Pov Ace

“The situation in the dungeon is getting worse, and there are enough morons who keep trying our defenses. We simply don’t have enough people to keep all of the recommended path protected,” one of my advisors explained. Another one took over right afterwards, basically saying the same thing in a slightly different way.

Just two months ago, the 48th floor was opened up, and the Big Three, along with the clans and other reasonable guilds who were the strongest, started to focus on the new floor. It left a sort of a power vacuum that the increasing number of platinum ranks, who are trying to make a legacy for themselves, have been using.

I looked at the papers in front of me with numbers on them, and they were kind of unbelievable. Eternal City was huge. We had nearly 15,000,000 people living in it, with another 4 million in surrounding cities and towns, which meant we were closing in on a 20 million population for my nation.

Yet, to our knowledge, there were 27 million adventurers currently inside the dungeon, and that’s a hotly disputed number. That’s nearly 20% of the entire adventurer population of this world. That number is so low only because, in the last 50 years, the number of adventurers in the world has grown by nearly 50%.

The survival rates are up, more and more people are choosing this path for their life, and more and more areas of this world that were too dangerous are now being subjugated and made safe for civilization to spread to.

It has been a strangely peaceful time, as not many wars have been going on or declared, but it almost feels like the entire world is ready to explode in violence. So many now know more about how this world works, and there’s more understanding about the Four Big Powers, which has changed how things are done quite substantially.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the need for trade, and that has lined my pockets to an absolutely scary degree. More and more high-end materials are coming out of this dungeon, but even with all of this, our biggest source of income—if you exclude taxes—is still the sale of rations.

The most common drop in this dungeon is still meat, and although most of the processing has moved inside the dungeon, there is still a constant stream of rations coming out and being transported all over the land and through the air.

I focused back on my advisors. "We need to increase the rank of our soldiers, and we need more recruits. We will mimic the advancement of our soldiers the way adventurers advance. All recruits start at the beginning of the dungeon, training and protecting the recommended path, and as they move onwards, deeper and deeper, the stronger they get. This is the only way."

"I can understand that, but where are we supposed to get these recruits? The time when young people wanted to join each army has long passed. Everyone who has an interest in fighting now chooses to be an adventurer.”

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“We can, of course, offer them more coin, and that would get us a lot of recruits, but being in the army isn’t all about how much you make—it’s about the commitment you make. And if all they’re after is coin, then they’re not soldiers, they’re mercenaries, and it would be a lot harder to control them."

The discussion continued like that as we tried to figure out how to get more recruits. The best of the best have gone into the ranks of the Navy, and as we’ve expanded it, they have taken up a lot of manpower—something we simply can’t buy with all the coin we have available.

"Perhaps we have to change tactics. There are guilds who don’t want to advance from the floor they are on. What if we hired them as additional security?"

"Perhaps, but we would still be running short, and giving up territory could lead to backstabbing. What we really need is mandatory service time for every adventurer who’s inside the dungeon. That would help alleviate our lack of manpower, and we could perhaps teach them some proper discipline so that most of them won’t be such greedy assholes in the future," one of my advisors finally said, which made all of us quiet for a moment.

“I don’t think that will go over well with the adventurers, but in all honesty, it might be the only way. It would be hard to implement that with the strongest adventurers, but if we start from the bottom like mentioned earlier and make the mandatory time be like 10 years—during which we guarantee them that they will reach floor 40, perhaps maybe 35 or maybe 45—we will need to discuss the promises later.”

“But I think this could work. Although, we couldn't press everyone into the military at the same time, we would be overwhelmed, and there wouldn’t be enough adventurers to bring in the resources they normally do," I said after the short silence.

I sat up a bit more straight as it seemed like we had a breakthrough in the problem we were currently facing. It was a really rough plan, but I could see that with a lot of work, we could perhaps make it work.

The discussion continued for hours when, all of a sudden, our meeting room doors were pushed open, and a few members of our information-gathering department rushed in, panic on their faces.

"Ace, it’s bad, really bad. I don’t know how, but everyone knows about the underwater world. People are going crazy, there are protests in the streets. So many are having a hard time understanding that there is a whole new world with armies and as much strength as their nations just beneath the waves and that all of that had been kept secret. Everyone’s demanding answers, what should we do?"

My mind went blank. It took me a bit of time to figure out why there would be such panic, but I was also getting information through my talent about how people were feeling. While most seemed to be angry at the injustice of not knowing about such a huge thing, it was all fueled by fright. It was like you had lived all your life in a village, and all of a sudden, behind the next hill, there was another village exactly like yours, and who knows what their intentions might be.

“I think it’s the unknown strength of the underwater world that's really the problem. Prepare everything for an announcement that everyone can hear. I want a speech where we would explain what we knew about the underwater world—keep the details light and vague—and that in the past few months, we have learned a lot more, this time with specific facts about their strengths and weaknesses, especially that most species wouldn’t survive outside water.”

“Also, we must show that we have the military might to protect our citizens, even if a full-scale war happens. Yes, I know it won’t happen, but they don’t know that.” Everyone immediately agreed, some rushing out of the room, others taking out communication crystals or pieces of paper.

I wanted to know how this information could have gotten out, especially how it could have spread so fast that everyone knew. But right now, that wasn’t important. What was important was making sure that I could calm the populace down so that a few individuals wouldn’t use this opportunity to manipulate a large portion of the population to get what they wanted.

My minder will also want answers, but I was surprised he wasn’t here already. He has been more and more absent as of late. It might be because he has been giving me enough rope to hang myself but perhaps, they are having other problems. The big four really aren’t set up to handle public relations, so most likely they are running low on manpower.