Chapter 11: Methods of Hunting
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Day 2.
The next morning.
Just as the first gleam of sunlight reflect past a flowing river, Claude had already started moving towards the first spot of area with high humidity and moisture level as written in the weather reports.
This relatively short trip, in comparison to his walk here from Sector-07, hadn't been an easy one.
Unlike his actions of collecting plants and mushrooms along the periphery of the designated area, Claude had to walk past a few different beasts' hunting spots and territories, including the dire wolves', to reach the targeted spot.
Fear was the least of his worries due to his constitution. However, being discovered would mean a huge deviation to his plans, which in turn might mean a detriment to his completion time.
So he was very cautious and wary of his surroundings throughout his whole walk there.
Unfortunately,
As he had predicted, the most dangerous encounter happened when he had accidentally walked into a scene of a smilodon hunt.
The smilodon, was a very large saber-toothed cat at least half a size bigger than normal dire wolves. They are considered a full fledged Grade-1 beast, as opposed to the wolves that were considered peak Grade-0 or half Grade-1 predators.
When Claude had encountered the scene of such beast hunting down and eating a helpless horned rabbit, he had no choice but to quickly stop in his place behind some trees and bushes, lest he got discovered right away.
'Calm down. He hasn't noticed me.' Claude told himself off in his mind.
'...'
He began to calm his rapidly beating heart down.
And as if following the command, his heart beat slowed itself straight away after a brief adjustment period. It slowed until it reached a normal heart beat level of around 60 beats per minute...
And then,
It went down a step further!
His heart rate kept slowing down, even past the lowest normal resting heart rate of 40 beats per minute and into the range below that!
This was a trick that he had learned back during his travelling days. It consisted of some specific breathing patterns followed by a series of taps to his pressure points resulting in the inhibition of all his bodily processes.
If he wanted, Claude could slow his heart beat and body processes down until it reached 1 beat per minute and be undetectable by outside forces for a period of time. Inducing a pseudo-death state from other people point of views.
Alas, the situation this time hadn't warranted such measures, so he simply lowered his heart rate a little to increase his hiding capability.
Blending his aura to his surrounding, the smilodon who was known for its keen sense of danger didn't notice a single thing as it briskly finished his light meal off before moving on to another area.
*trod* *trod*
'...'
*sigh*
Only after he was sure that he's out of the smilodon's perception range, did Claude dare to breathe out large volumes of air and let his body returned to its normal state.
"Still not the time... Your chance will come after I finished gathering my moss." He whispered towards the direction of the huge cat.
Not wanting to waste anymore time, Claude picked up his pace even more after he'd passed the last danger zone. Continuing to walk swiftly towards the direction of the mosses gathering spot.
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His plan for the mirage moss was simple.
During his time browsing the creatures database in the tablet last night, he had coincidentally discovered an animal known as the green-spotted pika living within the designated area.
These creatures, which were a variation of normal pikas, known to be the template of a certain 'yellow electric mouse', were animals that lived far away from any high-moisture spots within the area.
In fact, a very high number of them were living in holes underground around the rocky hills area of the forest to avoid their predators hunting range.
But the fact about them that had piqued Claude's interest was that these green-spotted pikas had very acute senses against any form of dangerous substances that might harm their bodies.
These sort of senses were considered normal to have for most of the wild animals to a certain extent. But the green-spotted pikas' senses were considered one of the best even amongst the whole of Eden.
Claude had instantly thought that he could use this.
pikas generally ate any plants that they could find. However, since the rocky hills area that they lived in was rather sparse on trees and any other kinds of greeneries, their diet usually only consisted of wildly grown weeds that managed to slip past the gravel-laden soil around them.
'If I could gather up large amount of mosses and put it around the area that they lived in, I could get them to seperate the normal ones from his target ingredient!'
After all, mirage moss was a very strong natural hallucinogenic, which should count as a dangerous substance to them.
With large amounts of food appearing in their doorstep, Claude could only hope that the pikas might yield the desired results in a timely manner before the day's end.
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The next moment after Claude had reached his target spot, he knew that he had come to the right place.
The rocks and the trunks of trees around this area were covered with many different types of mosses!
There's a different implication of difficulty between finding a rare type of moss amongst all the ones spread here, and swiping the place clean of mosses all the way.
The texture differences between the mirage moss and a lot of other types were miniscule and could only be discovered upon very close inspection. Obviously, Claude didn't really want to do it this way unless he had no other choice.
But since he had discovered the very sensitive species known as the green-spotted pikas, of course he would try his hand on this method first before giving up on any other way!
Claude took out a folded up large gunny sack that he had towed within his single-strap leather backpack and decisively started to scrape in large amounts of any kinds of mosses that he layed his eyes on.
The whole process of his plan was rather straightforward from there on out. After collecting three sacks worth of mosses around the area, he quickly moved towards the living habitat of the green-spotted pikas to place them all down in a single spot.
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The result immediately revealed itself not long after.
And it was a very fast and positive result!
Within a single hour after Claude had left the vicinity to observe, all the pikas that were hiding underground came swarming out towards the mosses as soon as they'd stopped noticing his presence.
Claude could feel his eye twitched looking at the scene, "That was brutal..."
'If all of them were carnivorous animals instead of herbivores, a swarm of them could probably finish off any predators in this area in a second.' He shuddered.
'Nonetheless...'
In a flash, the swarm of pikas left as quickly as they came, leaving what's left of the scenes with little clumps of mosses that were scattered about everywhere on the spot.
But these little bits of clumps were exactly what Claude was searching for! The mirage moss!
"This is a rather... Very efficient method."
Still, he doubted very much that this was the most efficient approach available for the Division's Rangers. After all, he still needed to collect a large amount of mosses around the area and transfer it to the pikas every single time, which ended up accumulating to a large amount of hours loss.
Plus, the amount that he'd gotten from this one trip was only around one third of the required total for the exam.
'I'm sure there're better ways for this...'
"Still, only around three more times to go right?" Claude was not disheartened.
Even if the trip and collecting took a little bit of work, this result was far better than if he were to search through the field on his own looking for every single bits and pieces of mirage moss.
Without delay, he quickly went back to the mossy area to go for the second round of feeding.
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Early noon.
After hours of going back and forth, Claude was finally finished in getting the required amount of mirage moss listed on the paper!
It had taken a little longer than estimated because his third trip hadn't yielded as much as he'd wanted, prompting him to went back and around for the fourth time.
On the other hand, those swarms of green-spotted pikas would always finish their food in matters of seconds each time before going back into hiding.
'Their appetites were monstrous.' He commented.
This little plan of his had taken quite a long while to complete, but he can finally move on towards hunting for beasts materials.
"Now these ones I have no problem finishing today..."
Just like the plants gathering list had one difficult ingredient mixed in, the hunting list also had one material that was equally difficult. It was the hunting equivalent of gathering mirage mosses.
Fortunately for Claude, finding it wasn't the hard part since he had even saw the material on his way to the moss-filled spot the first time around.
Yes, it was the smilodon's pelt.
"I can finally implement the plan I've formulated yesterday." Claude grinned with confidence.
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The 2nd Procurement Division 'Code of Conduct' that he had learned from the staff personnel had taught him to not incur a lasting damage or high-risk changes to the area that he was operating in.
Most people would conclude from this that they had to hunt their target stealthily and quietly with the least amount of traces before moving on to the next one.
But Claude thought differently.
'The 2nd Division expect us not to leave behind any lasting damage that goes against the natural process of the ecosystem, but that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be any collateral damage of any kind.'
"As long as it's in-line with the natural process... Then there's territorial dispute!" He concluded.
According to the environmental reports recorded in the tablet, in the last year alone, there had been four identified large scale territorial disputes amongst different resident animals in the surrounding area.
The most violent of which, was a dispute between the smilodon and a pack of dire wolves over a hunting ground.
Unlike the dire wolves who moved in groups, smilodons were solitary hunters. Therefore, even if it's technically far stronger than the dire wolves, the disadvantage in numbers quickly balanced out their playing field each time a fight broke out between them.
And fights did happen rather frequently between these two beasts. There were 4 cases within just the last 5 years.
Claude intended to fully utilize this fact to his advantage!
He was planning to induce a territorial dispute between the smilodon and the pack of dire wolves within the local area to check off multiple items from the hunting list all at once.
"Obviously, doing this frequently would cause some rather big changes to the environment. But the last territorial dispute recorded between the two was at least a year ago, which means..."
'It's safe to do it this time around!'
Claude didn't linger for too long and started to work.
Provocation towards these sorts of predators didn't really take much effort with their tempers. But it did take some form of trigger, which was where he came in.
He needed to make himself as the bait that pulled either the smilodon or the pack of dire wolves into each others' territory.
As for whether or not he could escape from the dispute later on...
'That shouldn't even be a concern as long as there're no outside variables.'
If and after he had successfully harvested the materials from the two sides, the rest of the materials on the list he could get from the most common of forest boars, which was even easier.
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Claude executed his plans with fine precisions for the rest of the 2nd Day.
He ran around inciting havoc between two of the apex hunters within the designated area, sometimes provoking and hiding, while at other times ambushing his targets when they'd reached the limits of their staminas.
The time flowed faster as he experienced this new form of tension that he hadn't had the chance to feel as much during the period before his imprisonment.
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In the sky, unbeknownst to him, a set of high-tech scouting drones were flying around all over the space capturing his every action with silent movements.
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And then,
The next morning.
Just as the new batch of young trainees were filing in towards the 2nd Division administration cabin to take their examination,
The whole of the Division within Sector-07 was being blown away by the result of a single person's exam evaluation.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
SuperHippo
SuperHippo Thanks for reading!
I haven't got the time to edit this one yet T_T, I will do it within today!
Updates: The next chapter will probably be released on May 6th 2020 at 12:00 PM (GMT+8)
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