Pov Dungeon Core

Everything had been going excellently, and I was making swift progress on all fronts. So, of course, something had to happen that pulled my attention away. One of the more interesting playrooms I have is the one on the 39th floor, currently named the Undead Playroom. Long ago, the small pattern that turns creatures into undead proved victorious in taking over the entire playroom.

This small pattern didn’t have any conscious thought like regular creatures do, but because some of the creatures it infected were able to keep their minds, at least to some degree, a sort of civilization has started to emerge there. It’s a really static one, as they would need new creatures that weren’t infected to continue to procreate.

I haven’t had a clear idea on how to fix that problem, and I still don’t, unless I just wanted to put in spawners that would create monsters, which would then get infected by the small pattern inside this playroom.

It’s a problem that I simply don’t have time to think about, but small patterns are interesting, and this is basically the only floor where I don’t have my usual rules in place that would kill off any small pattern that deviated too much from the norm.

Still, the undead small pattern was dominant, and only the vicious kind of small patterns—the ones that cause disease and desolation—were the ones that spread the most. So it was hard for me to understand what I was currently looking at. It was a small patch of area where the plants were no longer of the undead variety; instead, they had been restored to their previous living state.

I really didn’t have time to figure this out, but how could I not? I started to dig into the records of this playroom to find flare-ups of this kind of thing before, only that those small patterns died so fast that they were deemed not important enough.

I would have to agree with myself on that part, as those small patterns weren’t strong enough or developed enough to do what they needed to do to survive in this place and to go against the undead small pattern.

Fortunately, I still had the patterns in storage of the different versions of the small patterns that failed, and now that I compare them to the one here, it is obvious why this one succeeded while the others failed.

Almost everything was the same—they seemed to consume the undead energy to fuel their own expansion, exactly the opposite of what the undead small pattern did. This one, however, did have the same function as the undead small pattern of having a collective energy pool that they could use when they were near enough to each other.

Another reason why this relife small pattern, I guess I’d call it, worked this time was time. The undead small pattern survived and expanded by consuming life, yet it had run out of it a long time ago. Most of it has died off, and the rest went into a hibernation state, making it weak enough, especially in areas where there weren’t any smart undead, giving an opportunity for others to start preying on it.

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What I was certain of was that when the smart undead discovered this plague, they would destroy it. Fortunately, I had the pattern now, so I could spread the relife small pattern all over this playroom in the less populated areas and see what would happen. I think it will turn this playroom into an eternal battleground of life and death. What I was certain of was that this was going to be so interesting to watch develop.

Its unfortunate that this happened at such a time, but I couldn’t properly concentrate on this playroom. I guess checking in on it every once in a while should be good enough for now. It should also take quite a while before anything truly great starts to happen.

I wonder if I could make a skill so there would be more of me, but that sounded hard to do. However, I knew that the adventurers have been capable of making some skills that could truly enhance mental capabilities. I should perhaps look into that a bit more.

This wasn’t the only case of things not going the way I expected them to go. Fortunately, I plan for that. On the farming floor, two things that shouldn’t be possible have happened, and it’s great that I plan even for the unlikely things to happen.

One of those events was that one of the patterns that fight mindlessly to reach platinum rank achieved a form of consciousness before reaching platinum. It has happened 17 times now, and every time I am properly notified, I pull that creature out of those playrooms.

The other thing has only happened once, and I still have no clue how. The ooze, which should have no possibility of gaining any form of consciousness, somehow still achieved it—at least a small part of it. I also took it out; it’s currently in one of my testing areas in the experimentation playroom. It’s slowly continuing to develop its mental capabilities, and I still haven’t figured out why that’s the case.

While I make my playrooms, I don’t know everything about them, especially as time continues to move forward. They are open grounds for experimentation, and things happen in them all the time that I could never have imagined. At this point, even if I don’t get any new patterns from the outside world, I am certain that I would never run out of new creatures.

It should take me about another month to finish the first layer of the fortress dungeon stone upgrade, and about two weeks after that, I should be finished expanding the 51st floor. It seems like my advancement to platinum rank brought with it a large expansion of how big I could make a floor.

In all honesty, I’m starting to run out of ideas on how to fill so much space, and many terrain features are starting to look like I’ve already made them, because in most cases, I already have made something similar.

Is it possible to make a whole world have a different kind of rock? Could life develop in an atmosphere that didn’t have oxygen? Perhaps after the farming floors, I’m going to make an experimentation playroom and start testing out some more extreme environments, completely different from our world. I should also work on the project named using an old language of the Academy professor who came up with the idea.

It was called the Satellite Project, and I was supposed to make a gateway well above the planet so our Academy scientists could go and build facilities there, including telescopes to look further away than they could from the planet's surface. There were so many interesting projects that I wanted to get to, but right now, defenses were the number one priority. Still, I couldn’t wait for all that is to come.

Pov Vivian's Grandfather

“We also got another report from Vivian about the dungeon. She’s really excited about the discoveries she’s making, and it seems almost every dungeon will be changed after her latest findings are published.”

I looked at the idiot giving me the report. What is wrong with this person? How could they not put things together? “Do you not find it even a little bit suspicious that she hasn’t sent any direct messages, only reports? It’s obvious that something went wrong—can you not see it?” I watched as the person took a step back, and I could smell the fear on them. At least they were sensible.

“So, I want you to stop being stupid and start thinking. Now get the fuck out of my office and find out what has happened to my granddaughter, so I can personally squeeze the life out of anyone responsible if someone even damaged one of her hairs. At least I know that she’s still alive, and that’s the only reason why I’m still restraining myself and following the orders of the council. But if you don’t have any information for me in at least one week, you get to explain to the council why I’ve left my position here.”