Camping

You decide that it would be better to prolong the trip. There was a bit of risk in staying out, but to make any significant progress you’d need a lot more ore than you’d been able to harvest today. Better to stay and hit the nodes again early after they respawn and have a chance to track down a few more. Who knows, you may even get a chance to hunt for some experience while you’re out.

You find yourself a cozy hollow among the gnarled roots of an old tree. There are no signs of it already being used as a den by another creature and you feel reasonably safe as you curl up to sleep. It’s now that you realize how much you’ve already gotten used to sharing a bed with another creature. You have forgotten how cold sleeping alone can be. At least it would just be tonight.

It takes a little while but eventually you drift into a light and dreamless sleep. Your senses still attuned to your surroundings while you lightly doze. Perhaps it’s the effect of your passive stealth enhancing skill but no creatures stumble across you during the night and you wake after several hours of undisturbed sleep.

You begin the day once more harvesting the ore nodes you’d found previously, making slightly quicker work of it since you knew exactly where to go to find them. The work of gathering them remains a strenuous process and it still takes a couple hours to do. Once you finish with the ones you’d found you search for more, only locating a singular node that had already been exhausted by someone or something. The sight of it immediately puts you on guard and you drop low to the ground focusing your senses on the area before you.

You see tracks leading up to and away from the node, they’re not that old. Boots, shallow tread depth and… paw prints. A tamer and it’s animal companion perhaps? The paw prints aren’t canine, definitely feline. A small cougar or other wild cat that the tamer had managed to tame was your best guess. You didn’t have that much experience with cats.

This could be a good opportunity if you can find them before the trail grows cold, or before they find your tracks.