reason might be that other dungeons also give a lot more valuable loot.

In that aspect, I know that I’m worse than other dungeons, but I have learned that I actually enjoy the kind of people that come here because of that. It would be incredibly easier, especially with my mana regeneration, to just give out ludicrous loot, attracting a never-ending supply of adventurers, but I don’t need that to fuel my growth.

Still, as things continued to get more dangerous, I should perhaps think about a few other changes to the loot drops, as I can’t just start to give later on epic and legendary monster part drops for everything. It just wouldn't feel right.

Speaking of that, I did have to redirect a little bit of my attention to work on the idea I had when the first battle against the 16th-floor guardian started. Up until this point, besides the special items that some of the floor guardians dropped, the only other piece of loot that could be obtained in my dungeon were coins.

Now, at the start, I used the coin pattern I got from my parent, and apparently, that's an older design. With so many different adventurers from so many different places, I have been able to get patterns for a lot of different coin designs.

Some of them have been square or even more exotic shapes, but most are round. I've been seeing some special ones that have numbers on them, meaning that they are worth, for example, 5 standard copper coins. They’re usually bigger or have something else special to make them worth five times more.

On one side, there is typically some sort of a picture, sometimes it's the head of a king, sometimes an animal or a plant. On the other side, however, is a more consistent symbol of the kingdom, which is on every different type of coin from that kingdom.

Up until this point, I have just stuck to the original patterns that I have, but I kinda want to make my own that represent my own dungeon. While this idea has briefly crossed my mind, I didn’t really have an idea of what kind of designs I wanted, but the stupid faces those adventurers made when they saw the orc finally gave me the design I wanted to use. I was going to have many different coins, also with numbers on them and made from the standard metals everyone else uses.

The consistent symbol I had a little bit more trouble thinking up, but I ended up with three rows of crossing objects. The first row is a bone and a sword. The second row is a claw and a bone, and the third row is a claw and a sword.

On the other side, however, was what I was feeling a bit giddy about. There were going to be a lot of different images, even on the same type of coins, as I didn’t just want, for example, a copper coin to always be the same. The images would be adventurers' faces at moments they certainly wouldn’t want them being shown.

I had quite a few of the annoying person, and they were going to be quite numerous. I wasn’t going to use the deathly scared faces, as those were no fun. My favorites, however, were their ‘oh come on, really?’ faces.

It was just the perfect blend of desperation and frustration. This was going to be so much fun, and I was certainly going to capture many faces when they saw the new coins, especially because I could make them in good enough detail that everyone could recognize those faces.