To Another World... with Land Mines! Volume 9 (eBook)

Itsuki Mizuho (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024
250 Seiten
J-Novel Club (Verlag)
978-1-7183-8813-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Nao's party continues exploring the dungeon they discovered in order to train Mary and Metea. There they find all sorts of different fruits and other ingredients waiting for them on each new floor. Their diet soon expands to include high-quality milk, fresh jam, ice cream, tempura, and more. There's plenty of food in this ninth volume, but that's not all! A quest from Viscount Nernas with a surprising reward makes its way to Nao's party. More adventures await them in a land beyond Laffan!

Textauszug

Chapter 1—Garden Paradise?

The first thing we saw on the eleventh floor of the dungeon was breathtaking nature beyond anything I’d expected. There was an expanse of grassy plains that seemed to stretch on forever, forests scattered all over the place, and bodies of water that looked a bit too large to be classified as ponds. I looked up and saw a bright blue sky with clouds as well as a source of light shining down like the sun; it made the entire level as bright as noon outside the dungeon.

“So this is the scenery that was described in the books, huh? I kind of underestimated what it would actually look like,” I said.

According to the books about dungeons that we owned, about a tenth of the dungeons that had been discovered thus far had floors that exactly resembled the landscapes outside of the dungeons. Those landscapes could be forests, grassy plains, rivers, snow-covered mountains, volcanoes, and even seas, which was pretty amazing. The skies and seas in a dungeon weren’t endless, however. Apparently you would eventually bump into a transparent wall after traversing a certain distance, which would prevent you from advancing further, so there was a limit to how much of the world a dungeon could recreate.

However, the seas that had been discovered inside of dungeons were habitats in which normal fish could be found along with monsters. The whole thing sounded amazing, and it was particularly interesting to me. Man, I really want some saltwater fish. It’s been so long since I last had sashimi. Swimming probably wouldn’t be safe, but access to the sea would be extremely valuable even just as a source of new cooking ingredients.

“Whoa, we’re outside!” Metea yelled, stamping her feet in place as if she was trying to hold herself back from dashing forward.

When Mary noticed that, she hastily grabbed Metea’s hand. Mm, I know how you feel, Metea. We’ve been walking through dark and narrow dungeon floors, so seeing something this vast makes me want to run freely too, but we are inside a dungeon.

“We’re definitely still inside of a dungeon,” said Haruka. She turned around and looked up at the rock walls behind us. They reached up all the way into the sky—their summit wasn’t visible—but there was a hole at the base, and the stairs that we had walked down were visible within.

“If it weren’t for those stairs, we’d just think we got teleported outside,” said Yuki.

“Mm. Dungeons do contain things like return devices, after all,” said Natsuki. “The sky looks very natural, so it’s possible that Metea-chan was actually correct.”

“Um, what do you mean, Natsuki-san?” Mary asked.

Natsuki nodded in response to Mary’s question before answering. “I’m talking about Metea’s answer to my question sometime ago—why the sky looks blue. Can we be sure that the sky we see outside is the real sky?”

At the time, Metea had answered Natsuki’s question with “There’s a blue ceiling,” and we had thought she must be wrong based on our own common sense, but...

“That makes it sound like we’re in a self-contained world, like in the old Chinese legend of ‘heaven and earth in a pot’—it just looks real enough to be indistinguishable from reality,” said Haruka.

“Does that mean the places we think of as outdoors are actually still inside the ‘pot’?” I asked. “Hmm...”

Is virtual reality really “virtual” if you can’t even tell the difference? I don’t think there’s a clear answer to that question.

“Well, if we’re going to talk about this kind of thing, then there are other questions to consider,” I said. “Like, there’s the question of whether we’re actually alive or not, so—”

“Please don’t say scary stuff like that, Nao!” Yuki interrupted me, slapping me across the face before pointing at a faraway pond as if to change the topic. “M-More importantly, do you think it’ll rain on this floor of the dungeon?”

“If you think about it logically, plants can’t grow without rain,” I said. “Ponds can’t form without rain either, but...”

I tore some grass from the ground. It looked to be the same kind of grass that grew around Laffan. However, monsters in dungeons were able to survive without consuming food, so it seemed equally plausible that the grass inside of dungeons could grow without water.

“There’s wind blowing here, a sun in the sky, and heat as well,” said Natsuki. “Convection currents cause wind, and they also cause the formation of clouds, but there needs to be enough space, so—”

Natsuki had started to ponder the issue from a scientific perspective, but Yuki interrupted her before she could truly lose herself in thought. “There’s no need to think that much about it, Natsuki. The word ‘fantasy’ is enough of an explanation.”

Yuki’s conclusion was a bit simplistic, but she was completely right. There was a lot about dungeons that was impossible to explain from a scientific perspective, so there was no way you’d be able to figure out the right answer from just one floor.

“Mm, I suppose there’s no point thinking about it too deeply,” said Natsuki.

“Yeah, just accept things as they are,” said Yuki. “We’re in a different world, after all.”

“Indeed,” said Haruka. “We can use magic too—that’s another thing science can’t explain.”

“Tee hee. That’s definitely true,” said Natsuki. “I wouldn’t be able to explain what mana is even if someone were to ask me.”

Scientific knowledge was useful even in this world, but there was a lot of stuff it wasn’t applicable to—mana, magic, and so forth. Mana was a type of energy that existed in our bodies, and magic was the phenomenon that could be produced by that mana. Prana permeated the air and atmosphere and was believed to be responsible for spawning monsters. Magicites could be obtained from monsters, mana could be obtained from those magicites, and magical devices consumed the mana from magicites.

However, all of the definitions for those terms were quite vague, and they weren’t commonly used by ordinary people, just as laypeople on Earth would lump together things like radiation, radioactivity, and radioactive materials all under the one word “radioactivity.”

There were a lot of conflicting theories among people who specialized in magic—for example, about the question of whether or not the effects of magical devices counted as magic. That debate was still ongoing, but apparently the yeas had the upper hand right now. Of course, the majority of people didn’t care one way or another as long as the devices worked.

The consensus among my party was that the effects of magical devices weren’t magic. If you defined magic as a variety of phenomena that could be caused by the consumption of mana, then the main issue (according to the girls) was that the numbers didn’t add up. That is, magical devices seemed to have higher mana output than input.

The hypothesis that the girls had come up with was that it had something to do with prana. However, that hypothesis in itself invited other questions, such as whether the use of prana would count as magic. Then there was the basic mystery of what exactly prana was. Overall, it was something that I could only describe as too confusing to understand.

“Well, even if we can’t come up with an explanation, it’s still a fact that mana exists, and so do the phenomena that it causes,” I said.

“Mm. It’s no different for civilizations without magic,” said Haruka. “For example, gravity still exists even if gravitons are never discovered, and mass remains constant regardless of whether there’s a Higgs boson.”

There was a possibility that something like magic particles would be discovered a few thousand years in the future, but it wouldn’t change the fact that magic worked just fine in the present, so the best way to approach this environment would be to accept it on its own terms.

“Okay, let’s put aside the science talk for now,” said Touya. “More importantly, what should we do next? Honestly, I’m having a hard time restraining my desire to explore this floor...”

I noticed that Metea was nodding at Touya’s words, so she must’ve wanted to explore too. Her ears were twitching, and her tail was standing up straight, so she was definitely excited.

“Please don’t go wild, Touya,” I said. “I get why you’re excited, but still.”

The grassy plains ahead of us looked so vast that even I felt an urge to run around freely. In fact, if I had felt nothing upon seeing something like this inside of a dungeon, then I would have retired from the adventuring life right away.

“Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of stuff that I’d like to explore and investigate too,” said Yuki. “Our next move depends on our physical conditions, though.”

“I’m fairly sure that the five of us are fine,” said Natsuki. “Mary-chan, Metea-chan, what about the two of you? Do you feel all right?”

The sisters smiled and nodded.

“Yes, I feel fine as well,” Mary replied. “Our meals and sleep have been the same as usual even though we’re inside a dungeon.”

“I’m good to go too!” Metea replied. “I’m full of energy!”

They weren’t as accustomed to exploring dungeons as we were,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.9.2024
• Reihe/Serie: To Another World... with Land Mines!
• Illustrationen: Itsuki Mizuho
• Übersetzer: Itsuki Mizuho
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: childhood friend • Game elements • Isekai • Light Novel • Magic • Reincarnation • Survival
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-8813-6 / 1718388136
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-8813-0 / 9781718388130