My plan was a pretty basic one, if it could even be called a plan at all. After all, I still wasn’t sure how exactly I was supposed to go about killing and eating something that looked like it could swallow me in a single bite.

Step one of my not-quite-a-plan was pretty simple: I needed to move somewhere where I would be in less danger of getting killed. If the badger couldn’t get to me and kill me, then I would be able to survive long enough to figure out how to kill her instead. I know, absolutely brilliant plan, right?

Judging by the way the badger had been digging into my walls without me taking damage it seemed as if the tunnel could be attacked and I could come away perfectly fine from it, but I had a nagging sensation that if the crystal that acted as my main body was attacked I would find my life being snuffed out rather quickly.

Could I use [Appraisal] on myself? It would help if I had a way of identifying my stats the way I had identified the badger’s. If I could see what I had to work with then maybe I could come up with a better plan than just buying myself some more time. Something that would be more advantageous to myself.

I turned my vision inward, away from the entrance where I had been watching to see if the badger would return and instead towards the red crystal that sat hidden behind the roots against the tunnel wall. I focused on myself and willed [Appraisal] to do its thing.

Nameless [Dungeon Core] Lvl: 1

Title: None

Size: 22.44153

Points: 14

HP: 10/10

MP: 32/32

Skills:

[Mana Absorption] [Devour] [Tunneling] lvl.1 [Appraisal] lvl.1

Thanks to the magic that was [Appraisal] a lot of things seemed to suddenly click into place for me. I had heard the weird inner voice call me a Dungeon Core several times before, but now I seemed to have a bit better of an understanding of what exactly a Dungeon Core was.

A Dungeon Core was a thing like me, a crystal that was also the walls of the tunnels that it dug, that had phantasmal hands that couldn’t be felt by anything living, and lived to only build, expand, and devour everything around it.

A lot of things about myself suddenly made sense. It was just like when I had used [Appraisal] on the badger, I didn’t suddenly know everything about Dungeon Cores, but I had a vague impression thanks to [Appraisal]. Although my knowledge was incomplete I was confident now that I definitely was one, though I had no real reason to doubt the inner voice.

Despite how disastrous things had been when I first woke up even my own desperation for escape and sunlight suddenly made sense to me. I was a Dungeon Core, Dungeon Cores built dungeons, and dungeons needed to have entrances. It was all as simple as that. I had been driven by instinct to reach the outside world to fulfill that requirement, even if I hadn’t known it at the time. It had been pretty stupid of me, of course, but I seemed to be a pretty stupid core. At least if I knew I was an idiot I could try accounting for it.

Looking at my stats, quite a few things stood out to me as being rather interesting. The first was that I had MP where the badger had had SP, and the second was that my HP was so much lower than hers that it was practically laughable. I didn’t exactly know what any of those letters stood for, but I had a feeling that it couldn’t be good that mine were so low in comparison.

Since my stats were still hovering before me in the air, I decided to take advantage and began using [Appraisal] on the things that I didn’t understand, starting with HP.

HP. An acronym that stands for Health Points, though it can also stand for Hit Points. HP represents the amount of damage that can be taken before one dies.

Oh… Oh, that wasn’t very good at all then, was it? I only had ten whole HP! That wasn’t even a tenth of what the badger had! How was it even possible that I was so ridiculously weak?! She could probably just sit on me and end my life as easily as taking a breath! What an absolutely terrifying thought that was! How could I think I would be capable of killing a beast like that?!

I flashed back to the damage I had taken when I found the sun and bounced down the tunnel. Was I able to take more damage than I thought, or had it healed over time? What would happen to me if I cracked? A wave of cold unease rushed along my entire body at the mere thought. I would just have to be extremely careful and make sure nothing like that happened, then. As curious as I was, I was much too worried about what the results might be to go testing anything out. I’d rather just avoid taking any damage in the first place than risk getting hurt and possibly dying from it.

That meant that I should probably focus more on protecting myself and hiding from the badger than trying to figure out a way to attack and eat her… There went my grand plan to have a huge meal and absolutely stuff myself silly, gone before I even managed to actually come up with it. Sure, having something move in and live inside of me sounded pretty annoying, but I had felt more full than I had before after having her inside the dungeon, didn’t I? There was something about her presence that seemed to feed me, and to top it all off it was weirdly pleasant to have the sounds of a living creature around.

It was only practical that I allow her to live. I would probably get more food out of her presence over time than I would out of just outright eating her on the spot anyway. It was the logical choice, not one driven by any amount of feeling or sentiment. I in no way missed having the badger around, that would just be ridiculous. She had only just left, after all, and I had only been watching the entrance to make sure she didn’t come back. I hadn’t been hoping that she would. I was absolutely not relieved that things worked out to make more sense to let her live.

Now that I had decided I wouldn’t eat my unwanted guest, I focused my attention on the next set of odd letters in my stats. What was MP?

MP. An acronym that stands for Mana Points, though it can also stand for Magic Points. MP represents the amount of mana that can be used casting magic before it runs out.

Huh, okay. Did that mean that I could use magic and the badger couldn’t? That was pretty interesting, I suppose. I didn’t really have any skills that seemed like they would be magical though, and using [Appraisal] hadn’t seemed to cause my MP to change. There was really only one other skill I knew how to use, so I would have to see if that caused anything to happen. It worked out pretty well for me too since I needed to use it anyway if I wanted to put distance between myself and the badger.

I turned my attention to the wall behind my core and focused on it, leaving up the screen from [Appraisal] as I did so, that way if there were any changes I would be able to see them happen in real-time.

Activating [Tunneling] I dug into the wall that was pressed against me with my tendrils, scooping up and swallowing dirt, as I began to burrow at an angle that would send my core rolling downwards and away from the area that the badger seemed to have claimed as her own.

Two very interesting things happened to my stats as I expanded the dungeon, the first of which I had predicted. Using [Tunneling] had caused my MP to drop, and since I had expected that much to happen that wasn’t that big of a deal to me. The second one, however? That one was pretty unexpected. My size began to slowly tick up as I dug. It didn’t seem to be tied to how much of the dirt I was eating, but it was definitely tied to how much I was digging.

What did size even mean? My core certainly wasn’t getting any larger. I would have noticed long before if the crystal got larger every time I ate something, wouldn’t I? So what did size even mean? Did it account for the size of the dungeon itself, or was it measuring the tendrils that came off of my core? It certainly felt like they had more reach than before, but maybe that was only because I finally had more room to move in? It was impossible to say.

Then a third thing happened that I hadn’t accounted for.

While the first number in my MP was going down as I dug, the second number suddenly ticked upwards. Did that mean I could store more mana now? Was my mana storage tied to my size? I had way more questions than I had answers, and the questions were only stacking higher and higher by the moment. That weird inner voice of mine wasn’t volunteering any answers to anything, and there was really only so much that [Appraisal] could do. It could only explain the basics of things that I could see, so asking it questions would just frustrate me if I tried.

I continued to use [Tunneling] for a bit longer, shoving dirt into myself as I rolled steadily down and away from the roots that had begun to feel a bit too much like a cage for my comfort. I liked being able to feel the air around me, and being pressed between two places hadn’t been very conducive to that. As I dug and ate I watched two numbers go up while another went down, leaving me curious about the correlation between the three of them.

My thought process, and my [Tunneling], came to a sudden and abrupt stop as something wet and slimy was pulled partially into me. I got the briefest sight of my points and my MP ticking upwards before I dismissed [Appraisal] out of sheer surprise.

There in the freshly dug out soil before me was one of the wriggling pink things that I had been so happily eating before, only instead of devouring it whole in one go, I had somehow managed to only eat part of it, leaving the rest of it writhing about in the dirt and leaking some sort of liquid.

I stared at it for a brief moment, trying to figure out what I had done to cause this to happen, and then at last I decided to use [Appraisal] on it. If this was food to me then I wanted to know what I ate, after all.

[Worm] Lvl. ??

Status: Bisected

HP: 1/1

SP: 1/100

Huh, so the pink wriggly things were worms… The name made me feel a bit weird like it was something that should somehow be disgusting to me, but it had been pretty tasty so I tried not to think about that too much. Maybe it was better to not know anything about what I ate. Still, it was more than a little strange to me that I had somehow managed to bisect it. I understood that I could swallow the little things in the soil down and eat them, but something told me that it shouldn’t be so easy for me to harm something.

I sent that question out to my inner voice, hoping that this time I would get back an answer instead of being left in silence once more.

Any creature with an HP of one that is of a small enough size can be killed and devoured by the Dungeon Core.

I really hated having to talk to the inner voice. The way it sounded like me but also wasn’t, how it was so cold and flat and lacked all the warmth that [Appraisal] had… It all just left me feeling awful. It was so strange that something could sound so much like myself and yet nothing like me at all. There was a part of me that wanted to name it, to give it some designation to help separate it from the rest of me, but there was no way I was going to go and name a weird voice inside of me before I had a name myself.

At least it had answered me this time. A worm was a creature small and weak enough that I could kill and eat it, that was good to know, and it also told me that I would need a lot of help if I wanted to eat anything else. If I could only eat things like worms then it would take forever before I ever felt full enough to be satisfied.

I hated this. I was weak, so very weak, and I had no idea how to get stronger.

Feeling annoyed at my own limitations I seized the rest of the worm with one of my tendrils and dragged it to me, quickly eating the rest of it. I didn’t really feel any more satisfied than I was before, but I was ready to get back to work expanding and digging now. I turned [Appraisal] back onto myself, bringing up my new stats.

Nameless [Dungeon Core] Lvl: 1

Title: None

Size: 29.92205

Points: 15

HP: 10/10

MP: 28/41

Skills:

[Mana Absorption] [Devour] [Tunneling] lvl.1 [Appraisal] lvl.1

Some things had changed as I had anticipated, but points… What were they? I knew that they were something I could spend in order to purchase skills, but where did they even come from? Why had they changed the way they had? How did I get more of them? I tried reaching out to my inner voice to ask, but it stayed completely silent once again.

The word “points” had come up a few times already, once in talking about HP and again in talking about MP. Were they connected in any way? There was really only one way to find out. I focused [Appraisal] onto the word and let the skill go.

Points. What the Dungeon Core uses to purchase new skills and certain upgrades.

That wasn’t nearly as useful as I had hoped it would be. I found myself no more enlightened than I had already been since previously I had already inferred that points could be used to purchase skills. How did I get them? What skills could I even buy? Both [Appraisal] and the inner voice remained completely silent on the matter.

For some reason that left me feeling even more annoyed than before, and I furiously threw myself into more [Tunneling], only this time no longer digging at an angle downwards. Could this be called comfort eating? I wasn’t sure, because the dirt alone wasn’t filling in the least, but it did make me feel better to be doing something other than just laying about. Maybe Dungeon Cores were just meant to keep busy? I guess that meant this was less comfort eating and more comfort digging.

Once I felt that the tunnel was far enough away from the entrance and away from where I could possibly be reached by any badgers I decided to begin to drag my core along, pushing myself deeper into the slowly expanding dungeon.

My MP fell rapidly, much more so than I was comfortable with, and I stopped before I ran out of it. I felt exhausted already and I hadn’t even moved myself to the end of the new tunnel yet! And if I used the MP that I had left in hopes I found more worms to snack on I would probably pass out before I found anything else. After the last time I had passed out from exhaustion there was no way I was going to go and do it again on purpose. The first time I had woken up in a new place with a badger deciding she wanted to live in me, I could only imagine what new horrors and fresh hell would await me if I went and knocked myself out again.

As much as I hated the idea of it, it seemed as if there was really only one thing left to do now: I would have to wait for my MP to fill back up enough for me to get back to work. At least in the meantime, I could amuse myself by playing around with [Appraisal]. It didn’t ease the loneliness the same way that the badger did, but at least it sounded warm and friendly.