The First Wave of Settlers

[Before the Library Dungeon]

The Daikan had brought along several dozen shabby-looking people.

"Secretary-General-dono, I have brought those who wish to relocate. Ordinarily there are few who would care to move to an unknown land, but provisions being as scarce as they are, they have no choice but to gamble on the possibility."

"Please assign the rooms and the fields according to this diagram. The library's reading rooms are spacious, whole floors, or rather whole rooms, so partition them off as you use them. The basic rules I'll put in writing… ah, but you can't read or write, can you."

"Being able to write one's own name is enough, after all."

"So they go around saying things like, 'Swordsmanship only lets you face one opponent at a time, so it isn't worth learning,' and in the end they find themselves surrounded on all four sides by the songs of Chu."

"The songs of… what now?"

"It means that those who hold learning in too much contempt are doomed to ruin."

That's nothing like what it means.

"The caretaker will be this Tarōzaemon here, so I leave him to your good graces."

A middle-aged man with a head that had gone quite, well, slightly thin on top was introduced.

"Okada Tarōzaemon."

In the Edo period, commoners were not officially permitted to bear surnames, but in this region most people have one. Of course, some, such as certain adventurers, hold no surname at all (or have cast theirs aside).

"Once you have some surplus in the harvest, I'd like you to round up whatever adventurers are about and have them haul it to the village. Twenty sen ought to be plenty. I'd like to say the land tax is waived for three years, but this is inside a dungeon, so I've no choice but to leave that to the Secretary-General-dono."

With that, the Daikan departed.

"Well then, Okada Tarōzaemon… dono?"

"Just Tarōzaemon is fine."

"The soil is dead, so we'll have to apply fertilizer. For water, we run a hose from the library's outdoor spigot and… we'll need to work out a method. We really ought to summon an agricultural advisor or something…"

"Then please give us concrete instructions. Most of these folk can't make sense of vague orders."

"I'd like to tell you to go back and start over from compulsory education, but for now, let's begin with what we can do. Before that, though, how many days of provisions do you have? You'll have to make what you've got stretch until the harvest comes in."

"Er, we've brought nothing at all, I'm afraid…"

[Core Room]

"That Daikan… I wonder, is Asura liquid fertilizer actually safe for humans to drink?"

An Asura can take human food without trouble, but feed Asura fodder to a human over the long term and they'll come up short on all sorts of things, certain amino acids, vitamins A, B12, and C, calcium, iron, zinc, and so on.

"My canned beer is high in calories, though."

"And then they dance about singing 'cat, oh cat,' and end up drowning to death, is that it? If the Master keeps saying such nonsense, I'll fetch someone from Karatsu and make him into hot pot."

Naturally, no such thing can be summoned directly in this dungeon.

"To begin with, supposing we do cultivate vegetables, what are we going to do for meat?"

"In this world, they seem to rely on chickens, and on the dungeon monsters that drop meat as 'drop items.'"

"If they're dungeon monsters, then we can't very well lead them out alive and breed them, I take it."

"Not unless they've been made 'Named,' no. And besides, even supposing we got hold of a cow, this dungeon couldn't accommodate it."

"Marie-san, in the short term, first, what do we do until the first vegetables can be harvested?"

"The liquid fertilizer, the kind for drinking directly rather than the kind for the fields, to buy time until they reach malnutrition. That's all we can do."

"And after that?"

"Leafy greens and turnips in one to two months, and beyond that, I'd like to branch out into upland rice and soybeans, while keeping an eye on how the climate behaves. Tubers and fruit trees are hard to move through distribution as 'magazine appendices,' so we'll have to procure those from somewhere else.

Meat, on the other hand, we'll have to obtain through trade, but the thing of greatest value in this dungeon, 'knowledge,' is worthless in this world, so…"

"Could we just sell the fertilizer directly?"

"The soil is dead, and used anywhere outside a dungeon, the effect weakens. Even within a dungeon, a library is the sort of place that has flower beds and so on, so plants can be grown, but a pirate ship, for instance, scatter fertilizer across the wasteland outside the hull and it's wasted. That place is meant to be ocean, you see."

Had the Dungeon Master refrained from doing anything unnecessary, they could have gotten by on the meat and vegetables in the refrigerator.

[Before the Library Dungeon]

"I, Marie, personal secretary, hereby declare the founding of this Library Dungeon City. As I am not a school principal, I'll keep my remarks brief."

"Not in her prime, is she…"

murmured one of the settlers, who, not knowing the word "principal," had taken it for "past her prime."

"Now then, let us drink a toast. When I say 'Skål,' all of you say 'Skål' too, and drink the beverage you've been handed."

The Master's canned beer, black coffee, and cola from the refrigerator were distributed. The energy drinks were left out, on the grounds that the brand differed and ill suited a toast. …Which is a flat-out lie; they were simply far too stimulating.

And the Dungeon Master alone stayed home to mind the Core Room. Named monsters can be revived, but there was no guarantee against some unforeseen incident, so it was far too dangerous to let the Master appear in public.

"Skål."

"Skål."

And so the new-paddy development began. Why it is called "new-paddy" when there are no paddies at all remains a mystery.