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.
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