Violet waited until she received the notification regarding the nightly rent from Avorn and Camellia before starting her work for the night. With the 3 DP from repeat tributes a group of three had brought earlier that day, she now had 5,091 total dungeon points. Since she had already purchased the supplies for the charity for the week, she no longer had to worry about it and could spend the rest of her mana on building.
Only half of the floor had rooms built so far, but time was running out. Soon it would be spring and Violet wanted to get the third floor unlocked before then. Since the rest area and boss room were bound to take up a ton of resources, it was best she get it done now so she'd have time to finish gathering the dungeon points needed to pay for the next floor. Unfortunately, despite asking the system, she wouldn't know the answer to that until after the boss room was built. The system just kept giving her annoying error messages about needing a boss room before considering building a new floor.
Before she started building, first up was rearranging things. Violet wasn't going to fill the boss room with anything yet, but she decided to start with that. Thankfully, unlike the first floor, she had enough mana to outright buy a 32-Units by 32-Units room this time. The 64 MP didn't even feel like that much nowadays and the efficiency of building one large room instead of two smaller rooms and combining them was certainly a relief.
The second floor boss room was shoved up into the same corner as the first floor one had been. There were no rules against having rooms disconnected from everything unless it was the dungeon core room, so she could easily move on to the next step without worrying about rearranging hallways just yet.
The rest area room only cost 32 MP for a 16-Units by 16-Units room, the same as most of her rooms had. Since the two rooms only cost a total of 96 MP, she didn't even have to wait for her mana to refill until after the two rooms were made. However, since the hallways would have to be carefully arranged, Violet decided to wait until her mana was full again before she started working on that.
The long-term plan was to have the staircase that would lead from the second floor to the third just behind the first one. It would mean the hallway leading out of the boss room would be in a different place from the first, but the room size itself was big enough that things could still line up just fine. Besides, the new boss room wasn't going to be a maze, so it didn't really matter where the boss room doors were. The adventurers would still have to defeat the boss before they'd be able to leave.
Seeing her mana was full once more, Violet began to rearrange some hallways, buying new ones as necessary. It ended up costing 171 MP for various hallway lengths as well as an additional 20 MP for a 10-Units by 10-Units roundabout hallway. The rest of the length came from moving the hallway that was previously behind the dungeon core room to in front of it so that it connected to the boss room as well as utilizing the remaining hallway to the left of the peach orchard.
There was a lot of excess hallway on the second floor now, but Violet didn't care that much right now. She could always rearrange things later, but she wanted to be done with building the second floor for a few months, at least. Since she had forever to perfect her dungeon, it only really made sense to complete half of each floor before moving on to the next. While she had too much pride to be building empty rooms in order to advance more quickly, that didn't mean she had to entirely rush the process. Some of each floor could wait a while and be built slowly over time.
Now, in order for adventurers to reach the next floor they'd have to travel from the first floor stairs through eighteen rooms that were half challenge rooms and half [Monster] fields. With the doors all being locked, they'd be slowed down considerably. Once they got through the final room, the peach orchard, they'd have to walk down a long hallway, make a right turn, walk some more, and then they'd arrive at the rest area room. That would be the last stop before they'd end up at the boss room with just some hallway, including a roundabout, in between the two.
While Violet had long ago given up on the idea of confusing adventurers with a labyrinth, since she knew yearly dungeon mapping was a thing in this world, she still liked to use them before the boss rooms. She found that it made it easier to make branching pathways later on, should she decide it was necessary. Things like creating a shortcut for adventurers to leave or to get to the boss room faster was bound to save both her and them some hassle.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
Sure, it meant they could bypass all of the challenges, but, when she added a few more floors to the dungeon, that wouldn't matter much. The boss [Monster] was also likely to be the most difficult part of the floor. If they could get past it, everything else would just be stalling on her part. Besides, she was hardly going to build such a shortcut right away, right now she was definitely benefitting from making intruders trudge through long hallways and locking them into challenges one after another.
Finally satisfied that the foundation was set up, Violet decided to take a closer look at the rest area room. She had gone with a peaceful garden meadow with a wishing well to throw tributes into on the first floor, but this time was going to be slightly different. With the addition of the fairy houses for the pixies and learning she could resize things, she was planning on using that knowledge to create a much nicer rest area then she normally would be able to.
After removing half the trees from the rest area, only leaving them to populate the sides of the room, Violet spent 100 MP on a fairy house, which she placed in the middle of the room. It took a while for her mana to refill once more, but she had to be sure she could afford the size increase before attempting it. From what she had seen, decreasing the size of an [Item] cost 10% of its initial cost in mana and 0 DP to do so. Her experiments from a few days ago had also resulted in her learning that increasing the size of an [Item] would cost her the same amount of mana as it cost to initially create the [Item] plus ten percent of the initial cost in dungeon points. In this case, she would have to spend 100 MP and 10 DP on top of the initial 100 MP cost.
Of course, before she could do that, she had to spend 250 MP to increase the room's height by the maximum allowance of 10-Units. The total room height would then be closer to 15-Units total, which was just barely enough for a three-story home from her old world. Considering most one-story homes were just under 5-Units in height, from the tiny bit of information Violet could recall. She had to research a lot of size comparisons to help with her work designing things for video games. She didn't want to make a cat 1/10 the size of a house if it was meant to be 1/15 of the size. That would just make her look bad when the game tester complained about the proportions being off.
Unfortunately, by the time the fairy house was enlarged, most of the night was already over. That meant there wouldn't be much more she could do to improve the room for the night, which was probably fine since the house didn't need much more than it already came with. The house ended up being a little cramped with the ceiling being just barely high enough for her, but would likely present problems for taller adventurers. The room was just barely tall enough for a three-story house and the fairy houses she had made were meant to be multi-story abodes with plenty of space for her pixies to enjoy. The stairs leading up to the house meant the first floor was already raised off of the ground, then the roof cut the space she had off even more, leaving the three-story house a bit short.
Still, it was rather nice to tour the fairy house for herself, seeing the functioning magic lights and furniture for herself. Even the beds in the upstairs bedrooms were incredibly comfortable compared to the hard stone or grassy fields she usually had to settle for. Still, as much as Violet felt like she wanted to move into the home and claim it for herself, she knew there would be opportunities to create something better later on down the line.
After finishing the tour of the home, Violet decided to spend the last of her mana on some much-needed luxuries. She spent 20 MP on two empty aluminum milk cans with an additional 5 MP to fill them with water. Then 10 MP was spent on a large empty crate with 40 MP to buy eight each of apples, pears, oranges, apricots, and peaches. Finally, 18 MP was spent for a wooden sign that said
"Feel free to enjoy the amenities, but don't forget to leave a tribute as payment before you go."
Violet didn't really want adventurers to get greedy and steal the [Items] from the area. So, she decided to keep it simple and only offer water and the same fruits that were freely available throughout the second floor. Since the resources in a room would only reset once the dungeon was completely empty, it was a very real concern if the supplies were raided by those who didn't need them only for there to be nothing less when others came along.
Finally, Violet finished things up by spending 150 DP to set the room's theme before calling it a night.