Chapter 15: Resources

Rita started to take textbooks out of her bag, but a very different set of books than Karl had been issued his first day here. These were all about magical beasts, their diets, traits, abilities, and other factors that might be relevant to Hawk. "I will leave these for you, and come back tomorrow morning. What I want you to do today is come up with a care and feeding guide for the bird, and justify it with the information from the books. If it's good, and it follows the information that we have in a logical way, I think that I can get you some more resources. At the very least, I can get some more of the mana infused monster blood. We stock quite a bit of that for the warriors and other classes who need an instant physical power boost." She informed Karl with a smile. Rita left Karl alone with the stack of books on monster data, which were all written from the perspective of a Hunter. At best, they noted what the beast's usual diet was and where it could be found, but that was much different than a guide to help him properly raise them, much less one to raise them faster than usual to compete against wild beasts and magic users. Fortunately, he only needed a care and feeding guide for Hawk to complete the homework, which was a perfectly reasonable level of workload for the day. Plus, he had a cheat. "Hey Hawk, what sort of things do you think would make you stronger? Something that you could eat, or keep near you to grow extra fast." Karl asked the happy bird, who had settled down in the space inside his mind to rest. [I like meat. And the red juice from the evil lady, and those blue fruits over there. Can I eat those?] "Give me a second while I see what they are and what they're for." Karl replied, before opening up the notebook for the balcony greenhouse. [[Mountain Gooseberries] Tasty treats for both humans and animals. Used to make monster bait. No nutritional value that I know of, but the smell will attract all sorts of monsters. This berry contains a high mana content, suitable for creating mana potions of the weakest variety. Even in concentrated form, it is not as strong as a normal mana recovery potion.] Karl read the description twice and then went to pick three of the berries. "You can have this many, one time a day. If you eat too many, you will get sick." He warned Hawk. Really, he just didn't want the Hawk pigging out on junk food when he had a whole pile of meat in the taming space. The Hawk took the berries, looked at them with longing, then spread them all over the raw meat and began to tear it apart with renewed vigor. Karl added a note to the papers for his homework. [Windspeed Hawks will use the Mountain Gooseberry as seasoning on their preferred raw meat diet.] Once the Hawk had finished eating for a moment and lay down to let the influx of mana and nutrients settle into its body, Karl started with the questions. "Why do you call Sergeant Rita the evil woman?" He asked. [Every time I see her, she wants me to work, but there is never food. What else could she be except evil?] That made a lot of sense. The baby Hawk was still a magical beast, and his stomach was a primary driving force for his behaviour. Whatever bond they had forged made Hawk friendly to Karl, but that consideration didn't extend to anyone else around him. "Alright then, where is the most comfortable spot to rest?" Karl asked. [Right here, maybe the branches of that tea tree. Those ones smell good, and they hide your scent from prey. Tea trees are good trees.] All afternoon, Karl quizzed the bird and wrote out a report with the answers. Then he started to go through the textbooks, looking for supplements that might help monsters, or even elites with [Rend] type skills. The first group didn't have much research on it, but the second one was pretty common. All sorts of warrior classes had a rending attack after a bit of training, and it was among the skill techniques that the Golden Divine Academy taught its warriors. Naturally, they had supplements that were designed to increase the ability of the warriors to explode with inner power. The question was if they would be effective on Hawk. Neither of them could tell from looking at the description, so Karl began to flip through the standard textbooks until he found the alchemy text. That one was more productive. Once they had the list of potential potions and treatments, Karl just had to check the ingredients and see if it was something that Hawk might like. Most of them were all herbal based, but once he got to the Strength Potion, he found something promising. It was made from monster blood, infused with the dust of a gemstone that gave off strong magical energy. The two together gave the human imbiber a long duration burst of energy. That stone was the promising part. He didn't really need something that would give Hawk a burst of strength, it was a bird, not a gorilla, but the stone that it was made of radiated power that might help him grow more quickly. After that, Karl kept searching, but only found one other resource, a Wind Magic stone of the same sort. That one wasn't a natural resource, it was created by Mages as a mana storage device. Hawk loved to absorb mana, and since it was air magic, Karl had some hopes that it would be able to work with that stone to improve its own abilities. That was four potential resources. High-energy monster meat with berries for seasoning, the infused blood, the strength stone and the wind stones. If he could get all four of them, he might even be able to get Hawk through to Awakened strength in the next few weeks.