The Family System

[Tier-Group 4, First Floor, Reception Room]

A meeting of four: Marie, the Knight Commander, Okada Tarōzaemon, and Echizen-ya. The Daikan, for his part, had returned to Iruma.

"Erm, the social shishtem, was it?"

The Knight Commander, Kishi Harima-no-suke, who hadn't quite grasped it.

"Yes. Society means, in other words, the workings of the world. So, what sort of society would be best to build in this library-city dungeon? I'd like to hear the opinions of all of you, who are residents of this world."

"Secretary-General-dono, even if you say 'the workings of the world,' well, the workings of the world are just the workings of the world. If you ask me about some other workings, I can't say anything about that."

To Okada Tarōzaemon, any other social system was beyond imagining, and he couldn't even grasp the intent of Marie's question.

"For example, the question of whether a system called the family is necessary in the first place."

"Comrade Secretary-General, wouldn't it be necessary for children to learn the various things needed for living?"

Echizen-ya answered.

"Echizen-ya-san, on the point of educating children, the household isn't necessarily essential. For instance, ants and bees and termites are what's called eusocial, and they build societies more efficient than humanity's. To put it in human terms, it would be something like: all but the stud males castrated, some of the females devoted solely to breeding, the rest of the men and women doing the work, and the children raised by specialists."

"Insects were doing such things?"

Echizen-ya didn't know either. For the record, the worker ants and bees are infertile females, and the males are NEETs. The worker termites are larvae.

"Come to think of it, I've never seen an insect beastfolk."

So said the Knight Commander.

"Insects can't make their bodies large, so they can't possess intelligence enough to be called beastfolk. Explaining the reason in detail would run long, so I'll skip it here, but when an insect gets bigger it can no longer breathe, and is crushed under its own weight. That said, in a dungeon, depending on the unique law, there might be insect-beastfolk… not beasts in the strict sense, but something of that nature might exist."

Insects breathe through tracheae, which limits their size; even the giant dragonflies of antiquity had wingspans of only sixty centimeters, no larger than a pigeon. Being dragonflies, their tails were rather long, mind you.

"That's a dungeon I'd rather not see."

"Even among beasts, the animal called the naked mole-rat is eusocial, but they probably don't live around here."

"A bald rat? There was one of those somewhere. A samurai like that."

It is not Hideyoshi. Nor is he an acquaintance of the Knight Commander.

"In the case of animals, a horse for example, they form herds of roughly one or two males and three to five females; the lead mare guides the herd while the boss stallion protects them from outside threats, or so I'm told. But as for how it is with horse-beastfolk, even when I asked them directly they wouldn't answer me."

Horse society varies by region and circumstance. Horse-beastfolk? One can only say it's a good thing Marie didn't get kicked by Haruna.

"Well, that, ah, I'd be at a loss myself if someone asked me such a thing. Among beastfolk, the tanuki are quite strict monogamists, and mistresses and adulterers are driven out. Dogs form packs of a married pair and their blood kin, while cats have only the mother rear the young and the father goes off gallivanting. From my experience traveling here and there as a fuel merchant, the kappa, for instance, live separately by sex and consider it sinful to bear children, so their numbers are dwindling."

"In the case of a samurai, what matters more than the family is the house. If there are no children, or the children one has turn out poorly, then rather than letting kin inherit, one takes in an adopted son to continue the house itself. Fortunately, my own son is excellent, though."

A Knight Commander with no humility whatsoever.

"Comrade Secretary-General, unlike humans and beasts and Asura, the Preta aren't born from parents, so they have no families."

As the fuel merchant Echizen-ya says, the Preta are born from stone. If Sun Wukong were in this world he would count as a Preta, but, well.

"True, beasts belong to the animal kingdom and Asura to the plant kingdom, but the Preta belong to the mineral kingdom. So how does a newly born Preta acquire knowledge, I wonder? I can't imagine they possess the necessary knowledge from the very start the way dungeon monsters do."

"I don't know. About all we could do is catch a Preta and ask it."