Not Enough Adventurers

[Outside the West Gate, Kamikochō]

"So then, Director of Books-dono, how badly do you expect the food to fall short?"

"It troubles me that the influx of migrants is running considerably higher than expected, but if in autumn we plant some fifty thousand chōbu of wheat, the harvest will feed five hundred thousand people. In the worst case, if we can hold out until autumn, we can even turn rice over to be eaten, so we can endure up to a million. In other words, if we can last until the end of spring, until the wheat harvest, after that we can manage one way or another. The problem is the stretch until spring."

"So the time just before the spring harvest is the worst of it."

"Yes. At this rate we may become a stone-broke Frigid Empire and suffer through the spring hunger gap."

In the otherworld, the neighboring land of Japan, the Korean Empire, is pronounced the same. This country, what with Itō Hirobumi turning up dead afloat in a brothel ditch, has had its share of troubles, but it survives all the same. However, the ruling class known as the yangban has swollen to about 80 percent of the population, and since there are naturally not nearly that many official posts, nor enough "work befitting a yangban" outside of office either, the increase of unemployment and NEETs has become a problem (among these, a NEET who passed the grade-5 civil-service examination, that is, the higher-level exam, but was never appointed is called a sonbi. Not a zombie).

"The otherworld's words are hard to follow, but…"

"By the time the wheat-sowing is finished, the population will be a hundred thousand. If over the winter we assume a hundred thousand from the disordered east and a hundred thousand from other regions, then the food required is two-thirds of a year's supply for three hundred thousand, that is, a full year's supply for two hundred thousand, which in grain terms is three hundred thousand koku. Against that, our stock is the roughly hundred thousand koku bought up during the war with Awa and so on; this autumn's harvest amounts to ten thousand koku of rice, the equivalent of thirty thousand koku in tubers, and about ten thousand koku of corn, soybeans, and the like. Even supplementing with autumn daikon and Chinese cabbage, by simple arithmetic we still come up nearly a hundred thousand koku short as things stand."

"A hundred thousand koku, is it. Fuchū has a policy of hunting out and clearing several of the low-yield dungeons. But the adventurers have dwindled considerably, so there aren't enough to go down into the dungeons."

"There were two great battles this year, after all. Against numbers like those, there was no choice but to wipe them out with the dungeon's functions. With that method, it's difficult to separate enemy soldiers from mercenaries and adventurers."

Naturally, even Marie did not care to be called an evil Demon King who obstructs the way of the Buddha, so she would never come out and say that, to seize a great deal of dungeon energy quickly, she had massacred the noncombatants along with the rest.

"This dungeon is of the water attribute, while Tsukuba is fire and Awa is earth. As for what an attack by water would be like, it is terrible just to imagine."

"A dungeon cannot go out and attack; we plan to use water for defense as well. Right now we're storing water in a pond called the Minuma, and I am thinking that if we can manipulate the pond's water with the dungeon's functions, we might sweep away the Preta, who cannot swim."

Of course the dungeon was not of the water attribute.

"The adventurers would be swept away too, it seems. Though surely, even if someone now thought to mount an attack on this dungeon, there isn't an adventurer left who would go along with it."

"I hear that at the time of Tsukuba Naiyaku-no-jō, the more capable adventurers already saw the danger and refused to take part."

"That said, war is not the only reason adventurers are decreasing. To begin with, most adventurers are second and third sons with no other work, but now that they can be granted fields here in this dungeon, those who aren't simply continuing out of love for it are starting to quit being adventurers."

"That would certainly be how it goes. I had been thinking the influx of migrants was oddly faster than I'd predicted, but it's true that an adventurer can change residence quite freely."

"For a farmer with fields, a temple-registration certificate or a transfer paper won't easily be issued, but an adventurer, while not exactly a vagrant, can move house easily under the system."

"The adventurers are dwindling. In that case, the problem may not be confined to food alone."

"Indeed. Many products depend on the dungeons. If their supply is disrupted, that is a grave matter."

"We'll need to consider whether we can substitute them with things this dungeon can summon."

"My apologies. It seems I'm the one causing you trouble in return."