Chapter 20 - Breaking Through To The Surface 

To somehow get up to the surface I was faced with various different possibilities. I could, as I had done before, abandon my dungeon and somehow travel up to the surface, only to build up my dungeon again. It was a possible solution, but definitely in the last place amongst the others. 

Another plan would be to stretch my dungeon so far that it would be able to reach the top and bottom at the same time. This would of course need some time because I would have to spread my domain all the way up and stretch out my dungeon. A problem with this plan would be that the entrance down at the dwarven town would end up leading into the 7th zone, which was too risky and unfair. 

My last, and most promising solution, if it worked, was to spread my domain up to the surface, just as before. Then I would reposition my zones to be lateral in their position rather than horizontal. To allow all entrances to end up at a fair zone I would design a teleportation pad which would also allow me to forgo spreading out each and every zone. 

The only problem was, how would I ever get access to a teleportation pad. I, of course, already had some ideas, otherwise, I wouldn’t have considered the solution, but all of them were quite vague. 

The newfound knowledge about enchantment, magic, and runes, together with my high intelligence would allow me to advance quite fast in this sector. Sadly though this alone would surely take too long to award me with a decision, so I went back to my nature. 

Every time I absorbed any creature or technology I would instinctually know how they were made and how to replicate them. I could thusly use the biological teleportation of a creature with this ability and adapt it to my research. 

With a plan in mind, I got to work. While passively researching and learning about the topic of teleportation and experimenting around with runes and enchantments I searched for a fitting creature. To do this I planned to both, hire a monster hunter to bring me any creature with teleportation-like abilities and lure in some creatures myself. 

I bore some more tunnels out into the surrounding cave systems and began to create a large portfolio of different creatures. Over time I slowly adapted my bait to better fit to creatures of the teleportation trait, which meant shadow mana and earth mana together with the rare chaos, space, and time mana. All of them used the teleportation abilities in different ways, shadow mana used the shadow realm and shadows themselves. Earth mana creatures used large amounts of it to change their position. Chaos mana creatures simply altered their fate and space mana monsters warped the space, while time mana creatures stopped the time. 

All of their methods were vastly different, but all contributed to my research progress. Slowly, over months of hard work, effort, and lots of mana I developed a teleportation prototype, that then developed into a finished and tested product. 

I was able to, using earth, space, and shadow mana, together with specific runes and even constructions, create a stable teleportation pad connected to two immovable locations. The teleportation took quite a large amount of mana but got less and less the longer I worked on it. 

Two and a half years after I began experimenting on the pad I was finally finished. A lot of things happened in-between. An elite few of the dwarfs and draugr broke through to the sixth tier. The Tier 5 Ysgardian Dwarfs evolved into Tier 6 Dwarghts, master shapers of the earth. On the other side, the Tier 5 Shadow Draugr evolved into umbral Draugr, talented in the arts of shadow and darkness magic and rune crafting. 

This allowed them to create two wonderous settlements. The Dwarfen smithing city is named nobifabarar and the Draugr citadel is called noctumbral. Both were formidable settlements housed by thousands of citizens and manned by hundreds of guards and soldiers. 

Nobifabarar saw quite a bombastic rise in trade, crafting, and commerce over the years, and the dwarfen metalworking goods were rumored to be the best. On the other side, the military power of the draugr was told of in horror stories told to small children, though even they conducted trade. The black market in the draugr city was bustling with people and weapons, armors and tools were improved with the power of runes.

Overall the area surrounding my dungeon saw an exponential rise in inhabitants, even some other settlements had begun to spring up around the tunnels I dug, in the search of teleporting creatures. I was astonished to count a grand total of 50 thousand people surrounding my dungeon and was blown away by the high average tier of 4 to 5. 

I would have to make sure to expand my dungeon in the coming future or somehow figure out another method. Though first I had to install the teleportation pads and adapt the dungeon to its lateral layout. 

Over the coming month, I first introduced the teleportation pads, which allowed delvers to skip floors they had already completed and opened up the lower floors for the weaker parties. They took the new luxury with a lot of interest and were loving it. Most didn’t even notice the changes I did to the zones to allow my dungeon to break through to the surface. 

After roughly 20 to 25 years underground I finally was able to see sunshine again. I was sad that I didn’t arrive at the place I started at, but that was quickly washed away by the beautiful scenery. 

I opened up into the top of a hill, protected by a lush forest on three sides and bordered by a plains biome on the south. To make my entrance more visible I constructed a building around my dungeon, my more powerful mana even allowed me to spread my dungeon quite a way into the free air. 

Now, in place of just a hole in the floor, I had a large teleportation pad inside a stone Pavillion. Though there was still a hidden entrance that allowed me to balance the mana density and created a sneaky little back door for any of my spies. 

With access to the surface, I of course wanted someone to explore the surroundings and defend them. To do this I again took a look at the first-ever attacking unit I designed and tweaked them a bit. The minicugas - Nargacugas were altered a bit to be more stealthy and to fill their weakness to frontal assault and straight-up fight I created a new creature with them as the basis. 

Now I had the Barioth, a dark-furred wyvern-related creature. Similar in looks to the nargacuga but furred instead of scaled and with tools of destruction instead of scouting. To allow me to use them even underground and within settlements, I tweaked them a bit. 

The creatures were now able to transform into their humanoid forms. The Nargacugas looked similar to the narcullians, just more human, with only some scale patches and slit irises hinting of their monstrous origin. On the other side, the barioths, transformed into large humans with heavily developed canines and a large amount of black hair, as well as slit eyes. 

Leading the scouting and stealth group of were-nargacugas was the Tier 5 peak Lygacuga. Ordering around and strategizing for battle was the Tier 5 peak Lycbanth. Both of them were too able to transform into humanoid versions, they were just more powerful in everything they needed to be and specifically created for what they should do. This would allow them to even beat creatures of the next evolution. 

With a way to the surface secured and my scouts out, searching for signs of life, I went back to the problem of the crowded dungeon. If I introduced even more delvers through the entrance at the top I would definitely get into problems, so I desperately searched for solutions. 

Ideally would be if I was just able to allow more visitors to enter while not losing any space or having to invest in more creatures. 

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The solutions to this problem came to me after going through the failed experiments for the teleportation pad. During a failed run I accidentally split up the space into two parallel parts, instead of just warping it. 

After looking at it closer I asked myself if I was maybe able to stabilize the additional space and somehow teleport people in there. This would allow me to multiplicate my dungeon and allow for a larger number of people to delve the dungeon. 

Sadly, I was not yet able to stabilize the instance later into the zones because of the strong souls, dense mana, and large space. But at least I could get a load of the first some floors. 

Now every instance would be able to hold up to 500 individuals, which allowed me to create five of them. The extra space was only able to be applied 5 times to the first 5 zones and the last one only with great difficulty. 

Though not everything was as good as I wanted it to be, I still had to partially pay for the creatures within the instances and had to expand a large amount of mana to stabilize the instances. And additionally, I wasn’t even able to get all of the mana I got from kills inside the instances. 

The Instances together with my mines and teleportation pads were costing a fortune in mana daily and were the main obstacle to fast cultivation. Though if I deactivated even only one of them I would lose even more of the precious energy. 

Luckily I was freed from my sad thoughts by the report of one of the were-nargacugas. They had seen a large group of humanoids traveling towards my dungeon and had overheard that they came here after detecting the spike in mana-density. 

I didn’t have to wait for long because the caravan arrived at the entrance within a week and build their camp just outside of the Pavillion. 

With the arrival of a sentient race to my topmost dungeon entrance, my rein and revenge on the surface could finally begin!!!