Pov Dungeon Core

I was quite busy with everything, but every once in a while, I looked outside to see what the Guild Master was doing. As we expected he was more observant than the Minder ever was. But what was weird was that he seemed to be able to sense when I looked, which he wasn’t able to do before. That was a bit concerning.

Just in case, I watched the other diamond ranks from far away as they arrived on their ship. My creature, who was pretending to be the Minder, seemed to be able to fool everyone, which was good news.

This should at minimum give us a few months to a year before the Guild Master returns. Of course, we might have a problem with Vivian, the diamond rank we are holding hostage, but hopefully nothing bad comes from it.

Usually, I liked to concentrate my mind more whenever I viewed things that seemed interesting, but right now I didn’t have much to spare. Just changing the outer layer of my fortress defense to the stronger version of the dungeon stone I can now make was a huge undertaking, but something that needed to be done. The same with my 51st floor—that was a huge priority.

What wasn’t a priority was to make dungeon rooms on the 51st floor. Unfortunately, the adventurers needed to wait, and they would need to wait quite a while. Most likely, I will need to open up a small area of dungeon rooms to make it look like I’m still advancing, but I wasn’t liking this need to choose what I do and don’t do. It would be nice if I could just do everything, and it would just take a bit longer.

As I watched the diamond ranks leave on their ship and soon speed out of my vision range, it was time to do some more experimentation. For the first time, I would be able to use platinum-ranked patterns to make platinum-ranked monsters. I had so many stored up that I didn’t know where to begin, so I decided to start small with the first monsters I ever made—ants.

I was pleasantly surprised at how intelligently these monsters acted. While at gold rank, they didn’t pass the test where they would sit down with a normal adventurer and try to act like they weren’t a monster. I’m pretty sure that platinum-ranked monsters could actually pass that test, but I wasn’t certain if they could do it every time. It was still a huge improvement.

I continued to experiment, finding that they still had the hard limit of not being able to grow stronger from the moment I made them, although they should be able to learn to use their strength a lot better than gold ranks ever could. Fortunately, this meant that the higher percentage of adventurers killed mandate I was supposed to follow was now a lot easier to accomplish.

One thing that I was never going to do, even if it compromised my own safety, was to purposely kill off people just because they tried to get stronger in my dungeon. Ever since this plan was proposed to fix the problem of me producing too many high-ranked individuals, I’ve never felt good about even the idea of it. To purposely make someone lose their life because you stacked the odds against them so much that they could never win seemed to go against my very being.

Now, I had no problem making things incredibly hard—so hard that it was almost impossible to complete—but I would also make sure that anyone who tried to do such a thing would know what they were stepping into.

That’s why I’ve always found it hard to teach proper caution. You need to make sure that a person knows to be on guard, but if they start to rely on you for that information, they could easily get surprised in a situation that’s not controlled.

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That’s why I make large areas where such danger lies. Most of the time, you won’t be in danger, but you could easily run into it. It’s a difficult balance and one of the harder things in dungeon room design I must strive for, as in the end, my dungeon is meant to teach and train, not to be as chaotic as the outside world can be. So even if some recommended it, I have spent a lot of time finding a solution to this problem rather than actually starting to kill off adventurers like that.

What I was really pleased about was that it seemed like I could make my monsters quite close to diamond rank, although they did take a stupid amount of mana, but that’s the cost of reaching so far above my current strength.

Fortunately, the farms I have made have been paying off quite well. So right now, I have enough to actually make a proper platinum-ranked floor, the one I envisioned. Unfortunately, it will take a while before I can actually make it.

First, I needed to work on a series of rooms with gateways, mainly to my Academy but also a few that would be connected to the rest of the gateway network so even adventurers could come. This would not be a quest reward for them in the sense that they could stumble onto this quest—no, this service I would only offer if they signed a contract to protect me from any outside force.

The idea of these rooms was simple: they were fighting arenas, all of them, even if they looked simplistic. I would make dungeon rules that would spawn as many platinum ranks as the challenger wanted so they could do what the adventurers were calling ‘power leveling.’

It wouldn't have worked with gold-ranked monsters, as a platinum rank didn’t get much from killing gold ranks. Now things were different, and more importantly, my creatures could advance to diamond rank, and many were eager to do so.

It would be a huge facility that would function basically like a city. The Academy had been preparing for it for quite a while, gathering the necessary resources needed to build all the support facilities and make them function properly.

I, of course, would have made it all myself, but they convinced me that it would be good practice for them, and as I was so busy, it would be good if they could help me with things they could accomplish themselves.

I was still a bit hesitant to give adventurers access to this place, and I would need to wait until everything was in working order. Well, I didn’t need to wait, but it just didn’t feel proper. The bigger question was which adventurers I would offer the deal to. I did have some ideas—mainly, it was the clans. They have put everything into making a life for themselves in my dungeon, raising families, and preparing for generations to live in my dungeon.

Giving them a chance to get diamond ranks that would protect me and, of course, be able to protect themselves was just a good idea. Yet I wasn’t certain I could trust every clan just yet. There were also other individuals, a large portion of them in the runners' guild, and of course, I needed to take into consideration that most would never be able to reach diamond rank, even if you give them every resource possible.

In the end, like everything else seemed to be, it came down to the numbers game. The simple fact was, if you had more people and more resources, even if the percentage didn’t change of who would make it to diamond rank, and even if it lowered by quite a lot, you would still, in the end, have a lot more diamond ranks.

With so many of my creatures outside gathering information, I’m pretty confident to say that in this whole world there are only a few thousand diamond ranks and only a couple of dozen peak diamonds. The good thing is that they are split into four different camps, which all have their own splits as well, so all of them uniting against me is not just unlikely—it’s near impossible.

And if a large portion of them were to come here, I was certain that they would first fight amongst themselves to get ownership over me before they would attempt to subdue me. Perhaps we were wrong about this, but I had many creatures, and I could make patterns that would produce creatures almost certainly capable of reaching diamond rank.

It would only be a matter of time before I could contend with this world’s power. The key here was that I needed to make it to that point before anything happened, and that was less than likely.

Still, I worked as much as possible, pushing myself as hard as possible. Platinum rank gave me a lot. I was now so much stronger, but I also had so much more to do at any given time. I also felt clearer, like my mind was able to expand more than I even thought a platinum rank would give. It was nice to be so much more than I was just a few weeks ago.

The first few platinum-rank floors will be dedicated to farms where I could hopefully start producing diamond ranks, but that wish wasn’t as simple as just doing the same thing I did for the platinum-ranked farms. Fortunately, I had a few prospects that could work, but this meant a lot of experimentation and changing patterns.

It sounded like a lot of fun to me; unfortunately, once again, I couldn’t focus too much on just this problem—not to mention the fact that I could barely observe all the interesting things going on in the dungeon rooms and playrooms. Too busy of a time was not my favorite, but what can you do.