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2.4 Major Renovations

When Violet awoke, she was surprised to see she had a full 100 points of mana. While part of it had been from her daily regen of 25 MP, the rest had been from Camellia and Avorn's stay the previous night. It really did feel like she had lucked out by getting them to agree to stay in her dungeon for the cold season. Even if it was a mutually beneficial agreement, Violet was still starting to feel guilty. Maybe she could see about arranging some sort of gift for them?

Regardless, there was no time to waste! While the dungeon was still empty, Violet wanted to get started on renovating the first floor. While she often liked to see the changes in person, the amount of moving rooms around that she was about to do was going to be too much to be standing around on the first floor, so she chose to remain comfortably in the dungeon core room. Well, the stone floor wasn't exactly comfortable, but it was empty of [Monsters] and [Critters] that might otherwise startle her while she was in the construction view.

To start with, Violet had to move as many rooms and hallways as she could to the back side of the dungeon to make more space to move rooms into place near the entrance. She had to be careful to ensure there was still a path from the entrance to the stairs up to the second floor, but the rest of the rooms had no issues at all with being disconnected. Once she was done with that, she finally got started with arranging things the way she wanted them.

To start with, she moved the azalea hedge maze boss room to the front left corner of the dungeon. Setting that aside, she moved 10-Units of hallway to make an L-turn hallway off of the safety zone in front of the entrance of the dungeon. This was made to face the direction of the boss room. Next, she spent 32 MP to create a brand new 16-Units by 16-Units square room that she planned to, eventually, turn into a tribute room. She still wasn't sure what she wanted to do for the design of the room, but she knew that having the room right off of the entrance was ideal if she wanted adventurers to actually leave their tributes there.

Next, she moved 5-Units of hallway into place behind the new tribute room before spending another 32 MP to create another new 16-Units by 16-Units square room. This one would be for the altar room she needed to build for the goddess of love and beauty. She definitely wanted to complete the [Mission] related to it so that she could reduce the cost of evolving cute [Monsters]. Since she was hard-locked into that theme anyway, she may as well get some benefits from it.

Another 5-Units of hallway went behind the new altar room and then the garden meadow room was moved into place after that. The room wasn't really needed for rest so close to the entrance, necessarily, but it would work as a great hub for the first floor. Since it already had a four-way path inside the room, it only made sense to have four different entrances connected to it. Besides that, the plan was to have it connect to the boss room on the left side, so it would work as a great sign for the adventurers that they were coming up on the boss room so that they might be more cautious about continuing forward. At least, that was how Violet saw things, but the reality was likely to be different, especially considering the rather common discrepancies between Violet's view of the dungeon and how much the adventurers often struggled with things.

15-Units of straight hallway was added behind the boss room before adding a 10-Units by 10-Units roundabout. A 25-Units straight hallway was then placed to the left of the garden meadow room. However, Violet found herself in a pickle. She needed 3-Units of straight hallway to finish connecting the roundabout to the garden meadow, but she only had sections of hallway in multiples of 5. As it turned out, even if she already had the hallways, she couldn't move them in smaller increments without having that size of hallway researched first. Violet sighed as she spent 6 DP to research a 3-Units long hallway and finished the connection.

While Violet wanted to move the staircase room next to the boss room, she decided to leave it for last so that she wouldn't have to deal with the annoying sound of the dungeon system screaming at her that things would no longer be following the rules. Still, she rearranged the dungeon maze so that it would be able to lead people out to the right where the stairs to the second floor would later be.

The reason Violet wanted to move the boss room so close to the entrance was because she got the feeling that it would become annoying both for herself and adventurers to have to traverse an entire floor's worth of rooms just to move on to the next floor. Besides, the basic slimes weren't really a match for anyone who wanted to harm the dungeon. It was better to just skip straight to the boss room and see whether they could be defeated on the first floor right away. That would save Violet a good bit of anxiety in the long run while also making traversing the dungeon easier.

Moving on, 5-Units of straight hallway were placed to the right of the entrance hallway. Then the koi pond was put in followed by another 5-Units of hallway to the right. Next was the wildflower meadow room, 10-Units of straight hallway, and then the rainbow ball maze room. The next 5-Units hallway was placed leading behind that room and led to the slime jigsaw puzzle room. Then, another 10-Units leading to the left was followed by the hay meadow room.

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This created a pattern of sorts. The right-most rooms were all puzzles and they had [Monster] fields to the left of them. Meanwhile, the koi pond was safe for even locals to relax in and so was placed closest to the entrance. Violet hoped this would encourage people to come to the dungeon to fish, whereas they might otherwise avoid it due to it being too dangerous. Meanwhile, the rest of the right side would be filled with challenge rooms and [Monster] fields that were appropriate for both children and beginner adventurers alike.

Now that the first floor could be purely dedicated to Violet's goals without having to compromise for safety's sake, she planned to make the most of it. She'd have to wait a while to have enough mana and the opportunity to build new rooms for everyone to enjoy, but she was still excited about all of the possibilities. Rearranging the dungeon to prioritize the needs of those she wanted to draw to her dungeon was only one part of that, but she still took pride in her efforts.

However, that could only be one part of it. She still needed to sort out what to do about the slime parkour and floodplains meadow rooms. Since the slime parkour room needed to have an entrance on each side of it, due to the way the room was laid out, she decided to remove a section of hallway to the left of the garden meadow. Placing it in the middle between the roundabout hallway and the garden meadow, it left 5-Units of straight hallway on either side. This arrangement didn't seem too bad to Violet since it was likely that it would discourage those who were unprepared to continue forward, decreasing the odds they'd end up dying in the boss room or on the second floor.

As for the floodplains meadow, Violet decided to put in a 9-Units L-turn hallway to the left of the roundabout before placing the room behind the boss room. It might be inconvenient for the adventurers to have to repeatedly cross the river, but it wasn't like it was necessary to have a second entrance to the room. However, to make things easier for the adventurers, Violet did make sure to put the side with the pen for the slimes on the side with the entrance.

The slime parkour room and floodplains meadow were also a bit too difficult for the first floor. Too many people struggled for too long with the capture-the-slime challenge and the rainy weather in the slime parkour room made the platforms slippery while the midnight time of day made it difficult to see anything. Changing the floodplains meadow room was easy enough as all Violet had to do was remove the rabbit holes and network of tunnels. However, the slime parkour room would have to wait until she had enough free DP to spare.

That took care of most of the changes on the first floor. Violet couldn't help but note that without all the excess hallways and everything being spread out, it felt like there was a lot more free space on the first floor. It was even hard to say if it would still count as being half completed anymore, but, thankfully, it wasn't like the [Mission] rewards would be taken away once they were granted. That did suggest that she could just spam rooms on a floor to more quickly unlock the next floor, but she didn't really want to do that. The goal was to build a proper dungeon, not to just unlock floors in the fastest time possible.

Violet's next goal for that morning was to redo the second floor and rearrange the location of the stairs. The only problem was that changing it on one floor would cause the room to be moved on the other floor as well, which could cause issues with the system, so it would have to be done carefully.

First, she would have to move the rooms and hallways around. Taking inspiration from the first floor, Violet moved the flower hunt room to the front right corner, placing a 5-Units straight hallway to the left and behind the room. Then the blackberry forest was placed to the left of the flower hunt room while the raspberry forest was placed behind it. Next, another 5-Units hallway was placed to the left of the raspberry forest followed by the empty forest room. She planned to, eventually, put a challenge in the empty forest room, so that would create a checkered sort of pattern with [Monster] field and challenge rooms.

Even with moving most of the excess straight hallways from the first floor up to the second floor, though, Violet didn't have enough hallways to connect everything the way she wanted. She ended up having to use a 96-Units L-turn hallway to connect the staircase room and the dungeon core room. Even then, she had to spend 25 MP of the 36 MP she had remaining. It was a shame to cut out the rooms she had built, but it would cost significantly more mana to create enough hallways to connect everything properly and she had to abide by the rules of keeping the dungeon core room connected to the entrance.

5-Units of hallway had been saved for the first floor so that the staircase room down there could be connected to the boss room. While it had, temporarily, created an awkward situation on the second floor, Violet still felt like the long-term advantages made it worthwhile. Besides, it was likely that the second floor wouldn't look so awkward by tomorrow morning since she'd have plenty of mana to build with once Avorn and Camellia came back for another night of camping in the dungeon.

As she didn't have anything better to use it for, the last 11 MP she had was put toward one 5-Units and two 3-Units hallways for a total of 11-Units of straight hallway that she put to the left of the blackberry forest room. At least, that would make it easier to connect the staircase room to the blackberry forest before cutting off the connection to the dungeon core room in favor of connecting it to the empty forest room instead. If intruders had to go through the challenge and [Monster] field rooms before they could get to the dungeon core room, that would be far more ideal. Even with the butterfly [Traps] and deep pitfalls in the dungeon core room hallway, Violet just couldn't feel at ease with such a weakness in her dungeon.