[Floor Art Making] automatically acquired.

There truly was nothing better to wake up to after passing out than the sweet, flat, dead tones of Inner Voice loudly announcing something. Seriously, Inner Voice? Couldn’t you have waited for me to actually fully come around before yelling at me like that? I just woke up after passing out! How long was I out? What caused me to pass out? I have no clue at all, and you bellowing at me that I gained some stupid skill sure isn’t helping me figure out the answer to any of those questions!

How did I even gain a skill while passed out anyway? [Floor Art Making]? Isn’t that a bit too specific, Inner Voice? Let me guess, if I ask [Appraisal] I’ll be told that it’s a skill for making art on the floor? Useless. All of you are absolutely useless.

…

I’m sorry, Inner Voice… I’m just feeling grumpy because of what happened, that’s all. I passed out for a reason I don’t know and I’m confused and frustrated. I mean, wouldn’t you be? I really didn’t mean to take it out on you… And I’m sorry to [Appraisal], too. It’s still a low leveled skill, so I shouldn’t give it such a hard time about not being perfect yet. I’m trying to work on being better about that, promise. Can you forgive me, Inner Voice?

The Dungeon Core ran out of MP, and thus fell into temporary stasis.

I’m going to take you telling me what happened as you forgiving me. Thanks, Inner Voice… Still, that’s pretty weird. I passed out from running out of MP? I had about sixty before I passed out, right? I mean, I used some on shaping the doorway and changing the wooden plank into a proper door, but that shouldn’t have been enough to cause me to pass out, right? Those things definitely didn’t empty me completely of mana. Eating that dirt without [Tunneling] should have cost maybe six or seven MP at most, and though I have no idea how much a door costs there’s no way it was fifty-five… What ate up all my mana like that?

It costs 45 MP and 15 points to elevate a monster to named status.

“WHAT?!”

“Kor! You are finally the awake!” a squeaky voice greeted me cheerfully, and despite how shocked and out of it I was I immediately turned my focus to the source of the voice, expecting to see the friendly face of my favourite and only little kobold, Cobble.

A kobold was certainly what greeted me, but it took me a moment to recognize them as being Cobble. When I had last seen my kobold she had been small and thin, a bit lanky and perhaps even bony. She had been proportioned in a rather silly sort of way, with eyes far too large for her head and oversized ears that flopped about when she moved. Even her limbs had seemed like they belonged to a creature bigger than she was.

The kobold I was looking at now was… Well, she was different and yet somehow still Cobble. There was no mistaking that pebbly skin in mottled shades of green, her extremities fading to burnt orange, but she looked stronger somehow. She was a bit taller and her body didn’t look quite as funny anymore, her eyes still large but not looking as if they might pop out of her head. There was more muscle on her body now, and the scales that ran down her back to the tip of her tail seemed to be thicker, as did the scales across her shins and forearms. She looked like she might actually be able to survive a fight against the badgers.

“Cobble?”

Her head tipped sharply, one ear perking up as she gazed towards where my core rested in its alcove. Even the way her ears moved was different now, less jerky somehow, a smoother motion. They didn’t look as floppy anymore, either. “Yes, Kor?” she asked, voice and expression both sweet while also betraying her worry and concern. At least her voice was the same as before.

From her point of view, I must have been acting bizarrely. I had just woken up after being out for an unknown amount of time, I had screamed for a reason she didn’t yet know, and now I was acting as if I didn’t recognize her. Sure, I initially hadn’t recognized her, but somehow I felt like it might hurt her if I said that. I couldn’t help but feel lost. So much had happened in what felt, to me, like no time at all.

I wanted to ask her if she knew that my naming her would cost me so much, if she knew that I would pass out from it… I wanted to be mad at her. I wanted to accuse her of tricking me, but somehow… Looking into those large yellow eyes of hers? Full of so much worry over my well-being? All of my annoyance faded away. She had said that naming her would save her from death somehow, so I needed to trust that she had a good reason for doing what she had done. I could probably bug Inner Voice to puzzle out her reasoning, anyway.

“I was just checking that it really was you. You look so much stronger now. I didn’t know naming you would cause that kind of change.”

Cobble put her clawed hands over the end of her snout, muffling a squeaky little laugh as she twirled in place as if to show off her improved form. Almost giggling she twisted about, tail swishing, as she looked herself over. “I am much the good-looking kobold, yes?” she asked, and though I didn’t really know what kobolds should look like other than the example I currently had, I had to agree. She was very pretty now, though she had been just as pretty to me before her transformation.

After she finished posing and displaying all of her changes to me she paused, looking back at my core with curiosity. “Was that all you were the wanting, Kor?”

“For now, yeah… How long was I out, by the way?”

Her head tipped again, one white claw coming up to rest against her chin as she seemed to be thinking. She made rumbling little noises in her throat, the ridges over her eyes pulled down low as the tip of her purple tongue peeked out of her mouth. With the way she had changed physically it was nice to see that inside she was the same kobold as always.

The fingers of her other hand wiggled, eyes looking about the room, all while she seemed to be performing some rather complex calculations. Finally done after a brief moment she nodded, answering confidently, “Twenty-four hours. The badgers were the waking and the returning, and it is being the day time again.”

“I was out for the whole day? Seriously? That’s way longer than before… I wonder why…”

There was really only one thing I could do now, and that was to put [Appraisal] to work to see what my current state was.

Kor [Dungeon Core] Lvl: 1

Title: None

Size: 362.80522

Points: 33

HP: 10/10

MP: 288/447

Mobs:

Kobolds: 1/2

Skills:

[Mana Absorption] [Devour] [Tunneling] lvl.1 [Appraisal] lvl.2 [Room Building] lvl.1 [Item Making] lvl. 1 [Wall Building] lvl. 1 [Door Building] lvl. 1 [Floor Art Making] lvl. 1

I wasn’t about to run the full calculations to double-check that Cobble’s math was correct, especially since there was no telling how much time the badgers had actually spent inside the dungeon while I was out, but it looked as if her estimation was fairly correct. My MP was over half full now, though it looked like my storage had also gone up a bit…

A quick check of the rest of my tunnels confirmed that the badgers had expanded the size of their sleeping room, leaving them with a bit more room on all sides than before. Mama Badger was no longer digging her feet into Papa Badger’s belly while he slept, though she was now splayed out in all directions while he kept his face tucked against her back. They were just as cute to look at as always, snorting and drooling away in peace.

It seemed as if they’d brought in even more bedding while I was out, and I took the opportunity to happily clean up the bits of grass that lay on the tunnel floor near the entrance. It was enough to take my points up to thirty-five. That brought me to my next mystery on what had changed on my [Appraisal] sheet.

Hadn’t I had forty-four points when I passed out? If it cost an alarming fifteen of those to give Cobble her name, then how had I woken up with thirty-three of them? What caused me to gain points in the first place? And why was Inner Voice still refusing to tell me the secret?

Moving on from that, I had a brand new skill on my list. Once I had taken the time to look around my dungeon it became fairly obvious how I had gained it: there were drawings on the floor now, deep lines running through the clay floor of the room my core occupied. Cobble must have been pretty bored while I was out, and it looked like she had been doing her best to keep herself occupied by doodling. I couldn’t figure out what her drawings were supposed to be, they looked like a bunch of boxes and squiggles to me, but if they were enough to count for [Floor Art Making] then I was forced to call the drawings art.

I had no idea how I would use [Floor Art Making], but I was sure it could be useful at some point in the future. Maybe once I had the dungeon layout where I wanted it to be I could start working on decorating it? I didn’t really see any need to go making it fancy just yet, however, not when it wasn’t even built to the size for people to come inside of it.

Now that I had my bearings back and had accounted for the changes in the dungeon while I had been recovering, it was finally time to bug Inner Voice about what had happened to Cobble and what it actually meant to name a monster.

So, Inner Voice, could you please tell me what I want to know? It’s weird to me that she changed so much just because of a name, and why did it cost me so much mana to do it? Plus those points! What does naming a monster do that costs so much?

When a Dungeon Monster is named they gain the ability to be revived after death by paying an MP cost. This cost is the same amount as it would take to summon a brand new monster of the same species. In addition to this, named monsters are much stronger than their unnamed brethren. Normally, named monsters become dungeon bosses and mini-bosses.

So the mana cost probably went into remaking Cobble’s body to become something stronger… That made sense to me, she was made from mana to begin with. I wasn’t sure what the points had done, but…

It really only just began to sink in that, had Cobble died while she was outside my walls, I would have lost her forever. No wonder she wanted to be named! If she died then that would be the end of her. For me it would have been a mild annoyance at the time since I would need to summon a new monster and get them to understand what I wanted from them, but for her? It all would have ended. Like passing out, except forever.

It was like when I had learned what badgers were just by hearing about them from [Appraisal]. Talking to Inner Voice had carried more than just the words, but impressions of what the words really meant. I hadn’t actually really known what death was before, only that it was an inconvenience to me, but now? Now I had a better idea, and I couldn’t believe I had treated Cobble like something disposable. No wonder she had tricked me into naming her!

Maybe it was just because she was my first monster, maybe it was just because I had named her, but I was extremely fond of Cobble now, and losing her was the absolute last thing I wanted. If I had to sacrifice a few points and some MP to bring her back if something happened to her? Well, I thought that was a pretty low cost all things considered. It wouldn’t just be annoying to have to get used to a new monster and explain things to them. I would be losing the monster who gave me a name, who helped me figure out how to build a door…

I couldn’t just be a single pea in a pod by itself. I needed my other pea, and that was Cobble.

She was back to using her claws to draw lines in the floor of the room, making little chirping noises in her throat as she did so. She seemed completely oblivious to the realization that I was currently having, simply carrying on being her absolutely adorable self. Maybe I should take her example and continue on as if nothing had happened at all. Cobble had to know that, due to lacking [Dungeon Knowledge], I wouldn’t know the full extent of naming her, but what was the use in making a big deal of it? I just needed to be grateful that she was alright. Trick or not, it wasn’t as if it had been done maliciously.

“Okay, I’m all sorted out now and good to go. Any suggestions on what I should do first? I had wanted to expand the sizes of the tunnels before I passed out so they would be bigger for you, but… I can’t help but notice that you’re bigger now. Do you even fit through the entrance anymore?”

Cobble tilted her head at my question, standing up to do a few twists, gazing down at herself as she did. “I am the bigger, yes, but…” Her voice trailed away into a humming noise. Without finishing her thought she left the room, needing to duck her head as she moved along the tunnel to the door now. She had grown a good bit since being named! If she were to stand upright her head would be pressed against the top of the tunnel! I really needed to work on adjusting the heights of things so they would be comfortable for her.

She reached the door in no time at all, carefully opening it as quietly as possible. Once it was open she used her hands to measure first the size of the door, and then her own body. The door was a little wider than her shoulders, so it seemed as if she would have no issues at all in getting through it. The next thing she did was to crawl partway into the tunnel, squirming a bit to make sure there was enough room for her to squirm her way out of the dungeon.

The fit was a bit tighter than it had been before, I could tell that much just by feeling the way she pressed against the sides of the dungeon. Cobble would be able to leave the dungeon, but it would be difficult to bring anything back with her, short of carrying things in her mouth.

She let out a heavy sigh, wiggling back down before she shut the door. Turning her back to the exit she crossed her arms, sinking down to sit on the ground with a huff that would have made Mama Badger proud.

“I am the fitting, but it is being the difficult, and we cannot be the expanding tunnel because of the badgers,” she complained, her squeaky voice surprisingly pouty. I couldn’t blame her for feeling that way, however, because I felt the same.

It was annoying. I had made Cobble to help me collect items so I could expand faster, and now she couldn’t do her job because the tunnel was too small. I could always make the tunnel bigger, but… That might upset the badgers, and upsetting them was something I wanted to avoid if I could. Right now they were my biggest source of mana, and it wouldn’t be easy to replace them even if Cobble could get to work.

“Well… Wouldn’t I need to make another entrance eventually anyway? I can’t have people come in through the same entrance as the badgers, right? So maybe I should just start looking for a new place to have my entrance?”

It seemed as if my tentative suggestion was exactly what Cobble needed to hear to cheer up, because her yellow eyes lit up as bright as the morning sun as she scrambled up onto her hands and feet. Without bothering to stand upright she continued on that way, running on all fours back to the room before she began to excitedly pat her drawings with her hands, her palms making an adorable wet slapping sound against the clay. “Kor is much the smart! That was exactly what I was the thinking!”

I narrowed my focus down a bit more, letting everything else turn into fuzzy peripheral as I turned to the drawings that Cobble had carved with her claws into my floor. I could vaguely make out the shape of my own dungeon in the drawings, but only from a single angle. It looked nothing like how I saw it, which was probably why it had been so hard for me to puzzle it out previously. My dungeon was my entire body, after all, so it was hard to recognize it when it was flattened down to a single angle and dimension.

“It’s me… This part, here.”

I tentatively touched the area that looked like my dungeon with one of my tendrils, circling it, and found to my surprise that I had left a mark in the clay. Was that an effect from [Floor Art Making]? That was my best guess, given I couldn’t normally interact with the world around me. Just in case I quickly withdrew the tendril, hesitant to use up any of my hard-earned MP on doodles. [Appraisal] was the only skill I could actively use that cost me nothing, so I wasn’t about to chance things.

Cobble let out a soft wheeze, nodding her head as she made a rumbling noise in her throat again. “Yes, that is being the dungeon. And this?” She moved her claw to circle an odd square some distance away, with other lines that crossed between it and me. “This is where I am the thinking Kor should be the building the new entrance. Kor should be the digging in this direction.” It was a good distance away, but it was in the opposite direction from the badgers, making it the perfect place to dig towards.

“What’s in that direction? What made you pick there?”

If I had learned anything about Cobble in our short time together it was that she never seemed to stop thinking, so if this was where she had decided I should dig? There had to be a good reason.

As if she could hear my praise of her my kobold grinned, a rather sly look on her face as she glanced up toward where my core rested in its alcove. “There is being the ancient peoples ruin there. It looked to be the sight of the old battlefield, which means there should be the plenty of things to eat for Kor in that direction. Extra mana for Kor, plus the ruin can be the concealing the entrance. Brilliant, yes?” she asked with a chirp, her tail swishing slightly as if awaiting me to tell her just how smart she was.

Given just how wrapped around her fingers I was, there was no way I could resist.

“Brilliant? Cobble, you’re a genius. You’re the smartest kobold I know, you sneaky, clever, girl you! That’s perfect! Just… It is old, right? No people are going to come sniffing around?”

She was practically wiggling with joy from my praise, her tail leaving marks on the floor from where it wagged from side to side. “Oh yes, it is much the old. There was being the no signs of the peoples when I was the finding it. Just be the keeping the entrance Cobble sized, just in case, and we should be the safe,” she said, sounding just as pleased as she looked.

“Alright then! I’ll start digging in that direction. Should I go ahead and make a new kobold like we planned? Or should I wait?”

“Kor should be the getting MP from us dungeon monsters too, so…” She tapped her claws together in thought, though her words were surprising. I got mana from my monsters, too? How had I not known that? Then again, I didn’t know a lot of things so I wasn’t too surprised to find out a new thing I didn’t know. Oh well, I was starting off at a disadvantage thanks to not having [Dungeon Knowledge], and I was still learning. I could be forgiven for being a bit dumb. Still… Inner Voice, how much mana do I get from dungeon monsters?

The Dungeon Core absorbs 1 MP per hour per unnamed Dungeon Monster. Named Dungeon Monsters grant 2 MP per hour.

That was a huge benefit! It was starting to look like there really weren’t that many downsides to naming monsters! Sure, it cost a bit more at the start, but there was really no good reason not to make that investment!

While I was talking to Inner Voice it seemed like Cobble had been mentally weighing the pros and cons of my summoning another monster, and apparently coming to a decision, she nodded. “Kor is already the thinking it is the smart, yes?” she asked, waiting for me to agree before she grinned. “Then Kor should be the doing it. It is the costing a bit, yes, but it will be the helping in the long run.”

I couldn’t agree with her more. Sure, it was going to hurt a bit to lose a chunk of my mana right away from summoning and naming a new kobold, but if they gave me that much in passive MP recovery? It would be worth it once I started really digging. Between just Cobble and the new kobold I would earn that mana back in about half a day, and that wasn’t counting the mana from the badgers or what I absorbed naturally on my own. Plus, if Cobble was right, I would find new things to eat in the direction she wanted me to go. That would be even more mana and points as well!

It was coming up wins all around for me, and I couldn’t see a single downside in sight. My luck was finally turning around!

Okay, Inner Voice! I’d like to purchase another kobold! Hopefully this next one is just as cute and clever as the last.