The Library That Will Eventually Run Dry

[Core Room]

"It just occurred to me, how many libraries are there in the whole country?"

Sapien-sensei asked.

"Let's see… there are about 4,000 public libraries. We're at 482 tier-groups now, so we've still got plenty of room to spare."

"When we build a million chō of farmland, how many villages does that come to?"

"One village is about fifty to eighty households, with a population of two to four hundred, and at an average of 200 chō of farmland that's 5,000… oh dear. Sometimes, when there's been a rebuilding, we can somehow summon both the old and new versions, but even so it falls short. Especially with a small library like the first tier-group, you can't fit fifty households into a single building."

"In that case, the moment the libraries run out, we'll have to secure a large supply of building materials. But this world is a desert, so timber is precious."

So said the Dungeon Master.

"If it's only walls and roofs, it's not impossible to build them the way we built the ramparts. But then a proper house to live in becomes a perk for the early migrants, which is unfair."

"As the dungeon has grown, we've become able to summon a fair number of complex facilities with a low library ratio, so from here on, if we can summon things like the small branch libraries and community-center reading rooms inside complex facilities, that might buy us more time."

"Or, at present, university libraries are summonable, high cost though they are; but school libraries other than universities… there are nearly 30,000 elementary schools nationwide, and most of them have some sort of reading room or book corner, so if we could summon those, the problem would be solved at a stroke. As for secondary education, the systems differ greatly from world to world, so even once they become summonable the cost is likely to run high."

In the Japan of the world where there was no Second World War, the school system is one in which the old multi-track structure changed as advancement rates rose, so the new-system middle and high schools are not the sort of thing that "exists in most worlds."

"In practice, university libraries are summonable despite the steep cost, so elementary schools too should be summonable once we meet the unlock conditions. The third tier-group was oddly cheap; maybe there was a bonus on just the very first building."

"As for the next milestone, that would be either 10,000 'adventurers simultaneously present within the dungeon,' or 100,000 feet of 'dungeon elevation difference.'"

So said Mint.

"For the former, since their width doesn't reach 30 meters, they aren't used for the dungeon proper, but there are plenty of libraries in Tokyo and Taipei with many floors and large floor areas, or apartment complexes with attached libraries. We could use these for the towns we build at each gate of the ramparts, lodge the migrants there provisionally, and once the population hits 10,000, line up school buildings and start forming farming villages. For the latter, a height of 30 km isn't realistic, so we'd need to think of another method."

"Or we steadily collect the high-cost libraries that 'exist in only some worlds,' I suppose."

"'Exist in only some worlds,' Master? Umeda, the Mercantile City has stations that exist in only some worlds, like Daiki Umeda or Tōyoko Shinjuku, forcibly crammed into each of its tier-groups, and apparently its labyrinth-ification is terrible because of it. In our case, though, they'd be separate tier-groups, so we can make it work somehow. The summoning cost would just run high."

"All the same, who'd have thought that before we had to worry about running out of land from the population explosion, we'd start worrying about running out of libraries?"

"Master, if we summon non-Japanese-language libraries, the number is no problem at all, but the cost becomes the issue. We can't even reach the Imperial Library, so heaven knows how the British Library would turn out."

"Maybe the Imperial Library has some unknown unlock condition. Not just population or height, but the variety of holdings, or, since it's a library, the number of loans, or rather the number of books actually read. This dungeon has summoned almost nothing but fuel books and newspapers, hasn't it? If we summoned all of this third tier-group's roughly two million volumes and split them up to read through, something might change."

"Sapien-sensei, in that case we'd need someone to get the books read, someone whose job is to read books all day long… But that needn't necessarily be a Shiso (Asura). They do say 'bookworm,' after all; if it's just a bug that does nothing but read books, couldn't we summon one at low cost? The last entries on the monster-summon list, 'deathwatch beetle,' 'booklice,' and 'silverfish,' are pests by any ordinary reckoning, but if we make them Named, they probably won't go eating the books."

Anne proposed summoning a reading-specialist monster. Incidentally, the very first entry on the summon list reads "Shiso (Asura, Special)."

"There's the constraint of brain size, so even if we make a bug Named, whether it can actually read a book is doubtful."

"Master, surely we should steer clear of pests. If we couldn't control them and they bred in great swarms, it would be a catastrophe. I have a tolerance for most insects, but even so I've no wish to see a pest dungeon. Let's first try summoning every kind of holding from the third tier-group, the university library, and the sixth tier-group, the municipal library, and confirm what happens, then we can decide."