Chapter 88 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

While expanding the 19th floor, I did decide to keep the height at 800 meters as I didn’t really need tall mountains, and while I was going to have some cave systems. They weren’t going to be that extensive, so I didn’t need too much space on the ground.

Because of that, the area was going to be massive, but I also needed it to have multiple biomes. It was going to be interesting to do this, but I believed I had enough space to make it quite natural. The different biomes were necessary because creatures from all over my playrooms could appear, and I didn’t want them to have a huge disadvantage if they came from a specific biome.

I also felt that my floor expansion with each breakthrough started to get smaller. I was certain that I wasn’t spending more mana on floor guardians. Thinking back on it a little bit, I realized that before I reached my 10th floor, my floor size had also started to shrink in a similar fashion.

That was quite curious, but in all honesty, I felt that my floor size was already enormous. Now, would I want my floors to be bigger? Yes. But I could also improve my skills to achieve that; there was no need to fight my nature and try to force the floors to be even bigger. I didn’t even know if that was possible in any meaningful way.

Time continued to pass, and I was getting closer and closer to finishing the space expansion for this new floor. It was interesting to watch what was happening outside, but it required quite a lot of concentration and would limit my space expansion quite a lot, so I only did that periodically.

Ace was still not back, but I still felt the contract, although it had vibrated a little bit like it was about to break a little while ago. I didn’t know what that meant, but hopefully, it wasn’t too bad.

After doing another check of the surface I saw that the walls were now completed. It was continuously hard to count the number of people above, but I was quite certain that the amount of guards had increased, and everyone looked a bit more tense. Then my attention quickly focused on a certain room that only a few people would be able to get into. There I found someone I didn’t know.

"Great dungeon, The Eternal Training Ground. My master, Harmon extends his apologies. There was a disease that killed quite a few of his most precious creatures. So, it took a while before we were able to bring these creatures. We present them on the basis of the contract you made with Ace and the city itself, and we hope you find great pleasure in them."

The name was familiar. Master Harmon was one of the three people who had the dead dungeon cores where they housed their most precious creatures. Many times I have been tempted to just reach out and try to take the dungeon cores, but I have refrained.

The room had a special design, so I watched as the person opened up a huge backpack and then dumped the creatures down a slide. It would get them safely away from the people bringing them, and like that, I would have time to kill them when I knew that I could focus completely on getting their patterns.

I had grown a lot. Back when I was still young, I needed multiple creatures of the same kind to die inside of me to get their pattern. Nowadays, things were different, but if I still wasn’t focused enough, I might not get the pattern fully.

The person also left a book. I was at first quite confused as to what creature they were, as they seemed kind of like reptiles and birds mixed together. The book helped. Dinosaurs. Apparently, they are ancient creatures that have basically died out and only sometimes reappear thanks to magic or natural mana.

The book had creatures that left me in awe, but unfortunately, I didn’t get such creatures myself. The ones I got were small, with the biggest one being the size of a normal fox. What was interesting was that there were a few who were meant to live in the water, and there was even one who could fly.

They seemed to have really sharp teeth, at least the ones that ate meat. I especially liked how the flying one looked. It used its wing hands when it walked on the ground, and it seemed to have a lot of triangular shapes because of that. They were quite magnificent to watch, and I didn’t even have to do anything to get a few of the weaker patterns, as they were killed by the stronger predators.

They seem to need a warmer climate, but that wasn't the case for all of them; one seemed to have more feathers that allowed him better protection against the cold. As I continued to read the book, I was once again surprised.

While these creatures seemed ancient, the one with more feathers seemed to be 50 million years younger than the rest of the species here. That number made me freeze, and I almost missed one of the monsters' respawn timers because of it.

So much time was hard to comprehend. Apparently, there had been finds of titanic bones that seemed to be the monster versions of these creatures. Creatures so big that only my lower floors could house them, and that's saying something.

What could have ended this creature? For some reason, that question seemed to have an answer deep inside of me, but I was yet too young to understand. What could this mean?

Because of my inner thoughts, I almost missed one of the dinosaur patterns, and I decided to focus more on the now. There were things I needed to do, and I needed to call a few creatures here to take care of the rest of the dinosaurs.

When I had all the patterns, it was time to start calculating their difficulty rating. It was something that every dungeon did. For example, my parent used the system of 1 to 10 per rank to classify how strong a certain pattern was. I did not like that system; it was too simple.

I used a scale of 1 to 100, but not just one overall classification. I had some extra classifications, like if a creature was poisonous, there would also be a scale of one to 100 of how poisonous that creature actually was.

I felt that this was extremely important because otherwise, with the number of patterns I have, it would be hard to do anything quickly if I didn’t have a way to quickly know the overall strength of a creature without having to constantly check the full pattern and evaluate its strength.

The dinosaurs surprised me; they had some features from birds, like hollow bones, but theirs weren’t so pronounced. They also seemed to like heat, like reptiles, although their bodies could generate heat like mammals. In fact, they seemed to have more in common with birds than with reptiles, but the head shape and especially teeth resembled more that of a reptile and were incredibly dangerous.

They also seemed to be even more capable of fighting after getting injured. Their intelligence also seemed all over the place; some of the patterns seemed quite smart, perhaps almost capable of the same kind of communication as wolves, and some were barely at the stage of a regular cow.

I did enjoy the water-based ones because most of the fish I currently have a completely different type of mouth structure, mostly meant to just swallow their food. These dinosaur fish, however, could take a good bite out of their prey. This could change the underwater hierarchy.

Slowly, I started to introduce these creatures to the different floors, and I guess we will see what will happen. This did remind me of the bug guy and how he wanted the bugs that he made inside the dungeon rooms, so for a few upper floors, I did add some new monsters in the form of dinosaurs.

Right after I did that, I decided that was a bad idea. It would be quite obvious to anyone that I had gotten these creatures from Master Harmon, and I think it’s better if no one finds out about our deal just yet.

Quite happily, I went back to expanding the 19th floor. This distraction was quite nice, and I hoped that the other two masters would have a similar idea, and I would get different, more interesting creatures.

Then I was interrupted once again, but this time there was a human child being born inside the dungeon. Of course, everyone was extremely worried and wanted to get out of the dungeon, but I have noticed that people are beginning to get more and more lax about leaving.

Once again, I had an opportunity to try to learn more of the human pattern. I of course made sure that I wasn’t claiming the child as I didn’t want that trouble.

The whole process was over quite fast, and of course, they rushed out of me at their first opportunity while I got a few more percent of the human pattern. There are, of course, other patterns I needed to get, as there were different adventurer races. I believe when they finally understood that I wasn’t going to claim their children, there were going to be a lot more births inside my dungeon.

The couple returned about half a day later with smiles on their faces. "Thank you, dungeon," they said to me while bowing. The gratitude made me feel quite good, although I don’t think they understand what their decision will bring in the future.