Flickering flames cast an unsteady light on the caves before Alyssa, her torch insufficient to properly light everything that she was seeing, but what she could see was still more than magnificent enough to take her breath away.

Stalactites and stalagmites littered the cavern, with plenty having reached in the middle and become a solid column of rock, and they were in practically every color imaginable. Reds were most abundant, with white a distant second, but even in the absolutely awful lighting she caught glimpses of blues, greens, yellows, purples, and ones in multiple colors.

The occasional drip-drip of water was the only sound, the comparatively soft sound echoing in crazy ways into an almost deafening reverberation. Almost hypnotized, Alyssa continued forward, her feet absentmindedly finding purchase on the rough and slippery surfaces present as she followed the insatiable urge to explore.

Her foot skidded half an inch as it failed to find purchase on a slick piece of rock, but she barely even paid attention as [Leafstep] stopped the slip before she began to fall and gave her a second chance at finding traction. She took it gladly, eyes still transfixed on her surroundings.

There was something new, something absolutely fantastical to be seen, and Alyssa would be damned if she passed up this opportunity. She'd known that there would probably be something interesting to see, when she first ducked into this cave while scaling a small cliff, but it wasn't until she'd dipped out to grab a branch of wood she could [Ignite] as a light source that she'd properly appreciated what, exactly, she'd found.

Though even now, she didn't know if she could say she was properly appreciating the find. There was some complicated well of emotions bubbling up in her chest, not threatening to spill out so much as they were just… there.

Alyssa brought her torch closer to one of the nearby pillars, trying to get a better look at the stone, and saw almost organic-looking patterns emerging from the rock, as well as a sparkle of sorts she couldn't identify. Maybe some kind of gemstone? She didn't know how rocks worked. Her fingers brushed it, and she sucked in a breath as her sense of touch was flooded with a myriad of textures that she'd previously missed.

There was Magic here. The deep kind. Why she hadn't felt it with her feet, she didn't know, but this place…

There were lots of elements present that she could recognize, things like Dark and Water and Earth, but there was something beyond that too, some grand working of Magic that she could only barely feel thanks to how much it disrupted everything around it. Some grand, natural working of magic she was just barely capable of discerning.

She wiped the faint bit of water her fingers had picked up off on her leg, and carried on much more cognizant of the magnitude of… something, that surrounded her. Maybe Oliver would know, if he was here. But he wasn't and she didn't, so instead she just took in the awe-inspiring sights, sounds, and feelings the cave engendered in her.

Alyssa wasn't certain how long, exactly, she spent wandering the cave system when she decided to turn back. There was lots, and lots to explore, but as much as it pained her… she did have a job to do. And therefore, she was being responsible and not spending multiple days wandering around the caverns of stone, the literal exact opposite of the task she'd been given.

Actually, what would the literal opposite of finding a hill next to clay be? She idly mused. Hiding the existence of a valley next to… air? I know that clay is Earth, but air is kind of everywhere. Though Earth isn't all dirt, so does that mean Air would only be a specific kind of air?

Maybe she'd ask Oliver at some point. He knew these things.

But in any case, she was very proud of herself for pulling herself back on topic, and if anyone asked it would be because of that exact reason and no other, and was completely unrelated to how much of her torch had burned up and how she very much didn't want to be wandering around this place in the dark.

Nope. The dark was totally fine. She just didn't want to be irresponsible, and that was truly her only incentive.

At least retracing her steps was easy enough. The intensity of the caverns did threaten to almost wipe away the traces of her passage, but she knew how to retrace her footsteps well enough that it didn't truly matter.

The echoes didn't sound that much like other people converging in on her position, so Alyssa's rush towards the end had much more to do with simply not wanting to waste any additional time rather than fear. There was no fear involved. Not of the dark, not of unseen predators rushing at her in the depths of the earth, not in the slightest.

Besides, she wasn't rushing that much, so even if she was afraid of anything, it wasn't to any real degree. [Leafstep] only kept her from slipping twice!

The light outside was almost blinding after the unsteady darkness of the cave, and Alyssa tossed the mostly-burned torch onto a pile of loose rocks where it could burn out safely. Everything here was too bursting with life and wet enough that there was little chance of even a magically-ignited flame starting a massive forest fire, but that was one of those things you really didn't want to play around with.

It would probably be great for her [Ignite] level, though…

Maybe some other time.

She paused for a minute to catch her breath – that is, to enjoy the fresh air that didn't smell of stale mineral water – and to remind herself about which way she had been heading before her detour. Up was the obvious direction she needed to head, given how she needed to find a prominent place for a mage tower to be built. However, clay tended to accumulate in riverbanks, and that made this… tricky.

The Jungle had fairly interesting geography, to put it lightly. It was a lot more dramatic than Alyssa was used to, and she wasn't certain why. She hadn't thought that human activity had dampened the magic of the world that much, but maybe it had?

Or maybe this was just a naturally extreme world. Or she'd underestimated how different other worlds were just as a baseline. She knew that unlike home, most worlds across the cosmos weren't actually planets, but her impression had been that climates were still similar to what she thought of as 'normal' physics, barring some of the weirdest extremes like the worlds that were chains of flying islands, or that were deep enough into other forms of magic that everything was made of fire or something like that.

Should I have paid more attention in Interplanar Ecology?

Eh, maybe not. The training had been mandatory, but like most classes, it hadn't been that useful for her. She'd already effortlessly aced it all, because she'd already known how to do things like identify whether some unknown thing was edible thanks to her mana sense. If you could feel Harvest mana, it was food. If you could feel Poison, you avoided it anyway. There was no way that the times she'd zoned out during the class would have covered subjects like tracking down clay deposits on worlds that had unusual geography. And considering how much the practical portions of the class were about using skills or devices to help... there was no way it would have made things easier.

But she wouldn't let that deter her! Tracking down the portions of the landscape that already stuck out above the treelines and checking their surroundings for clay close enough to work would be much easier and quicker than trying to find clay and hoping that it was by an elevated area anyway, so did it really matter? Even if she did understand the geology around here, the fact that she'd be relying on elevated areas would mean she'd have to guess at how the landscape used to look, because clay didn't really accumulate in high places, and at that point it once again didn't matter!

So yeah. Even if she had paid attention, it didn't make a difference. Ergo, she had done nothing wrong.

Alyssa re-checked the bindings holding her hatchet in place, making sure it hadn't shifted too much, then continued her climb up the slope. It wasn't a sheer cliff, which was a nice change of pace, but it was still steep enough that she had to use her hands just as much as her feet. It wasn't aided by the moss covering all the rocks, making the climb not exactly slippery, but certainly not stable enough for easy traversal.

She still reached the top quickly enough, finding the few scraggly trees she'd spotted from the distance looked… exactly as she expected them to.

The ground itself was a rocky bluff, a few patches of earth spread out here and there that supported the growth of some tenacious bushes and said scraggly trees alongside a good amount of lichen and moss. No clay, unfortunately, but from this height she was able to re-orient herself, making sure she knew where she was going. Going long distances in trackless wilderness was never easy, and it was made all the harder by not having any tools to aid her, but she had a decent idea from when she'd climbed halfway up the cliff and looked out, and now it was just actually getting those places.

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Off in the distance behind her, she could see said cliff where it loomed above Shelter, and if she looked really hard and deluded herself, she thought she might be able to see the rocky outcropping she'd sat on to first spot this location.

Still, a bit more height was never a bad thing, and she got another twenty or thirty feet by climbing up one of the nearby trees. Its scraggly constitution meant she didn't have to peer out through dense foliage in order to see anything, and Alyssa was able to take note of several other locations that seemed promising.

If she arbitrarily called the way she'd come from as south, off to the east she could see where The Jungle ended in favor of the ocean, the west was a green carpet that slowly increased in elevation until it vanished into the blanket of mist, and the north was substantially more promising. Breaks in the treeline promised massive rivers, yes, but even from here she could see what appeared to be other hills large enough to break through the canopy. Something odd that she had noticed in her exploration thus far was that unless the terrain outright exceeded the height of the canopy, the tallest trees growing on it… still terminated at the same height. The forest wasn't so dense as to wholly eliminate any light from filtering through to the ground floor, and accordingly there were smaller trees that didn't reach the canopy line, but it was nonetheless incredibly interesting that trees capped out at a hundred feet above what she thought of as ground level.

She dearly wished that [Leafstep] was a high enough level to let her run across the tree branches without breaking them, but she probably still had another ten levels before that would be safe enough for their current state of basically no medical care. [Unblemish] did not count, no matter what Henrietta said to try and excuse their idiot, spoiled noble brat of a 'healer.'

Not that it made a difference, with her days away from said idiot. If she broke her leg, that would be all but a death sentence, and their pre-mission briefings had made it very clear that heroic sacrifices weren't acceptable if it left the team without mission-critical capabilities. With all of their normal safety nets stripped from the very start, that included everything.

Alyssa took a drink of water and fixed her eyes on the next-closest protrusion from the dense canopy before casting about for other sights nearby. Once she descended beneath the emerald sea once again, it would be incredibly difficult to reorient herself, so she needed to make sure she knew exactly where she was headed. Any and all landmarks she could use to calibrate her journey would make it that much easier, that much faster to make sure she was actually doing her job properly.

There wasn't any particular landmarks this time that would be visible from below the treeline, so Alyssa just had to do her best. She did get somewhat pulled off-course after a particularly aggressive animal drove her off from its territory – a really weird thing that Alyssa could best describe as the offspring of a bouncy ball and a turtle – but she found her way there eventually, though not without more trouble than she had anticipated. What she had thought was a ridge that only broke through the canopy in one spot was more akin to a miniature mountain, a steep cone of dark gray stone that jutted straight up from the ground and required legitimate scaling to reach the top.

It didn't technically meet the requirements that she'd been told to look for, so Alyssa kept looking, but she kept it in mind as a backup as well as something to just generally mention. If a natural stone spire counted as a 'tower' for Oliver's wizard tower purposes, then that would save him a tremendous amount of work from needing to actually build said tower if they could just clear away the woods in a large enough area around it instead of piling up bricks. They'd still need to enchant the stone, sure, but that was probably easy enough if he didn't fumble the casting.

She ended up finding two more of those strange spires during her hunt, giant columns of dark stone piercing the canopy above her, though neither had any exposed clay.

The hunt took… a while. Alyssa honestly lost track, and she was beginning to feel the absence of her group. It wasn't that she couldn't operate on her own, but something about the specific combination of absolute crushing solitude, the fact her only tool was a basic copper hatchet, and the incredible hostility of her surroundings wore on her.

She could only wake up with a start to the sound of dramatic jungle-noises so many times before her nerves gave out, especially when her ability to secure her sleeping arrangements boiled down to finding somewhere small and wedging herself inside, then hoping there weren't any highly poisonous or venomous creatures that might kill her in her sleep.

At least venom seemed to be a comparatively rare strategy out here. There weren't a ton of poisonous plants that she'd found – the feel of Poison entwined with Wood was something she knew intimately – and most of the smaller creatures didn't have the incredibly bright coloration that dangerous-to-touch creatures preferred. Needing to constantly worry that she might put her foot on a scorpion or instant death frog was one step further than what she really enjoyed doing.

Instead, her ire was more focused on just… all the insects. The noise produced by the endless tides of bugs was often downright deafening, drowning out anything else she might want to hear, while other times it shrank away to almost a whisper. Without a normal day-night cycle, there was no time that it was better or worse, but instead the insects were almost location-locked?

It was like there were hundreds of micro-ecosystems, each with their own unique mix of small animals of varying volume, but she couldn't really notice any difference in the terrain that would indicate why there might be so many different splintered ecologies.

Where she was right now was particularly bad, perched in the lower branches of an absolutely massive tree. From far off, it had looked like a looming hill, but no, it was just a single massive tree that absolutely annihilated the local 'hundred foot' trend. A typical branch was as thick as she was tall, and some even had their own trees growing on them, to the point she couldn't even see beyond the edge of the gargantuan foliage. It wasn't even ygdrassilic, a supersized form of some other tree with all proportions scaled up, but everything was… well, it was all at a normal scale. Large, yes, but the leaves were only about her size, and the structure was clearly grown in a way that could understandably support the ludicrous size.

Of course, it was ygdrassilic in the way it was absolutely teeming with life. Flocks of birds filled the air, hundreds to thousands of the critters barely audible over the underlying whine of insects, while larger creatures either lounged around or foraged in the abundant foliage for food. It was quite possibly as much animal life as Alyssa had seen for the past two days, and all in one place.

And at least half of that animal life was insects. Really, really loud insects.

She swatted a cloud of moth-things away, then ducked under a wayward branch as she sought to get to the trunk and begin to scale it.

It was a bit harrowing to be around so many creatures, but the overriding mentality seemed to be aligned with simply living and letting live. A creature that reminded Alyssa of a goat with a bird-shaped head presented the largest challenge to her out of anything else, but even that was quickly left behind by skittering out of its personal space, a section of the trunk that was rich in a striped red and green moss and smelled almost like citrus.

But outside of that momentary encounter, Alyssa didn't experience much in the way of challenge as she scaled the tree. Branches were common and sturdy, and the trunk itself seemed to be comprised of many different branches almost woven together, giving her the impression that the tree may have naturally been more like a specialized vine, which just grew on top of itself again and again until it became this… massive organism.

She diverted from her path up the tree at one point to grab some fruit hanging in a semi-precarious place. A bunch of them were nibbled at, but there were still a few pristine ones that she was able to get her hands on. She took a moment to run her fingers over it, feeling its internal composition. It had a bit of give, so it would be chewable, but it wasn't immensely soft either. It was physically fibrous, but she could also feel a few threads of edibility entwined throughout its entire flesh. No spots of poison, either, so that meant it was all entirely digestible. Maybe not the most nutritious, given the particular texture of Harvest present, but perfectly safe for her to have for lunch.

With the fruit in hand – it looked a bit like a red blueberry about the size of her fist – she swung herself up to sit on the branch she'd plucked it from to eat it. It wasn't very… good, if she was being honest with herself. Most of the food here was a letdown of some kind or another, and she'd intentionally weaned herself off of meals made by Classed cooks in preparation for the Jump. She'd known that the sorts of food they'd be eating wouldn't be made with the benefits of modern techniques, spices, and spells, but she hadn't anticipated the fruits she ate to be so much worse than what she'd eaten back home.

It was just fruit! Trees grew it. Yeah sure, domestication or whatever, but how was it this much of an issue?

This particular fruit was really stringy, and though the flavor was alright, it was a bit too bitter to be properly enjoyable, and had nowhere near enough juice to actually seem like fruit. Maybe it was more of a vegetable that grew like a berry? She could see that being the case.

Once her food was finished, the handful of pea-sized seeds at its core spit out with impunity, she resumed her climb.

Once she judged she was probably above the primary treeline, Alyssa started looking for a suitable branch to bring her out to the edge of the foliage, because the tree she was in was so massive the leaves everywhere prevented her from seeing anything just as surely as the normal canopy would.

Making her way out to the end of a branch only reinforced her idea that this might not have been a normal 'tree,' with branches acting almost more like a giant net as they split off from one another, then rejoined elsewhere. It made for quite the unique traversal experience, albeit a fortunately easy one.

Still, she did manage to make it to the edge after just a few struggles. She must have wandered too close to a nest at some point, because a birdlike thing kept harassing her until she took a different route, and a cloud of glittery insects made such a racket when she got close that she avoided them as well just to be safe.

The view from the edge was a little less exciting than she'd hoped, as Alyssa had apparently overestimated how high she'd been able to climb. She was above the treeline, but only barely. Given how high the tree stretched into the sky, she'd hoped that she would already be getting a better view and be able to more clearly see potential landmarks.

Not wanting to fight all the way back to the main trunk and then return, she instead worked to climb along the outside of the tree. There were only one harrowing instance wherein a branch wasn't able to support her weight as well as she'd hoped, but she managed to catch herself before she fell more than ten feet. It tore her tunic, but Henrietta's magic would fix the rip before she returned to base and needed to be self-conscious again, so she didn't worry about it too much.

In any case, the climb was absolutely worth the trouble. While at the distances involved, it was a bit tricky to decipher all details, she saw a new spot that looked incredibly promising. A hill, sticking out above the treeline, but with a good copse of trees present already, indicating that soil existed there. Even better, it was close to what Alyssa thought might have been a river, a cut in the trees that meandered slightly, until it met up with…

"Well," she mused, "That could be a problem."

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