Chapter 45 - The Will of the Future
While inhaling the scent of Vihita’s undergarments and lingerie hanging in the room, Auf noted the subtle changes in their fragrance.
Occasionally, her gaze wandered to the soap, honey jars, chocolates, and loaves of bread as she pondered.
“No doubt about it—the will of this dungeon isn’t of this world. A person from the future? Or perhaps another world...?
Well, it might not even be human, so calling it a ‘person’ feels off. Future demon? ...Hmm, that doesn’t quite fit. ‘Future being’ will do.”
When speaking to Vihita, Auf kept her reports within the bounds of common sense.
But when left to her own thoughts, she often spiraled into these wild, incomprehensible musings.
This time, after observing the soap, Auf reached a conclusion: The will of this dungeon wasn’t originally from this world—it came from another time, or perhaps another world.
Rather than calling it the dungeon’s will, it was more accurate to say it was a will whispering knowledge into the No-hunger Dungeon.
In any case, this guiding will was an entity from the future—or another world entirely.
The first hint of this realization struck Auf when she attended a noble’s banquet at her parents’ urging, during the six months Vihita was forced into hellish training.
Social gatherings never interested Auf very much, but she decided to attend this time, curious to observe the changes in the cuisine and decorations.
Upon entering the banquet hall, her eyes were immediately drawn to the transparent glass lamps.
“They must have melted down and reforged the honey jars,” she thought. Never before had she seen glass of such flawless clarity.
This level of transparency shouldn’t exist in this world—unless one shattered and remelted those honey jars.
With no impurities, crafting perfectly clear glasswork would be effortless.
She hoped the glass artisans wouldn’t grow complacent and would instead strive to replicate this purity from raw sand. ”I wonder how their research is progressing?”
Even at a banquet, her mind buzzed with such thoughts.
The dishes served were all new creations, made from ingredients harvested from the No-Hunger Dungeon.
There were snacks like finely chopped, dried bread crisped in oil, adorned with colorful fruits and drizzled with honey.
Meat dishes featured thinly sliced cuts seasoned with pepper, stir-fried with corn and onions, and garnished extravagantly with fruits.
Countless other elaborate dishes—each more intricate than the last—crowded the tables as nobles feasted and chattered.
“Auf-sama, what do you think of these new dishes made with dungeon ingredients?”
The unfamiliar female knight acting as Vihita’s replacement guard addressed her.
“Right now, they’re all just experimental prototypes—existing cooking techniques haphazardly applied to new ingredients.
At the moment, they’re nothing more than the whims of top-tier chefs.
But with time, they’ll refine into something more, gradually establishing themselves as a new culinary tradition born in Sepans... Watching that evolution unfold might be mildly interesting.”
“I... I see...?”
Had she said something strange? The substitute knight’s gaze shifted, as if she were staring at some bizarre creature.
Then, as Auf’s eyes fell upon the plain, unadorned loaf of bread and honey jar—brought straight from the No-Hunger Dungeon and placed humbly among the lavish spread—a jolt like lightning surged through her.
“Huh?”
Auf’s eyes widened as she froze in place, startling the attendant knight.
“? What’s wrong, Auf-sama?”
“That’s it... refinement. Yes... this is too refined. Now that I think about it, this doesn’t make sense. How did I not notice before?”
“Huh?!”
The knight let out a bewildered yelp, utterly lost.
Vice Captain Vihita had warned her—The young lady sometimes gets carried away with her thoughts and ends up saying things that make no sense. Just don’t mind it.
That’s what she’d been told. But still... was this one of those times? The female knight couldn’t help but wonder.
After all, they’d all grown used to seeing this combination of plain white bread and honey in Sepans. So what, exactly, was she so shocked about now?
Auf had thought the same when she’d laid eyes on the lavish banquet hall—lined with crystal-clear lamps crafted like works of art, and dishes decked out with extravagant ingredients that screamed luxury. Her impression had been clear:
Yes, this is what one would expect.
Everything was designed to flaunt its opulence, as if to outshine the next. “This is noble decoration!” “This is noble cuisine!” “This is the pinnacle of refinement!”
It was like a peacock in full courtship display, each item competing to be the flashiest, the most extravagant.
They were built to create the illusion of value—so much so that even if someone charged a ridiculous price, the setting would make it feel justified.
But the things that came out of the No-Hunger Dungeon had none of that excessive ornamentation.
Take the bread, for instance. Just a simple square loaf, evenly browned on the outside, pure white on the inside.
Nothing fancy—but so utterly refined, it felt complete.
Even the honey jar was unadorned. A flawless transparent container with a thin, metallic lid. No decoration whatsoever.
Yet the design of the lid itself—the mechanism for opening it—was astonishing in its precision. So clean, so practical, so sophisticated.
Not one of these items tried to force a sense of luxury upon the viewer.
They were ordinary.
And yet—so impossibly polished, so absurdly sophisticated, that they defied everything one expected of “ordinary.”
Normally, items like those on display in the banquet hall would be the standard: gaudy, overwrought, practically shouting ‘Look at me, I’m expensive!’ Like the gems found deep in Kenma’s Gem Dungeon—cut and engraved by a master artisan to an unbelievable degree.
But the food and tools produced by the No-Hunger Dungeon? They were a different breed. Until you saw them for yourself, it was hard to even imagine such simple perfection.
They were the products of endless refinement. The recipe, the materials, the process—every shred of excess had been removed through innovation spanning generations.
They were like artifacts from the future, born of painstaking improvement after improvement—iteration after iteration—across a span of years so vast, it made the mind reel.
There could be only one explanation: the dungeon’s will must have already known these items—must have seen them before. How else could this be?
It was one thing to believe a dungeon’s mysterious magic could create fluffy, delicious bread. Or that magic could somehow conjure up a honey jar as clear as water.
But that lid? That specific lid design? That was a different story.
If anyone claimed that the dungeon’s will had invented the jar’s lid from scratch... then calling that will a genius wouldn’t even begin to cover it.
Besides, even if the dungeon had somehow come up with the idea, there’s no way it could have refined it into something so sleek and flawless—not even with magic to ease the process.
Because refinement, in this sense, wasn’t something a lone genius could achieve through brilliance or invention alone.
It was the product of corporate persistence, relentless market competition, years of consumer feedback, complaints, and adaptation. A process that could only exist in a world shaped by long-term societal forces.
In other words—these weren’t creations the dungeon had thought up by itself.
No, it was more plausible to assume that the will inhabiting this dungeon belonged to a far more advanced civilization than theirs.
That this being had simply summoned products from a future it remembered—refined and perfected over centuries—and offered them to the people here as rewards.
After all, the original food produced by the No-Hunger Dungeon had been nothing more than imitations of the portable rations often carried by Sepans’ adventurers.
Some time after the banquet, Auf saw the newly produced chocolate and soap—and that was when she became certain.
The will of this dungeon came not from the future alone, but from another world altogether—one far more advanced than their own civilization.
The chocolate, too, was a confection of extraordinary perfection. And while it was impressive enough to feel out of this world, she couldn’t say with confidence that it would be impossible to reproduce in this world with enough time and effort.
But the soap—that was on another level entirely.
Her family back home owned a few bars of soap, so she was no stranger to the product. Even if one were to magically enhance the quality of those soaps, there was no way—absolutely no way—they would ever match the standard of the ones produced in the Hot Spring Dungeon.
The disparity in quality was so vast that it transcended issues of technique or refinement. From the production method to the raw materials, every last aspect felt fundamentally different at its very core.
And yet, it all came together with such simple, effortless elegance—so impeccably polished that there could be no doubt: these were products of the future.
Even if the palace’s finest scholars and alchemists had somehow become the will behind the dungeon and attempted to create soap, the most they could manage would be to boost the existing quality and drown it in high-grade fragrances.
Yes—that would be like the dishes served during the banquet: extravagant meals crafted by combining dungeon-grown ingredients using the best techniques currently available... and yet still unfinished, still lacking.
No mere sage or scientist could possibly create such perfectly refined, flawlessly complete products one after another.
If there was any being capable of this feat, it had to be a will from the future. Nothing else made sense.
That was the conclusion Auf had reached.
And once she’d reached it, she immediately began writing a new theory—her hypothesis on the true nature of the dungeon’s will.
When she finished the paper, she decided to send it to her longtime pen pals: a group of dungeon researchers she had been in correspondence with for years.
She even included a small shard of the soap.
Is it really okay to distribute something like this without permission? she wondered briefly. But she reasoned that it was the very foundation of her argument—it’s necessary. It can’t be helped.
So Auf summoned a maid and a guard to arrange for the letter’s delivery.
However, Vice-Captain Vihita was currently deep in the dungeon, excavating more of the soap, and the younger female knights—trainees included—had been brought along as well.
Which meant that the only female knight currently in the ducal household... was a woman in her fifties from the Fourth Unit.
“Would you mind delivering this letter for me?” Auf said. “Oh—but not as a noble. Please send it under a commoner’s name. The recipient is an old pen friend of mine.”
The veteran knight and the maid, letter in hand, shared a warm smile.
“My, I didn’t know Lady Auf kept in touch with friends even during the time she stayed holed up in her room.”
“She’s always written letters quite regularly since she was a child. I wonder if her correspondent was some sickly girl who couldn’t travel. A friendship untouched by social rank—letter-writing really can be a lovely thing, can’t it?”
Chatting fondly like that, they handed the letter over to the postman.
Neither of them had the faintest idea that the letter’s destination was a gathering of eccentric dungeon researchers—so fanatical, so ahead of their time, that even within their own field they were considered outcasts, labeled madmen, and whispered about behind their backs.
Comments
Post a Comment