If There's No Rice, Just Drink Liquid Fertilizer

The season was autumn, September as the otherworld would reckon it. Against the current population of nearly a hundred thousand the paddies were few, and since the rice harvest took relatively little manpower, we summoned in bulk the seeds of autumn-sown vegetables, daikon, turnip, onion, spinach, lettuce, and the like, along with rapeseed for oil, and planted them one after another. These came as magazine supplements, so the unneeded magazines themselves were shipped out of the dungeon as fuel.

Potatoes, since seed potatoes can't be summoned, had to be inspected from the small ones we had on hand and used as they were. For this reason, we couldn't plant very many.

[Tier-Group 3, Floor 10, Reception Room]

"There are more immigrants than expected, while the securing of food is stalling, so the plan is to cultivate large quantities of quick-growing vegetables to supplement the nutrients that the Asura liquid fertilizer lacks for humans, and somehow keep the residents alive until the wheat harvest."

Maribel, the dietitian, was explaining with charts and diagrams as well, but Marie aside, to the Master it was unintelligible. Incidentally, Maribel is, strictly speaking, a registered dietitian (and naturally holds a dietitian's license as well).

"Rice and wheat have a limited sowing season, but vegetables can be sown year-round, more or less, something can always be planted. That said, with 'if there's no rice, just drink liquid fertilizer,' the humans don't seem able to put up with it."

"If this were 'if there's no bread, just eat cake,' there's no cake either, but we do have liquid fertilizer, so couldn't we just season it with sugar or salt?"

"Master, the food for the Dungeon Master, main-line monsters, and retainers can be summoned through the dungeon's functions, but in this dungeon humans can't be summoned, and so neither can seasonings. The Shiso (Asura) get fertilizer, and the Master and the retainers get black coffee, beer, energy drinks, and so on."

That the refrigerator had, at the very beginning, held vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, eggs, milk, and the like was something no one remembered any longer.

"It's a desert, so salt at least ought to be lying around just about anywhere."

"Master, even in a desert there is no salt of edible quality. And even if we extracted it from salty mud and the like, the impurities would be hard to remove."

"This world already has a high salt intake to begin with, owing to pickles and so on, so it would be better to go easy on the salt. Even so, how the retainers manage not to fall ill on a diet like that is beyond my comprehension."

"So why exactly is that liquid fertilizer so outrageously vile?"

"Master, the Shiso have no sense of taste, so the food the dungeon's functions prepare for them probably gives no thought to 'flavor' either."

"This world isn't generally in a nutritional state of sugar excess, so if we had sugar, or even a chemical seasoning, we might be able to make it somewhat more palatable to humans. But in any case, this dungeon can't cultivate the raw material, sugarcane."

As Maribel said, it was too cold for sugarcane. It was grown in the Land of Awa to the south, but it was extremely expensive.

[Core Room]

"If it were gold that had turned up, I could understand it, but… does the population really swell this rapidly?"

On the screen, from the Eastern Land to the east, a throng of migrants, or rather, by now a horde of refugees, came trudging down the highway.

"The East is in chaos because its government has collapsed."

"Either way, large numbers of refugees would have been flowing in over the winter, so we should count it fortunate that it came before the wheat sowing. Naturally, taking in the entire population of the East would be beyond us."

"We'll have to have Oda Ukyō-no-suke-dono do his best for us."