Chapter 128 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

Pov Ace

I was totally exhausted. It has been a crazy month—scratch that, a crazy year—no, a crazy decade. Well, perhaps not this long, but ever since the dungeon's birthday, which was now a bit more than five years ago, things have not really slowed down at all.

Fortunately, the celebrations for the city state's 100th are now over. So many parties, so many speeches. Ruling is stupidly exhaustive. At least all of the chairs are comfortable. Really glad I was able to hire that carpenter.

Equally exhausting, however, has been dealing with the dungeon, or more specifically, the ramifications from its celebration. Multiple organizations and even nations demanded a full audit about everything surrounding the dungeon.

There were some universal laws that everyone needed to follow, and one of those things was what kind of creature could be given to dungeons.

Since I was the leader of a nation, I had been able to get permission to give the dungeon various creatures, but even pushing the limit, I would still fall short of what I needed to give it.

So, smuggling and secretly giving creatures to the dungeon has been a side business of mine for a while. Fortunately, I have been really careful, but it was annoying for a few years with all the investigators sniffing around.

Still, I don’t want to give the dungeon too much, but I’m now a lot more comfortable giving it stronger monsters, as I’m pretty sure it was quite responsible and wouldn't start killing or raising the difficulty too high.

It already had a mix of normal difficulty to absolute nightmare, but you could choose whatever difficulty you want, so no one could actually find fault in the current design of the dungeon, although some really did try.

At least all this meddling has helped me finally find out who was messing with me so much. It was the Dungeon Pixie Guild.

That was really unfortunate as I couldn’t do anything too open to them, but it also wasn't unique; they messed with anyone who was in charge of free dungeons. Now, at least since I know, I have been able to block some of their shipments and, in general, make their life harder, and they can't do anything about it.

It brought a smile to my face just thinking about them trying to bring up this unwarranted harassment, and then I could just show that they have been hiring people to assassinate me. It would not go well for them.

Unfortunately, they weren't so stupid. I guess having a few peak experts really made you somewhat above the law, but you also couldn't play both sides. You couldn't have the law on your side and also break it at the same time. At least things weren’t that corrupt. There were other problems.

There were other problems, but I never imagined that I would have this kind of problem. Even with all the celebrations and extra spending we did, we were still accumulating coin, and a lot of it. Now that the celebrations are over, things will just get worse.

It was a weird problem to have, but it was still a problem. It would literally be such a bad idea to just pile up mountains of gold. I was also the problem as I didn’t want to spend on things that wouldn't make sense, and most of the things that would make sense would start bringing in more coin.

Looking towards the wall that had the map of my entire nation, I finally saw how empty it was. Then I remembered some of the reports and future predictions of how expensive this city would get.

It was inevitable that everything would start rising in prices, but I have been trying to do everything to keep that rise in check. But like Aylin explained to me, it would be impossible to keep doing this forever.

That would, however, break the delicate chain of upward motion. If new adventurers can't come in because everything is so expensive, then apprentice crafters couldn't get the weak materials from the earlier floors.

Slowly, it could break everything and turn this city into the playground of the rich while everyone else would suffer.

Perhaps I had been going about this a bit wrong. It would still be a good idea to keep everything as cheap as possible, but I did have a large mountain range and a lot of land surrounding it, and the dungeon has shown that it could open new entrances easily enough.

Expanding our forest fruit production would become a lot more feasible, and we could even add a few other industries. We could build cities into the mountain itself, and there were certainly interesting industries we could run from those places. The cost of doing so, building cities and transporting people there, would be enormous. However, that was exactly what I needed.

I could see it now: we would still be the Eternal city-state, but not just one city; it would be dozens all over the mountain range with dozens of entrances into the dungeon. We could purposely make it so most of those places would be perfect for newcomers.

This would also allow us to expand the airship port as well. We would even probably need a large compound or even a small town fully dedicated just to running the airship port operations.

That would all cost so much. But perhaps then, I wouldn’t need to continue to stupidly expand the vaults. So much planning to do. I immediately ripped the map off the wall and started to think about this idea more thoroughly. This would also help hide bringing creatures to ETG as well. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.

I do not know how much time passed, but I suddenly heard someone clearing their throat. Looking up, I saw one of my council members looking a bit worriedly at me.

"Good, you're here. Come look at this and tell me what you think." He furrowed his eyebrows but came beside me and looked at the map on the floor. I could see him swallowing in nervousness. "Sir, you cannot be serious."

"What, my drawing isn't that bad. This should solve a lot of our problems, and we do not need to do it all at once; that would be unfeasible. But I think it’s time for us to expand, don’t you think?" I could see his face going white a bit.

"This would be a lot, a lot of effort, and a lot of coin, but help me, God, I can see where you’re coming from, and yes, it might be a good solution for the problems we are currently experiencing or going to experience."

His voice was quite monotone by the end. I think he realized his free time was disappearing with every word he spoke. “There was, however, a reason I came here. We have a letter for you from Lady Aylin."

That was a bit weird; usually, those letters were brought by an ambassador. It seems he could still read my mind because he answered my silent question. "This is not an official letter from The Cerulean Nation but from Lady Aylin herself."

Oh, I wonder what that’s about. Taking the letter, I marveled at how beautiful it was. It was almost a shame to open it up. Her and I have become quite good friends and talked quite often, as we were both people who ran trade nations.

When I read the letter, however, I could feel my heartbeat speed up. How could I have forgotten that her term as leader was coming to an end?

It seems that she didn't want to continue in politics and instead wanted to go and see the world. Now, I do not know why my city would be her first choice of visit, but it seems like in 10 years, I would need to plan a grand welcome for her. Immediately, I dismissed the council member and started to plan out a reply letter.