Energy Overflowing, and Still Not Enough for the National Library

[Core Room]

"I feel myself being lured down the path of evil."

They say "he who burns books will come to burn people too," and after burning books by the heap for fuel and then swallowing ten thousand human lives on top of it, the dungeon had stockpiled energy in abundance. The Dungeon Core, normally silver with a metallic luster, was now glowing in rainbow colors.

"But, Marie-san, on an outward campaign we can't use such an outrageous method, can we."

"Master, to begin with, no matter how much evil you do on an outward campaign, dungeon energy doesn't increase. Lopping off hands in a colony, inducing famine through forced cultivation, strapping rebellious residents to cannons and blowing them apart, throwing slaves overboard from a ship, none of it means a thing to a dungeon."

Carry out a great purge like Stalin's and you could obtain dungeon energy, but the side effect of reducing the residents' emotional energy was too great, and it was ill-suited to a human farm. Of course, even for a nation rather than a dungeon, it would be a bad move that damaged national strength, but…

"So razing the whole of Mount Tsukuba with a swarm of self-destruct drones in retaliation would be pointless. Is that it."

"That's right. And besides, one doesn't normally mount an expedition from a dungeon. Ordinary dungeon monsters can't leave the dungeon, and Named monsters are limited in number."

A stampede of dungeon monsters, or combat between one dungeon and another, didn't normally occur. There were cases of a dungeon's Named monsters commanding adventurers to conquer a small-scale dungeon, though.

"Then what about hiring a great army of mercenaries, launching a counterattack on Tsukuba from our side, seizing the residents, hauling them back to the dungeon, and using them as sacrifices?"

"Master, according to the Encyclopedia Dungeonica, 'Asuka, the Temple of Stone' makes heavy use of sacrifices, but offering up ordinary people as sacrifices doesn't yield much energy. It also goes beyond the bounds of self-defense. Turning the tables on the pirates and warlords who come to us is by far the most efficient approach."

"Even so, the dungeon energy we've accumulated this time is quite the quantity."

"The bother is that it can't be quantified."

"Looks like we could add another two tier-groups or so of library. No, this time, maybe around ten tier-groups."

That the buildings a book-burning dungeon could summon happened to be libraries was about as ironic as it got. Of course, it was also possible to dig caves or stack stone and brick and designate them as dungeon structure, but while that was fine for something structurally simple like a rampart, when it came to residential facilities, ordering ready-made products was overwhelmingly faster and cheaper.

"Forget ten. We could easily summon twenty or thirty large municipal libraries. If need be, we could even summon the higher-cost university libraries."

The libraries of famous universities, high in renown and exclusive in standing, would come out an order of magnitude more expensive than a municipal library that anyone could enter.

"What about summoning the Imperial Library?"

"A national library is in a class of its own cost-wise, so that's out of the question. It amasses every book in the country; in a sense, it's the final destination of library summoning. True, its holdings number close to a hundred million, but Tier-Group 6 (in Japan, the municipal library with the largest holdings) and Tier-Group 3 (a somewhat large university library) both hold about 2.5 million items, so it's only thirty times or so, yet the summoning cost exceeds even all the energy we have now. Whether it's double, or tenfold. There's even a chance we're only a few percent short. Or perhaps there's some prerequisite condition."

The Imperial Library was the same thing as the National Diet Library, with the name differing by world. Of course, when the building was summoned it came with no holdings, and books of the same kinds as its holdings could be summoned separately. A library might hold multiple copies of the same book, and summoning the main building made the annex's holdings summonable too, so the number of items summonable differed from the number of holdings.

"Then let's gather ordinary libraries. Taller means more energy gained from the World Core, wasn't it. While we're at it, summon as many as we can."

"We have to leave at least some energy, or we won't be able to respond to emergencies. Still, the next group of migrants will be here soon, so we can wait until after that to add tier-groups."