While Moriko set out to practice and train on the sixth floor, Mordecai and Kazue set themselves to playing merchants and hosts. Ricardo was not available to represent his interests immediately but several of the merchants in this particular caravan had their own interests and could begin trading while Ricardo was indisposed.
Mordecai was pretty certain that someone had spread the word that the dungeon appeared to have a fondness for cute animals, because it looked like every exotic pet shop in the capital had been raided based on what was coming in. There was a wide selection of livestock as well which would probably be useful.
Exotic plants, spices and herbs, foreign fruits, a variety of mineral and metal samples, textiles and cloths, hides of rare monsters, various makes of weapons and armor including some more firearm models, insects, mushrooms and other fungi, more books and writings, one trader even had skyfall specimens, including a few samples of sky iron. Mordecai did not correct the terminology, terms like meteorite seemed to usually only matter to those who specialize in academia and the terms were clear enough and the merchant had the understanding to realize that it would be valuable.
There were far more samples of non-living things than living, but even seashells and dried fish were useful for the purpose of evolving their own versions of those species, and while the new and old ceramic pieces weren’t terribly valuable as materials, they were samples of craftsmanship and art. There were even some clockwork toys, and having the exact alloys used for certain springs and parts was very useful to have to shortcut their own development time for those materials.
Each trade gave them more resources, but they could only use so much mana for producing goods each day, and there were always delvers to consider. So they settled for only using half of their available pool for trade each day, which also encouraged more of the caravan to try their hand at delving.
Only a small portion of the merchants, drivers, and workers were inclined to try the combat path at all, and not many guards could leave the caravan for prolonged periods, so the eventual groups were broken down into sending 2-3 guards with each group of less combat focused personnel.
The rest of the people who were able to make time to explore the dungeon wanted to try out Kazue’s games and puzzles. Those who thought that they’d gleaned most of the tricks for the first floor from conversations they’d had with others they’d met along the way found themselves in for a surprise when they reached the point where the faeries were so very eager to be helpful. And really, the tiny fey creatures were doing their best, but unfortunately for the visitors that just made things more confusing.
After some discussion, Mordecai and Kazue decided to only let one group enter the combat path each day, and no more than three groups could travel Kazue’s path each day. The library level was the bottleneck for both, but Kazue’s had been specifically set up to handle up to three competing groups, while Mordecai’s version was set up to only cope with one group at a time. As rest both before and after the library was going to be the norm, it seemed best to just not have too many people crowding near the entrance.
They couldn’t actually stop more people from trying the dungeon if they really wanted to, there had to always be a path forward for those willing to take it, but as Mordecai pointed out to the couple of people who protested the limitation that didn’t mean that it had to be the same path. And they did have a third, very unpleasant and dangerous path available if they absolutely insisted on challenging the dungeon beyond the limits that had been set forth.
No one took him up on that offer.
Which, well, quite frankly he was rather glad for. Oh, he’d have let them do it if they insisted, in some ways he wouldn’t have had a choice. The only other option would be to let them violate the rules he and Kazue had established, and if you just let people break your rules without consequences then what was the point in having them?
Just the deals without Ricardo left the dungeon in weeks worth of debt to pay off in materials and goods as quickly as they could make them. Once Ricardo was available negotiations became more difficult. Mordecai had to dissuade Kazue from participating and giving her father sad eyes, he felt that would have been completely unfair (though he’d had no issues with Kazue using her adorableness or other tactics against most of the traders).
While Ricardo was probably an easy mark for his daughter, against Mordecai he bargained hard, there was no mercy to be had. And Mordecai enjoyed it, it made a good way to get to know the man. Hard but fair in business, and happy to relax and joke once business was done.
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Their negotiations came in short bursts at first, Ricardo only had a few free hours each day for the first several days after his marriage, but eventually they were able to make their way through agreements on all of the goods. The man had even made sure to bring bulk goods that the laganthros were going to need to advance their crafting.
This alone was going to take three weeks in the production of rare materials to pay off, but it was worth it. And once the bargaining was done, Ricardo was even nice enough to deliver all his goods ahead of time and collect his payment portions as they came due. Plus a gift of one finely made adamantine dagger. Mordecai would have been happy to trade a decent selection of goods for even a sample of the material, though he wasn’t going to even try and reproduce it until after they had their next floor established. The mithral had been bad enough.
There was only one thing this caravan had left them lacking: More rabbits. So Mordecai asked his guests to spread the word of an offer: Double the going market rate for live rabbits, and he’d pay the adult price for even newborns. Specific breeds didn’t matter, hares and other species were fine as well. Just like the dungeon needed external supplies in order for the inhabitants to craft things that weren’t part of the dungeon’s loot capacity, they also needed more of their most commonly elevated species in order to keep up with their growth rate. Rarity and uniqueness had the highest value, but it was not the only thing of value.
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While her paramours were busy with their business guests, Moriko started preparing herself for more combat oriented entertainment. The lake had been divided by a set of jagged stalactites and stalagmites, making passage between the two sides difficult but leaving enough space that the boss fight could be viewed from Kazue’s path, though a lot of detail would be missing.
The ice floes were easy enough to adapt to and she’d made sure to wear the boots that Mordecai had been able to enchant when they’d first bonded, so that part of the fight was going to be easy enough. The trickier part for her was coordinating with the inhabitants. As a contractor she did have a version of the empathic communication that the dungeon shared with them, but it was much more limited and required a greater amount of her concentration. So her focus for this period was to develop signals that indicated what sort of inhabitant she wanted to have attack the delvers and a target. Anything more coordinated than that was beyond the time limit they had, so her assistants would have to decide amongst themselves how many to attack with and which ones would do the attacking.
Given a day for the first three floors and a day each for the fourth, fifth, and sixth, Moriko figured she wasn’t going to see anyone for a little while, and that would depend on if the first group could actually make it this far. So for the first few days she trained hard while the negotiations were going on, then made her way back to their private chambers to get her well-earned playtime. She had missed them dearly and wanted to enjoy every moment.
Plus Kazue made the most interesting noises when Moriko put to use the toys she’d picked up from a very discrete shop back in the capital. However, Mordecai’s tickle-proof physique proved resistant to the sort of stimulation such items provided as the pleasure/pain threshold wasn’t as easy to play with. It all tied to his overall pain resistance.
So they teamed up on him to experiment and eventually worked out that while he was highly resistant to potentially negative stimuli, he could be teased with very light sensations. His senses were keen enough to react to faint vibrations and slight changes in temperature, so the threshold to make sure he felt something was much, much lower.
Her days turned routine far quicker than she’d have liked however; the mixed groups were not quite enough to clear the fourth floor. While the non-guards did also have combat training and some had experience dealing with bandits or random monsters, the constant pressure of making their way through a dungeon floor was much harder than a single brief skirmish or two.
Moriko did have reason to be hopeful however, Mordecai let her know that the groups that returned to the entrance were reorganizing and trying to figure out what was the best group of seven they could put together.
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Kazue did her best to completely ignore how preoccupied her parents were while she worked with Mordecai during their negotiations. She did her best to be the right sort of distracting for the men, making sure that her dress was just low cut enough to leave interesting shadows when she leaned forward to show her interest in what they were saying. It took a bit of coaching from Moriko to pull it off right, but Kazue felt safe and confident enough to practice this sort of pseudo-flirting now.
For most of the women, she instead focused on being innocently cute and sweet. Kazue wasn’t quite as successful as she might have been before meeting Mordecai and Moriko, since she wasn’t quite so sincerely inexperienced anymore, but it was still reasonably effective.
She felt relieved when her parents finally rejoined the world like normal people. It was nice to see them so happy though and they were cute together, they were practically inseparable. But it also made things a bit more boring for a while as Mordecai refused to let her mess with her dad’s head by using puppy eyes at him.
When that was finally done with, Kazue decided it was time to finally use one of the gifts that the royal family had given them. She wanted a tea party with her family!