Let's Dig Up the Very First System Log

[Tier-Group 3, Control Room]

"Director-dono, in all likelihood this Library-City Dungeon has something quite unforeseen going on at its very foundations. A tower over sixty kilometers tall, made by sloppily stacking up some three thousand libraries. That structure itself seems rather unnatural and rather reckless."

Because it included overlapping old and new buildings, community-center reading rooms, and the like, it was not simply every library that existed at once in some particular year of an otherworld Japan (Taiwan and so on included).

"Mint-san, if we work out the root cause, then a thread toward solving Marie-san's problem might come into view, too. Might it not."

That, before, it had understood none of this was already lost in the far reaches of oblivion.

"Perhaps. Now then, you are aware, I think, that most ordinary, naturally occurring dungeons have no Dungeon Master."

"I've heard as much."

(A dungeon is one that has a Core; a natural cave or ruin or the like is one that doesn't. That's the gist of it.)

"In a dungeon with a Master, the Master touches the Core and 'spins out' an image to operate the dungeon. This dungeon, however, comes with the 'Encyclopedia Dungeonica' prepared for it, and a kindly arrangement whereby you advance through the tutorial while reading the introductory manual, 'Dungeon 101.'"

(By the time I checked the dungeon system, the tutorial itself no longer existed. It must have vanished before that.)

"The books were all in English, so I threw them aside without reading them."

"English is the de facto common tongue in many other worlds, so the dungeon system, too, has some connection to other worlds, and is therefore in English, I expect. In worlds with magic, the incantations are often in English as well, so they say, though whether that's true or not is unclear."

(A dungeon's unique laws deviate from the ordinary laws of science, so in a sense they could be called magic, I suppose, but they aren't particularly in English, are they.)

"Now then, let us look at the very first part of the operation log. To begin with, this is the first operation the Director-dono performed."

"What the original 'main-line' was is unclear, but it means the present Shiso (Asura) is an original monster. Also, an original monster ordinarily requires detailed settings, but it appears this one was forced through by sheer master-user authority."

"Normally the main-line was the basic monster of a given dungeon. If I recall, ours was originally Ox-Head and Horse-Head, I think."

(Ox-Head and Horse-Head for a Library Hell. That, too, strikes me as odd, given that Tier-Group 1 is an ordinary library.)

"The moment it's Ox-Head and Horse-Head, it doesn't quite fit a 'library' setting to begin with, but since the summoning list itself has been rewritten, there's no telling what the original was. The main-line monster is, for a pirate-ship dungeon, pirates, and so on; for the most part, it's the monster you'd naturally expect to find in that dungeon."

(For a library, a librarian, then? Doesn't seem to be so simple a thing, though.)

"There's no use fretting over what we can no longer summon."

"They do say 'never forget your founding spirit.' If we learn what it was at the start, it'll likely prove useful. If we can't learn it, then it can't be helped."

(Mint, that's a matter of one's resolve, which I believe is rather different from initial settings.)