Chapter 16: [Vol-1] Ch.16 Diversified Palate

When I finish with my crystal testing, I've also finished testing the plants against my lips. So my next test is to try chewing some to see if it has any negative effects. I start with the long root from the flowering plant, and I immediately notice a bitter flavor, which is usually a bad sign. Before I swallow any of it, I check my health, and sure enough, I'm missing 2 points. I spit the root out. Well, that's unfortunate. Although there is a chance it might be fine if thoroughly cooked, so I set that aside as an option to try. There were actually quite a few common plants on earth that were poisonous if not cooked as I recall.

I wait a while until my hp is recovered before trying the next plant. Next I try the leafy plant that was growing in abundance. Since there isn't much besides leaf to actually eat, that's what I'll try. I chew on some for a little bit, when my mouth starts to feel really warm. I check my stats, and although I'm not missing any hp, I'm actually missing 4 points of my mp. Again, I spit the plant out. If it drained that much mp from just chewing on a leaf, I don't want to know what would happen if I actually ate it. My mouth was feeling progressively warmer as I chewed, so I'd be worried about something like internal combustion occurring. That said, I might try my hand at grinding this into a paste. If I could poison a blade or some other weapon with this, it might help if I battle someone who uses mana.

Finally, I'm on to the flowering bulbs that the animal I spotted was eating. I chew into one, and it tastes exceptionally sweet, but after a little chewing, it's basically dissolved into almost nothing in my mouth. I mean, it is a flowery bulb after all. After holding what's left in my mouth for a while, and not noticing any ill effects, I swallow it. Although it would take a lot of this to make a meal, it might be decent as a flavor, or boiled. As long as I don't notice any new negative effects from here on out, then I might try to use it to make my other food more palatable.

I don't have much time left in my day, so I take the time left to clean up some places in the room. A lot of my crafting has involved me essentially cutting stone blocks out of the wall to make extra buckets and other tools, so I'd like to convert that area into a new shelving area. I don't have anything I want to store on the new shelves yet, so I make them fairly generic. I'm sure I'll need more blocks in the future, so I make sure I don't make the shelves in such a way that I can't get more blocks out of the wall next to it.

I haven't lost any hp or noticed any other side effects from the flower bulb I ate earlier, so I go to sleep for the day.

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I don't wake up with any new issues from eating the flower bulb, so I think I can assume that it's edible, if lacking in substance. This morning, before I eat anything else though, I want to try thoroughly roasting the bitter root. If it is viable as food, that would be very helpful, as there was a decent amount of it growing down by the cliff. With that in mind, I start cooking it over the fire.

I let it cook to the point where it's probably overdone. Later I can try to get it to a better cooked point, but for now I want to see if it is still dangerous to eat now that it's thoroughly cooked through. I take it off the fire, and let it cool for a little while before taking an apprehensive bite out of the charred root, and chewing. I taste a lot of burnt material, but no bitterness so far. I check my hp, and I haven't lost any yet.

I hold the chewed root in my mouth for a while before swallowing, and eating a little more of it. For now I'll wait and see if I lose any hp throughout the day. With this though, I think I'll need to come up with names for my food. I'm eating two kinds of roots, and a flower. The bulbous roots from before, while not overly similar to potatoes, since there are only a few roots under the plant, are close enough that I think I'll call them spuds from now on.

The other root reminds me of an overgrown dandelion, with a different flower on top, so I'll call it lion root, since it also is dangerous unless cooked. As for the flower, I'll just name it based on what it is, sweet rock flower.

While I wait to see if I get sick from the food, I decide to start shaping the new shelves to hold the lion roots and sweet rock flower, as well as potentially more of the mana burning plants. I'm careful to place all three away from each other, because I don't want any of the three to get contaminated by the others.

Having converted some of my new shelving into bins, I again verify my health is fine. Seeing that my hp is still unchanged, I think the food is likely fine. Just in case though, I don't want to go and harvest more until tomorrow at the soonest. Today though, I will go gather some more wood from the nearby area, after I convert some more of the storage area for holding wood.

By the end of the day, I don't notice any new health issues, so I think tomorrow I'll go and gather some more of these lion roots. Which should be just in time, because I'm almost out of spuds, and I haven't found a good new source of them. I don't know how long lion roots will last in storage though, so I'll have to repeat the same process as I did with the spuds to test shelf life.

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Given the distance to the lion root, I'm not going to haul the charcoal down the mountain, and I'm only planning on gathering five days worth this time anyway, so I don't need extra stuff to carry it back. I carefully make my way down the mountain until I start finding lion root, and I pull begin pulling them up. As I make my way back up the mountain, I spot a bunch of birds in a tree that scatter as I get close. I hope they aren't too territorial, since I probably will be making this trip occasionally now. I don't like the idea of being mobbed by a flock of birds.

When I get back, I store most of the lion root on the shelf for it, and then I make two small boxes next to my desk where in the first box, I set a few separate to observe over time to see how well they last, and I cook a few roots to put in the second box, to see how well they keep once they've been cooked through. Over the next few days, I'll try cooking them less and less to get it to a point where it's much less charred than it is now.

With a new food source determined, I decide that I should spend the rest of the day hauling some of the charcoal and bone meal out to the spuds in the clearing, since I haven't found a new source of them yet. As I bring it out, I try to mix the bone meal into the soil around the plants that are already there. I still don't know if it'll have the same effect as on earth, but if it does, it should at least help these plants grow, which hopefully means they'll seed the area again.

By the time I'm tired, I've only hauled about half of the charcoal and bone meal out, but I set the buckets up near the other bucket for now. Unfortunately, I'm noticing that this spot isn't really able to hold more buckets after this, so I'll either need a place to store buckets, or destroy the rest of them when I'm done with them. With all that completed for the day, I head back in to my room, close up, and check my stats before I sleep.

<EPIC IMP>
Level: 79
HP: 415/415

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MP: 103/103
Traits: Mana Affinity, Earth Manipulation
Magic: Stone Shaping

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