Chapter 2139: Going Back Inside!

"I have encountered a monster root before," an old elephant orc said. "I was fighting a high-level avian beast with some allies, was taken away, and I was dropped deeper in the Hollow Forest after some struggle."

Damba was an elephant orc, but her size was just a bit bigger than the other orcs. Further, female orcs were just smaller than male ones in general, but she was still bigger than most orcs. She was also quite a bit stronger than most, so she was one of the tribe’s most revered female warriors at the time.

"At the time, my team and I wanted to go to the place that increases strength, but we got caught up with beasts early on."

"A place that increases strength?" Althea asked. This place sounded a bit mystical. Could it have something to do with the target place?

Damba nodded. "It’s an old legend among us. Inside the Hollow Forest, there is a place that can help physique grow much stronger. We were a group of twenty, thinking it should be enough to handle a few wild roots.

The existence of monster roots wasn’t well-known at the time. Not only were they so rare, but communication between tribes was also far and few between.

"But that experience was a wake-up call for everyone, and since then very few orcs venture into the Hollow Forest—regardless of strength. We couldn’t even get past the forest itself, we dare not dream of that legendary place anymore."

"Even a few kilometers into the forest, we already encountered many troublesome Wild Roots. Before we even passed a few miles, we had already lost a partner, and everyone was seriously injured."

She lifted her trunk, which had deformed and had an extra gaping hole in the middle.

"When a monster mob with avian monsters entered the forest, we had a hard time going against them, even those weaker than us."

Monsters would still enter the Hollow Forest in droves, especially if there were targets there. Blood from orcs was certainly attractive to the beasts, and this was also a way for the wild roots to get more meat for themselves.

"My enemy was an avian. I was one of the orcs who does well against them since I can pull them down with my trunk."

Damba’s trunk was expandable, like one of those expandable hoses. Her trunk could go longer than her height, which indeed lowered the advantages of flying orcs. Not to mention, the Hollow Forest was a dense area with thick canopies. In such a setup, avians’ advantage was not as pronounced.

It was why they preferred to pull their prey up and then fight them elsewhere, where the sky was clearer. Stronger avians would even use height to injure their enemies—that is to say, take them up in the air and then drop them down, over and over.

This was what happened to Damba, though because she struggled and held on well with her trunk, the battle got extremely far away from the rest of the team.

"We fought hard, and I managed to pull a lot of its feathers, partially breaking its wing. When I was dropped, it wasn’t that high, and I watched as it flew without balance. When it landed, several vines grabbed it.

"The wild roots were normal, and the avian was strong, so most wild roots wouldn’t be able to handle it. In most cases, they can just fly up and pull the plant out of the ground."

"However, its enemy this time was a Monster Root. It was the first time I saw one! It was at least twice as large as the biggest wildroot I have seen.

"It is very strong, and the monster couldn’t do anything at all. The vines—twice or thrice as thick as most wild root vines—easily grabbed its body and SNAP bent it into two."

At the time, Damba did not know it was a Monster Root. After all, Wild Roots and Monster Roots looked similar. What if it were just a bigger wild root?

It was only until much later, in retrospect and when communicating with others, that she found out it was a different tier of plant altogether.

"It went near me, and I thought I was going to die. But instead of attacking me...it ignored me, as if uninterested," the elephant said, tone sounding as if she were still confused.

"Later, I found out that unless we attacked, these things wouldn’t attack either."

This made Althea’s eyebrows rise up.

So...if this was accurate (and it could be incorrect), these so-called wildroots take sustenance just from monsters but not intelligent beings?

Anyway, now that Althea heard everything they knew about the plants, there was no way she could sit still. Her husband was there. While she knew he would be okay, he might still be in trouble!

At the same time, she wasn’t so foolish as to think she could just waltz into the Hollow forest and come out completely unharmed. Even a large group of orcs would be terrified, let alone her.

At the same time, she couldn’t ask the orcs to go with her. Considering how scared they were of those wildroots, she might as well ask them to die.

Her [Woodland Camouflage] proved to be useful to some degree, but it had a duration and cooldown. She at least had to find a place to hide whenever she had to, but wasn’t that difficult? What if she found herself surrounded when the skill deactivated?

At this, she thought of something.

She might not be able to find a hiding spot every time, but she could take it with her!

Why not build a portable shell to rest in whenever she ran out of energy or skill CD?

Her space was large now; she could literally place a house inside and take it out as needed.

Of course, this couldn’t just be a typical house. It had to be the sturdy kind that even those monster roots couldn’t tear apart so quickly, at least capable of delaying time enough to give her time to recover before she had to take it away.

Since she was building it, might as well make it comfortable and fit more people. She had a very strong labor force available right now, anyway.

She opened the eyes of the local orcs with a batch of blueberries, and then offered a few pieces as payment for a couple of hours’ labor. Though she’d use her element, there was still a lot of hands-on stuff that had to be done.

Thanks to her training over the past days, her earth ability had improved since she had climbed that mountain. While she wasn’t to the point that she could mold granite like clay, it was enough for her current purpose. With enough effort and manual assistance, she should be able to create a small abode with nine to ten square meters in floor area within a day.

The orcs watched as she took out the small boulders and small rocks made of hard rock. These were the loose rocks she had taken in before. Some were from the mountain while fighting monsters, and the others were from when she was digging tunnels with the Feyun tribe.

The Orcs thought that the sheer amount of loose stone was several times the volume of what their spaces could take. They began to wonder if people’s spaces were just that different??

Anyway, they watched as she slowly molded it into a shape. Althea started from the base upwards.

A curved, dome surface was the most stable 3D shape, so that was what Althea chose. She added a lot of fibers around them, laid out in dense grid patterns. It wasn’t just to handle tension, but the added friction between fibers should also increase its passive defense capabilities.

The fibers were made of various materials, the best being bast fibers from the inner bark of certain trees. It so happened that the trees in the orc region were quite robust, and Althea didn’t have a hard time picking the right species of trees to target.

The orcs helped her out with the task of creating and placing fibers. She paid them a piece of blueberry per kilogram of fiber they successfully made (with her guidance at the start, of course).

You know, if you put two thick books together and then overlap their pages in alternation, even two cars might fail to pull them apart. Just with this, the surface of the house was bound to be quite sturdy.

The weakness of this structure would probably be the connection of the curved and the flat parts since it was a dome, so she had to reinforce those areas heavily.

The house was finished early the next day.

As for how long it would last...she wasn’t sure yet. Anyway, hopefully, she’d have recovered enough mana and strength to either use the camouflage skill or fight back by the time it showed cracks.

It was the best she could do.

It was time to rescue her husband! Hopefully, he was not in trouble!