Milk & Butter

Tobias was just as wary of upsetting the dungeon master as Matthias. So, they ended up leaving a much nicer tribute for Violet than they otherwise would have. Violet ended up with three silver coins, a potion of healing, potion of stamina, and a potion of mana. This gave her silver as a [Base Resource] as well as a higher tier of potions for her [Items] list. Of course, since she didn't have a stamina potion base in her [Base Resources], that also gave her a nice boost to her DP. 

This brought her total up to 183 dungeon points, which was a relief, but all too easily spent. Violet walked to her hay meadow room and requested to set the theme for the room.

[Would you like to set the theme for this room? This will cost 150DP. You will no longer be able to change the room's theme and all [Items] added to it in the future must match the set theme, but upgrades will be unlocked for the room.

Yes or No?]

Violet selected the [Yes] option, bringing up the next system prompt.

[Is the current theme correct?

Theme: Hay Meadow

Yes or No?]

After selecting [Yes] once more, she noted that she now only had 33DP left. This wasn't much, but it was enough to set the temperature and humidity to reflect the weather. While Violet hadn't chosen a specific weather or sky option yet, it did still help the room feel more real. Instead of having a sunshine-filled room without any feeling of heat radiating from the sun, it now felt like being outside on a nice sunny, spring day. Of course, it was likely Violet would still change the weather and time of day later on when she had more dungeon points to spare.

Violet knew it wasn't realistic to always set such options for every room she'd build in the dungeon. However, she hoped that some of the rooms in the future wouldn't be for the outdoors either. Maybe she could even have something akin to a luxurious manor or a mine full of colorful crystals and beautiful ponds full of fish? Both were unlikely to need any weather or sky controls. Violet could see temperature or humidity controls still being useful since a damp cave or a chilled indoor space that mimicked air conditioning could be fun to play around with.

Sure, a dungeon was meant to be a place to help adventurers grow, learn, and earn treasure while protecting the dungeon core. However, that didn't change the fact that Violet would also have to live here for the rest of her life. If she was going to be stuck in one place for so long, she might as well make it an enjoyable place to live.

Violet finally arrived in her new 16 meters x 16 meters square room. So far, she only had a large, circular 10 meters deep hole in the middle of the room. However, Violet wouldn't be able to do the research to put what she wanted in the room for a while yet. So, she spent her entire mana pool on a new 50MP spawner.

The time must have gotten away from Violet as David and Alice showed up not much later. Violet had to wonder if this too was an effect of the dungeon. At first, she had felt like there was too much downtime and was often bored. However, now, it was like time flew by and she barely noticed its passage. Perhaps this was another way the dungeon core helped to protect its dungeon master? Being left alone for eons was likely to drive most humans crazy, so making the passage of time less noticeable was likely to help preserve one's sanity.

David sighed as he put the aluminum container of milk and ceramic butter pot down by the tree in the wildflower meadow room. Theodore had chewed him out after his recent visit to Violet's dungeon. Apparently, she had casually mentioned his money concerns, which had gotten David in trouble since he shouldn't have mentioned it to her. While David could understand where Theodore was coming from, it was still frustrating.

Violet was too gentle-hearted for her own good and Theodore was worried that David was taking advantage of Violet by even mentioning how his punishment was affecting him. As such, Theodore had demanded David purchase something extra nice for Violet and never mention anything to her ever again. Granted, buying the milk and butter from the locals had created some goodwill between them and David.

A kind man named Gregory had even agreed to give David and Alice free lodging in return for David teaching his son, Henry, swordsmanship in the mornings. This solved a good bit of David's concerns, for now, but he'd still need to find a proper job to tide him over until the adventurer's guild could finish being built.

The adventurer's guild's HQ had already sent a few people over to check out the area. The construction had even started and the foundations were starting to be built for the new building. However, construction could take a while and they still needed to hire a proper guildmaster and receptionists. 

David was, apparently, likely to be given an instructor's role in the guild. He'd be training new adventurers and helping with rank advancement evaluations, when necessary. This was supposed to allow him a good bit of freedom with his afternoons left free for him to continue training Violet while a few mornings a week would be spent teaching classes on swordsmanship and dungeon safety.

Part of his new job would also require him to report information on Violet's preferences and any issues that cropped up with her dungeon. His position as an instructor for Violet was not a common occurrence at all, which made him a valuable asset to the guild. Most guildmasters had to rely on what little information was reported by adventurers and whoever was hired to map the dungeon that year. 

That meant he was guaranteed a long-term position in the guild and would easily be able to relocate to live in Millstone. David was sure that this was exactly what Theodore wanted. Being forced to uproot his life in Elesfield and move was already a bit frustrating. However, it was even more annoying that he wouldn't even be able to sell his previous home until his initial one-year contract period expired.

He'd have to insist that Theodore allow him time to sort things out after that point, since it was all but guaranteed that he'd be blackmailed into renewing the contract. Of course, selling his home wasn't something that David actually wanted to do. It was where he had raised his daughter, where he lived with his now-deceased wife, and he was quite attached to the place. Even if he'd likely earn plenty of money once Violet's dungeon became more developed and would be able to afford to have a nice new home for him and his daughter built, it was still a hard thing to accept.

Violet was, of course, delighted to see what David had brought her. Now that she had butter, milk, eggs, flour, sugar, vanilla, water, salt, and wild yeast as [Base Resources], there was relatively little she couldn't recreate sweets-wise. Violet didn't necessarily plan to always have sweets for challenge rewards, but she definitely felt it was fitting for the first floor since she was trying to build it as an appropriate floor for younger adventurers.

As Alice had successfully completed the jigsaw puzzle the last time they had visited, she was excited to start working on puzzles again. However, David had to fail the slime parkour challenge first. Honestly, Violet was starting to wonder why he even kept trying when his aging body was far too stiff to easily jump the distance. However, she said nothing as he attempted the challenge each and every single time. Who knows, maybe he'd successfully complete it one of these days?

As David dragged himself up out of the water, Violet commented

"Maybe you'll have better luck on the other challenge I set up? It only requires you to capture five slimes and put them into a fenced area and you get candy apples as the reward. If Alice participates, you could even get two candy apples for completing it once."

Well, that was Violet assumed, anyway. It wasn't like she had seen anyone complete the challenge and she couldn't see the reward prompt. David hadn't helped Alice with the jigsaw puzzle either, so it could really only be left up to speculation. David nodded before asking Violet to lead the way.

"It's nice to see your rooms are no longer empty. Looks like you even used those berries I brought you right away. Those and the apples should sell pretty well. It'll be winter time soon, so it'll be impossible to get fruit outside of dungeons. Even when these things are in season, it is difficult to get fresh fruit without living near an area that naturally produces it. I bet that alone will increase traffic to your dungeon."

Violet wasn't sure how to feel about that. While it was good to have more adventurers so she could earn more mana and dungeon points, she didn't want a ton of people in the dungeon right now. It would make it difficult to build since she didn't have a second floor to work on while the first floor was busy.

Since Violet hadn't been there to observe Tobias's party, this was the first chance she had to observe someone trying to catch her slimes. It was rather amusing for Violet to watch David almost catch one only for them to slip right through his fingers. Alice had a slightly easier time as the slimes seemed more interested in being playful than fleeing. Violet had to wonder if Alice just had less of a dangerous aura and didn't seem that intimidating to her slimes.

When a slime jumped down a rabbit hole to escape Luna's clutches, Violet couldn't help but think that was exactly the problem. The slimes didn't seem to have any way to actually see, but they did seem to be able to tell when someone was an actual threat or not. While Violet was all for children using her dungeon as a safer alternative for training, she wasn't sure she liked the idea of children being brought along just to make the challenge easier. However, there wasn't much she could actually do to prevent it, so she had to hope that those who entered her dungeon weren't evil enough to do such a thing.