Much to Alex's surprise the fruit spilt a thin watery glowing juice after being cracked open that had an intense sweet scent. Licking the inside of the fruit that was basically hollow Alex was left speechless to discover that this fruit was almost identical to a coconut in a all regards. 'How the fuck did coconut trees get down here , and how did they survive long enough to evolve like this?' he thought with a frown. From what he had gathered so far there was no logical way that any plants or seeds of plants from the surface could make their way into this pocket forest. 'Then again this isn't the first time that this world was shown illogical scenarios so maybe I'm just overthinking.' Alex thought with a shrug. Having discovered that the trees that made up the forest were in fact just a subspecies of coconut trees he began to check the other plants to see if the same applied to them as well. The final conclusion he came up with was that it was a mix bag of both new and already known plants that made up the forest. Amongst the new plants included a type of berry bush that Alex was beyond thrilled to discover as the fruit on it had powerful healing properties similar to mega potions. These fruits were only slightly bigger than a grape and glowed in a dim green color. Alex found out thanks to the system however that these berries also had powerful narcotic properties since his [tranquilizing poison] trait gained a level. 'Healing abilities in addition to knock out ones , the doctors in astera would sell their left arms for these things.' He thought eagerly as he carefully stored the berries in a small jar from his satchel before returning the jar. Most of the other new plants were merely just edible things like mushrooms or a new type of spice to be used in flavoring foods. 'The chef would probably cry tears of joy at the stuff I've found in this place.' he chuckled at the mental image before focusing on the surroundings again. Once Alex was done exploring the immediate surroundings of the forest he began to carefully move deeper. Most people were unaware of just how much they take moving air currents on the surface of the planet for granted until they find themselves without them. Alex was currently experiencing this in the underground forest as he traveled without the gentle breeze he normally relied on for smelling any danger. He quickly found out that the only time the air moved was when it "rained" from the layer of cloud at the top of this underground area. Even this movement was actually just the water droplets causing the air to shift around them as they fell. So when he got tackled by a brand new monster during his exploration that was camouflaged as a small pile of weeds he was very upset. This new monster looked very similar to a toad with a more reptilian head and scales lining it's rocky body covered in actual plants on it's back. The monster itself was close to the size of a Volkswagen bug in size but clearly relied on ambushing to hunt as well as having terrible eyesight. The reason Alex figured this out was that even with it's jaws fully opened the monster barely covered a single one of his limbs. A few of Alex's scales cracked from the impact but besides that he was almost totally unharmed from the ambush. It took the monster all of a minute to realize how badly it had fucked up as it clearly wasn't very smart and confusedly kept trying to figure out why it couldn't swallow whatever it had caught. Alex almost felt like letting the thing go since it was rather humorous to watch , almost. Despite being master rank this monster was clearly at the lowest end of that spectrum barely even counting as tier 7 and as a result very much killable for Alex. The method he used to accomplish this was a simple application of brute force to the monsters skull turning it's brain into paste.
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I have decided to increase the amount of chapters available to my patrons to five chapters ahead of the those without it to make it more worth it for those who do. Out of the close to a thousand people reading this story I have only eight patrons which bothered me a bit , this was my solution. pa treon.com/user?u=81578854