What Is the Imperial Library's Reason for Being?

[Imperial Library]

The Dungeon Master and Marie were inspecting the Imperial Library they had just summoned.

"So this is the Imperial Library. Though, there's nothing in it."

"The books have yet to be summoned. For your reference, the otherworld Imperial Library itself holds several tens of millions of items, but in this dungeon, while the cost runs high, we can also summon 'books that exist in only some worlds,' so the number of summonable volumes runs into the hundreds of millions."

"And if I were to read them all?"

"Even at a mere hundred million volumes, reading ten a day would take close to thirty thousand years. No matter that a Named monster has no lifespan, it would become a veritable 'Library Hell.' Although, well, we'd run out of storage space first."

"That would wear the spirit clean down. So, then, how shall we make use of this Imperial Library?"

"The Imperial Library is a library for 'preserving' books. It differs from a university library, which is for 'putting knowledge to use,' from a public library, which is social infrastructure for residents, and from a bookstore, which we cannot summon in this dungeon at all."

"I don't really follow."

"It's outside my field as well. Properly speaking, one ought to summon a librarian, but… This Library-City Dungeon comes from a world with neither Asura nor beastfolk, and yet its proper main-line monster was Ox-Head and Horse-Head. There are a great many mysteries about it. Not that anything can be done about it now."

"In the otherworld, the Asura Realm was the plant kingdom, the Beast Realm the animal kingdom, and the Preta Realm the mineral kingdom. Wasn't it."

"The essence is the same, I'd say. The plant world is a world of struggle, fighting over shared resources like light and water; the animal world is one of survival of the fittest, lived by instinct; the mineral world is one where you can neither eat nor drink, tormented by hunger and thirst. That's how it works out. Of course, stone itself is inanimate, so it falls outside the cycle of reincarnation."

"In this dungeon, the careers, or rather the academic backgrounds, of the Shiso (Asura) we can summon are constrained, and there's no librarian-training course. Wasn't that it."

"Yes. And even if we were to summon one of your kindred, Master, there still seems to be no librarian among them. Furthermore, in this dungeon, 'otherworld reincarnation' is useless. I mentioned that before."

"An Asura has no brain at birth, and a Beast's brain capacity is insufficient. Was that it?"

"That's right. As a result, their memories are lost, and it becomes no different from ordinary reincarnation, which carries no knowledge over."

"Indeed, that would be meaningless."

"Which is why the only method to obtain a librarian in this dungeon is 'corpse-possession summoning' using a sacrifice, but I don't know how it's done."

"It's plainly an evil method, I'd wager."

"In any case, it would be best not to rush the decision on what to do with the Imperial Library, but to consider it carefully. Since the Library-City Dungeon is, by rights, 'a dungeon that summons over a hundred million books along with countless magazines, newspapers, and the like from multiple otherworlds; a library that gathers and compiles into books all manner of information, from this world's myths, legends, and adventure chronicles to invented tales and verse; and a city where many residents, scholars foremost among them, make their lives.' Given that, the Imperial Library's function will be the key to all of it."