Chapter 158 - The Great Snail Empire (1)

1

Immediately after I cleared the stage, I was forcibly transported to the thirty-second floor, where my fellow hunters and [The Princess Who Walks Through Mirages] were waiting for me. The Princess was hugging a rather peculiar-looking pillow.

“Wait, is that...?”

On closer inspection, it wasn’t a pillow. It was a snail plushie.

Unbelievable.

A goblin plushie, I could understand. But a snail plushie...?

“I do have a goblin plushie, too.”

“Pardon?”

“Here.”

With a little “Hiya!” the Princess produced a goblin plushie from her arms. Its long ears, nose, and even its cheekbones were reproduced with astonishing accuracy.

“Wh-where did you get that...?”

“I made it.”

“Could you let me take a look...?”

Just as I was about to make a perfectly legitimate and lawful request as the Goblin God, someone interrupted.

“What are you two doing?”

The Black Dragon leader stared at us incredulously.

“If you have time to play with a constellation, let’s move on to the next stage. It took us twenty-four days just to clear the thirty-first floor. ... Or has my sense of time gone strange? It took years to clear the tenth floor. Honestly...”

“You’re holding something yourself, Black Dragon leader...”

“Th-this is for research.”

She hid a bat plushie behind her back.

The Count and the Paladin were also fiddling with an elf plushie and a mermaid plushie, respectively.

“I’m inspecting the merchandise. An item made by a constellation—quite a rarity, wouldn’t you say?”

“The item description is thorough, too.”

These people...

“Well... sure. The sooner we clear the stages, the better.”

I accepted the goblin plushie, hugged it tightly to my chest, and looked around.

A white world. There wasn’t a single object in sight. It was as though a sheet of white drawing paper stretched on forever, with only us stranded in its center.

Hmm.

“... Is this the thirty-second floor?”

I asked despite privately thinking that couldn’t be the case. Sure enough, the Princess shook her head, still hugging her snail plushie.

“Think of this as a sort of waiting room. Before I can bring the thirty-second floor into being, all of you have to declare ‘Stage clear.’ Oh, Viper over there has spent a fortnight here waiting for you.”

“I thought I’d fucking die of restlessness!”

Sitting on the white floor, Viper scowled.

“What took you so long? You should’ve looked after the kids and gotten out of there. I couldn’t even watch what you were doing from here, so I spent the whole time meditating.”

“With your dokkaebi plushie.”

“It helps me meditate. See, I’m taking a thoroughly practical, pragmatic approach to this stage, but what the hell were you doing all this time? You people get way too invested...”

“No, you’re simply too careless.”

The Paladin sighed.

“Didn’t the Princess tell us when we entered the thirty-first floor? ["Floors thirty-one through forty are the War of Races."] In other words, those floors may form a continuous sequence of stages. We might keep governing the races we chose on the thirty-first floor.”

“... Huh?”

“If we only had to clear the thirty-first floor, Heavenly Martial Sect’s leader, we could simply give them a little help, as you said. But governing them through the fortieth floor is a different matter. We have to prepare in advance so our races can develop on their own [even while we’re absent].”

Viper blinked his lone eye.

“W-wait. Did someone say that?”

“Anyone could have figured it out.”

The Paladin’s sigh grew heavier.

“Please, think this much through for yourself, Liao Fan. You tend to give anything unrelated to martial arts far too little thought...”

“R-really? Is that why everyone lingered on the thirty-first floor for a fortnight?”

Viper urgently looked around, his eyes pleading, as though hoping one of us would tell him no.

Unfortunately, none of the hunters here had enough defective brain cells to grant his wish.

“It’s all right, School Master.”

I smiled kindly and patted his shoulder.

“D-Death King... That’s not true, right? The Paladin’s got it wrong, right? I’m not the only idiot who’s fallen behind...?”

“Even if your race goes extinct, we still have six others left.”

“Damn it!”

Viper buried his face in his hands.

Watching our little farce, the Princess gave a playful chuckle.

“Don’t worry too much. The races belonging to ranks one through seven all survived into the ‘next era’... into the thirty-second-floor stage, at least. Thanks to all your hard work, prehistory ended quickly. We’re in antiquity now.”

Antiquity.

An entire stretch of history separated the thirty-first floor from the thirty-second.

‘At least several thousand years must have passed.’

Several thousand years. I worried about how the goblins had fared over that immense span of time, but the Princess’s assurance that they had survived eased my mind a little.

Then the Princess said something completely unexpected.

“Now! Everyone who’s coming is here, so I’ll open the next stage.”

The Princess levitated her snail plushie and climbed onto it. Then, like a cavalry soldier on horseback, she raised one arm with a cry of “Oh!”

“The thirty-second floor is the world two hundred years after the thirty-first!”

“...”

Silence fell among my companions. My reaction was much the same.

“Pardon?”

The Princess had just said two hundred years, not two thousand.

That meant prehistory had ended and antiquity begun in a ‘mere’ two hundred years.

“Two hundred years? My lady, didn’t you mean two thousand?”

I stared blankly. That was impossible.

In the past, even when the Flame Emperor had poured all the points into raising the elves, more than a thousand years had separated the thirty-first and thirty-second floors. Even if my memory was inaccurate, it had to have been at least five hundred.

And now it was two hundred?

Had we really raised our kids that well?

“You heard me right.”

The Princess beamed.

“I was surprised, too. I knew you were fast, but I never imagined you’d be this fast. Actually, in this case, perhaps I should say [slow] rather than [fast]... Yes. Sometimes the long way around is the shortcut.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll understand once you get to the thirty-second floor. There we go.”

The Princess set a goblin plushie on the white floor and spread her arms wide.

“Now, I’ll open the thirty-second floor!”

“Wait a moment.”

The Black Dragon leader spoke. She, too, was bewildered by the figure of two hundred years.

“We aren’t all here yet. The Inquisitor is missing.”

She was right. There were six of us gathered in the waiting room, myself included. One member of our group, the Inquisitor, still hadn’t appeared.

“We have to wait for him to declare the stage cleared before going to the thirty-second floor...”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. It’s fine, it’s fine.”

The Princess waved her hand.

“I told you. ["Everyone who’s coming is here."] If by the Inquisitor you mean your fourth-ranked hunter, he was the first to reach the thirty-second floor. He’s waiting there.”

“... What?”

“As I said...”

The Princess smiled.

“You’ll understand when you get there.”

Light burst forth!

White light enveloped us.

2

When we opened our eyes, we were floating high in the air. The world spread out beneath our feet.

The previous world had been thick with a vast ocean-like forest. This one was different. There were no woods, no streams, no sunlight shining between the leaves.

There wasn’t even a sky.

“My God.”

The Black Dragon leader murmured dazedly.

“What is that...?”

The world built beneath our feet.

The landscape she had called ‘that’ was an ‘underground city.’ A city unlike anything I had ever seen or heard of had been built there.

“The commute home is so long, it’s exhausting, raim.”

Fluent voices drifted over from somewhere.

“I hear a new tavern opened near the Great Cavern...”

“I’d like to postpone my service days this year, raim.”

The city teemed with crawling creatures. Yes, crawling, not walking.

They were snails.

Translucent creatures wriggled about, carrying large shells on their backs.

“What the fuck...?”

The underground city—no, the underground world—was completely different from where we lived. For one thing, it had no streets. Instead of walking along roads, the snails clung to walls to get around.

“Don’t go sticking yourself to our wallway, raime!”

“What a joke. Every wallway in the polis is public property, raim! God decides where I must arrive, but I decide how I crawl there, raim.”

The snails moved freely from side to side, and just as easily up and down.

An enormous underground world.

Stone buildings that clearly stood more than twenty stories tall had been erected haphazardly, yet there were no stairs anywhere. The snails simply climbed the walls and slipped through their own windows.

“Rent has gotten so expensive lately, raim...”

“Unfortunately, I’ll have to spend this winter in my ‘old home’...”

There were even homeless people.

They huddled together in small caves, retreating into their shells. They passed around a mineral that shone bright blue. When one snail swallowed a blue pebble, its translucent body began to glow blue. Its body itself had changed color.

“Raim... I make it through the day for this one mouthful, raimu...”

“Judging by that brilliant glow, the little shits got us some good stuff, raim.”

“We got lucky. Dealers these days really have no business ethics, raim. Of all the things to adulterate, how can they tamper with stone tobacco? No decent person would do that, raim.”

“Let me have a bite, too...”

That wasn’t all.

“Hurry up and move the cargo, raim!”

A snail lashed out with a tentacle.

SPLAT!

A wet sound rang out. The member of another race struck by the tentacle groaned and loaded heavy blocks of stone onto a wagon.

The Demonfolk.

The dokkaebi Viper had once governed were grunting as they worked.

“Honestly, all Demonfolk are lazy! Raim!”

A snail who appeared to be an overseer grumbled.

“They’re fucking expensive, yet the moment you look away, they start slacking off, raimu. We feed them, clothe them, house them, and let them live. What on earth do they have to complain about?”

“Exactly. Treat slaves even a little kindly and they start getting above themselves, raim. What makes an inferior race without shells think they have any right to defy us?”

“Hey, slave. Try saying ‘raim,’ raim. If you can pronounce it properly, I’ll let you off.”

The snails were much smaller than the Demonfolk. The Demonfolk had large bodies like orcs, with a single horn growing from the center of their foreheads. Yet they cowered before snails that didn’t even reach their waists.

“R-raimi.”

“Look at that! Slaves can’t even pronounce raim properly! They’re so lowborn they can’t even utter the sacred word, raim. Filthy creatures! Hurry up and move those stones!”

“Ugh...”

Good God.

Were those snails actually keeping the Demonfolk as slaves?

“Wait... what the hell is that...?”

Viper’s mouth fell open.

His race had suddenly been reduced to slavery.

“C-come on. How does this make any sense? I-I did what I could for them before leaving the thirty-first floor! I made them swords and spears, and taught them how to fight... What the hell is that? Slaves? My race became slaves?!”

“Oh?”

Just then, a familiar voice rang out.

“I see some faces I’ve missed!”

It was the Inquisitor.

“Ahaha! I see, so we’ve finally been recognized as having entered a new era. Hmm. Slow in one sense, fast in another. No, objectively speaking, I should consider this recognition that we were relatively fast!”

The Inquisitor was just as he always was. He wore his usual black priestly robes and his usual cheerful smile. So Viper noticed nothing amiss as he lunged at him.

“Hey! You psychopathic bastard!”

“Oh, yes?”

“What the hell happened down there? Why is my race doing your race’s dirty work?!”

Viper grabbed the Inquisitor by the collar and shook him. Even as he was rattled back and forth, the Inquisitor never lost his bright smile.

“That’s easy to explain! The [Snail Civilization] I’ve established currently requires a highly concentrated labor force. Slavery is quite a useful system for supplying labor! As it happens, the Demonfolk launched a large-scale invasion one hundred and twelve years ago. After repelling them, we captured them all!”

“Wh-what...?”

“Aha, don’t worry. They’re an extremely proud race, so they were difficult to tame, and still are, but we’ve succeeded in breaking their spirit to some extent! In another three generations, we should be able to change the race’s inherent nature.”

“...”

Viper’s mouth opened and closed. His expression made it clear he couldn’t follow what the Inquisitor was saying at all. Our other companions, however, had caught on to a degree and exchanged silent looks.

“... Inquisitor.”

I stepped forward to speak on everyone’s behalf.

“There’s something I’d like to ask you.”

“Oh, Death King! Yes! Ask me anything.”

The Inquisitor smiled. If he’d had a puppy’s tail, it would have been wagging furiously by now. His smile was lively enough to conjure up that image.

“After declaring the thirty-first floor cleared, we were moved to a waiting room. You weren’t there. The Princess said you were the first to arrive on the thirty-second floor... What does that mean?”

“Hmm? Oh. I see. Aha.”

The Inquisitor tilted his head three or four times.

“Strictly speaking, that’s an inaccurate description. I didn’t arrive on the thirty-second floor first! I simply stayed on the thirty-first floor continuously, right up until now!”

“...”

Silence.

“... Pardon?”

“Just as I said, Death King! I know you all declared the stage cleared one after another. The Tower informed me. But I thought to myself! If the thirty-first floor connects to the next floor, why bother declaring it cleared?”

“...”

“I have some knowledge of how human history unfolded. That knowledge was certain to be an enormous help in developing the [Snail Civilization]! So I told the Tower I wouldn’t declare the stage cleared.”

“Then...”

“Yes! I stayed by the Mountain Snailfolk’s side and continued looking after them!”

The Inquisitor beamed.

“Welcome, everyone! Aha. It’s been two hundred years, six months, and twenty-one days! It’s a pleasure to see you again after so long!”

Holy fucking shit.