“Did we just get experience without killing them?” Colt asked, just as Lacey asked, “Is this really the first time we didn’t kill anyone?”

“There was the one time I let Hughe go,” Colt mused, trying to figure out how they didn’t know the best way to get experience.

“He didn’t kill anything that time though,” Lacey worked through it with Colt, “so it doesn’t count if they don’t kill anything.”

“What about the first time when he almost killed us all the way down here?” Colt posited, his cupcake materializing as he asked for it.

“That was a dungeon wipe before he withdrew,” Lacey pushed Colt aside to try to scroll to something that would make it make sense. They’d gotten more experience, but they didn’t have access to whatever would tell them how much experience they’d gotten.

“The point is that we got double experience,” Colt wiped a bit of frosting from his cheek and stuck it in his mouth.

“Double of what?” Lacey slammed her palm on the edge of the pedestal. “How can we know if it's cost-effective unless we can run the numbers? It’s impossible!”

“Lace,” Colt pushed her out of the way and ordered them both another cupcake. They were hoping that, after they ate 10 of the cupcakes, they would be given an upgrade that was more economical. Ordering the cupcakes had given them access to some of the ingredients of the cupcakes, including the cupcake papers that they’d used to make the cup and paper punch-out puzzle. “Let’s just work under the assumption that double experience is good, and dungeon wipes are bad. We at least made enough credits to buy a few cupcakes, right?”

“Maybe, but I just can’t tell,” Lacey took her cupcake and sulked over to the table to eat it. “We don’t want to be doing a bunch of things that aren’t efficient or don’t make money.”

“Did you reset the rooms?” Colt asked, finishing off his first cupcake with a large bite so that he could grab his second one.

“No,” Lacey peeled the wrapper on her cupcake back carefully. They’d used the cupcake wrappers to cover the cups because it didn’t cost as much as real paper. They didn’t have access to real paper anyway yet, and there weren’t books anywhere on the pedestal. They hadn’t been able to use the used cupcake papers because they were gross and not very malleable, but Lacey would be sucking on that paper for an hour rather than waste a single taste of the chocolate cake.

“I’ll do it,” Colt was dripping crumbs of his cupcake on the pedestal that Ginger was avidly dusting even as the crumbs fell.

“And did we still make credits even after we have to reset the rooms?” Lacey wondered aloud. While Colt was happy to scatter crumbs around, Lacey ate her cupcake carefully so that she didn’t miss out on a single morsel.

“Are you sure you didn’t reset the rooms?” Colt asked her, cupcake frozen halfway to his mouth.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Lacey replied.

“Then this way is the way we’re supposed to be doing it,” Colt smiled at Lacey, but he was so easily amused that she didn’t immediately smile back. “The rooms reset automatically. I’m pretty sure we didn’t lose a dime doing it.”

“Wait, really?” Lacey put down her cupcake on the table to squeeze between Colt and the pedestal and stare at the screen. Even the monsters had respawned.

“I didn’t reset them, and you didn’t reset them and…” he paused to flick to the room where the larger beetles had pushed the adventurers back. “Is that a treasure box?”

“It looks like a treasure chest,” Lacey agreed, watching as Colt moved the treasure so that it sat in the room next to them. As Colt tapped the treasure, the system told them that the treasure was a level 1 treasure chest. Colt was already half out the door to retrieve their prize. The thought that they’d get prizes as the dungeon hadn’t even occurred to Lacey.

Before Ginger could start dusting again from the frozen state that resulted from Colt moving things, Colt had brought the treasure chest into the control room. Lacey moved her cupcake quickly so that he could set the chest on their table. They stared at the chest, wide-eyed, until Ginger reanimated enough to clap for them. They looked at Ginger and then back at the chest.

“You do it,” Colt waved at the chest.

“You do it,” Lacey rebutted, her nerves so tight she thought her hands would shake too hard.

“Okay,” Colt grinned like a kid at Christmas. He flicked the small latch on the front of the chest and eased the top open to look inside.

Lacey stood on her tiptoes beside the chest, her cupcake almost forgotten. “Is that a book?”

The chest was about 2 and half feet wide by one and a half feet wide and two feet deep, not that it was packed to the brim with enough treasure to justify its bulk. There were a few dozen coins of different colors and sizes, as well as a few daggers, and a big book that sat in the middle of it all. Amidst the coins were about a dozen different-sized locks with keys stuck out of them and a bundle of good steel springs that were worth more to Lacey than the coins. There were also two smaller chests that were each about 6” across, each with a brass plate with their names on them.

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“Please make that be a manual, please make it be a manual,” Lacey chanted, crossing her fingers on both hands while deftly not fumbling her cupcake.

“It’s not a manual,” Colt said, pulling the book out and staring at the cover with a frown. There wasn’t a title on the book’s cover, nor on the spine and when Colt flipped it open and ran his thumb along the pages, they could see that it was blank.

“A blank book,” Lacey uncrossed her fingers and took a bite of cupcake to assuage her disappointment.

“Maybe a diary?” Colt suggested, pulling out a small box of pencils that had been nestled underneath the book.

“Are those drawing pencils?” Lacey reached for the pencils eagerly. Lacey’s dad had threatened to stop paying for college when she’d changed her major to art, but she had still managed to fit in a few electives that her dad only scowled at. She had justified it as a necessary skill for an engineer, a degree she hadn’t completed after she’d lost her nerve about halfway through. “They are drawing pencils!”

“So, a sketch pad,” Colt mused, handing it off to Lacey, who put her cupcake down and wiped her fingers on her shirt before taking the book from him.

“A leatherbound sketch pad?” Lacey considered the thick book, with a frown. It had hundreds of pages, with the first half blank and the last half grid paper. “I get that it’s treasure for us and the locks and springs are great too, but this is a pretty hefty book for just sketching.”

“Grid paper,” Colt pondered. “I wonder if there’s a way to transfer dungeon designs from the book to the pedestal.”

“Probably only once we unlock the stupid thing,” Lacey tried to stay pessimistic, but she was excited about the possibilities of the book.

“At the very least, it’s probably unlocked real paper in the pedestal store, right?” Colt suggested, stuffing the last of his cupcake in his mouth with a contented sigh.

Lacey bolted to the pedestal to check, and they did indeed have a new section on planning materials for the dungeon. They had the steel springs that were stronger than the copper ones from before, and they had a variety of chests too. And the chests were practically free, like the system wanted them to use them. “Okay, yeah,” Lacey breathed. “This makes it worth it.”

Colt gave her a grin and pulled his smaller chest out of the trunk. Lacey pulled herself away from the pedestal long enough to grab her own small chest, but she waited to see what he got first. He tilted back the lid and pulled out what looked like a few small valves or plumbing pipes and some rubber tubing.

“Oh yeah,” Colt fingered the tubing like it was the second date. “The system approves of my little bootlegging endeavors.”

“What is that stuff?” Lacey asked, bemused.

“Technically, what I did to make alcohol shouldn’t have worked,” Colt shrugged. “The fact that I handed some raw fermented alcohol off to some goblin workers and let them finish it with some magic was what made Adam not want to tell Eve about it. With a little more hardware and a little more time, we can do it without magic, but right now what we’re doing should have killed a few goblins and made us all sick.”

“It did taste a bit more like cleaning solution than even a simple moonshine, but I wasn’t going to spoil the party,” Lacey shrugged and gave Colt a smirk. “I wonder what other things might work for us, even though we don’t quite have everything for it.”

“What’s in yours?” Colt prodded her to open her own chest.

Lacey cracked open the box and then gave a laugh. Inside the small chest was a whole stack of cupcake papers, at the bottom of which was a coupon for 100 clay cups. Underneath that was a small and simple lockpick set engraved with her name on each tool and housed in a simple leather pouch. Considering that Lacey had stolen every cup the goblins had made to make her little grid, this was a big win for her, or at least a way to pay back the goblins who were currently drinking out of buckets and ladles until the new cups dried enough to carry liquids.

“I guess the system approves of our puzzle room too,” Colt’s laughter pinged off their walls and for the first time in a long time Lacey felt like they were getting somewhere.

“I was thinking about how we set things up and I think we can do better,” Lacey fingered the lockpicking tools, flipping the flap of the leather pouch open and closed as she thought. “The puzzle room really slowed them down, but not as much as the mobs that drained their mana.”

“And they weren’t sitting there bored in the puzzle room like they would be if they were meditating to get mana back,” Colt pointed out, both of them going back to the pedestal to rework their design.

“The first few rooms were well-balanced,” Lacey nodded at them. “But they got overwhelmed too easily as the levels went up. If we want a treasure that’s level 2, we’re going to have to give them more grinding rooms.”

“Yeah,” Colt agreed, scrolling to copy a few of the first rooms. “Do you think they get bonuses or experience for doing the puzzles?”

“If they don’t, then they don’t have a reason to focus on the puzzles,” Lacey considered what Colt was saying. “But if the puzzles were what awarded treasure instead of what got them further in the dungeon, then we could give them mobs to grind experience on and puzzles to give access to treasure chests.”

“We were thinking that giving out treasure would make us broke, but there’s a reason we got a bunch of cheap chests,” Colt nodded to the table. “I don’t think we’d get coins as treasure for us when we get credits directly deposited into our pedestal for most stuff. Why go to the trouble of putting it in a chest just to have us pour it into the pedestal?”

They scrolled through screens full of new stuff that had been unlocked as they’d accessed their treasure. Colt was right in that coins and chests were cheap, while the trap mechanisms were expensive. When they did dump a coin into the pedestal, it had almost half the value of what they could buy them for, which was almost nothing. The coins were cheap, but they were made of useful metals that they could use. Copper was easily workable, and when they bought crafting hammers and equipped the goblins, their resourceful minions could make basic shapes. When Colt laid down to sleep that night, he did so on his bunk, now adorned with the small brass plaque that had been on his small chest. Lacey’s bunk, also similarly labeled, would have to wait until Colt got some sleep because they were both still nervous about sleeping at the same time. One hundred-year sleep was more than enough for both of them.