บท 495: Hostile Foraging

Quicker than I would have liked, the Tigrin golem was back, and we made for the east. As I expected, the first hundred fifty yards or so had picked 'clean', at least of foods the hobgoblins themselves could eat. After that, the scrub plains began to yield berries and nuts, herbs and vegetables and foliage. Most of the animals could run away. It wasn't a quest for proteins, it was an attempt to gather as much biomass as my System could process at a single time.

Part of that was how it handled nutrition; every fifteen minutes, a stomach would take a point each from up to six tracks, or three from the greatest remainder. System stomachs could hold up to ten servings of the same type of food. My real stomach... was smaller now, but it would hold anything that would fit. <1>

"How do you find all this?" the golem asked. "It cannot be by sight alone."