Candy Shop

It was once more tea time with the pixies. They gathered around excitedly as Violet set everything up. First, she had to summon a few mason jars then she added some black milk tea powder, put the lid back on and then shook it up well before placing it in an especially sunny spot. That was harder to do on the second floor due to the tree coverage, but still not impossible. Then she summoned a few strips of cloth to spread out as a blanket before creating several varieties of sweets.

Jasmine and Daisy squealed in delight before flying around excitedly, clearly happy about the feast laid out before them. Violet had some concerns about feeding them a diet of sugar, but she also wasn't really sure what to feed them that would be appropriate. From what little she had been told, they were used to drinking dew off of tree leaves after it rained and foraging for berries, nuts, and mushrooms. She had included a few of those as well, but the pixies weren't overly eager to eat those when there were cookies and iced carrot bread to munch on.

Oh well, Violet wasn't exactly their parent, they could sort it out for themselves. She had work to do. Removing the coin pouch from her belt, she loosened the strings and pulled out her inkwell, a goose feather quill pen, and the most recent drawing she had made of the dungeon. Quite a bit of progress had been made over the last week, even if it was just on the first floor.

For one thing, the first floor tribute room was finally being properly utilized. She had ended up deciding on an old-fashioned candy store theme for it. While she had initially been throwing around the idea of making it something nature-themed to fit the meadow theme of the first floor, she had struggled with thinking up something that felt fitting for it. In the end, she ended up coming to the conclusion that it didn't have to fit the floor's theme. She would only ever have one official tribute room, after all.

She had decided to decorate the room with shelves to line the walls, tables in front of those, and baskets to fill the tables. Then she would use large barrels lined up in rows to fill the middle of the room. While it would have more of an appropriate vibe for a candy store if there were colorful candies to fill the various storage containers in the room, that wasn't quite how things had ended up. Instead, the idea was for the tributes from adventurers to be placed in the barrels and baskets. It was a bit of overkill to have so much storage space for everything, but Violet figured it would likely be needed in the long run.

Tributes couldn't be absorbed unless the dungeon was completely free of non-dungeon entities. When there were more floors in the dungeon, it was likely that there would be times when adventurers would camp out in the dungeon as they spent weeks traversing the many floors trying to climb as high as they could. That could result in the tributes piling up and then anything less than this might seem underprepared instead of fitting as it would right now.

A lot of research had to be done in order to furnish the room. 10 DP was spent on researching the shelving and then 70 MP was spent on fourteen shelves. The same costs applied to the tables that were placed in front of the shelves. Then 2 DP had to be spent to research straw from grass before another 4 DP could be spent on researching the woven straw baskets themselves. Since each table could hold ten baskets and there were fourteen tables, 280 MP had to be spent on the baskets. Still, that was hardly the most costly [Item] used in the room.

The wooden barrels cost 20 DP to research, but 640 MP was needed to create 64 of them. They were lined up in rows next to one another just like the ones that would hold loose individually wrapped candies in a candy store. The barrels would be doing most of the work when it came to storage, though, so it was fine that nearly an entire week's worth of morning mana had to be spent on them.

Since the room would otherwise be too open with green grass and a blue sky, Violet also had to spend some DP on researching an extra large canopy and mana on putting it and some stone brick path in. The canopy was the most expensive dungeon points-wise at 50 DP, but it only cost 25 MP for one large enough to cover the entire area of the room. With the addition of a 10 MP square of stone brick pathway, it was almost as good as an indoor-style room, but it was still a bit awkward. Still, there wasn't anything more that Violet could do about that.

Of course, just putting a bunch of storage in a room and connecting it directly to the hallway outside the entrance was hardly enough to make it clear that the room was meant to be for tributes. So, 90 MP was spent on wooden signs to place throughout the room and just outside it. They each read

"Please leave your tribute here before continuing your adventure."

That wrapped things up on the mana front, but Violet was hardly going to leave things at that. In order to call it officially complete, she had to spend another 235 DP to set the room theme and to make it always midday and sunny with the temperature and humidity reflecting the weather. While most of this wouldn't be visible through the canopy, it did make it so that the room was lit up to some extent, making the contents visible even without a magic light or torch.

Thanks to David making an extra trip to the dungeon in the daytime, Violet had nearly 1,500 MP to spend over the last week instead of a mere 1,400 mana points. Well, she had more than enough mana at night time, but that was the amount she had available to spend during the day time when there weren't adventurers preventing her from improving the first floor. So, that meant that, after she spent nearly a week and a half in the tribute room, she was able to work on other rooms as well.

One of the minor things Violet had gone out of her way to work on was the koi pond room. It was pretty good as it was, but she wanted to add in the lily pads and lotus flowers she had received from Theodore a while back. Why she had put it off so long was a bit complicated. She likely could have scraped together the 8 MP to apply them to the room long ago, but every time she had the mana to do so she had conveniently forgotten about it, until now anyway. Still, they were certainly a nice addition as they made the pond more colorful.

From there, Violet had prioritized building new [Monster] fields. The two empty 8-Meters by 16-Meters rectangular rooms had already had 100 MP spawners installed in them, so this was a rather cheap matter to take care of.

The first room she had created she decided to name the dandelion meadow. Since she had removed the late-stage dandelions from the flower hunt challenge room, this was where she decided to recreate the effect. 40 MP on basic slimes and then moving one of the basic slimes from the wildflower meadow, reducing their numbers to five, easily filled her quota for the room. Well, she could have placed ten basic slimes, but she didn't want to overdo things and cause the adventurers to be overwhelmed. Besides, she could always put some [Critters] in to add to the ambiance later on.

6 MP was all the dandelions and late-stage dandelions cost her. Then 285 DP set the room's theme, made it midnight with summertime weather patterns, slightly windy, and made the temperature and humidity reflect the weather. It was super simple, but Violet still found it quite lovely as it made the effect of the dandelion seeds floating on the wind that much easier to appreciate.

The second [Monster] field room was named the misty meadow and was a bit more complex, but still fairly simple compared to some of her other projects. Instead of basic slimes, Violet splurged an entire 50 MP and 125 DP to make five new chameleon slimes for the room. The only other room that she had utilized them in thus far was the hay meadow, but she felt their unique camouflaging skills would work well in this room as well.

As she wanted a nice pop of color, Violet spent 12 MP to apply long grass, allium roseum, butterfly weed, and chicory flowers. This created a nice mix of green, pink, orange, and bluish-purple from the grass and flowers. Most rooms with multiple flowers were more like a rainbow of colors, but this was more of an intentional combination that Violet felt paired well together.

In order to complete the room properly 200 MP had to be spent to research foggy weather effects. The price was a lot higher than it really should have been, but Violet could only assume that was because she only had water as a [Base Resource] and not water magic to base the weather effect on. After spending 150 DP to set the room theme, 50 DP to set the time of day to dusk, 25 DP to set the weather to always sunny, and 10 DP to make the temperature and humidity reflect the weather, it had only cost 50 DP to make it very foggy. That meant she had to spend four times as much just to research the weather effect as the highest setting for fog instead of a more normal amount like when she researched the windy weather effect. Still, it felt worth it since it gave the room a unique effect she hadn't used before.