Pov Dungeon Core

I was still not completely sure about what would happen in the future with the ants and their colonies outside of my dungeon, but it seems like that was the start of many problems.

More and more platinum ranks were not just arriving but also advanced from gold rank inside the dungeon rooms. It was a good distraction to focus on, to get my mind off the ants and the endless making of rock in the underground world of the 44th playroom.

While filling it up with rock I was also making a lot of empty areas like we had seen was the case in this world. As I was getting more and more patterns, I was filling those places up, but I was also adding my own patterns from already collected ones that could possibly do well in the underground world. Some of the patterns had lots of potential, and thankfully, that helped me figure out what was wrong with the adventurers.

We ran the calculations a while ago and designed the dungeon room floors in such a way that an adventurer should reach platinum rank near the end of the 50th floor. Yet, they weren't even at floor 44 with the dungeon rooms, and already adventurers were reaching platinum rank.

That caused me a bit of panic because if that was the case, the last 20 floors or so were designed wrongly. That would require a lot of rework, and of course, why would the adventurers want this as it would make it harder for them to advance?

Fortunately, that wasn't the case, and the answer came down to potential. Currently, the adventurers advancing were the very best—they were simply better than the average by a big margin, and because of that, it was easier for them to advance. When I started looking at the main mass of adventurers that were progressing, everything seemed to be going exactly as our calculations predicted.

In the future, perhaps I will make some quests and opportunities for the truly gifted to advance floors faster, perhaps even skip a big portion of them, but that would be for the far future—or perhaps not so far, as I was close to reaching platinum rank, which would close out the gold section of the dungeon.

Because of this, and because we had more information available, especially about platinum ranks, we reran the calculations about the platinum floors, and that's where the real trouble began.

Currently, about 5% of my mana regeneration goes into my mind matrix skill to improve myself. With it being S rank, I was able to push a lot more mana into it to continue improving myself, and thanks to that, I have actually been able to measurably see the improvement it is giving. Yet, it is still nothing compared to a breakthrough, but everything helps.

About 30% goes into maintaining my dungeon rules, another 10% into sub-dungeons, which I continue to make on every floor in my playrooms so my creatures can have a way to continue advancing. Although they are not in every playroom, as some of them, like my experimentation playrooms, aren't really good for that kind of feature.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Another nearly 35% goes into maintaining monsters for my dungeon rooms and the beginnings of playrooms. That number fluctuates quite a bit depending on what playroom I’m working on.

The rest is used to make the floors, with the excess going into making expensive resources. Currently, I haven’t had much excess mana to make expensive resources, as my projects eat up the leftovers. But even with the platinum ranks I already have, which number in the tens of thousands, it’s still way too low to actually make a few platinum-ranked dungeon room floor as big as the last gold floors will be.

There are two options: either I make the dungeon rooms of the platinum floors a lot smaller, which would also decrease my defenses, or I find a way to start making a lot more mana. The real question was how did I get here? It has been so long since mana has been a problem. My advisors and I didn’t truly appreciate the quantitative change that came from moving from gold rank to platinum—that was the problem.

I also couldn’t fix it easily. My creatures didn’t simply start as platinum rank, not even dragons started as platinum—basically nothing did. It’s something you have to achieve, and that means only a few make it that far in a short amount of time.

I can now see how dungeons run out of mana regeneration as they continue to get deeper. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how they can even function properly, but that’s because I’m used to having so many monsters on each floor. There’s a reason why other dungeons don’t do what I do.

I continued to work on the problem as it kind of came out of left field while I started to put the finishing touches on the 44th floor. The plan was to make the 45th floor a playroom for creatures and plants that like to grow big. They didn’t really fit well into the current ecosystems and were usually killed off by groups of smaller yet stronger creatures, so I wanted to make a playroom where they wouldn’t have that problem and would be filled with creatures of their own size.

I was going to name that playroom megafauna. After that, it was going to be the rank 4 playroom for creatures who have reached beyond the beginning of platinum rank who were too strong for the current rank 3 playroom.

All of those plans will need to be scrapped now as I need to figure out a way to make tremendous amounts of mana. So I made a new project named The Farm. I only had inklings of what I needed to do, but I knew I would probably need multiple floors—at least two. I had some wiggle room, but there were only six more playrooms until I reached platinum rank. The problem was that floor 50 was already spoken for, which didn’t leave much room to mess about.

I also needed a rank 4 playroom. I guess the 45th floor will have to be the one I make the rank 4 playroom in. This will also give me time to work on the farm project and figure out what I will actually need to do to make this happen.

While this was a big problem, it was only because I wanted to continue making my dungeon rooms as big as they currently were. Fortunately, it wasn’t a critical failure if I didn’t succeed, so I kind of think this new kind of challenge would be fun to tackle.

My thoughts were interrupted when I heard a few masters discussing the influx of platinum ranks and the uptick of gold ranks reaching platinum. Well, I can add that to the pile of problems.

Fortunately, they were simply discussing it and not seeing it as a real problem just yet. But it will become one if our estimates are correct. The current rate of gold-to-platinum rank advancement was only the beginning, and I think Ace will be put under a lot of pressure soon enough.

After discussing this with everyone who was advising me, it was time for a drastic change. While I didn’t want to do so, as it meant changing so much, I stopped putting the finishing touches on the 44th floor and started changing the whole structure of my dungeon.

While outwardly nothing changed, the main tunnel that would connect to the outside world wouldn’t be my current entrance to Eternal City, but instead to the underground colony.

All of this will take some time, but what this will allow me to do is to make it so that I do not have to open a dungeon room whenever I advance to the next floor. This will allow me to secretly grow, but even I couldn’t hide my platinum rank advancement, as I was quite sure that nothing could hide that.

If I can get the farm to work properly, then perhaps it would be a good idea to stretch things out. We simply needed more time before I was put under too much scrutiny. Things were starting to get a bit dicey.