Chapter 364: Name Like Home

Although Kang Taewoo was not immune to physical damage, its racial traits meant that things like poison had no effect on it either.

Joo Joowon fell silent for a moment, not knowing what to say. He could only force an awkward smile and reply, "That’s... pretty convenient."

While holding its axe, Kang Taewoo casually asked, as though nothing unusual had happened, "By the way, my lord, are all the names I saw on the map your territory’s residents?"

"Yes. Why do you ask?" Joo Joowon wondered about it for a moment. Surely Kang Taewoo was not making fun of the names he had chosen because they sounded too bad, right?

Otherwise, the next time he took in any animals or plants, should he randomly pick a surname from the list of the hundred most common Chinese surnames before giving them names?

"No! It’s nothing!" Kang Taewoo’s eyes suddenly lit up. "I just happened to come across a territory whose naming style is the same as our race’s. It caught me a little by surprise."

"...?"

Joo Joowon thought about it for a moment before finally understanding. Many people did give their toys cute or somewhat silly names. The most common approach was to use repeated words or syllables. However, even so, wasn’t that still quite different from a name like Kang Taewoo’s?

Then again, when he thought about it carefully, if Byeol had not been neutered and had given birth to several kittens in one litter, he might genuinely have named them that way, too. Something like First Kitten, Second Kitten, and so on. He would simply go with whatever names were easiest to say.

Besides, there were players and entire worlds inhabited by animal races among the player community. Surely he was not the only one who had given his residents names like these, right?

Joo Joowon was curious, so he simply asked Kang Taewoo about it.

Kang Taewoo poured out its grievances. "Our names were all like this in the beginning. But as our civilization developed, the names people gave each other started getting stranger and stranger. They even complain that names like ours are strange. What’s so strange about them?"

They even thought there were too many people with the same name. What a joke! If there were another bear with the same name as it, Kang Taewoo would absolutely feel an instant connection with that bear and insist on becoming sworn brothers!

Joo Joowon, however, did not find this surprising at all. It was an inevitable stage in the development of civilization.

Regardless of whether one looked at Eastern or Western cultures, the earliest names were generally rather casual. People might be named after what they did for a living, or after whatever happened to be around them.

There had even been people in the past whose names were things like Roof Tile or Hemp Rope, hardly proper names at all. However, as civilization developed, various customs, etiquette, and cultural traditions emerged. Names, being a form of identification used when communicating with outsiders, naturally became increasingly formal. People no longer chose them so casually.

When a game connected countless different worlds, however, this kind of change could become even more intense. It was essentially a form of cultural invasion.

If a race living in a low-level world discovered that the customs of a higher-level world were different from its own, its members would naturally imitate those customs without even realizing it. Before long, they might begin to feel that the things originally belonging to their own culture were somewhat embarrassing or inferior.

If they had ever been mocked for their customs, the change would become even more noticeable.

Whenever cultures came into contact and blended with one another, some things were inevitably altered.

If Byeol and the others eventually decided that their names were no longer suitable and wanted to change them, Joo Joowon would support their decision, too. After all, from the perspective of human civilization, names like these were really only suitable as nicknames. Very few people would actually use such names as their formal names.

Kang Taewoo, on the other hand, finally felt as though it had met someone from its hometown. Even Joo Joowon’s stinginess no longer seemed quite so irritating to it.

After all, when it thought about it carefully, this was not entirely unreasonable. For races like theirs, which were not particularly powerful, establishing a little "utopia" of their own really did require careful budgeting and making every resource count.

Joo Joowon did not know that Kang Taewoo was already making excuses for itself. Even if he needed to purchase other resources, he would still have to cut down all the trees on the mountain. Otherwise, Earthfire would have no way to take up residence within the city walls.

They stopped in an area with plenty of trees. Kang Taewoo immediately took out the lumberjacking axes from its inventory. Although it did not know the lord’s level, judging from his aura, he was certainly not weak. Since he had dared to make such a claim, he must have had some confidence in his abilities.

And as it turned out, that was indeed the case.

Joo Joowon moved his fingertips slightly, and ten strands of spider silk quickly wrapped themselves around the axe handles.

Since this was her first attempt, he had no intention of going all out just yet.

Kang Taewoo froze for a moment as it watched Joo Joowon put his strength into cutting down ten trees at once. After swinging the axes more than a dozen times in succession, the trees finally turned into streaks of white light and came crashing down across the ground. In their place, neat, square blocks of wood were left scattered everywhere.

This was one of the special features of the game’s lumberjacking axes. Players did not need to process the wood themselves. Once a tree was cut down, it would turn directly into processed basic wood, eliminating the need for any further work.

Joo Joowon was also stunned when he saw this. He had not expected a game that had previously pursued "realism" to suddenly become so "game-like."

However, he had only started playing games recently. Since the Age of Apocalypse had been given the name of a game, it was only natural that it would have plenty of game-like features. He had simply begun to explore it more deeply now. There was nothing particularly surprising about that.

With that thought, Joo Joowon stopped worrying about this change.