Opening the Infirmary: The Fourth Shiso, Physician and Sage of Medicinal Herbs

[Rooftop Garden]

The reconfiguration had relocated the Core Room and the garden to the rooftop, but with the inter-tier-group elevator, getting around was easy.

"A physician Shiso, Master? Well, the Shiso family does have a great many medicinal herbs, so if you concentrate hard and summon one with intent, summoning him as a physician should be possible. That said, depending on the species, the 'general image' of it can drag things off course and spoil the result, a Henbit coming out as a dancing girl, say, or a Japanese Beautyberry as a doujin author."

"So I should decide on a few candidates ahead of time, and plan out a name too."

"That's astonishing progress, coming from you, Master. I've prepared an herb encyclopedia here, so let's settle on a summoning candidate. Although, do note that lemongrass and coriander and the like aren't part of the Shiso family, so those I can't summon."

A medicinal-herb encyclopedia might have been better, but the more entries there are, the more of a bother it is to decide.

"This one. Let's go with it. Known as a medicinal herb, also called medicinal salvia, and in English the word for it is the same as 'sage.'"

[Core Room]

The summoned Shiso had hair of gray metallic luster (structural color) faintly tinged with green, the base color being gray. The eyes were a greenish gray. The general vibe: a middle-aged guy.

"I am called Sage. For any labor of the mind, leave it to me."

An emotionless greeting. At the moment of summoning there was no name yet, so this was about what one would expect.

"I'll be counting on you."

The old Dungeon Master would probably have read "Sage" the romaji way and instantly named him "Sa-geh."

"The Latin salvia corrupted into the English 'sage,' and since that's spelled the same as the word for a wise man, I'll pull it back to Latin, sapientem, 'Sapientum'… too long, so I'll hack off the end and… 'Sapien.'"

Not much progress, really. Of course, Sage is Salvia officinalis and not Homo sapiens.

The Dungeon Core announced,

"First, as a physician, I'd like you to look after the settlers. Unfortunately, since this is a library dungeon, I can't summon medical instruments or medicines just now. After that, I'd like to ask you to whip the settlers into shape, no, to educate them."

"In addition to medicine, I possess a general-education-level grounding in law, theology, and the like from the very start. Given books to draw upon, I shall be able to deepen my studies further still."

That said, theology in this region differs from the Western sort: it is about training monks and researching Buddhist law. And, general education? Gen-ed?

[Core Room]

"It's true, this dungeon doesn't have a single physician's tool."

So observed Sapien-sensei, after running a quick check of the items available to summon.

"I can procure something like a medicine chest as office equipment, but a 'library' is not a clinic, you see. There's a restaurant in the third tier-group, but I wasn't able to summon any foodstuffs. Plenty of libraries have a café and so on, but I suppose that sort of thing isn't included in the functions of a 'library.'"

Summoning a public library with an attached café to obtain bread and coffee in bulk. No such trick was available. For instance, since each tier-group of Umeda, the Mercantile City, holds countless shops, if one could summon the goods of those shops, one would easily seize economic hegemony over the region. In reality, the essence of Umeda, the Mercantile City, is a "train station," so its products are tickets and IC transit cards. It looks like one could even summon trains, but who knows.

"Marie-san, the third tier-group is the library of a university with a medical faculty, and yet there's no infirmary."

"Ordinarily a campus has any number of buildings, and there'd be a separate 'Health Management Center' or the like. Well, both you and I are college graduates by our 'settings,' Master, but in fact neither of us has ever so much as attended elementary school."

They had appeared with that setting in place from the beginning; this was not an otherworld summoning. Though they may have passed through reincarnation at some point.