I was now 81 floors deep. Quickly, I reconnected with my dungeon and checked if anything had gone wrong, but nothing had. Then I looked inside to see if I had managed to get the correct skill.

  What greeted me was a skill called Space Push: Rank D. Not exactly the name I was expecting, but I guess it’s time to test it out a bit.

  This was going to be strange. Slowly, I loosened my hold on Hold Location while gradually increasing the usage of Space Push. We dropped a bit as I hadn’t quite gotten it correct, but soon I was only levitating thanks to the new skill. Then I started to push it more, and I started to ascend toward the sky.

  I then tried to move back and forth, up and down, and in every direction possible—and it was possible. It took a lot of mana, but it was manageable. I kinda wanted to do more perhaps see how fast I could really go.

  Unfortunately, that was all the testing I could do before things started to get bad for my inhabitants. I contemplated making a dungeon rule to help with all of this, but that would take too much mana. It would also not work the best.

  No, I needed the skill to dampen the forces caused when I moved. Fortunately, a lot of research had been done on this long ago, but my Academy had been putting in effort to make it more understandable and even develop some skills that I could perhaps take inspiration from to create my own skill.

  As I was expanding the 82nd floor, most of my free time was spent on this. We were also close to finishing up the second layer of the outer defenses, and then work on the third layer would start. The problem was that if there truly were so many ranks above diamond, it would mean that the space inside would not be enough for all the floors.

  So currently, there were a lot of people trying to figure out the best ways to cut apart the defenses to increase my overall size. One thing was clear—we were not going to be doing this before I reached the next rank. Having less weight would be a good idea, as the Space Push skill would need more mana to accelerate me.

  It took the Academy’s best mathematicians about a week to figure out my current top speed with space push. They had little to work with, as I couldn’t really test anything out, but I could give them the approximate mana usage and how much I could still increase it when I did my tests.

  The results were not that good. It would take about 100 years to make it to the nearest solar system, and that one was not a good candidate. There were only two planets there, both gas giants.

  It was strange to think that even in our solar system, there were planets that were basically entirely made of gas. I wondered if any of them would have life and what it would look like. Could there really be patterns to collect even there?

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Fortunately, there was an easy solution to this problem—I just needed to increase the rank. So during the next breakthrough, I did just that, getting it to B-plus rank. It took another breakthrough—me finishing up the 83rd floor—to get me to S-rank.

  Now, when we did the test, the time was about five years. That was better, but still not good enough. So, for the first time, I decided to push a skill in S-rank.

  It took me nearly everything, but I did manage to get it to SS during the next breakthrough. Now, when we ran the tests, it would only take me about a year.

  During all this time, I would be suffering from slow suffocation, but we had also been able to run tests on that, thanks to Rafe. He’s been working on how to survive outside me, and it seems like there are methods to sustain him a lot longer than we originally thought.

  That also seemed to indicate that the more powerful probably wouldn’t need any planet to support them—they could do that themselves. This was a scary thought, because what could a person do when they had reached the higher ranks?

  Now, they couldn’t do much to comparable planet-core ranks, but I was certain that even a diamond-ranked adventurer could destroy a moon that didn’t have a developed core. Could those people near the end truly just destroy planets even with developed cores? That would be scary.

  All of the dungeon rooms I was going to make were done. Now every floor up to floor 76 had dungeon rooms the last floor the 75th one has over 750,000 rooms. Now that was fun to make.

  It would most likely take the adventurers longer to reach the end than it would take me to finish the diamond rank. Perhaps I would have even set up everything else, gone into hiding, and actually finished my first diamond-ranked dungeon room floor. It would be kind of awesome if they didn’t have to wait, but some of the try-hards would probably make it before that.

  I was also basically done with the reward world. There were still a lot of details left undone, as the winners could choose some of the features, but the floor now looked quite interesting. It kind of looked like the hexagonal shapes bees made for their colonies. The largest world was in the center, and the land areas got smaller and smaller the further to the edges of the floor you went.

  The floor itself was my biggest in terms of land area. The entire floor was 541,000 kilometers in length, 406,000 in width, and 48 kilometers in height. This was now split up quite a bit, but there was so much space that even the tenth-place winners would end up with quite a big world.

  While the first bracket would only have a prize for the top 10, the second bracket would have a prize for the top 50. There were a lot more organizations than civilizations, so this just felt like a good balance.

  I, however, wanted to wait a little bit longer because I needed to wait for a good opportunity to reveal this competition. A part of me just couldn’t stop myself from messing with some of my creatures.

  When I finished making the 85th floor, I finally decided to take the plunge and turn the dampening spell into a skill. When I looked inside myself after the breakthrough, I found exactly what I was looking for. Dampening: Rank C.

  Immediately, I activated it to find that the cost of keeping it active was reasonable. Then I ran tests, and it was clear that it was working extremely well. None of my inhabitants even felt as I moved, although there seemed to be limits, and I certainly needed to get this to S Rank.

  During the expansion of the 86th floor, the opportunity finally came. The ant nations and their council were preparing to request me for another world. Just as they were finishing up and starting to vote in and—I was certain this was going to pass—I triggered the quest notification, and absolutely everyone in the dungeon looked down towards their necklace.

  When they looked at the quest, they would find a new competition, with the prizes being new worlds or large hideout/hub stations. Ant faces couldn’t express much, but they could still express themselves. The annoyance and utter disbelief in that room were magnificent to behold.

  Now I had a lot more images to use for the new coins, and this wasn’t the only place where I was able to get a lot more excellent faces to use for future coins. What a wonderful time.