I tried to keep my activities minimal and unobtrusive for the rest of the evening, not wanting to disturb the mouse as it presumably tried to process what had happened.

Honestly, it just made me feel sick with myself.

I’d granted the ability to think to a creature that had just watched its entire family get slaughtered, eaten alive or crushed by cave-ins within the span of a few short minutes. What had I expected? A willing minion, ready to do my bidding at a moment’s notice?

That was short-sighted on my part; wishful thinking. It took me a while to realize what had led me to even jump to that conclusion.

For some reason, I was still treating this new life as a problem to be solved--like if I could just manage to find the right combination of actions to take, I might be able to push forward. It wasn't that, though. I'd casually granted a creature sentience as little more than experiment, just to try and trial-and-error my way into gaining agency.

I still didn’t even know what that “Core-Touched” modifier really meant for a creature, aside from allowing me the ability to level it up further. How much influence was I able to exert, exactly?

It didn't even feel like mad science at this point, more like playing god.

And aside from the standard tooltips I’d grown used to, there hadn’t been any surprise additions to my mental notes in a long time. Weeks? Regardless, I wasn’t getting much in the way of outside guidance. I was on my own and just bumbling around blind.

The periscope was a success in some ways. It did help me see the surrounding area, though the density of the forest meant that ‘the surrounding area’ was roughly forty feet in each direction, with my line of sight frequently interrupted by the thick, towering trunks of the pine trees. While my sense of vision didn’t help me much, I still managed to glean something from the project.

I could hear water somewhere nearby.

The distant sound of waves lapping against the rocks, moving in rhythm with the tides. I was near the coast somewhere, in a rocky, hill-covered area with pine trees, giving me a rough idea of my general area.

If I’d still been a human, I could have just smelled the salt in the air, felt the cold on my skin, maybe walked two minutes in any direction and I’d have gotten to the same conclusion that months of progress as a core had gotten me but hey, it was something.

On that note, I’d branched out into a new resource: wood.

I’d technically gotten a few scraps of it before, but hardly anything of note.

The mites can gnaw at the trees the same way that consume everything else, which is great since wood seems like a resource that I can absolutely get some use out of. It's pliant and moldable, far lighter than stone and honestly just... really nice looking. However, my limited range means I only have access to a few trees right now, and I can’t just eat them from the top down. Since I have to start at the bottom, I’ve basically only been taking a little bit from each tree to try and leave them alive and sturdy enough that they don’t topple over.

But hey, if things get cold I could make a firepit to keep my little friend warm.

Er.

I could make the pit, I don’t think I have a way I could make a fire.

Maybe if lightning strikes nearby sometime in the future, I could use it to jump-start a bonfire in my vault? Then I’d just need to keep it fed and I’d have fire whenever I needed it.

Assuming I ever needed it.

It took until the afternoon for the mouse to finally stand back up and return to exploring its surroundings. I wasn’t even sure that it knew I was here. Maybe it was time to try to communicate with it.

Which would likely be tricky since even if it was more intelligent before, that didn’t mean it would understand language intrinsically which meant any kind of writing wouldn't work. On top of that, I still had no way of actually speaking.

While it examined the planter that my mogo bush was inside of, I tried to move my mites into position, at first only sending one of them to phase up through the earth a way in front of the mouse, a shimmering blue mote surrounding a wireframe of condensed light. It reeled back at first, waddling backwards at the sight of this strange new thing, but I forced the mite to remain still and keep a distance, hoping to appear non-threatening.

The rodent’s fur stood on end, its back arched backwards in a defensive posture, ready to flee. There weren’t really many places to go though—upwards perhaps, out through the periscope or through one of the grates if it could somehow manage that.

Slowly, I made another manamite reveal itself, then another, forming a curved path going directly to my shimmering, crystalline core, hoping that it might understand what I was trying to communicate: “This is me. I’m here.” After letting this trail linger for a while, I brought the manamites closer, having them condense into formation near my core.

It watched tentatively for a while, before continuing to retreat back into the one safe place it knew of: the den I had constructed for it.

Damn.

I really needed a way to communicate, even if it was just something simple like what I did with the manamites to convey my intentions. Maybe I could figure out some way to do so via pictographs? Until then, I doubted that the mouse would be able to be used for anything productive.

For now, I chose to let it be. As a precaution, I had the mites gather a few berries from one of the bushes overhead, snipping the stem and carrying them to the grates in the roof to drop them down, where the other mites would move them to a neat pile outside of the mouse’s den.

That was the best I could do for the moment.

Still, surely there had to be more features I could unlock. Maybe I just needed to ascend again? That or find a way to increase my level—while I didn’t seem to have a way to ‘force’ my own level up, I had already managed to get some experience at some point. My assumption was that I’d received it from ending the ripper cat, but I hadn’t seen any sort of alert at the time indicating my gains.

For now, I would build.

Since my perception was tethered to my walls, it seemed logical enough that I could extend that perception by expanding myself into new areas. As such, this was the goal for myself and my swarm for the moment. I was going to build a hallway.

While I wasn’t certain what I would connect it to or how long I’d make it, it would serve well for two purposes. First, replenishing my stocks of stone. Second, giving me an easy place to expand to should I end up needing additional space. As a bonus, I was a bit eager to use some of my newly-gained wood to decorate with but that was hardly a driving point behind the choice.

The mites began to work, neatly carving away at the stone outside of my walls, forming a neat rectangular ‘frame’ of the hallway’s height and width, which I tweaked a little bit to be a bit less angular for aesthetic reasons. I might have been an immobile gemstone stuck in the middle of the wilderness, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to be the most comfortable, cozy immobile gemstone around.

They kept digging, and I kicked back to watch the magic happen.

Over the next few days, my recovering patient and sole occupant didn’t really get up to much. With food being brought to it, the mouse had little incentive to venture out beyond its little world. In truth, it generally spent most of its time skulking around inside its home.

Mana had continued to accumulate over this time, and I’d mostly left it alone in order to build up a small stockpile. I could always decide what I wanted to do with it later—considering my options seemed to be rebuilding other creatures or adding new manamites to my work crew, there wasn’t much to tempt me to spend.

Building advanced right on schedule, not that there was any kind of schedule. The mites had a speed that they worked at, and nothing I did would serve to hurry them or otherwise. After three days, I’d managed to form out a useable hallway. It wouldn’t be too spacious for a human to move around within as far as I could guess without having one nearby to check with, but as long as they watched their head they’d be fine.

All in all, it was a bit over six feet tall in height, six feet wide and twenty feet deep.

On its own, that doesn’t sound like much, but cubic feet would beg to differ. At a whopping seven-hundred-and-twenty cubic feet of earth displaced, my virtual hoard was in great shape for now. All the better to use for any potential building projects I could come up with.

I didn’t want to just continue to build aimlessly, though. I wanted to work towards something.

There was still a bit of lingering concern for me still about what I knew I’d have to do soon: I was going to try to level up the mouse and see what that the results of that were, as well as how it differed from ‘ascension’.

Without a way to communicate with it, I couldn’t exactly relay my intentions to the mouse, assuming it would even understand such a gesture anyways. As such, I had decided that my best choice would be to wait until it was sound asleep before giving it a shot. At the very least, it might not cause some sudden shock to the poor thing that way if I was lucky.

Which meant daytime was my best bet, given its nocturnal nature. Busying myself with some minor construction practice, I kept an eye on the rodent throughout the day, waiting for a time where it seemed to be well and truly fast asleep. I didn’t have to sneak up on it, thankfully. It was just as simple as resynthesizing had been. I offered the mana, and providence took care of the rest.

It wasn’t anything as flashy as resynthesis had been, no dazzling lights or bursts of arcane energy; my magic simply flowed into the dreaming creature, feeding into some astral part of its being.

Experience Requirements Bypassed.

MOUSE RUNT has increased to LVL 1.

MOUSE RUNT has gained 2 skill points.

CORE-TOUCHED has granted MOUSE RUNT the ability [Festering Bite].

Well that certainly seemed promising. An ability that seemed offensive in nature, as well as two skill points. Not that I had much of a clue what to do with skill points yet, or if they were something that were even in my domain. Maybe the mouse would get to spend them once it woke up.

I spent a few moments to check the ability’s tooltip—hardly anything special, just a chance to cause one of a small selection of diseases if the rodent took a bite out of something. There didn’t seem to be much of a practical application for that defensively—if things were desperate enough that I had to call upon it to defend our turf, infecting an intruder with a disease might not even inconvenience them at all until weeks down the line.

However, I did spot an option to spend the mouse’s skill points while lingering in its tooltip—that was exciting, at the very least—oh.

Oh there were a lot of options. Selecting the option to access the skills menu from there had actually almost terrified me when a tooltip appeared stretching from one wall all the way to the other, bigger than most I’d seen up until this point. A small portion of the menu was legible from where I had been most focused: the inside of the mouse’s home. The rest of it simply clipped right through its walls as if they weren’t even there. On it were easily thousands of skills, organized in categories and subcategories.

I started to read through, transfixed by this sudden wealth of choices, almost paralyzed by suddenly having access to such a wide breadth of options.

From Combat to Mercantilism, Craftsmanship to Animal Husbandry, the categories seemed to cover almost everything I could think of, branching down into smaller, more specialized skills down below. There wasn’t any chance I’d get to actually read through this. Besides, most of them weren’t even selectable as I skimmed through.

Requires Intellect Tier of 3 Requires LVL 5. Requires at least 6 eyes.

While the reasons for restriction varied tremendously, the message was clear: mice weren’t exactly designed to get the most out of the skills menu. If anything, most of them seemed geared towards humanoids, with well over half of the disabled skills I counted listing [[Requires Bipedal Movement]] as a main limitation.

Still, there were options. In particular, under the “Dungeon Monster” subsection.

To call it a ‘skill tree’ wouldn’t quite be right, but there was clearly some interdependence between them with some skills requiring others, while a few skills even restricted access to other conflicting skills. There were certainly a lot to pick from, but I only had two points to work with at the moment. I had to be strategic and pick something that could see immediate use.

One of the options was just unsettling.

Core Egocide I: Permanently attunes this creature's psionic and arcane resistance to be critically weak to core magic, allowing a core to directly influence this monster's actions via suggestion. At higher ranks, the creature's will becomes erased and supplanted with a connection to the core.

So creepy brainwashing, got it. Absolutely not happening--my conscience already felt dirty from some of the things I was having to consider, but that seemed to step over several boundaries I wasn't comfortable with.

While I may not have been human in any sense of the word at this point, but I planned on clinging to my humanity to the bitter end.

I settled on two skills: [Core Link I] and [Core Bond I]. They were hardly anything too flashy, but they each seemed useful in their own ways.

[Core Link I] essentially acted as a telepathic bond, through which we could communicate. The wording seemed to imply it would transcend language which was what had initially brought my eye to it. I could open and close the connection at will, while the mouse didn’t really seem to have much of a say in it. It was fairly limited in scope though, and wouldn't carry tone.

[Core Bond I], on the other hand, was a bit less obvious in its effect, but would open up more ways for me to take an active role in things, as well as offer new ways for me to potentially waste my precious mana.

Core Bond I: A strengthened aetheric bond between this monster and its lord allows for mutual benefit. The core can spend mana to provide a burst of either healing or endurance to this monster once per day. In addition, any experience gains this monster earn will be increased slightly, with this bonus experience going directly to the core.

Seemed like a win-win to me. I got a bit of experience off of the top, and my little friend would get a bit of insurance if things went wrong. That seemed fair enough to me. As an added bonus, I could even count the healing ability as a way to insure my investments into the rodent.

Still, I wasn’t really sure how a rat was going to get any kind of experience yet anyways. Somehow, I doubted a training montage and a few slightly-increased numbers would be enough to allow a common field mouse to fight back an actual monster. Maybe we could find some way to use [Festering Bite] to give someone tetanus or something like that. Would that even result in an experience gain for us, though?

The intent would be there at least, but wouldn’t that mean getting anyone sick by any means could result in a power boost? Could a mediocre chef gain a level up from giving an entire restaurant extreme food poisoning?

…Did restaurants even exist here?

Huh. It always seemed to be the little things that made me feel the most homesick.

Money existed here—somewhere out there, there had to be something close to a restaurant. I guess I could take some comfort in that, even if I might never get a chance to visit and I’d already transcended beyond the need to eat.

Really, I didn’t know much about this world at all, except that it wasn’t the one I’d been born in. Maybe I’d been too relaxed about all of this, taking it at an easy pace when I maybe shouldn’t have been. There was a whole world out there waiting for me, and I’d really just been wallowing in a hole for months trying to figure out a system that seemed intent on dragging things out as long as possible.

It was a few more hours before the mouse began to stir, shambling around its den, hesitantly looking out through the entrance but refusing to go further.

This was going to be a tough thing to handle no matter how I did it. So, I just jumped right in.

“Hey. Look, this is going to be weird, but I’m sure you’ve noticed the changes that have been happening to you lately. After what happened that night, I tried to help you. And I know things aren’t great, but I could really, really use your help,” was what I finally managed to blurt out, shoving it all in at once over [Core Link I].

I’d barely managed to push even a single word through when the rodent’s head perked up, scanning the room in confusion as if looking for where this disembodied voice might be originating from. It offered no reply, simply scooting back into the shelter, too spooked by this strange happening.

“…Sorry, I’ll explain. I’m the room. Specifically, the shiny bit in the center,” I added, praying that the clarification might be enough to warrant a response.

And I got one.

What came through our psionic connection was a loud, cerebral static that made me wince. Barely audible over the noise, I could only just make out a voice replying.

"what?"