The treant fruit was fairly sour with a tinge of sweetness. It wasn’t astringent, so its flavor resembled that of a wild berry—which was just what it looked like. That it was tasty didn’t seem odd, since an appealing fruit would attract more prey. Nothing abnormal happened to me physically, but I did feel as though my bowels had loosened. The safest way to eat this was to cook it to eliminate the enzymes and make it into jam. I entrusted the fruit, which looked somewhat shriveled after two days, to a citizen good at cooking, making sure to mention the safety aspect.
Troach showed an aversion to consuming fruit from a man-eating plant, but after asking several others, I discovered that her viewpoint wasn’t commonplace. It was probably because that treant almost ate her. Then again, after I’d gotten up out of the pit soaking wet, Troach had told me that if you slew a slime the right way, it could be prepared as food. Then she scolded me for not having done so.
I was fine with having ruined it. If even a little of myself had ended up in that slime, I didn’t want to partake of it. Nor did I want to feed that to anyone else.
Thinking about it, I realized that among the spoils from the slime, there had been a usable blade and several pieces of jewelry that I’d just thrown into the bag without thinking. We’d put everything functional to immediate use, then saved the jewelry in case we had an opportunity to sell it for money. After considering ways to store the valuables, I decided to leave them in Troach’s hands.
“What?! You sure you want me to handle this?!” she exclaimed upon seeing me hand her the pouch containing a golden ring, a silver anklet, and a gemstone necklace. We were standing in an isolated corner of the palace.
“I doubt anyone would be more suited for the task than you,” Mizuho replied in an ironic tone.
“Umm, you know who I am, right? Formerly a thief—”
“And would anyone think to steal jewels from the nation’s number one thief?”
“Aw, you’re making me blush… No, wait. I mean, you trust me not to make off with them?”
“Where would you run? We at least have a little faith in you,” admitted Mizuho.
“Mizuho…!” Troach, tears in her eyes, tried to hug the girl.
However, Mizuho smoothly stepped out of the way. “Please don’t come any closer to me.”
“But why?!”
“More importantly, Taiga, we shall need to decide what to do with the territory we’ve acquired,” Mizuho said earnestly, ignoring Troach.
“Territory?”
“I’m referring to the rooms we’ve taken control of. Our country has the right to annex both the greatbat cave and the treant hill.”
“Is that how it works?”
“It is customary in Million Dungeon that any nation that has taken control of a room in the dungeon has the right to decide whether to add it to their domain. Of course, should the nation grow larger, it would cost more money to administer it, so there is no hard rule saying we must take it… However, in our case, I believe it’s best we do. At present, our nation has no facilities apart from the palace.”
“Understood. If we did take it on as new territory, how would we put it to use?”
“I think we should leave the treant hill as it is for agriculture. The soil there is rich, and if we place the star you retrieved from the slime on the ceiling, it will be enough to grow crops.”
That item I’d grabbed hadn’t been a star fragment, but an actual star. After returning and polishing it, it had suddenly begun to shine much more brightly, almost blindingly, as though it had just remembered that was what it was supposed to do. It was currently hanging on the support beam next to the first campfire we’d made, illuminating the palace. Of course, it was only bright in the daytime; it darkened at night.
“What should we do with the bloodsucking kudzu?” I asked. “If it reaches out again, we won’t be able to farm. Or should we just make a field of them…?”
“It would be a waste to plant it on such good soil. And if we leave them to crawl on the stone walls, it will mean more insects and animals coming in to steal things… I think we’ll need to cut them all down and replant them elsewhere.”
“Hey,” Troach cut in, “if we’re gonna make a farm there, wouldn’t that mean you’d have to go through the greatbat cave to get to it? That means we need to improve the cave on the way, too, right?”
“It does. What shall we do with that space…? Should we build Savakan a smithing workshop?”
“I asked her, and she said a spot near water would be better.”
“Isn’t this palace the closest spot to water in our nation?” Troach inquired.
“Maybe we should take the chance and move the palace,” I suggested.
“To the cave?” Mizuho questioned.
“I don’t know yet…”
“Well, let’s try and think of something. Until then, shall we put up some torches or something to at least light the way to the farmland?”
“It’s so dirty in there, though. All that greatbat crap everywhere…”
Troach’s remark gave me an idea. “If we need to improve that cave anyway… Can we collect the droppings?”
“Huh?”
“Pick up the poop?!”
As they gaped in disbelief, I explained, “In the world I come from, bat dung was good fertilizer. Maybe it’s the same here. It’s conveniently located right next to the farmland, so we might as well test it.”
Cave-dwelling bat dung contained phosphoric acid, making it good, quality manure. I came up with the idea because I knew that in the past, in Southeast Asia, people would extract saltpeter from piles of bat droppings on cave floors to use for gunpowder.
“I have a question for you both: In this world, do people happen to make greatbat dung into gunpowder?”
Mizuho shook her head, but Troach’s eyes lit up. “I’ve heard of that! I’ve heard the price of animal poop goes way up before wars! Once, someone said they wanted to go poop-raiding, but I turned them down.”
“Thought so. Then it should be the same in both worlds—we can use the greatbat dung as fertilizer.”
“Huh? Hold on. Wouldn’t we get more out of selling it instead of making it into fertilizer? Or we could make our own gunpowder instead.”
“We can’t do that, Troach. Selling it for money might make sense if we had established trade routes, but our nation can’t afford that. We need to secure a stable supply of food first.”
“Hmmm. I suppose. But wouldn’t it still be good to have gunpowder? We can get resources if we take over nearby parts of the dungeon, but we’ll need weapons to do that.”
“You’re not wrong, but…,” Mizuho cut in.
“How much of a scarcity are firearms and bombs in this world?” I asked.
The girls exchanged glances.
“Scarcity?”
“He’s asking how common they are,” Mizuho quickly clarified.
“Oh. I’d say pretty common. A little expensive, though,” answered Troach.
“Yes… You can easily buy them with money. As you might imagine, they see a lot of use.”
“In that case, if we need gunpowder, we’ll buy it,” I decided. “That should be enough.”
If it came to it, we could actually extract saltpeter from human and livestock excrement, too. However, we’d need to boil it down or filter it out, which would be an incredibly smelly affair and, speaking bluntly, a troublesome task.
The basic rule of survival was to use whatever you had. Unless you were conducting experiments for personal interest or purposely tackling difficult challenges for likes and upvotes, there was no need to indulge in meddlesome things. If gunpowder was in circulation, we could simply purchase it.
That choice presented a new problem, however. What were we going to buy it with?
One morning, after a few busy days of work, the answer would come to us from elsewhere.