Sheep, as it turned out, were crazy delicious.

There wasn’t a single part of the creature that didn’t make me want to eat more of it, from the thick and curly wool on the outside to the pink and slippery bits on the inside. Full of mana and with a richly savoury and metallic flavour, I felt like I could keep eating it forever without ever feeling full.

Of course, that part was because I had [Tunneling] working on expansion while I ate, not because the sheep wasn’t actually filling, but the point still stood that the flavour was absolutely one I wanted to continue to eat. If I had learned one thing in my short time being alive it was that there was nothing more delicious than something that had once been alive, whether it was a bug or a plant. Animals, it seemed, were even more delicious than even that.

Too bad I couldn’t eat the whole thing… As it turned out the sheep was mostly for my pair of kobolds and not so much for me.

“We are making the weapons from the bones, yes?” Cobble had chirped cutely at me as they waited for me to [Appraise] the sheep when they had first come in. “The skin will be for sleeping on, and the meats for the eating, but Kor also needs to have some so they will be able to make things.”

The strange blue kobold who turned out to be an evolved Cobalt had added, “Cobble and Cobalt did lots of talking. Kor needs to eat more things to know how to make things, so a big risk was taken to get sheep. Kor needs to know how to make cloth, and though Cobalt searched high and low no cotton was found, so wool it has to be.”

I had decided that I would worry about this “big risk” and what it meant to know how to make things until after I had finished both eating all the different parts of it they seemed to think I would need and I had finished up my new room with all the mana I was gaining from eating. I had been reluctant to eat so many new things at first thanks to the earlier mishap with the mana filled rocks, but one bite was all it took to change my mind.

Now I was staring at the creature with jealousy as the kobolds began building a pile of wood in the middle of the room. They said they were making a fire to cook the meat, whatever that meant, but I couldn’t care much beyond the fact that I wanted more. Maybe once it was cooked they would let me try it again? I really hoped so… I could technically just take it if I wanted to, but that was a line I wouldn’t let myself cross.

No matter how desperately I wanted to.

While they worked together on their project I threw myself into my own work. I hoped I would get the new room for my core done soon, hopefully before Mama and Papa Badger got back. If I could finish that room before she finished her first new addition then maybe I could even try to sneak a fourth new room in. What would Inner Voice say then? When the badger had built a sixth room into my dungeon for me?

Would sneaking in extra rooms unlock my bonus rooms? Or did I need to reach level two before that was even an option for me. I still didn’t know what I needed to do to get special rooms, after all, and Inner Voice still wasn’t saying anything about it.

Despite the situation with my own silence towards myself it seemed as if everything was coming together so nicely! So why did it feel like I was forgetting something…?

“Oh!”

My kobolds paused, heads cocking and adorable chirruping noises leaving them as they turned their attention back to me, looking away from the fire and vaguely towards the ceiling despite the fact I existed everywhere. “Yes, Kor?” and “What is it?” were spoken simultaneously.

“I wanted to look at your new stats, to see how you changed from being named, but I completely forgot!”

Apparently the sheep had really been just that much of a distraction to me, I hadn’t been able to think of anything else but that since they had both come in.

“So nothing Cobalt needs to worry about?” Cobalt asked, flicking his wings slightly. The moment I reassured him it was fine, he turned his full attention back to whatever he was doing with the wood. It looked like he was making little wooly fibers out of it somehow, rubbing a sharp rock across a particularly thick branch. My kobolds seemed to know what they were doing, and I had no idea what it took to make a fire, so I wasn’t going to bother them anymore about it.

Okay, [Appraisal], let’s see if anything has changed with Cobalt!

Cobalt [Kobold] Lvl. 2

Title: None

Male

HP: 10/14

SP: 17/22

MP: 10/10

Skills:

[Dragon Heritage] [Dungeon Knowledge] [Trap Making] Lvl. 1

[Kobold Knowledge]

Wow. So either Cobalt had leveled up while I was asleep, or the process of being promoted had leveled him up. Either way, he had more than twice the HP that he had before, and the same with his SP, too. MP had doubled as well, but it hadn’t more than doubled, so maybe leveling up gave bonus stats in places? They had apparently hunted down the sheep, after all, so maybe that was the reason for leveling up? It was certainly the most likely reason for his HP and SP being so low.

Now that I wasn’t feeling rushed to dig I finally had time to check out what the skills were that he had as well. Hopefully the leveled up [Appraisal] was more useful in what it told me about skills, rather than just telling me something that I could have easily figured out just from reading the skill names.

[Dragon Heritage]. Monsters with this skill are closely related to dragons.

[Dungeon Knowledge]. Monsters with the skill have basic knowledge of how dungeons work.

[Trap Making]. A skill that makes building traps easier.

[Kobold Knowledge]. Monsters with this skill have basic knowledge of kobold culture.

Okay, so [Appraisal] was still basically useless at explaining things, but at least I knew how Cobble knew more things about the dungeon than I did. Surely they had the same skill, right?

Cobble [Kobold] Lvl. 3

Title: None

Female

HP: 9/14

SP: 19/24

MP: 12/12

Skills:

[Camouflage] [Dungeon Knowledge] [Trap Making] Lvl. 1

[Kobold Knowledge]

Cobble was a female kobold! That was good to know! Did that mean that the females were naturally larger than males? Did males have horns while females didn’t? I was so curious to know the difference between them, because aside from the obvious colouration differences and how they had changed after being named I couldn’t really look at Cobble and Cobalt and tell what the difference in gender was supposed to be.

It was sort of like with Mama and Papa Badger. Papa was bigger, yes, but that could just be from being older, or something that changed with levels. For all I knew Cobble was bigger because she was a level higher than Cobalt, which might have been from doing more exploring than he had. She had taken a little damage the first time I had [Appraised] her, so maybe she had been fighting things out there?

I really didn’t know what she had been up to when she had gone outside. I had no knowledge of anything beyond my walls, and it was incredibly frustrating. There was a whole world out there that I wanted to see, taste, and touch… And I couldn’t. I had to convince that world to come to me somehow if I wanted it, and that was exactly what I planned on doing.

Was it safer to just hide and slowly burrow away without taking any risks? Of course it was! It was way safer, for both me and my kobolds, as well as the badger family. I had too great a craving to ignore, however. I wanted the entire world, to both eat and to just see, and while I knew I couldn’t have it I still had plans to give it a try.

For now? For now I wanted to know what [Camouflage] did.

[Camouflage]. A skill for blending into the environment.

[Appraisal]. Just as useless as always. If there’s one thing I can count on it seems to be that. I wasn’t sure if it was a comfort or not… I wanted [Appraisal] to grow and get more useful of course, but at this rate I wasn’t sure if it would ever happen. Oh well, at least in its current state it could tell me some things I couldn’t guess just by looking. I would have never known that Cobble had a skill like that otherwise after all, or that she was female.

My kobolds were banging rocks together now, clustering around the pile of wood they had made and whispering encouraging words to it. Apparently the fire they were trying to make needed lots of praise. Honestly, it sounded more like they were trying to lure something out of hiding than it sounded like they were trying to create something.

A tickling sensation alerted me to Mama Badger shuffling back in, Papa Badger close behind. There was blood on their muzzles, and she was licking her mouth constantly in an effort to clean it. I felt a longing build up inside me, but I had already drained all the blood that had come spilling out of the sheep. The only things that were left for me to eat were the plants in the pile that had evidently all been for me from the beginning.

I didn’t want sweets, though! I wanted meats!

Huffing with annoyance I continued my [Tunneling], my attention split between the kobolds and what the badgers were up to.

Papa Badger seemed to be in charge of adding more to the bedding, dragging in dry grass, while Mama Badger was right back to digging away. As annoying as it was that she was expanding her side of the dungeon I didn’t feel the pressure anymore. I had altered my plans to only need two more rooms to work, and I was about to reach the point where I wanted my second of those rooms to be. I didn’t need to rush anymore though, my goal had been reached, anything I did beyond that would be a bonus.

If she didn’t finish her new room by dawn, when she seemed to go to sleep, I would start digging a new tunnel, but it didn’t matter if I put a room at the end or not. Either I made a room there or it would become a dead end for my labyrinth. It was as simple as that. Either way I would get what I wanted

Heat bloomed against my floor, followed immediately by light and the cheering of the kobolds.

“We did it! Cobalt, we did it!” Cobble was laughing, and she got up from where she had been kneeling on the floor to leap about in place, her tail thumping against the ground in her happiness as it swung about. He got up as well, his hands held close to his chest and his eyes bright as he watched her, tail swaying and wings wiggling. “Cobalt knew we could!” He added, his slightly rougher voice squeaking.

Cobble moved towards him once he stood, taking his hands in her own and pulling him away from the fire, where she continued her hopping in place while he stood there awkwardly for a moment, just staring at her. His wings fluttered a bit faster, tiny though they were, before he joined her in jumping about. He seemed awkward at first, as if he didn’t know what he was doing, before he became just as enthusiastic.

It was kind of cute how excited they were about getting the fire started, but my curiosity was fixated on the thing that they had made together. So this was fire… I hadn’t known that it would be so bright!

I stretched a tendril towards it, feeling heat crawl all the way to my core. It was warm and bright, but it didn’t cause pain the same way that the sunlight had. I stretched myself further, taking a small bit off one of the growing points of the fire, but it simply continued to grow and spread through the wood pile as if I hadn’t done anything. Something I could eat forever that would continue to grow?

What a disappointment… Even though it moved like something alive it gave me absolutely no mana, and not a single point… There was no sense in continuing to monitor it then, and certainly no point in eating it. It didn’t even have a flavour. It didn’t hurt me, the kobolds seemed to know what they were doing, and it gave me nothing.

Fire was pointless.

It was time for my [Room Building] to become useful, however, so it was all the same that I turned my attention elsewhere once more. I had learned my lesson from before as far as using the skill, so instead of taking the room out in one go I started in small chunks. It was all the same to me in the end, it didn’t use more mana to do it slowly, and at least this way when I automatically devoured all the material in the room I wouldn’t make myself sick if there was something rich in mana inside.

It actually felt more natural to do it in small bits. My tendrils didn’t all jerk and pull me to fill the space, no, it was more of a slow stretch, like I was easing myself into a larger size. Sure it had felt good to expand out earlier, like I had been crammed into too small a space before and was finally able to move, but this? This felt nice too, but in a different sort of way. It was more like I was becoming the size I was meant to be.

So far there was nothing mana rich in the soil, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking for anyway.

This room was meant to be my own, where I would eventually dig down to another floor when Inner Voice decided to allow me to do so, so I wanted it to be more of a long rectangle rather than a big square.

A large and elegant hall that would lead down to where I would construct an altar for my core to sit, and then eventually when I could move down I would hide the stairs behind the altar. It was a good idea, or at least it made a pretty image when I thought of it. If I ended up unlocking bonus rooms that allowed me a room for just myself then I would still use the basic idea.

A false altar room with a false core, a hidden tunnel behind the altar leading to the real room, and then the stairs hidden beneath that altar when I was able to build a lower floor.

[Room Building] peeled away another layer of the room, and this time I finally found what I was looking for: the extra tasty mana filled stones that I had made myself sick on twice already. There were several of them, all small shards in various pointed shapes, scattered in a line that ran diagonally down across the middle of the new wall. I had eaten a couple of them, it seemed, but not enough to fill my mana capacity to bursting, not now that I had grown it while digging.

Okay, [Appraisal]! Time to find out what my favourite food is!

[???????] Lvl. ???

HP: ????/????

SP: ????/????

MP: ????/????

You have got to be kidding me.

Come on, [Appraisal]! I was counting on you to at least give me a name! I knew you were useless, but this is just beyond useless! You could at least say something stupid like [Red Rock] instead of just a bunch of question marks! Do you even know how awful that sound is? No, you don’t, because you’re the most useless skill I’ve ever had and I wish I had never purchased you!

“Kor? Are you alright?”

My attention turned back to my kobolds, finding them both looking towards my core which had begun glowing a bright red that had overpowered the light of the fire that they were putting chunks of sheep over. I huffed, feeling irritated still, but for them I tried to calm down. The light faded a bit, settling into something softer.

“I’m fine, just a little frustrated is all.”

Cobalt, who had been the one to call out to me, tilted his head sharply. The longer bits on the sides of his head that seemed to be ears twitched and wiggled, the heavy ridges over his fire coloured eyes pulling in while he seemed to consider what I had said. “Did… Did Cobalt do something wrong…?” He asked, his voice very quiet. If I didn’t exist everywhere all at once I might have missed those words.

That was a strange thing to ask…

“No? Why would you think that?”

He held his clawed hands close to his chest as he looked around, as if trying to avoid looking directly at me, a hard task to accomplish when he was standing inside of me. There was no place to look that wasn’t me.

“Kor doesn’t wish they had never purchased Cobalt?” He squeaked, obviously nervous.

Oh. Oh no. At some point in my angry rant at [Appraisal] I had started projecting the words out, and now here was my precious little kobold looking around like he might start crying at any moment. What did I do? How could I hurt him like that? He was my monster, and I needed to keep him happy if I wanted him to be happy to continue working with me!

“I’m so glad I purchased you, really. I wasn’t mad at you, I was mad at my [Appraisal] skill. I found a weird stone in the new room I’m making and it couldn’t tell me what it was, that’s all. I promise. Please stop looking so sad!”

While Cobalt tried to get his emotions under control, something that seemed to be more difficult than expected given he wasn’t immediately all cute kobold smiles again, Cobble stood back up. “You found strange thing? Can I take look at the rock?” She asked, seemingly far more interested in what I found than the still obviously sad Cobalt who had been sitting beside her.

I wasn’t sure if it was a good idea or not, especially when I felt like cheering him up was a priority, but I gave Cobble the affirmative to take a look. She looked back at Cobalt and reached out, patting his head roughly and awkwardly as if even she wasn’t sure how to help his injured emotions. “Watch the meat, yes? Make sure is not the burnt. We will eat when I am the return, and please, stop the sad faces. Kor is very kind, they would not say such things about you. I am much the sure of this.” She said, both her voice and expression steady and firm.

Cobble, it seemed, was a natural leader.

Leaving him behind, nodding slowly as he looked after her, she ventured down the tunnel that I had made and towards the new room. While it was big enough to technically count as a room I wasn’t even halfway done with what I wanted to do with it. There wasn’t much I could do at the moment, however, not with all of those red stones blocking my path. My mana was almost to capacity again, and if I dug any further I would hurt myself like I had done before. Sure I could always just throw myself into digging more tunnels, but I didn’t want to feel rushed to do so.

I had a carefully constructed plan, after all, and right now it was being interrupted.

Reaching the wall where the streak of strange red shards ran through the dirt, Cobble reached out, laying a thick padded hand against the stones. She was silent for a moment before finally speaking. “Strange… They feel much like Kor feels, but different.”

“They feel like me? What do you mean?”

Cobble tilted her head, making that vibrating sound in her throat, her large eyes clearly fixated on the stones. “How to use the words…” She mumbled. “They have much mana, yes? Like Kor does. They are not the alive though, not like Kor is. They are the dead, like the sheep is the dead.” She explained, pausing once for me to confirm that they were, in fact, full of mana.

Her words made me feel strangely unsettled somehow, as if I had just swallowed a bunch of worms and slugs all at once. I felt cold and slimy, a thickness inside that I wasn’t sure how to express. What was this feeling?

“Are they other Dungeon Cores… but ones that died?” Even though there could be no real change in the volume of my projected voice to her I was sure Cobble could tell how unnerved I was, how careful I was speaking.

She seemed to be hesitant, her claws gently tracing the outlines of the shards as she considered my question. They were rough in shape, like they were broken somehow, a fact which seemed to make my theory more possible.

Had another dungeon been here before? Had it been broken and buried in the dirt? Was I digging into a grave and eating the corpses of my siblings? It made me feel awful somehow that I thought they were so delicious now. I wanted to eject all of the stones that I had eaten so far, but they were long ago burned into mana to fuel my growth.

Finally Cobble shook her head, her ears flopping. “No… No, I do not think… Dungeon Core is what happens when enough mana gathers together for long enough. Maybe one day, very very far from now, these would be like Kor, but now? They are not the big enough, not full enough with the mana.”

I felt so much relief run through me that my core almost rolled off the shelf it was sitting on, but almost immediately another thought flashed through me.

“Not big enough? Didn’t you say I’m much too small for a Dungeon Core? They aren’t that much smaller than I am!”

Cobble tilted her head back, making that vibrating sound again, and then she laughed and turned from the wall. “Do not the worry, Kor. You are the special, yes? Kor is very strange and special case. These are not the alive yet, maybe not be the alive for years and years and years. There is nothing to be the worry about, yes?” She squeaked at me, her mouth open in a happy smile.

“Right. Nothing to worry about…”

“Come, Kor, I will give you the cooked meat and we will do the talking about future plans, yes? For the traps, and the item making, though we will not be doing that tonight, no. Is nearly dawn, and Cobalt and me need the rest, yes? So let’s eat.”

The cooked meat did smell awfully good… And I would rather focus on that than whatever was going on with the red stones. I could worry about them later. As full as I was of mana I could start digging a new tunnel while we made our plans…

“Yeah, sounds good to me.”