Chapter 109: Building the Greatest Library in the World (Big 3 Included)

In the dungeon of the Calamity of Greed, everyone had gone back to their assignments. Upyr had stayed behind with Freya’s replica, who had set to work without wasting a moment.

She was working on several things at once, all of them tied to the database that now served as her brain. She had quite literally turned herself into her own lab rat.

She searched her own head for anything that might be useful to them, whether for the dungeon, for Evangel, or for facing what was coming. And every time she landed on something, she wrote down only one thing about it.

The name.

Just a notch on the list, a word set down to come back to later. Developing each of those ideas now would take weeks she didn’t have.

Upyr helped her from beside her, writing down the names she dictated so she could go faster. Two were still better than one, especially with a brain like the one Freya had.

She didn’t stop between words.

"Agriculture first. Crop rotation, fertiliser, irrigation, greenhouses, seed selection, crop preservation. Then industry. Mills, blast furnaces, steel metallurgy, mechanised textiles, printing presses, glassmaking. Construction, now. Concrete, lime mortar, vaults, sewer systems, water supply, urban planning. Economics. Double-entry bookkeeping, unified currency, banks, credit, insurance, joint-stock companies, progressive taxation. Medicine. Hygiene, handwashing, sterilisation, penicillin, vaccination, quarantine. Education. Public schools, literacy, arithmetic, primers. Military. Line formations, logistics, cartography, signals, gunpowder. Administration. Land registry, census, civil records. Entertainment. Board games, chess, sudoku, and manga, all of it, the Big 3 above all. Music after that, music theory, notation, string instruments, wind instruments..."

And she kept going like that, category after category, only pausing for breath when she had to.

Upyr wrote as fast as his hand would allow, the quill scratching across the paper without ever lifting.

And he wasn’t only taking notes. He sorted as he went, one sheet per category, agriculture on one side and industry on the other. Every new entry found its way into the right compartment without her needing to tell him where.

He didn’t ask what sudoku was. He didn’t ask what the Big 3 were either.

He simply wrote, all eight of his eyes fixed on the page.

Freya watched the piles grow with a satisfied smile.

Because this would make everything that came next far easier. Once Pen-chan was back from his training, all she would have to do was pick a category, pull out a name, and walk through it with him from start to finish, until a single sheet became an entire book.

What she was doing here amounted to sorting a database. Except this one could be leafed through by anyone other than her.

It would be a great help to Naïa and her intellectual growth, too. She already learned everything put in front of her, and soon she would have whole shelves to devour, sorted, catalogued, and made with her in mind.

And it was while watching those piles rise that Freya understood what she was really doing.

She wasn’t taking notes. She was laying the foundations of the greatest library in the world.

Everything her utopia would need was there. Fields that fed everyone, cities where nobody died from what they drank, schools where every child learned to read, an economy that no longer hung on three nobles and their good graces.

Centuries of human progress, which she could lay over this city in a matter of years.

And a few manga, because a utopia with nothing to read at night wasn’t really a utopia.

Because yes, Freya had discovered something genuinely incredible lately.

Her database of a memory, paired with Pen-chan, who could access her thoughts, was nothing short of a cheat.

The pen could copy and write down anything she thought of at blinding speed, reproducing all of it perfectly down to the smallest stroke, without her lifting a finger.

The discovery had revolutionised everything to do with paperwork. Above all, it had revolutionised everything Freya’s replica would be stuck handling in the future.

And on top of that, it opened a door onto something that mattered to her far more than sewers and bookkeeping.

The culture of Earth.

Not the useful knowledge, this time. The other kind. The kind that serves no purpose except making you laugh, cry, or stay up far too late.

She remembered all of it. The first novel she had ever read cover to cover, and the coffee stain on page one hundred and twelve. The volume she had waited months for and finished in a single night. The ending of a series that had put her in a bad mood for a week.

All of it was still there, every page, every panel, every line of dialogue.

And with Pen-chan’s hand, she could now bring all of it back. Even the most complex artwork, the kind she could never have drawn herself, but could still see effortlessly down to the last line.

Nobody here had ever read a single line of it.

And apart from the Dungeon Lords, or whatever other reincarnated souls there had to be somewhere, the way Myrphès, Kaguya’s father, had been one, she was the only one in this world who could give it to them.

Isn’t that wonderful?! I can already see Laïa devouring manga while eating her frozen mangoes~~!

But all of that would have to come later.

That was why, for now, she was only having Upyr write down the names instead of tackling each one. The books would come later, with Pen-chan, when there was time.

Because behind all those lists, she was looking for another one. One she would never write down anywhere, and never mention to anyone.

A solution.

A solution that would give her some kind of countermeasure against Belzebuth.

A solution, something, anything at all. She wasn’t kidding herself. How could anything from Earth possibly help with that particular problem? But you never knew. Belzebuth came from Earth as well, so it was worth trying all the same.

Because she knew it was only a matter of time before his next worldwide announcement, and before everything went even further off the rails because of her.

In the meantime, she would play the woman who took no measures at all. The one focused only on the present, on what was coming, and not on that damned fly.

She would try not to alert him, while searching in the shadows for a way to crush him with her fist.

And this time, I do mean his real body~!

And to find that solution, she first had to understand what she was dealing with. So far, she had only managed to establish two points, and both of them were hypothetical.

The first was simply that his ability had to be a control ability.

Belzebuth had confirmed as much when she asked, and had even shown surprise through the fly. But all of that could very well have been an act to send her down the wrong path, and she couldn’t afford to jump to conclusions.

The second was that Belzebuth had used his ability simultaneously.

He had delivered his message everywhere at once, as he had said himself. And she suspected that, for everyone to believe it, he must have tailored his words to each listener. For example, by first pointing out something the other person couldn’t deny, so they would be forced to swallow the rest whole.

That’s certainly what she would have done.

But I’m drifting again.

Even without the tailored speeches, all of it pointed to a single conclusion. He could spread his consciousness across his bodies. Not in two, the way she and her replica did, but across as many flies as he controlled, speaking through each of them at once.

Maybe through a second skill. Or maybe it was simply part of his first unique skill.

She didn’t know, and she wasn’t sure. But she would have to be. ℴℴ𝘮

She needed to learn Belzebuth’s four unique skills as quickly as possible.

Right. Now that I know where to dig, let’s get to work properly.

The real Freya had long since arrived in the core chamber and settled onto her throne.

It was time to focus on upgrading her dungeon.

Over the past week, she had built up a great deal of mana.

The first two days after raising her dungeon system to level 5 had gone into upgrading the upgrades category, for 10,000 mana, which had left her with just 1,600.

That was when she discovered that the other two categories, along with the mana core upgrade, all cost 10,000 as well.

So, as usual, she had spent the next two days pushing the dungeon core up to the next level for the same amount. That had left her with around 4,000 mana, if she remembered correctly.

Her faction must have taken in a lot of mana outside of the passive gain over those two days.

The core now granted her 100 mana points per hour. That came to 2,400 a day, which brought her average daily generation, with the 1 %, to around 7,000.

Yes. She was rich.

And since then, she hadn’t spent anything at all, not a single point, not even in the shop. She, who usually bought anything and everything there to spoil the girls, a cake here, a dress there, another frozen mango for Laïa, hadn’t set foot in it once. She had kept every last point for this tier.

Over the last four days, she had pushed her mana all the way to the cursed sum of [ 32,457 / 100,000 ]. Now that she was here, there was no reason to wait a single second longer.

"System, upgrade the buildings category, please~!!"