Mel and I spent the rest of the day fixing the place up. We didn't do too bad of a job, all things considered. And we barely considered murder-suicide more than three times over the whole twelve hours of daylight. A new record!

We focused on clearing out the front of the property, since I knew we'd be expanding that. It meant a lot of pulling up weeds and brambles and breaking up the ground to make it a lot better for construction. Mel was sure to point out that I shouldn't be using my sword for this, but since I forgot to get a rake or hoe or something, it was what we had.

The sword wasn't going to break, anyway. It was made of finer stuff than this godforsaken sun-baked and arid dirt.

She was almost right, though. I was doing perfectly fine, until I wasn’t. There was a particularly nasty bit of buried stone that the sword got snagged on, and I almost snapped it in two.

After that, I went back to just using my hands. Wasn’t worth losing my sword over.

Mel's smug smiles behind my back were just something I'd need to learn to live with.

The stone showed up first, and so we set about expanding out the front of the building. It meant I got to use a sledgehammer. I'd never used one before. Sure, others had made it look a lot easier, but it was quite a rush anyway. We first laid our new brick where we wanted it, getting it lined up in two straight-ish rows about my height away from the current wall. I wasn't sure if the roof would be able to take that expansion, but we'd find out.

When the walls were in place, I used the building's menu to finalize them.

It was so cool to watch them go from haphazard stacks of crumbling stone to actual walls. The roof expanded out over them, although it creaked loudly as it did. A few more holes showed up, but nothing that couldn't be patched later.

"Simple as that," I told Mel, to which she answered by handing me the sledgehammer.

I focused on knocking out the old front walls while she reconfigured the door.

The heavy two-handed hammer felt a lot like the first weapon I'd picked up when I started adventuring. I thought I would be able to wield a massive fuck-off hammer and smash my foes to little bits... but those things were heavy. It took a lot out of a person to swing it around hard enough to damage someone, and I was constantly winded. That's when I decided to go to swords. Or, well, Duncan decided for me. He'd humored my attempts with the hammer, but it became obvious I was a liability. And liabilities weren't allowed in Duncan's operation.

Thinking of Duncan warmed up my blood, and smashing the wall down became a lot easier. I almost enjoyed it, truth be told. Wished it was really his smarmy little face I was bringing a giant weapon to bear against, but I could settle for a little imagination for now.

Once I had a bunch of money from my successful eatery, I could just hire an adventurer to go kill his ass.

When the old wall was down and the door moved, Mel and I both worked on patching up the holes in the walls. I wasn't opposed to having windows, but without a considerable amount of money, we weren't getting glass. Even shitty second-hand glass was expensive. And so, having open holes would just let in vermin and beggars, and we didn't want either of them in our restaurant if we could avoid it.

Patching the walls was even easier than making new ones. As I approached a section that needed repairing, with the appropriate menu window open, it just told me how many [Cut Stone] to deposit. I'd relay that to Mel, she'd help me ferry them over, and then the menu would let us know when it was enough. Accepting the repair was even more fantastic than building the front wall.

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Did I really want to become a chef? Building things seemed way cooler.

But yes. I did. Everyone had to eat. And adventurers loved eateries. Not just because they needed to eat, but because certain foods gave stat boosts.

Mystic Falls might not have been much now, but as soon as it had a fancy eatery serving up specially curated status effects for adventurers... it would mean we'd eventually rival Kinon for places adventurers wanted to be most.

Anything I could do to destroy Duncan's little empire.

It was nearly nightfall again before we were done with the walls. But I felt a thousand times better that night, and slept better than Mel.

And in the morning, we did it all over again.

And by we, I meant that I fetched breakfast, paid for some new supplies (a carpenter was willing to put together five sets of tables and chairs for only 50 gold total, which seemed like a steal for how expensive stuff was in this town), and got right back to work on the repairs.

We used the leftover [Cut Stone] to make a dividing wall between what would eventually become the kitchen, and what was the dining area. Then we used the [Cut Timber] that was finally delivered to patch up not only the roof, but the floor as well. There wasn't nearly enough of it to do an amazing job with either, but we did what we could.

Honestly, I was surprised with the results, though.

When we installed the [Iron Bars] as a sort of fence out front and extended the roof over it, the roof didn't cave in. And there weren't any new holes, either.

And the floor creaked a lot less as well, which was saying something considering it groaned more than Mel did about having to do physical labor.

By the time the sun set on that third evening, we had a surprisingly functional building on our hands. Once the tables and chairs were delivered (the menu told me it would be another day and a half, which was fine) and once we got the kitchen all set up, we'd almost be ready to open this thing up.

"Did you figure out who the local building inspector is?" Mel asked, casually, over another disappointing dinner. This time it was some cabbage soup stuff that smelled and tasted like literal ass.

"The who what now?"

"Building inspector. You can't just make modifications to a building like this and not get it inspected."

"Why the hell not?"

Mel put her bowl down on the floor in front of her and leaned forward to glare at me. "Seriously? You're the one from the human cities. You should know this stuff."

"Yeah, well, if it didn't have to deal with stabbing monsters or saving damsels, I didn't really pay attention."

"Right. Great job, Harps." She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling under the irritation. "Buildings need to be inspected. Otherwise the menu won't let you open it up. Take a look."

I did as she instructed, and low and behold, I couldn't set the eatery as open. There were a few other issues (the menu prompted me that I needed at least an oven, a preparation area, one table and two chairs, and a basin to wash dishes in, not to mention a name for the place) but "Building Inspected - NO" stood out like a giant slap to the face.

Ass.

"So, what, we just figure out who the person is and they make sure we did everything right?"

"Yeah, I guess. I think they also make suggestions for what could be done better, but I'm not really sure if you have to do what they say."

Double ass.

"Alright," I said with a huff. "I guess I'll go ask Phelps about it in the morning. And I really hope they don't need us to like... do anything else. Because this is already way more expensive than I thought."

"Told you," Mel said, although the words were muffled, since she'd just taken a giant mouthful of cabbage soup.

I didn't say anything, mostly because she was right. But I was also pretty sure we wouldn't survive the rest of the week on the 30 gold pieces I had left in my inventory, especially if we needed to make more repairs.

I needed something to go right, for once.

But of course, it didn't.

It never does.