Let's Make an Orchard

[Tier-Group 3 Front Plaza]

In exchange for taking in the surplus humans nobody wanted, Marie had obtained fruit-tree saplings from the Daikan, and she was now planting them across the orchard on the hillside slope and in the plaza before the entrance of Tier-Group 3. At some point Tier-Group 3 had risen to an altitude of 15 km, into the stratosphere, yet the air pressure and temperature remained perfectly normal, presumably owing to one of the dungeon's unique laws.

"Until harvest, plums and chestnuts will take three or four years, persimmons five or six, I should think."

"We'll need to increase the number of fruit trees themselves, too."

"Master, persimmons can be propagated in great quantity through what is called 'root-burying,' in which you cut off a stretched-out root, plant it, and induce it to take root. Mass production should therefore be quite swift. Plums, however, are difficult to grow from cuttings, and chestnuts are flatly impossible to propagate from cuttings by the usual methods. If we make saplings from seed, mass production will take time."

"Persimmons first, then."

"One caution: a sapling grown from seed becomes a different variety from its parent. For example, the persimmon seeds that come bundled with the picture-book teaching materials for 'The Crab and the Monkey' are a game of Russian roulette, since you won't know whether they're sweet or astringent until they've grown. And in the case of grafted saplings, what root-burying propagates is, naturally, the rootstock, so if you wish to increase a specific variety, you'll need to graft onto the propagated saplings."

Incidentally, whether because Asura can't taste anything, or because tannin, the astringent component, is something plants ordinarily contain anyway, astringent persimmons gave Marie no trouble at all.

"Marie-san, what about the varieties we don't have right now, and making up the shortfall in numbers?"

"My policy is to obtain saplings as they come, from adventurers and merchants, in exchange for the Master's beer."

"So that's why the beer in the fridge is always gone…"

This Dungeon Master's staple diet was black coffee, canned beer, chūhai, and the like. All of them were splendid items that, in summer, also served as countermeasures against heatstroke. In the case of humans, however, there was a danger of the opposite effect.

"In this region, the water is poor, so they can't brew any decent liquor. Beer in particular is well received, presumably because there's no other way to obtain it."

Beer is produced from nothing but malt, hops, and water (plus yeast), so while it looks simple at a glance, production is a nuisance.

"This was supposed to be the 'Library' dungeon, wasn't it. So our products are fuel and beer?"

"And fertilizer, though we use it only within the dungeon's sphere of influence. That, too, is the result of trial and error as the situation demanded."

"Making it up as we go, then."

"Can't you identify the fruit-tree varieties?"

"We have no laboratory equipment to test DNA, and it can't be done until they bear fruit anyway. Persimmons, for instance, come in as many as a thousand varieties, and depending on the region the same variety may go by a different name, or different varieties by the same name. At this region's level of civilization, I doubt any systematic management of varieties is being carried out."

"So book-knowledge alone has its limits one way or another, just as I figured."

"We have no production technology that depends on the actual work-site, such as factories. There was even an incident where some religion tried to produce weapons and gathered up brilliant scientists, but because it had no technicians who'd graduated from technical high schools, it failed at mass production."

"That sounds like nothing so much as an evil cult."

"A dungeon, too, is rather like an evil cult that craves the blood of sacrifices. Wherever there is light, there is also shadow."

"Should we just own it and declare ourselves an evil cult, then?"

"That would be best avoided at the present stage. However great the gap in technological level, it isn't as though the people of this world are inferior in valor or in thought, so holding a dungeon-city against a proper military commander would be difficult. It's better to quietly hunt the likes of mere bandits. Granted, there was that brainless toad who commanded a great host despite himself, but one shouldn't count on luck of that sort."

"The Core Room may be 'No Unauthorized Entry,' but there's a limit to holing up inside."

"Since we are a human farm, we must house and feed a great many residents. The vast fields and paddies spreading outside the dungeon will be our greatest weakness. And a Great Wall encircling the entire sphere of influence would have far too poor a cost-benefit ratio."

"So having more 'things worth protecting' brings its own problems, eh. 'A rich nation with a strong army leads to ruin; a poor nation with a weak army stands out too much,' was it."

"It holds for the dungeon as a whole, but the individual residents are also accumulating private property. Before long we'll need the judicial system we've asked Rāja to draft. We won't be able to get by, as we do now, with simple decrees alone, that murder means the death penalty, injury corporal punishment, and theft restitution."

"You mean to rebuild that whole Six Codes Compendium to fit this world… Rāja-san has it rough too."

"Regarding the persimmons just now, in 'The Crab and the Monkey,' the crab who took revenge on the monkey was put on trial and sentenced to death. But where there is no law, there's also the danger that the monkey's relatives might attack the crab, setting off an endless chain of retaliation."

"Eh, the crab got the death penalty?"

"In a modern state of law, we cannot very well permit unlimited private retaliation."