The competition came to an end, but my mind was mostly elsewhere. For a long while, I focused fully on the competition to go through all that had happened. I did so because I needed to make sure the points were all correct, just in case.

  After a week of doing this, I was certain we had the correct winners. The competition was over, but I had yet to announce the winner, and everyone was getting restless.

  One of the ones who was really restless was Rafe, because he now had about 100 children, and he hoped he made enough of an impact to get a reward of enough land to raise all his children.

  “Do not worry, my guardian. While you fell a few spots, you managed to stay in the top ten, getting the ninth spot. So, do you want to go over what features you would like?”

  A large smile blossomed on his face, which now looked like a human one. “Yes, I want many lakes connected with rivers. One side to be mountainous, the other flat with lot of forests everywhere.”

  He continued to speak to me about his dreams of what kind of place he wanted to have as his home. There were a few features I found interesting, like a few deep lakes with an underground section completely filled with water, and a few high peaks with cliffs that looked over a lot of the landscape.

  It would be easy enough to accomplish, but would take a bit of time, as he wouldn’t be the only one who will want changes. He went over his gotten points but never once did he want ore veins or some precious plants. Rafe just wanted to make a beautiful home for himself and his children, so I decided to give him that.

  The rest got a less personal announcement. They would have features they can choose from a list that cost certain amounts of points, that they could add into their new homes. The lists were quite extensive, with even biome imageable and nearly every type of creature, and you could even choose the difficulty of everything.

  I was certain that some might choose to turn their new land into a hunting ground, but I guess we will see. It would be quite interesting to see what choices would be made.

  The organization leaderboard winners were the expected ones. The Runners Guild won, the other two of the big three also receiving their own homes. Mostly the clans were the ones who won the other spots, with the Bug Guy even getting his own place.

  The Beast Clan just fell under the cutoff point, so they wouldn’t be winning any land, but they were close, even with so little time to establish themselves. I was certain they were going to receive a high spot in the next competition.

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  In the nation leaderboard, the ants pulled out a close victory. The second spot going to the Five Spires tribe, the third to the Kobalts, the fourth to the Orcs, and surprisingly the fifth spot to the Dwarfs, who managed to climb up the leaderboard. What surprised me was that the small folk like halflings and gnomes managed to get to the 10th spot, claiming their own world.

  So from the adventure species world, only two nations managed to get their own world. I could also see this competition was a bit unfair to the creatures and civilizations that lived under the water.

  Of course, I didn’t have many of them as I still hadn’t made new adventure worlds for them. So, I was still waiting to use the patterns I had collected, but perhaps I will fix this problem when I’m finally at a more stable state of my life.

  It was quite funny to see how everyone started to argue internally about what to buy for their new world. It actually got so bad I had to implement a timer, otherwise they might argue forever.

  To my surprise, literally no one decided to purchase any of the upgrades that would make their world even a little bit dangerous. It seems everyone even the ants wanted a safe home base with enough resources that they could be self-sufficient if needed.

  I wasn’t going to make them choose anything else, even if their choices were a bit too boring for my liking. At least some of them had good enough imagination to make wonderful places.

  One clan even turned their room into a huge mountain pass that would see quite a lot of snow, but in the summer it would be quite beautiful. I think I will make more of these kinds of places in the future—they just look so nice.

  When everything was said and done, everyone was once again surprised when they got the notification that it would take about 3 months to finish everything. Now, if I was fully focused on it, I could do this a lot faster, but I needed to make a lot of specific changes, and of course, I had bigger things in mind. As I was quite certain I was going to be getting the skill that I was going to need for the future.

  The breakthrough came easily enough. The floor guardian was a really powerful lion. As for these floors, they truly needed to be powerful and diamond ranked. Then came the skill portion of the breakthrough, and so I started to go through all the mental gymnastics that were needed and I was certain were going to give me the skill I wanted.

  I do not know exactly how long it took, but eventually, I came out of the breakthrough and realized almost two months had passed. That was basically the entire time expanding one of my new floors would take.

  Reconnecting with my dungeon, people were still curious about their new world and when they would be finished. It seems I need to put a bit more of me to finish everything on time, but everything else seemed to have gone as expected.

  It was hard to have needed to wait so long, but I wanted to confirm that everything was alright, but now I looked inwards to see if I had gotten the skill I wanted.

  Inside is Outside: Rank F.

  I hadn’t seen such a low rank in quite a while, and I also noticed that this skill didn’t have the opposite effect, Outside is Inside. But I did focus on the other way around more, because that was the actual important thing to get right.

  Immediately I tested it on Rafe.

  “Father, what’s happening?” he immediately asked as I saw that he was starting to leak mana.

  Thanks to my skill, he was now considered to be outside of me, which was exactly what I needed. With that, I should be able to make the planet inside of my dungeon be counted as outside of me, but still inside my influence. That should help upkeep me, and with enough of them, even if none of them are diamond rank, it should allow me to survive.

  Right now, Rafe was the only one who suspected it, but soon many would know that I managed to get the skill needed for our long-term survival without us needing a diamond-ranked planet.

  A heavy weight seemed to lift off my core, and the future seemed to be a lot brighter. It was all thanks to my creatures and adventurers who made me their home. I could not be more thankful to them.