Chapter 83 - Unmelting Ice Cream
“Huh? Isn’t that Commander Shield of the Marponware Knights? What’s she doing back in the Hot Spring Dungeon?”
With nothing much to do until I’d earned enough points, I had been idly wandering, peering at the various hot spring floors.
That was when I spotted a sizable company of female knights.
A closer look confirmed it—they were led by none other than Commander Shield, whom I had encountered once before.
“Listen up! Keep hauling water from the hot spring on the tenth floor to the No-Hunger Dungeon!”
That was the kind of order she was barking at her subordinates.
The tenth floor hot spring... wasn’t that the training enhancement bath?
In other words, Queen Teta must have dispatched Shield’s unit to strengthen them through training, rather than relying only on her own female knights.
After all, if all they wanted were things like soap, chocolate, or liquor, it would have been cheaper to simply buy them than to mobilize an entire knight order.
Or maybe they figured that if it was for something as valuable as tourmaline gemstones, it was worth deploying knights to make a profit.
Thinking along those lines, I decided to observe Shield’s knights rather than the Sepans knights I had already grown completely used to.
And after about a week, I finally realized their true purpose.
“...So in the end, this whole expedition is just because the commander’s a drunk?”
It wasn’t as if I’d overheard anything.
I simply pieced it together after watching Shield soak herself seven times in the fifth floor’s information-gathering bath. From that, I could practically read the hidden motives behind their stay.
Even her subordinates seemed clueless about the real reason.
In truth, what it boiled down to was this: Commander Shield was so desperate for alcohol that she would rather resign from the order than go without. The compromise they reached was this “training expedition” to the Sepans Dungeon.
“Is this stuff really that good? ...I don’t get it. No matter how many times I try, I just don’t understand.”
Peta-chan muttered as she held up a bottle of whisky.
“Yeah, I don’t get it either.”
Every time I saw how wildly popular liquor was in this world, I regretted not having tried it back in my old life.
...Although, even if I had, it’s not like my body would magically have learned to enjoy it.
The only knowledge I had of alcohol came from work. For instance: if you ran a shop by a busy station, you needed to stock plenty of liquor for the commuters.
But if your shop was in a service area along the highway, where customers came by car, you should limit the alcohol and focus on hearty meals or family-friendly products. Just textbook business consultancy.
By that logic, serving liquor in a battlefield where people fought for their lives was probably even worse than offering drinks to drivers.
But hey, if business was booming, then who was I to argue?
This world ran on ethics even older than those of Showa-era Japan. It was all fine.
Captain Shield’s unit carried hot spring water from the tenth floor all the way to their forward base in the twelfth floor in the No-Hunger Dungeon, where whiskey could be harvested.
They had rented a mobile outpost that served as their headquarters and lodging, and planned to basically live there.
At first, I thought the thirteenth floor, where you could also harvest chickens and Spam cans, would be better for living. But it seemed placing their outpost that low down risked constant destruction from monsters.
There was also a wide grassland on the seventeenth floor, but they clearly had no intention of building an outpost there.
After all, the monsters around that level included gorilla-like brutes that hurled boulders, and giant serpents that could slip through barricades.
A spiked iron hut wouldn’t last a day down there.
Another curious thing I noticed: during cooking, Shield’s knights often used a very familiar-looking knife.
It was the butterfly knife I’d once handed to Bugu-kun. Apparently, it had already been unearthed from the Weapon Dungeon and formally adopted into the knight order’s arsenal.
“...So even that cheap little knife got accepted as equipment for one of the world’s strongest knight orders. Modern civilization really is terrifying.”
As I absentmindedly watched their training, their post-training baths, their liquor gathering, and then their leisurely soaks afterward, Peta-chan came over with something new.
“Master~ I made a new dungeon dish! An ice cream that never melts!”
She was in the middle of inventing all sorts of bizarre cuisine that could only be made inside a dungeon.
“...Uh, no matter how much I lick this thing, it doesn’t melt. What the heck is it?”
“Like I said! It’s ice cream that doesn’t melt!”
...Things had been like this lately.
Chunks of the coarse sugar crust from castella. Daikon radish oden with the texture of konnyaku. She kept coming up with questionable experiments.
It was like watching a rookie manga artist churning out rejected storyboards, no longer even sure what they were trying to create.
This strange ice cream, for example—bite into it, and it stayed cold without melting. A sweet, soft gum-like substance that just lingered endlessly in your mouth, never going away.
“What the hell is this...? The more I chew, the colder my mouth gets, without end.”
...Huh?
“Fine, fine! It’s a dud, right?! It’s always a dud! I know your world already has amazing products, so there’s no way mine can compare, huh?! Hmph!”
Peta-chan, frustrated and sulking, began to throw a tantrum. But I—I might just have stumbled onto a breakthrough.
This ice cream might actually be something incredible.
“Hey, Peta-chan. Could this actually be reproduced inside a dungeon too? Not just in the Master Room?”
After all, not everything I could make inside the Master Room could be implemented in the dungeon itself.
As the master of the Hot Spring Dungeon, I could freely produce iron inside my private room, but that didn’t mean it could exist out there. If it stayed limited to the room, then sure, it was nearly omnipotent.
“Huh? Of course I can. It’s just an effect that prevents it from melting.
Wait... hold on. Does that mean... this stuff was actually delicious?!”
Peta-chan’s face suddenly lit up with the brightest smile.
Yeah, no way. She hadn’t even tasted it before handing it to me, had she? If she had, there’s no chance she’d think something like this was tasty.
“No, it’s not delicious at all. Not even close.
But the fact that it stays cold forever without melting... that’s what makes it valuable.”
Yes. No matter how much you chewed it, this strange substance just kept pulling the warmth from your mouth, staying cold the entire time.
In other words, it was essentially an everlasting refrigerant.
Such a thing didn’t even exist in modern Japan.
It didn’t need to be ice cream at all. If we made it out of plain ice, it would be perfect: ice that never melted, ice that stole away heat forever.
Gather enough of it, and you’d have yourself a refrigerator.
Thinking it through, it made perfect sense.
After all, the hot springs and cold baths in this dungeon maintained whatever temperature they were set at, so long as they remained inside their pools. The laws of thermodynamics didn’t apply here.
So really, producing ice that never melted was well within the dungeon’s logic.
“This is amazing, Peta-chan. Honestly, it’d be better made as plain ice instead of ice cream, but still—do you think this unmelting ice could actually be taken out the dungeon?”
“...If it really never melts, I’d say you could carry it down to the fifth floor. From the fourth floor, it would at least melt much more slowly.
But outside the dungeon... it’d probably just turn back into normal ice.”
Peta-chan looked a little disappointed as she said it, but it was still more than enough.
If it couldn’t be taken to the surface, it might not have been that useful in the past.
But now? With people beginning to settle inside dungeons, the role of an almost everlasting coolant was immeasurable.
It would be like installing a refrigerator inside a mobile outpost.
“But, Master... why can’t we keep it as ice cream instead of plain ice? It’s still cold, isn’t it?”
Peta-chan tilted her head, saying something absurd.
She probably didn’t fully grasp concepts like food spoilage or freezing preservation. To her, the usefulness of a refrigerator likely wasn’t all that clear.
“It doesn’t need to be something edible. Why would it have to be ice cream?”
“Because! For me, producing something like ice counts as creating a natural substance, not a food. Using food costs less points to reproduce.”
...So in Peta-chan’s mind, ice was classified as a natural phenomenon, not a foodstuff.
But no—we needed ice, not ice cream.
If we made it ice cream, no one would think to use it as refrigeration.
In fact, that strange ice cream felt dangerous—something humans shouldn’t eat.
If you ate something like that, it felt as though it would keep draining the warmth from your body until you froze to death from the inside out.
When I forced myself to swallow a bite earlier, I could feel the chill spreading endlessly through my stomach, as if my insides were freezing solid.
If you actually made unmelting ice and put it in your mouth, it felt like biting down on a shard of freezing glass.
The sensation was so wrong that your brain instantly screamed, ‘This isn’t food—don’t eat it.’ No one would ever mistake it for something edible.
Which was why it absolutely had to be ice.
With that in mind, I pulled out an old-fashioned shaved ice machine and a big square block of ice, fitting it neatly into the grinder.
Turning the crank, I shaved the ice into a soft, fluffy pile.
Then I poured a generous helping of strawberry syrup over it and handed it to Peta-chan.
“Here, try this.”
“Oh? This feels completely different from ice cream... but it’s good! Just shaved ice, yet it tastes really nice.”
“Right? It’s delicious. Which means ice counts as a food. Got it?”
“...Ah. Okay.”
Peta-chan even cranked the shaved ice machine herself, piling up several servings and sampling them with all sorts of flavored syrups.
Before long, she figured out how to churn out ordinary ice at a fraction of the cost.
I didn’t really get the mechanics behind it, but apparently, once you truly recognized deep down that ice was “food,” the price automatically dropped.
On the other side of the screen, Commander Shield, finally enjoying a rare day off, sat inside her mobile base. With whiskey in hand, she wept tears of joy.
“This... this is the very same liquor that Her Majesty Yuzha downed in one gulp back then, choked on, and threw the entire venue into chaos over...?
Is this... a strong liquor made from dungeon mana, infused with a distinctive smoky aroma, almost like it’s been aged over smoldering wood...?
Impossible... That Japanese sake too—it was a rice wine refined to the absolute limit...
And yet, to think a drink could exist that carries this kind of strength and a depth of flavor to match it...!
All those spirits I went through such pains to acquire and savor until now...
The legendary brews said to exist only across the sea, the royal family’s secret reserves I had the privilege to taste... What in the world were they, compared to this?”
Overwhelmed, Captain Shield downed the liquor as fat tears streamed from her eyes.
Well, well. Soon enough, this dungeon that no longer had to worry about food would also be getting refrigerators stocked with ice that never melted.
That meant she’d be able to enjoy properly chilled drinks to her heart’s content.
Preferably while soaking in a nice hot spring, too.
That was what went through my mind as I watched Commander Shield.
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