Chapter 265 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”

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Thank you all for the wonderful year. As a reminder from my last announcement, this will be the last post of this year as the holidays are starting. I will resume posting on the second of January.

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Pov Dungeon Core

I had expected a more extreme response to the disaster that was their first attempt at forcefully getting to my core. Instead, it’s been over two years of proclamations about how evil I am. While, yes, they have brought in a lot more people here to work around the clock in destroying me, and they have doubled—perhaps even quadrupled—their efforts in the labyrinth, all in all, I’m quite disappointed in their efforts.

The world was made aware of that incident, and this time the sentiment was actually against me because quite a lot of the landscape was destroyed, and the debris from the incident that fell far away actually did kill people, which was truly unfortunate. Nevertheless, the outside world meant less and less with every day that went by. There are, however, some more worrying developments.

We have lost a few people when we tried to take out the separated groups in the labyrinth. You don’t get to platinum or diamond rank without having trump cards and a strong will. When you think the only other option is death, you use everything you have. The raids on the surface have been a lot more successful, as there everyone has the opportunity to escape when they feel like they’ve been pushed against the wall.

My main targets are currently the research and development centers for weapons meant to fight against me. One of the most worrying new types of weapons is a modified design of the melter that’s just meant to hurt and destroy my domain.

Fortunately, for right now, those weapons do nothing to me, but that’s because My World skill is at such a high rank. It’s unfortunate that during the last breakthrough, I couldn’t bring it to rank A just yet, as it needed so much mana.

Working on the 53rd floor was more pleasant than the last one, as I had the water crystals to fill up the world with water, so I didn’t have directly do anything. I have yet to get any diamond ranks from the previous farm floor, but that was to be expected, as it will take quite a while to get it properly running.

I’ve also been using a lot of water crystals to refill the first layer of defense I have. This has made trying to attack the next layer a lot harder, as currently water is rushing out of the holes at quite high pressure.

There is a danger that if things go on for too long like this, I would actually start to raise the sea level of the entire world, but it would take centuries at this rate, and by that time, I would have either won or lost.

During all of this, I’ve also opened up a new project. I haven’t yet put many resources into it, but the idea is simple enough. It’s to tackle two problems at once. One is to get a skill that would allow me to copy adventurers' talents. The fact that I have to watch and see some truly wonderful talents disappear when their adventurers finally die is one of the saddest things. So if I can at least copy them, their memory would never truly die.

The second part is so that I could use talents myself. Perhaps at the start, only one, but I hope if I increase the rank, I could have multiple ones working at the same time. There are some truly wonderful talents—some that I already have, and some that I would like to get from a few adventurers.

Now, I don’t want talents that would help my combat power. I don’t even actually know if I could do any proper combat. Magic maybe, but I definitely can’t wield weapons. But there are some mental talents that would truly boost my capabilities.

Just a month ago, I also revealed the satellite project to all of the Acadamy as I did with every project that was entering its last phases. Its location is going to be quite far away; in fact, it’s will be at the edge of the world’s will’s influence.

It was quite difficult to get so far away, but my Dungeon Gateway skill is quite special. It’s hard to judge exact distances, but the satellite colony should be about 350,000 kilometers above this world’s polar north.

They have had a lot of problems making an environment that will be suitable for life up there, but they’re slowly getting the hang of it. Help from the rest of the Academy should help speed this up.

The main purpose of building it so far away was to get away from this world’s influence in every sense of the word, so they could more freely and without interference start to learn more about this place we inhabit.

Already, they have built multitudes of devices that allowed them to view faraway objects like stars, but this worlds atmosphere was in the way and doing anything on the surface has become really dangerous.

They aren't entirely certain yet, but it's only a matter of time before they confirm it when they get out there. They believe the stars are similar to our sun and that there are similar worlds around those stars, like ours has. The implications, if it turned out to be true, were reality-changing.

Already, many were questioning whether other worlds with life existed and what kind of life that would be. The first thought I had was more patterns, which was exciting. But one thing that isn’t in question is the distances between stars, and those are truly vast. Even I have a bit of trouble understanding how large space actually is. Yet, I think if I ranked up my dungeon gateway skill, perhaps I could reach some of those distant worlds—but that's for the future.

We also have a lot more people in the Academy, as even that was revealed to the rest of the dungeon inhabitants. Many adventurers applied, and while a lot were rejected, some brilliant minds were accepted. In fact, the entire ecosystem of the dungeon was changing at a rapid pace, and I just wished I had more time to observe everything.

One of the first great deals to be struck was between one of the more successful merchant guilds and the queendom of the bees. In exchange for more sturdy materials for building hives, the bees supplied the merchant guild with many different sorts of honey. Some even helped recover injuries, like health potions did. The most expensive type of honey was the one that helped extend one's life.

This trade deal overall helped ease the tense environment after the revelations of the true nature of my dungeon. Now, there were many trade deals. Adventurers were back to clearing rooms and collecting loot that would, in turn, be sold and transported to the different worlds of my dungeon. I was truly happy to see it all.

I had never seen such interactions before, and I always enjoyed seeing something new. Of course, the mistrust was there, especially when large ants, some the size of large dogs, walked the streets of hub stations as delegates to forge different trade deals. The technology of the ants was actually better than the outside world’s, so the novelty and usefulness of it meant that it was one of the most lucrative trade opportunities currently available.

It was also wonderful to see how everyone reacted when they truly started to understand how big I actually was. The biggest shock to the adventurers was the world where their own species lived.

The fact that there were so many, and that they were technically completely real and not monsters, was still hard for most adventurous to understand. But travel there was less restricted, so there was much more interaction, which slowly helped ease tensions.

Of course, a lot of adventurers started to make their homes in the eternal world that Ace inherited. They had a rough beginning, but now there were fields of grain surrounding the city and many new villages being built. There were also groups of people who decided to go further away, starting outposts and villages of their own. It will be wonderful to watch as they slowly settle the entire world.

In fact, so many interesting and wonderful things were happening inside my dungeon that I was now really pissed off that I needed to focus on defense. I would have easily liked to take a few years off to properly observe all the interactions going on.

Perhaps I should also start annoying people on the surface. I wouldn’t be able to do anything too serious to them, but keeping them annoyed and raising their stress levels should help me in the long run.