Harvest Time

[Outside the West Gate, Across the Minuma, the Farming District]

At summer's end, the harvest of the early rice began.

"Ho, so this is the reaping of the rice."

Having hurried over from Kasumigaseki on hearing that the rice harvest was on, the Iruma Daikan, Yoshida Nishinoichinojō, was looking on, impressed.

"Daikan-dono, is this your first time seeing a rice harvest?"

"Water being precious, rice is a luxury you grow in tubs, you see. There are dungeons that yield rice, but as luck would have it none lie nearby, so no rice ever finds its way round to Iruma."

"You've helped us with no end of things, from procuring seed to providing seedlings, so once the harvest is all in, I'll send you a year's worth of rice, three hyō, as a gift."

"Most kind of you. Though, naturally, I cannot keep it all to myself; and at this rate, Director of Books-dono, it will not last a year, I fear."

"Next year we'll plant some tens of times what we did this year, so you'll likely be able to just buy it with coin as a matter of course. It should even become possible to pay the rice-stipend retainers their full stipend in actual rice."

"Next year aside, I can hardly wait for the new rice the day after tomorrow."

The harvested rice was threshed with a Taishō-era-style pedal thresher fitted with a motor, and sorted with a winnowing fan likewise fitted with a motor. Owing to the constraints of the industrial base, it was difficult to build a combine harvester using only "library fixtures," the things the dungeon could summon.

"A Worker-Peasant Russia tractor, the kind that's been knocked off all over the Middle East, Africa, South America and elsewhere, looks like something we could copy even with comparatively immature industrial technology."

"Dr. Ōba, you mean the 'weapon of mass destruction' that's even emblazoned on the flag of Mozambique, the 'tractor that has driven the most species to extinction'? I do feel there's something a bit dodgy about knocking off copies without a license. Granted, the Saitama Prefectural Police won't come all the way to another world."

Beyond that, the rice was dried until the morning of the day after next, then run through a rice-polishing machine and a rice cooker, which seemed less like library fixtures than like equipment out of a security guards' room or the like, before at last one could eat cooked rice. That said, this year, when reaping a thousand chō would take many tens of days, was one thing; from next year onward, when the area under cultivation would grow by an order of magnitude, the bulk of the rice would likely be sun-dried, a process of some ten to twenty days.

[Core Room]

"Marie-san, so the day after tomorrow is the harvest festival?"

"No, that comes once the reaping's all finished. What we harvested today is the first fruits, so I expect we'll hold some sort of rite, but this dungeon has no shrine, so it'll be more along the lines of having a monk chant a sutra. Properly there ought to be a traditional local 'way of doing it,' but this region is desert, and for all that rice matters socially, it's grown on a small scale. So there doesn't seem to be any shared, commonly accepted ceremony everyone would be happy with."

"Since it's a religious matter, we can't very well go by 'if there isn't one, make one.'"

"Going and founding a religion would be the very deed of a heretical cult. Cooking up a new faith that worships me as a god, say. As the otherworld's Goseibai-shikimoku puts it, 'A god's majesty waxes by the reverence of men,' so were I to do that, my power might well increase. Though whether it earns me rebirth in paradise or casts me down into hell would come down to how that pseudo-religion gets used."

Was rebirth in paradise even possible, for an Asura?

"That's much like a dungeon, which uses human emotion for energy."

"In the end, since it all conforms to the laws of the world, the underlying principle is presumably the same. And worshipping the very maker of those world-laws is what makes a monotheism. Worshipping, on the other hand, those who belong to the Heavenly Realm of the Six Realms, or great figures of old, or natural phenomena, and in some cases particular Asura or Pretas, makes a polytheism."

"Like foxes?"

"No, the fox itself isn't a god, but a god's messenger. There are others, like snakes. Vasanti would be cross if you called her a snake, but the power to bring rain, even granting that it borrows the dungeon's power, is the sort of power that can become an object of faith."

"Enshrine Vasanti-san as a god's messenger, you mean?"

"Who's to say? She herself might be pleased if liquor were offered up to her."