Chapter 25: Wooden Crate

If your favorability with the elves gets high enough, there’s a tiny, tiny chance they’ll offer to sell you a plant called the “Flower of Rebirth.”

As its name suggests, the Flower of Rebirth is one of the very few revival items available on the Sunset Continent.

It’s incredibly powerful, but the price is equally staggering. Back then, Su You practically had to empty out half her entire storage just to trade for a single, rather plain-looking flower from the elves—and that was after a discount.

Still, considering what it does, Su You thought it was worth it.

Because on the Sunset Continent, once you die, the system forcibly deletes your file. There’s no chance to start over—unless you have a revival item.

If your save file is gone, what’s the point of all that stuff in your storage anyway?

…But I digress.

The last building is the Statue. Its function is that every morning at eight o’clock, you can go to the statue and receive a blessing (an aura).

Different statues grant different blessings, and the longer you worship a particular statue, the stronger and longer-lasting the blessings become.

That’s why it’s considered a helpful building…

When facing the tenth day’s attack from the dark creatures, if Su You chooses the Tavern card, she can recruit NPCs to help fight them.

If she chooses the Post Station, she can trade goods to quickly gather useful materials, craft more items, and strengthen herself.

If she chooses the Statue, that’s also a great option, since the statue’s blessings (auras) are generally very helpful—and they’re group buffs.

In other words, not only does Su You benefit from the aura, but any NPCs who’ve joined her territory do as well.

With these buffs, as long as she plans around the specific effects, the territory’s development speed will definitely get a huge boost.

…

…

Three different buildings, three different development paths—but no matter which one you pick, they’re all excellent choices. At this point, Su You was genuinely torn, because she thought all three were great.

If she could, she’d take all three cards… but obviously, that wasn’t possible.

When the countdown reached the final ten seconds, Su You finally chose the “Tavern Card.”

It wasn’t because the Tavern Card was better than the other two. Objectively, all three cards were equally good—down to the decimal point. She picked the Tavern Card simply because it relied less on luck.

The merchants at the Post Station appear at random times, and what kind of merchant shows up and what they sell is also random.

The statue’s identity is random, and so are its blessings.

By comparison, while the NPCs you recruit at the tavern are random too, at least they all come with skills.

[Confirm selection: “Tavern Building Card”?]

Su You quickly hit [Yes], afraid that if she waited even a few more seconds, the reward would expire if she hadn’t confirmed her choice.

[You have obtained Tavern Building Card x1]

As the notification for the new item sounded, a gray-brown building card appeared in Su You’s hand, with a little “Open for Business” sign hanging at the door.

[Tavern Building Card]

Category: Special

Quality: Blue

Description: Use to instantly build a tavern within your territory (no construction time required). (Note: The Tavern Building Card does not come with staff; you must recruit them yourself.)

…

Although the tavern is a place to recruit special NPCs, it can also function like a regular tavern, selling alcohol, food, and other goods.

But to actually run the tavern, she’d need an NPC who knows how to manage it, as well as goods to sell.

Right now, Su You obviously had neither, so she put that idea aside for now.

After receiving the Tavern Building Card, Su You didn’t place the tavern immediately, since the description said it would be built instantly, with no construction time.

If it did require construction time, she would have placed it right away, because normally it takes two hours to build a tavern… Oh, wait, actually it’s five hours.

The two-hour build time was only when Su You had a high-level craftsman NPC (who could reduce construction time) and the relevant construction aura. Right now, she had neither, so it would take even longer.

Looking at the mess of items scattered everywhere, the first thing Su You needed to do was tidy up.

Previously, she didn’t have a territory, so she just piled things up wherever. But now that she had a territory—a “home”—there was no way she could keep doing that.

With such a detailed game system, of course there had to be a building called a “Warehouse” for storing materials.

But Su You couldn’t build a warehouse yet, because she didn’t have enough materials.

[Level 1 Warehouse] (Cost: Plank x10, Stone Brick x5)

Description: Used for storing items. Can slow food spoilage to some extent. Level 1 warehouse has 100 slots. For non-tool/special items, stack limit is increased to 100. (Can be upgraded with materials to increase storage space.)

Planks weren’t an issue—she already had those from building the Heartfire. The real bottleneck for the warehouse was stone bricks.

3 Pebbles = 1 Stone, 4 Stone = 1 Stone Brick. So 12 Pebbles = 1 Stone Brick, and 5 Stone Bricks means 60 Pebbles.

It was almost nightfall, and all the stone she had in her backpack had been used to build the Heartfire. She didn’t even have a single pebble left, let alone stone or bricks.

But that was okay, because a warehouse wasn’t the only way to store things. There was something else she could use in the early game, when stone was scarce, to get by until she could build a warehouse.

[Wooden Crate] (Cost: Wood Block x3)

Description: Used for storing items. Has 20 slots. Stack limit is the same as the player’s backpack.

Compared to the warehouse, the wooden crate only needed three wood blocks—that’s just nine pieces of wood, which was a breeze for Su You, who had an axe and was in the forest.

Although Su You had chopped a lot of wood earlier, she’d used up a batch making an arrow tower, and then used even more for wooden fences to deal with the fire demon boss. She even made a shovel… After all that, she only had five pieces of wood left.

Thinking of this, Su You picked up her axe and started chopping trees… and didn’t stop until there were only ten minutes left before nightfall.

Although she no longer had the Lord’s Token, so she couldn’t check the countdown on it to keep track of time, she still had her two auras, so she could at least manage her time well enough for now."

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