Pov Dungeon Core

  Things were starting to get more and more interesting. The Academy was really pushing the edge of knowledge we knew and well, pass it. I guess that’s what you get when you have such a pool of talented people and give them infinite budgets to experiment and build whatever they want.

  Of course, they don’t know that they have infinite budgets—they think they’re working under restrictions, but I think that works even better.

  Just recently, they found out that light has speed and the exact speed it travels at. It also turns out that nothing can go past that without the help of mana. That was fascinating. We also learned more about the galaxy and the universe as a whole.

  Apparently, there are older sections where there are a lot more diamond or above-rank planets. They also found that we weren’t the only cluster of star systems. It took them a bit of time, but they were able to find and locate all 328 of them that seemed to occupy this universe.

  There seems to be a boundary beyond that, where there isn’t just emptiness like around planets and solar systems, but something else. Light takes time to travel—a lot of time because of the distances—but they are pretty sure that, that boundary is something that even eats light, and if it does that, it will also consume matter.

  It was weird to think that we were trapped by that, but the place we had been given to work in was incredibly large. For a moment, I thought perhaps we were inside a dungeon, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

  Mana has revealed quite a lot, and the latest telescope—the one they built to study that boundary, which literally cost more than the last three floors to make—has revealed tiny mana dots beyond the void. Perhaps other universes, perhaps something else… we were still too weak to understand.

  That’s why I was pushing ever closer to the next breakthrough. But before I made it there, another huge breakthrough happened.

  One of my creatures—a simple squirrel that fought and survived all the way up to diamond. She even fought in the war. One of the things that allowed her to survive so long was that she was capable of moving her position with her gold-rank talent.

  Up to this point, she believed that she was simply pushing on air, but during the war, there were plenty of instances where she was seemingly able to move in the absence of that and when other spells or skills were trying to keep her in place.

  She was already a part of the Academy, but she wasn’t a genius or anything—just doing her part while using her interesting and often unconventional insights to her advantage in climbing towards the top of the academic world.

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  Well, now she had confirmed that she wasn’t pushing on air but on the very fabric of space itself. She could move as freely outside the atmosphere as she could inside it. Currently, they had just finished making a spell that kind of mimicked her talent. It was a huge breakthrough because it was something that could possibly help us achieve the speeds needed to actually travel in the universe.

  The satellite outpost itself had expanded quickly. While at first, it was at best a two-story house, now it was the size of a village, if not bigger. There were also nearly 1,000 people up there, doing experiments and continuing to build out new devices to understand the place we called home. That’s not to say that I wasn’t doing my own experiments.

  One of the things that I don’t have much use for anymore is sub-dungeons. Now that every world, if they wanted to, could use the dungeon rooms, there was no need for them. But they did give me an interesting idea.

  I needed a planet—a world core—to sustain myself. It needed to be outside of me, but what if I could flip it? What if I could put into my floors a proper planet with a proper world core and that it would be treated as me being on that planet?

  Now, of course, that couldn’t fix the problem of me needing a diamond world core to sustain myself when I breakthrough, but there are some interesting observations and calculations that have come to light. Multiple lower-ranked world cores could achieve the same effect as the current platinum core of this world.

  The number was 24 beginning-ranked world cores. If I took into account the jump to diamond, it would probably be a few hundred beginning-ranked world cores. But even in this solar system, there were five such cores—if I didn’t count the large gas planets, which also had a core. The sun did as well, but I felt like fitting an entire sun into my floor would be a bit too much to ask.

  Of course, there was no way to combine world cores, but if I managed to nail down a skill that allowed me to have things function like they were outside of me while they were inside, then I could technically have entire planets on multiple floors that would combine their effects to sustain me.

  In the end, there were a lot of assumptions made about this, and we needed more testing, but there was already the beginning of a mission to go to the moons and then the other planets to do more research and confirm some things.

  If things worked out and I was able to get enough skills—the correct skills—and rank them high enough to matter, I might be able to get moving, cut myself from the connection to this world, and then find a way to move to other solar systems to collect their planets so I could sustain myself.

  A lot of what ‘ifs’ there, but hopefully, we can manage. I really didn’t want to become a planetary core—it just sounds so boring. Yes, watching how people acted and how civilizations rose was interesting, extremely so, but making worlds and tinkering with patterns was even more so.

  It seems like I have definitely made my decision. Even if the chances of my survival after that are low, I think this option is a lot better than just using myself to upgrade this world’s core. And, of course, there is a backup plan, as there always should be.

  The other dungeons certainly don’t seem opposed to becoming this worlds core—in fact, I believe they are looking forward to it. So, when I hopefully find a way to actually leave this place, I will give them some of my knowledge so that they can hopefully reach diamond rank as fast as possible. And if needed, I would just return.

  There was one big ‘if.’ When this world core reaches diamond, everyone in the galaxy and universe will be able to see it. Would that mean that whoever or whatever lived on those planets would come here? That was something I was wary about. While the distances are great, magic is the great equalizer of all—even interstellar distances.

  Hopefully, the plan to collect planets works, and then we go into full hiding, making ourselves impossible to be noticed. There were already a couple of teams working on that in the Academy. But the continued collection of the planet is a pattern, and others could use it to find us.

  Perhaps the sub-dungeons would become useful. Would there be a way I could use them to forcefully upgrade the planets I collect? Just think—a few hundred diamond-rank planet cores powering me.

  That fantasy made me snap out of it. Yeah, I was a long way off from even reaching the end of diamond rank, and already I was envisioning way too much. Time to get back to reality and start working—hopefully towards that future. But that was a long way off and would probably take tens of thousands of years to reach. But I guess, as an immortal, it’s good to have long-term plans.