181 Bluish-White flower (1/2)

Making his decision he slowly resumed his climb. Each nerve was tensed and each sense strained to the limit, ready to identify the incoming thread and to react to it. And he wouldn't be disappointed.

He had barely made 1m headway when once again the snake shot towards him from its hiding place.

This time he didn't waste time whipping out his dagger instead he let go with his right hand and used the motion to escape the incoming attack. At the same time, he used his empty hand to try to catch the snake behind its head.

The strengths of the snake where its capability of hiding and its fast linear speed while attacking. Now that its attack had missed it was hard for it to change its movement. It tried to once again retreat into the lush tree leaves to hid but Ivan's hand was faster.

With his fingers closing around the snake just behind its head he managed to catch it safely. He was now able to reaffirm his guess as to what kind of snake it was. It was a Blue Vine Snake, a snake that could commonly be found close to the blue vine which had been his target. It wasn't seen as a difficult-to-defeat monster since it could easily be caught if you knew about it.

It would try to bite its victim and inject a fast-acting paralyzing poison. It wouldn't normally attack humans as long as they didn't invade their living habitat, which he had done by climbing the tree. After all, they weren't capable of eating something as large as a human. This poison could also be extracted and then used to refine pills that acted as fast-acting painkillers.

The best method would be to keep the snake alive and milk it but with Ivan's current position of clinging to the trunk of a tree, he wasn't able to safely keep it, leaving him only with the choice of killing it now and then extract the available resources later, which would be less but there would still be some useful material.

He used his mana to summon a small flaming blade and then cut into the snake just behind its head. By separating the head from the body with the hot blade he would be able to keep as much as possible from the snake, damaging only a small part of it.

After separating the head from the body he put away both parts and continued upwards into the tree.

There weren't any more incidents and he easily reached the top of the tree. Besides the lush green leaves of the tree, there was also a bluish-white flower that had a radius of around ten centimeters. This was the flower of the blue vine and the reason he had climbed up here.

There were five petals and each of them had the same color signaling that the flower had been completely developed and had thus the maximum use for pill refining. He carefully plucked two petals, leaving behind the other three. This would ensure that the vine would survive and bear a new flower next year. If he removed more petals it may be possible that the vine wouldn't be able to survive, since the flowers were essential to recreate as well as collect energy.

Descending from the tree was easy and fast, and soon he found himself once again searching the forest for other materials.

Meanwhile, Vlada hadn't been lazy either. She had found four different groups of bears. Although bears would normally live alone the here ones living here Steelback Bears loved to meet up regularly, thus they would create something similar to small communities.

Those communities consisted of only a few caves located next to each other, making them very hard to find. Without Vlada's scouting abilities it would have taken Ivan a lot more time to find even one, as long as he didn't stumble into one.

Now he could slowly make his way towards one of the four she had found, while constantly keeping out an eye towards possible resources.

And he wasn't unfortunate. Along the way, he not only picked up a few more mosses but also flower petals, snakes and other small herbs. After getting back he would be able to refine a lot of pills. Although he would give some of the materials to the store so the others could practice as well.

Finally, he arrived at a clearing in the forest which was dominated by the huge stone in the center which was surrounded by cliffs on three sides. According to Vlada, Steelback Bears could be found in the caves which had naturally been formed inside the cliffs.

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But currently, there were no bears in sight.

”Could they all be inside the caves?”, Ivan wondered.