There were six incomplete quests on his list. Two of them were for mining: one asked for soil samples, while the other wanted to check a nearby area for ore content. Two of them were for harvesting: one needed him to collect native fruits to supplement the recovered food supplies, while another asked for a specific variety of medicinal herb.

The last two were for monster drops.

Apparently something called a cougadile was a source of valuable hides for making and patching the expedition’s tents, and vines from a flytrap could serve as a strong and weather-resistant rope.

The quests themselves had pretty big areas marked out for them in the jungle, which suited Kaldalis just fine. The already thin crowd of people going counterclockwise around the camp thinned even more as the forest grew denser, walls of trees, leaves, and vines separating him from the rest. If he didn’t listen too carefully, he might almost believe he was alone out here.

The first task was the native fruits. He could see them pretty clearly hanging from the trees above him - they looked like pear-shaped mangos, bright oranges and reds dangling out of the foliage. He felt like he could reach up with his glaive and bat them down. But, of course, it wasn’t going to be that simple.

The gathering menu looked more like a separate inventory than it looked like any sort of skill management system. From it he was able to produce a “fruit picker” as the menu called it. It looked more like an overlong lacrosse stick with teeth than anything else, but it was something. He stood up on his toes and reached into the forest canopy, trying to use it to swipe a few of the fruits.

It took him a few tries to get the hang of it. He wondered if he should have stuck with Balrim and Myrin in case there was information from the tutorial for how this worked. The real-world method of using this fruit picker seemed to be to use the teeth to hook onto the fruit and pull it down. The problem was that his harvesting skill was at zero. When he pulled the fruit down and retrieved it from the little basket, he often found himself with more stem than fruit, or a fruit that was lumpy and misshapen, and they entered into his inventory with the uninspiring name of “juice-grade pearpaya” and looked more like a junk item, failing to progress his quest. He stopped to take a look at them after the first three, and found that there was a small description saying that they could be used for a gathering quest turn-in to the harvesting skill trainer. He supposed he’d be glad for them then, even if they weren’t helping him now.

His eighth harvest attempt yielded a full pearpaya and progressed his quest, but that didn’t herald the start of a streak. There were four more failures - two of them just clumps of leafy branches instead of juice-grade fruit - before the next success. He kept his wits about him, preparing for something to spawn in and attack him, or at least for some wandering monster to try and take advantage of the precarious position the harvesting put him in, but nothing happened. And by the time he had enough of the fruit to complete the quest, he was happy to be moving on. As frustrating as the low success rate was, the boredom was worse.

The next quests were farther into the jungle, but there was a particular spot where three of the quest areas overlapped. Kaldalis set his course for that spot, but kept his eyes open on the way. The nearest one was to fight cougadiles for hides, and so he wanted to look out for them.

The cougadile itself was pretty unmistakable. It looked kind of like a green-furred sabertooth tiger, but it carried itself very low to the ground, as if perpetually coiled to pounce. The coloration made it blend into the dense jungle, and so Kaldalis didn’t see one until he reached the area where the cougadile quest overlapped with the ore-gathering quest. In this area there was a small stream cutting through the forest - presumably to let him pan for metallic sediment - and a few outcroppings of greyish stone. Against those backdrops, the first cougadile became visible, and Kaldalis brought his glaive to bear to get a head-start on the hides.

The fight itself was nothing special. The creature was clearly the same level as the nautilobsters he’d faced on the ship. When he approached, it turned to face him, locking eyes with him and bristling its fur out for combat, but only two attacks felled it before it could strike as he swept his glaive in viciously. It rewarded the same 12 exp as the beasts on the boat, too. He didn’t secure a hide from the drops, but a couple of cougadile claws would probably serve some purpose.

Kaldalis followed the stream as he continued through the jungle. Going into the gathering menu again, he found the mining menu did have a pan to sift through the sediment, and he stopped when a flash in the water caught his eye. He got some sand and gravel that seemed to fill the same purpose as the juice-grade pearpayas, and he almost groaned aloud at having to face the same struggle again - and likely two more times for the other mining and harvesting quest. But before he could, another cougadile caught his eye as it crept through the underbrush, and he leaped at the opportunity to do something other than interface with the gathering system. This time the final hit netted him a hide, and his quest ticked up by one. At least something was going right.

Now that he knew that the monsters in this area weren’t going to be visually obvious, he started noticing them more. He saw a creature that looked like a bird with a toothy maw instead of a beak that fluttered through the canopy on wings colored to look like just another pearpaya when it came to rest. He caught sight of something with a dark brown tail as it flashed from the water of the stream up into the undergrowth faster than the eye could follow. And, of course, more of the cougadile, creeping through the undergrowth, presumably looking for prey.

After a few minutes traversing the dense jungle, he had three more hides of the six he needed, and six more handfuls of useless sand from panning the stream for metal. Well, not useless. It would be tradable to a trainer for more skill, he supposed.

The third quest area that overlapped here was the other monster drop quest. It took some time for him to spot a flytrap, but that wasn’t because of their coloration. They were bright orange with threads of red and yellow running through them, and looked like something out of a botanist’s nightmare. They were the stick’s answer to the stickbug, spindly and thin, made of entwined vines, with a giant grasping flytrap for a head. Kaldalis hadn’t spotted the first one because it was simply standing stock-still. He thought it was a large shrub nestled against the trunk of a tree, vibrantly colored to ward off herbivores from its poison. It wasn’t until he stepped up right next to it to walk past and the grasping head turned to orient on him that he realized it was no mere plant.

He also let out another extremely manly war cry. Extremely manly and planned and not at all ripped from his lungs by terror.

Despite its terrifying appearance and sudden attack, it went down as easily as the cougadile, though not before scoring a hit on him, doing, surprisingly, fire damage in addition to the physical blow of its bite.

He was grateful for the drops, though. Where the other quests only asked for a handful of the target item, this one asked for twenty of the vines. This first flytrap dropped three of them, alleviating his concern that he would be hunting them for days after the cougadile hides proved not to be a 100% drop rate.

Now that he was in the area where all three overlapped, he tackled the quests in earnest. The easiest way seemed to be panning the stream for metal samples while keeping his head up and eyes open for passing cougadiles or creeping flytraps. As expected, despite putting the majority of his time into the river, he had all his cougadile hides long before he had even half of his ore samples. But he stuck with it, pushing through to complete the quest before he was willing to move on. After that, he only had to hunt down two more brightly-colored flytraps to finish off that quest as well.

As he made his way towards the next quest area - to hunt for medicinal herbs - he started paying closer attention to his surroundings. Now that he knew what the wildlife in this world looked like, he was able to pick things out more easily. He was walking through flytrap territory now, and so was able to steer clear of the creepy red creatures easily, but there was more out here than that. He caught sight of something he thought was a cougadile, but it was too small, and it vanished from sight before he could identify it more properly. He also saw an enormous winged insect zip by through the forest canopy. It was hard-shelled like a yellowjacket, with red and black stripes, though he couldn’t see more than that before it was gone.

His eye was caught, however, by a wider trail that cut through the forest. It looked like something sizable had ambled through, shouldering aside the thicker branches and brush. It must have been at least four feet tall at the shoulder, and incredibly broad. As Kaldalis watched the trail, he saw leaves and branches snapping back bit by bit back into the path. It took him just a moment to realize what those little motions meant.

Whatever left this trail had just passed by this way not long ago.

And he could catch it.

Whether driven by curiosity or by desire to put off whatever gathering still remained on his quests, Kaldalis found himself creeping through the brush along the little game trail, away from camp, and towards what he hoped was a real adventure.