Chapter 266 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

Pov Dungeon Core

The constant activation of dungeon melters was annoying. The only reason they weren’t actually hurting me was because of my size. Now, I don’t know exactly why I was so big; I guess I’ve always been bigger than I meant to be.

From my understanding, most other dungeon cores are made of more special gems. Mine isn't anything special—in fact, it's one of the cheapest gem-like materials out there. It actually makes me feel more special to just be a common variety. Perhaps because of this, it has given me unique opportunities and allowed my core to get so big.

On this day, if all goes right, I will not have to feel another dungeon melter going off. I watched as the annoying pests outside froze one of the breaches they had punched into my outer layer. In preparation for this operation, they attacked me a few more times. I now had seven breaches, all of them constantly gushing water. However, they managed to achieve their goal of lowering the pressure of water coming through all of the breaches.

I watched as they froze the original breach, then manipulated ice to allow them entry. It was fascinating and impressive to watch them do so, allowing them to walk inside the inner layer of the first defensive layer.

They moved sideways, then finally started to set up one of the most impressive dungeon melters. It was incredibly large and not only designed to do its main purpose of melting my dungeon but also to make that process as devastating to my territory as possible.

They have come to the conclusion that their melters aren’t hurting me like they expected. We are constantly raiding their research and development facilities, but they’re under heavy protection. It shouldn’t be too long now until I start to have some more diamond ranks so I can truly turn up the pressure on them.

They installed the remote triggering device and left quickly, hurrying out. With them gone, it was easy enough to change a part of the dungeon stone into a gateway. After the activation, and a moment later, Rafe walked through. He immediately rushed to the dungeon melter, disabled the remote activator, and started to mess with it. He had a crude smile on his face as he installed inside the device an artificed bomb.

They would start to panic as soon as the remote trigger didn’t work, and when they came back to mess with it, well, they wouldn’t have a good time. Before Rafe walked back into the gateway, another person came through. A mage that made sure that no one was going to notice that there had been a gateway there. With the plan completed, all we needed to do was wait.

It took them longer to return than I thought, constantly messing with the activation device and trying to figure out what went wrong. Eventually, a group did come. There were even two diamond ranks with them.

When they tried to open up the remote-triggering device, the bomb went off. It managed to kill everyone except for one diamond rank, and of course, all their work to freeze the entrance was undone as the explosion shattered the ice, allowing the water to once again flow out.

Of course, the idiots outside immediately started to blame each other, and then there were the meetings. I wanted to tune all of that out, but I couldn’t. I needed to continue to observe everything. It took them about two years to finally figure out what was going on with their remote triggers as every time they tried, they failed. This time they had to sacrifice a few diamond ranks to finally punch a hole into the second layer.

The second layer wasn’t as massive as the first, so while the water jet still destroyed diamond ranks, it didn’t do as much damage as they expected. After that, they ran into the same problem as the attack teams in the labyrinth. The dungeon melters barely did anything to the next defensive layer as the wall there was a mix of real stone and dungeon stone. They also didn’t have an easy environment like the labyrinth to work in.

They were also making steady headway in the labyrinth, so eventually, they stopped their attacks on my outer layers and focused almost everything on the labyrinth. It was the correct call on their part because they were making steady progress and would eventually reach my core floor.

It was a good thing that I was being so careful with the dungeon gateways inside the labyrinth, because if they used a dungeon melter in certain areas, they could actually punch through into dungeon rooms, and I really didn’t need to deal with that mess.

The siege had now been going on for years and years. I had just finished advancing and finally got my ‘My World’ skill to S rank. It took me so many breakthroughs to actually get this skill so high. As always, after a breakthrough, I reconnected my dungeon and started expanding the 56th floor. Originally, this should have been the end of my 5-farm-floor plan, but plans change. So this one was also going to be a farm floor.

The reasons were simple. I needed more diamond ranks, and with some of the farms already working but not yest at full capacity, the number of diamond ranks I had was low. In fact, currently, my other creatures and a few adventurers numbered higher than the diamond ranks I had gotten from my farm floors. But I didn’t expect the adventurers and other creatures to be able to keep up with the speed of my farm floors in producing diamond ranks as time went on.

Even with so many new diamond ranks, we were still heavily behind in the power department. We still only had one peak rank, while the forces outside had dozens. It also seems like they have been boosting their platinum ranks to diamond rank quite fast, although their methods were still so much slower than mine.

What was incredible was the amount of mana I was generating. With more and more diamond ranks living inside my dungeon, my generation was really picking up. While it was annoying in some ways, I certainly had a lot of projects that needed a lot of mana. The reason I decided to go with a sixth farm floor was simple: I needed more creatures who were great at flying.

Land was covered, water was abundantly covered, but now it was time to make an air-centric farm floor. I was now quite experienced in making the kind of patterns I wanted for my farm floors. I was also fixing the problems on the other farm floors of creatures gaining sapience too soon.

Yet I could already predict that no matter how much I tried, there would still be a few that would break the mold. Fortunately, I had dungeon rules to notify me, so I could always pull those creatures out, ensuring they wouldn’t have to remember and suffer the horrors of these floors.

It was also finally time to execute the satellite project. I concentrated on my dungeon gateway skill and then started to tunnel through space. It was hard to do this without a specific location and without a specific target, but I didn’t need to be pinpoint accurate. In fact, accuracy didn’t matter at all.

The small, minuscule tunnel that the dungeon gateways outside my territory use snaked underneath the ground until it reached the North Pole. Then it shot up directly away from the world, climbing higher and higher.

It didn’t take long until I reached out of the atmosphere, but I kept pushing. I do not know exactly how long I pushed, but I held on until the even the worlds will began to diminish. I think I was about 300,000 or 400,000 kilometers outside the atmosphere when I finally felt that I couldn’t push any further. I then started to solidify the pathway and grow my dungeon gateway so far away from this world.

The gateway wasn’t going to be a big one, but when it was finished, it triggered the solidification of my connection to it. This made the worlds will truly turn its attention to me. This time, it took quite a bit longer to decide what to do, but eventually, it gave permission so the connection fully solidified, and the gateway could be opened at this remote location.

A bunch of my creatures were ready to step through, but before, they started to form air shields around every member. I could see a bit of what went on, on the other side of the gateway. It was so interesting to see my creatures floating in emptiness.

After they confirmed that everything was as they expected, they went to work building an outpost there, so they didn’t have to burn so much mana keeping themselves alive in the vacuum. I will be quite interested in continuing to observe this outpost and, of course, receiving the information they got when they started to gather the knowledge they were seeking out there.