Pov Unknown

  "Master, that signal I’ve been trying to get a lock on—it's not showing up even a little bit anymore. I think whatever experiments they were running, they either ended it well or figured out that someone might see it."

  "That was the weak diamond world core signal, right?"

  "Yes, although I’m not sure it is. Our devices should have easily been able to detect that, and it is in a region that is way too young to have any of these types of cores. I’ve also looked, and there doesn’t seem to be any rogues with bounties who are strong enough to do something like this, so I really have no idea what’s going on."

  "Well, let’s give it some more time and mark that region as a bit of a higher priority, so the sweeps go through there more often. If anything else happens there, we’ll know."

  "Yes, Master."

  Pov Dungeon Core

  With another breakthrough completed, I started work on the 93rd floor. I couldn’t believe that I was getting so close. Right now, a lot of my free mind went into making a lot of expensive materials, so for a long while I didn’t have extra mana generation to do anything.

  The thing was, the plan to have planets in my floors was brilliant in terms of survival, but the real question is how we were going to get those moons, worlds, and perhaps even stars to be in those floors without me claiming them.

  The answer was: a lot. And I mean a lot of magical teleportation devices that would be surrounding the entire celestial object I wanted transported into one of my floors. That’s where a lot of my resources have been going into. I’ve even made a lot of monsters to help with the work, but a lot of my creatures were also helping, especially the ants.

  Fortunately, we didn’t have to cover the entire celestial object. There could be distances between the devices, they didn’t actually have to touch the celestial objects—just needed to surround it. So in theory, we could do it far enough away from the sun’s surface to not have to worry about the devices melting.

  It would also take a lot of mana to activate it, and the entire celestial object needed to be inside my territory, but with how big I could expand my territory, taking even planets the size of this world would not be a problem.

  I was still a bit too weak to get gas giants and way too weak to get stars, but perhaps eventually I would become strong enough. And who knows how much stronger I will get when I reach the next rank.

  The world was still panicking, not really understanding what was about to happen—many worrying that I was going to destroy the world by what I was about to do.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  This required us to release more information about the outside world—and I mean beyond the solar system—and some more truths they would have taken a while to figure out. This stopped the panicking, and I even decided to share what dungeons actually did. While many had suspicions, I was now able to confirm what really happened to the world.

  The general populace started to calm down when it was made clear that the same kind of destruction that happened before wouldn't follow. And while the world would most likely be a lot more dangerous place, the very strongest could once again get even stronger to balance that out.

  It takes me about five months to expand a floor. Now it was time for another breakthrough. Once again, I increased my gravity control skill, getting it to S rank which felt good enough. Perhaps I will increase it more, but there were other skills that I needed to increase as well.

  During the next breakthrough, I increased the shield of life, getting it to C-rank. This meant that I was now expanding my 96th floor.

  The instincts that wanted me to make proper floors were starting to get quieter and quieter. I think if I reach the end of this rank, this would be the point where a dungeon would actually be fully mature—like adventurers who could be called adult in every meaning of the word.

  The cost to break through started to get to a point that I would actually have to wait longer to gather enough mana before I finished expanding the current floor. It was strange to experience something like this, but I did have stores of mana-abundant materials ready to be absorbed if I needed to speed things up.

  Honestly, I would rather wait because with the next breakthrough I would actually be the deepest dungeon in this world.

  Time moved a bit slower at this time, but only because I had finished expanding the floor and was just waiting around, gathering mana. I had made enough materials that it would take ten years for the current workforce to finish making more of the devices that would help transport celestial objects into my floors. We already had enough to try to take a moon-sized celestial object.

  With the next breakthrough, I got the Shield of Life to B rank and started to expand the 97th floor. Right now, however, I didn’t put too much focus on expanding the next one because it was time. Messages went out, and in those, there was a clear timeline: in one week I will be leaving this world.

  Some still didn’t believe that I was capable of this, but I started to pull back my territory so I would only be occupying the main sphere and the outer defenses. It was not nice to do this, but with the skill, I wouldn’t be hurting myself.

  During all of this time, I was surprised at how many people chose to enter my dungeon from the outside world, even knowing that they might never return. What was even more surprising was how many diamond ranks chose to do this—approximately 10% of the entire world’s diamond ranks.

  The preparations took a lot of concentration, but we were done with them a day early. So all that was left to do was wait, and then I would start to manipulate a lot of my skills so that I could leave safely from this place without hurting any of my inhabitants.

  I would still be connected to the world's will and be supported by it, but to a lesser degree because I was so far away. This was all to run experiments and see if our plan was actually viable.

  While everything seemed like it could work right now, we didn’t actually have any concrete evidence that it actually would. So without any fanfare—although there were a lot of people watching outside the dungeon—I triggered my skills one by one.

  First, I activated dampening as strongly as possible so everyone could survive what’s to come, including me. Then I used gravity control to stabilise the gravity inside the dungeon and to lower its effect on me from this world.

  The shield of life went up so we wouldn’t lose atmosphere as we ascended. It was finally time to start using space push. We weren’t moving, even though I was now putting quite a lot of mana into the skill, the reason was hold location was still active.

  So I started to relax my control over that skill, and slowly the two skills that were working against each other switched who was winning, and ever so slowly we started to move upward.

  All of this was taking about 40% of my mana generation. Now I released hold location altogether, and we started to move up faster, finally clearing the surface completely and continuing to move upwards towards space.

  The connections I had with my dungeon gateways outside my territory snapped—I guess they couldn’t sustain themselves while I was moving—but for some reason, I could still feel the dungeon gateways, which means that if I wanted to, I could establish a connection with them later on.

  That was a bit of good news, and I continued to push myself further upwards—further and further towards the edge of this world. I was really doing it. These would be the first steps towards complete freedom and the future ahead.