Xu Han mentally sighed when the party of dwarves disappeared from his dungeon. That was so disappointing. The dungeon core had heard the party mentioned that they were going to enter the Bamboo Forest Room and was looking forward to the attempt. Despite the party’s higher levels, Xu Han had full confidence that the Panda Boss would beat them. It wasn’t to be.

Not for the first time, the dungeon core wondered how long he would need to wait before he is able to capture some prisoners for his experiments. Adventurers on his first floor either died in the fog, or survived long enough to get to the second floor.

The Lake Room was not an option. The kappa-like creatures he created were too weak, and the Boss was unsuitable for taking prisoners. Even when it managed to drag an adventurer into the water, the adventurer would either activate a Recall Stone or just drown.

None of the adventurers were attempting the other two rooms on the floor, so it was hard to see where the prisoners would be coming from. Xu Han mentally sighed again. He would need to change his floors if he wanted to capture prisoners.

It had been a few days since his trade with Challenger, and Xu Han was a little embarrassed that he still had not started his experiments. It was also disappointing as Xu Han had gone through the other dungeon core’s methods with a fine-toothed comb, and found it to be promising. Challenger’s method may have some drawbacks, like being wasteful, but the method did work.

Challenger had proof.

He had created a strange new species with his method, and the story of their creation was fascinating to Xu Han. According to Challenger, his dungeon was near a kingdom with a knightly tradition. Xu Han wasn’t sure what that meant, but the kingdom Challenger was near had a lot of Classed with the [Knight], [Squire], and [Soldier] classes. When he saw this, Challenger decided to base his dungeon around melee combat, and designed and decorated his dungeon around the concept of honourable combat.

Challenger called his dungeon ‘The Challenge Arena’ and filled it with his dungeon creatures. They were designed to be like walking suits of armour. He designed the dungeon to challenge the adventurers individually, and duels were a constant occurrence in The Challenge Arena. There were even special areas where magic was banned, and the test of arms was the only way to get through.

However, Challenger was never satisfied with the walking suits of armour he created and constantly tried to find ways to improve them. The dungeon core improved the composition of their armour, used magic to improve the suits’ combat skills, even made a point to kill any Classed with weaponry classes to absorb their Skills.

After killing a bunch of [Swordsman], [Axeman], [Halberdier] and such, Challenger found some success. His dungeon made a name for itself as a difficult but fair dungeon, and it became a point of pride for adventurers to defeat his suits of armour in one-on-one combat. However, Challenger always believed that more could be done.

Challenger did not want his creatures to be a challenge, he wanted them to be skillful enough to challenge the greatest of masters. Unfortunately, his creatures could never reach that level.

The problem was that his suits of armour were not living things, and it was impossible for the suits to improve on their own. Any improvement must come from Challenger, and the dungeon core was no warrior.

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So, much like Xu Han, Challenger decided to create a new species. He wanted his walking suits of armour to have life, so that the creatures could improve on their own. Challenger even picked out a name for them. He was going to call the new species, Dullahan.

Unfortunately, Challenger was no master in the art of creating life and met with years of failure. However, time meant little to dungeon cores and after persisting for years, he stumbled on a method.

Challenger had captured some adventurers in his dungeon and found that if he could overload a person’s body with divine power, he could then control the power to change the basic structure of the body. The dungeon core could add scales, give the prisoners extra limbs, and even give them the ability to breath underwater.

It wasn’t easy. The method was crude, messy, and unsubtle, with an incredibly high casualty rate. Most of the time, the prisoners just blew up in a storm of blood and gore. In rare cases, it worked. Encouraged, Challenger went further.

The dungeon core overloaded the body of a prisoner, and then did the same to one of his dungeon creatures. He placed them beside each other and added divine power to merge the two together.

It worked.

The suit of armour and the prisoner merged into one, and Challenger managed to create the first Dullahan. It was, well, not breathing, but it is alive and the Systems of War and Magic recognized it with a Class. Emboldened by his success, Challenger created more of them and even has a small group of them currently living in his dungeon. Most of them had classes like [Squire], and [Knight], with the strongest being a level 33 [Veteran Knight].

However, Challenger warned Xu Han against creating his own species.

Despite his success, the Dullahan were a disappointment to Challenger. The other dungeon core informed Xu Han that most of the Dullahan were mad, a seemingly common side-effect when you changed a person’s species, and those who were not were dark grim creatures. Although they do obey Challenger’s commands, occasionally some of them would do something that Challenger did not order.

Challenger said that the Dullahans liked to leave the rooms they were guarding and wandered along the hallways of The Challenge Arena. They had a habit of walking on their lonesome, challenging any adventurers they happened to meet. Some had even left his dungeon on their own.

In short, the Dullahans were living things with their own thoughts, desires, and erraticity. Considering the expenditure required to create just one Dullahan, Challenger believed that they were too wasteful and stopped creating them decades ago.

However, the Dullahan species did not die off like Challenger expected. Challenger had expected the adventurers to kill off the surviving Dullahans, and while some did die that way, something occurred that shocked Challenger.

The Dullahan found a way to procreate.

Adventurers always die in dungeons, and whenever the Dullahan wish to procreate, they would take the dead bodies of adventurers before Challenger could absorbed them and placed the bodies in one of the safe rooms of the dungeon. Several Dullahans would do this at the same time, usually over a period of weeks, and then the Dullahans would guide several suits of armour into the room.

The suits of armour would lay on top of the dead bodies and the Dullahan would stand guard outside the room. According to Challenger, they would not leave even when Challenger ordered them to. This was also about the only time the Dullahans would come together. After a period of time, the suits of armour would come alive as new Dullahans.

Challenger wasn’t sure how this happens, and it worried the dungeon core. Although, the newly-born Dullahans were not mad, and did not challenge the dungeon core, Challenger was suspicious of them.

For his own safety, Challenger had banned the Dullahan from the lower levels of his dungeon, and never stop any Dullahan who wandered out of his dungeon. Although he had never ordered them to go, Challenger would not consider it a bad thing if all of them would one day decide to leave.

So, Challenger warned Xu Han that not only was creating a new species a heavy expenditure, the species he created would also not be fully obedient. They are a new lifeform, not dungeon monsters, and Challenger advised that it would be better for a new dungeon core like Xu Han to just create new monsters and traps against the adventurers.