Tree Planting. But I Can't Wait Fifty Years

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

"Well now, Comrade Secretary-General. A precious thing, but I've brought you some cedar saplings."

"Echizen-ya, you're a wicked one."

"Oh no, no, hardly the equal of you, Comrade Secretary-General."

"Next I'll be wanting horses. Oh-ho-ho-ho… One really shouldn't do things that don't suit one. Now then, what is the lumber-production situation like in this world?"

Echizen-ya's main trade was as a fuel merchant, but he had quite thoroughly become a purveyor to the dungeon, bringing Marie all manner of things she needed.

"In these parts, no organized forestry is carried out. There's no water, you see."

"So lumber comes from afar?"

"Mostly it's dungeon-produced. Some dungeons yield wooden furniture, and folk make their timber and firewood from that. But sooner or later such dungeons have their monsters hunted to extinction, the furniture stops being replenished, and they collapse. A dungeon that produces fuel steadily, as this one does, is a rarity."

"Furniture costs a fair bit, ah, in expense, so if the furniture gets carried off and replenishment can't keep pace, the books won't balance and the dungeon goes under. Most Dungeon Masters have no intellect and live by instinct alone."

"With this dungeon, too, at first it was said to produce furniture, and lumber and furniture merchants took notice. But it stopped putting any out almost at once. Was that because, on account of the expense, you didn't replenish it?"

"That's right. Smashing the bookshelves and carrying them off, or burning the books because they couldn't read them, was entirely beyond what I had anticipated. An 'intelligent' dungeon monster like myself holds the necessary knowledge from the very start, but I don't know the finer circumstances peculiar to a given world. And this dungeon can summon books from other worlds, yet can't obtain the books of this world, so there are constraints on acquiring information."

"Comrade Secretary-General, should an opportunity to obtain books arise, shall I bring you some?"

"No. Were I a librarian, I'd give books the highest priority, but for now their priority can remain fairly low. We must establish a production base with all urgency. Still, if you can manage it, materials on history or geography would be a help."

"And so the Comrade Secretary-General is taking up forestry?"

"Climatically this is plainly unsuited to lumber production, and culturally there's plainly heavy use of lumber, so demand will assuredly exist. The trouble is that it takes fifty years… With cedar, I do think we could accelerate the growth if we could summon a Hinoki-family Asura. But the families of the Asura are like mafia houses, on poor terms with one another, you see. The Asura Realm is a world of strife to begin with."

"I don't know the words 'mafia' or 'family,' but the Asura Realm sounds hard going too."

"The Hinoki family are nothing but primitive gymnosperms, big only in bulk, so at least they aren't as brazen as the Orchid family, who style themselves a 'higher species,' or the Chrysanthemum family, who style themselves 'the most evolved, most differentiated clan.' The orchids are a vulgar lot, dangling a huge 'orchis' about. As for brazenness, the Rose family is just as bad, especially the rose genus, who, I hear, put on handsome-fellow airs and go around producing bouquets and the like… Ah, these are Asura affairs. I've no intention of dragging you into them, Echizen-ya."

Being an Asura herself, Marie unconsciously looked down on the other families.

"Pond noodles? Logs are even more precious than furniture, you know. Regrettably, fifty years from now this Echizen-ya will have passed the business to the next generation."

"By then, if some dungeon that produces lumber steadily were to turn up, my trade would be done for. But since Dungeon Masters mostly have no intellect, such a one probably couldn't last very long."

"This is something I heard before and haven't been able to confirm, but they say there was once a dungeon deep within a cave that held a forest, with light pouring down from the ceiling."

"That tale was written in the 'Encyclopedia Dungeonica' as well."

"Lumber being precious, a great many adventurers swarmed into the dungeon and cut the trees down from the edge inward. At first the trees grew back as fast as they were felled and the medicinal herbs were gathered, so on top of the adventurers, lumber and medicine merchants too took up residence inside the dungeon and built a village. But in time the trees stopped growing back, the ceiling gradually dimmed, and at the spot where they'd cut the last of the trees the dungeon's ceiling suddenly caved in, burying a great many people alive, or so the story goes."

"A dungeon structure is maintained by the dungeon's power, so once the dungeon vanishes, an underground space that vast would naturally collapse. An ordinary cave might remain, perhaps."

"And there were people who carried herbs and the like out of that dungeon, but none of them would grow, they say."

"A dungeon's flora and fauna, whether monsters or mere background, are not strictly speaking alive, so of course they won't grow outside the dungeon. Named monsters can live outside it, mind you."

"Comrade Secretary-General, even now there's a forest dungeon called 'Tanzawa Hills' that produces lumber, but it's in an inconvenient spot, swarming with unpleasant bloodsucking creatures, leeches and mosquitoes and ticks, so no development is carried out. Why, there's even a famous haiku that goes, 'Atop my hand / together with a leech / I take my noonday meal.'"

In this world, two meals a day was the norm, but manual laborers added a midday meal and idlers a late-night one, making three.

"A forest dungeon, you say. If we subdued it, made the plants into Named monsters, and carried them out, we could propagate them, it seems. Let's file that as a long-term project. And whereabouts are these Tanzawa Hills?"

"In the far reaches of the Land of Sumō, to the south."

"So it isn't 'Sagami'…"

"Gazami? Is that a dungeon monster?"

Since there was no sea, crabs existed only in dungeons.

"No, it's what they're called in the other world. Are there no forest dungeons besides Tanzawa Hills?"

"They say there's a forest dungeon deep in Mōda as well, at the southern border of Sō, but I don't know much about it."