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Chapter 215 Dungeon Core: “The Eternal Training Ground”
🕑 Added 2024-09-17 16:33:17 +0000 UTCWith the floor guardian done, it was time to move on to the skill section of my breakthrough. I slowly increased the Planned Evolution skill until it finally reached S rank. That was my biggest worry, and I even had a few percent left to put into Creature Making. I finished my breakthrough and reconnected with my dungeon. A breakthrough was always wonderful, but right now I had other things on my mind.
Still, I didn’t start to expand the next floor immediately but did my run-through of my dungeon, upgrading everything that needed upgrading as I was now stronger. Although there were only a few dungeon rules that actually required updating, almost everything was already as strong as it needed to be.
The adventurers weren’t up to much, but I was glad to see that I was getting a small uptick in my underwater adventurer population, which was nice. I already had quite a few underwater adventurer species, as many of them didn’t have the protections most others did since they came after the world breakthrough that gave civilized creatures protections from the dungeon.
I still haven’t figured out exactly why dungeons even allowed this, but I’m guessing that we don't have as much control over our breakthrough that advances the world as I would like to think.
Currently, I’m running on the assumption that it’s something I won’t have much control over, but I will have some. I would also have to grant a wish that I’m capable of granting to someone closest to my core. This is my current speculation.
That would explain why they wouldn’t just have the dungeon make them all-powerful, but the fact that they could influence the choice at all is a bit weird if you really think about it. Hopefully, I will get those answers before I reach that far. It took a bit of time, but it was now time to start expanding the 47th floor, and it was going to be a slog.
Purposely, I stopped at the height of 1,000 meters and put all the rest of the volume for my floor expansion into the length and width, while still keeping the oval shape I seem to prefer, as I’ve never used any other. The expansion itself didn’t take too much time, only a few months, but now it was time to start making the surface of this playroom.
Simultaneously, I started to make rock on the ground, and in the sky, I started to make the dungeon room’s skeletons, only focusing on the outer wall. I was split into many parts, all of them doing their own job to speed things along, but things were going slowly as a large portion of my mind was focused on the patterns. Thankfully, it seems that the skill increase from getting planned evolution to S-rank was enough to make things work how I wanted them to work.
This pattern was going to be so complex, and I’m guessing that this pattern would simply die immediately if 99% of it wasn't locked. It needed to be a multistage creature, as every stage needed to be its own creature, but there were already some creatures out in the wild that were kind of like this, for example, frogs. But well, my version was supercharged in every way.
Months quickly turned into years as I worked on both the playroom and the pattern, and it was a race to see which I was going to finish first, as this pattern was so complex. I had multiple times when I had to go back to multiple iterations of the pattern because every new change I tried to do simply broke everything down. Yet I never stopped, and now I wasn’t simply doing this because I needed more mana—I liked the challenge and wanted to see this finished.
The playroom itself was done first, but I did focus on it more and took resources away from the dungeon rooms, as I would have time to finish those. It was now time for the first major change from any other dungeon room. It was the skybox.
The sun that was going to have to shine was going to be really harsh and extremely powerful, so much so that silver-rank adventurers would die in minutes from the burning effect it would have. But I needed so much output, as the ooze needed energy to continue expanding itself at an enormous speed, as it would be consumed almost as fast.
The ooze was another pattern I had made. It was water-like but a lot thicker. It was also incredibly nutritious and could expand itself by eating some biological matter, which it could digest, as it was a strong enough acid to consume a silver-rank adventurer in a few minutes. It didn’t have any consciousness, and I made sure that it could never develop one. That was not its purpose.
The floor itself was huge—its length was over 630,000 kilometers, and the width was close to 535,000 kilometers. It was so much surface area that I was amazed it took me so little time to make it all.
A lot of it was just rocky, barren ground with nothing special but a few different kinds of rock formations. Yet, on average, every few kilometers there was a huge pit that reached to the bottom of the floor. Those were filled with water and plant matter, and then I introduced the ooze.
At first, it was a monster like everything else, but it expanded so fast that soon only the creature version of it was left. It consumed everything in the pit in just a few weeks, and it wasn’t the only one, as I had done the same with countless other pits on this floor. The ooze then slowly started to expand out of the pit, but as there wasn’t any food out there, it couldn't really continue to expand.
It was now time to finish the first pattern—the one meant for this playroom. I focused almost all of me on the task and started to make even quicker progress. It still took nearly another year to finish, and it was time for the first test. I was so nervous, but I made a monster that was pre-adolescent and in its second stage of life.
Immediately, it came to life in the ooze and almost instantly started eating it, as its system was meant to consume this as food, along with basically anything else biological it could get down its throat. Everything stayed stable, so I continued to observe this one as I made more and more of them in other pits.
Its life cycle was quite short, as it only took a month for it to go through another two stages of life. It continued to get bigger until it entered its adult life and continued to grow, now the size of a large dog, still swimming and consuming the ooze.
Near the end of its current life stage, the shell that was keeping it protected from the acid was filled with small creatures of its own kind, only in the first stage, waiting for their chance to start eating the ooze.
The end of this life stage came when the creature was large enough that the shell around it didn’t grow with it any longer. As soon as it cracked, the creature needed to quickly get rid of it and move out of the ooze as fast as it could, or otherwise be consumed.
Everything seemed to go perfectly. As it got older, it continued to move closer to the surface just like I planned. Instincts were powerful motivators, and for these creatures, something they couldn't ignore.
The shell was starting to break down as the ooze was now able to consume it, so the first stage of this pattern was able to get free and start swimming around, going deeper down where they would be better hidden, as there wasn't much light down there. They will continue to eat and grow until they do the same thing as this monster did.
The monster itself got to the surface and was now silver rank. It could survive in the ooze for a few days, as I was not sure it could escape immediately, as there would be so many of them when this thing was fully operational.
Its body was strong enough to survive the harsh sun, but it almost immediately turned around and started consuming the excess ooze coming out of the pit. It used its strong flippers to move around, and it wasn’t the only one to have reached this far.
It took about a week of this before it had its first minor breakthrough, and the true genius of this pattern came to light. It would do this subconsciously, but as the minor breakthrough finished, it now started to grow a new body part it picked for itself from the choices it had. It will have a choice at every minor breakthrough and major one until it reaches platinum rank.
One thing I did was make sure that it wasn’t conscious. In fact, it will be like that until the platinum rank, when it will achieve consciousness. It would get a new body part with each breakthrough, and then it would forever be the pattern it had made for itself through the journey to platinum rank. Currently, it had nothing better to do than eat ooze, as it was the only food source around, for now.
Time passed, and life started to really explode at the depths of the pits. Many of the creatures who had been born were just finishing up their first stage and moving into their second. This time, however, they had more food options than just the ooze. They also started to hunt each other, as I made sure the ooze didn’t taste the best.
Currently, there wasn’t much fighting, as there weren’t too many new creatures, but already some were able to hunt down their own kind. The ooze took its own cut and finally started to get the biomass it needed to continue expanding, ensuring that this pattern would have enough food until it got out of the pit.
Focused on the life cycle of this pattern to make sure nothing went wrong, time passed by faster than I expected. Already, multiple cycles of the creature’s ooze life cycles were finished. The pits were now a fighting ground where only the strong and the lucky survived. When you got out of the ooze, you just had more creatures looking at you hungrily. The fighting was fierce, even if the number of creatures out of the pit was still low.
With every cycle, more and more managed to get out of the ooze, and eventually, there would be endless hordes of these creatures coming out, then starting to fight with each other to stay alive on the surface and grow strong enough to get to platinum rank.
As soon as they do, they will develop proper consciousness, and of course, I would take them out of this floor and into the previous playroom, where they could now enjoy life, barely remembering their struggle to get here as I wasn’t so cruel.
During this time, I finished the dungeon rooms, so it would soon be time for another breakthrough, but I wanted to continue observing, as none of the patterns had reached platinum rank yet—only a few had reached gold rank. But the fact that some had was exactly why I did this. The constant fighting for survival will make platinum ranks incredibly fast. The playroom simply needed more time to ramp up its biomass creation.
Comments
Zarik0
Goo Gu Jar xDD
Gordon
Tftc
Chimera
Tetg just made a gigantic Goo bug jar
Swarmlord bell
These creatures remind me of the primal Zerg from StarCraft where every animal is basically of an evolution race against each other. TFTC
