[New Quest! - A Good Meal!]

  [Quest Type: Encouragement]

  [Rewards: Mortar and Pestle, Chopping Board, Salt]

  ["You have tools, some protection against the elements, and a small amount of comfort when resting. Now it is time for you to start making food! Cook something decent using the materials you have on hand!"]

  Wilona nodded as she eyed the quest that popped up. Well, good for the system to give her more encouragement and reward her for doing things that she was planning on doing. She wasn't complaining about this—far from it—she just found it interesting that the system wanted her to start a life in some swamp.

  "But then again," Wilona hummed as she looked around, "it is a pretty good place to stay in. The air is cool too. Fresh." She exhaled and finished tying the end of her rope around a branch. Now all she needed was a hook. She cut a small piece from another branch and began carving. "It's a lot harder than I thought."

  A quick check at her system revealed why this was—she still hadn't gotten any carving skills from her survivalist profession. But she was hoping it would pop up after she made her first hook. And holy shit, was it a "hook." She wasn't sure how she failed so miserably, but she somehow did. Well, at least she now had a carving skill.

  The next hook turned out so much better than her first one, and she even managed to shape it into a decent-ish crescent shape. The pointed tip was pretty sharp too—pricking her finger with it literally caused her to flinch.

  "Alright, Fuzz, I'm going fishing!"

  "Goodbye and good luck." The myceloid watched Wilona grab a piece of jerky and carry it to the nearest stream. She didn’t know what to think of her new companion.

  Fishing—Wilona had never thought much of it, honestly. For her, watching a bunch of people sit around some lake and wait for a catch was kind of weird. But then again, she never really imagined herself cooking a freshly caught fish. And for good reason. She’d tried cooking fish before, and the fact that she didn’t know she had to de-gill, de-scale, and gut it resulted in an abomination of a meal that sent her to the hospital.

  She never tried her hand at fish ever again after that. Fresh ones, at least. She didn’t learn her lesson and still ate fish sticks, but they were perfectly safe—a lot of people bought them, after all!

  "Maybe I should make fish sticks?" Wilona mused out loud, biting her lip. "But I also don't have any oil..."

  Well, that’s a bust. Wilona looked at the body of water in the distance. The rope she cast was decently long—around 12 feet-ish of tied rope. She basically used everything she made from her three drying racks—and it allowed her to steer clear of the swamp to keep herself safe while also putting a good chunk of the rope into the deeper parts of the water.

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  For her setup, she didn’t hold the fishing rod—that would be stupid. She couldn't reel it in, after all—and instead had the stick buried deep into the ground so that the fish met resistance when tugging at the rope. She had to manually pull the rope to drag her catch ashore, but Wilona thought she could always use some exercise.

  Maybe she had been overconfident when thinking that, because when she finally got a catch, pulling it was like trying to crank one of those stupid lifters her dad used when fixing his cars. "Whatever those are!" Wilona screeched, her thoughts spilling out of her mouth. "What the hell?!"

  The fish was strong. That’s all she had to say.

  Wilona fought it with everything she could physically muster, but it was obvious she was falling short. So like any reasonable person in possession of magic, she used her spells to help her catch a fish. She tried purifying her aching muscles at first, but that didn’t work. Rather than relieving the pain in her muscles, the spell cleaned the rope she was holding instead.

  And you know what? Wilona decided to go along with her purifying spell’s idea. She imagined boosting the rope as she tugged, and when that didn’t work, she desperately wished for the fish to get caught by the vines and get so tangled that it couldn’t move.

  To her shock, the resistance she felt stopped, and she was able to pull her catch out of the water and onto the shore. She expected it to be the alligator gar messing with her at first, but nope—it was some kind of giant goldfish. Or maybe salmon? She wasn’t sure. She'd never been a fish person.

  Oh, and did she mention that this thing was fucking gigantic?! No? Because it was!

  "Holy shit, it's the size of my arm..." Wilona pulled her hand back from the flailing fish—or attempted to. The vines holding it stopped that—with widened eyes. She stood in place for what must have been several minutes just staring. "I... What?"

  Fish could get this big?

  Luckily for her, her catch managed to fit in her basket, so she didn’t have to worry about how to carry it back home. Wilona turned to the stream as she removed her fishing rod from the earth and met eyes with the alligator gar. Hm, did it watch the entire thing?

  "I'll give you the extra parts later," she said, knowing that the fish could understand her. "I'll come back here."

  She headed back to her camp.

  Wilona dropped her basket next to the fire pit. "Holy shit, have you seen this thing?" she told Fuzz. "This fish is the size of my arm!"

  "That's normal. No?" Fuzz sounded confused instead of shocked.

  Wilona crossed her arms defensively. "Well, I didn’t know that," she rebuked. "Jesus. Anyway, I’m gonna gut this thing and prepare it. Do you want to eat cooked fish?"

  "You can eat it all," Fuzz replied. She sounded like she was focusing on something, so Wilona left her be.

  After grabbing a flat rock and washing it in a nearby stream, Wilona purified the damn thing and placed it next to her fish. Afterwards, she grabbed a knife, purified that too, and then pulled out all of her bowls so she could place the pieces she got from her fish somewhere.

  "Man, I really want that chopping board now," she muttered. The reward only came after she finished cooking, though. "This sucks. And it's unhygienic. I'm gonna need a table at some point, aren’t I?"

  Despite her verbal protests, Wilona worked on the fish. She put it on top of the flat stone, gutted it, removed its scales, and then chopped it up into several pieces. The parts that she wouldn’t eat went back into the basket, while all the edible flesh was placed inside the bowls.

  When everything was set up, she left the camp with her pot and basket. After depositing the extra fish parts into the water—eh, she decided to throw the basket along with it after internally debating for a bit—she scooped up an entire pot of swamp water and brought it back home.

  "I’m gonna need to filter this, aren’t I?" Wilona groaned. "Ugh, I hate this."

  "I'm sure you can do it," Fuzz encouraged. "You just need to make two more baskets, fill them up with gravel and sand, purify them, and then start filtering your water."

  Wilona looked up. She still had a little bit of daytime left. "You know what? Sure. Why not."

  After another hour or so of working, she had a fully filtered pot of water, and now all that was left for her to do was boil it... "I don't have any firewood."

  "It's because you live in a swamp. Everything here has water in it, so they have a hard time catching fire," Fuzz explained. "Just bring them to me, I'll take care of it."

  Wait, what? Wilona blinked. She had meant that in a way she hadn’t gathered firewood! "Huh. Thank you, Fuzz," Wilona sighed. "I thought I was gonna work for another half an hour again."

  "It's almost night. It's best you start cooking as soon as possible. And I am here to help."

  "I know, I know." Wilona left the camp and came back with a bunch of branches. She dropped them on the soil and watched as they began to rot. Weird. She picked one up. "It's kinda light."

  "I removed its moisture using my mycelium," Fuzz said. "Hence why it became lighter."

  "Ah." Wilona nodded. "Okay, so I'll start the fire now, boil the water—wait." Wilona purified the pot. "Uh, boil the water, and then cut the other ingredients."

  "You do that."