What about that place?

It took you a good dozen minutes to decide your eventual destination.

Location after location had been carefully considered and dismissed for a variety of reasons - some were too risky, some were too far, others required you to pass through territories of monsters you did not want to deal with (trice damned trash pandas, how you hates! them. they drive you to drink!), etc...

The location you had finally settled upon was rather far.

It was a semi-isolated shrine to Tenko O-Kami, some six or seven hours from your lair - well, more like four and a half from the foot of the hill, where you were when you started deliberating where to go.

What made it good for your purposes was that it was a sanctuary where adventurers could take a few quests, unload their excess loot and rest safe from monsters behind the barrier maintained by the divine power of the great one.

Only...

Tenko O-Kami was god/goddess (they tended to switch their gender at a whim, not that anyone minded) of foxes and foxkin. Well, also love, fertility, commerce, booze and prosperity, but none of those were important in this particular case.

So, God/dess of foxes and foxkin.

Such as you happened to be.

So, yes, you could freely pass the barrier, it did nothing to you.

Unless, of course, the devs had patched that loophole since you were there last time, but even so, you should easily find a lone adventurer or two in the vicinity, even if the barrier now blocked you.

While time was of the essence, you did take care to harvest any bamboo and wood resource node along the way, and hunted a few small critters - mostly rabbits and squirrels - for meat and furs.

With 19 units of

bamboo - common (bamboo, wood)

(thank the kami that it stacked in units of 5), 4 units of

Oak - common (wood)

and some combined 3 pieces of fur and 3 pieces of meat, your already tiny inventory was almost filled up, prompting you to pause in your trek to fashion a crude backpack out of 4 pieces of bamboo and 2 furs.

While harvesting presented you no penalties according to the system thanks to your skills and knife, it looked like you were out of luck when it came to crafting the backpack.

lack of skill penalty -75%; tool 0%; dexterity bonus +10%; total crafting speed 66%

Well, there it was, the bite behind the crafts.

Thankfully, it was barely an inconvenience, and something you quickly decided that it did not actually bother you all that much.

On the surface, the measly 4 extra slots your handiwork offered seemed not even worth the effort invested, much less the loss of materials that went into it.

As it so often happened, there was more to the story than appeared at first glance.

The crude backpack possessed a trait that made it extremely useful.

Basic bulk stacking - allows for limited stacking of common material resources

All of your bamboo and wood easily fit into two of its slots.

Having temporarily solved your issues with the carrying capacity, for the time being, you proceeded onwards to the shrine, bagging another rabbit along the way, but, unfortunately, finding no more additional resources.

Finally coming up to the shrine, you determined by the position of the sun above the canopy that your gathering and crafting had cost you only about three-quarters of an hour.

You considered that time well spent, as you carefully closed the distance towards the tori gate.

Spying no one around, even after a few minutes of careful surveillance, you determined that getting up to the gate would be safe enough.

Offering a short prayer to Tenko-sama you stretched up your hand towards the space underneath the gate. And experienced nothing at all, as your hand passed freely.

Now filled with confidence, you proceeded on.

Not even three steps beyond the gate, your sharp ears started catching some rather peculiar sounds.

Sounds indicating a rather specific type of activity. Very ahh... personal and personally involved one...

Your vulpine grin reappeared (you really did have a facial and racial structure suited to those).

Now, whatever shall you do?

Interrupting might come of as rather gauche and boorish, after all.

On the other hand, distracted pray was an easy pray...