It was nearly four pm by the time the others got back. Heather had a rather full vegetable bag, while Sadie had a heavy backpack and a long branch she was more or less using as a second walking stick. They didn’t even wait to get into normal talking distance before Akari shouted “Did you bring those paint markers for blazing?”

  “Yes, I have them,” Danielle called back.

  “Well get them ready to go, because we found something awesome and we need to mark it before we forget where it is!” Akari called.

  Danielle and Cassy exchanged glances. “I guess it’s our turn to head out,” Danielle said.

  She and Cassy got ready; Danielle brought her backpack and vegetable bag and a few more shopping-type bags, while Cassy took her weather gear out of her satchel and brought the satchel and her shopping bags and a basket. Danielle made sure she had the paint pens and a full canteen of water.

  “You guys look kinda, um, pink,” Sadie said when they got closer.

  “What?” Cassy asked, then looked down at her arms. “Oh no. Our sunscreen must have worn off!”

  That was enough for everyone to pause and reapply sunscreen. “I think we’ll set up the tents while you’re gone,” Heather said.

  “Just make sure you keep the water distillers going, too,” Danielle said. “We’ll be short of clean water otherwise.”

  “We will,” Sadie promised. “Heather, can you heal sunburn?”

  Heather frowned. “I don’t think so, but it’s worth a try,” she said, coming up to Danielle and reaching out to touch her arm. She looked to her System Interface for a moment, then shook her head. “Sorry. Not a wound.”

  “We’ll use that Camper’s After-Sun Lotion tomorrow,” Danielle said. “It’ll be fine. We’re not beet red, so it’s just a mild burn, and we’re about to go into a shady area, right?”

  “Mostly,” Akari said. “If you’re not in pain or anything, then come on – we need to get the path blazed while I remember it!”

  “OK, OK, we’re coming already,” Cassy said, and they set out.

  Akari walked quickly down the riverbank; possibly more quickly than she realized, Danielle thought, because she was clearly excited. Cassy ended up out of breath, but she kept up. After a while, Akari slowed down and started examining the tree line more closely. “There!” she said, a minute later. “That’s the tree with the funny-looking knob on it; that’s where we want to start going east.”

  Danielle drew a circle around the funny-looking knot with her paint pen, and they stepped into the trees. Cassy activated her Notice Edible Plants Skill a minute later, and started scanning the forest to either side. Akari, meanwhile, was looking for landmarks again. She had Danielle mark various trees, some of which were landmarks in their own right, others of which were simply nearby to things she remembered.

  “Oh, I found something good, I think!” Cassy said. “It’s right over there!”

  “Can it wait until we’re on our way back?” Akari asked. “I really don’t want to lose my path.”

  “Oh. Well, wait here then, and I’ll just go over and grab some sample leaves so we can identify the plant later, OK?” Cassy proposed.

  “Will you be in easy sight the whole time?” Danielle said. “I’m not clear on what you’re pointing to.”

  “Yeah, it’s not that far,” Cassy said. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  She walked over to some bushes growing between the trees, and examined them. “It’s berries!” she announced. “Not sure what kind – they look red. I don’t think they’re completely ripe yet, though.” She picked some leaves and broke off the end of a berry cluster and came back. Danielle and Akari both looked them over with interest. Neither recognized them from the books, so Cassy put them in her bag and they moved on, continuing to mark convenient trees as they went.

  Finally, they reached a clearing, and stepped out at the foot of a hill. It was a reasonably gentle rise covered in scrubby bushes. There were a few burned trunks of trees standing her and there, but they seemed old, and all the thriving greenery around them said that the fire had been a long time ago – the previous year at least, possibly longer. “This is it!” Akari said gleefully.

  Danielle looked around. Low shrubbery and rocks were the order of the day, though she did see a swath of mana-purple plants, like a paint stroke across the canvas of green, off to the north. “What am I supposed to be getting excited about?” she asked in confusion; then she heard Cassy gasp.

  “More food!” Cassy said. “I activated my Skill, and practically the whole hill lit up!”

  “Go ahead and see if you can identify these,” Akari said, “but if you can’t remember them, I’ll tell you.”

  Danielle walked in a little way and bent to examine the most common foliage around her. The pointy oval-ish leaves didn’t seem very distinctive, especially compared to what Cassy had found in the woods, but after a moment she realized the low bushes had berries on them.

  “Is it more unripe blueberries?” she asked. “The bush is kind of different from the ones we saw along the road, but I think it’s blueberries.”

  “I think so too,” Cassy said. “The bush is different, but the ones by the road were dealing with shade and these have an open field. The berries are pretty much the same, though.”

  “It sure is!” Akari said. “A massive, massive field of blueberries, and here’s the best part – those purple ones? They’re growing purple berries, just like the purple tomato plants grow purple tomatoes.”

  “Ooh. You think it’s another source of mana?” Danielle asked.

  Akari grinned. “That’s what we figure. We’re going to have to come camping again in a week or two and pick ourselves silly. Sadie says she’ll work on more drying racks. You two have to help us figure out if we can preserve the mana berries any way that won’t lose the mana.”

  “Why us two?” Cassy asked bemusedly.

  “Well, you are the mana experts,” Akari said. “Not to mention, the party members who can get the most out of the bonus mana source.”

  “Well, we’ve eliminated cooking,” Danielle said. “We’ll have to try drying next.”

  “I’m pretty sure cutting releases the mana too, though,” Cassy said. “We’ll have to try poking a hole or two and drying them whole. Or in the case of the berries, maybe they’ll be small enough to manage without the holes.”

  “You see why I was so excited to make sure the path was blazed, though?” Akari said. “This is a much bigger patch than the cherry tomatoes. This’ll be big enough to share and sell and stuff.”

  “And that is exciting,” Danielle agreed. “It’ll be even more exciting if at least one of us figures out the System Skill for drying plants, because then it’ll be a lot easier to preserve the harvest.”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Heather’s working on it,” Akari said. “She’s going more for the requirements for Herbalist than how you’re going about it, with the clothes drying and stuff.”

  “That might be smarter,” Danielle said. “We know for sure it’ll work, for one thing. I want to be able to use it for other stuff, too, but for all I know the Herbalist Class Skill would do that.”

  “Well, if she gets it first, I bet she’ll be happy to have something to do between healings,” Cassy said.

  Danielle nodded. “Like she was saying earlier. We can’t leave it all to her though; not if we’re going to take advantage of all this! I’m guessing the Skill is another one that the whole party could have, and we’d still run out of uses. Maybe even worse than Purify Food.” She looked around. “Anyway, let me blaze one more tree, and then we can head back into the forest and try to find some new stuff.”

  “Sure,” Akari agreed. “We actually came at this patch from a little more to the south the first time, so we should work our way back towards the river at an angle towards the north, to catch stuff that Heather and Cassy’s Skills haven’t reached yet.”

  “Works for me,” Cassy said. “I bet Heather’s Skill couldn’t see anything but the blueberries around here, so I’ll activate as soon as we get going the other way.”

  Danielle marked one more blaze, and then they started off at an angle to their previous path. “I hear water – let’s see if we can find the stream and follow that back to the river,” Cassy said a few minutes later.

  “Sounds good,” Akari said. “There will be different stuff there for sure.”

  They diverted further north and kept going, following Cassy’s ears. The river was presumably somewhere fifteen minutes’ walk or so to their left. A few minutes further on, Danielle suddenly pointed to the right, and exclaimed, “Oh! That’s an edible plant! I think? I think that’s the stuff Heather found on Saturday, do you see it, Cassy?”

  Cassy turned and looked where she pointed. “Oh, yeah, good catch! Let’s go pick some,” she said. “I was looking mostly to the left, away from the blueberry hill; I might’ve passed right by it.”

  They went over and started harvesting the greens. “I think we figured out what this stuff is,” Akari said. “It’s called miner’s lettuce.”

  “Huh. Weird name, but it does make a decent salad,” Danielle said. It was a fairly large patch, so they filled her vegetable bag full of it before moving on towards the water Cassy was hearing again.

  Soon Danielle and Akari could hear the water as well; it sounded like a small stream, and they were fairly close, but there was a brambly thicket in their way. They were just debating which way to go around, when Cassy refreshed her Skill and exclaimed, “Wait – I think they’re more berry bushes!” They went closer, and it almost immediately became evident that Cassy was right; the bushes were dripping with what looked for all the world like orange raspberries.

  “I guess they’re not ripe either,” Akari said disappointedly.

  “Aren’t they?” Cassy said, sounding excited, and picked one. She popped into her mouth and chewed, grinning. “They definitely are!” she announced.

  “What – aren’t raspberries supposed to be dark red, though?” Akari asked.

  “They aren’t raspberries, they’re salmonberries,” Cassy said. “They grow around the stream in the camping area, too, if you follow it far enough from the tent sites.”

  “So how do we tell what’s ripe?” Danielle asked.

  “Unripe ones will be yellower, and have more of the hair-looking stuff sticking out,” Cassy said. “Ripe ones can be redder than this, but it varies from bush to bush. All the ripe ones on a given bush will be about the same, though, unless there are mana traits involved.”

  Danielle picked a few of the pink-tinged orange berries and tried them. “Juicy,” she commented. “Not very strong-flavored, but nice. It’s nice to have something sweet, too.”

  Akari also tried some. “Not bad,” she said. “I’m not seeing a lot of yellow. Do they just ripen earlier than everything else?”

  “Looks like it,” Cassy said. “It tracks with what I remember from camping trips, too. We find salmonberries if it’s early in the season when we go, and blueberries if it’s later.”

  “Well. Let’s pick a whole bunch,” Danielle said, eating a few more. “We’ll have to be really careful carrying them back, though, they seem pretty squishy.”

  The others agreed, and they spent a good hour picking (and eating) the orange berries. Cassy passed on berry facts from her parents: “Some people think they’re named for their color, because they can be pretty close to the color salmon; but it’s mostly because the native peoples used to eat them with salmon, the fish, back in the pre-industrial era,” she said. She went on talking about how they’d never been farmed, because they were hard to preserve. “They don’t freeze or dry well – that might be a problem for us, but you can make juice or jam out of them, or even fruit rolls supposedly, but we never did that with them.”

  “Did you ever make fruit rolls with other fruit?” Danielle asked. “I always thought those were kind of, you know, a highly processed, slightly artificial kind of food.”

  “Oh, Mom used to make blueberry leather for Dad all the time; it’s one of his favorites,” Cassy said. “It’s just a fancy way of doing dried fruit, where you kind of grind it to paste and dry the paste instead of drying the fruit whole. The fruit rolls in the store aren’t that much like the real stuff – mom says they’re actually made with fruit juice and some kind of seaweed extract, which just blows my mind.”

  “Seaweed. Now that’s something we don’t have access to,” Danielle said.

  “Yeah. We’ll have to make the ‘leather’ kind – it’s better, though, because it has more nutrients and even some fiber. It’s basically fruit jerky, and until we get the tools to make jams, it’s the next best thing. If you put a circle of it in oatmeal before you cook it, it’ll soften up and melt into it and you can pretend it was jam!” Cassy said excitedly. “I would’ve told you all about this once we had blueberries. You can dry blueberries whole, but blueberry leather fruit rolls feel like good old fashioned comfort food to me. It’s probably a weird Returned family thing, but hey, it’s useful out here so I might as well share it, right?”

  “Are we going to need tools for it?” Danielle asked. “I don’t think we can put fruit puree on Sadie’s drying racks.”

  “Oh – ouch. Yeah. We’re going to have to make some kind of tray to put it on,” Cassy said. “Back home, we just used baking sheets and parchment paper, but out here I’m not sure. Maybe we could make something with wood slats, so they fit close together, but when it’s dry we can turn it over and take the slats off? The trick will be to keep it from sticking. If we just carve a tray shape in a log, it’ll get stuck in there and be super hard to get out.”

  “Maybe wood slats, and we use the leftover wax from the pemmican to wax them before we cover them,” Danielle said.

  “Yeah, maybe! We, uh, might have to just eat this batch, though,” Cassy said. “Like I said, they don’t keep well. We’ll have to eat these while we make tools, then come back and harvest more, and see if we can get it to work on that batch.”

  “If we’re not going to preserve these, then let’s not pick too much,” Akari said. “Let’s give up on the stream and just blaze another trail back to the river, and share them with the others, and discuss the fruit leather rolls plan with Sadie.”

  “We’re practically on the stream,” Cassy countered. “I’m pretty sure these berry bushes are right on the bank. Let’s see if we can’t follow it out, like we said before.”

  “All right, that’ll be easier to follow back if it works,” Akari agreed.

  “It’ll be good to save on the paint pens, too,” Danielle said. “They weren’t really meant for this, and they’re kind of a cheap version – a necessities store isn’t exactly the bastion of quality art supplies that Craft Annex is, you know?”

  “What are you getting at? They’re working fine, aren’t they?” Akari said, starting to walk around the bushes towards the west.

  “Yeah, but I’m worried the one I’ve been using most is already running low on ink,” Danielle said.

  “Oh. Well that’s annoying,” Akari said. “Do you think they’ll sell some proper blazing paint in the catalog?”

  “No idea,” Danielle said.

  “They’ll probably want us to do it some other way,” Cassy said in tones of annoyance. “Which they of course won’t tell us, because everyone knows that’s how it’s done.”

  “No suggestions from your parents on that one?” Akari asked.

  “They suggested using Memorize for the first year at least, so other people wouldn’t just follow my trail and snatch my food source,” Cassy admitted. “They said early on, people band together according to their school cliques, and competition between the bands can be pretty cut-throat; since I’m not part of one, they said I have to be extra careful not to just give away everything up front, because if they can replace trusting an unknown with trusting someone familiar, they probably will.”

  “Lucky for you it’s two schools and a whole bunch of home-tutoring students,” Danielle joked. “This way, everybody is all distrustful and crazy equally!”

  “Hah. Maybe. What’s really lucky is that I met you guys the first day,” Cassy said. “If I hadn’t met you four, I don’t know what I would’ve done when things got scary with my roommates.”

  “Aw. I’m glad things worked out. Heh, even if you did kind of give us a scare when we first found you camped out at our door like that,” Danielle said.

  “Yeah. It was only a week ago,” Cassy said. “Feels like forever, though. Two weeks ago? It’s like it was another life or something.”

  “It’s because everything we’re doing since then is new and urgent,” Akari said. “It’s like how we expect to unlock a bunch of news Skills when we get to the Access Point, even though it’s only been a few weeks. That’ll slow down, for sure. I mean, it has to, right? If we’re unlocking tons of Skills, it’s because we’re doing tons of new things. It makes it feel like everything’s weird and unsettled and time’s moving faster and slower and – whatever. It’s got to settle out at some point.”

  “Yeah. We’ll get our feet under us, and make a bunch of tools and unlock the Skills we need and then things will settle into a new flavor of normal for a few months,” Cassy said. “Not sure if that’ll survive winter arriving, the first time, but by year two, we’ll be old hands, right?”

  ! Paid tiers already have the end of volume 1, which is chapter 19. Starting next week, $10 patrons will be able to read at least two weeks ahead. $4 Patrons get the week's posts as a single big chapter on the Saturday before they appear on Royal Road. I'm planning some occasional bonus content there as well, but I'm not promising a schedule on that. Finally, Patrons can join Discord with special roles to gain access to a special character Q&A channel.

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