Pov Dungeon Core

It had been a really busy few weeks after our victory. I dove deep into the world of enchantment. Many expected it would take me a while to get competent enough to start working on our defenses, but I totally floored them when they realized that in a little over a week I had mastered all that I could.

Now, the only thing holding me back was my skill rank. Without increasing it I couldn’t make more powerful defenses with this skill simply because I couldn’t use more or denser mana lines.

Of course, then I had to explain why I couldn’t. They did not understand what the problem was. Their skills were a lot more flexible than mine, so I started with that. After that, I explained to them that I still needed to learn everything from scratch, as my skills didn’t come with little nudges like theirs as they continued to improve.

My skills more so allowed me to use those kinds of methods without overexerting myself, and of course, they gave me flat bonuses whenever I leveled up that allowed me to perform those skills faster and more powerfully.

I had tried to explain what followed next before, and this time I was able to come up with a good example. They thought that I was a genius at enchanting, but actually, it took me way longer than an average enchanter to get half as good.

It’s just that many parts of me worked on different problems. In fact, on average for the past week and a bit, around 1,000 parts of me worked, so I could understand and master everything I knew about enchanting.

They didn’t understand what it meant time-wise. To them it might have seemed like I had just spent a little over a week mastering something, but in fact, I spent way over 1,000 weeks. It’s just that the different parts of me did their own thing, and then the greater me knew what they did and passed it on to the different parts of me, constantly getting better at a slow rate for me but incredibly fast for a single-minded person.

They finally understood when I gave them the example of 10 people working for 10 hours at one job versus one person working for 10 hours at one job. While only 10 hours passed, the 10 people actually worked 100 hours in that 10 hours, which allowed them to do 10 times more work. Now, of course, in reality, things don’t work so smoothly, but they understood what I was trying to say.

While in some ways I am the same as the creatures and adventurers who live inside my dungeon and outside, the way I experience the world and time is a lot different. Whenever they lost someone, they would grieve for some time but would never truly forget, as sometimes those memories come back.

I never forget, but I move on incredibly fast, as many parts of me grieve at the same time. I think that’s why most dungeons seem so cold to single-minded people—because our emotions for them are so short-lived, they don’t really see them.

Even then, they didn’t understand it fully, and it was hard for me to continue explaining a life to them that was so foreign. What they also didn’t understand was how I could not help them with the problems they were facing. If I had so much time, so much opportunity to figure out things, why would I ever need them? The answer to that was both complicated and simple—it was really hard for me to think of new things.

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As time went on, I have gotten better at this, and with enchanting, I have found that I do have the ability to innovate, at least a little bit. The best way to do this was if I thought about enchanting like I did my patterns—I just needed to combine different parts to make the combination that came out of it better. Yet, trying to think of something completely new, something that needed a different kind of approach that I didn’t know about, my mind just couldn't make that leap.

I think I’m too rigid for that kind of thinking. But that’s why I have my creatures and adventurers. We have always been in a symbiotic relationship, and I have accepted my shortcomings, which I could understand was, once again, a bit hard for them to understand.

For them, it was important to strive to remove their weaknesses. It was important to them, and I could give them that. I could make them challenges, and I could use the knowledge I received from them to help others of their kind. Which I truly liked to do.

After all of this, the work on the fortress defenses properly started. The current outer shell, which I was still working on making a perfect circle, was going to have another layer on top of it filled with fortifications meant to repel any attack and, of course, improve my defenses immensely against magic types of attacks. The first problem we ran into was gravity.

At the bottom, you couldn’t really make proper fortifications if you needed to stand on top of them upside down. So, for the first time, I was making a dungeon rule that was going to affect the outside of my dungeon.

At the equator, the gravity would switch. The top half would remain the same, although I did still make a dungeon rule so that anyone who wanted to flip that gravity would need to overcome my dungeon rule before that could happen. The bottom half had its gravity flipped, so now I technically no longer had a top and a bottom but instead two tops.

A lot of the mountain that used to dominate this area was already gone, as it was being cut apart by hundreds of millions of ants into large blocks that I would then enhance. A lot of it was also turned into fine gravel to be mixed in with my dungeon stone. All of this was going to be used to build the defensive outer layer. The designs were quite complex, and altogether they were about 10 stories tall, although there were peaks and valleys.

Anyone wanting to reach my outer shell or the two main entrances would need to fight through all that. And of course, they would still need to punch a hole through that outer shell, which was once again going to be pressurized with an immense amount of water. The second layer of compressed water was going to be removed, and another layer of fortifications was going to be built, which was once again manned.

In the end, the weakest points were going to be the two main entrances, and whoever reached that far would just need to contend with my inside defenses, like the labyrinth.

I do not know how long it would take, but eventually, the plan was that all of those defenses were going to be run by creatures or volunteer adventurers. But in the near and probably long-term future, most of it was still going to be run by monsters, even if they were never going to be as good compared to properly thinking people.

We had seen a few scouts near my territory, but no force was approaching, which was good news. Hopefully, they would never return. But when I was about two weeks away from finishing the expansion of the 56th floor, I felt something I had never felt before—a dungeon, a platinum-rank dungeon, broke through to the diamond rank. It was halfway across the world, but I could feel the power it possessed. Before long the ripples of that breakthrough stopped.

Emergency meetings followed. Everyone agreed that they will try to build a force so strong that they could overwhelm us. We didn’t know much more, but it seemed like the Pixies were the most angry about what had happened and the most adamant that I needed to be destroyed.

It didn’t take long for me to finish expanding the 57th floor. The floor itself was a bit over 267,000 kilometers in length, almost 201,000 kilometers in width, and 46,200 meters in height. Then I triggered another breakthrough. During the breakthrough, I put all of my skill allocation into Enhancement, barely pushing it into the A rank.

What followed was much of the same—my main focus was working on the defenses and continuing to advance by expanding my next floor. Then I felt another dungeon breakthrough into the diamond rank. Just a few days after that, another one followed.

We learned that they were advancing dungeons that had been kept near the end of platinum rank. It was obvious that they were trying to push all of their dungeons so they could continue to boost new members and raise a proper army.

Unlike what they did with Ace, I was certain they were going to give those recruits proper training and skills. They must have been putting a lot of resources behind what they were doing, which meant another confrontation was going to be inevitable. I felt bad for the regular people of this world, as it meant the end for them.