Next Up, Lumber

[Core Room]

"They say 'food, clothing, and shelter.' Well, as for shelter, summon a library and it'll last for ages. Food and clothing we cultivate in the fields and paddies. Which leaves, still in short supply…"

"Mineral resources and lumber. Yes."

"Mines and forests, then. Mines are a matter of the geology itself, so I suppose all we can do is expand the dungeon's sphere of influence and make a geological map."

"Generally speaking, iron and copper are said to drop from monsters in mine-type dungeons. For instance, there might be a metallic golem, and if you erase two of the characters of the word 'truth' on its forehead, you obtain a lump of metal. That sort of thing."

"We really are dependent on dungeons in every way. I suppose water and air depend on the dungeon too."

"As for air, I don't think the residents of this world have noticed. Incidentally, a Dungeon Core is also an iron-nickel alloy, so if you conquer a dungeon you can obtain iron, but in terms of efficiency it's out of the question."

"We'll go with purchasing iron for the time being, then. It's not as if we use it in any great quantity. So. Lumber."

"This being a desert, lumber is clearly in short supply."

"If we summon bookshelves and desks as library fixtures and dismantle them, we can get teak boards. But there's a lot of waste in that."

In this dungeon, wooden furniture turned out to be teak. Incidentally, rapeseed oil and sesame oil came out as perilla oil.

"Furniture and fixtures cost more dungeon energy than books do. The amount a Named monster sets in a room is a rounding error, but if it's a matter of putting them in every household or selling them externally, the cost reaches an unacceptable level."

"It takes time, but afforestation is best, I suppose."

"As for producing lumber, in theory the lowest-cost method is to summon a Shiso (Asura) teak, give it a name, call forth its 'true-body' plant, and then propagate it. However, teak is a tropical plant, so it can't survive the winter."

"Does it get cold here in winter?"

"Judging from the solar and temperature observation data since the dungeon was established, and from the testimony of settlers and adventurers, winter is certainly below freezing. Summer, I'd predict, easily exceeds 30 degrees. There are libraries in Hokkaidō with attached greenhouses, but none on a scale capable of mass-cultivating tropical trees."

"What a brutal climate. Better than Siberia, mind. Vader, that Derby filly, means 'water' in Russian, but Russian water is probably the sort of distilled spirit a Preta would drink."

"Within the dungeon's sphere of influence, the climate becomes somewhat more bearable. Even so, Rāja may find winter hard to be active in."

"And if we did want to mass-produce teak?"

"We'd build a giant greenhouse, perhaps 50 m tall, and keep it warm over the winter period. Something along those lines."

"Taller than an airship hangar."

About 240 m long, 70 m wide, 40 m high. A spoil of the World War, brought over from a Germany that no longer exists.

"With dungeon structures, you can't make anything too complex, so for the present it would be a long-term project, I'd say. And even if you make soil into a dungeon structure, it isn't transparent, so it can't substitute for glass."

"True enough. The ramparts, the roads, even the bottoms of the paddies, are all just desert soil shaped by the dungeon's power and made into dungeon structures."

"The problem is that they look muddy."

"In that case, what trees might be usable for forestry without a greenhouse?"

"Assuming we water them, of course: with such a large temperature swing, summers are too hot for beech, and winters too cold for shii and kashi oaks, so deciduous broadleaf trees like kunugi and konara oaks, or perhaps cedars, would suit. What I'd take to be a 'warm-temperate deciduous forest.'"