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When the group reached the edge of the jungles of Driasal, Ismene and Einar spent some time discerning the best route to take to find Doctors Stieber and Shanta- or at least information on them. While true prophecies couldn’t be forced, lesser sorts of divinations were quite easily done, especially by the Fourth Eye Seers. They might not necessarily know what the end results would be, but at least they could say they had a good chance to find something. That was better than trying to search the entirety of a nation by hand by a very large margin, and they didn’t exactly have a trail to follow.
Everything in the jungles of Driasal varied wildly in size, from fairly normal sized trees to trees a handful of meters across and hundreds or more meters high. Trees weren’t the only things that ranged in size- jungle cats ranged from large to gigantic, and snakes and bugs similarly ranged in size.
The bugs were most annoying. They didn’t really feel any sense of danger from cultivators, and had even less respect for Barrett. Normal insects weren’t anything but an annoyance, because they couldn’t possibly hurt him, but there were some small mosquitoes that, while frail, could land on him and suck out some of his blood. If that happened once, it wouldn’t be a big deal. A hundred times? It would be annoying, but at least the bites healed up almost immediately. If a thousand or ten thousand of them drank a tiny bit of his blood, it would quickly start to add up. Barrett recovered blood more quickly than average, but not as quickly as he healed wounds. If he let ten or a hundred thousand mosquitoes drink his blood, Barrett would find himself down a dangerous amount.
With them appearing in groups, he figured they might average one per second, more than enough to drain him dry over the course of a day or two. Everyone else had energy to protect them, which easily deflected the mosquitoes bites- the problem Barrett faced was that the mosquitoes could stab their proboscis in between his cells, so technically they weren’t breaking anything. Sure, he could squeeze his arm slightly to break them apart or slap them, but it was a chore to do it continuously. The best he could say for the whole situation was that he became adept at tracking every small thing around him, no matter how insignificant they normally were.
Attacks by actual animals of any sort were rare- most of them were sensitive enough to danger to realize the group wasn’t prey. That said, sometimes Barrett had to work in crushing snakes or stabbing giant panthers into his routine along with squashing mosquitoes.
The biggest danger they ran into on the first day were the plants. The smaller sorts designed to catch insects were no trouble at all, and even the larger versions of most of those didn’t matter. It was easy enough for Barrett to recognize he shouldn’t jump into a giant pitcher plant or try to pick fruit surrounded by an open maw of plant flesh. It was much more difficult to avoid brushing up against hundreds of random plants, a very small proportion of which had poisonous dust that shook off their leaves or flowers or something equivalent. It wasn’t exactly time efficient to closely inspect every single plant he saw- even the new varieties of plants in the jungle were seemingly countless.
However, without any other dangers… purging himself of toxins was easy enough. It just led to a bit more exhaustion at the end of the day. Fortunately, they’d brought special tents for camping that would keep out all sorts of insects and provided their own air supply. They still had to pick locations that were inconvenient for large predators to attack, or otherwise dissuade them, but progress through the jungle had been fairly smooth so far.
Barrett could see why doctors would want to visit the area. There were so many poisonous plants and venomous creatures, and they could concoct counters for anything. Of course, Barrett was also aware that they used poison in combat, but he didn’t think it really mattered how you killed someone if you were going to kill them anyway, except making it more painful than necessary. The morality of killing people came in when there was a good reason- self defense, or defense of others. The problem with the Silver Blades in Stredo wasn’t that they used poisons, but that they were assassins who killed people strictly for money or power.
Just because they hadn’t yet run into anything of significant danger didn’t mean Barrett thought that it would remain the case. If he was alone, he would have to be significantly more cautious. Even so, he hadn’t seen dangers that could have reasonably caused trouble for the pair they were looking for yet… and that meant there was something worse. Maybe they just hadn’t noticed it yet, or it only existed in certain parts of the jungle. Or, possibly, the trouble was people. Natural dangers were almost never as bad as people.
—–
Teran Hykel was glad that his berserk energy automatically took care of mosquitoes, unlike poor Barrett. There was a near constant slapping sound coming from further back in the group. Grandmaster Zhubin trailed the group, which put Teran up front with Ismene and Bridgette.
“Teran,” Ismene said, “I am glad your disciple is getting along well with Einar.”
Teran Hykel tilted his head. “Are they getting along well? They barely speak.”
“Over the past few days Einar has exchanged nearly as many words with Barrett as he has with me over my time knowing him.”
“I see.”
“More words than you have said to me, as well. Do you still blame me for her death?”
Teran frowned. “…no.”
“Next time, say it with some conviction.” Ismene folded her arms, “I understand though. Even cultivators don’t get to choose how they feel.” Ismene’s eyes flashed, “We are close. We should prepare ourselves for battle.”