[NR] Double Drumsticks - Chapter 627

Jason slept for the entire night. While he personally thought he was perfectly fine on just a few hours of sleep and some meditation. He also admitted that he might not be the best judge of it and so didn’t put it to the test. Once he started writing the manual, he wasn’t going to stop for anything besides food and sleep.

His hidden room under his house was full of various supplies. Rosha and Courtney knew and would be taking shorter trips so they could check in more often. Oh, and Rosha was going to be babysitting Lily.

The last time Jason had closed up, he had let Lily just stick around on the surface. It isn’t like she is weak or anything. But this time since the girls wouldn’t be going deep, Lily would be fine traveling with them. And while it might seem odd to go from saying she isn’t weak to not wanting her to go too deep, it was more that his critter harness didn’t fit on them.

Jason had to pause at that. Yep, definitely seemed like he was being too protective. He can’t help but shake his head when he realized he was playing the overprotective dad role.

Jason sighed, but calmed himself. This manual wasn’t going to require supernatural focus or anything, but he was going to put his all into it. So he ate a cooked meal for what was going to be the last time in a while and then headed into his hidden room.

An hour of mediation to center himself. Careful work preparing a batch of black ink. Then Jason placed the first page of vellum onto a writing stand he had made for the task and carved his first quill.

Jason had been tempted to use a brush, but that wasn’t the proper tool for the job. While a brush was perfect for paper, it was better to use a quill or pen with vellum. At least that is what he had read online and simple testing by him seemed to agree? But that was mostly just a feeling.

Whatever the case, he could use either tool and so it didn’t matter. Better to go with the accepted advice. Well, technically, the advice was always talking about pens, but feathers were easier to source for him and allowed for a bit more customizability. Though it would mean a bunch of quill sharpening.

Ready, Jason began to write down his manual. The scratching of his quill, the only thing accompanying him in his isolation. And once the front of the page was complete, at least the black portion, he didn’t move onto the back, instead proceeding to the third page, second sheet of vellum, to let the first dry. This was going to take a while and he was going to do it right.

On the other hand, Rosha was practically bouncing through the forest. Lily had been with them for a few days now and it was amazing. While she wouldn’t say that Jason was ignoring her, by hanging around the clearing so much, there aren’t really that many chances to fight with her.

The only downside is that they can’t go out into the compressed biomes and beyond. Though the fact they wouldn’t be tromping through strange foliage that might make Lily sick if she ate it was a good thing in Rosha’s book.

The trio paused, there was a sound to the right. Rosha’s bow is out though not aimed in that direction. A good thing, as from the opposite direction a four-legged bird bursts out of the underbrush.

It isn’t the biggest, only coming to her waist, but the beak looks sharp enough to be a threat. Rosha’s aims to left and slightly down from at rest, and she fires a half-pull arrow towards the center of mass. The quadruped bird squawks as it stops charging to forcefully dodge to the side.

Right into the path of Lily, who has her spikes activated. They crash together, but despite losing flight, it seems the bird thing hadn’t lost the hollow bones and it crumbles under her savage tackle.

Rosha turns back to the right, but Courtney has already finished the fight. There was a second of those bird things, but at some point she had snuck up behind it and gave it a new “smile”. Still, Rosha doesn’t relax quite yet. She keeps her bow at a neutral position as she doesn’t know from what direction or height any additional threat will come from.

Twang

Her bow is now pointing almost directly upward and a third one of those creatures falls down dead right in front of the group. While its claws allowed the thing to clamber around in the trees, it wasn’t a good enough climber to dodge.

The trio holds steady for another minute or so before they finally relax a little. Though Rosha maintains over watch as Courtney begins to harvest anything worthwhile from the dead monsters. Which turns out to mean just their beaks.

For some reason, while their bones are still hollow and their bodies are quite light, the beaks are chock full of metal Qi. Still not that heavy and Courtney figures they probably source the metal from the gravel they use in their crop. Because of course, when you’re thinking of a light metal, most modern people are going to think of aluminum. A metal that is quite abundant, if hard to extract without the right technology. Or by cheating with Qi, it seems.

Whatever the case may be, the beaks are about the perfect trade good for the trio. Significant weight and size to value ratio, plus easy to carry? Here birdy, birdy, birdy! Why’d only three of you show up?

Now, sure, Rosha wasn’t the biggest fan of killing something for just one little body part. That sort of nonsense had caused more than enough grief irl whether it was horns, tusks, fins, whatever other oddity people decided they “needed”. However, this was the Deep Wilds. Even in NeoRealm proper, Rosha would be careful about not overhunting an area.

In the Deep Wilds, any such worry was moot. It doesn’t matter how many of something you kill. If it is helpful to the Deep Wilds, it will be preserved. In the same way that if something is harmful, that something better get out or it isn’t going to live long. And this wasn’t surface level judgment. It was more like the very rules of reality within the Deep Wilds were warped to achieve this, replacing even the classic “survival of the fittest” as the top rule in some ways.