Kai was happily humming a tune as she started to arrange her mini fire pit. She found rocks strewn about the forest and a pile of various sized broken and old bamboo along with other burnable debris. These materials were essential in allowing her to cook up what she managed to find in the forest.

While collecting the fire materials, she also went through the forest keeping an eye out for edible plants that the wildlife had easily ignored due to the sheer volume of abundant vegetation. That abundance is what Kai and Mao needed in this unknown land that resembled an Asian landscape.

Kai was glad to have packed a few miniature guide books. One of these such books being a guide to wild plants across the world that are edible.

Fortunately, the guide book gives a brief explanation on how to find, identify and cook certain wild plants that she was unfamiliar with.

Unfortunately, some plants in this terrain seemed beyond comprehension, as the fruit hanging off one of these strange trees looked plump and delicious with a rainbow hue. It did not appear in her books so she simply ignored it, not wanting to chance what it may have in store for them. Instead, she documented it in a mini sketchbook and decided to pluck a few and carry them with her until she could verify with a local if it was edible. These fruits gave off a cherry-lime scent and were the size of a plump peach however the surface was smooth and gave off a holographic sheen to it, as if it had a plastic synthetic coating. It reminded her of a holographic background in the common playing cards she had as a kid or baseball cards she saw her friends play with in elementary school.

The tree itself appeared dwarf sized like a genetically engineered apple tree and the leaves looked like a strange combination of a lily pad that was crossed with a maple tree, round and broad in the middle with jagged pointed ends pointing out a few inches apart.

Kai was very fascinated but did not dwell too long on these types of specimens as she was hungry and needed to continue working hard to gain a lunch. She did not want to dip too far into her supplies and she generally gathered a generous amount of identifiable plants that tickled her fancy, as these plants were sometimes not an option in her area on earth due to the geographical location.

Mug wart was one of the plants she came across in abundance as well as a different variety of fiddlehead ferns. She also found yarrow and miner’s lettuce among the brush. Common supermarket plants like bok choi and chinese broccoli sprouted in sandy areas and were easily identifiable due to the large size that they grew, due to their undisturbed overnutritions growth.

Wild herbs like Mint, Thai basil, and Dill made her excited, as more recognizable plants were littered across the space, making her inner food demon salivate. Rock arugula was found down river in a dryer area when she was looking for sizable rocks. Watercress was fund closer toward the river, growing in the muddy riverside.

In the meantime, wild ginseng was sniffed out by Mao who gently used his delicate paw-beans to dig out the sensitive root. He wasn’t a fan, but he knew if combined with Kai’s variety of plants, could make her happy and might be of use to him later via trade or bargaining chip. Mao also brought over a few mushrooms, identifying a shiitake mushroom under a rotting bamboo tree, as the smell of the fresh fungus was familiar to him growing up in the household.

Kai always let Mao sniff the foodstuff she played with as it helped his curiosity grow with the variety of seasonal and unusual vegetation that she brought in. His sense of smell coupled with the pendant’s knowledge as he wandered the forest allowed him to also bring in a sizeable edible haul, albeit one at a time due to his cute little doggie-retriever attitude.

All these edible plants were worth their weight in gold. Each one seemed to belong to a different region on earth yet here they were, growing side by side in harmony. The weather was perfect, the dirt seemed rich, and the verities of these edible plants all thrived in this specific area, almost surrounding this body of water.

Kai did not have to go too far to find something else that caught her eye and she constantly zig-zagged around the area, generally identifying and finding something she would be able to make with later. Her exuberance and excited attitude started to decline as her stomach started to violently grumble in protest as she continuously knelt and dug or cut or pulled or picked to her hearts content. At some point, she had to physically stop in her tracks as she started feeling dizzy and fatigued from all her activities and decided to start prepping and cooking.

She sighed in defeat as her body naturally gave her the signs to postpone the harvesting frenzy and actually focus on feeding itself. With her last haul being little shallots, she trudged back to camp and actively started to make the fire, fishing out a lighter for convenience. She had her delivered flint and steel kit however the lighter was a convenient tool that would be used sparingly for times when a fire needed to happen immediately, especially for instances like these where the stomach cramps from hunger were too unbearable.

Mao, on the other hand, decided to spend a little more time to continue the forage, keeping tabs on his separate pile of contribution so that Kai wouldn’t dip into it too soon.

The little flame from the lighter transitioned to a bigger and brighter flame and soon consumed the starter twigs whole, causing Kai to immediately build up the fire with the materials on hand. She started mentally panicking, thinking she did not have enough.

This feeling was quelled and later transformed to confusion when she saw Mao walk back effortlessly, tail held high, with a huge dry log trailing behind him. The pendant’s ghostly paw-hand seemed to be the one doing all the work in dragging the log back while Mao was using the pendant as a proxy to bring it to the camp location. It seemed impressive that this feline managed to bring home something Kai would have had to process for over an hour with her hatchet in order to bring back. What was even more shocking was that Kapt’n was able to drag it to the site and peel the bark off by hand as further material for the fire. Kai’s eyes were bugged out the whole time and almost missed the opportunity to add more fuel to the fire, which caused her to yelp quickly before falling to her knees to blow more air and fuel to rekindle the fighting flame.

Kai had a genuine smile on her face as she knew that everyone was doing their all, in order to progress in the long stretch. Each moment spent here kept on igniting more curiosity and a sense of adventure. She did not come across any animal but at this point she was wary of anything wanting to devour her. She needed to stop these paranoid thoughts and focus on the task at hand!