Pov Dungeon Core

  Currently, I was feeling a bit weird. It feels like half of my life has been on a rush, and now that I am so close to the end of this stage of my life, everything seemed to have sort of slowed down—even if it hadn't.

  There were no longer any questions about me reaching the end before any other dungeon, and kind of, it didn’t even matter anymore, because my biggest worry was not being able to be a dungeon and being consumed if someone else made it to the end first.

  Now, however, I was pretty certain that if I simply cut my connection to my original world and its world will, the changes that would happen to that world would not affect me. The dungeon that triggered the making wouldn't be able to consume me for fuel. I would just be in space, and once the making would be over, I could simply reconnect myself with this world.

  Of course, a diamond-ranked world will would probably be a lot more conscious about what it does, so perhaps it wouldn't accept me—but that was another option. The first is to simply go to another solar system and do my original plan.

  I wasn’t going to abandon that, because it would be a stronger solution for the future. It meant I wouldn’t be tied down to this solar system. Also, it meant I could take a lot longer to advance.

  In the end, I think doing things as fast as I can has always been the way I do them, not because of necessity, so to say, but because it’s who I am. Slowing down has always been unpleasant, and my instincts certainly agreed with it even though I couldn’t even feel them anymore.

  I do not know exactly what the instincts are. They don't work precisely like they do for other creatures, especially adventurers, but I guess it’s just the part of our physiology to keep us alive at the start—especially because most of my brethren are quite unintelligent at the start.

  So they would need to rely on those instincts more, and no matter how much I disagree with most of what they have always told me, they would keep a more stupid me alive, even if the choices wouldn’t have been as optimal as I made them.

  It was also a lot harder to tell the time. I had the same problem when I couldn’t look outside of myself to see the sunrises and sunsets, and I kinda miss that certainty. Because of that, I actually commissioned—outside of my Academy—a quest to make a huge and extremely precise time device that could keep time for a really long time.

  Not centuries, not even millennia, but beyond that. That would actually go into my core room, that way I could always have a precise knowledge of what time it was and how much time had passed.

  It will take them a few months to finish, cause it’s gonna be quite big and complex, but we had that time, and I didn’t want to start the clock before I reached the next rank. It would sort of work like the making, where every time they reset the years starting from zero after to world reset. I think it would be a nice start for the next stage of my life to see how long it was going to last.

  The adventurers and creatures were quite nervous about what was about to happen, but so was I. For most of them, their lives didn’t change even a little bit, but many did decide to at least visit the entrance towns to see the space we were in. The reactions were quite varied, but most seemed to find the blackness and the stars beautiful—although plenty were quite scared.

  Basically, my floors were worlds, and every world was in space, so that didn’t change too much. It’s just the change of perspective that took a while to get used to.

  I have always admired how fast adventurers could adapt, and most of them didn’t even blink because of this change. If fact more and more talks were turning from our current situation and them being in space to wondering when the next large challenge would start to win new worlds.

  What I’m also quite amazed about is how many creatures are developing intelligence way before diamond, and it’s kinda getting to the point that it’s becoming a problem. My trait, intelligent-leaning evolution, truly was working miracles. Now, whenever a creature reached diamond rank, it was almost guaranteed that they would be, at the level of adventurers or near them in terms of intelligence.

  The reason why it's a problem is because species like that like to dominate their surroundings completely, which is messing up a lot of biomes.

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  It just means I need more worlds that are basically empty, where I could put such species who develop like this, so that they could have their own playground and wouldn't mess up other creatures’ development before they reach a stage where they could truly start to compete with others.

  Finally, it was time for the last breakthrough before the final one. Once again, I simply improved the skill inside is outside, getting it to B rank. With the calculations done, this should technically be enough that I should be able to survive—but we wouldn’t know before it was time to start collecting planets. Now I was 100 floors deep, and I could feel the next rank calling me.

  This time I needed to stop working on a lot of things and just focus on expanding and collecting mana, because to reach the end of this rank required more than I expected. It would take a year, but I suspected everything would go by so fast. It was still hard to believe that the centuries of my life that I have lived, and now in just one year I would’ve reached further than any other. It was exciting.

  The year moved fast, but it might have been my best year to date. Because I couldn’t do much, as I needed to save mana, I was able to simply observe everything that happened in my dungeon—and while nothing truly special happened, the struggles of the individuals were as legendary as ever.

  It was always sad to see someone’s struggle come to an end. Something that happened because someone pushed themselves too hard, and sometimes it was because they were truly unlucky. And those were the cases where I actually looked into stuff to see if some of the mechanics of my dungeon, especially traps, were perhaps too punishing for that area.

  It should have been tedious, but there was a reason why this year felt the best—it was just fun, simple pure fun, to fix some of the problems caused by me rushing through the floors. Changing some layouts to make things more efficient, making some things less efficient because there needed to be more struggle—in the end, the dungeon rooms were there to teach, not to kill.

  There’s also a sort of saying that developed over the course of dozens of decades, or perhaps it was more of a wise proverb: If you have more than one close call for one section of a floor, you need to go back one or two sections and do those until you won’t have multiple close calls when you try to push forward.

  This advice is basically said to everyone that tries to be an adventurer, and I am glad that many seem to be taking this into account.

  Of course, there are people that don't listen, and if they come to an end because they push themselves too hard, it is their choice to do that. I'm not here to handhold anyone.

  Then the time finally came. Yet I didn’t trigger the breakthrough immediately. I still needed to collect as much mana as possible so that I would have enough of a reserve to complete our goals.

  It took me 6 months to reach the point where I couldn’t store more mana in my core. Of course, I could endlessly keep making mana-rich materials to give myself an even bigger reserve, but I felt it was not necessary as I already had a lot of mana in reserve. So it was time, and with quite a bit of nervousness, I triggered the breakthrough.

  Immediately I was in the space of my breakthrough. This one felt different. First of all, the connection I had with the world was tenuous at best—almost ready to snap. Yet I needed to make a choice: either cut myself from the world and lose its support, or strengthen it.

  A moment of clarity hit me. There were probably dungeons who chose to cut that connection instead of embracing it. It was just that they starved to death because of that choice.

  It was tempting to choose the option to strengthen the bond because it had always been there, and I could feel how I could be truly connected to the world. It was trying to call to me, so I would join it and consume the other dungeons of this world so the world core could rank up.

  It was an easy choice. I completely ignored that connection and instead just cut it.

  Nothing changed for me. I was no longer reliant on the world. For my 100th-floor boss, I finally decided to use a dragon. Enough of them had been born that I now had their pattern, and I felt for the 100th floor it would be the perfect boss to end it off with.

  Then came the skill selection, and here, for the first time in a long while, I put everything I had into Spatial Expansion, bringing it to SS+ rank. This should help with my size problems quite a lot. I expected that perhaps something else might happen, but no. The next time I was conscious, I was back.

  The increase of a new rank always felt so good. I immediately reconnected with my dungeon and started the clock.

  Turns out that it had been four months since I entered my breakthrough. Nothing had happened that I would classify as wrong, but immediately I felt the drain of mana.

  I implemented the strategies Rafe developed for functioning outside of my territory, and immediately the drain of mana lessened quite a bit. I did some calculations and was pleasantly surprised to find that I had nearly two decades with the mana in my core, even while using all of my skills to move around. This should be enough to get plenty of celestial cores to start supporting myself once again.

  While I could start working on the next floor, that would be a waste of mana. Instead, I would be using my mana-rich reserves to expand the last 10 existing floors.

  The Space Expansion skill should give me enough that I should be able to fit multiple worlds into one floor.

  There was also the power that came with my new rank. First of all, having a greenish glow coming from my core was something I was not used to. I didn’t know if I exactly liked it. But I was also correct that this wasn’t such a monumental change like going from gold to diamond rank. This was more like going from silver to gold, a significant change, but not something incredibly huge.

  The closest star system to us was a long way away, but it was time to start accelerating towards it. This time, I was accelerating fast enough that even with my dampening skill, my creatures could somewhat feel it, but it was necessary. It would mean that I should reach that system in one year and two months, and hopefully there will be plenty of planets with celestial cores that I could take.

  Then I tried to expand the 100th floor and found myself utterly dumbfounded. I was expecting to be a little bit better at expanding space, but that singular moment of push accomplished something that would have normally taken me hours to accomplish.

  Something was off, and with all the excitement going around and the things I needed to do, I completely forgot to look into myself to see what trait I got.

  It was just two words, but they resonated with me so deeply that I instantly understood what they were. It seems that my space problems were forever fixed. Because finally, I got the trait that seemed to synergise with me the best: Expansive Space.

  Not only did it seem to make expanding space extremely easy, but I was so certain that it meant that my current floors could be expanded a lot further than I expected. I know if I was an adventurer, I would have a stupid and incredibly large smile on my face.