Such Brazen Demands. Seed Potatoes, Saplings, and the Head of John the Baptist Too!

[Core Room]

In the Core Room, Mint was assembling the model that came packaged with Weekly Build the Casablanca-class Escort Carrier.

"There are going to be fifty of these, you realize. Lining them up on the Core Room bookshelf, could you not? Your own room, fine, but here?"

"Marie built the first one, so what's another forty-nine on top of that."

"A bookshelf is a place to line up books… To think Mint had this much free time. I'll have to pile on more work."

"Please do. Oh, Master, visitor. Distance twenty thousand, the Daikan's party most likely."

Mint read off the footage from the surveillance cameras.

"About a day's travel, then. Arrival tomorrow. Eventually I'd like a post-station in every direction, one day's travel out."

"Spreading the sphere of influence that far would be quite a labor."

[Before the Library Dungeon]

"Secretary-General-dono, things are coming along nicely. The buildings have grown considerably larger."

The Daikan had arrived.

"Indeed. But there are still a great many things we're short of. Seeds we can obtain to a reasonable degree, but for seed potatoes and fruit-tree saplings we've no prospects at all. The fact is that the soil hereabouts is completely dead, so farming is impossible anywhere but the dungeon. Nor is there any village somewhere actually doing agriculture, either."

"Eh? Folk farm just fine."

"Is that so?"

"The soil is poor, true, so the crops don't grow well. We give it what little night-soil and compost we have and manage to produce something."

"In soil like this. It must be hard work."

Then what in the world was all that uproar about hunting down and raiding a botanical-garden dungeon?

"The vegetables here are growing nicely."

"The komatsuna and spinach are already harvestable. The bok choy and turnips will be soon as well. Come summer, tomatoes and squash and corn; come autumn, rice…"

"Rice, you say!"

The Daikan cut in, breaking across her. He seemed to have let the vegetable names wash over him; some of them didn't exist in this region, or went by different names.

"Yes, up there, in small quantity. Next year I'd like to begin rice cultivation in earnest."

Marie pointed up at the plaza before the third tier-group's entrance, high above.

"Rice… how many years has it been since I last ate it, ever since I was posted to this backwater magistracy."

"If we manage a harvest, I could spare you a little. Provided, however…"

"If it can be done, I'll do anything."

"The head of John the Baptist, then."

"Eh? Yosaku's head? Ah, the dungeon grows on sacrifices, that's right. Even so, bandits who've earned a death sentence don't turn up so readily."

The Daikan, Yoshida Nishinoichinojō, didn't know John the Baptist, so he didn't know the stock answer to "I'll do anything," either.

"I'd like every variety of seed potato and fruit-tree sapling you can lay hands on. And livestock too, if there are any. In exchange, I'll spare you a little of our seed."

"Potatoes, eh… Grain doesn't grow well here, so sweet potato is effectively the staple in these parts, but I'd dearly like to eat rice."

"A little this year, a fair amount next. That's how it stands. The exact quantity depends on the harvest."

"And how many settlers can you take in?"

"Space-wise we can receive about a hundred more settlers, but as things stand the food won't last until autumn. If you send a second wave, please have them bring at minimum their own provisions. Also, we were raided by bandits the other day, but one of them escaped. Do take ample care."

"Do you know the bandits' names, anything of the sort?"

"No. We dropped them into the trap before they could announce themselves."

"They may have been wanted criminals. I brought this along, as it happens."

A retainer waiting behind him held up a single board.

"Decree: the Christian sect having been proscribed for years on end… informant against a bateren, five hundred pieces of silver; informant against an iruman, three hundred pieces of silver…"

"It's an article fixed since ancient times to be posted in every village. This board is a freshly copied one, but the wording has been handed down from of old. What a bateren might be, though, I do not know. Iruman I take to be a word bearing some connection to my own Iruma Magistracy in Kasumigaseki, but…"

"So this area is called Iruma, then."

"No, this is Adachi. It's utter wasteland, so there's not so much as a magistracy, let alone a village. No one governs the place at present, so you might as well simply declare dominion over it, for that matter."

Of course the geography differed from the otherworld's; from the Iruma Magistracy to this dungeon was about three days. After various other arrangements, the meeting concluded.

[Rooftop Garden]

"So farming was being carried out even in barren land like this. I'm impressed by human effort."

"The first wave of settlers had no farm tools, no seed, no provisions. The misunderstanding that no farming is being done can't be helped."

"In other words, that Yoshida Nishinoichinojō is to blame. Down with the Yoshida regime."

"Going by that performance, I suspect he'd capitulate readily enough if we dangled rice in front of him, but…"

"Now, that board the Daikan brought, that's an otherworld anti-Christian edict, that is. Originally someone must have carried it over from the otherworld."

"Which means there's a high probability a dungeon of that sort exists. Is that it?"