Chapter 119 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

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I announced on discord that I had a small accident well after going to the doctor it turned out that I have nerve inflammation. He said it could keep hurting like it currently is for a week or two. (this sucks) I did get better pain meds but its still not good. So chapter uploads might be a bit more messed up until I get better. 

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Pov Dungeon Core

Time continues to pass. Usually, I did not care much, but I was slowly getting closer to my 100th year of life. The sad thing was that I actually didn’t know my exact awakening date.

Not only that, but I have lost track of time a few times in my life. So, to make things easier, I decided to choose my awakening day to be on Midsummer, exactly 5 years before the date the city-state above me was founded.

That meant it was six years until I turned 100. It should be a meaningless number, as it would just be another year passing, but every creature, from my smallest ants to the adventurers, puts significance on time passing and reaching certain ages.

They even celebrated each year when the war ended, and it has been around 20 years since then. There are no marks left in the city above that anything had happened, yet they still celebrate.

They throw large parties every time they celebrate these kinds of events. From what I understand, they are going to have a huge celebration when 100 years have passed since the founding of the city.

In the ant nations, they also celebrate similar things, and huge events are planned when the date of a significant event comes. This has urged me to do the same.

There’s still time, but it's hard for me to think of stuff I should do on that date. One thing I will do is create a special coin that will only drop on that date, but that would only be one thing. Perhaps some special quest as well, but then there was the question of what I would give my creatures. Perhaps this is too difficult, or perhaps time will give me some ideas.

What I decided to do was continue making the 22nd-floor playroom. The general shaping was done. Now it was time to start adding life to this floor.

It would need to have the basic patterns; otherwise, the weaker adventurer races would not survive for long. While they had amazing potential, they were quite weak otherwise.

I still didn’t have the human pattern, but it was close. More and more adventurers were having children in my dungeon, and now it was common knowledge that it was safe to do so.

What was also amazing was how many new adventurers I was getting. Currently, the adventurers had only reached about halfway into the 21st floor, but now there were more gold-rank adventurers in my dungeon than there were silver ranks on the 20th floor.

It was because of an interesting feature of the gateways I had long ago implemented that was still in effect. If you were a silver-rank adventurer, you didn't have to do the upper floors; you could just gate down and start at the silver floor.

The same went for my gold rank floor. Adventurers could just teleport down there. It was, however, highly encouraged that those adventurers would not try to challenge the 20th-floor boss before proceeding to the 21st-floor.

It was instead recommended for them to work backwards towards the second hub station of the 20th floor so they could get used to the way my dungeon worked and so they could get access to a large market inside the dungeon.

Thanks to this, the 21st floor now had a lot of adventurers, and more were coming every day. Even with the massive influx of new adventurers, this floor proved a challenge, and that was why they had been progressing so slowly.

This was nice as it meant that I did not need to hurry as much to get the dungeon rooms finished. Time began to pass faster as I got more into my work. It didn't take long for a large event to pull me out of my work.

The Safe Arena project was finally done. The ants watched in amazement as they got the rewards that I promised. Only one of the original team members was still alive, and she was incredibly emotional to finally achieve what they had been working on for their entire lives.

There wasn’t a need to test the safe arena out as the ants had done a lot of testing. Immediately, I built a lot of them in the ant world but also made them anywhere there were intelligent creatures on my floors.

Of course, they were not completely safe, but the system would detect if someone was in mortal danger and teleport them safely out to a healing room where healers could immediately start work if needed.

Well, there could still be deaths, but overall, it will still be an incredibly safe place to work out differences between different parties or fight for glory and rewards.

Of course, everyone else in the stands could enjoy the entertainment, but it would also be a learning experience to watch the fighters trying to kill each other. From all of my creatures, the orcs and ants loved the arenas the most.

Then, after a bit more design, I worked out how I wanted to add the arenas for the adventurers. I would only be adding them into the hub stations and I would add them near the gateway stations.

That meant I needed to shift around a lot of the buildings built by the adventurers, but flexing a bit of mana would make that possible.

So, on a completely unassuming night, a part of the hub stations was covered in fog as I quickly worked on adding the arenas. When it was all done, these structures dominated their surroundings as they were a lot taller and larger than anything else built.

There were some quests associated with the arenas. I made sure that these arenas could work as healing stations by having a dedicated place for healers, not just for the fighters who used the arenas but for everyone else as well.

Most of the quests were for healers, so they would actually decide to use the arenas as their base, but there was one significant exception. Every month, there would be a tournament quest where adventurers could fight to get rewards from me.

I also hoped that they would do their own tournaments and stuff like that as well, but time will tell if that would happen. Now, it was time to get back to work, but I still kept a large portion of me observing how everyone reacted to the changes.

Their reactions were amazing. My creatures were more excited about using this arena, and the orcs and ants were using them basically nonstop. It was amazing to see the brutal fights and then see them again as the same fighters could fight each other once again.

It seems that even I underestimated how much this would help improve the fighters themselves. Being able to get life-and-death battle experience really started to transform these fighters from being dangerous to something even beyond that.

On the other hand, the adventurers were a lot more cautious. It looks like it wasn't uncommon for other dungeons to have similar places, but the adventurers still started to use these arenas, mainly for training.

It was at this point that it occurred to me that there weren't actually any explanations that let the adventurers know what the arenas were actually capable of.

It actually took an entire week before some more nasty people decided to test out if killing someone in the arena would result in a penalty quest. It wouldn't, but they didn't know that.

It was a young boy, only 16 years old, who had reached the first hub station of my dungeon. He signed up for a training session that these nasty people were a part of.

At first, their training fight was not special, but then, out of nowhere, the sword that the nasty person held slipped just the right way that it would pierce the neck of the young boy.

Just before the blade pierced, however, the young boy disappeared, appearing in one of the healing rooms, surprising the healers there.

All hell broke loose after that, as people started to test this effect, which ended up not good for most people, as the ones attacking didn't truly strike to kill, which ended up leaving a lot of bad wounds.

Almost immediately Ace came for a talk. It was a short one, as I was quite busy, and I just gave him the necessary information. He tried to get more out of me, but I ignored him.

Only a few hours later, the city-state gave out a statement about the arenas, which basically halted the entire adventurer population as everyone started to discuss this new change.

I had expected it would be interesting to add something like this, but I never expected so much entertainment out of it. This finally gave me an idea I could do for my 100th celebration. What if I did a monster gauntlet challenge?

Teams of up to five members could choose to accept a quest that would pit them against stronger and stronger monsters. Yes, I like that, and it would be nice to keep this event as a celebration event and not make it a regular thing. I liked it when things worked out in my favor.