Pov Dungeon Core

It feels like every day I simply get busier and busier. It’s also not the good kind of busy where you do what you enjoy. Instead, I feel like a huge portion of me is constantly working on projects to keep me alive. It would be nice to just get to do things my way and not have to worry about them condemning me to death.

This overall situation has helped me understand my creatures and their lives a bit better. For a lot of them, this is their state of being all the time. Only in species that have developed civilization do I see things changing. It’s an interesting observation, and I always do enjoy a bit of distraction when things start to get a bit too similar.

I’m constantly adding to the labyrinth project, and even though it's ready to be opened up to everyone, I still need to wait until my secrets are revealed to open it. Of course, that would only happen if I could survive my secrets being revealed.

For that reason, the second layer of my fortress defenses is close to being finished, but I would still need to strengthen it all when I reach platinum rank. Even with all of my mana regeneration, it’s going to be a tall order to do all of that fast.

Because of that, I’m currently cutting back on my construction efforts across everything—cutting down on nonessential expenditure and putting it all into making mana-dense materials, which I could dissolve into mana when needed to make the current dungeon stone even stronger. There were a few places where I didn’t cut funding, and in some cases even increased it—one of those places being the academy.

The only reason we even had a prototype concealment device meant for large gateways located outside my dungeon was because of the ridiculous amounts of resources I was giving them so they could experiment. If I remember correctly, at one point we had three times more of a rare resource than was available in the whole world at that time.

It takes a lot of mana to make such materials, but the results speak for themselves. There are even a few who are trying to make mana generators. They have not had any success yet, and perhaps they never will, but they certainly learn things from their failures.

About two months ago, one of their failures helped another team design a better concealment artifact for high-density mana emissions. That could be crucial in the future, but that discovery was just a coincidence.

The problem is books and paper in general. Every discovery, every report, comes on paper or is recorded in crystals—which is done less often but it still has the same problem. It's a singular point—you would need to physically find this piece of information, which wouldn't be a problem if you knew where to look and what information was on the item.

While we have made finding things as easy as possible, our library is already massive, and trying to find something useful that you don't even know could help you is literally impossible. Only through luck can you find something that could be helpful.

So, while at the start, a library with all the information we have gathered sounded amazing, I've come to notice that more important information is being shared by individuals who are competent and know a lot, with others who are seeking knowledge, usually by simply talking about stuff they are working on or interested in.

This problem needs to be fixed, so I posted another mission outlining the problems and gave my observations, like they teach in the Academy for researchers to do.

It's been a few months since the build on the large gateway's hiding device started, and while everything is going well on that front, I've continuously added more missions, especially because of my newest project.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

‘Good Future,’ as I call the project, is me trying to figure out how to change my future. As I started to work on the problem, I found that I knew too little about the fundamental forces of the place I lived in.

As I dived into the knowledge this world had gathered, I found it lacking in many ways, but the most significant one was that the only thing we knew—well, we didn’t actually know for certain, but many agreed—was that the stars in the night sky were other suns similar to the one that we were rotating around.

It looked like a big ball of fire, but from my understanding, that should not be possible, so the sun should be something different. We also know that light has speed, which means that if those objects we see in the night sky are so far away, it means they should be quite old. So, how long does the sun last?

All those questions, yet not an answer to be found. Because of all that, I’ve been giving out a lot of missions to find those answers, and as always, if someone gave a good enough proposal, they would receive any funding they desired.

Yet it wouldn’t help if others didn’t get access to that information, so once again I decided to increase the priority on the information problem, bringing it nearly as high as the fortress project and our other missions dedicated to keeping me alive.

That finally lit a fire under quite a few genius individuals, and a few days after that, I received a truly unique request. One of the brilliant thinkers who chose to join the Academy and has worked on many scientific projects asked me to make a copy of her—and not just one, but nine—so she could work on multiple angles of the same problem at the same time.

The proposal was well reasoned and written out, with her bringing up the problems and already giving me the answers to the questions I would have asked.

Up to this point, I have kept creatures and the monsters made from them separate and overall only did so on a few occasions. This was interesting enough that I was willing to let it happen and see what came of it.

Of course, the monsters I made of her wouldn’t be able to progress further, although I have come to learn that while monsters don’t get stronger, they do have some capability of getting smarter.

There are a few occasions where monsters in dungeon rooms have survived long enough to develop their own patterns of behavior, although even those don’t deviate much from their base, but it does happen.

She, of course, knew those problems, but what she needed was someone who could keep up with her calculations and do the busy work that she was certainly capable of but simply didn’t have enough time for.

Time was also a huge project for many in the Academy. Many desired the control it, especially because magic was somewhat capable of messing with time, although it did come with consequences.

Many hope to find ways around those consequences, but some were not so certain any longer. There were talks about firm laws that even magic couldn't break, although it could still bend them. If they were to somehow succeed, then, well, my playrooms could have centuries pass with only a few years passing in the outside world.

It was a nice dream. It would mean that I would instantly become so strong that I could simply conquer the outside world without many problems and just rule it how I wanted to. It would also mean that I wouldn’t have to break through the limit of this world and become the World Will.

It is one way of completing my Good Future project, and there are plans being made to do exactly that, even without the help of time acceleration. It would be sad if things came down to that because that would mean the end of progress. Was I so selfish as to do so just to keep living and stay in power? I didn’t think so, but it’s still better to make those plans just in case.

The 49th playroom was coming along quite nicely, and I did kind of like making it look like the world outside. It was kind of nice. A different kind of challenge.

Too bad I have to do this a second time on the 50th floor. I guess I could make things a bit more different there, perhaps mix up the continents. To think about it again I don’t actually have to make that playroom exactly like the world outside—only the immediate area around my dungeon.

Still, they would be standard worlds without anything too fancy. I believe it will be quite fun to build a copy of the Eternal city-state on the 50th floor, but I’ll see if that’s true when I get there.

Things were also heating up in the dungeon rooms, and I think a lot of it is going to turn into a war zone soon enough, as more and more large guilds are breaking apart. The ones that haven’t already broken apart have finally caught on to what is happening. Of course, the ones in power don’t want to lose that power and are willing to go to lengths they really shouldn’t to keep it.

There are also a lot of adventurers leaving because of this reason, and while most say they will come back when things calm down, I’m a bit worried about what especially the ones who have gotten to platinum rank will do when they spread out into the outside world. Hopefully, we can keep the four powers distracted enough that they will realize what's happening too late.

A part of that plan was the dragons. When they go missing, it will be huge news, and not just in the upper echelon, but everywhere. A lot of current supply chains will also break down, especially high-end potions. It will be interesting to see what changes that will bring.

So much to do, and I still have about a year and a few months before I’m finished with this playroom. Then I think I will break through to the 50th so I would be a bit stronger, and then start working on the dungeon rooms of the 49th floor and the 50th playroom at the same time.

If everything goes right, it should be about 10 to 12 years before I break through to platinum. By that time, we should have everything prepared. During all this time, I would be ready to break through at a moment's notice, so if we get even a hint that something might be wrong, I could advance and start reinforcing my defenses. Hopefully, that won’t happen, and I get to break through in peace and get a few more floors deep before everything goes wrong.