Chapter 18 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

When I activated my breakthrough, I had a firm image in mind for my floor guardian. I quickly received feedback that my idea would work, but I would need to allocate more of my breakthrough mana towards the floor guardian.

I didn’t mind this as I had quite a lot more than I was originally supposed to, as I was saving up mana and pushing myself to the absolute limit of what I could hold. The floor guardian room formed as it always does, extremely fast, but now I could feel a complicated set of dungeon rules intertwined into it.

When I was done with my 8th floor, my floor guardian wasn't a guardian but more of an event. The room turned out larger than I expected, but it was a simple grass field with a bit of variation in height. It was perfect for hiding rabbits, especially the ones who inhabit this room.

They were a bit bigger and had mean-looking horns that could do some real damage, especially when they jumped with their powerful back legs. Altogether, there were 107 rabbits, but I think that number will vary. Of course, there’s the alpha rabbit that will help the coordination of the rabbit horde even better.

After the rabbit horde is destroyed, a band of 30 high goblins will ambush the delvers who will have no possible way of finding out there's an ambush and where it is because the goblins simply haven't been spawned yet.

I did not know if I was glad about that fact or not. On one hand, it felt a little unfair as no matter how good you are at noticing others, you will never be able to find out where the ambush will start. But on the other hand, it should be excellent training as you will inevitably be ambushed at some point, and knowing what to do when that happens is crucial for survival.

But now that that was done, it was time to start expanding downwards into a new floor. Once again, I felt that I was a lot faster at claiming my land and removing the rock that I found there. It took me a while, but I was pleasantly surprised when I was about 47% larger than my last floor.

On the previous floors, I had seen a downwards trajectory on my floor expansion, and I was a bit puzzled why it took such a big jump upwards. But currently, it didn't matter as I would be able to make my playroom even bigger.

My floor was once again in the real world in between the size of my third and fourth floor. Inside, it was a lot bigger, but this time I really didn’t need the height, and honestly, I was getting a bit annoyed that so much space was wasted. So, I did something that I had never tried before and tried to lower the height.

It was hard going, but it was working, and as I had hoped, it expanded the length and width of the floor. At the start, I was quite excited, but I never expected my floor to get so much bigger. I was simply amazed when I finally finished and hit my target of 55 meters for my height.

The length of this floor was almost 20 kilometers, something I never expected to reach before I hit floor 20, and the width was over 10 kilometers. It now feels like every other floor I have is just a tiny little room.

It took me a bit to understand what had happened, but the ants were learning everything they could, and from them, I finally understood that it was the volume of the floor that stayed the same, but I had so much height that it added so much to the length and width when I squashed the height down.

This was an incredible discovery, and I now kind of regretted my 7th floor as there was so much unused volume that just sat there full of air and nothing else. Still, it was good for something as my Mountain Lion pattern has advanced enough that I could use it for my 9th floor dungeon rooms. I never expected I would be calculating so much, but once again, I figured out how fast I was supposed to finish this floor and how much I could push it without being too weird.

I also planned out the rooms that I was going to make. I kind of wanted to reflect the enormity of the 9th floor, so I decided to spread out the rooms more and connect them with longer tunnels that intersected more often. Also, let’s not make the tunnels only have traps but also monsters, but sneaky ones.

I did have an interesting upgraded pattern for a spider. It wasn't much larger than its original one, but it was more poisonous, and it could pierce its fangs quite deep and through a lot of skin. I will also make some more difficult traps with pressure plates and trip wires that are a lot more difficult to notice than the previous floor.

The rooms themselves will also not have a singular theme as I feel that gets boring, especially if I plan more than 200 rooms and the shortest path being 150 floors from the start to finish. I will make the rooms like small cutouts of different environments that I currently know, like the mountains or the grass fields and the future forest that the 9th floor playroom will become.

With a rough plan in my mind, I started to make the staircase downwards and start making the first room. Perhaps I should also add a few rooms with different opponents, but I will think about that when I reach that far.

It took a few months, but finally, I had the floor as empty as I wanted it to be, and it was time to start crafting the new environment. I was incredibly excited and probably spent a bit more mana than necessary when I started to add the dirt to the floor. I made it quite thick so the trees should have enough space to continue to grow their roots.

When I had the layout with the empty rivers and lakes done, I started to add the water and the plants. I didn’t skimp on the diversity, but I will be making this floor colder than the previous ones, so they will be struggling for quite a while.

The trees themselves I grew to a decent length, which cost a lot of mana, but it was necessary as otherwise, it would take decades to get to a point where I could actually call this a proper forest. It still took quite a while, but the benefit of having real living stuff meant that they also gave me mana regeneration.

It will still take about 14 months until they break even and will start to give me more mana than I’ve spent on them. Doing this was quite tedious as it took a lot longer than just making them fully from my mana. It was at least a little bit entertaining as no tree grew the same way as the previous one. I even made up a ranking system for different trees on how many different branches they made.

Then finally, it was time for the animals. I fit as many species as I could into this floor, but most I kept to low numbers except for two species that were the main focus of this floor: deer and wolves. A secondary focus being on the bear, but it will take quite a while before they become any stronger, as this animal was ridiculously powerful.

Even now, I wasn’t certain that it would be appropriate for the 10th floor, but perhaps a few rooms in there so I wouldn’t have to put multiple bears into the same room as that just sounded terrifying, especially because I knew that they would be able to cooperate.

This floor was quite special as about 2/3 of the year there was snow, although it was quite thin as I didn’t want the smaller plant life to die, but it made this floor so much different from the rest and I did enjoy the calmness that it brought.

When I was finished, almost 2 and a half years had passed since I made my breakthrough. My dungeon rooms still weren’t complete, and it will still take over a year before it was done, although I could push myself and probably finish this in a few months, but I wasn’t going to.