Sugarcane (1)
Thud-roll—
The headless torso rolled emptily across the floor.
I flicked the blood from my cat-hand and muttered under my breath.
"Never… underestimate the meow-meow punch again."
With the power of the Cat Power Gauntlet, I had smashed the Goblin Lord's skull in a single blow. The result: one-hit kill. The Goblin Lord's head had burst like a firework, leaving nothing but a cold corpse, and the surviving goblins stared in horror.
"Th-That's cheating!!!"
"What the hell kind of punch was that!!!"
Cheating?
What, so your boss challenging the weakest guy here—me—to a one-on-one under Yaksha rules was fine?
I blew a soft breath across the Cat Power Gauntlet and said,
"In Northern duels, there's no such thing as cheating."
Then I declared to the still-confused lot,
"Heads on the ground, you bastards."
You're my underlings now.
There had been a bit of a ruckus, but after winning the boss fight against the Goblin Lord—with his subordinates as the stake—I successfully brought the goblins to heel. For all their talk of cheating, goblins themselves were a long way from the righteous path, so they accepted their defeat readily enough. And as promised beforehand, they submitted and became my subordinates.
Of course, not everyone fell in line. There are rebellious types wherever you go. But those ones all got the Wei Yan treatment.
Those with rebellious bones sprouting from the backs of their heads shall not survive.
Once the unrest was settled, things roughly normalized. I scraped what information I could from the surviving goblins and, through additional reconnaissance, mapped the dungeon's internal terrain to a fair degree.
"The dungeon is quite vast. Rough surveying puts it at over ten thousand hectares."
Ten thousand hectares?
That was nearly a hundred square kilometers.
I was so delighted by this unexpected harvest I could have jumped for joy.
"What an incredible find! This is why people go on about dungeons!"
I was so happy that if it weren't for my station and dignity as the Second Young Master, I would have been hopping in place on the spot. Max and Sir Bearwolf, however, did not seem to share my joy.
"Ahem. I'm not so sure it's that significant."
"To be honest, I feel the same. We searched for spirit herbs or anything similar, but found nothing of the sort."
Honestly. Was this what they meant by knowledge being power? Treasure right in front of them, and they couldn't even recognize it.
"Why would there be no spirit herbs? Things far better than that are lying around everywhere."
"Things far better? Surely you don't mean those strange grasses spread so widely?"
"Do you know what those are?"
Having lived their whole lives in the cold, snowy North, Max and Bearwolf had no idea what sugarcane was. Well, that made sense. Sugarcane could grow almost anywhere—except climate was its one weakness. It couldn't manage cold climates, or even temperate ones. Only tropical weather like this would do.
In that case, seeing was believing. I had some of the sugarcane cut and brought over.
"Here. Try it."
I had only peeled the skin and cut the stalks into pieces to put in their hands, but the moment they tasted it, both men's eyes went wide.
"Huh? Such flavor from a mere plant?!"
"Mmph. This… has an addictive taste. Mmph. Though sticky hands are a downside…"
They polished off one piece in the blink of an eye and reached for the next. Watching them, I smiled contentedly and put a piece of sugarcane in my own mouth.
Just tastes like regular sugar water.
Truthfully, from a palate spoiled by modern MSG, sugarcane didn't have any particularly amazing flavor. But this was the Middle Ages. In a world without proper spices, chewing a plant stem and getting sweetness was revolutionary.
"Think about squeezing the juice and mixing it into ice water. Instant organic drink."
"I don't know what an organic drink is, but… Northerners will go crazy for this, that's certain!"
Yeah, of course. Sweetness—the basic taste detected by the tongue's receptors—mainly came from glucose. And glucose was what plants synthesized through photosynthesis. The North had sunlight but no plants, so that taste was hard to come by. To them, sweetness was essentially a brand-new flavor.
Their tongues are going to tingle like crazy.
Just the tongue?
"It makes your brain tingle too!"
Glucose was the primary energy source the brain could use. The two men immediately grasped sugarcane's utility.
"Nothing else needed. This dungeon will be used as a sugarcane cultivation dungeon. Using those goblins over there."
"Ah—so that's why you spared the goblins!"
"I wondered why you subjugated them—what a scheme!!"
Everyone gasped at my idea. I had half-worried there might be pushback over the inhumane method of enslaving goblins, but—
This is a medieval world. Slavery still exists. They're not about to hand out human rights to other races.
They actually praised it as a brilliant idea. Honestly, the one with the most guilt was me. Even if they were monsters, working them like cotton-picking slaves didn't sit right.
But don't forget. These bastards, the first time they saw us, started salivating.
The Goblin Lord had snarled about tearing us apart and eating us alive, and the subordinate goblins had drooled approvingly. They walked on two legs and spoke something close to human language, but they were a fundamentally different species.
After deliberately shaking off the pangs of conscience, I said,
"Assign people to manage this place going forward. From what I can see, this will bring in more profit than the existing iron ore mines."
"Understood!"
"We'll manage it thoroughly!!"
Perhaps because they had tasted the sweetness of sugar, the two men answered with high spirits and vigor.
Good. That's settled.
Then shall I look around a bit myself?
Whenever you arrived somewhere new, inspecting your post was always inevitable. You needed a rough grasp of the geography of where you had been assigned before you could outline what to do. After possessing this body, the first thing I had done was climb a high spire and survey the Grand Duke's territory for the same reason.
Well, this isn't a post—it's a colony. Still.
I had somehow become colonial governor, but I felt no particular guilt. Who told them to lose a Yaksha-rules duel? If they had a problem with it, they should have won.
With that bit of mental victory and rationalization sorted, I looked around inside the dungeon. In the peaceful sugarcane fields here and there, hardworking goblins were visible.
"Kyaaaak! Save me!"
"Kyaak! It's too hard!"
"Stand straight, goblin."
They were doing well. Behind them, Northern knights in charge of supervision were excellently monitoring the goblins.
"Why didn't you stack the harvested sugarcane evenly?"
"I… I was going to, but… they told me to clear something else first…"
"Gah!!!"
"Kyaaaak!!"
Goblins who talked back received a whipping.
"You goblin bastards always have too much to say! This is the North! When we say jump, you jump! Don't you get that lazy slobs like you can never survive here?"
Crack. Crack.
Yeah. That's how you keep them in line.
It seemed they were even combining it with labor re-education. I had worried at first whether Northerners could manage the goblins well, but that concern proved unfounded—they supervised them thoroughly. Those with insufficient results, or those slacking, got the whip. Of course it looked harsh, but they properly provided meals.
"Mealtime!!!"
When one of the knights shouted, the goblins harvesting sugarcane scrambled over in a hurry. And something rained down on them.
But—
Huh? What's that?
The goblins eagerly reached for the crops given as rations. I watched for a moment, then approached the knight in charge of distribution.
"What is that?"
"Oh? Young Master!"
The knight who spotted me answered.
"Ah, honestly I don't know either. But they said this is what they normally eat. It was growing all over the place nearby, so we gathered it in one spot for easy management and distribute it sequentially at meal times."
It was a long, tuberous root crop resembling a sweet potato. The Northern knights seemed unfamiliar with this crop as well, but for me it was interesting—so this was here too.
This is cassava.
It was an unfamiliar crop not just to Northerners but to Koreans as well. However, along with sweet potato, it was an important food source in tropical regions—used as a staple by people across sub-Saharan Africa. I only knew it because I had seen it during my deployment; otherwise I would never have recognized it. But actually, most Koreans had eaten this crop before in some form.
Still, they're eating it like that.
I watched goblins hastily swallowing the cassava tubers. Looking at that alone, it might have seemed normally delicious—but
That stuff is poison to humans.
Cassava tubers resembled sweet potatoes, but actually contained a more potent toxin than the solanine in potato sprouts. You absolutely could not just eat it—you had to pound or grind it, then rinse it multiple times in running water to strip out all the water-soluble components.
Come to think of it, weren't goblins said to be monsters with toxins in their bodies?
Did they eat that to produce toxic components inside themselves? Just in case, I told the knights not to eat it. The knights reacted as if that were obvious.
"Haha, of course."
"You shouldn't carelessly copy what monsters eat."
Even if this was the North where the weak did not survive, they had that much common sense. I nodded with a sigh of relief. But after stopping them, a strange regret lingered.
I stopped them, but just letting that rot feels wasteful somehow.
In a tropical climate dungeon, it was natural for cassava to grow wherever sugarcane did. And the reason those two crops were famous—and the reason I knew about them—was that their uses were so varied. Wasn't there a way to put this to use?
…Ah!
After a brief moment of thought, I immediately hit on a good idea.
That's it!!
I summoned Max at once.
"Butler, call the supply battalion personnel."
"Yes? Here, right now?"
"Yes. Right here, right now."
I confirmed it to Max when he asked again.
Right now.