Over the last few days, Veronica continued to get plenty of tributes and room rentals. The number of adventurers visiting the dungeon seemed to be remaining about the same from day to day, but her room rentals were slowly increasing. That all aligned with what Seraphina had told her about the area her dungeon was in, though. She was lucky to have people in the area who were used to dealing with dungeons and who would give it a chance right off the bat. However, it would still take time for others to hear word of her dungeon and to be drawn to it enough for dungeon traffic to increase beyond what it was now.
Veronica was glad that she got her next challenge room built when she did as it didn't take long for a new party to get trapped in her tropical parkour room. Rather than continuing to work on the inn and tavern side, though, she decided to take a few days off to focus on training with Seraphina. No use in wasting the time moping about when she only had a limited amount of time to make use of Seraphina's help. Apparently, the elven woman had other Dungeon Masters to attend to and she had been putting it off while she was helping her.
Veronica seemed to learn more and more from the woman as days went past. Yet, she still wanted to have her space. She could swallow her pride enough to accept her daily butt-kicking while she improved her own poor combat skills. Even living with complete strangers in her inn side of the dungeon was fine, but it felt physically uncomfortable knowing just how close Seraphina was to her dungeon core all of the time. Even though the dungeon didn't seem to consider the woman a threat, the way it did everyone else, didn't mean she was comfortable with it. She just couldn't trust anyone when she had such an obvious weakness.
Shaking her head, she decided to review the tributes she had received in the last few days. The room rentals themselves had netted her 170 DP. It would seem some of the adventurers had been curious about the larger, fancier, new rooms she had built, which had easily netted her an extra 100 dungeon points. Still, it was mostly her cheaper 10 DP rooms and tributes that she was depending on. For tributes she had earned 12 DP from repeats and an additional 245 DP from new tributes, which had included white beech mushrooms, enoki mushrooms, chickweed, dandelions, watercress, soapstone, and sunflowers. All of that had brought her total up to 862 dungeon points, which wasn't too bad, but not as high as she'd like it to be.
Honestly, a lot of the time Veronica had to wonder exactly what adventurers thought she was doing with the tributes they brought her. Flowers, minerals, and culinary ingredients just weren't going to help her build new challenges or more luxurious inn rooms. Maybe the food options might be useful when she went to build a kitchen and tavern, but it was still a flawed idea. She needed alcohol, meats, and basic produce, not random greens and mushrooms. Maybe that was the sort of thing the elves around here ate or something, but she neither knew how to make whatever recipes they were used to eating, nor was she interested in learning to do so. Serving the food that was common to the area wasn't exactly a great way to market her dungeon, not the way serving something more unique would be.
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Stretching, Veronica stood up, gaining a wary glance from Seraphina. She waved her hand dismissively as she said
"Don't worry, I'm not interested in training just yet. I just thought of a new project I'd like to work on and the last person staying in the inn just vacated the area."
Well, she wasn't really working on anything new or exciting, exactly. Mostly Veronica just planned to make herself some temporary living quarters. She had been cutting off the backmost right room that led to the dungeon core room from the inn side of the dungeon. However, that just seemed wasteful to leave it unused like that. She may as well turn it into something useful, but the only thing that would allow her to still keep adventurers out was to make it a room that only she had access to.
The space was smaller than her large inn rooms since it was only 11-Units by 18-Units instead of a full 18-Units by 18-Units square, but that was just fine for Veronica. She started by making herself a bathroom space, but she only needed it to be large enough for a bathtub, sink, wardrobe, towel rack, and a rug. She didn't need a toilet since she didn't actually have such human needs anymore. Bathing was still necessary because her inhuman status didn't mean she couldn't get dirty nor did it stop her clothes from getting dirty.
The other part of the room was a bit more cramped as well as she combined a kitchen, bedroom, and living room space into the space. Well, that might be exaggerating a bit. There was plenty of space for everything she wanted, it just didn't have as much space as the other rooms she had built.
Nothing new had to be researched and it was easy enough to spend the mana to create a magic icebox, magic wood stove, magic sink, kitchen cupboards and jade counters, a teal armchair, a bed, and even a fireplace. As she still had yet to bite the bullet on researching pots and pans or cleaning supplies, the only other thing she had to make were the wooden hangers for the bathroom wardrobe. Maybe one day she'd be able to add those last details, but she just couldn't justify the expenses when she had so few dungeon points saved up.
With her own space finished, she laid back on her new bed and stared up at the ceiling. It felt nice to have a space no one else could enter, but that was still close enough to the dungeon core room to not worry about being able to react in time. Maybe one day she could make a truly nice home full of all the luxury [Items] and entertainment she could ever dream of. That would be nice.