That was… something I had sensed myself. I had just been thinking, “Because magic can do anything, perhaps the people of this world don’t have much of a sense of wonder,” earlier.
“Everything mysterious or miraculous is hand-waved as the power of magic or little spirits we can’t see,” said Genia. “Until we solve this thing called magic, the greatest mystery of all, we can’t completely deny their absurd theories. It’s such a pain.”
The frown on Genia’s face after she said that probably wasn’t only because of the sip of coffee she took.
“This is the truth,” she went on. “While we were studying the jewel discovered in the dungeon, we had the chance discovery that if we used water and wind elemental magic on it, it would take in the scenery around it and project it through the receivers that were also discovered. The bit about sylphs and undines was just an explanation someone came up with later, thinking that maybe it was made possible by the spirits’ blessings.”
“Then, are there no sylphs or undines?” I asked.
“I can’t go as far as ruling that out, either. They may be out there, somewhere. I mean, we’ve got a country conspicuously called the Spirit Kingdom of Garlan, after all. But, at present, I have no definitive proof of their existence.”
Well, it was impossible to prove the non-existence of a thing, after all. But this was huge.
I had assumed this was a world of sword and sorcery, like the kind you’d see in an RPG. No, well, they did have both swords and sorcery. That’s why I assumed it wouldn’t be weird for spirits to exist, too. Was that just something I convinced myself of?
“Well, what about the godbeast said to protect the dark elves’ forest, then?” I asked.
“Oh, that one’s fine,” said Genia. “Godbeasts definitely exist, or did at one point. I couldn’t tell you if there’s one in their forest or not, though.”
“That one exists?!”
“I mean, the greatest godbeast of all, Mother Dragon, really does exist in the Star Dragon Mountain Range. Yep, yep, I can understand why you’re confused. The line between things that exist and things that don’t is vague in this world. That’s another factor that makes it hard to see the truth.”
“My head’s starting to hurt,” I complained.
“Are you okay?” Liscia placed a concerned hand on my shoulder.
I put my own hand on top of hers and answered, “I’m fine,” but… internally, I wasn’t fine at all. In the course of a few minutes, I had lost my understanding of this world.
There was magic, but I didn’t know if there were spirits or not; but these things called godbeasts did exist… nothing made sense to me anymore. I would need to collect a list of more things that did and didn’t exist, then compare the two before I would have even a vague sense of what this world was like. That was how I was starting to feel.
“Getting back on topic, here’s the second mistake,” said Genia. “Well, I’ve pretty much told you it already, but it’s ‘the jewel is a tool to send out images and sounds it picks up’ part. Like I told you before, the ‘broadcast function’ of the jewel is something we discovered by accident when we tried using water and wind magic on it. In other words, we’ve only been using the jewel for broadcasting.”
“Wha?!” I exclaimed.
Then, did she mean… the jewel wasn’t only a tool for broadcasting images and sound?
“For instance, mankind uses the water wheel in a wide variety of applications,” said Genia. “They’re not just for irrigation; we also use them to thresh and pulverize wheat, and to spin thread, too. But, if someone who had never seen a water wheel before saw a spinning wheel, don’t you think they’d assume it was a tool for spinning thread?”
“That makes sense…” I said slowly.
Though, if she’d used an example with more applications, it would have been easier to understand. For instance, imagine if someone in this world discovered a cellular phone, and then they accidentally discovered it took photos while they were messing around with it. The people in this world would think that cell phones were cameras. The same way we had been thinking of the Jewel Voice Broadcast jewel as a TV camera…
“Well, then… what are those jewels, really?” I asked.
“Yeah. We know that one.” Genia gave my hesitant question a clear and confident answer. “They’re what’s commonly referred to as a dungeon core.”
Dungeon cores.
They were said to be the most important part of a dungeon, maintaining the unique ecology of the labyrinth from its deepest level.
I say they were said to be, because it was just someone’s deduction.
If these dungeon cores were destroyed or stopped, the environment inside the dungeon (the temperature, the humidity, and more) and its ecology would collapse, turning it into a ruined dungeon. While wild creatures might come from outside to live in a ruined dungeon, no more monsters would appear after that point, so it was assumed that these cores were central to a dungeon’s function.
Incidentally, the adventurers of this world made their living exploring dungeons, but their ultimate goal was to clear the dungeons by stopping these cores.
As I had just heard, dungeon cores were used as Jewel Voice Broadcast jewels. If they brought them back, they could sell them to the state for fame and an immense fortune. However, it tended to be that the closer they got to the lowest point of the dungeon, the more powerful the monsters that appeared. Across the whole continent, it was only every few years, or decades, that a dungeon would be cleared.
That was why ordinary adventurers like Dece and Juno made their living protecting merchants and caravans from bandits and wild beasts, or killing monsters that came out of dungeons or the Demon Lord’s Domain. Even if adventurers occasionally went dungeon delving, most did it to sell materials from the monsters they defeated there, or to sell off the artifacts they might, on rare occasions, find. (There was nothing convenient, like treasure chests.)
Let’s get back to talking about dungeon cores.
Until a dungeon core was stopped, it would continue to give birth to fierce monsters from somewhere. To this point, no one had ever brought back a core without stopping it. That was because no one wanted to see the surface end up full of monsters as a result of bringing back a working core against all common sense.
In other words, dungeon cores had only ever been studied in a broken state.
In my earlier cell phone example, it would be like the person playing with it had somehow managed to fix just the camera function and were using it for that. In that case, you might think it would be a good idea to research them and search for other functions they might have, but… Here’s something to consider.
Cell phones don’t spit out monsters.
If you knew that the cell phone had a self-destruct function that would blow away everything around it, would you want to search for any other features it had?
That was one of the reasons why research on dungeon cores hadn’t advanced.
“Though, with the level of technology in this world, restarting a dungeon core once it’s been stopped is impossible,” Genia said. “I mean, we don’t even know how it worked in the first place.” Genia shrugged, looking down into her mug. “I can understand why people would want to explain it with magic, I guess. It’s fear of the unknown. It’s scary to have something exist that you can’t see or explain, so people try to force an explanation in order to grasp and understand it…No, just to feel they understand it, maybe?”