Chapter 75 - Carrying
Sigh... It really seemed like the dreaded life of eating, sleeping, and living inside a dungeon was about to become reality.
And yet, the despair I once felt about it wasn’t nearly as strong as it had been in the past.
After all, this time, the plan was to sleep inside the dungeon in proper rooms, on real beds.
On top of that, we were even granted leisure time within the dungeon—free to drink, read, and do embroidery during our breaks.
And those breaks? They came with dungeon allowances that were twice what we’d get for life aboveground!
I had once received a bottle of dungeon-brewed liquor as an apology for having a break canceled.
Thinking of a life where I could spend my off-hours sipping that... Honestly, living in the dungeon didn’t sound too bad anymore.
It was just that good. The bottle I’d hidden in my room vanished almost instantly.
And during dungeon leave, if I fought alone and earned alcohol as a drop, I could claim thirty percent of it as my own!
Thirty percent went as a dungeon tax, and forty percent covered transport costs. (Though using a transport team wasn’t mandatory.)
The remaining thirty percent? That was mine to keep.
This rule applied to regular adventurers too.
If I got my hands on, say, a hundred bottles, that meant thirty were mine.
Of course, I couldn’t possibly drink that much, so I could sell about ten of them to merchants and stash away the earnings.
After hearing all this, hardly anyone still felt despair over the idea of living in a dungeon.
And so, we began with the construction phase.
For a while now, we’d been having our well-trained transport team candidates carry in building materials.
Using them, we set up a very rough, temporary hut—barely habitable—on the ninth floor of the Hot Spring Dungeon.
According to Lady Auf, if negotiations with the dungeon’s will had been successful, the structure wouldn’t be absorbed by the dungeon.
Two days later, the building had vanished without a trace!
Yep. The world wasn’t that generous after all.
...However, something unfamiliar had appeared in its place.
A dark, flat surface—not quite stone pavement, but with a texture all its own.
It stretched out for hundreds of meters.
For now, I needed to report this to Lady Auf.
I managed to chip off a palm-sized fragment of the ground and brought it back with me.
When I returned to the estate and handed her the piece, Lady Auf began stroking it and broke into a huge grin.
But not a refreshing or innocent kind of smile.
No, it was more like... slick. The kind of creepy grin a greedy uncle might wear while fondling a bar of gold.
“Hehehe...! Dungeon-san! Dungeon-san responded to me!!”
“Um... My lady?”
“This! This ground made from that material—it's spread out all over, right?”
“Y-yes, ma’am. It looked about the size of the royal palace plaza.”
“Judging from its texture and durability, it’s perfect for wheeled transport! The dungeon’s will actually answered my letter!!”
It seemed Lady Auf was now absolutely convinced she had communicated with the dungeon’s will.
In her excitement, she even pressed her cheek lovingly against the black stone surface. And... oh no... now she’s kissing it. Lady... please, that’s gross...
She looked just like a die-hard fan who had received a gift from their favorite idol or heroic figure.
“But still, that first structure we built was completely erased, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. So maybe the dungeon just can’t preserve unmoving man-made materials?
I mean, it’s being so cooperative—enough to lay down this kind of special ground—so if it could preserve a building, why wouldn’t it?”
“Then wouldn’t it be better if the dungeon built the buildings for us in the first place?”
“Well... even if it did, that building would still technically be part of the dungeon, right?
If we left supplies inside, wouldn’t they just vanish with time like everything else?”
“...Ah.”
Come to think of it, she was right. There’d be no point in building something like that...
And being part of the dungeon, it wouldn’t be surprising if monsters started spawning inside the bedrooms.
“Well, let’s just stick with the original plan—to install that inside the dungeon.”
Saying that, Lady Auf pointed toward a large, square iron box that had been set up in the duke’s courtyard.
It was a mobile structure on rails, large enough to house several dozen people.
To prevent monsters from destroying it, the whole thing had been reinforced with solid iron walls.
From the outside, it looked like nothing more than a massive iron cube.
Inside the structure, there was a hand-crank mechanism. Turning it would slightly lift the iron walls surrounding the exterior.
After that, all that remained was to assemble the rails and push with a group effort—the entire building could be moved as one.
With practice, moving it just far enough to escape the dungeon’s auto-deletion range would take roughly two hours.
“Hey... do you think, maybe with this kind of ground, we could skip using the rails altogether?
I mean, doesn’t it seem even better for wheeled movement than the stone-paved roads used by carriages in the capital?
Maybe for the next prototype, we should try making a simplified version of the railway—just to see if it works.”
“Then we’d only have to push it a day’s travel or so—it’d be over in minutes. If that proves workable, it’d be a huge help.”
“Could it be that this surface is something like tar mixed with gravel...? Hm... I’ll have to show it to a road construction engineer... We need to run practical tests, mumble mumble...”
Wait, what? Asphalt? What even is that?
Well... if Lady Auf understands it, that’s all that matters...
I’d only forget it after a while anyway, even if I asked.
♨♨♨♨♨
After watching the female knights for a while, just as the letter had described, they began constructing a hut using logs.
It was a pathetic little shack—looked like something you’d find at a bus stop in some remote mountain village. Clearly, it was built with the assumption that it would be deleted anyway.
“Well, it is going to vanish soon enough, so I guess it doesn’t matter... But that’s the spot you want the building, right?”
With that, I began laying down asphalt roads centered on the location where the hut had been built.
At first, I considered building a rail system too—but I had no idea what size wheels or track gauge this world’s version of a railway used.
And in any case, “railway” here probably meant nothing more than something like a minecart system—not anything resembling modern trains. I had no clue what kind of contraption they’d come up with.
Besides, I knew absolutely nothing about railway construction. If I tried to wing it and build something poorly, it’d probably just get in the way. So I dropped the idea.
Iron was also ridiculously expensive to create.
In this dungeon, pulling out anything unrelated to hot springs came with a cost dozens of times higher than normal.
Peta-chan’s No-Hunger Dungeon had the same kind of limitation.
That said, if they used the rails strictly as rails, I could tolerate it.
But if someone decided to treat them as an endless iron mine—ripping up the tracks for materials—I’d be screwed.
Unlike soap or mirrors, which my brain could justify as “hot spring-related,” iron was too far off-theme. If they started hauling it away regularly, the dungeon’s economy would collapse.
After weighing all that, I came to a conclusion: I’d pave the roads—just the roads—and leave the rest up to them.
Asphalt wasn’t really in line with the dungeon’s hot spring concept either, so its installation came at a steep cost... but it wouldn’t be taken away, so it was a one-time investment.
No one in their right mind would try to bring back asphalt to use elsewhere... or so I thought.
And then, as I stood there watching, that knight woman named Vihita walked over and started breaking off the edge of the road.
Hey!! Stop!! What are you doing?!
She broke off a palm-sized piece of the asphalt floor, tucked it into her gear bag, and—thankfully—refrained from doing any more damage beyond that.
Ah... I see. She just wanted to take that fragment back to her lady as a sample report. Thank goodness. I dodged a bullet.
Repairing this asphalt floor costs a ton. Any damage is a serious pain.
“...Alright, I’ll set it so that repairing any damaged sections takes six months.”
If I fixed it too quickly, it might just encourage more sampling.
To send a clear message—“Don’t break this so easily”—I decided the repair time should be nice and long.
Several days had passed, and the knights had begun hauling in large quantities of proper construction materials.
Even Captain Touji and the others—who had been training deep underground—pitched in, submerging certain parts into the bath on the 16th floor, which specialized in dungeon-exclusive equipment enhancement.
Most of these components, from what I could tell, seemed to be wheel-related.
Maybe they were reinforcing the more wear-prone parts using the power of the hot spring?
If the parts weren’t going to be taken outside the dungeon, then enhancing them with dungeon-limited methods actually made perfect sense.
As I observed the construction progress, the project finally came together.
From the outside, it looked like nothing more than a plain old shipping container.
The finishing touch involved lining the outer walls with blades—like a field of spikes—to prevent monsters from ramming into it.
A boxy, hedgehog-like room—ugly and clunky. It screamed “prototype number one” from every angle.
“...Y-yeah, they’ll likely just keep building more of these until the performance and aesthetics gradually improve.”
For now, I decided to pretend I hadn’t seen the outside.
Alright, let’s check out the interior.
Surprisingly, it was quite cozy inside, clearly designed with comfort as the top priority.
There were iron-framed windows that could be opened to let in sunlight.
One of the female knights had already ditched her armor and was lounging around in her undergarments.
“Ahhh~ Taking off my armor inside the dungeon and reading in peace... This is bliss~”
“It doesn’t quite feel like being back home, but I’d say it’s about as safe as a military camp.”
“Our mission this time is to assess the livability of this setup, so we’re free to spend our time however we like.”
“I can’t wait for the hot spring water to arrive~”
Wait—hot spring water?
That phrase jumped out of nowhere, but as I took a closer look around the living space inside the box...
There was a lounge area, a toilet, a set of five-tiered bunk beds that looked like a detention facility, and at the very back, a large wooden frame.
I wasn’t entirely sure what that wooden structure was supposed to be, but... could it be a bathtub?
So, they were planning to bring hot spring water from the dungeon and pour it into that thing?
“Do you think we could even cure cavities... on the ninth floor?”
“I’m not sure... Lady Auf said the effects weaken the shallower the floor, but...
Curing cavities and correcting physical distortions both sound like miracles on the same level, don’t they?
So if the ninth floor bath can fix distortions, I’d imagine it could handle teeth just fine too...”
Hold up!
What are you even saying?
You mean that’s something it could do?
No way! Absolutely not!
The whole point of setting up the dental-repair bath was to lure Her Majesty Yuzha and her many guards all the way down to the 17th floor!
If they find out they can just use water brought up to the ninth floor to fix their teeth and leave without ever seeing the bottom, I’m done for! This is bad... very bad...!
...Is it?
Wait a second... is that really a bad thing?
Even if bringing hot water to the shallow floors yielded the same effect...
Someone still had to keep going down to the bottom to fetch that water. Over and over. No matter what.
So in the long run, would it really be a problem?
There’s the idea of reeling in Her Majesty Yuzha—the ultimate VIP—for one big trip to the lower floors...
Or, there’s the alternative: keeping people constantly coming to fetch water from the depths and letting customers bathe at the ninth floor instead.
Which one would make more money in the long term?
“If Queen Teta hears about this, she’ll be furious—I mean, wouldn’t that mean even the 11th floor bath could be used just fine as long as the water is brought up to the entrance?”
“...Wouldn’t carrying the queen to the 11th-floor bath be about the same difficulty as hauling the bathwater to the entrance?”
“If a hundred people each carry a paper carton’s worth of water back...”
“And how much would that cost for just one bath? I guess at least the 11th floor bath’s value won’t drop too much.”
“If this experiment works, we’ll have to haul water to the No-Hunger Dungeon too...”
“Ahhh—nooo! Don’t wanna think about it! I don’t want to think about how much water we’re gonna have to haul forever!”
Huh?
They’re delivering hot spring water to the No-Hunger Dungeon too?!
The moment that thought crossed my mind—
“Huh? They’re bringing hot spring water to my dungeon too?!”
—from the back of the Master Room, where she’d been casually baking pizza, Peta-chan suddenly chimed in with the exact same reaction as me, eyes gleaming with realization.
She hadn’t seemed like she was paying attention... but apparently, she was listening after all.
“Wait, is that... even possible?”
“Well, we already brought ingredients from the No-Hunger Dungeon into the Hot Spring Dungeon. So why wouldn’t it work in reverse?”
Fair point.
There was no reason it couldn’t.
After all, both dungeons shared the same core—Peta-chan herself—so of course it was doable.
In other words, a new era was dawning—one where even male customers could enjoy the benefits of hot springs... inside the No-Hunger Dungeon.
“...Hmmm. Forcing the water’s effects to stay put and dragging Her Majesty Yuzha down to the lowest level... Honestly, this way probably earns more over time.”
Alright, I’ll allow it.
That hot spring transplant plan? I’ll just let it proceed without interference.
I mean, it’s no different from a restaurant chain.
Instead of clinging to the original store and trying to monopolize everything, expanding as a franchise will make way more profit.
Munching on the pizza Peta-chan baked and sipping the cola I pulled out, I decided to sit back and quietly observe how things would unfold.
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