The Dangerously Cute Dungeon Volume Two [A Dungeon Core LitRPG]

2.22 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.