Pov Dungeon Core

We had won. Not the war, but at least a crucial battle. I would hope that they would never return, but that was a fool's hope. A lot of my creatures were currently working on the designs to make us a proper fortress.

I should have known that just being defensive wasn’t good enough, but it seems like not just me, but all of us, overestimated our abilities and underestimated the breadth of attacks that could be launched upon us.

While my physical defenses were excellent, and while we could still improve on them, trying to defend against magical attacks with physical defenses was unbelievably stupid, even if it did work somewhat.

The problem still remained that I couldn’t properly power magical defenses. I could make some dungeon rules that would help and perhaps a few runes, but otherwise, everything would need to be done by my creatures and powered by them almost entirely. That was a lot of commitment to protect me, as I was too large.

I could shrink my outer sphere and make it smaller, but that would reduce my defensive size and also make it so that only 100 floors would fit inside me. No, rather than shrink, I would expand myself a little bit more to make myself a perfect circle onto which our defenses could be built, defenses that could be manned by my creatures. But I would also need to be able to power those defenses.

This meant I needed a skill. While I wasn’t completely done building the 56th floor, its size was expanded to its maximum, and a lot of it was already filled up with what I needed to make it into an aerial farm floor.

So while I was making myself a perfect circle and already forming the mountain above me into the design we wanted, I was also working on visualizing the skill that I needed, so hopefully, I would be able to get something that would help with my defensive needs.

A part of me also needed to focus on politics. With the siege lifted, many were asking to be allowed into the outside world, but I couldn’t allow this. Everyone inside already knew too much, and right now, we were still in a vulnerable state. There was also the trouble of the Beast Clan. They were currently isolated in one of the larger areas that could only be accessed through the labyrinth.

I did have to make a gateway there so that I could send in some of my creatures to get rid of some of their resources and materials that they could use to make melters, as I couldn’t have that kind of manufacturing capability in the hands of people I didn’t fully trust yet. Of course, not everyone liked it, but their leader was understanding, and I did tell them that the isolation was temporary—which it was.

When I reached diamond rank, I wouldn’t care if they roamed my dungeon. I wouldn’t care if people wanted to leave, because nothing they could tell about me could hurt me. While they could explain how I worked, and that might help the powers of this world change their own dungeons, they would simply need too much ramp-up time to catch up to how much mana I was producing.

It took me three weeks before I was confident enough to trigger a breakthrough and certain enough that I would get a skill I wanted. One of the other problems was the floor guardians. I was no longer making huge numbers of dungeon rooms, so it was a bit more difficult to get the difficulty right. But I guess I could change it a little bit even after I finished making a floor guardian.

For the floor guardians themselves, I just decided to pick a version of a creature that had most recently made it to diamond rank. So, this floor would have a frog-type guardian.

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It took me a ridiculously small amount of time to gather enough mana, and with a few orders given, I triggered the breakthrough, still keeping it silent so that even if someone was trying to pick up on it, they wouldn’t.

Everything went as expected, but I was surprised that during skill selection, I could actually put the full 20% allocation into just making this one skill. I guess it would just make it a higher rank. Perhaps it might also give other benefits to fully focus on one skill during a breakthrough.

I did everything quite fast, so it didn’t take long before I was out and reconnecting with my dungeon. I looked inward to see the skill that I got: Enhancement Rank C. That made me a bit hesitant—I didn’t expect such a name, but I still hoped that it would work. As I started to test out this skill, I found it was more than I expected it to be, and I was thankful for it.

Not only would this skill allow me to power enchantments with my own mana, but it also allowed me to strengthen materials beyond their normal properties. What was even more interesting was that adventurers had a similar skill, and it seemed to work in quite the same way. So, for the first time, I had a skill that I didn’t have to figure everything out by myself but could actually use all the knowledge I had gathered.

The funny thing was that I actually now needed to practice because I didn’t actually know how to enchant stuff or how to make large-scale enchantment circuits. While I would be borrowing some knowledge from the adventurers in terms of large-scale fortifications using enchantments, the Ant nations were actually the leaders in that type of technology.

Many adventurers and creatures received invitations to a new department of the Academy. At this department, the job was just to start creating the types of enchantments I would need to keep myself safe from all kinds of attacks.

Once again, we needed to change our defensive plans, as this development changed a lot. Also, a lot of tests were needed, as some were thinking about whether the weakness of the dungeon stone could be fixed by these types of enchantments. There was a lot to do, and this department, like any other, would have the mana budget they needed to accomplish their goals.

What I also started to do was expand the 57th floor. I also felt like the length and width of my floors had gotten a bit too big once again, so for this floor, I would be pushing the height instead of keeping it at 15,000 meters like I had been doing for quite a while now.

These floors that I was now going to make were going to just be empty, with only a bit of work done to make a few dungeon rooms and the floor guardian room, and nothing else.

While I would have liked to keep doing what I had been doing, I simply didn’t have the time. While yes, I could destroy this world with that small pattern, it didn’t mean that I could survive if they truly attacked me.

I had a feeling that they had more stuff up their sleeves, but it would cost them too much to risk it unless they were certain I was bluffing. If they attacked me, then realized I wasn’t, well… if they were going down, why not take me down as well?

So a lot of my focus was on my new skill so I could learn its intricacies. The more I learned about this and enhancing materials—even real materials—a sort of understanding started to click inside of me, but I didn’t truly understand what it meant. As time continued to go by, this realization started to become more. It was now getting so distracting that I decided to look inside to see what was happening.

It had been a while since I thought about this, but almost immediately all of my focus was taken up by a single section—one that had my first gold rank trait: Intelligent Leaning Evolution and Enhanced Pattern Combining.

Underneath it was two words that were now a lot less blurry, like I could almost see them. As I continued to focus on it, I understood that traits, like talents, sometimes needed to be discovered by doing something that corresponded with them. So, what had I been doing?

Lately, I had been focused on applying my enhancement skill to real materials that weren’t made by me. And then it instantly clicked—the blurriness disappeared, revealing two words: Real Materials.

Understanding flooded me. I had been able to make real materials in the form of loot thanks to my dungeon rules, but now I fully understood that function and could apply it without needing dungeon rules. Now I could make real materials, so I wouldn’t have to go digging for them.

Immediately, I started to test and was smacked with a dose of reality, as adventurers sometimes like to call it. The cost of doing this was unbelievable. Then I understood that this wasn’t how dungeons were meant to work.

Making a decent amount of real materials without using the loot workaround was so expensive because they weren’t a part of my domain. Dungeons were creatures that made everything their own that was inside of them. I had to focus on not claiming the rock that was in a lot of my dungeon stone to keep the melters from working, so making so much that wasn’t me was incredibly hard and incredibly expensive.

There were ways around that. A perfect example was the water-making runes. They were quite different from enchantments—they were more a physical type of magic. But, as another dungeon demonstrated to me, making real water with them was simple enough. I just needed to let mana flow through them, and they would just make whatever, unlike enchantments that needed specific inputs.

Now I could do both, and with the combination of the two and, of course, the help of my Academy, I think I could make a combination of runes and enchantments to help produce real stone and any other kind of real material.

It would just, once again, take some time. It was also now a lot easier to keep real materials inside my territory without them turning into mine. No wonder it took me so long to figure this trait out, as I would have never expected it to be something like this.