Day 15 Morning - Dungeon economics 101

Even though the host struck me as something of a muscle head, the reading room of the Raznok estate was surprisingly large. In fact, it was about the size of the public library old me used to frequent in elementary school except, well… red. Red covers, red bookcases, redwood chairs with red velvet cushions… Razzie had a thing for the color, it seemed. On the same note, unlike the rest of the mansion, this one room was lit by fist-sized glowing orange orbs in sockets on the walls instead of the usual smokeless braziers, probably because of the flammable nature of the place.

Speaking of rooms, I actually managed to bully my way into using the bath (which also had a crimson bathtub, go figure), and they even lent me the slightly long but otherwise comfortable (and most importantly, freshly washed) night gown I was wearing at the moment. It was red, because of course it was, so it didn’t really suit my complexion, but it felt nice to be clean all the same.

Anyways, at the moment we were sitting at the oaken table in the middle of the chamber. I had a couple of books in front of me and had Razzie sit by my side in arm’s reach. He already had his glamour turned back on, probably to hide the humongous bags under his eyes. He had them even before I convinced him I wasn’t going to kill him, but spending the entire night forced to read excerpts from books for me made them all the darker. Speaking of which, first I really wanted him to teach me how the local writing system worked, but it turned out to be this really complex, right-to-left vertical hieroglyph stuff, so I decided to do it later, and focus on getting some dungeon-specific information from him first.

“So you say that the entire dungeon exists just to get this [Lux] thing out of people?” I asked my unwilling host while I looked over my hastily scribbled notes.

“Y-Yes…” the large demon sitting at my side replied with a nervous voice completely unbefitting his appearance, with or without the glamour.

According to Razzie over here, the System (which they called the [Divine Administration], but that was a mouthful, so I decided to keep calling it ‘The System’ anyway), was created by the great god Tih A’maer. He was a hero who came from a different world, and upon seeing how chaotic the place was, he set out to gain divinity and reform the entire world. Considering the present, he obviously succeeded. Also, note to self: people can become gods around here if they try hard enough. Look into it later.

But back to this Tih A’maer fellow: he also designated humans, fae and a couple of other sentients as [Races of Light]. They got extra support from the system, while the rest became the [Races of Shadow]. In other words, the traditionally heroic races were designated as the protagonists, while the rest became the antagonists. Since some found this somewhat unfair, the "antagonist races" then created the dungeons as a way to harness the system for themselves. And thus we reached the current point in the conversation, so let’s return to it.

“So, if I get this straight…” I spoke after placing my notes on the table, ”Dungeons all have several layers. Each layer is governed by a Floor Master, and the Floor Masters are under the command of the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master guards the Core at the bottom of the dungeon, which is used to gather the Lux from the people entering and then… then what?”

Razzie shifted on his seat uncomfortably before he finally spoke up, his gruff voice strangely tense.

“W-Well, the Core does… something with the Lux. I don’t know what exactly. I've never seen it myself, you see, but it turns Lux into Credits, and we can use them to do things.”

“Such as?”

“Errr… Well, you can… for example, change the layout of the labyrinth, you see? The caverns as well, to a degree. Or you can modify what kind of monsters spawn in an area. Things like that.”

“Oh, so you do spawn monsters…” I mused while writing, “I guess that’s where the new goblins came to the village.”

“I… I think so. Critters are managed by the Area Guardians, so…” Suddenly the real Razzie under the glamour visibly paled and shook his head. “I-I mean, when I say ‘critter’, it's just terminology, you see? I am not judging goblins or anything, you see? It’s the Divine Administration where they are designated as such, you see?”

“Yes, yes, I see,” I answered half-heartedly. At first his overreactions were a little amusing, but by this point I was getting tired of them. “So you spawn ‘critters’, then what?”

“Y-You see, there is this kind of… environment we have to keep up. Like the above ground. There are bugs that get eaten by rodents that get eaten by foxes that get eaten by wolves, then the wolves die and the corpses get eaten by bugs. That kind of thing.”

“So a food chain.”

“A chain? Where?”

“No, that’s what you described is called where I come from. It’s required for an ecosystem to stay stable, I think.”

“Then it surely is! A chain of food! How profound!”

I shrugged my shoulders an ignored the man’s clumsy attempts at bootlicking. More importantly though, lately I've found that I could remember a lot of things from school I was sure I had already forgotten, like how ecosystems worked and the like. Maybe it was because of my steadily rising Mind score? Just how was I mentally affected by those stats anyway? At least I didn’t feel particularly insightful, so they couldn’t be that prominent. I decided these were things to think about later, and instead I tapped my pen on the table to punctuate my next question.

“So, in this ecosystem, the goblins are near the bottom of the food chain, right?” Razzie probably still didn’t grasp what those terms meant, but he awkwardly nodded all the same, so I continued; “So they exist to be eaten?”

“N-N-No! I didn’t mean it like that! They are a very important part of the dungeon, very important. It’s just that your… erm… ‘predecessor’ required female humanoids for her race’s… errrrm… reproductive needs.”

I paused for a moment to let that sink in.

“… So what you are saying is that goblins were on the First Floor because the spiders needed something to lay their eggs into?”

“No! I mean, yes, but… I had nothing to do with it, you see? It was the Old Widow! Oh, right, Old Widow was what I called her, you see? She had no name, and she couldn’t talk, but I had to call her something, you see? She was not particularly smart, but she still managed to figure out that if she added more goblins to the area, her spawn didn’t have to hunt for upworlders all the time.”

“So she made the goblins entirely female for that?”

“N-No, actually it wasn’t her. You see, all the creatures spawned by the dungeon are female. This way they cannot breed, and so we don’t have to worry about them overpopulating. It makes things easier to manage. It’s… um… it’s good for the ee-ko system. It… err… balances… things.”

I raised a hand like I was taught in school, and the giant man on my side nearly fell out of his chair with a surprised cry. I shook my head and let my hand down.

“Stop doing that, I only wanted to ask something. You said all the dungeon creatures are female so that they won’t breed, right?”

“Y-Yes?”

“Then what about the spiders?”

“Oh, them?” Razzie sat straight again and began absent-mindedly stroking his goatee. “They were left behind by the Dungeon Master, you see? The old one, not Master Shorkuz. White Widow silk is one of the materials the dungeon uses to lure upworlders down, so she tried to spawn lots of spiders to make lots of silk. Unfortunately, it turned out they had a habit of eating each other, you see? At first it was good for weeding out the weaklings, but after a while the old spiders were eating the newly spawned young spiders before they could even build a nest, so there simply wasn’t enough silk to entice the upworlders, and so spawning spiders began to cost more than how much Lux they earned. So, the previous Dungeon Master decided to modify them to be able to breed, and then she made goblins and other critters in the area they could use to reproduce so that there would be a… a balance. Like the chain of eeko in the system, but completely different, you see?”

“I see…” I noted his answer and thought about it for a moment. “But wait. Does that mean that you can modify monsters?”

“Yes. It’s done through the Dungeon Management interface.”

“Really?” I tried to call out a number of different things, like ‘Management Panel’ and such in my head, and I actually got a new panel open up in front of me. It was black, and it had a series of tabs on the top. There were a couple of neat things, like a map, a bunch of statistics about the creatures on the dungeon floor, a pile of graphs about Lux income and Credit expenditure, and so on. I decided to mess around with it later, and for the time being I returned to the conversation. “Neat. Now, for my next question…”

“Please excuse us.”

My words were interrupted by the ringing of a tiny bell as the door opened, and two beautiful young women walked in pushing a food cart. They were the maids of Razzie, thought they weren’t wearing French maid aprons, instead opting for fairly conservative dresses. There were four of them in total, but only two of them came in this time. The tall one with the waist-long brown pony-tail holding the door open was Sera, a Level 9 human rogue (or at least so I guessed based on her skills), while the busty girl with short black hair pushing the cart was Alvilia, a level 7 imp. Now, while the word ‘imp’ might've conjured images of stubby, big-headed little devils with tiny little pitchforks, she looked like a perfectly pretty, if red-skinned human girl with a pair of petite horns on her forehead and a thin tail ending in a spade attached to her rear. I asked her before when she helped me pick my night-gown and, according to her, imps were the low-level form of succubi and incubi in this world.

Anyways, the two stiffly entered the room and stopped besides us.

“We thought you might be thirsty, so we prepared some tea,” Sera spoke in a businesslike manner.

“Oh, you didn’t need to,” I told them with an amicable smile. “The refreshments you brought in at midnight were more than enough for me.”

“But we had to! We don’t want to be bad hosts!” the imp girl exclaimed with a, dare I say, impish smile, and offered me a cup.

I let out a sigh and graciously accepted it, then I put it down onto the table.

“Thank you.”

“Aren’t you going to drink it?” Alvilia asked.

“I am not thirsty right now. I will drink it later.”

“But you should! We need to know if—”

“If you like the blend,” Sera smoothly interrupted her eager coworker.

“Don’t worry, I'll tell you later.”

I sent a glance at Razzie, and after a short twitch of recognition, he cleared his throat and spoke up with a booming voice; “Do not pester our esteemed guest, you two! Move along!”

“Yes master!” “Understood!”

The two non-french maids bowed in unison, and after some hesitation, they left the premises. Once the door closed I let out a sigh, at which point Razzie’s dignified façade cracked at once and he began sputtering.

“P-Please do not take offense! They are just eager to serve!”

“They sure are,” I muttered flatly before I pushed the teacup aside and picked up my notes again. “So, back to the floor management: You said Credits are earned from converting Lux.”

“Yes.”

“And you get Lux from adventurers.”

“Yes. We call them upworlders though...”

“And you use the Credits you earn this way to spawn creatures and materials to lure in the adventurers, who then give you Lux, which you use to get Credits. Do you see a problem with that?”

“… No?”

I sighed and put down my pen.

“This is a cycle that has no end goal. What do you actually get out of this system?”

He hesitated for a while, and then told me, “We are kind of upholding the natural circulation of Lux in this world, you see? So, maybe if we didn’t do this, things would get out of balance, you see?”

“… You just pulled that out of your ass, didn’t you?”

Razzie shrunk back and feebly nodded.

“Yes ma’am. Sorry ma’am.” I sighed yet again, and he hurriedly added, “But… But you can buy things with Credits too, you see! You get a personal portion out of the area you manage, and if you bring in a lot of Lux, you can buy all kinds of things. For example, I bought this mansion and all the things in it with Credits!”

“So you can get some personal gain out of it, huh?” I paused for a moment to think, and then inquired, “So the amount of Credits you can spend is proportional to the amount of Lux you collect. How exactly do you increase that?”

“W-Well… You see… Upworlders give you a little Lux over time just by being in the area you manage. When fighting they give you a bit more, and you can get a lot at once if they die. Creatures give you some Lux when they die too, but not as much as it costs to spawn them. The stronger they are, the more Lux the upworlders give you both when alive and when they die. The best way to increase the amount of Lux you get is to lure strong upworlders to your area with some kind of valuable raw material, like spider silk, and then keep them bogged down in fights or kill them to get lots of Lux fast.”

“Any other alternatives?”

“Erm… The lower layers sometimes use small labyrinths or traps to have the upworlders kept there until they starve. Those cost a lot of Dungeon Credits, so doing that is only really cost-effective with very strong upworlders, and they rarely bother with the first floor.”

“I see…” I nodded again and began absent-mindedly arranging my notes while thinking.

Razzie kept watching over me for a while, but at last he cleared his throat and gingerly pushed the teacup towards me.

“Your tea… it’s getting cold, you see…?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you going to drink it? My women went out of their way to make it, you see? I don’t want them to think you shun them by not drinking it. It would make them sad, you see?”

I glanced at the tea, then up at Razzie’s big, earnest mug, and at last I shrugged my shoulder and picked up the cup.

“Fine, fine.” I raised it to my mouth, but before I took a sip I glanced up one more time and added, “To be honest though, I'm pretty sure your maids already dislike me.”

“W-What would make you say that?!” Razzie raised his voice in surprise.

“Call it intuition,” I told him before I gulped down a mouthful.

You have been poisoned with [Laxative Lv1]. You are immune to poisons. Poison resisted.

“Huh. So it was laxative this time…” I muttered under my nose just a touch irritably.

“E-Excuse me…? I couldn’t hear what you said.”

I looked up at the nervous demon at my side and gave him a reassuring smile.

“I just said your maids make really tasty tea, that’s all.”

Saying so I raised the cup to my mouth and took another sip, deciding to ignore the both the warning message popping up after every gulp and the increasingly nervous giant demon at my side.