Plague

[Core Room]

"Aide-de-camp scribe-dono, there's been a death inside the dungeon."

It was Mint, who had been monitoring the dungeon's interior, who spoke.

"An adventurer? There are no monsters, and we don't have any traps, do we?"

"No, a civilian. A settler."

"Can you tell the cause of death?"

"Uh, probably an infectious disease. Several settlers and adventurers each are laid up. Symptoms are fever, cough, runny nose."

"A doctor… is naturally not something this dungeon has. And even if we did call for a doctor, given the technological level of this world, probably… First, emergency measures. Asura don't catch human illnesses, so I'll ask Anne to do the nursing, and go fetch the Master while I'm at it. The duties of a maid-of-all-work include those of a 'nurse,' right? Probably?"

That "nurse" means a wet-nurse, not a nursing attendant, so probably not included.

[Core Room]

"Marie-san, is it the plague, cholera, or…?"

"Most likely just a cold, but if it's an infectious disease native to this region, then with rest and proper nutrition we can avoid a worst-case outcome. However, if it's the product of somewhere far away, say, another continent… do continents even exist here? Or of another world entirely, then with no immunity to it, it could turn fatal."

"Could it have come riding in on a book, then?"

"Infectious diseases are caused by bacteria and viruses, but as for a book's appendix carrying something like that… I don't think anything came along unintentionally. In any case, we need a doctor.

An isolated dungeon is the same as a pirate ship on the open sea. Just as a pirate ship needs a ship's doctor like Darwin, or the fictional Gulliver or Doctor Dolittle, a dungeon needs a doctor too."

England is a pirate isle, and every English ship is a pirate ship. Therefore the Beagle was a pirate ship. Incidentally, Doctor Dolittle hates Japan and refuses to learn Japanese, of all languages.

"It's not as if you can become a doctor just by reading a book, though. We'll need to summon a doctor and medical texts as a set."

"Medicine, agriculture, and divination: the very things even the First Emperor refrained from burning. In addition to agriculture, we now urgently need medicine as well. Since the books we can summon are limited to the holdings of the libraries we've already summoned, if we're going to need a large volume of medical and agricultural texts going forward, our next summon should be a university library with both a Faculty of Medicine and a Faculty of Agriculture."

Divination, left out of the group, may well be watching forlornly from the sidelines.

"A freezer… we had one, right. We mass-produce ice, buy time on nutrition with the Asura feed for now, and… as for a household medical guide…"

Marie went about arranging the nursing supplies, but the settlers made to drink that Asura feed, foul as muddy water, were a pitiable sight.

[Core Room]

A dungeon may absorb the corpses of adventurers and the like at once, but since not even permitting a funeral would be a problem, it grants enough grace for non-intruders to at least cremate their dead. The unfortunate settler, burned with fuel books, was converted into dungeon energy along with the grief of the bereaved.

Returning from the settler's funeral, Marie conferred with the Dungeon Master on their course from here.

"Master, first, as for our present forces: two ordinary public-library facilities. And three monsters: a secretary, a hacker, and a maid."

"And what we'll need going forward…"

"A doctor and an agronomist. Plus medical and agricultural texts… which means a university library. A university library can summon papers and journals on top of specialist books."

"We're getting magazines even now, aren't we."

"What we'd summon going forward are academic journals. Their print runs aren't large and most of them are in English, so the cost is higher, but they're necessary for the future.

And rather than, say, summoning the libraries of a medical university and an agricultural university separately, I'd like to settle it with a single building."

"A squid university? In Hakodate?"

"That's the Faculty of Fisheries of a different university. It's true that some medical universities do farm squid, but that's for research on their nerves."

"As a plan, then: first summon the university library of a university that has a Faculty of Medicine and a Faculty of Agriculture, then summon 'Shiso' with the abilities of a doctor and an agronomist in turn. Right."

"No problems with that. Only, the dungeon energy required to summon a university library is nowhere near enough, so 'right away' is out of the question. Before we get there, let's decide which university's library to summon."

Had it followed the tutorial, it could have summoned a university library too. Not that anyone knows it.