Pov Dungeon Core

I have not been enjoying the last year or two, and I will not be enjoying the next four. All the distractions inside my dungeon help, but keeping myself about 90% full of mana so when I need to, I can advance at a moment’s notice is not pleasant. What isn't helping is that the 50th floor is done, and so are the dungeon rooms, just waiting for me to open them up.

I think this is what anxiety feels like, but I’m not entirely sure. Anyways, I don’t like this feeling. It's simply much better to keep myself quite low, and when it’s time for a breakthrough, quickly gather as much mana as I need. This entire plan of having to wait so long to rank up is starting to get annoying. Because of that, I’m kind of hoping something goes wrong, which I know is so bad, but I simply don't like this.

What’s not helping is the amount of mana generation I currently have. The farming floors are going crazy, producing so many platinum ranks so fast that we are having some problems meeting the demand for welcoming the new ones. Fortunately, quite a few new platinum ranks that come from the farm floors are willing to take up the job of greeter, which has helped quite a lot.

What they didn’t expect was to get another opportunity to observe how a different kind of civilization forms, as so many of the platinum ranks have decided to stay on that floor and live their lives without trying to push forward. That's not to say that everyone is like that, as quite a few have joined other playrooms where they can continue to fight and advance, and some have even joined the Academy.

The adventurers are still messing about with their constant warfare. It seems that at least they are starting to develop rules of engagement, which has cut down the animosity, and it’s the first step towards a more peaceful state of affairs in the dungeon rooms. Overall, things are going quite well, but mana expenditure has remained my biggest problem.

When I finished floor 50, which was 232,000 kilometers in length, 197,000 kilometers in width, and 15 kilometers in height, it didn’t resemble much of the surface world, but it still had a similar structure. It took quite a lot of mana to make it all, especially the detailed work on replicating the cities, towns, and villages of the Eternal city-state. The dungeon rooms also took quite a lot, as there were 500,000 of them, which was a deliciously big number.

Of course, the recommended path meant that you could skip the majority of them. And for the runners, I made it especially hard if they wanted to go through the fastest route, which was half as long as the recommended path—the shortest I’ve ever made such a route.

After that, I finished up the expansion for the labyrinth, and now I’ve been almost fully focused on the Fort project, having finished up the third layer and currently working on the fourth. Fortunately, the brilliant inventors of the Academy managed to create a variant of the dungeon stone that, while it wasn’t stronger than the current dungeon stone, had properties that would become incredibly useful in the near future.

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What it did was block a huge amount of every type of signal going through it that I could think of, and what's better, the stronger the signal, the more difficult it would be to get through the new dungeon stone.

This was going to be crucial—not every diamond rank could hide their existence like Ismael could. The problem is that the thicker the dungeon stone, the better it worked, but it needed to be really thick to be truly useful.

Right now, I was working on separating dungeon rooms from the playrooms, so if a platinum-rank creature were to achieve diamond rank, it would be kept a secret. I would need to be careful where I used this new dungeon stone.

If I were to change every inch of dungeon stone I have into the new version, well, people would find out incredibly fast that something was off about me. And while I was certain they would be finding that out sooner rather than later, this was still a critical time. If I were discovered now, I don’t think I could survive, which made pushing my advancement forward even more anxiety-inducing.

Time continued to march forward, but I hoped that it would move faster. Our spies in the four great powers were also reporting that more attention was being put on me, which was bad, especially with the beasts. That was quite unfortunate, but I finally reached the time point to open up the 50th floor, and I did so even if no one had quite yet reached the end of the 49th.

I liked how the adventurers, especially the front-runners, cursed under their breath as they felt the fake breakthrough. They had been able to take vacations during the last few floor openings, but this time they didn’t get that lucky.

It also seems like the device to hide the gateway near the dragons was finally finished, so it was time to open that up, which seems like perfect timing as that should take the focus away from me once again.

Through my skill, Dungeon Gateway, I felt the connection to the gateway that was so far from me. There was a small sliver of territory that connected me to that gateway, but without the skill, I wouldn't even be able to properly feel it, so small was it. I could get a little bit of information from the surroundings where the gateway was and found there to be a lot of people waiting there.

The gateway seemed to be in its proper place, so I started to channel my mana through my skill into that gateway. It felt amazing as I was using so much mana. The device surrounding the gateway powered up immediately as it started to feed on the mana emanating from the gateway. While this skill was amazing, it certainly wasn’t efficient, at least not in the creation phase.

Ever so slowly, the gateway started to expand, creating new material out of pure mana. It was something we dungeon cores were incredibly good at, but the complexity I was currently making was such that, without that skill, doing what I was currently doing would be beyond me—at least for the current me.

But that’s what skills were—they allowed you to easily do things that you should only be able to do after investing a huge amount of time learning that kind of skill, and in some cases like this, you simply weren’t powerful enough to even try.

Section by section, the gateway was built, ever-expanding its diameter. It took me about a day to get it to the size of a normal gateway, similar in size to the one I had in the underwater world. This, however, wasn’t the size that was needed here, as dragons were a lot bigger, and none of them except for Ismael could make themselves smaller.

So days continued to go by as I continued to use this skill and channel mana into it to make the gateway bigger and bigger. I’m pretty sure that I could keep going like this forever, making the gateway as big as I wanted it to be. The only problem was, the bigger it got, the more mana it needed, and it was an exponential curve. Fortunately, it wasn’t too bad.

When I finally finished, I relaxed a bit and marveled at the gateway, now 50 meters in diameter, taking up basically the whole cliff face. Surrounding it was the device that constantly absorbed every bit of mana and every other signal from the gateway. It was unfortunate that when we were done with this, the island would be sunk and the gateway sunk with it, to keep my involvement hidden.

But now it was time to welcome back my creatures, who had been gone so long, and the new friend named Ismael, who was coming for a visit to the world he commissioned. I was certain that he would find it acceptable, and then there should be a flood of dragons that would enter that playroom and find themselves a new home.