Return to the Lower Stratum
Satou here. Shocking truths aren’t just revealed by mass media, like news channels and magazines. Sometimes you might learn about one in the middle of a casual conversation.
“Ban, I brought the things you asked for.”
Late that night after the mochi party, I went alone to the Eternal Night Castle in the Lower Stratum of the labyrinth.
We were leaving for the royal capital the next day, so I wanted to deliver Zena’s letter and the goods I promised before I forgot.
I would’ve liked to bring the kids, too, but I didn’t want them to experience any negative effects with their lack of miasma resistance, so I decided to hold off until I could develop some anti-miasma magic tools and spells, like miasma masks or miasma guards.
There were plenty of spells for purifying miasma, but none of my spellbooks contained a single spell for resisting it, for some reason.
“Kuro, eh? You’ve returned sooner than expected.”
“Yes, and I brought you a letter, too.”
The vampire progenitor Ban, a reincarnation and lord of the Eternal Night Castle, came out to welcome me. I handed him the letter from Zena.
“A letter? …Ah, it’s from the girl I assisted before, is it? What a conscientious lass.”
The vampire lord opened the seal and murmured to himself as he read its contents.
“So first you came to the Lower Stratum to rescue her, and now you even act as her personal mail carrier. Is that girl your sweetheart, Kuro?”
“No, she’s a very dear friend, but not my sweetheart.”
My heart belongs only to Miss Aaze.
“Is that right? What a shame. The wives would have loved to gossip about that.”
The vampire lord folded up the letter and put it away in his Item Box.
“And this wine is a thank-you from her, too.”
I handed over the bottle of Lessau’s Lifeblood red wine.
“A gracious gift indeed.”
Ban was all smiles.
This guy really likes that particular wine, huh?
“Is this the only bottle of Lessau’s Lifeblood you have for now?”
“From her, yes. But I did get the five casks you asked for. I’ll bring them to your wine cellar later.”
I searched far and wide, but aside from the one bottle I got through the merchants’ guild, I wasn’t able to find any around the royal capital or the neighboring Zetts County. I actually ended up going to the vineyard in Lessau County to buy them straight from the source.
Just as I’d heard, Lessau County was the site of some terrible destruction; its capital had become a ruin overrun with monsters, and many of the villages nearby were abandoned, too.
Even in the village where the vineyard was, citizens were debating whether to abandon their land because some monsters had built a nest nearby.
I wanted them to keep regularly producing Lessau’s Lifeblood wine there, so I went out as Kuro to destroy the offending monsters and their nest, used Earth Magic to build sturdy walls around the village and their vineyards, and even set them up with six level-30 golems to defend them from enemy attacks.
The golems should be able to take down any ordinary monsters or even lesser demons without a problem.
“My wives can carry the casks for you.”
I took the casks from my Item Box and placed them in the space the head handmaiden indicated.
“Should I leave the other gifts here, too?”
“Very well.”
While I was getting the vampire lord’s permission, the handmaidens laid out thick waterproof cloths on the tables, so I placed the gifts for the vampiresses and handmaidens there.
“Lord Ban, won’t you please make me a Nippon katana with this mithril?”
“This is a splendid ingot indeed. Yes, I’ll be able to make a fine blade with that.”
When I overheard one of the vampiresses making a request to the vampire lord, my hand froze in the middle of taking out the gifts.
“That’s right… You’re a swordsmith, aren’t you, Ban?”
“Indeed, it took me some three hundred years to learn to make a proper blade… But how do you know that, Kuro?”
“I just remembered that a katana I once found in a treasure chest in the labyrinth said it was created by Ban.”
I didn’t have the sword on hand at the moment, since I’d given it to Tama.
“Would I be able to observe your process of making a katana for future reference, if you don’t mind?”
I had tried to make a Japanese-style katana before, but it didn’t go all that well.
While I managed to make blades that bore a decent resemblance to a katana, they broke easily, and their attack power was far lower than my Magic Swords and fairy sword.
Basically, I was a long way off from making the “unbreakable, unbendable, unbeatably sharp” katana that are so often depicted in light novels and manga.
“Very well. However, I shall need some time to prepare the furnace.”
“I can wait, of course. By the way, that ingot is pure mithril without any special ingredients. Will that work all right?”
“Indeed. My furnace is of a special make that utilizes Blood Magic, so in fact a pure ingot is ideal.”
That works out, then.
Feeling pleased that I had lucked into a swordsmithing lesson, I resumed laying out the presents.
“These are for the handmaidens.”
I handed out some things I thought they would like, including sewing kits and some light reading.
“Are you certain?”
“Of course.”
“I call this book here.”
“I’ll take these coral earrings!”
“Girls! You can pick out your baubles later! You’re disrupting Lord Ban and his guest!”
“““Yes, Mistress Fedoralka!”””
The vampire lord’s trusted elderly head handmaiden scolded the younger girls as they loudly scrabbled over the gifts.
Evidently, the progenitor had asked the head handmaiden many times if she would like to become a vampire, but she insisted on remaining human.
As all this unfolded, a lovely young woman arrived from deeper within the castle: Yuika.
There were two small horns on the goblin girl’s pale forehead. She was a reincarnation like Ban and possessed the most Unique Skills of anyone I knew.
“Hello there, Kuro.”
“Hi, Yuika.”
Yuika’s pretty frilled dress suited her well.
“I brought some fresh mochi and an assortment of spices—”
“Mochi?! Oh, it’s been so long! It’s so difficult to get sticky rice here.”
Yuika was usually pretty reserved, but she seemed so excited that there was a rare grin on her face.
“I brought ingredients for sushi and sashimi, too.”
“Sushi, eh? How long it’s been. Maze bass, is it? Or the sakura salmon from the royal capital, perhaps?”
“No, it’s tuna from—”
““TUNA?!”” Ban and Yuika exclaimed.
Yuika’s expression had changed to that of Yuika Number 3. Her appetite must have gotten the best of her.
Since Yuika had multiple past personalities due to one of her Unique Skills, her personalities sometimes switched periodically like this.
The quiet Yuika, who had been there moments before, was Yuika Number 1; this was clearly the face of Yuika Number 3, the original Yuika, whose decidedly edgelord full name was Foilunis la Bellefille, the Beauty in Black.
“How very nostalgic indeed. Some eight hundred years ago, I recall I set out to the southern seas in search of tuna myself.”
“Ah, yes. We had difficulties with the kraken and the skeleton aboard that ghost ship at the time, so we only managed to hunt the likes of skipjack and sharks.”
I had a feeling I knew what “ghost ship” Yuika Number 3 was talking about.
Most likely, they had encountered the Skeleton King, who tried to revive the legendary floating island of Lalakie.
“You couldn’t find it with your Unique Skills, Foilunis?”
Yuika Number 3 hated being called Yuika, so I referred to her with her edgelord name instead.
“Even Unique Skills are not all-powerful, you know. The ocean is far too large.”
I guess my Map Reading ability is outrageous even compared to Yuika’s Unique Skills, then.
“Well then, if there is tuna to be had, we must summon Mukuro and Yoroi as well.”
“They would be very cross if we didn’t.”
The progenitor vampire sent his vampiresses to collect the pair.
I gave into the impatient demands of Yuika Number 3 and produced a bit of mochi and sushi to hold us over, then went to see Ban’s swordsmithing in the forge that the vampiress who wanted the katana had prepared.
“The equipment isn’t that different from the tools of an ordinary forge.”
“I am remiss to agree with the descriptor of ‘ordinary,’ but yes, the equipment is nothing too unusual. The only difference might be that we use powdered fire stones and Firelight Pearls to improve the overall firepower.”
The vampire lord touched some red and crimson powders set out next to the forge, inspecting the heat of the furnace by sight.
He picked up a pinch of powder and tossed it inside, and the flames roared all the more.
“That ought to do it.”
Satisfied with the heat level, the vampire took the mithril ingot, cut it into three parts with a blade made from Blood Magic, and put one of the three pieces into the furnace using a pair of tongs.
“Up until this point, the process is identical to any sort of forging.”
Then he used a sharp fingernail to make a small cut in his wrist.
Blood seeped from the cut and slithered toward the red-hot mithril like a living thing, producing red steam.
Once the steam settled, there was a mysterious pattern on the surface of the mithril.
“This cursed seal will make the blade stronger.”
The vampire lord swung his smithing hammer.
Any forging process would produce red sparks, but the strange black haze that rose at the same time was definitely unusual.
At first, a vampiress swung the other hammer in alternation with Ban, but they let me take over partway through.
The process was a repetition of heating, imbuing the curse seal, and tempering the metal.
“This back-and-forth tempering process is part of the original method of swordsmithing as well. Traditionally, it is meant to remove impurities and even out the amount of carbon, but in our case we use it to create magic circuits, or perhaps one would say curse seal circuits.”
While we alternated swinging the hammers, the vampire lord explained the reasoning behind each step, as well as how it differed from ordinary smithing, which was incredibly helpful.
“This will be the ‘inner iron.’”
He put aside the mithril we’d been working on, which was now jet black, and we set to work on the other two.
One would be the extra-hardened “outer iron,” while the other was what was called the “edge iron,” its strength and viscosity carefully refined.
Ban explained that normally this balance was achieved using carbon, but in the vampires’ forges they were able to adjust that using the curse seals.
“Finally, we sandwich the edge iron between the inner and outer iron, and fuse them together.”
We weren’t actually working with iron at present, but the vampire lord didn’t seem particularly bothered about the distinction, so I let it slide.
The clump of black mithril slowly began to take the familiar shape of a katana.
“That should be sufficient for the lengthening. I will carry out the rest on my own, but you ought to observe closely, Kuro.”
The progenitor vampire used Blood Magic to keep layering on curse seals as he hammered the black mithril blade into a katana.
Ripple-like patterns began to appear near the edges.
When he finished making the tip, it was time for the firing process I’d so often seen in movies and swordsmithing videos, but even that was accomplished by passing the blade through a vortex of blood in midair. With that fantastical, or rather vampirical, process, the Japanese-style magic katana was complete.
“Aah, so this is where you’ve been hiding out.”
“Where’s the tuna? Didn’t eat it all on us already, did you?”
Mukuro and Yoroi arrived in the forge just as we were putting the finishing touches on the katana.
“Aww, man, Lord Ban’s already finished his katana forging? But he looks so cool and serious when he’s working in the forge…”
Semery was with them, too.
“What, you were making a katana for the kid here?”
“No, this is for me.”
The vampiress who requested it held the freshly finished sword to her chest.
Looking with “Miasma Vision,” I saw a black aura creeping around the vampiress’s body, as if caressing her, which was a little weirdly sexual.
“I have dubbed it the ‘Blade of the Black Fog.’ Use it with care.”
“Yes, Lord Ban!”
The vampiress thanked Ban and skipped away to make a cover for the hilt.
“Aww maaan…” Semery watched her go, grumbling with jealousy.
“Did you really get anything out of watching Ban’s swordsmithing?”
“I don’t appreciate your tone.”
The vampire lord scowled at Yoroi.
“I can’t use Blood Magic, of course, but he taught me a great deal about smithing.”
I learned a great deal, since I’ve been making a lot of things up based on what I remember seeing in manga so far.
Though I tried touching it a little when Ban used Blood Magic, I wasn’t able to acquire the ability. According to him, it was a sort of fusion between Dark Magic and Water Magic, among others.
“I’m looking forward to putting it all into practice when I go back to the surface.”
“Indeed. Do come and visit when you’ve a finished sword to show me.”
Once I got a bit better at making them, maybe I could create a ninja sword for Tama.
“Forget that crap. Time for tuna sashimi and sushi.”
Mukuro pushed us along out of the forge, and I ended up becoming the official sushi chef in a newly set up banquet space on the terrace.
It was a little too much to do on my own, so the chefs of the Eternal Night Castle helped me.
“Uho-ho-ho, this ootoro is melting in my mouth.”
“Aah, this is perfection. You made some damned fine wasabi, too.”
“The flounder and sea bream sashimi are delicious, too.”
“Kuro, no wasabi on mine, please.”
I smiled back at Yoroi, Mukuro, and Ban as they smacked their lips with pleasure, and served up the request of Yuika Number 3.
But while the reincarnations gave the feast a warm reception…
“Even if this is Lord Ban’s preference, I would prefer not to partake of such things…”
“I don’t know about this.”
“……”
…the vampiresses gave the sushi and sashimi a wide berth.
“Eating fish raw like animals? That’s far too disgusting for me.”
“Semery?”
“Are you saying Lord Ban is an animal?”
“…Prepare to eat those words.”
As soon as Semery uttered a criticism of the vampire lord, the other vampiresses all turned on her and dragged her away from the terrace with multiple Blood Whips.
I’m guessing they were just using her as an excuse to get away from the strong smell of fish and vinegared rice.
Shirahime in particular was clutching a handkerchief to her face the whole time.
“Is this soy sauce–boiled beef?”
“Close, but it’s whale, not beef.”
“Oh, whale, is it? How very nostalg—”
When I answered Mukuro’s question while working on the wasabi-free tuna roll for Yuika Number 3, he suddenly froze mid-sentence.
“…Did you say whale?”
“Yep. I have tons of it, if you’d like some.”
We’ve been eating it like crazy for a while now, but we still haven’t even come close to finishing the first whale.
I guess that’s to be expected with a thousand-foot-long gigantic whale.
“What do you mean, ‘yep’?” Mukuro imitated my tone. “By whale, you don’t mean the giant monster fish Tobkezerra, do you?”
“That’s right. Why? Do you not like monster meat?”
“Mukuro, are you really still surprised? Or did you forget that this is the crazy bastard who casually took down Doghead?”
“Right, right…”
That was a somewhat rude reaction.
“Sure, gimme some whale meat. I’ll owe you a favor for it, yeah? If you ever have problems with the gods, come see me.”
“I certainly will, thank you.”
That seemed like a great deal to offer for a cut of my nearly endless supply of whale meat.
The vampire lord gave me some rare materials from the Endless Night Castle, like blood pearls and blood stones, Yoroi offered me one of the macho statues from his base, and Yuika agreed to set up a barrier like the castle’s around my labyrinth vacation home and hot springs.
I hate to say it, but I didn’t really need what Yoroi wanted to give me.
“By the way, is there not any wrapped makizushi?”
“I can make cucumber maki, but that’s about it.”
“What about tekkamaki?”
“I just want regular makizushi.”
By “regular,” Yuika Number 3 was evidently referring to futomaki, a thickly rolled makizushi, with dried gourd (kanpyou).
“Sorry, but I don’t have any freeze-dried tofu or dried gourd.”
“There’s freeze-dried tofu in Ban’s castle.”
Oh?
I had acquired some regular tofu in the old capital, but I couldn’t figure out how to make the freeze-dried version, koya tofu.
The Eternal Night Castle crew who was helping me cook agreed to teach me the recipe; I decided to make it right away once I got back to the surface and give some to Arisa.
“Besides…”
Just then, the vampire lord suddenly dropped a huge revelation on me like a bomb.
“We found gourds for making kanpyou when we were looking for tomatoes.”
What?!
I used “Warp” to get up close to Ban and ask him where he found it.
Very politely, of course.
“Where did you find it?! Spit it out!”
“Kuro, back down, will you! I have no interest in male-on-male romance!”
He seemed reluctant to share his information; maybe he’d had a difficult time finding it.
It seems rude to push someone’s face away when they’re just politely asking you a question, though.
“Wait. I don’t have a map, but it should be simple enough to find.”
“So where is it?”
If he could narrow down the location for me a bit, I should be able to track it down using my Map Search function.
I’ll finally be able to eat the makizushi I so often had for lunch again!
“You know the great river in the east of the Shiga Kingdom, yes?”
“Of course.”
I doubt anyone in the Shiga Kingdom would be unfamiliar with the river that runs next to the old capital.
“First, you must travel upstream to the source.”
Even farther north than Gururian City, huh?
“If you cross the mountains beyond there and head north-northwest…”
Wait, north-northwest…?
“You will find the great forest village where the forest giants dwell. It grows freely in their domain.”
Wait…that’s the Mountain-Tree Village!
Who would have thought I could find kanpyou gourds in the giants’ village, where I had already traveled before?
“Those giants are a difficult lot, however. They crushed quite a few of the blaze wolves and ghouls I spawned for my exploration.”
The progenitor offered to help me if I intended to invade their territory.
“That’s all right, thank you. I might have an idea.”
I had friends in the forest giants’ village. Even if the village chief Stonehammer didn’t know where to find them, I could probably ask the little giant leader Lank and the other villagers to track down the gourds.
I wanted to head there right away, but we were leaving for the royal capital the next day, so it was probably best to wait until we did some sightseeing there and got settled down a bit.
“I’ll definitely bring some next time I visit.”
“I look forward to it.”
I promised Yuika I would make her the best makizushi ever.
“Wow, so the Celivera Labyrinth has been around for that long?”
“Which is precisely why demon lords like Doghead so often come to accumulate power here.”
While we ate the mochi I’d brought as dessert, the reincarnations who lived in the Lower Stratum told me about how this was the oldest labyrinth on the continent.
“Most demon lords only live one life, but a few of the famous ones like Doghead, the Scorpion Lord, the Bug Lord, and the Tempestuous Lord have been revived and have come back on several occasions.”
They explained that revived demon lords reappeared in this world as spirit bodies, and manifested from there into physical bodies by using deposits of thick miasma.
“So these past thousand years, heroes come to investigate just about once a generation.”
“Although most of them don’t come all the way down here.”
“It’s all well and good when a hero mistakes us for demon lords and comes to attack us, since that can be entertaining, but I wish they wouldn’t trample the garden so with their dirty boots.”
Come to think of it, even in Labyrinth City, the explorers’ guild adviser, Miss Sebelkeya, was under the mistaken impression that the Bone Lord, the Abyss Blood Lord, the Steel Lord, and the little ogre princess were all demon lords as well.
I suspected these names actually referred to Mukuro, Ban, Yoroi, and Yuika, respectively.
“There do seem to be legends about you on the surface.”
“…Legends? Are they horror stories, or romance, perhaps?”
“It’s a story about the ancestral king Yamato called ‘The Depths of Celivera.’”
“Ah, that old gossip rag.”
“As if a carefree lazybones like that could ‘exorcise’ Mukuro and me…”
The ancestral king Yamato was a “lazybones.”
“So is the part about fighting the Ogre King made-up, too?”
“Hm? All I did was teach Yamato how to make miso and soy sauce.”
What a shocking reveal!
So it was Yuika who was responsible for passing miso and soy sauce on to the Shiga Kingdom.
“Oh, that reminds me, Kuro. Did you get an elixir from Ban?”
Yoroi, who had been munching away on all kinds of mochi and drinking Shigan sake while the rest of us spoke, suddenly brought up a new topic.
“Oh, do you need elixirs?” asked Ban. “I have several in the basement storage cellar. Go on and take what you need.”
“No, I couldn’t accept something so valuable.”
I should be able to mass-produce them in another three months or so, and in the meantime I had enough for Arisa, who would need them the most.
“It’s quite all right. I hunt the floormasters of the Lower Stratum on a regular basis, so I acquire a new elixir every few years or so.”
“You hunt them regularly?”
“I have to do it every year, or Mukuro grows worried.”
“About what?”
Maybe it’s like worrying you’ll miss out if you don’t hunt a rare monster whenever you see one?
“His bride is very precious to him.”
“Shaddup!”
Mukuro scowled at the progenitor vampire’s words.
I wasn’t sure I understood what Mukuro’s concern for his wife had to do with regularly hunting floormasters.
“What is she like?”
Since she’s Mukuro’s wife, maybe she’s a mummy queen?
“Mukuro’s wife, you mean? She’s the DM, duh.”
Yoroi gave an unexpected answer.
“DM? You mean the dungeon master?”
“Yeah, that’s right. A guy like you must’ve beaten a floormaster or two by now, yeah? You know the part in the summoning speech that goes, ‘Soon I shall come to thee with three proofs in hand!’? Well, that ‘thee’ refers to the dungeon master. S’why we always hunt the Lower Stratum’s floormaster, so no one can collect all three proofs and put the DM in danger.”
Wow, his wife is the dungeon master? That’s impressive.
I was definitely a little curious how that particular romance began.
Oh, wait a minute…
“Is there any chance you’d be able to get a ‘Chant’ Gift Orb, then?”
If I could get my hands on that, I could use magic a lot more freely.
“…Oh dear.”
“You moron.”
“Drop it, kid.”
Lord Ban, Mukuro, and Yoroi all recoiled at once.
“Did I say something wrong?”
“You dumbass. My wife is a rebellious soul, y’know. If you say something like that…”
“Ho-ho-ho, then you’ll definitely never get it.”
What? That’s so mean.
“It’s what they call a ‘desire sensor.’”
No, I think that’s something else.
“Don’t you have an orb or two left in your treasure house, Ban?”
“I’m afraid not. I give them out to any wives or handmaidens who want them.”
Yoroi got my hopes up for a second, but Ban promptly shot them down.
Hmm…
“Is there any way I could meet her to ask for it myself? I would be willing to pay any price, of course.”
“Any price, eh…?”
Mukuro’s face was dour.
“Knowing Mukuro’s wife, she might very well ask you to hunt down a god as payment.”
“Oh, for sure. She hates the gods.”
“Uho-ho-ho, I could see her saying that.”
For real…?
Whether I could actually defeat a god or not, I don’t think I’d be able to kill someone I have nothing against just to get something I want.
“Come on, don’t let it getcha down.”
Yoroi smacked my back to cheer me up.
Since his hands are made of metal, it was pretty painful.
“Yuika, can she even see into Ban’s castle?”
I looked up despite myself when I heard Mukuro’s question.
If her barrier was strong enough to interfere with my Space Magic, maybe it could defend against the prying eyes of the dungeon master, too.
Feeling a little hopeful, I looked at Yuika… But she only looked back at me with a forlorn expression.
Evidently, she’d turned back into the quiet Yuika Number 1.
“I’m not so sure… I’ll put the original back in charge.”
Yuika Number 1 switched with Yuika Number 3, the original.
“The only place she can’t see into is Mukuro’s secret base, fools. It would be cruel to leave her out, wouldn’t it?” Then she put a hand to her chest and recited, “Bullying is bad, no matter what.”
At any rate, it sounded like my chances of finding a “Chant” orb in this labyrinth were virtually nonexistent.
“Bah, it only takes ten years or so to learn it.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“It is as my lord says. Aside from those who quit their training partway through, all the handmaidens here have managed to learn it in five years or so, eight at the most.”
After receiving a pointed glance from Ban, the head handmaiden, Miss Fedoralka, chimed in to reassure me.
“All right. I’ll keep up my ‘Chant’ training.”
I was already practicing with the orphanage kids, so maybe it would be shameful for an adult like me to take the easy way out by finding a Gift Orb for it anyway.
Eventually, I said my farewells to my kindly friends in the Lower Stratum and returned to the surface.
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