Chapter 13: Chapter 12 – Girl

The day came and went as I absentmindedly played with the fluffballs. Some of them left elsewhere, but many more had come.

(Maybe they went to get others?)

If that was true, then I didn't mind. Even if it wasn't true, the fact that so many were around meant that it wasn't a problem either. Rather, it would be a problem if they kept gathering without any leaving.

Right now, it was like a field densely filled with fireflies. If too many more showed up, I wouldn't be able to see beyond a wall of glowing lights.

But now that the sun had hidden away, I was able to come out and play with the fluffballs directly. The newer members of the group were startled and backed off when I showed myself, but since there were plenty that had gotten used to my physical body already, I didn't have to do anything special to convince them that I didn't mean any harm, and they joined the group again quickly.

As I chased a group, a group of the original balls of light came back. At least I thought that they were ones I had seen the night before. All the fluffballs looked identical, so I had to rely entirely on the feel they gave off to identify them.

They were bouncing around trying to get my attention, but unlike when the others did it, it didn't seem like they wanted to play.

I approached the small group, but they backed off.

Tilting my head in confusion, I approached them again, but they backed off once more.

It didn't feel like they did it out of fear, which could only mean that they wanted to follow them.

I didn't have any reason to refuse them, so I did just that, speeding up to match their flight.

The fluffballs I was chasing flew much faster than I had ever seen. After a minute of acceleration, they were already moving as fast as a car, and with me following just as quickly thanks to my high agility stat. The wind pulled at my clothes and loudly blew into my ears. Annoyed by the effect, I erected a wind barrier to calm the air directly around myself and cut down on wind resistance.

Here and there, I saw monsters of all sorts of shapes and sizes. A few I thought I recognized from the dungeon, mostly ones from past floor 50, but there were plenty I had never seen before. Even the ones I thought looked familiar, we blew past them by the time that thought even came up.

We travelled for quite some time through the forest, probably three or four hours, before the fluffballs stopped and circled over a spot.

There was a child huddled on the ground between two roots of a tree. She was dirty and wore thin rags that was practically a potato sack with holes cut out for her head and arms. She didn't even have shoes. Her breathing was faint and her lips were blue.

There was no doubt in my mind that she was suffering from hypothermia.

But despite that, the first thought that came to mind was that she didn't look very delicious.

I quickly shook that thought out of my head. I didn't want to eat a person, especially the first one I had found in this entire world.

I thanked the fluffballs for bringing me to her, then opened my robe and pulled the child's body against my own before closing my robes around her.

Her body was icy to the point that a shiver ran through my body. She wouldn't last long if I didn't warm her up quickly.

Not wasting any time, I ran at full tilt back to my home, leaving the fluffballs to catch up later.

Careful to support the girl's body as I ran, I got back in less than half an hour.

Teleporting with the child to the 85th floor where I had made my latest home, I drew water from the fountain and filled my bathtub before heating it with magic.

I stripped us both down while carefully balancing the girl in my arms and stepped into the tub, submerging the child up to her shoulders but careful to not let any of the water enter her mouth or nose.

As I rubbed and washed the girl, her body warmed up. She slowly started to take deeper and deeper breaths, and her limbs relaxed. I could feel her heart pound more and more inside of her chest against my own as her core temperature returned to normal levels.

Eventually her breathing reached a point that felt normal and her body entrusted itself to be supported by mine.

It looked like she was now just sleeping normally, and would recover normally.

But that was only on an immediate level. The girl was just skin and bones. It looked like she had been malnourished for quite a while.

Was she lost in the forest for a long time, or was she treated poorly by her family? Did she even have one?

Staying in the hot water any longer would have adverse effects, so I lifted her up and used some fur pelts to wipe ourselves reasonably dry before I lay on my crudely made couch, laying the girl on top of me and a large bear pelt on top of us both.

It would take a while before she would wake up most likely. Until then, I had to watch her body's condition.

I softly held her body to mine, and thought what this encounter meant for me.

She was the first person I had ever seen. Those fluffballs were my first friends, but I hoped I could become friends with this girl too.

I couldn't rely on her body to keep warm on it's own in this situation, so I lay there with the intent of being her bedding for the meantime.

But there wasn't anything for me to do until she woke up. I had finally gone out of the dungeon for the first time, only to be stuck again nursing a little girl.

She really was small though, probably only six or so. Her features were round and soft, but her shoulder length hair was rough and oily on top of being unevenly cut. Not only was there no fat on her body, but there wasn't any muscles either.

It made me wonder just what kind of life she had to have lived to end up like this.

The rags that she wore was probably indicative of that, but I didn't have anything to compare them to. That could've just been normal fashion for kids of this world for all I knew.

I was a little jealous though. Despite how dirty and worn down the sack she wore was, it was still more evenly woven than my robes were, which were made from obviously better material. It would be nice if I could get my hands on a professionally built loom, or even have my clothes tailored by a pro.

My skill correction could only compensate so much for my lack of knowledge or experience.

I lay back, careful that if the girl moved, she wouldn't fall off, and stared at the glowing ceiling.

It didn't take long for me to get bored, but I couldn't get up in case the child's body was weaker than I thought.

Instead, I opened up my status and thought about the 87th floor again.

One by one, I scrutinized my stats and skills, seeing if there was something I had missed. The tooltip would open, and I'd analyze the words, trying to find any hidden meaning or subtext that I had missed before.

Every once in a while I discovered something new about my skills that I hadn't noticed on a casual look, so it was worth the try at the very least. And if anything, I had plenty of time to do it right then.

But the more I scrutinized the words that appeared in my head, the less confident I grew that I had missed something in the skill description.

Suddenly, the girl shifted in place, turning from lying on her back to her front while adjusting her head to more completely use one of my breasts as a pillow. It was a confounding sensation, but the fact that she moved at all was a good sign. If only she wasn't breathing across my nipple.

The feeling was strangely distracting.

As I did my best at ignoring the sensation, something unusual did pique my interest.

At the bottom right corner of the tooltip was a small triangle built into the corner of the window. It reminded me of those resize corners used on windows in Earth's computers, but more stylized. The boarder along with many other features of both the tooltip and the status windows were stylized in ways not commonly done on Earth, hut I simply presumed it was all decorations.

But if there was a chance that it wasn't mere decoration, then it was worth investigating.

With my mind, I touched the corner of the tooltip and dragged it.

As I suspected, the window changed dimensions based in how I moved the corner, automatically rearranging Tue contents to fit the best they could.

But at the same time, that was all that had happened.

I wasn't particularly disappointed though, since that was the entire point of such a feature. I didn't know what I was expecting, but not seeing anything unexpected wasn't any particular bother. Rather, I was pleased to discover another feature of the status window.

Maybe a sign of how bored I was, I amused myself by playing around with resizing the window to weird and awkward shapes, but eventually changed it to a comfortable size a little bigger than before.

One last look though the text description of the skill didn't reveal anything useful.

I was about to close the skill's description when I noticed something else odd. There was a small button in the corner near the resize dragged at the window's corner.

That button was definitely new. It read [See Source Code].

There was no way I wouldn't check out something so interesting.

With curiosity and excitement fillings my heart, I hit the button.

What opened up was filled entirely with hopes and dreams beyond the imagination of people like myself. Just like what the button promised, the source code behind the skill I had selected opened up to me, naked as it was in it's original creation.

Not only that, but there was a blinking curser.

Just to test it, I thought about adding a few words to one of the lines. The curser moved and added those words I had thought.

For a former programmer, this was like a dream. The power I had just discovered was vastly beyond my own imagination. To have thought that the underlying system was something I could actually read and understand. Not only that, but for it to be entirely accessible.

This was power. Absolute power. With this, I could do anything I wanted. No foe could possibly stand in my way if I could simply change a few parameters to suit myself.

It wouldn't be difficult for me to effectively become a god of this world if used this power properly. Nobody could stand a chance against me. Conquering this massive dungeon would be nearly effortless with this power.

*cough cough*

My train of thought was suddenly broken when the little girl laying on my body shifted with a few coughs.

The coughing was a little worrying, but a soft smile rose on my lips as I was able to confirm that she was getting better.

(But all of that would go against the point)

As much power as being able to alter the source code of the world would be, it went counter to what I wanted. Despite the difficulty I was facing right now, I was enjoying conquering the dungeon. If I cheated and rigged the fights by altering the code, I'd go down a path I didn't want to treat.

It was one thing if I felt I didn't have a choice, but this wasn't a life or death struggle. Even if I never got past the 87th floor, it wouldn't be that big of a deal.

Cheating to make fights easier was something I didn't want to do. It didn't just cheat others, but it cheated myself.

That said, it was a different story when it came to making my life better. I looked through the skills that I didn't normally use and found one that was of a particular interest: [Solar Power]. It was a racial skill that recovered HP and MP while exposed to light. It didn't specify that it had to be actual sunlight, and experience showed that at least the dungeon's artificial light was good enough.

Opening the source code, I quickly scanned through the text and confirmed the effects to be exactly as I suspected. It was automatically triggered by exposure to light of any form, and recovered HP and MP based on the intensity of the light. Further down, I found the bit that said that it was a racial only for plant-type creature. If I changed this one line, then I could gain this and stop fearing the sun.

It would still burn me, but if I recovered my health as fast as I lost it, then it wouldn't be a lethal problem for me anymore. Just a painful one.

It wasn't ideal, but it was a solution.

I quickly commented out the line that restricted the skill to only plant-type monsters. After a quick confirmation to confirm that there shouldn't be any problems, I went to save the data when I hesitated.

(If I did this, then anyone with the skill, regardless of race, would benefit)

While it was hard to imagine any ordinary creature having this skill aside from plant-type monster, the very fact that I had it meant that there was the possibility that others would have it as well. And at the top of that list would obviously be vampires as well, who would also be the biggest beneficiaries of a skill like this. Not only that, but it was likely that most other living vampires would already have the skill.

In a lot of fictions, the very fact that vampires were weak to sunlight was one of the big balancing factors between the night walkers and everyone else. If I changed this skill carelessly and people found out, it could seriously disrupt the balance of the world. A world which I have yet to explore at all, and thus couldn't even imagine how the alteration would change things.

The pressure ended up being overwhelming, and I cancelled the changes.

I needed a safety net for moving around during the day, but something that could adversely effect the world at large wasn't an acceptable change until I learned more about it.

I needed an alternative.

Without changing anything, I started to investigate the system more deeply. From the source code window it was possible to dive deeper and check out other parts of the system. The first thing I went to was the skill list, but a cursory scan told me just how insanely huge the list was.

There was tens of thousands of entries, many of the skills being things I couldn't even imagine what they did from the name alone.

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(Phase alternating gizzard? What even the hell?)

It was something that I needed to have a proper look at someday, but I couldn't muster the energy to do it right now. Instead, I only checked out a couple that stood out. The first was [Light Resistance], the skill I really wanted but couldn't get, and I discovered why. One of the lines included a list of creatures that couldn't learn the skill, and vampires were included.

(Guess it figured)

I had gotten all the other major resistances already, so it was weird that I hadn't gotten [Light Resistance] if it wasn't for a specification like that.

Not wanting to alter the specification in the worry of the damage it could cause, I simply sighed and looked elsewhere.

One thing that was interesting about the skill list was despite how huge it was, it wasn't at capacity yet. There was still unused space dedicated to the system, enough for dozens, if not hundreds of new skills. It was possible that it was in case new skills needed to be added. Rather, that was the most likely reason. Extra space like this was a little inefficient, but was necessary for future proofing a system.

If there was space for new skills, then there wasn't any reason why I couldn't make one myself.

With a quick look around, I found a button to do just that, and got an empty page for a new skill. It contained the basic information automatically to be set as the next entry in the skill list, but otherwise was empty.

With this new skill, I just had to make something that dealt with my sunlight weakness, but nobody else could get.

The major parts of a skill were the identifier, the acquisition conditions, acquisition restrictions, and effect.

The identifier was mostly just the skill number, name, and description. The skill number was automatically included. To cover up what I was doing, I put in a dummy name and description.

([Bleeding Resistance] and [Increases one's resistance against bleeding]. That should do it)

There wasn't any rule that the contents had to do anything with the name or description after all. A quick look also confirmed that no such skill name existed before, so there wasn't any chance of a conflict or confusing the two.

Next was the acquisition condition and restrictions. For now, I set the condition as none and restriction as all. I didn't want chance anyone getting it until it was ready. If there was no way to learn the skill and the skill itself rejected everyone, it was a double layer of security that should be absolute.

Finally was the effect. I simply copied the effect from [Light Resistance]. It was a simple and straightforward effect with few lines of code to make it work.

But when I tried to save it, I got a compile error. The error descriptions pointed at almost every line of the code.

Some of them were obvious, like how having no potential skill acquisition targets was an issue, but that was only described as a warning, not an actual error. But the restrictions and effects both had errors along with plenty of errors that didn't have corresponding lines.

The fact that even the part I copied had errors meant that I sorely underestimated the complexity of the skill system. Making a new skill wasn't going to be this easy at all.

As I was reading the errors in detail, the girl I picked up suddenly stirred while laying on my body. The way she was basically grinding her face into my breast as she moved her head was especially distracting, sending unfamiliar feelings through my body in addition to warming it up, especially my face.

I even considered forcefully waking her up, but thought against it. It was best to let her wake up on her own, lest it adversely affect her health.

Instead, I saved it as a draft and took a break. It wouldn't be added to the actual skill list, but I'd be able to open it up later to make it work.

Lifting the edge of the bear fur I was using as a blanket, I glanced at the little girl's face. Despite how malnourished she was, she was pretty cute. It was clear that she didn't spend much time doing hard work due to a lack of scars or callouses, so it was possible that she wasn't treated poorly. On the other hand, there were plenty of fresh scratches, and the smell of dried blood faintly drifted from them.

The scratches could be explained by her wandering around the forest, and most likely the place I found her was where she fell asleep after getting tired. But since it was cold out, she would've froze to death if I hadn't been lead to her by the fluffballs.

But the questions that popped up were less pleasant. Why was she all alone? Why was she in the forest in the first place? Why didn't she have shoes? Why was her dress basically just a ragged sack with holes?

The softness of her fingers with the roughness of her outfit created conflicting pictures that I couldn't reconcile.

I had to ask when she woke up, but if it risked bringing up unpleasant memories, was it right to do so?

(She's so small, yet all alone. Just what had happened?)

If only those fluffballs could talk, then I could look into it without asking her, though then it was an invasion of privacy, so maybe it was best that they couldn't?

My mind meandered as one conflicting thought after another in and out of my brain, when a sudden movement caused me to divert my attention.

*cough cough*

"Mmmmmuh?"

It looked like the girl's coughing woke her up, but in a confused daze, she was startled and panicked, rising up and sitting on my thighs, preventing me from righting myself.

"Don't worry, you're safe"

"Wha...hyaa?!"

She looked at me in the eyes, then patting my belly with her hands before recoiling. The girl tried to get up, but her legs got tangled with mine and she instead fell off the couch and hit the hard floor.

In a panic, I leaned over to check if she was hurt, but the girl had already sat back up while holding her shoulder.

"Are you alright?"

"Hyaaa!"

She backed off once again, shuffling on her butt as she retreated from me.

"It's okay, I don't mean any harm"

I pushed my hands out in an attempt to calm her down, but avoided moving closer and gave her space.

"You...who are you? Where am I?"

"I'm...I'm a person who lives in the forest, and you're in my home, a cave in the mountainside"

I had forgotten, but I didn't have a name in this world. I regret not spending the time to come up with one in the long time I had alone.

"I...I'm sorry. I *cough* don't know how I got here but..."

I worried about her continued coughing, but it could've been a symptom of hypothermia. It wasn't something I knew much about. All I could hope for was that it would get better.

"It's okay. I found you out in the forest chilled to the bone, so I brought you back. You didn't do anything wrong"

"Really?"

Finally my words had loosened her tense shoulders. The way she was acting wasn't doing favours for my image of people in this world, but such a small sample size was hardly indicative.

But still, while she was still rubbing the shoulder that she had hit the ground with, her legs were tucked close to her body and her arms were wrapped around them. She was shivering as well, but while I thought it was from fear, it might've been different.

"Are you still cold? How about we warm up a bit?"

"Ah, no. I'm fine. I couldn't possibly..."

"Kids shouldn't be so reserved. I'm offering, so there's no harm in taking my hand"

I interrupted her. I couldn't stand the way the conversation was going, so more force than I intended entered my voice, causing the girl to jump.

The little girl raised an arm and started to wave it gently in the air. For a second I stood there confused as to what she was doing when I noticed something odd about her, beyond her actions.

Her eyes weren't properly focused. I didn't notice since she was properly facing towards me the entire time. But at the very beginning, she didn't even notice she was on top of me until I said something. My presumption that she was simply just in a daze might've not been right.

A closer look revealed that her pupils were a light grey, not the pitch black that was normal. It was possible that she was blind.

Not wanting to risk losing any glimpse of trust, I quickly rushed over and took the girl's hand and pulled her to her feet. But that wasn't enough for me, so I picked her up in my arms, holding her like the little child she was.

"Hya?!"

Her little shouts were starting to get a little endearing.

With a smile, I brought us to the bath tub. With a little magic, I removed the top layer of water to clean it up a little before heating what remained up to a nice steam.

The girl was pressing her body against mine as she shivered, her body twitching every time I did something.

I removed my underwear and stepped into the bath, slowly lowered us both in.

"Hya?! What is this?!"

The girl started to panic as her feet entered the warm water, and she started to squirm and kick, trying to keep her body away from the hot water. If it wasn't such a struggle to stop her from falling while it would've been cute.

"It's just a bath. Is the water too hot for you?"

"A...bath? *cough cough*"

"..."

She stopped squirming, and I stopped at her response.

"You know a bath? To bathe in?"

"You mean like those that noble people use? Are you a noble lady?"

I had to chuckle at that response, but it kinda made sense. Historically, only the rich could afford a proper heated bath. The most a commoner would get was a cold bath in a nearby river. Though I was pretty sure that changed during the Victorian Era, if this world was a pre-Victorian society, it would make sense that this girl had never had a bath before.

"I'm not a noble lady. Just someone who goes through a lot of effort to stay clean"

Technically it was hardly much effort at all, thanks to magic, but from this little girl's perspective, it might've been better for her to imagine that it was. I didn't know how common magic was in society, so it was better to let her get used to things slowly. Overwhelming her was likely to do a lot of harm, especially when I didn't have her trust.

I lowered our bodies into the hot water. The girl squirmed a little, but she bore with things the best she could as I sat her down into my lap. The bath was too deep for her without doing at least that.

Fully submerged to her shoulders, I turned the girl around and pulled her back to lean against my body as we warmed up.

"Is the water too hot?"

"No, it's fine"

"...You don't have to bear with it if it is you know"

"I'm fine! I really am!"

She panicked and turned to face me as she denied my words. I couldn't tell if she really was fine or if she was bearing with it.

"...well, it's a bit warm for me, so I'm gonna cool it off if you don't mind"

"...okay..."

With her permission, I lowered the temperature a few degrees using water magic. It was a bit too cool for me now, but I could feel the tension slowly leave the girl's body. It felt like I made the right choice.

My arms wrapped around her little body as I pulled her more closely to my body.

I'd never spent much time around kids, but it felt like it was something that wasn't as bad as I thought.

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