Library Summoning Work

[Core Room]

"Right, let's get on with summoning libraries. Marie-san, does it look like we can summon the Imperial Library?"

"Not yet. I shouldn't think there's a condition like 'summon every last library in the country' attached, but perhaps the Kansai-kan, the Taiwan-kan, and the Children's Library all have to be summoned as a set."

"If we can't, then let's just go down the line, from Karafuto all the way to the South Seas Islands…"

"We must leave at least some energy in reserve, or we won't be able to cope with an emergency. Master, first the full sixty-three prefectures, agencies, and cities… sixty-one remaining, then. We'll summon those, and after that I'll pick out the larger municipal libraries as suits, so please decide where to slot them in. Stacking them in order from the broadest footprint up makes for a better-balanced look, and it will also make installing the inter-tier-group elevators easier."

The figure is sixty-three prefectures-agencies-cities rather than fifty-five prefectures because the Six Great Cities are special cities, reckoned apart from the prefectures, and because this world conforms to one where the Korean Empire still endures and there exist the five prefectures and three agencies of Taiwan, the Karafuto Agency, and the South Seas Agency. An "agency," incidentally, is in essence simply a thinly populated prefecture.

"Since Tier-Group 3 is the de-facto command center, let's keep the original three tier-groups up at the very top, and Tier-Group 4 has no basement and balances well, so it goes at the very bottom, and… Tier-Group 7 will be Karafuto, Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate."

"The dungeon's height has exceeded 305 meters."

An announcement abruptly issued from the Dungeon Core.

"So there was an evaluation item like that too."

"We must have passed the Yokohama Lighthouse Tower, or was it Abeno Tenkasu. Next would be the Asakusa Twelve Storeys… no, if we get past even the Oshiage Twenty-Nine Storeys, maybe something will happen."

"It was a height of 666 meters, I believe. Somewhere around there."

"Marie-san, there's a strange, oddly long, narrow library over two hundred meters in length here."

"Shall we leave that one out of the summoning?"

"No. Stack up buildings that each differ in design, and a certain untidiness can't be helped either way. Let's go with it as is, as Tier-Group 11. Align the long axis east to west, rotate any building that runs long north-south, and arrange them in order of their shorter side, Akita, Yamagata…"

"Tochigi, Gunma… a prefecture with no main building…"

"Let's set Kumagaya and Kuki side by side and cram the two of them in. Luckily they're about the same height."

"Every prefecture-agency and special city is summoned. The smallest are Tier-Group 36 and Tier-Group 37, both with a short side of thirty meters. Before the special cities were established these were the same prefecture, weren't they. These two."

"In population, the smallest special city falls below some of the government-designated cities. Though saying so is liable to earn me a roundabout, sarcastic dressing-down."

In population and in economic scale alike, Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, Fukuoka, and Taipei have the edge. That is something one must not say.

"Now the municipal libraries of the government-designated cities in turn… Tier-Group 70 is a tower apartment block. That's the first one taller than Tier-Group 3, isn't it. Tier-Group 76 has too low a library ratio to summon easily? Saitama again, is it."

"If it's under ten percent of the floor area, it can't be helped. It comes to about seventy meters all told, above and below ground. Still, costly as it is, we ought to count ourselves grateful that we can summon it at all."

"Anything thirty meters wide or less is a nuisance to fit an inter-tier-group elevator to, so shall we exclude it? Among the government-designated cities, only Utsunomiya falls short, then."

"Tier-Group 3 is fifty-six meters wide, so a building narrower than that will need a fitting section either way, but the first and second tier-groups are only about thirty meters north to south too, so a standard of around that should serve."

"Master, among the prefectural capitals, quite a few come up for exclusion on size. Toyohara, Morioka, Fukushima, Mito…"

"We won't summon those this time. Some other day we can use them to fill the gaps in the tower."

"The dungeon energy from the World Core is height-dependent, so if it's to fill a gap, next time will do."

"The dungeon's height has exceeded 3048 meters."

The Dungeon Core spoke just as Tier-Group 105 was summoned from Hyōgo Prefecture.

"We passed Mount Yushan? No, that mountain is nearly four thousand meters, so it's Mount Fuji we've cleared."

"The underlying system runs on the yard-pound measure, after all. The system was in English at first, and Dungeon 101 going by 'Dungeon One-oh-one' is an American convention too. Which is to say, that's ten thousand feet."

"I wonder if Taipei 101 was made a hundred and one storeys as a play on words for some sort of introduction."

"Tier-Group 128, Kyupokyupo Kawaguchi; Tier-Group 144, Homeland Okegawa… complex facilities rack up the scale, but can you really call them libraries… well, good enough!"

"While we're at it, it would be nice if Antonescu Pond Town in Koshigaya had a municipal library too. Mind you, the Ōsagami Regulating Reservoir is shallow, so I rather think it's not a pond but a marsh."

"Even if we could summon it, wouldn't it stick out, size-wise?"

"What is it, I wonder, that separates a summonable 'tower apartment block with a library attached' from a building we can't summon."

"It's all rather vague. It seems to come down to something like a public library of a certain scale. We couldn't summon a privately built apartment block with a library attached, but whether it simply can't be summoned, or the cost shoots up, or there's some unlock condition, I can't tell."

"The South Seas Agency would be the one on Saipan, Tier-Group 243 or so. As for the big library. Oh, Marie-san, we can summon the branch libraries individually too."

"As long as the main building exists, we can summon the branches' books as well, so in terms of holdings there's no point, but for racking up height it's effective. Tokyo City alone has something like two hundred libraries."

[Wasteland Outside the Dungeon]

Around the middle of the tower, or sometimes near the top, where smoke partly obscured it, a tier-group would be added within, and everything above it would be hoisted higher still.

"Tarōzaemon, it just keeps getting taller, doesn't it."

"Harima-no-suke-sama, however many thousand shaku can it possibly be."

"All the same, it seems we've come to an outrageous sort of place."

"Quite so."

In the World War the Aleman (Germany), Austria, and the Ottomans were carved up along ethnic lines, and a Second World War never came off in this world. The Korean Empire endures, half a shambles though it is, and the Kwantung Leased Territory was returned to, what, the Later Qing perhaps. In that case, it seems likely Taiwan stays Japanese territory.