Harvest Festival, and One Year Since the Dungeon's Birth

[Outside the Northeast Gate: Kannon-ji]

The Library-City Dungeon has no Shinto shrine. In England, Japan's "god" is handed down as Amida Zacca Nacon Cambadokshi (Description of Formosa), but the Kannon hall is a temple that enshrines the Bodhisattva Kannon, not a shrine. And so the harvest festival, too, ends up being conducted in the Buddhist manner.

That said, the locals are rather casual about all that: the octopus monks chant the nenbutsu, while the kappa abbot Pereira makes the sign of the cross. Such things are trifling discrepancies; the congregation's interest lies in the banquet.

[Core Room]

Some of the drinkers seem set to carouse the whole night through, but the sensible folk head home. A few do drop by the "Fox Cafe" run by the enchantress-fox Yōko. Incidentally, before anyone quite realized it, a "Tanuki Cafe" and a "Cat Cafe" had sprung up next door. "Cafe" is English for "teahouse," and in this dungeon, too, it does indeed come out as a "teahouse"…

"You should have joined the banquet too, Master."

"A Named monster can be revived even if it dies, but whether the same holds for the Dungeon Master, I have no idea. Outside the dungeon's central core, where unauthorized entry is forbidden, there's no telling where a ninja might be lurking."

"You'd seem to have nine lives, Master."

"I've no wish to put that to the test, naturally."

"That reminds me, today marks one year since the dungeon was born."

"One year. Only one year, is it."

"Yes. A year ago there was only the single-story first tier-group, and only you and I were here, Master."

"And now it's 5,000 floors across 500 tier-groups, with a hundred or so monsters too."

"To be precise, 4,787 floors across 554 tier-groups, 19.9 km tall, with 21 dungeon monsters, 54 retainers, and one Master. Which is to say, we've replication-summoned 554 libraries from the otherworld and stacked them up."

The Imperial Library is a four-building set (the main building, the Kansai branch, the Taiwan branch, and the old building) counted together as "Tier-Group Zero." There are other libraries that come as multi-building sets as well, so the actual number of buildings is a little higher.

"Elementary schools and the like weren't included in the tier-group count, were they."

"No. To begin with, only libraries can be used for the dungeon's main body; a 'school with a library room' can be placed within the dungeon's sphere of influence, but it can't be incorporated into the main body. If elementary schools could be used for the main body, then even at an average building height of 10 m, summoning ten thousand of them would reach into space."

"How many sacrifices it would take to summon that many, I shudder to think."

"We'd turn into an evil Demon Lord."

"Think we'd have enough if we preyed on the settlers living here now?"

"They're almost all ordinary folk, so I doubt it would be enough. Besides, this dungeon can't summon dangerous monsters."

"Elementary schools aside, just how many libraries can we summon?"

"As I've mentioned before, there are around 4,000 public libraries nationwide. For now, ones smaller than the first tier-group (roughly 30 m square), or only about 10 m tall, are inefficient, so we basically haven't summoned them. Things like station-building branch libraries, on the other hand, we've added to the summoning targets. Most likely the next 500 will add about 20 km of height, and a further 1,000 of the shorter ones will take the added height to around 40 km, which is probably the limit… As for the remaining half, some are already in use in the satellite cities at the gates, and others are smaller in length and width than the first tier-group, which makes for awkward balance when fitting the inter-tier-group elevators."