Pov Dungeon Core

I watched how some of my most brilliant creatures interacted with each other after just completing one of the most dangerous missions they have ever been on. It was necessary to send them with Ace to that meeting out there in the Black Ocean, and we did get some good information that has helped me connect more dots. But I’m even more glad that they all came back alive.

What I’m worried about is the recommendation to start influencing things more and not just gathering information. In all honesty, I don’t care much about what happens outside my dungeon. I know I should—it's important, especially for my survival—but it's just not my world out there. Inside my dungeon, it is, and I love every inch of it.

Fortunately, I have creatures to handle the things I am not that good at, and Ace seems to be quite reliable as of late. His management of my entrance has been commendable, as he has been able to keep everything functioning so more and more adventurers could delve into me.

Yet I’m a bit disappointed in myself. I have not put enough focus on the adventurers who already live in my dungeon, especially the younger ones who have never left my dungeon.

Technically, they're not adventurers. They are just humans or dwarves or the other races. Not everyone is an adventurer, which is still weird to think about. For so much of my life, I only knew these species as adventurers who came to delve into my dungeon. But now, there are so many others who are technically not adventurers but still live in my dungeon, especially the young.

While most of my creatures have had dozens of generations, they are the smaller ones who breed and die faster. I also have some creatures that have barely had two generations. The adventurer species who are in my dungeon have had multiple generations, with a lot of their young now having grown old enough to reach the front lines, as the strongest adventurers are calling it. Yet I only now realize how I have failed them.

Sometimes it takes me too long to figure things out, and in this case, it has taken me way too long to realize that creatures and adventurer species learn the most when they are young, and it shapes them so much. Yet what am I doing? I’m trying to train them to survive and become adventurers, but I’m only starting when they take on the challenge of adventuring when they start to delve into my first floors.

There is, of course, a marked difference between the young who have been raised in my dungeon and the ones who come from outside. The survival rate is almost double for the ones who lived in my dungeon, yet it’s still too low. This needs to be fixed, and for that, I commissioned a new kind of quest necklace. It's smaller than the ones adventurers are carrying, and it only works for the young.

I even paused a lot of my design team work on the 41st floor so they could go through all of the quests and make new suggestions so nothing could go wrong with this new launch.

There would also be a new way to get these necklaces, and children who try their best at something might happen to find a necklace next to whatever they were trying to achieve. If they happen to put the necklace on, they will be able to get access to a different kind of quest system.

I cannot make them stronger, and I actually don’t want to. I also understand that not everyone would want to be an adventurer, even if I wanted them to be. So the quests won't only focus solely on that. The main focus would be on finding something the child would be good at or truly passionate about.

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If they are lucky, they will find something that covers both of those things. Then, they would have a chance of becoming a genius at whatever they have chosen for themselves.

That’s not to say that I won’t focus on survival training as well. No matter your choices, knowing how to survive should be the goal of every single being. For example, I have seen some creatures die simply because they didn’t know that drinking salt water would not be good for their bodies. Just one sentence would have saved their lives, but they simply didn't have access to that knowledge.

I would also be doing the same with my creatures in my playroom. The older ones who are smart enough can already get the regular quest necklaces, but now, if they show enough promise at an early age, they might happen to get a young quest necklace as well.

It will still take me a bit of time to refine the system, as I don’t want any mistakes, but that testing and refinement won't take all of my attention, so it's time to get back to work and finish the 41st floor.

With over 14 kilometers of height to work with, I was going to have some fun with this floor. The bottom of the floor was going to be normal: a few continents with an ocean surrounding them, although I was going to make some tall mountains.

Yet, that would be the most normal part. There were two approaches I could take: use mana crystals and make large sections of land that would float, or use a dungeon rule to make the same thing happen.

With crystals, there would be many limitations and worst of all, the land masses could break apart and even fall. I don’t think I want that, not in this playroom. Using a dungeon rule would also make it possible for smaller pieces of land to keep floating—even rocks the size of an average adventurer.

I wouldn’t want smaller pieces floating about and cluttering things too much. I should also add to the dungeon rule that smaller pieces of land would be attracted to each other, while the bigger ones would want to stay further away from each other. Yes, that would be marvelous.

I needed a lot of myself to make this happen. Dungeon rules were weird things, and sometimes they had a mind of their own, so I needed to put a lot of laws into this one to make it as close to the outcome I was looking for.

What I also did was support this dungeon rule with my other skill, Extreme Environment, as I needed extra power to make it so that this dungeon rule could keep afloat five times the amount of land surface area that was currently at the bottom of the floor.

It was going to take a lot of mana to keep this dungeon rule working, but when it clicked and started to work as I wanted, I immediately made a landmass and tied it to the dungeon rule.

Seeing a piece of land that weighed so much just effortlessly floating about was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. This, this makes me so happy. Now it was time to add a few thousand more of these things, some bigger, some smaller.

As soon as I had done a few dozen of the land masses that were currently floating, I told my design team to make a few bigger rooms for the dungeon rooms of this floor, and to do something similar, perhaps using floating traps, but to mimic at least a little bit of what the playroom of this floor was all about.

While continuing to make the floating land masses, I started to think about how to do the water systems for these places. Of course, they would need to have their own springs. Fortunately, they didn't have to have natural sources of water, as I could just make endless springs wherever I wanted. The problem was, what do I do with the water that overflows? If it just randomly overflows, it could cause quite a bit of devastation down below.

It took me a long while to figure all of this out, and I also got a bit of a shock when there was a bit of a panic in the Academy after they figured out that about a year ago, I had turned 150 years old. I personally hadn’t thought that was an important milestone, as I was pretty sure the 200-year mark should be the important one, but apparently not.

All of the members of the Academy, the lawyers, and the design team made me something new to celebrate, and I guess this would be my version of getting presents during a birthday. It was nice, so just in case, I asked about other important dates, only to find out that 175 was also deemed important, but I shut that down. Every 50 years was good enough for me.

Fortunately, all of this gave me some good ideas to fix some things in my earlier playrooms and some new ideas for future playrooms. But more importantly, I finally got an idea of what to do with the water in the 41st playroom. It was time to make another dungeon rule.

After I implemented it, I watched it work and was amazed. Now, water that flowed off the floating landmasses didn’t continue to fall downward. Instead, it gathered underneath into a large floating ball of water.

The size of the water ball was determined by the size of the landmass above, but when it reached a certain size, a river would start to flow out of it, heading downward toward another landmass, and it would connect to its water ball.

Like this, water would connect to each landmasses water ball going downward until it reached the non-floating land and started to flow onto it. The best part was that as the landmasses moved so did the rivers they might even change where they flowed into.

It was going to take some time before the water network filled up properly, and I haven’t even finished making all the floating landmasses, but I think this playroom is going to be one of the most gorgeous ones I have made.