Minutes passed by as I waited for Myra to show up. I grew even more restless by the minute, wanting to celebrate the day by seeing her smile or at least her surprised face, but it seemed she had gone outside of the dungeon to talk to the group for a bit.

Having nothing better to do, I returned to the volcano room to wait for her while playing with the foxes. While the earth foxes were happy to receive their pets and scratches, I was rather curious about what they would consider fun, given I couldn’t exactly play favorites. They were generally lazy creatures, much like the lava foxes, spending most of their time sleeping in their burrows or digging through the ground only to pop up from random entrances when they were needed, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t appreciate a little more variety in their lives. Only, I had no idea what to give them.

With a sigh, I decide to leave that issue for later. Maybe Myra would have an idea. And if not, she would likely be willing to help me carry some of the soft furs over instead, so that the foxes could at least pad their burrows a bit. That way, even if they spend most of the day sleeping, they could at least do it comfortably.

Soon after making that decision, Myra finally reappeared. I couldn't help but run up to her, my tail waving from side to side, before praising and thanking her for what she had done that day. Myra accepted both with a smile, before hugging me, spooking me quite a bit.

“We are finally alone,” she said, before gently letting go of me.

It was only now that I noticed her four tails had almost drooped to the ground, with even her ears being lowered. She looked like somebody had bullied her, but who would dare to do such a thing?

Myra didn’t give me the chance to ask her, as she was already explaining her pitiful appearance. “I am sorry,” she suddenly exclaimed. “About- about everything!”
I could only look at her with a puzzled face, reason enough for her to elaborate.

“I have thought of your dungeon as being a mess,” she now confessed. “Even though you are doing your best. And I was thinking of you as a bad person just because you were human!”

I didn’t quite know what to answer to this. The short time we had together had been more than enough for me to realize she had a past with humans, although I didn’t know any details about that. Still, I guessed she had a good reason for her to feel insecure being around me. Still, interacting with the explorers had somehow helped her overcome this, that or her talk with Cilia had gone well. Whatever it was, I was deeply thankful for it.

“That is in the past,” I offered. “Don’t worry about it. I’m fine!”

Hearing these words, Myra couldn’t help but hug me again, a little while longer this time. When she then let go of me, she showed me a wide smile, one that immediately made me forget about our rough start. Even her tails began wagging now, causing her entire image to shift.

“You said there would be a gift?”
I couldn’t help but chuckle. “It's in the storage room.”

Myra nodded, accepting this answer for now, before indicating for me to lead her toward the room in question. With a shrug, I said my goodbyes to the earth foxes, before making my way over to the bridge leading to the former core room, Myra right on my heels. When we reached the dark tunnel, she readily assisted me with her magic, lighting the walls with a rather ominous blue.

Thanks to Myra’s help, it didn’t take us long to reach the storage, allowing me to present the many gifts I had prepared for her. “This is all for you,” I offered. “You can do with them whatever you like!”

Myra didn’t say a thing as she walked up to my side, her eyes darting from pile to pile, growing larger and larger with each of the materials she identified. When she then discovered the equally haphazardly stored metals, even her tails showed a reaction. But instead of beginning to wag from side to side, like I had hoped, they grew visibly thicker, as her hair stood up in utter shock. I could only stare at her in disbelief as she stumbled towards the five bars of orichalcum, each of them bigger than the rod she soon produced from outside of her cloak, where she had hidden it who-knows-where.

“This- all of this-” I heard her stammer.
“I summoned everything I had,” I proudly proclaimed, before adding. “Well, I got even more stuff now, thanks to you! Just give me a second!”

Myra suddenly turned around, surprising me with her unexpected movement and especially the expression on her face. There was a smile to be seen, just as I had expected, but she somehow looked slightly angry as well, which I couldn’t make sense of, that was until she opened her mouth to scold me.

“Stop being so unreasonable!” she exploded.
“Un- unreasonable?!”
“Do you know how often I have seen mithril in my life?! And orichalcum?! That is stuff royalty would wear! It is something most adventurers can only dream of! Just how much did all of this cost you?!”
“One mana,” I heard myself offer, before quickly adding. “But it is one mana per material! And there are a lot!”
All color left her face. “How- how much did they give you?!”
“Nine-”
“Nine?”
“Nine hundred and eighty…”

All color left her face as she seemed to run the calculations of just how many more bars of metals I could now summon. Given how much I now had, I could probably easily copy the statue I had built in the prayer room, this time using pure orichalcum. Naturally doing that would quickly draw attention to my dungeon, much more so than being a chosen dungeon did. So it went without saying that I should keep the existence of this metal a secret. Not only that, even building all these mithril statues was already going over the top and would likely end up giving at least some of the delvers very wrong ideas about what to expect in my dungeon.

Sure, even thieves wouldn’t dare vandalize or straight up steal these statues, especially when it could very well mean hours of work just to free a single chunk of metal at the risk of not only angering Cilia but also becoming a possible enemy of the church and the masses. What good were all the riches of the world if you could no longer live a peaceful life?

Still, these statues openly showed that I had access to all of these materials, and it was only my choice whether I would hand them out as rewards or not. And as my dungeon had an avatar you could actually talk to, chances were that they would soon ask for riches or maybe even straight-up demand them. It wasn’t them who would be punished by not following the rules placed on dungeons after all, but rather my head on the chopping board.

To circumvent this becoming an issue, I had to create a reward system that was good enough for delvers to be satisfied while not overdoing it for my own sake. And keeping the more valuable materials hidden until it was the right time was the first necessary step.

Myra seemed to know this too. After overcoming her shock, she quickly called for a change of plans. Instead of using my newly gained mana to summon new materials and thus increase the chaos I already had thrown the former core room into, she instead had me use most of it to increase the room’s size, turning it into a large, rectangular area that would serve as a storage hall in the future.

The resulting room was almost a hundred meters wide while being more than twice as long as that. This was far larger than I had any need for, it seemed, but Myra seemed to be sure this much was the minimum requirement, so I followed her advice.
For the next task, she led me over to one of the long walls and instructed me to create wooden compartments to store the various items in. All of them would feature a lowered front, so that most foxes would be able to enter it, while having high walls at the sides and the back, allowing for material to be piled up high.

While I created almost three dozen of these wooden compartments near the wall alone, kneeling down and closing my eyes every few meters to do so, Myra had me list up all of the materials I now had access to. And there were many, far too many to store them in a single one of these rows.

In the end, she encouraged me to create seven rows of these wooden compartments, with the middle rows being placed against each other, as to save a little bit of space. We still spent most of the available space to create this storage, and I was sadly nowhere near done, as my next task was filling most of these compartments under Myra’s watchful eyes. She decided to use the two rows closest to the walls for foods and beverages, making me summon one mana’s worth of each option I now had, before leading me to the next pair of rows she planned on dedicating to monster loot and various other valuables, once again tasking me to fill as many compartments as I could.

As for the remaining two pairs of rows, they belonged to animal and plant materials, including fabrics, leather and pelts; or metals, ores and minerals, which also meant the small selection of gems I had gained. In the end, we had filled about a third of the compartments, which meant I was hopefully safe for the time being.

Sadly, doing all of this had left me with little mana to play around with. My once proud stash of mana had reduced to a pitiful seventeen after having spent hours following Myra’s advice and orders, and she seemed to be nowhere done, as she now led me towards the piles I had meant to gift her, instructing me to store them all away properly.

Naturally, this meant hours or days of work, a fact that even she reluctantly accepted. So, after a long moment of thinking about it, she tasked me with having my dungeon reabsorb almost all of the materials aside from the metal and the fabrics, which, by her accounts, were far too precious to simply give up. By this point, I was too exhausted to even argue about the fact that they, too, had cost me the exact same single point of mana and instead quietly went to work. I knelt down, closed my eyes, and thought about getting rid of the unrequired piles of goods.

Luckily, it worked just like that, the whole task not even costing me mana to perform. If anything, having the materials disappear into nothingness was the sole price I had to pay, which I was more than thankful for given that I had spent quite a bit today.

Mana aside, I was totally drained after building the storage hall. I had spent far more mana than this before, many times more, in fact, and I wasn’t even emptied out yet, but having to concentrate on creating all of these wooden compartments, barrels, crates, boxes and all of these materials had been quite the ordeal, a fact even Myra was forced to realize. So instead of urging me to get rid of the remaining piles of valuables, she allowed me to rest on my bed, which I gladly did.

I spent the next few minutes watching her store away the orichalcum bars, all four of her tails wagging behind her back as she made her way down the rows to the location she had decided upon. But soon, I grew too sleepy to even watch. Instead, I tried to hug my core, only to realize it wasn’t there, making me feel quite lonely for some reason.

Luckily, Myra was soon finished with her preparation, using this chance to unknowingly save me. She came up to my bed, set down next to me, and began petting my head, just like Cilia would do. I couldn’t help but close my eyes and lean into her touches, doing my best to enjoy my reward to the fullest. It had been far too long of a day…

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Catnip

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