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[The Library Open-Stack Repository-cum-Reading Room]

"A pleasure to meet you. I am the Dungeon Master's personal secretary. My name is Marie."

Marie, who had come out of the Core Room, made her greeting.

"Sek'tary?"

It seemed to be a word the Daikan didn't know.

"Perhaps 'Secretary-General' would be easier to understand. I handle the dungeon's administrative affairs in general."

"So you are telling me that you, Secretary-General-dono, are the one who manages this fuel-storehouse dungeon."

"Well, in practical terms, more or less. And this dungeon is not a fuel storehouse but a library. In other words, a dungeon that produces books, which is to say knowledge."

"Be that as it may, books do not fill an empty belly. What we lack, above all, is food. Food before anything else."

"Smoked meat… from pork-beastfolk, most likely. But as they say, 'knowledge is power.' If we summon the knowledge of another world as books, and adapt it to this world through experiment…"

"With respect, today matters more than tomorrow. Humans have no need of knowledge."

"In that case, please wait a moment. I cannot say whether it will be to your taste."

So saying, Marie went into the Core Room and came back out carrying a potted plant.

Incidentally, while only the fuel merchant and the Daikan could read the "No Unauthorized Entry" sign, since a library's administrative office is normally off-limits to the public, this dungeon can use its unique law to close the Core Room to entry. With a pirate-ship dungeon, on the other hand, the captain's cabin is "a place the navy or mutineers break into," so it cannot be made off-limits.

"Some sort of leafy green?"

"It is a radish. It can be eaten raw, or used in stir-fries or soups."

"A small turnip, then. But if you have brought this to me, you mean to say you can produce it in quantity."

"The reason crops won't grow around here is that the soil is dead and there is no water. But I can supply water and fertilizer, within limits as to quantity. The fertilizer, however, must be used only on this dungeon's grounds."

This was because the fertilizer would be sucked away and lost into the barren earth, and because, even if crops were harvested outside the dungeon's range, the emotions could not be converted into dungeon energy.

"First we shall have to gather a few people willing to resettle and start farming."

"I can also provide a small quantity of seeds. But seeds are precious, so do not harvest all of your vegetables. Leave some behind."

Of course, with hybrid vegetables, taking the seed and sowing it produces offspring with scattered, inconsistent traits and no commercial value (in the real world, this is forbidden under seed and seedling law). But there are also varieties, such as heirloom cultivars, from which one can take seed with no trouble at all (genetically and legally alike).

[Core Room]

"So the seeds that come as magazine appendices count as proper seeds without any trouble, and if Asura are the main-line monster, then I can summon fertilizer as 'feed for Named monsters.' Is that it?"

"The seeds do cost a fair bit (since their print runs aren't that large), but the fertilizer is comparatively cheap. Pricier than newspapers or 'books for burning,' though… The problem is that we can't put the cost into numbers."

"There's no longer any need for it to be a library, is there."

"As long as the dungeon's essence is a library, running it as a library ought to be the most efficient course. Still, truly, in this world books have no value. Even the First Emperor of Qin didn't burn the books on medicine, agriculture, and divination.

If we had summoned the horse-beastfolk librarian as originally set, we couldn't have gone the 'books for burning' route, and the food storehouse would have had pasture grass in it."

"Er, let's see, the one that won the Nakayama Grand Prix… was it Silkworm? Or Kobe Tomcat…"

"When I asked before, it was a different name. It wasn't Vietnam Cat, at any rate."

"It can't be summoned anymore anyway, so whatever, good enough!"

"… If there were a dungeon whose main-line monster was humans, the way a pirate-ship dungeon has them, then it could summon food directly, couldn't it. This one, I mean. The cost would be worse than fertilizer, but it would save the labor."

That said, the goods would be rotten salted meat, dried meat, maggot-ridden biscuits, and great quantities of spoiled beer. If anything, the original library dungeon was the one that could have supplied healthy ingredients. But the Dungeon Master never did notice as much.