Outbreak Company: Volume 8 by Ichiro Sakaki

Author:Ichiro Sakaki [SAKAKI, ICHIRO]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: J-Novel Club
Published: 2019-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a relatively well-known story about the Palace of Versailles: that at first, it didn’t have any separate bathrooms.

Maybe that seems obvious enough. Before the development of sewage pipes and bathrooms with running water, the pit latrine was the most common method of collecting waste, which would then be used as fertilizer.

In Middle-Ages Europe, I’ve heard, human waste was typically thrown away in courtyards or in the street.

And remember what I said about the Eldant Empire being a lot like Middle-Ages Europe?

The “toilets” in our mansion were... yep. Pit latrines.

That was manageable when you were in a one-story building, or when there were toilets on just one floor... But when it came to a massive, complex structure like Eldant Castle, things got a lot more complicated.

For a serviceable pit latrine, you need some height. You can’t just flush the waste away like with a flushing toilet. Build a bunch of toilets above each other on each floor, and it would just come straight down on the head of the guy beneath, which would not only be stinky and unsanitary but downright psychologically damaging. In light of how many people needed to use the toilet in a building this big, the sheer amount of waste was no laughing matter, either.

So how did the toilets work in this castle? They were... surprisingly cutting edge, actually.

The toilets were mostly located around the outside edge of the castle, in order to make it easier to bring in air from outside (or so I was told). Believe it or not, they had toilet-specialist mages whose whole job was to periodically gust magical wind through the bathrooms. The wind would go down into the areas where waste was collected along the outer wall, helping to both keep down the smell and disperse the humidity, as well as dry out the contents of the waste collection vessels and tamp down the material. It virtually eliminated the smell.

People charged with waste collection would then take this stuff and use it for fertilizer. The whole process had apparently been systematized.

I have to admit, I was pretty impressed when I first heard about all this. Not that doing your business at Eldant Castle was exactly fun. As I’ve written, the toilets were mostly towards the outer wall, and the passageways running around the castle were plenty complicated... So if you had a real emergency but didn’t know your way around, you could waste a lot of time rushing around the hallways.

And thus I found myself...

“Sigh...” I sighed as I walked down the hall.

Where the heck am I?

I had no idea, let alone any sense of how to get back to the room I’d come from.

I was completely and totally lost.

I remembered the same thing happening at the workshop and realized to my chagrin that getting hopelessly lost was becoming something of a routine with me. I wasn’t even especially bad with directions, but here we were. The castle was just too big for me. I was amazed Petralka and the others could get around without getting lost.

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