Chapter 184 – Renovating their mansion

Sophia and Maya were still retrofitting their mansion with heated floors and had just finished equipping their bedroom with it. The couple had also already given it a test run afterward. After their break, they decided to keep on going with the other rooms. There was still a lot of work left, after all.

Before starting with the living room, the delivery of the remaining heating ore and the insulation arrived just in time for the group to renovate the rest of their mansion.

“Alright, that should do it.” Sophia had just finished putting everything from the living room, including its wooden floor, inside her storage dimension.

“Is there anything we can do?” The wolves wanted to help, as well.

“Sure, we need to carve out the ground by around 10 centimeters in each room. Feel free to do that for me while I’m putting everything that’s in the way into my storage.”

“Got it!” The wolves sounded highly motivated.

“I’ll help the two of you with the insulation.” As Maya couldn’t help the tiger, she decided to join Fen and Aura instead.

“Alright, I’ll continue emptying out the rooms.” Sophia liked the plan.

“Which rooms are we going to install the heated floors in?” Aura wanted to know much they had to do.

“Eh?” The blonde tilted her head. “All of them, of course. Storage rooms, hallways, and every unused room upstairs included. Every inch of this place shall have heated floors!”

“Okay!” No one seemed to have any complaints about it.

The group kept modifying their mansion for the rest of the day. Thanks to all of them being slightly on the overpowered side, retrofitting every single of the many rooms took them only a couple of hours. Once they had dinner and the couple finished their regular bath in the evening, everyone got together in the extremely toasty feeling living room.

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“Haa~…” The couple was currently cuddling on one of the sofas when Maya let out a most satisfying sigh. “The heated floor in the bath was divine~.”

“It’s not half bad in here, either.” Aura also seemed rather satisfied as she stretched her body next to Fen on the sheepskin rug. “I might actually start worshipping you for this, my goddess.”

“Stop that!” Sophia immediately got loud. “I am no goddess!”

“You could be one if you want to, though.” The female wolf had fun with the topic.

“But I don’t want to!”

“Why not? You could be the goddess of heating. Sounds fun, doesn’t it?”

“It does not! If anything, if I actually become a goddess, my first official act would be taking back my blessing of heated floors!”

“I am deeply sorry, my dear divine tiger!”

“Alright, that’s it! This divine tiger will be removing her blessing to the living room first thing tomorrow!”

“Eh?!” Fen and Maya didn’t like the sound of that.

“Can’t you just banish her to the stables in the garden for her outrageous blasphemy towards the higher striped one?” The cat-girl absolutely didn’t want to let go of it. Although, her wording made it relatively clear that she directly jumped in on the teasing.

“Oh?” The blonde next to her moved away from Maya she was cuddling with until now and stared at her. “It sounds like you’d like to join her, huh?”

“Can we get blessed with heated floors in the stables?”

“How about a blessing with permafrost floors instead?”

“I wouldn’t like that at all.” Aura and the cat-girl’s voice overlapped.

“Well, contrary to Canir, I wouldn’t be a benevolent goddess, after all.”

“W-Wow…” Fen was happy that he hadn’t annoyed her this time. He knew how benevolent Canir was, after all.

“Anything you want to share, big guy?” Sophia looked at him.

“Not at all. I’m just relaxing here in peace.”

“Is that so? How do you enjoy my blessing, then?”

“Your invention isn’t half bad.”

“Good.” She liked his answer. “Fen can stay. The two of you are sleeping in the stables per the goddess decree!”

“Good thing there is no goddess here, right, Aura?” Maya glanced at the female wolf.

“Yep, only the good old stripey one. Our dear tiger, that is.”

“You two sure are something else.” Sophia wasn’t really angry.

“Ehehe.”

“Seriously, I don’t wanna, okay? Also, don’t joke about that when it’s not just the four of us here…”

“Of course!” Maya and Aura gave her an understanding nod.

“Good.” The tiger decided to drop the topic. “I still need to find out what to do with the conductivity ore… Having to touch the ground to charge it up is kinda suboptimal if you ask me. Not to mention that you have to actually concentrate on it for your magic to go through the wooden floor. It works a lot better in the kitchen or bathroom where the floor’s made of stone.”

“Hmm…” Fen also gave it some thought. “How about you make tiny connections with the conductivity ore through the wooden floor all over the place? If the two of you walk around barefoot, which I assume would feel great with the heated floor, or Aura and I, who do that all the time, we have paws, after all, we’d charge up the heating ore just by walking around.”

“Ohh!” Sophia got excited. “Yeah, I plan to run around barefoot or socks only all the time because it’s the best feeling ever!”

“It indeed feels great, but…” Maya was a little less enthusiastic. “I do like the idea, but what would happen if we don’t need the heat? Like when it’s already warm? Wouldn’t we still charge it up then?”

“Ah.” Fen and the blonde hadn’t thought about that.

“You came up with it because it existed in your old world, right?” Aura looked at her. “How was it controlled there?”

“It was mostly controlled by the temperature, automatically turning on when it went below a certain temperature. No idea how I’d be able to recreate that, though.” Sophia didn’t think she could easily recreate a thermostat, let alone that one still had to charge it up with magic, anyway. “You could also manually operate with a switch on the wall. That was my plan here, too. I’ll place a little box on the wall on easy-to-reach places like next to the doors, the bed, or the bathtub, and connect those with the floor using the conductivity ore. You touch them, pour your magic into it, and the floor should heat up, I guess.”

“Sounds like a plan.” The male wolf liked the idea. “I’d like some charging pads in paw-height. We can force out magic through the floors with our paws, but the pad sound like the more efficient way.”

“Sure, I’ll place them all over the walls~.” She was having a lot of fun. "Oh. maybe I could even put lines of the conductivity ore all over the mansion and let them all run together in the entrance hall. That way, you can heat up the rooms without actually having to go there first. That would be the ultimate level of laziness~."

“Are you going to tell the king tomorrow?” Maya remembered the conversation with him. “He wanted to know what you wanted to do with the heating ore after all.”

“Why not, I guess? I wanted to visit Ari, anyway. I can do it quickly once I’m in the castle.”’

“What do you plan to do with the jaguar?”

“We wanted to do some training.” Sophia chose not to specify what kind of training the two had planned. Cooking, too, is training, after all.

“Oh, I see…” The cat-girl paused for a moment. “Well, I might as well do the same then and play a bit with the princess.”

“We’ll watch the house.” Fen and Aura chose the lazy option.

“Watch the house or test if the heated floors can be used continuously?”

“Yes.” The wolves had learned a lot from the tiger.

“I see…” She wasn’t sure how to react.

“We’ll also work some more on the maze.”

“Great!”

“If I can make Fenny get up from the floor, that is.”

“H-Hey!” He glared at Aura in response.

The group chatted a little longer while relaxing in the living room before they eventually turned in for the night.

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The following day, the couple headed to the castle once again to meet with the king before playing with their friends there.

“Already back again?” Menzor looked at the duo in his office with a questioning expression. “Was there something wrong with my permission?”

“No, everything was fine with that.” The blonde shook her head. “You wanted to know what I needed it for, didn’t you?”

“You already succeeded with your idea?”

“Yep.” She sounded pretty proud of herself. “It was a rousing success~.”

“Was it?” He tilted his head. “By the way, some reports reached me, mentioning the sounds of multiple explosions having happened in the noble area where you live.”

“A-Ah…” Maya awkwardly scratched her cheek.

“Those were just some minor setbacks during the experimental phase. No one got hurt besides the lawn in our garden.”

“That’s good to hear.” He sounded relieved. “So?”

“I’ve invented a new way of heating houses.”

“Oh?” Menzor’s expression changed to one of curiosity. “In what way?”

“I added the heating ore mixture directly on the ground, or rather, below the floor. We also added some insulation and spread the ore on top before returning the actual floor to normal. The whole room now gets evenly heated up from below without having to have a heater or fireplace in the room.”

“The warmth radiating from it feels amazing, too!” The cat-girl got excited again. “Because the heat comes from below, you get warm feet before it slowly spreads up your legs and heats up your entire body. It’s the best!”

“I see…” The king wasn’t sure what to think about it. “It does sound fascinating. I’m always feeling way too hot, though, so I might not be the best to judge it. Do you mind if I send over Kira to take a look at it?”

“Of course! She can come over whenever she wants!” Sophia liked the queen, after all. “Ah, but waiting till next week would be the best to evaluate it. I’m still doing some fine-tuning with it.”

“Alright, I understand. I’ll tell her later today, and I’m sure she’ll get back to you.”

“Perfect.” Sophia nodded at his suggestion. She also knew that Kira would love it. “Well, that’s all we have at the moment.”

“Okay, thank you very much for the update on your experiments.”

“No problem~.”

Afterward, the couple left the king’s office and went to look for Ari and the princess. Thanks to Sophia’s detection magic, it didn’t take them long to find the duo who seemed to be in Anna’s room at the moment.

Teanam

A big thank you to

- Vakire -

for supporting the story on Patreon to make more art possible. I'm super grateful for that!