The Iruma Magistrate Has a Brainstorm... A Dungeon Floating in Midair (Day 9, Late Morning)

[Tier-Group 34, Lifelong-Learning Wing, Small Training Room]

"The dungeon's growth had stopped, so I rushed over thinking the matter was finally settled, but."

The Iruma Daikan, Yoshida Nishinoichinojō, came in.

"My apologies. I slept the whole day yesterday. There's no end to the zombies, the headless corpses. It seems they really are 'inexhaustible.'"

"If it grows past seventeen ri (two hundred thousand shaku), then on the off chance it toppled over onto us it would be a catastrophe, so I'd dearly like the dead to run out somewhere."

"In the end we'll have to capture the enemy dungeon directly, but hydraulic mining wasn't enough to dig away the Kozukappara Execution Ground Dungeon itself. We're considering other methods."

"Hydraulic, was it?"

"It's a Roman method of mining gold. You use vast quantities of water to wash away a mountain and extract the gold."

"An old demon? For gold?"

"In any case, in this region, how are gold mines worked?"

"Gold, eh. The famous one is a mining dungeon called the 'Sado Gold Mine,' where, by all accounts, a 'Queen' curses the slaves as pigs and lashes them with a whip, and gold falls out. You hammer it flat to make a koban. In other words, the gold you can extract from a single slave comes, as a rule, to two koban. Naturally, if the weight differs from the standard, you adjust."

"That isn't going to be of any help."

Marie cut him off flatly.

"Beyond that, I've heard that far away, at the very ends of the northeast, there is a hell dungeon that produces gold, and the dead bring it forth. But it's so far off that the truth of it is unknown. In the old days there were several gold-producing dungeons out beyond Sumo as well, but it seems they've all been mined dry and collapsed."

"It would be easy if chanting a sutra would send the zombies on to Buddhahood… We predict the core is buried somewhere in the dungeon's earth, so we'd like to dig the dungeon away by some method or other. That's the problem. Is there no good way?"

"Since by the karma of a past life they've been reincarnated as the dead of hell, a sutra would have little effect unless it were chanted by the person themselves or by a high priest. Now, if it's a castle you mean to dig away, there is the mole attack."

"Ah, the one where you dig a tunnel, pack it with gunpowder, and blow it sky-high."

"It's a method the Pretas of the Land of Kō use now and then. But there's no one in Musashi who can manage it. By the way… do dungeons float in midair?"

"No, dungeon structures do not float in midair. If they did, they'd have all sorts of convenient uses."

"Then, even if you can't destroy the dungeon itself, you simply dig away beneath it and flip it over. A turtle, flipped over, rights itself with its neck, but a headless dungeon can't pull off such a trick, and the dead will be crushed of their own accord under the dungeon's own weight."

"This dungeon is a tower type, so underground it has deep foundations spreading far and wide like the roots of a tree. But if that Zombie Dungeon has no roots, we should be able to flip it over; and even if it does, digging deep enough to tear them out at the root will send the zombies plummeting to be crushed under their own weight. Fortunately, we have dungeon energy to spare. Thank you. Flipping it over cleanly would call for complicated calculations, so in the end the usual method of dropping it into a pit seems best after all."

"Mm, I await good news. The dead won't grow us any white rice, after all."