The Fuel Depot on the Hill

[The Library Dungeon]

Word got out that there was a Dungeon producing paper for kindling and paper-made firewood, and a fuel merchant from nearby came by with a junior clerk in tow.

Inside the Dungeon, several adventurers were busily making newspaper logs. Being a Dungeon, it absorbs garbage, which is convenient.

"If only it would at least put out blank paper…"

said the junior clerk.

"That would just have the paper merchants poking their noses in."

The fuel merchant picked up a single book.

"'In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was formless and void, and darkness…' It's common knowledge that the heavens are round and the earth is square, what they call 'round heaven, square earth.' 'Formless' and so on is nonsense. This has no value as a book. There's no need to go to the trouble of filing a report with the guild headquarters in 'Umeda, the Mercantile City.'"

"Running a courier would cost more than it's worth."

Free-roaming adventurers have no such thing as an "Adventurers' Guild," but merchants maintain guilds for each trade. Important information is relayed to headquarters, but going out of one's way to convey trivial information is a waste.

What's in high demand is rapeseed oil, which can be used for both fuel and cooking, and timber, which is the subject of endless turf wars with the lumber merchants, but few Dungeons produce these. Candles are an even rarer commodity. Paper, by contrast, is second-rate as fuel. To put it the other way around, it has the advantage of drawing little interference from other merchants.

[Core Room]

"Marie-san, maybe the book I showed him was a bad choice. It was the cheapest of the cheap, after all."

"Even so, delivering a worthwhile book properly into the hands of someone who wants it is difficult. To an adventurer who can't read, it's nothing but fuel."

"Mere fuel doesn't impress the adventurers much, and this Dungeon can't summon precious treasure, and on the flip side there aren't any traps we can use to torment them either, and to finish off an adventurer… well, you can't beat an adventurer with a book."

"That's because there is a discrepancy between the Dungeon's true nature and the adventurers' perception of it."

"Maybe we should just quit being a library and convert into a 'fuel depot.'"

"The Encyclopedia Dungeonica says nothing about a Dungeon's 'true nature' changing. It can be influenced by its name, especially a 'byname,' but a library is unlikely to become something else entirely.

"That said, this Dungeon abruptly replaced its main-line monster with an original monster, so while it's still a library without question, we can't say nothing might happen. According to the Encyclopedia, an original monster can only be set once a Dungeon has grown."

"… Come to think of it, what's this Dungeon's name?"

"It doesn't have one. And while we're at it, the Master doesn't have a name either."

"Is there any inconvenience in my having no name?"

"According to the Encyclopedia, a Dungeon Master gets no name effect of the sort a Named monster does. To begin with, most Dungeon Masters live on instinct and have no intellect at all."

A shocking fact, revealed here and now.

"Then no name it is. Good enough!"

Umeda, the Mercantile City, is a colossal Dungeon-city housing several guild headquarters, including the fuel merchants' guild, and the underground portion of the first tier-group (group) "Umeda" alone is said to hold twenty thousand people.

Each tier-group is made up of numerous floors, and because all sorts of train stations, lines like the Hanna Electric Railway and the Hankame Railway that were never built in some worlds, have been jumbled into it, it has turned into a labyrinth. The second tier-group deep underground, "Nagoya," is comparatively small in scale, but the third tier-group "Ikebukuro" has the Hokubu line at its south exit (no relation to the Chichibu Railway; it runs its network in the gap between Tōbu and Tōbu) and the Nanbu line at its north exit (home base around Kawasaki), and of course Seibu and Tōbu have east and west reversed, which is all dreadfully confusing; the fourth tier-group "Shinjuku" is simply enormous; and the fifth tier-group "Shibuya" is so viciously structured that the Tōyoko Kids (not Tō-yoko) even turn up on its lower basement fifth floor, so no one has ever made it all the way through, and what lies further below than that remains unknown.