CHAPTER 184 - JEST IN TIME: BEWARE, DON'T CLOWN AROUND IN THERE!
🙞❤︎🙜
My original plan had been to use the [Curious Cloth Contraption] that I could use to turn raw [Fiber], an item that randomly appeared when cutting grass, into [Cloth], but Fengying nixed the idea since the White Tiger clan derived most of its wealth from silk. I didn’t want to rock the boat.
Also, when I raised the question of giving presents in return, Scholar Wu told me not to give more since the [Diamonds] had been more than enough, and adding to it would just burden Prince Baiyu’s family.
However, when we were talking about it, I jokingly mentioned the [Wondrously Whimsical Workshop], and my apprentices begged me to let them see it.
How bored were they?!
I did as they asked and temporarily replaced a [Rice Mill] with the requested building. Everyone in my household recoiled when they saw the monstrosity I had unleashed.
[Wondrously Whimsical Workshop:
Come one, come all! Enter a mysterious world in which your unwanted items are turned into treasures!]
The workshop building looked like a circus funhouse and the front was designed to look like a clown’s face, with large, colorful swirling patterns for its eyes, a bulbous red nose, and an open mouth ringed with yellowish square teeth as the door.
Lifting the striped red and white cloth covering the entrance, I took a peek inside and then smirked at my apprentices, gesturing for them to go inside first.
Kharli was the first to enter.
“How cute!” Kharli exclaimed.
That triggered the crowd to all rush inside, and they saw a very normal-looking large square room with wooden walls. In the middle was an enormous wooden table with a glass dome on it that covered half a dozen colorful, elaborate contraptions with tons of small moving parts. I racked my brain for a long time before I remembered the correct term for them. They were Rube Goldberg devices.
The normality of the room decor was unexpected. Of course, in the game the player just clicked on the buildings and didn’t physically enter, so I thought the interior would also be circus-themed. Instead, the space inside was colorful but restrained and tasteful compared to the tawdry exterior.
When a player clicked on the building in the game, a circus-themed interface popped up where one could load items and choose from one to eight levers to pull up, down, or sideways. Pushing the [Start] button would then make the player’s items disappear and a new one take its place.
It was inevitable that people tried all sorts of lever combinations until it was proven that the outcome was random.
The [Wondrously Whimsical Workshop] was theoretically a recycling machine that turned trash items into sellable ones. For example, [Burnt Food] could be loaded into it and turned into one of the hundreds of items the workshop made. In reality, the building was so overused that when one tried to sell its products, either in the player auction house or to the NPC stores, one was rewarded with exactly zero coins.
In this world, it could only be used as a source of entertainment since I doubted people would actually want to buy stuff like [Bottle of Sand], [Bag of Seashells], [Paper Coin], [Grey Stone], [Ant Eaten Bread], [Empty Capsule], and so forth, though there were a few rare items that might be pretty enough to keep such as the plushies, key rings, and figurines.
“Okay, here’s how it works. Put some items from my bloodline inheritance here.” I went to the part of the table that had the leaf-and-flower-themed Rube Goldberg device and dropped [Burnt Strawberries] into the chute below it. “Kids, help the others by putting the junk inside. This building takes the junk and turns it into… you’ll see.”
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
I grinned at the others, not hiding my glee at what was to come.
“Now pull the lever any way you want.” Demonstrating that the levers beneath the table could move, I placed them in the Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, and Right positions. “When you’re satisfied, press this big red button.”
Everyone waited with bated breath.
A marble dropped into a tiny wooden bucket that fell on its side, triggering a spring. The spring's force rotated wooden gears, which turned a wheel. The wheel tugged on a string attached to a lever, which tipped over a cup of water. The water poured into a funnel, filling a small weight. As the weight grew heavier, it pulled down a pulley, releasing a ball. The ball rolled down a track, hitting a series of dominoes. The last domino nudged a tiny wooden car, which rolled forward and bumped into a lever. The lever swung upward and struck a bell, ringing it loudly.
A few of the others screamed and jumped back in shock when a clown doll popped out of a concealed opening beneath the table. The sound of hysterical laughter came from above, no doubt from hidden speakers.
Laughing merrily, I took the gift box the doll had in its hand. The clown popped back into its hidden compartment, and I said to Kharli, “Feeling lucky? This is the prize.”
I handed her the brightly wrapped box.
Unlike children from Earth, the people here valued paper, so they didn’t tear the wrapping. We all waited patiently as Kharli painstakingly removed the box’s paper covering that was printed with colorful clowns.
Kharli’s brow furrowed as she turned the item over and over in her hands. “It’s a… [Piece of String]?”
I burst out laughing. “Sorry, better luck next time. Half the time, the machine’s ‘prizes’ are junk items.”
Kharli pursed her lips, but Mo and Lari turned to me with sparkling eyes and expectant expressions.
“Here’s the stuff. Help the others and don’t quarrel, okay?” Putting down a dozen buckets of burnt food for the kids to use, I circled the table to check what was on offer. The device I had set off was painted with flowers and leaves, while the others had interesting dragon, rocket ship, octopus, pirate, dinosaur, robot, unicorn, and clown themes.
Grabbing a bucket, Lari put a piece of [Burnt Dough] in the chute below the dragon-themed device. “I’m next!”
What followed was a time of flashing lights, ringing bells, clown laughter, and the groans of disappointed players, punctuated by cheers from time to time when the prize turned out to be something good.
“I got a tiger toy!” The lucky Haoran held up the plushie for everyone to see.
“I want one! Why do I keep getting junk?!” lamented Yinuo.
Fengying let them play with the machines for the rest of the morning, until she made the staff leave to prepare lunch, promising that they could return after the meal to play some more until dinner. The kids and staff got so addicted that they returned to playing the junk game after the evening and after the kids left, the adults made a party of it, bringing chairs, tables, food, drink, and musical instruments to mockingly accompany the clown’s ever-present and annoying cackling. This was helped by the discovery that the machines could be operated by adding back the junk items it disgorged, which I think was a bug, but it was harmless, so I ignored it.
Deming got hooked on the game, obsessively playing the pirate-themed part of the table for hours at a time, his eyes red and glowing with gambling fever. Yinuo told me that Fengying had to drag him away from the table at dawn.
The same pattern of behavior continued for the rest of the week. I was supposed to put the [Rice Mill] back the next day, but it took six whole days for them to finally get bored of it.
An unexpected and unwelcome result of my unadvisedly letting people use the [Wondrously Whimsical Workshop] was the sudden proliferation of clown-themed items in the house.
Lari even suggested that we ask Muchen to paint a clown on our front door!
***
“My lady, are you sure there won’t be a demon there this time?” Scholar Wu peered worriedly at the map I was holding.
“I’m sure! It’s just a forest shrine I want to clean up.” I turned to the flying carriage’s driver and pointed at what I thought was the proper location on the map. “It should be somewhere around here. Please look for a landing place nearby.”
The temple was roughly twenty minutes away by flying carriage if my guess was correct.
“Yes, my lady. I’ll show it to the others.” The driver took the map and went off to consult the drivers of the flying ox carts that we would also be using.
Scholar Wu, Fengying, Deming, and half of the staff were coming with the kids and me to help with the temple restoration. The Commander of the Ancient Hill Forest’s Tiger Spirit Division was also coming with us, along with a few guards. We made quite a sizable party, and I used my inventory to bring along as much food, supplies, and cleaning tools as Fengying thought we would need.
“Let’s go!” My step was light as I walked to the carriage with Scholar Wu and my apprentices. “We’re gonna have to work hard today.”
“Are you sure there’s nothing dangerous there?” asked Scholar Wu again.
I entered the vehicle and settled down on the plush seats. “I really think it will just be a simple cleaning-up errand. The Harvest Goddess’ temple should be a nice and peaceful place.”
And so we set off on our next fun adventure.