Pov Dungeon Core

  During the months when we have been under full siege, with no one getting in or out, the adventurers were starting to suffer. They didn’t have any problems with food or staying alive; the problem was with the economy.

  There was no longer a place that would purchase almost all the drops that the adventurers didn’t want, so they could make coin and purchase things they needed. And, of course, many of the industries that supported a civilization were now unavailable to them, which made some products quickly rise in price.

  If things continued like that, the entire adventurer population would suffer an economic crash along with many other problems. Already, a lot of adventurers were no longer going out to clear rooms to get loot because they couldn’t do anything with it. I also think that’s why the diamond ranks up above thought that I would eventually crack and fail—because I would be attacked from within due to civil unrest. Fortunately, I had a way of fixing it.

  It would have brought problems before, but My World was a wonderful skill. There have always been devices that allowed better teleportation or even communications and now I could find them all. They were mainly used for longer communications and teleportations, but they could also be used to break through interference like the signal-blocking dungeon stone, and even my own dungeon rules that stop teleportations and communications from happening.

  Once again, the powers of this world have underestimated me, as I have now located the devices and spies that are still in the dungeon rooms. I gave my go-ahead, and all the teams waiting moved immediately to capture these spies and deactivate or destroy all those devices, so no diamond rank could use them to get into the dungeon rooms. Some of them were very well hidden, but I took care of those ones personally.

  It took about a day to complete this task. Some even managed to evade capture for a while, but you can’t really hide inside the dungeon if the dungeon itself is hunting you. This caused a bit of panic, but the preparations were done, and it was finally time to properly address all the adventurers.

  It was a good thing that a few of the ant nations, especially those focused on technological advancement, figured out—thanks to their cooperation with the Academy—how to make more complex compute cores.

  That was the name they gave them—they were technology mimicking my quest crystal. All of it started with the stealing of the Guild Master’s skill crystal. It was mainly made of a crystal that combined a dungeon core and a few variants of mana crystals to allow for the enormous amount of saved skills that could be copied and not taken, unlike skill stones that were one-use items.

  Now I have three of them, and while I could make the large compute core myself, the inner workings were a lot more intricate to make and needed trial and error to properly make work. Fortunately, experts in the field have emerged over the course of the time they have tried to develop this technology for their own use.

  The quest crystal was already quite overworked, mainly because of the reward systems I’ve added to it, but now I have a dedicated compute core for the rewards and one to handle citizenship.

  The biggest problem was that the adventurers didn’t have a market to sell their more common drops. There were markets already in my dungeon, but the problem was that they weren’t accessible to the adventurers. I also didn’t want to make them freely accessible, which necessitated a solution from the outside world.

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  Travel was going to be restricted depending on the citizenship you had. There was already a bit of panic among the adventurers as the news spread about the arrests, and what didn’t help was me now making huge dungeon gateways in every hub station.

  Those world gates, because that’s what they were, they were connections between the different playrooms, or as I was now calling them, worlds, because it was voted overwhelmingly that calling them playrooms would cause even more panic.

  There would be special visas for merchants so they could more freely travel through the world gates, and of course, everyone would learn of my true size. There was no doubt in my mind that things were going to be tense for a while, but especially the ants would provide the necessary connection to civilization so the economy could work and so that the dungeon rooms would have access to established industries. These industries would support them in exchange for the huge supply of meat and valuable materials that could be obtained from the dungeon rooms.

  Of course, every world will also get passports and visas, but a large portion would not be able to delve the dungeon rooms. This was mainly because there were way too many creatures in the different worlds that I had, and they would simply overwhelm the current size of the dungeon rooms.

  I could easily see a future where, in the later floors, I would actually make more versions of upper floors the same way I have done with the first 15 floors, as they had multiple versions of them available to be used.

  I did the final checks, tested all the systems, then every quest crystal made a unique sound of a dungeon-wide alert. Not only did I make the information section of the quest interface available to everyone, but there was also a lot more information there now.

  Everyone also got an explanation of what has happened over the course of the last few days, a brief summary of the current siege situation, and, of course, the revelation of the different worlds and who inhabit those—and, of course, about the world's gates and the passport system.

  For the moment, I stopped almost all of my pressing works and focused solely on the dungeon rooms, as I wanted to experience and see all the reactions as they were happening instead of viewing them later.

  Their reactions were as varied as I expected them to be, but I was glad that I saw more acceptance than I originally thought would be possible. I only allowed myself one day of this break before I got back to work.

  It will take a bit of time, but already in the dungeon rooms and my other worlds, everyone was preparing to make first contact so they could start establishing trade relationships. That was also another reason why I didn’t want a large portion of my creatures to be able to delve the dungeon rooms. It would cause conflict, and we really didn’t have time for that because, during the siege, a conflict inside could be disastrous.

  At least that’s what I’ve been told, and I can understand their reasoning. I’ve also been recommended to start hurting the economy of the outside world as well. I’m still not completely sure that I want to do that, but Vivian's grandfather had brought a lot here, and with his industries making high-end consumables and other items, the forces outside were getting stronger and stronger.

  From what we can tell, the other powers were also planning on bringing more supplies here, as it was becoming clearer and clearer that this siege of theirs would take a long while. While they had some very good airships. Most of them need the trade winds to get here in a reasonable amount of time. From what we can gather, a huge number of airships were currently on their way here to bring a lot of supplies.

  They would most likely be able to then build the structures and devices that limited my territory above much more easily, which would make our other plans harder. It would help so many ways if the trade winds no longer slowed above this mountain range, so they couldn't build up their strength above so fast. They would eventually do it no matter what, but it would take them much longer.

  The problem was that by doing so, I would most likely crash the economy of the entire world. That would not really affect the four great powers, but it would affect ordinary people. Many would lose their jobs, and there would be a lot of suffering, as it would take time for markets to stabilize. There was already a huge shortage of rations around the world, which was causing a lot of problems, but this would cause even more.

  It took me a while, but on a wintry afternoon, I made almost all of the mana crystals in the mountains disappear that were causing the effect of slowing down the trade winds. To hide the fact that those were the cause, the sound of massive cracks and then falling rocks were heard for hundreds of kilometers as almost every mountaintop collapsed, causing massive rockslides.

  The diamond ranks easily defended their established compounds, but the entire terrain of the formerly known Eternal City-State was now changed. And, of course, the slowing-down effect of the trade winds slowly dissipated. I really didn’t like waging war.