When Joey woke up in the morning, he didn’t hesitate to find some animals to kill and harvest their hide once more. It turned out to be another bull as the boars ran away too quickly. Meanwhile, he found it a breeze to stab through the bull’s skull and kill it quickly, albeit not painlessly.

He didn’t really see a better way of doing so though.

After half an hour where he moved the corpse to the river and cleaned it off, he had a slightly better removed hide, as well as another 40 pieces of meat and 30 more fat lumps. Additionally, he properly drained the corpse beforehand so any issues of blood or guts were promptly dealt with. All that remained was to head north and collect the sap recommended to him, which meant he created a second tree tap as well.

But first, he placed five of the black pearls from zombie hearts into the sunlight and took note of the few hours his necklace informed him about. Then began the short trip.

Casually boring out a hollowed stick as the recipe asked for, he finished the recipe before even reaching the gravel trees at the north of the prairie. Then continued northwards even further, stepping through the stony dirt with ease before the trees began to grow a lot denser, and he noticed that the yellow barked ones stopped appearing occasionally. They stood out considerably from the gravel trees as well.

With a dark yellow bark, as well as leaves as though the tree was in fall, he felt as though he stepped into an entirely new time zone from the change in seasons.

But with the gravel trees right behind, it was as good of confirmation as anything that the two forests sat right beside one another.

Barely 30 minutes from his home at a brisk pace as well.

With the chisel and hammer, he cut out small wedges from trees to test for sap, only taking two tries to find a springy wood which couldn’t have been more alive. And as the stone tip cut into its core, a stream of red, bubbling sap immediately flowed out, at which point he expanded the hole slightly before forcing the tap into the tree. Filling at a rate no different from the oak tree, he truly wondered just how plants in this world worked.

“Can I make jerky by leaving meat out in the sun? I know that’s how you actually make it… But without salt even?” If true, he’d have an excellent way to store meat for weeks on end, and he wouldn’t be forced to keep it inside his inventory in fear of rot.

But on the topic of sap.

Given how much he needed in the near future, it made sense to tap multiple trees for now, and he used the remaining parts of a chopped stick to make an additional two hollowed out one.

Of course, all these traps ate heavily into his log supply. After checking that everything flowed well, he made sure to get another 20 sticks, and 54 logs, whilst in the gravel tree forest.

With this his supply issue immediately lessened, and he headed back to figure out what to do for the day. “Guess I make a load of bronze ingots and make that rune then. Not like I can do anything for the rest of this day.” He did try to think up other tasks which would be of a bit more interest, but quite literally all his recipes required leather to advance further. While the tongs were important for smelting, he knew that any recipes of importance would be locked behind those involving leather. His watered farm took up some time in the day, hemp stalks already up to his knees in height at a rate that others would simply call unreal.

Even the variety of plants he’d sown already sprouted, hundreds of small shoots above ground and growing aspiringly.

Unlike the refreshing scene, his smelted bronze just involved a lot of heat, then almost ruined him once more to create 9 ingots. But this was enough.

He arranged five ingots into a cross on the grid, with a final sixth one in the northern slot to complete the recipe. A single tap granted the tongs which he desired since starting.

How he evaded a burnt hand is a miracle on its own.

The bronze tongs didn’t gleam with the same sort of edge prominent in his other bronze tools, instead far rougher as though coated in a layer of sand. This sort of spattered coating allowed his hands to better grip the metal, unlike trying to hold a smooth rod, and especially helped when closing the tongs around the circular crucible neck to pick it up.

Great physical strength made the act of carrying and pouring a breeze as well. This craft required just 6 ingots, which meant he technically came out 3 ahead from this.

By the time he finished all this, an expected sight appeared above him. Light grey clouds completely covered the sky, with sunlight only barely piercing through. Just an hour until a light drizzle began, only to ramp up to a storm over the half hour after that.

With the oven smothered, he walked back home and switched into the hemp shirt due to the comfort it offered over leather. And from there, well, he did as he expected.

It took two hours to carve the two boar totems.

These totes differed somewhat from the owl and serpent, but in a way mimicked their concepts. The thin boar fur required some strangely skilled carving to properly denote how such a thing flowed over the boar’s body without completely chipping thousands of tiny notches into the wood. Furthermore, the tusks extended out of the wood a fair distance along with the nose, but the eyes actually had to extend inwards. Thankfully he didn’t have to carve poor quality ones himself, or it’d take months before he finally acquired one.

By placing the three shoddy totems into the grid’s top left spaces, he merged them into a poor quality totem, ready for usage tomorrow.

“Fuck… I forgot about the orbs. Surely it’ll be fine? How bad can it be to leave them out beneath–” Joey gulped. It took seconds for the very visceral reaction Diavolo held to the stars, that the man with years of magical knowledge knew of no way to block out their sight besides depending on natural factors!

Otherwise, why else would he care about the sun’s position?

The necklace might have told him it still rained outside, but his own two eyes confirmed that night had not fallen.

He ran to the tree, naked, and grabbed all five black pearls…

“Wait. Definitely five of them, so where is… Did a fucking slime grab it?” Head swivelled in a wild panic, but nowhere did he see even the slightest sign of a glowing red object. The last one completely vanished, and he just hoped that this didn’t mean anything.

After a few minutes, Joey made it back to the workshop room, dried off, and changed back into his dry clothes.

It did not take long for night to fall, and he slept after a bit of fibre separation. In just the 50 minutes required to strip 15 stalks, he gathered 175 fibres, of which he transformed 150 into string. The results were then 50 string, and 84 fibres, a fair amount for now.

* * *

When he woke up the next morning, it’d stopped raining, and a few hours of direct sunlight cleared up most of the wet dirt, although he still noticed rain in the branches of many trees or the grass itself.

“Where to find a dry place… Impeccably dry, whatever that means,” he pondered over the notes’ description whilst putting on the leather armour and heading over to the northern yellow trees. The ritual of the boar specified that the totem only responded when covered by earth in an impeccably dry place, which meant trying to fulfil its somewhat vague requirements.

But an answer was soon found.

“Would this count?” He rubbed his chin, looking down into the open top mine and how the fire clay here so quickly dried back into powdery substance after just one night.

Perhaps none of this material retained water all too well, and it flowed away on top of evaporating. He aimed to try out his plan after the hide was prepared.

Firstly, he plugged the three taps as their cups completely overflowed after last night, then stored them whilst harvesting some bark. It didn’t take long to find one which died, and he easily cut away the bark in layers with his axe. Once 3 units of it had been stored, he chopped the rest of the trunk into 8 logs before leaving the sticks to decompose. Like that, he could finally go ahead and make leather, although he didn’t understand how a sticky substance filled with ground bark actually tanned hide.

“Need to leave the pearls out. And try to not forget about them, now would be a great time for you to come alive, Sal.” He placed the rock beneath the oak tree to talk to, and placed the four objects further away such that direct sunlight would hit regardless of the time of day.

He tore the bark into shreds by hand. Milled it into a fine powder with a heavy rock.

And added one unit at a time to each cup of sap.

Almost in an instant, he felt how the sticky, smooth sap gained an obvious roughness from the ground bark. But more than that, its viscosity greatly fell, now more like running his hand through oil instead of the honey-like property it held moments ago. If it was this easy to work, he didn’t doubt the ability to smear it all over the hide.

For now, he only mixed in one cup’s worth to see how much more he’d need.

Hand smeared in the runny substance, the hide received a fair douse of fluid. However, it became apparent that one cup only covered one side, and as such another grounded unit of bark entered a second cup to finish off this job.

“Leave it for a day, and hopefully we have quite a bit of leather tomorrow. Though, I don’t think it’s enough for some pants.” Hands covered in the runny substance, he placed the cups back into his inventory and quickly washed off at the river.

Now came the next rune.

At the open air mine, he found a flat space and dug a small hole for the totem to stand in, such that half the totem remained exposed. From there, he filled in the hole with the dug out material until level with the surrounding ground again. Then came the ritual, still performable in just a leaf skirt, fortunately. The process was, as expected, pretty similar to the ritual of the owl. Shake the chimes in a rhythm for ten cycles, perform some bows, shake once more.

Perhaps what stood out were the natural phenomena which represented the ritual working.

The ground itself gently vibrated where he stood, with the totem as a clear source. With every shake of the chime, he felt the vibrations grow stronger, so much so that he almost lost his balance at one point, but quickly repositioned himself to finish the ritual.

As he prostrated to the ruins once more, those vibrations turned to a rumble, and then a quake.

The nearby pile of rocks toppled as some dislodged, but their small size meant that he ignored the danger. Although, none damaged him in the fact, and after about 30 seconds of the rumbling, he saw half the totem still above ground, but lifted it up to see how everything below vanished.

Everything, except a smooth, circular disc of wood. Carved with the symbol of two triangles inverted and overlaid on one another. Within the carving, some sort of pale dust formed and vanished, flowing about like the water from the serpent rune or lightning in the owl rune.

Using the lens of nature revealed green flows within the rune’s lettering. Whilst a different element, all three runes contained this same type of magic.

That gave rise to an idea on how ‘colours’ worked in the lens.

Rather than stating elements, it seemed to distinctly identify ‘types of magic’ as he preferred to call it.

Solar magic clearly differed from farming and nature magic. Meanwhile, the black pearls belonged to some sort of dark or black magic. Therefore, he believed that more colours should exist to correspond to their own types of magic, but for now he didn’t know how to discover any of those things. Also, it made sense for such things to not grow in his surroundings as they may need more magical power to even appear in the first place. Like alchemical plants as a perfect example!

But in the end, Joey only did all this theory crafting for a single reason.

There was nothing to do unless he decided to venture further out, and like hell he’d try taking such a risk at the moment.