After overcoming his existential crisis, Gorm turned back to his dungeons matters. Since he achieved initial success in his father’s technique just below 50 years had passed. But the changes in the dungeon were enormous.

Before he would examine all the new things, Gorm wanted to find out if there were any benefits to having an entrance and a bigger core room. Because he couldn’t find any changes that he could trace back to one of the two things, he decided to consult his status window.

Status

Name

Gorm

Title

Natural Dungeon

Race

Dungeon Core Oak

Floors

47

Rooms

1.3 k

Age

707 years

DP

142

Level

11 (47)

Mana

17 m / 17 m

Affinities

Nature

Mana Regeneration

1000 per min

Specialties

One with Nature

Initial Success in ???

Abilities

Natural Dungeon

Perfect Environment Creation

Complete Cycle Creation

Natural Seeding

Growth Spurt

Creature Maturation

Clear Headed

Animals

Ecosystems

True Endless Wilderness

Riparian Forest

Common River

Light Oases

Common Forest

Ocean Archipelago

Mystic Forest

Monsters

552 k

Sapients

157 k

Lesser Beasts

-

Humanoid Animals

19.8 k

Beasts

25 k

Divine Beasts

1

Humanoid Beasts

-

Plants

Magical

1.4 m

Monsters

65 k

???

1.7 k

???

1

Bosses

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Melia (Elder Ash Dryad)

Anty (Greater Antmother)

Bonded Creatures

Seker (Life and Death Spirit)

Special Creatures

- (Divine ???)

Intruders

13

Gorm was amazed by his new status, especially the doubled mana regeneration and almost tripled mana capacity intrigued him. He had finally been able to increase his mana regen, but more importantly, he had gained the increase in mana capacity he should with floors as huge as his.

Another noteworthy fact was, that he couldn’t find any indication that his mana regen was burdened by the upkeep of the two floors outside of the mountain spanning formation. Gorm had a feeling that this circumstance had something to do with his father’s cultivation technique, which he assumed was also where his new specialty was from.

To confirm this notion, he willed the description to show in front of him.

Initial Success in ???:

After achieving initial success in an unknown divine grade cultivation technique and the nature of your core, you now have complete control over every part of your dungeon with a root of your core oak in it.

Due to the absolute control, the floors gain all their mana from what your roots passively disperse.

Due to being a divine grade technique, the System is unable to predict the changes that would happen when further cultivating it.

This time Gorm was stunned, he had prepared himself for a high evaluation of his father’s technique, but he never thought it would be divine grade. Gorm could still remember how his father taught him.

Back when he was still a child his father had taken him into their garden and had shown him a little seed. Whilst explaining the technique, his father accelerated the growth of the seed and used it as an example. Thanks to that he was able to grasp it the first time he heard it. That made his father very happy, but he still had him help with farm work.

Now that he thought about it, it was quite unusual for farmer family to have a divine grade cultivation technique, from what Gorm knew, Kingdoms had fallen in fights for cultivation techniques of lower tiers.

Brushing off the thoughts about his past, Gorm concentrated back on his status. The next things he wanted to investigate were the changes in his list of ecosystems. Especially the True Endless Wilderness interested him.

Ecosystem True Endless Wilderness:

The True Endless Wilderness ecosystem is an accurate recreation of what the majority of the Endless Wilderness is like.

The Endless Wilderness ecosystem is an upgraded version of the Magic Forest ecosystem, which is the upgrade of the Mystic Forest ecosystem.

Due to having a room with an active, functioning ecosystem that is simulating a magic forest you gained the ecosystem Mystic Forest.

The System detected a deep connection to the Endless Wilderness in the dungeon core, after comparing its knowledge about the Endless Wilderness with the Mystic Forest ecosystem, strong similarities were detected.

The Mystic Forest ecosystem first got upgraded to Magical Forest and then to Endless Wilderness Ecosystem.

+ additional 100% mana regeneration in rooms with this ecosystem active

+ 50% faster growth and higher birthrate for every non-monster living being everywhere

+ 300% defense to all trees in the entire dungeon

- 95% mana cost to all plants that are included in the ecosystem, anywhere

- 75% mana cost to all non-monster lifeforms, included in the ecosystem, anywhere

- 50% mana cost to all monsters, included in the ecosystem, anywhere

Endless Wilderness ecosystem is your standard ecosystem. Meaning that every new room will automatically be an Endless Wilderness ecosystem with no additional cost. That is unless you specifically want to use another one.

Due to an upgraded version of the Endless Wilderness Ecosystem being available, you can, for a small amount of mana, upgrade any Endless Wilderness Ecosystem into said upgraded version.

You can’t use any monsters, animals, plants or things that are unnatural.

This setting is not changeable.

Ecosystem Mystic Forest:

Common Forest that, due to a long exposure to high-density mana, started to be inhabited by more and more magical plants.

+ 50% chance for a monster plant to appear

The True endless wilderness ecosystem was a surprise, it basically doubled all effects of the old endless wilderness system. What was most surprising, was that the part he had explored of the endless wilderness was apparently only the outermost rim. When he had cleared his questions from his status, he would investigate his new core room in detail, he really wanted to find out what the true endless wilderness was like.

While the mystic forest was nothing special, its effect was awesome, Gorm had already seen the huge numbers of magical and monster plants. Magical plants were uncommon, at least from Gorm’s experiences, but he now had almost one and a half million of them in his dungeon. They would greatly elevate the strength of all his animals. Monster plants were the next evolution phase of plants, even Gorm had only seen a handful of them on his travels.

To evolve into a monster plant a magical plant needed huge amounts of mana and some other special circumstances. Most magical plants could grow for tens of thousands of years before they accumulated enough mana to evolve. Monster plants were multiple times more effective than magical plants and would be treasured anywhere in the outside world.

Gorm knew that plants could evolve further, with one stage being sentient and another being sapient, but because he had never met anything beyond a plant monster, he wasn’t sure what the stages were exactly and in which order they were.

So while the huge increase in animal evolutions made him excited, the number of plant evolution, especially the almost two thousand from which he didn’t know the evolution name, made him ecstatic.

Something that bothered Gorm was, that he didn’t know his new boss Anty, but due to her name, he assumed that she had met Melia. And if Melia gave her a name she couldn’t be all that bad. He would talk to her as soon as possible, especially because of her race. Gorm assumed that she was responsible for the ants that guarded the entrance into his true dungeon. He wanted to talk about some plans he had for the inhabitants of the first nine floors. He was playing with the idea to give them the possibility to enter the lower floors for training and resource gathering.

He only had that idea now, that he knew that his suspicion came true. Only in the part of the dungeon that was within the formation, did the animals show the crazy increase in intellect. The two new floors still had a higher chance for monsters to appear, but the probability for a sapient animal was as minimal as in the outside world.

Another piece of good news was that Sek finally was able to finish his change, Gorm didn’t think that evolution or mutation would be a good way to describe what the spirit went through.

Gorm hadn’t ignored the thirteen invaders, in truth, as soon as he saw that there were invaders in his dungeon he had scanned it in its entirety, and the intruders turned out to be small animals that had stumbled into the entrance of his dungeon. After discovering the high mana density, they decided to settle in the part that was intended for the future adventurers.

Now the only thing left was the nameless unknown divine creature. Gorm pulled its description up.

- (Divine ???)

Barbary macaque that, due to lucky coincidences, got the chance to evolve into a divine animal.

The evolution is still in progress, so it’s unknown what the end product will be.

Even though Gorm didn’t know what a divine animal was, he knew that the little monkey would be insanely strong, so he decided to make him the guardian of his core oak. As soon as the evolution process finished he would talk to the monkey and make him his protector.

<<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->-<->>

With all the new information sorted through Gorm only had to investigate a few more things and talk with Sek, Melia and the new boss Anty. But he would try to do so with more patience. Now that he was open to the outside and didn’t have to worry about how to get enough mana to afford the upkeep of his future floors, Gorm could allow himself to do things a bit slower.

In his last life, he never was in a state of constant stress like in his dungeon core oak form. If he was still a human, he would have never had the energy to work this crazy for so long.

Now the only things Gorm wanted to do was expand his dungeon slowly, enjoy his time with Melia, Sek, and his creatures, and find out why he even was in this situation.

Gorm didn’t know that the very definition of being a dungeon core was to never have peace for long. Unbeknownst to anybody, a group of hunters of the nearby village was on its way to the dungeon.