Chapter 61 - Meanwhile, Auf...
“That was a close one...”
So muttered Auf as she sketched out the blueprint for a lighthouse reflector.
It had all started with a half-serious idea:
“Couldn’t we use this mirror to concentrate sunlight and make a weapon that burns things?”
It sounded fun at the time.
The experiment itself had actually gone well.
She’d managed to set a nearby tree on fire with ease. And on a perfectly clear day, even a ship some distance away might catch fire if she focused the beam on a dark spot for around thirty minutes.
But then came the real question:
What practical use did this thing have?
The answer—absolutely none.
If you wanted to burn something nearby, it was far quicker to just carry fire from the kitchen using a torch.
If your goal was to burn a distant ship, firing a flaming arrow would be far more effective.
Besides, this "weapon" only worked on sunny days. The target had to have a dark spot, had to be perfectly still, and even then, ignition wasn’t guaranteed. Burning a moving enemy ship was basically impossible.
In the end, it was nothing more than a toy born from idle curiosity.
When she’d first built a focusing lens strong enough to ignite wood within seconds at close range, she cheered like a kid. “It worked! Yay!”
But after the fun wore off and the wave of post-play enlightenment hit, reality sank in. She had used a ridiculously expensive dungeon mirror—several, in fact—for a silly curiosity project that resulted in nothing but a dangerous novelty.
That was the full extent of her accomplishment.
If Her Majesty Yuzha found out about this pointless experiment, her research budget would almost certainly get slashed.
Worse, she might even get kicked off the project entirely.
It was her very first assignment as an official dungeon researcher—and she’d already made a huge blunder. Auf turned pale just thinking about it.
For the time being, she sat in the garden with a cup of tea she had pointlessly boiled using the heat from the focusing lens. As she sipped, she pondered her next move.
While she was lost in thought, a maid who knew nothing about the focusing plate approached and said, “What’s this?”
She nearly burned herself on it.
Not only was the thing useless, it was actively dangerous—capable of burning people or even setting the house on fire just by existing. Auf realized she needed to do something about it, and fast.
Driven by desperation, she wracked her brain for a way—any way—to make this invention benefit the country. After much thought, she arrived at an idea: enhancing lighthouses.
She quickly dismantled the worthless focusing plate and began designing a new kind of reflector—one that would transmit light over long distances instead of concentrating heat.
What she created was a prototype that could boost a lighthouse’s performance to an unprecedented degree.
‘This... this might actually impress Her Majesty’, Auf thought, feeling a wave of relief. ‘At the very least, it shouldn’t get me scolded.’
And when she presented the reflector to Her Majesty, she was thrilled.
She immediately approved the plan and even declared that until all the lighthouses in the kingdom had been upgraded, dungeon mirrors would be exclusively reserved for the Kingdom of Sepans.
By proving that mirrors had far more strategic value as part of national infrastructure than as mere art or household goods, she had dramatically raised their worth.
From that point on, anyone who wanted to buy one for personal use would need to offer a sum greater than its national utility—an impossible feat for all but the wealthiest nobles or top-tier merchants.
By turning the mirror into something directly usable in a national project, its perceived value skyrocketed.
As a result, Auf’s dungeon research budget was massively increased.
To outsiders, it might have looked like she had effortlessly achieved the perfect result—like some kind of genius.
But in truth, Auf’s actions were driven more by curiosity than logic, and her methods were always a bit reckless and improvised.
With the reflector’s design completed and construction now in the hands of the engineering team, Auf shifted her focus to something she found more fun: analyzing the buff food on the 14th floor.
She had already reviewed the list of effects from the dishes Vihita and the others had tested.
Now, she began forming hypotheses—trying to determine how different cooking methods like boiling, steaming, roasting, and simmering interacted with various ingredients and seasonings to produce specific effects.
Was there a consistent pattern? Or were the results random?
How much did someone need to eat for the effect to activate?
Would eating more enhance the effect, or did even a small amount suffice?
If a drink was boiled down until it became concentrated, would it still work the same?
Would powdered, dried meals retain their effects?
She’d already tasked Vihita and the others with conducting tests—processing meals for better storage and portability, to see whether the effects held up.
If they succeeded in compressing a buff effect into a single, small vial, it could revolutionize dungeon exploration as they knew it.
“Every day, I build new hypotheses from the data I’ve gathered... It’s fun. I’m happy.
Ahh, I can’t wait to compile all these results and present them at the archive.”
There was nothing more thrilling to Auf than sharing her research and watching the world change because of it.
With that thought lifting her spirits, she had been happily musing over the effects of cooking buffs—until a royal messenger arrived with news that killed her mood instantly.
An order from the palace: “The effects of the 14th floor must remain classified for the time being.”
Auf’s enthusiasm plummeted.
That night, she drowned her frustration in copious amounts of rice wine, clinging to the empty paper carton as she passed out in bed.
Unlike the last time, when she had merely looked like a drunk clutching a sake box, this time she truly was one.
The next morning, Auf awoke to a pounding headache and waves of nausea.
She was hopelessly hungover.
It wasn’t surprising—her tolerance for alcohol had always been low.
But this time, she had done it intentionally.
“Haa... haa... I’ll... mix a little honey into the water from the 14th floor... and drink it...”
She felt a bit better.
Just a bit.
She’d heard that honey dissolved in that floor’s hot spring water acted as a remedy for physical ailments.
If she’d drunk it in the lower levels of the dungeon, where the miasma was present, it probably would have cured her hangover in an instant.
But here on the surface, where there was no dungeon energy, the effect was barely noticeable—a placebo at best.
The citrus tea that supposedly sharpened one’s vision to birdlike clarity had only slightly cleared up her blurry eyes on the surface.
This time, she had wanted to use her own body to test how effective the remedy really was against a hangover.
“Ugh... so this is all it does? There’s no way I could sell it on the surface like this...
If I can succeed in miniaturizing it, I could sell it to the adventurers who drink directly in the No-Hunger Dungeon... They’d be able to explore safely, without getting drunk... Ugh—”
Unfortunately, she then remembered that the release of information regarding the 14th floor’s food buffs was currently prohibited.
...Lame.
That thought made her headache throb even worse.
She decided to do nothing for the rest of the day and just go back to sleep.
As she lay in bed with her eyes closed…
“What if I mixed the healing water from the 8th floor with the body-correcting water from the 9th floor, then heated it using the 14th floor’s hot spring? Would that become some kind of injury-healing potion...?”
Unnecessary ideas like that started popping into her head again, and before she knew it, Auf had sluggishly risen from bed.
She tried to list out the possible effects of combining waters from different floors, but her headache made it impossible to concentrate.
‘I never should’ve used myself for a hangover experiment…’
Even as she regretted it, she couldn’t bring herself to stop writing down her ideas.
Comments
Post a Comment