Pov Dungeon Core

  I purposely directed the main forces of my attacking army to concentrate on parts of the fortifications that only had monsters.

  There were two reasons for that—one, so anyone truly real didn’t die, and two, because those were actually the weakest points since there wasn’t anyone real there. Their experience will help me make better monsters in the future, as there is no conceivable way to actually man all those fortifications without having most of them filled with monsters.

  Fortunately, as I get deeper, I feel I can give monsters more freedom, and they’re slowly becoming more capable of critical thinking. Even if I am certain that they will never be like my creatures, I think I could get them close enough that it wouldn’t matter for this situation.

  In the end, the fortifications were still breached, and while the defenders could easily defend against the current numbers, what if they were up against armies of tens of millions?

  Now, this world couldn’t supply such numbers—they had restricted too many people from advancing. But monsters from dungeons could certainly boost those numbers if they were let loose. Yet, this world also heavily limited every dungeon. They could only send monsters at me that were based on animals, which—while in some cases annoying—made fortified defense a lot easier.

  There were a lot of people upset at me, but I was certain they would calm down eventually. Days passed after this event quite quickly, and meetings were started to be held. I got a little bit of a talking to, like I was a senior and they were my children who had grown up and needed to educate their parent a bit. It was quite funny and also a little bit sweet.

  After that, things went back to semi-normal, as I couldn’t get back to real normal in a long while. Many talks were had, and some shortcomings were brought up, but the most serious one was the lack of range on our ranged attacks. After a lot of discussion, two methods to increase the range were agreed upon.

  First, there would be more enchantments and enchanted rooms that would help anyone inside cast spells over a longer distance. We already had some of those, but they would get overhauled, more would be made, and newer enchantments would be thought up to help with that even more.

  The second solution wasn’t only to fix the range problem; it was to fix many other issues, including the lack of firepower. While we were missing heavy hitters on the walls, that was on purpose, as there weren’t any heavy hitters on the other side. That didn’t mean we couldn’t provide our defenders with those capabilities.

  To fix those problems, artificers, scientists, and many others would start developing stationary weaponry that individuals or groups could use to punch through particularly troublesome attackers, whatever siege equipment they might be bringing. And, of course, a way to deliver more soft attacks to take down a larger number of enemies and keep them pinned down.

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  Those would be more physical attacks, so we were not merging them with the other long-range and offensive structures already planned and currently being built.

  A lot of innovation was happening. It was mainly thanks to my creatures and the large pool of individuals I could pull from. While there were plenty of adventurers in the Academy, they still only made up perhaps a few percent of the personnel there.

  I have expanded the area of the Academy a couple of times. It was now the size of quite a decent island, with many different concentrations of population instead of what was previously just a large Academy town.

  The tensions in the Academy were minuscule between the different groups compared to the dungeon rooms. The dungeon rooms sort of acted like a hub where many different civilizations and creatures mixed together. There were obvious racial hostilities, but I managed to hold back anything violent simply by creating another quest that gave negative rewards if you did so.

  What I found even more interesting was how effective negative rewards became. Now that they couldn’t leave my dungeon, those consequences became way too real. In fact, I actually had to ease up on some, as the punishments were simply too severe. Now that I didn’t have to worry about new people coming in, purposely making a mess, and then getting out

  Slowly, there was also a level of acceptance being built up between adventurers and creature adventurers. It didn't take long for problems to arise when that was discovered, but nowadays, while my creatures are still looked upon as not truly real, they’re more thought of as dungeon-born rather than monsters made by me.

  That makes me happy, and I think as time goes on—especially because the adventurer world is the most open in terms of movement—things will slowly shift towards a situation where no one actually cares.

  Of course, if we’re speaking of normal creature lifetimes, that might not happen, but I’m talking about generations, which for me wouldn’t take too long to see happen. Speaking of time moving fast, I had finished yet another floor, so it was time to advance and then start making another one. I was already at the end of floor 63, and I was able to get even closer to diamond.

  This time, I increased my Extreme Environments skill, raising it from C rank to B+. When I reconnected with my dungeon, I needed to remake a lot of dungeon rules since, thanks to the upgrade, I could now make a lot of them work more as I wanted them to.

  And of course, making basically all of them that required more extreme environments even more mana-efficient. This also helped stabilize the gravity dungeon rules I had for the outer layer of my dungeon, making it even harder for others to affect it.

  I already knew that the following years would be more of the same, but fortunately, my design team was ever-expanding, and they never stopped designing. While I couldn’t make my worlds and especially dungeon rooms just yet, my design team—and of course, me—were working on making every floor have its own world and dungeon rooms.

  While this was all subject to change, the general blueprints would be finished, which meant that if I finally reached the stage where I could fully dedicate myself to making my dungeon again instead of protecting it, I could do everything so much faster.

  Just thinking about it, I was sure that if I had an adventurer’s body, I would be subtly smiling while still doing annoying work.

  It’s just that I wanted to test out all the new room designs, the different combinations of monsters, and to challenge adventurers. That made me stop. Would creatures who start delving into my dungeon rooms—should I call them adventurers as well?

  They have their own sub-dungeons. They are, of course, small, more like regular dungeons from the outside world, but I never even contemplated calling them adventurers for delving into those dungeons. How could I not call them adventurers if they started to delve into the dungeon rooms, especially when I opened up the upper floors to basically every civilization?

  The fact was clear that the upper floors were getting sparser and sparser in population. Soon, there would be no recommended path, and the people who fought against those monsters would disappear.

  The current number of adventurer children who delved into the upper floors was small. I would need ten times the population to keep sustaining the upper floors, and I could only get those from my other worlds.

  This would cause a lot of conflict, and it was the main reason I hadn’t done this. But eventually, I would have to, and that eventually was going to come much faster than I wanted it to.

  In the end, I think that yes, even my creatures should be called adventurers if they started to delve into my dungeon rooms properly.