Chapter 74 - Plan
They had submerged all kinds of equipment into the restorative hot spring on the 15th floor.
Even the armor they wore had been thoroughly washed.
And while everything dried, the female knights lay stark naked on the stone beds, their unguarded forms fully exposed—prompting the Master to break into a triumphant dance.
“Just as planned!”
Well, truth be told, on the 15th floor, they didn’t necessarily have to wash their own gear.
But when it came to the equipment-enhancing spring on the 16th floor—usable only within the dungeon—dipping their own equipment in it was absolutely essential every single time.
Either way, it was unavoidable that they had to strip everything off and wash their gear thoroughly.
The equipment spring offered a flawless, two-layered undressing mechanism that left no room for escape.
Of course, since this was the First Unit, all the women were thoroughly trained warriors—nothing but hardened female bodies to be seen. Still, that had its own appeal.
Eventually, the members of the Second Unit would likely bring in their gear and join the bath as well.
That said, staring at too many naked bodies lined up together for long made things start to lose their charm. It became like working at an adult store—eventually, nudity just blended into the scenery.
In situations like this, it was best to act quickly while you could still think, Oh yeah, this is great.
“Alright, I’ve had my fill of admiring the female form. Time to check the letter.”
Before entering the hot spring, Captain Touji had spoken to me—said she’d hang a letter here from a dungeon researcher in the Kingdom of Sepans, and if I could read it, I should.
The researcher hadn’t been named, but it was likely that girl called Auf.
“Haah... every now and then, you get dungeon researchers who send letters like this,”
Peta-chan commented with a bored expression, munching on some potato chips while watching from the side.
Lately, whenever I was inspecting the hot springs, Peta-chan tended to look at me with those droopy, half-lidded eyes. Maybe she was getting bored?
“Huh? This kind of thing happens often?”
“Seems like it does, but you never notice, right? I mean, Master, you barely pay attention to people in the lower floors anymore, do you?
And the rare letters you do happen to find usually just say things like ‘Please hear our voices,’ without clearly stating what they want you to actually do.”
I nodded in understanding. Most researchers never made it to the depths of the dungeon, so they sent letters and requests on a whim, knowing full well they probably wouldn’t be read.
And as they kept sending letters that never got results, their content got more and more watered down.
Eventually, the messages lacked any meaningful requests at all—and even when they finally reached the dungeon core, they were too weak to warrant a response.
“But this one’s different. It’s packed full of writing...”
Yeah, it was written so densely I couldn’t even read it.
This monitor-style viewing setup was handy for checking the overall situation, but not so great for reading fine print.
It was like trying to read a novel someone was holding on a security camera feed.
To make things worse, that floor had been configured with a dry breeze to help laundry dry faster, so the cloth the letter was written on kept fluttering, making it even harder to read.
“Hey, Peta-chan, think you can retrieve that letter and bring it to the Master Room?”
“I can, but not until it’s been hanging out to dry for about two days—until it starts fading away on its own. Otherwise, no go.”
Two days, huh. What a hassle.
Well, if the dungeon were always able to dissolve and retrieve adventurers’ belongings instantly...
Then if you ever wanted to kill an adventurer, you could just steal all their gear while they slept and take them out easily.
If a dungeon was too focused on killing adventurers, it would become dangerously lethal.
So it made sense that it took around two days to reclaim items.
...Ah, right. Come to think of it, there was no real reason I had to view things through the surveillance camera mode.
I could just do what Bugu-kun did—display the text on the cloth like a comic book. Simple.
I gathered the surrounding mana and kneaded them together, creating a single book.
“Ooh, perfect. Much easier to read. Yeah, analog methods really shine in times like this.”
The letter detailed how the ingredients produced in the No-Hunger Dungeon and the effects brought about by the Hot Spring Dungeon had begun to spread and gain a reputation in the Kingdom of Sepans.
It also mentioned that the Kingdom of Sepans had abundant rock salt deposits, meaning they had no trouble acquiring salt and similar products.
Additionally, the region was a major producer of legumes like soybeans and red beans—so much so that they were already exporting them as trade goods.
On the other hand, spices such as chili and pepper were quite rare.
However, because preserved food in Sepans relied more on salting than on spicing, spices remained a luxury item primarily enjoyed by nobles—not something with massive demand.
The letter included detailed information on Sepans’ trade practices.
This was genuinely helpful.
It gave me insight into what kinds of products the No-Hunger Dungeon should produce in the future.
So Sepans had a salt-centric food culture—that was great news. It meant their tastes might closely align with those of Japanese people.
And spices were rare... which meant curry powder might end up being one of my most powerful secret weapons. The only question was—when should I play that card?
“Still... that’s a lot of writing.
You’d never go this far unless you were absolutely convinced the dungeon could read text.
Isn’t this girl kind of... nuts?”
The Master himself had never once indicated that he could read the Sepans language. Or so he thought.
But the truth was, the reason Auf was so sure the dungeon could read text was because of the “Hot Spring Dungeon” sign carved at the entrance.
Back when the Master had created the dungeon for the first time, he’d casually etched those words into the wall, more as a test of the controls than anything else—without giving it much thought.
But while he was busy working on the dungeon interior, he’d completely forgotten that he’d ever written those words at the entrance.
And he’d also forgotten that, during the early stages when the dungeon hadn’t been completed yet, he could see the entrance wall from the Master Room.
Now, that part of the dungeon was considered “outside,” and no longer appeared on his monitors—making it impossible for him to recall what was written there.
As he continued reading the letter, the latter half introduced a rather unusual plan.
It proposed building inns inside the dungeon to house adventurers.
“Dungeon Will, I believe your goal is to gather more people into deeper layers of the dungeon.
Some researchers think your true purpose is to kill people as deep inside the dungeon as possible.
But my hypothesis is that simply having many people exploring is already enough to bring you benefit and growth.
In the early stages of the Hot Spring Dungeon, not a single person died.
Yet the dungeon evolved at a phenomenal pace, simply because so many female knights kept coming to use the hot springs. Based on that, I formed my theory.
“Now, to the main point: we are planning to build movable inns—places where people can eat and sleep—within each layer of the No-Hunger Dungeon, and also in the clearing of the 9th layer of the Hot Spring Dungeon.
It is widely known that if you leave surface materials inside a dungeon, they begin to break down and get absorbed after about two days.
However, research has shown that if you keep an object moving at a rate of approximately 12.23 meters per day, even surface items will not be absorbed by the dungeon.
In other words, by placing an inn on disassemblable rails and mounting it on wheels, then physically moving it about 13 meters every day by manpower—
We believe it is possible to maintain a safe, livable inn inside the dungeon.”
...
What on earth was this girl thinking?
“Therefore, if it is possible for the Dungeon’s will to control the absorption of foreign matter...
And if you could establish a condition whereby the building and its interior furnishings are exempt from being absorbed...
Then we would move forward with constructing not just inns within the dungeon, but perhaps even small towns—like miniature fortresses.
Should you be in agreement with this plan, we intend to first build a temporary hut within the dungeon.
If you allow it to remain without absorbing it, then we will take that as a green light to proceed with the larger plan—”
...
One unexpected idea after another kept hitting me, and before I realized it, my head was spinning from trying to keep up.
“Hey, Peta-chan.”
“Hmm? What is it?”
Peta-chan showed zero interest in the letter. Over in the corner of the Master Room, she was busy whipping cream and preparing a cake.
Even she, who was fairly curious by dungeon core standards, reacted this way. No wonder most dungeon researchers had failed to establish any meaningful communication with other cores.
“Say, Peta-chan... would it be possible for the dungeon to selectively not absorb foreign objects under certain conditions?”
“Nope.”
A total and immediate rejection.
Couldn’t she have at least thought about it a little first?
“No, I mean—listen. These people want to build homes inside the dungeon and live there.
If we allow them to build strong structures in deeper layers, they could station a large number of people inside permanently.
And that means a steady stream of dungeon points, right...?”
“Hmmm... how should I put this?
Oh, right—I just finished a shortcake. Try some, Master.”
“Huh? Uh... okay?”
Without really understanding what was happening, I took a bite of the shortcake she handed me.
It was delicious.
“Alright, now. From that cake you just ate—can you make it so that only the strawberry stays in your stomach and never gets digested?”
“Like hell I can!”
“Exactly. That’s what I meant.”
...Ah. Now I got it.
I completely understood why she had answered immediately with “no.”
Yeah... no way that’d work.
“Sigh... so I guess that plan for a mobile inn is doomed too, huh?”
“What? Mobile inn?”
“They say the dungeon won’t absorb anything that moves more than 12 meters a day. So they’d build tracks, and... like this...”
I crafted a small model of a railroad, explaining to Peta-chan what I believed Auf-chan was trying to accomplish.
Basically, it would be like a bed-and-sleeper train—tough enough to withstand monster attacks—mounted on rails. If they moved it each day by at least the length of the inn plus 13 meters, they could avoid absorption.
“...That’s the plan, apparently. But would it still end up being absorbed anyway?”
After listening to everything, Peta-chan stood there with her mouth half open and her eyes wide in disbelief.
“Wait... is she a genius or something?”
...Judging from her reaction, it looked like this might actually be possible.
So as long as something was in motion, the dungeon wouldn’t absorb it.
“So then, what if we made a platform that automatically moved 13 meters every day—would that solve the problem?”
“Nope. It has to be moved by the will of a surface-dweller, I think.
Like... you know how arrows stuck in a monster’s body keep moving with it, but they still get absorbed and disappear eventually?”
...I had no idea about that.
The details were a bit fuzzy, but if what Peta-chan said was true, then things powered by the dungeon’s own force wouldn’t count as “moving” from the dungeon’s perspective.
If dungeon-powered motion did count, then that wind-blown letter flapping in the breeze would never disappear—yet it clearly did after two days.
So yeah, even if I created a floor that circled around 13 meters daily, it probably wouldn’t cut it.
“Should I just make a lake or something? If it’s a boat, even with a lot of people and cargo aboard, you could move it easily just by paddling a bit...”
“If you made a huge lake, you’d have no idea what kind of monsters would start spawning in it. They’d probably sink the thing in no time.”
“Ugh... So even though they went out of their way to ask for help, there’s barely anything we can actually do for them, huh...?”
I really wanted to help, if I could.
It was a huge deal that someone had reached the conclusion that a dungeon wasn’t just for killing people—that having people simply stay inside held value in and of itself.
Most dungeons got greedy, blinded by the sheer amount of points they gained when adventurers died, and so they kept escalating the danger levels.
“Seriously though—monsters, bosses, everything in this place—why are they all so damn inflexible? I had to manually set up the boss on the 16th floor, remember!”
I’d done that on purpose. Just like what happened back on the 5th floor, I didn’t want another boss spawning in some weird place again. So this time, I’d assigned the 16th-floor boss the role of guarding the Equipment Enhancement Hot Spring—a feature that only adventurers would care about.
This way, since the boss would be regularly defeated, it would be less likely to randomly appear in areas that were meant for non-combatants.
But even so, when it came to bosses, the safest option was to have them guard only crucial areas like treasure rooms or the staircase to the next floor.
They couldn’t be stashed away somewhere out of sight just to avoid conflict with people.
After all, monsters were manifestations of stagnant miracle-energy within the dungeon.
You had to either let them freely roam around, or, ideally, have them taken out regularly to keep the dungeon’s miasma in balance.
If the dungeon core was the brain, and the dungeon itself was the intestines... then monsters were basically filth—waste matter.
And if you forcibly isolated them and kept them inside the “intestines,” they’d just rot and cause disease.
By that logic, humans were kind of like beneficial gut bacteria—breaking down that waste.
Those who reached the deepest layers were like living organisms making it all the way through the intestinal tract while still alive.
And now, those very humans wanted to live inside the dungeon—how could I not be grateful?
“Hmm... Even if we can’t give them our full support, I still want to show we’re willing to cooperate.”
“Definitely! This is one of those things where it’s way better if it goes well!”
And so, we decided to support the plan to let humans live inside the dungeon.
...Even if there wasn’t all that much we could actually do.
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