“A dungeon — are you serious!?”
I turned to Alicia and practically yelled the question back at her.
A dungeon — one of only twelve known anomalous domains in the entire world.
Their interiors were said to hold both powerful monsters and countless treasures lying dormant.
The Embance Kingdom had exactly one, and it was held as direct royal territory.
Rumor had it that the wealth a dungeon generated alone was equivalent to a large domain with a population of a hundred thousand.
“Y-yes. But — why are you here, Lord Viktor?”
“I was asking Mumul about the Elves. But forget that — the dungeon!”
I leaned in toward Alicia’s face.
She gave a small cough and steadied her breathing before answering.
“I didn’t go inside, but there was a gate. That was without question a dungeon entrance.”
“As I had anticipated.”
“……Makina already knew?”
“To some extent. From the degree of change in the scales you gave me, I was able to estimate that they had been exposed to extremely high levels of magical energy.”
Come to think of it, we had handed those scales over to Makina’s research institute.
That the institute had been able to deduce that much from a few scales — quite a capable operation.
“The cave survey also served to confirm whether a dungeon was present. I kept it back to avoid getting everyone’s hopes up prematurely.”
“So that’s what it was. But if there’s a dungeon, that changes a lot……!”
Monsters spawn inside dungeons.
Just like that — appearing out of nothing.
To be precise, they use magical energy rising from ley lines as their material — but.
The important thing was that no matter how many you killed, given enough time they’d just keep spawning.
“First we’ll need to survey what kinds of monsters appear in the dungeon, and how many can be harvested per day.”
“Harvested — you’ve already made up your mind to use the dungeon as a magic stone farm. Well, I was going to suggest the same thing, but……”
“If we’re doing it anyway, we may as well suppress part of the dungeon and reshape it to suit our purposes. It’s also of interest as a research subject.”
Suppressing a dungeon.
I’d heard it was possible if you fully cleared the dungeon and seized its core.
In fact, there was a military power in the south that had reportedly improved a dungeon for human use and gained enormous strength from it.
But fully clearing a dungeon was a feat that would go down in history.
When that southern military power cleared theirs, they had apparently mobilized S-rank adventurers gathered from across the land — plus an equivalent force from within their own military called the Six Demon Generals.
With our current strength, there was simply no way……
“It’s beyond our power. Even with Makina, I’m afraid……”
“Fully clearing it and bringing the core under control would be difficult, yes. But using golems, putting the upper levels under effective control is entirely achievable.”
“How?”
“Simply station enough golems inside the dungeon to process monsters immediately as they spawn.”
“Golems could certainly camp out in a dungeon indefinitely, but……the enemy’s numbers are limitless. No matter how many golems we station there, they’ll eventually get destroyed.”
When I pointed out the problem, Makina smiled as if to say it’s fine.
She seemed to have a plan, and looked quite confident.
Then she turned to Alicia and asked:
“Have you ever entered a dungeon, Alicia?”
“Yes. I went into the upper levels of Minastil several times for training.”
“A quick question then — is it true that dungeon walls and floors regenerate?”
“That’s right. The walls and floors regenerate so quickly that forcing your way through them is considered nearly impossible.”
At Alicia’s answer, Makina looked satisfied.
What was she planning?
We tilted our heads, and Makina began to explain slowly.
“To put it simply — we build self-replicating golems.”
“Self-replicating?”
“Yes. First, we build a golem that manufactures golems. And for its materials, we use the magic stones from monsters that spawn in the dungeon, along with the dungeon’s own walls and floors.”
“I see……that’s brutal.”
I grasped more or less what Makina was getting at.
Use inexhaustibly harvestable materials to create golems inexhaustibly — and the dungeon gets crushed under its own weight.
Though if the control went wrong, couldn’t something horrific happen?
Alicia seemed to have the same concern, and made a troubled face.
“I have a rough sense of where this goes……. Wouldn’t the golems multiply out of control and cause a disaster?”
“If we set a cap on the maximum population, it should be fine.”
“Even so, it’s a little frightening. If there were ever an error and golems started using things outside the dungeon as material, that would be extremely dangerous.”
“……Understood. Then let’s skip the suppression and focus only on magic stone collection. However, I would like to at least conduct theoretical research on self-replicating golem technology. It may prove useful someday.”
“Alright — but be careful.”
At that, Makina nodded deeply.
Either way, this settled the question of a stable magic stone supply.
“Right — once we have magic stones coming in from the dungeon, let’s mass-produce Talos-types. And use them to build the road to Elven territory.”
And so the immediate direction for my domain was decided.