'I was already going to explore the place anyways but now I am even getting paid to do it? Fuck yeah!' I did a little celebration as I thought this much to Gaia's amusement. "Alright Gaia lets head back to the cave at the bottom of the mountain for the night , I want to be rested up for when we head in here tomorrow." I said and she nodded in agreement. As we headed down the mountain I couldn't help but fantasize about what sort of goodies I might find in that cave. Evolution stones , legendary pokemon fossils , you name it and it was all a possibility.-

Obviously I was aware that I wasn't likely to randomly discover actually valuable stuff like a legendary fossil but I could hope damnit. Once back at the cave we currently lived in I had to collect some more dry sticks and pine needles for the fire. I even had Gaia bust up a nearby fallen tree into small logs and stored them near the back of the cave to dry out in the heat of the fire. While I was at it I also collected some pine sap crystals to make a torch because unlike how they were shown in the game most caves were dark as hell.-

Gaia went out to hunt for tonight's dinner while I winged it and tried to grind out a bowl for my sap crystals. The only reason I even knew about how flammable this stuff was was because a couple years back I had this obsession about forest fires and this fact stuck with me. I wasn't a pyro or anything but I was simply curious why everyone always made a big deal about them and kinda got engrossed in the information I found.-

Anyways long story short I learned that pine resin which is basically crystalized sap was flammable as all hell and if melted down could be used to make a torch. The tick was to melt it with exposing it to fire or you would only have a bunch of burning resin. I basically found a decent size rock near the cave(there is a lot of them) and started to hit it with another rock until it split down the middle. Once that was done I had two nice semi spheres that I agonizingly ground another rock against to hollow out into a rough bowl.-

Is there a better way I could be doing this , probably. Did I know what it was , fuck no I didn't. Still now that I had my heating bowl I tossed in some resin and set the bowl near the fire but not in the fire. Honestly speaking I halfway didn't expect this to even work but it did and I used a couple of sticks to move the bowl away from the fire and grabbed my large stick/torch in training. Dipping the end in the bubbling resin and spinning it to get a nice coating I then carefully wrapped one of my totally destroyed socks around the sticky resin.-

I then gave the now cloth and resined stick another turn in the hot stuff and carefully set it aside as my new torch. I had to set it on a rock off the ground to dry and harden but otherwise it was done. Gaia came back at this point with what I can only describe as a small flock of Pidgeys , which was to say six of them. Considering that they were all the size of a chicken and totally hollowed out from a massive hole where their heads were supposed to be I'm pretty sure Gaia was not gentle at all when she killed them.-

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Well as much as I would love to cook these immediately we need to get the feathers off of them first." I said honestly and Gaia snorted before tossing down most of the birds and violently tearing off the feathers on one of them. I chuckled at that and grabbed one of the birds to get to work on it myself while carefully saving the feathers to be used as bedding later. I may get pricked by the ends a few times but at least I'll have a semi-soft spot to sleep now.-

As I quickly learned plucking feathers is a pain in the ass since you have to pull out the root and everything. Gaia was rather irritated to learn that simply grabbing a claw full and yanking on them hard tended to break off the roots instead. Her second Pidgey was plucked much more patiently while I dealt with having to fix the firsts roots. After about an hour or so as the night truly fell over the land we finished plucking the birds. Much like the Zigzagoon before I stuck the things on sticks propped up around the fire to cook.-

While waiting for the food to cook I took out my other two rewards from the completed quest and tore the skill ticket immediately. I watched as the wheel of skills spun round and round for about a minute before slowing down and stopping on a skill I wasn't familiar with , aura. (A/N:I shit you not this was what the randomizer wheel landed on.) I closed my eyes as a massive amount of foreign and strange information on the subject entered my head.-

What I learned stunned and confused me greatly all things considered. See according to this new information aura was the sort of vital force/spiritual energy of a living thing. It was esoteric as fuck to say the least but apparently with the right mindset , training and techniques it was possible for literally any living thing to tap into and manipulate their aura. The aura skill I just got was basically a training guide to mastering this energy which gives some frankly broken abilities in my opinion. For example if you have enough aura and skill it's possible for a human like me to directly fight a pokemon , moves and all.-

The full list of things a master of the skill was capable of included reading the intentions and actions of others ,the ability to sense of auras and ones surroundings even with a blindfold on , projection of ones aura in a barrier , attack or transfer it to others which can be fatal if pushed too far. Literal telepathy , seeing and speaking to the dead , and if one has enough mastery and volume of aura even using pokemon moves. As I said this skill is seriously busted when mastered unfortunately the information I received said I was lucky to even be able to sense or project a tiny amount of aura after training for a month.-

Any faster than that and I was either really talented at it or was naturally born with a large amount of aura which apparently massively helps at the start of the skill. Helpless that I had yet another skill that I couldn't really use at the moment I went back to focusing on the food. Not going to lie the aroma coming off these birds was making me drool a little and Gaia was glaring at them as if willing them to cook faster.