Veronica wanted to be excited about unlocking the fourth floor, but she just couldn't quite muster the enthusiasm for it. She had waited a few extra months after she finished the third floor to do so just so she could use a bit of extra mana to get supplies like food, paper, and charcoal pencils to use for entertainment. However, while she could now track time by keeping track of when she got the notification on her mana regenerating each day, she had no way of knowing how long she had gone without the system before that. Had it been just a few months, a few years, or even entire decades?

Considering the state of Bluelight Cove City when her dungeon first appeared in this world, it was unlikely they could hold out for very long without an active dungeon around. If the dungeon had been continuing to process aether into mana the entire time, then it was unlikely anyone would end up dying from aether poisoning. However, that didn't change the fact that the homeless population no longer had her dungeon to depend on, the local craftsman could no longer purchase materials from her dungeon, and there would no longer be her dungeon to draw adventurers to the city. All it would have going for it would be the fact that it was a port city used for trade. Who knows if that would even be enough for the city not to become a ghost town?

So, Veronica couldn't help but feel grim as she selected the [Yes] option to begin the process of upgrading her tower of a dungeon to have yet another floor.

Would you like to purchase the fourth dungeon floor for 5,000 DP?

Yes

No

That certainly wasn't as bad as it could be. It was certain the fifth floor would only be that much more expensive. How much would the tenth floor cost her? What about the twenty-fifth and final floor? Before being locked up, earning dungeon points had been as easy as breathing. Even 100,000 DP wouldn't have been a big deal as it would have only taken her a few short months to earn that amount. Now that she had more floors, it would have been even easier. However, without patrons to serve, there was no way to earn more and she'd have to make do with what she had remaining. What was it now? Oh yeah, she had a [Dungeon Status] menu for that sort of thing.

Dungeon Status:

Current Mana 38 / 200

Current DP: 314,727

Current Floors: 4

Current Rooms: 75 (25+25+25+0) | 92 (41+28+23+0)

Tavern

Monsters

Critters

Construction

Research

Missions

The dungeon side always had the same number of rooms since Veronica rather liked the simple and repetitive nature of keeping them the same. It was almost like routine to simply set them all up with the same size rooms and then to fill things in with three challenges and a boss room. There was no need to worry about the awkwardness of leftover space like with the inn-side of things. Thus far, the inn side was slowly, but surely ending up with fewer and fewer rooms per floor. It wasn't like there would be as many adventurers who had the strength to make it to the upper floors as there were people who could visit the first floor. Even if they could beat the boss [Monsters] there was still the problem of being able to afford the inn rooms. The more time they spent in the dungeon, the fewer resources they'd have that were from outside the dungeon.

Please select a new skill:

Skill Name:

Info:

Housekeeping

Allows the Dungeon Master to auto-clean and straighten a room at a cost of 10 MP per use. Includes restocking supplies that were previously stocked in the room when the room was first designated as an inn room.

Guest Profiling

Displays a list of non-dungeon entities currently in the dungeon alongside their classification, classes, rank, location, temperament, and hospitality preferences.

Tranquil Retreat

This crowd-control skill turns the tavern side of the dungeon into a non-combat area with a non-stressful, relaxing environment. Non-dungeon entities who violate the non-combat rule will be banned from the premises permanently.

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Surveillance

Allows the Dungeon Master to view all areas of the dungeon as if they were looking through a window into the room. Rooms that have been rented out for private use are off-limits to maintain guests' privacy.

How strange, there were now four options instead of three. There wasn't any explanation from the system as to why that was. Did it just randomly upgrade at random intervals? It was hard to tell, but she was hardly going to complain about having more options to choose from. Both [Tranquil Retreat] and [Surveillance] sounded like powerful options for dealing with problematic adventurers like Bo. It would be nice if she could just hang out in the tavern and avoid unnecessary conflict. She'd still have to step up to defend the dungeon should anyone get too close to the dungeon core, but the dungeon would alert her the moment anyone made it to the same floor as the dungeon core room anyway. It simply wouldn't be an issue.

Still, since she didn't know when the dungeon would be open to adventurers again, she didn't particularly feel like wasting this opportunity on them. Something like [Housekeeping] would allow her to spend mana to clean her own space, saving her time and effort without having to invite her brownies into her personal space, so that’s what she went with. She was still living on the first floor right now, but Veronica had ambitions for building a large, comfortable home for herself on one of the upper floors. Maybe the twelfth floor?

Otherwise, she could fully embrace the chaotic nature of her life and live on the thirteenth floor. It was a number with quite a bit of superstition surrounding it in her old world. Some cultures saw it as lucky while others saw it as bad luck. She didn't personally believe in luck, preferring to think that life just happened and you had to be adaptable enough to make things work anyway. Somehow, the thirteenth sounded like the perfect place to make her home.

There still weren't new [Monsters] or [Traps] unlocked. If this was anything like a video game, it was likely she would get something new on the fifth floor and then again on the tenth floor. What the deal was with multiples of five, she wasn't sure, but it was certainly a pattern she couldn't deny. All that was left was choosing a new floor theme.

Please select a new floor theme:

Overgrown Ruins

Bamboo Jungle

Acacia Forest

It would seem she had no choice but to choose an outdoor theme this time. That meant her odds of not having walls to block off the 'rooms' were far greater than they'd otherwise be. Since she was planning to use goblins on this floor, it was fitting, though. With a sigh, she quickly chose the [Overgrown Ruins] theme.

As it would turn out, it wasn't the worst choice. There were stone brick ruins that created the rough outline of walls for anywhere she designated a room. There were bricks missing and the walls were barely taller than she was, but it would work well enough. Besides the walls of the room, there were vines, rocks, and random remnants of ruins spread throughout the floor. Some places seemed like they may have once been stone brick roads that led to nowhere while other places were more like buildings or old wells. There was even water at the bottom of one of the wells, but it wasn't much and there wasn't a bucket to draw it up with. She highly doubted it would be of any use to the adventurers.

The layout for the fourth floor mirrored that of the second floor. That mostly just meant switching around which direction the boss room was placed. For odd floor numbers, it would be at the back of the dungeon while even floors had it towards the front of the dungeon. The rest of the rooms would then be arranged to progressively lead to that room to ensure the adventurers were more likely to have to complete the challenge rooms to finish the floor.

The inn side of the dungeon was much simpler to arrange this time around as most of the room sizes were ones she had previously researched. There were only two that she had to spend DP on. One was a 37-Units by 35-Units rectangular room while the other was an 18-Units by 35-Units rectangular room. Between the two she had to spend 250 DP.

The inn rooms on this floor were all 18-Units by 18-Units square rooms. They were each set up to house a single individual with a bedroom, bathroom, and open floorplan living room and kitchen area. Most of the rest of the rooms on the floor were 11-Units by 18-Units rectangular rooms including: a cleaning closet, laundromat, spa, pool room, gym, training area, and a public bathroom. The bathrooms used wooden partition walls to divide it into two separate bathroom areas with a hallway in between them. Many of the other rooms were similarly divided into smaller sections.

The reception room was an 11-Units by 16-Units room, but that was already one she had unlocked. The two new ones she had to research new room sizes for were actually a kitchen and a dining room. Rather than having a bar where alcohol was served, Veronica was going to try out having a dining room with the alcohol prepared in the kitchen before being carried out to the dining room. Considering she had ended up deciding on an Aztec temple theme for the floor, it was a bit ironic that this was where she decided to try out a more upscale dining feel.

None of it really mattered, though. The inn-side of the dungeon didn't have any of its rooms set as a particular theme, so she could always tear everything down and rebuild it another way in the future. Testing out different ideas to see what worked best and how she felt about them was better to do on the lower floors as well. The upper floors were less likely to ever see adventurers, so she had to learn what she could before she got to that point.

In order to match the Aztec temple theme, Veronica decided to research a bunch of stone furniture. Much like anything wooden, stone was relatively cheap as it only cost 10 DP to research and 5 MP to create. If it was something more complex like a stone statue, it could be incredibly more expensive, but something as simple as a chair or sofa wasn't exactly a problem.

She ended up researching a stone bed frame, gray dye, gray silk sheets, a gray quilt, a stone armchair, a stone sofa, a deluxe magic shower, potted aloe vera, stone dining chairs, stone dining tables, wooden archery targets, wooden man posts, a swimming pool, wooden diving boards, and pool ladders for the fourth floor. The wooden man posts were actually Chinese-style training dummies, which she had seen a number of times in movies. She didn't really watch action movies very often, but she did like cartoons, including those with Kung Fu in them.

All of the previous floors had included bathtubs, but it wasn't like showers were any more difficult for the dungeon to make. They still required magic crystals, porcelain, and, in this case, wooden benches. If she was going to take a shower, then one with a place to sit was, obviously, the best choice. Veronica had lived in places with small square showers where there was only room for her to stand and to store her cleaning products. However, the fancy large shower in her parents' home had always been her favorite.

After everything was set up, she had 313,947 dungeon points remaining. With any luck, she'd be able to finish this floor as well without dropping below 300,000 DP, but it was likely that the cost to unlock the fifth floor alone would be the tipping point. Eventually, she'd have to consider being more conservative with her spending, but she wasn't going to worry about it just yet.