Time continued to march on, and it had been many years since I stopped my work on the 44th floor. Changing my main pathway that I connected to the outside world, which allowed me to continue living, was way more difficult than I ever expected.

There wasn’t a good way to explain this feeling, but it sort of felt like I needed to switch from normal breathing like an adventurer did, and all of a sudden switch to start breathing through the skin.

My core room was connected from the top to the dungeon rooms and from the bottom to the playrooms. Ever since I started to switch things up and expand the gateways and pathways of the playrooms, my exchange of mana with the outside world has been strange.

There were long periods of time where I simply felt that I had to hold my breath, or I couldn’t breathe at all even if I wanted to. I thoroughly disliked this feeling, but the change was necessary.

I felt I was close to finishing the change as I was able to take a deep breath for the first time in a long time just a few hours ago. I continued to work on the pathways, which also included moving around some of my floors. It was a long process, but in another week, I would be able to take an even deeper breath.

What helped was the ants continuing to expand the underground area, connecting it with more and more pockets of life. What I also did was connect further with the underwater gateway, as that was also an entrance that wasn’t connected to the surface.

All of this didn’t mean that I wouldn’t be exchanging mana with the surface—I would still need to do that, which I think was the real problem. If I just closed up all those entrances, all of that work I had been doing would have been natural and a lot easier.

It took another month before I finally felt it click into place, and I could take deep breaths once again without any problem and feel like I wasn’t suffocating. Finally, I could think normally again.

It had been hard to keep track of everything that was happening in my dungeon, but I quickly looked over my memories and what was currently happening. The adventurers had finally reached the end of the 43rd floor, and when they saw that after the floor guardian it was the core floor, they literally cheered. It was still only the very best or platinum ranks who had reached this far; the mass of adventurers were in the midpoint of the 41st floor.

I also felt the lessened presence of diamond ranks on the surface. It seemed like my creatures were doing their work excellently. After I finished going through the literal rooms full of reports I had gotten since I started to change my main entrance, I finally understood what they did.

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They started by leaking pieces of information that would make anyone who learned of it want to ask more questions. At first, the diamond-ranked powers managed to handle those leaks quite well, but we didn't stop, and now they were getting questioned by the masses. We continued to leak information, making them expend more and more resources to find out what was happening and trying to appease those they couldn't shut up.

This was beyond fun, and it should give me enough wiggle room to make sure that I could defend myself against diamond ranks. None of this would be possible, but these four powers have purposely kept the number of diamond ranks quite low to keep themselves in power. The biggest worry I have is the Pixies, but I think I have a fix for that. It meant that I needed to finish up the 44th floor and enter my breakthrough.

It took me about six months to finish the floor, and I’m pretty sure I don’t want to make another underground playroom as it just took so much rock. It was easy enough to trigger the breakthrough.

This time, for the floor guardian, I made a larger room than normal and used one of the underground patterns of a worm that used pressurized water to dig through the rock in front of it. I needed to adjust it quite a lot to make it appropriate for the difficulty of this floor, but when that was done, it was time for the skill section of the advancement.

This time, I didn’t increase any of my existing skills. Instead, I started to make two new ones. The first was a way to stop Pixies from teleporting to my core floor. While making the skill, I thought about stopping these kinds of teleportations so that I would have complete control over the space of my dungeon territory and that nothing could breach it in any way that wasn’t physical. I would have wanted the capability of stopping physical entrance too, but I knew that would be too much and could mess up the skill, making it weaker overall.

It took plenty of time, but finally, I felt the skill click, so I moved on to the second one. While I already had a skill that helped me with the number of creatures and monsters I had, I felt the increase in mana required to keep so many connections. So I focused on that, expanding the idea of the first skill to a ludicrous amount, hoping it would work. Eventually, the skill clicked, and I hoped it would be good enough.

I came out of my breakthrough, reestablished control, and was glad that nothing bad had happened. Immediately, I looked inside myself to view the new skills. The first one was called My World Rank E.

It was a passive one, which I liked, and when I felt it activate, I was pretty sure it did exactly what I wanted it to do. No damn Pixie was going to be able to get to my core floor now. Yet I also felt influences coming from the outside world lessen— influences I didn’t even know were out there.

One of them was from down below, calling me to expand deeper in every sense of the word. I could also feel influences from every diamond rank, but those were even weaker and couldn’t affect me at all.

I also felt influences from further away, from what I suspect were other deep dungeons and what I’m pretty sure were some diamond-ranked creatures, suddenly influencing the world to a scale that a platinum rank could never. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been able to understand those influences if it wasn’t for my Aura Crystal skill.

One was to the north, a strong and big one. The others felt further away; I think those are from the underwater world. That was quite curious, and I did add this information to the academy's growing library.

The second skill I felt synergized with my Creature Quantity skill. It was called Ever-expanding quantity. It was rank D. To my surprise, it was a skill like the ever-expanding mind matrix, where I needed to supply it with mana, which would allow me more and more connections over time. That was good enough.

It was now time to start working on the 45th floor. This playroom was going to be my rank 4 playroom, which meant that I was going to use the best patterns I had available for the environment to make it so that anything in this playroom could continue to advance in a scary time frame.

Otherwise, the playroom itself was going to be quite normal, with a few continents and plenty of water. My main focus will go to figuring out how to make a farm that would produce platinum ranks as fast as possible. It was going to be a difficult problem to tackle.