Chapter 112 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground” (Patreon)

Pov Dungeon Core

Everything was finally finished. Updating all 20 floors sure took a lot of time, but now it was finally time to start with the 21st floor.

Well, I did have the space expanded, which gave me a floor size of a bit over 8600 kilometers in length and around 7200 kilometers in width. I also decided to start increasing the height a little bit with every floor, so this one was 1600 meters in height.

It was a lot of real estate to use, but unfortunately, I didn’t really have the biodiversity to truly make a vibrant multi-biome playroom. Also, while I will soon open up the upper playrooms to be even larger, I feel that the ants need a new challenge.

While the nations and champions have a lot to do because of the gateways to different floors, the regular population seems to be missing some excitement.

Ants are a very warlike species and very expansionist. Currently, they don’t, however, have many new places to colonize.

Well, yes, they still have plenty of free space to expand to; they have purposely slowed down their expansion and are slowly building things out. They're doing it for a good reason because they could easily outstrip their capability of feeding themselves if they expand too fast.

If they, however, had a huge new land to explore, all the nations, and more importantly, the regular citizens, would become incredibly busy. This time, however, I didn’t want to make the land too unsafe as I have been making it, but I also didn't want it to be as dangerous as on the desert floor. I’m sure I can find the perfect middle ground between the two.

Now, for the land itself, I want mountainous areas as I feel like the ants have not really been pushing into the mountains. I mean, I understand why not. Why do something that’s a lot more difficult when you have so much open space to use?

That being said, why would they want to go into the mountains? There should be a good reason for it. That is actually a really good question and something that I need to think about.

Of course, I could add lots of metals; that's a given. But it would not make them colonize the whole mountain; they would just be mining for resources.

Perhaps it’s time to flex my gold rank power. I was actually quite excited as I had never actually done this before. But if I wanted to accomplish something amazing, I would need to use different species and combine them together.

For the base, I decided to use the most used fungus that the ants cultivate for food. Then I realized my plan wouldn’t work if it didn’t have a companion plant. So, I guess I would need to make two and make them dependent on each other—a truly symbiotic relationship.

Opening up the fungus pattern, I next opened up the bees' pattern. What I wanted from them was the ability to make a honey-like substance.

It took a little bit and quite a lot of my concentration to make this work, resulting in a completely different-looking fungus that had large concentrations almost like bellies that would produce honey and slowly leaked it out.

Outside of these round concentrations would be the spores the fungus would use to spread. Any insects or any other creature would be attracted to the honey-like substance and also have spores attached to it, which they would then spread out, allowing the fungus to continue to reproduce.

Of course, it will also grow by itself and it could get to an enormous size. The problem would be that it could not fly around like a bee and find flowers that would have nectar. A different approach needed to be taken and the plant needed to be something that could survive underground.

After looking around for a bit, I found the perfect base for this plant. It was glowing moss. It could already use some of its light for photosynthesis, but I needed it to be more efficient at it.

This turned out to be way more difficult than I expected because changing the light output would simply consume too much of the moss's resources. It would simply die out from starvation simply because it shined too brightly.

I still needed to increase the light output, but what made the most difference was changing the wavelength a little bit, making it more white-blueish instead of dark low blueish.

It was now time to combine the moss with some type of flower. This was really difficult because I couldn’t make the flowers too big; otherwise, it would consume too much. It took over a week of testing to find the perfect flower, with the end result being small flowers that grew all over the moss. Now, however, the moss needed some really specific nutrients and in large quantities.

There was an easy solution, well not easy, it would take a lot of testing to figure out, but I could make the fungus constantly grow feelers that search for flowers. When the fungus finds moss, it will start to grow in its root system and spread out its feelers to find the flowers to get the nectar.

If it did find a flower with nectar in it, it would change that feeler into a more permanent part, but if the feeler didn’t find anything, it would let that feeler die off. The nutrients the moss needs could be inside the feeler, and when it dies, the moss can start to consume it.

The moss's root system also needed to be quite moist, and it needed to have some specific nutrients to make the fungus grow even faster. The only thing they would need would be water, and they could basically live anywhere.

When the two patterns were finally done and the tests seemed promising, I noticed that almost two months had passed. Well, that took longer than I expected. At least I was a little bit focused on making the land of their 21st playroom; otherwise, I think I would have wasted too much time on this one project.

Letting them grow out naturally was painstaking, but I didn’t want to inject them with mana as their patterns weren’t that stable yet. I had pushed them a lot. The results were, however, magnificent.

The fungus and moss could slowly grow into even dense rock, and wherever there was a little bit of moisture, they would slowly expand their domains towards it. What resulted was whitish-blue caverns that were quite damp and smelled incredibly complex.

I was quite pleased with all of this, but now it was time to fully focus on the 21st floor. The playroom was slowly coming along, but it was a lot of space to cover. Now, however, I also started with the dungeon rooms. Making 210,000 rooms was going to take a bit, but it will also take a lot of time to create the monsters for those rooms.

While I did have plenty of gold rank patterns, those patterns represented the strongest creatures in my dungeon and would most definitely defeat any fresh gold ranks.

So, it would be once again a lot of experimentation trying to get some more regular animal species into the gold rank to make sure that the jump in difficulty isn't too high. But to alleviate the problem, I will also place a lot of silver-rank creatures into the 21st-floor dungeon rooms.

I, however, needed to be really careful about that because if I put too many, it would mess up the adventurers' ranking up timeline.

It would be really unfortunate if they were to die of old age before they were able to rank up in a reasonable amount of time, and if that happened, they would not be delving deeper into me, which would limit my entertainment, and that's something to avoid if possible.