The problems of being the only tree in an open space, and the conspicuousness that came with it, could be very easily solved as Licht soon found.

He did this just by repeating the same process as before with every tree he found, but not integrating them into him. As soon as Licht recovered his stamina, he continued to connect to trees, ‘walk’ them closer to him, and set them down while staying connected. He would then use the connections of these trees to connect to more trees, before he very soon had a literal spider web of trees surrounding him, with his body as the central node.

He eventually had to stop connecting to more trees as the further he got out the weaker his influence was over the new trees. He likened his capacity to be like holding a ‘mental load’. The more things he had connected to him and the further out they were the harder it was to control everything. Eventually his influence became too weak to push trees out of the ground in order to walk. At that point he had stopped.

Now, Licht just had to work on stabilizing his new position. Surely that wouldn't be too hard, right?

“Mrrrmmm, problems problems problems. Can’t catch a break around here I’ll tell you that.”

Licht internally put on a pondering expression. He was sure this would only serve to make him more mysterious in case anyone was observing him, but really he was unsure of what to do. He had finally hit into the problem of food.

As it turned out, though the hundreds of trees under him were self-sustaining thanks to photosynthesis and all that, connecting with them to him still put a strain on them. Such as it were, they were all currently in a frozen-like state. The energy needed for the connections were just enough to stop them from growing yet not enough to cause them to starve.

This wouldn’t do for Licht. If you weren’t moving, you were dying. Licht had read enough webnovels in his time to know entropy meant death, although he had yet to see any abominations in this world.

So essentially, he needed to gather food as an alternate energy source if he wanted his little forest to grow. The rabbit corpse had been completely assimilated into his own body at this point, causing it to grow substantially. He couldn’t seem to absorb the bones however so he just pulled them to rest underground until he could figure out how to use them.

Licht made a mental note to check on them before they became fossils.

Although the rabbit was now gone, his options for food were not limited. Little critters were present all over the forest floor, some not any smaller than the car-sized grey-eared rabbit had been. The problem was…

“At the end of the day, I’m still just a tree. Not exactly the optimal form for catching prey and quick reactions.”

For a few hours Licht practiced folding and unfolding a net of thin tendrils that he had formed out of a root. When fully unfolded and theoretically full of something, the net looked partially domed at one end like a bird cage.

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It was a bit embarrassing, Licht thought, that the greatest idea he had to combat the megafauna of this forest was a cage from Earth designed to house one of its gentlest creatures.

Licht shaked off the thought and set up a few variations of the cage. He hung the root cages over the branches of several of his connected trees, pointing the cages downward over fruit abundant bushes or burrows he had seen some of the smaller creatures entering. It only took a few minutes of waiting to test his new idea.

“Gotcha!”

Licht let the tension in the root go slack, and watched with his vision sense as the cage fell around a small reddish squirrel-like creature. Before the cage could fully fall around the squirrely however, it dashed out at the last second, leaving the cage to fall onto nothing.

“Damn! Am I too slow or are the creatures in this forest too fast?”

Licht looked around frustrated as the same scene played out multiple times across his connected area. He wasn’t even targeting intelligent creatures for god’s sake! He was only after the bare nutrients contained in organic flesh, and had totally disregarded going after some of the bigger beasts that he was sure would have plenty of AF and the intelligence to go with it. It didn’t make sense that this would be harder than even killing the rabbit had been.

“No way I’m going to do that again, either. Nuh uh. I’m a firm believer of the hikikomori lifestyle now. This tree is way too comfortable.”

Licht searched his mind for a while, considering how to solve the food problem in a different way. Could he absorb something else? Well, he could absorb water, if only he could find any. Within his vision sense of his connected sense and the area around it he didn’t see any bodies of water.

Evidently the Giving Tree had placed him on a tree far away from the lake he had seen previously. He wasn’t able to start expanding his connected area in search of water either until he solved the problem of mental load. Staking all of his growth on waiting for it to rain was a no-go as well.

No, he had momentum now, and it was the right time to capitalize and compound upon that.

“Actually, I didn’t see the option to absorb water until I actually did it. Are there more things I could absorb for stats?”

An interesting thought, but one Licht would have to shelve for later. He didn’t have the luxury right now to go searching for exotic materials. He wondered briefly if he had been as distracted by simple things in his previous life as he was in this one.

“Hmm…What did hunters used to use before guns? Uh, traps? …That would actually solve a lot of my issues with reaction time. Kind of embarrassed that I didn’t think of that before.”

Putting aside the fact that it had taken him far too long experimenting with the dumb idea of a manually activated cage before realizing he could just make a normal trap, he got to work.

”No use in complaining. Something becomes a lot less fun once you acknowledge how un-fun it is. Let’s get to work.”

…And immediately hit a block.

“Well I know how to make a pitfall trap, but for all the other ones…”

Unfortunately Licht didn’t have the dexterity needed with his roots to make the lever and axle mechanisms necessary for things like a bear trap or a mouse trap. The pitfalls would have to do.

“Well since that’s the only thing I can really make, how about I just put them everywhere?”