The birds' habitat comes from the Xia clan in the forest.
"Our Yunlan really loves plants. Grandma can tell."
"Because they are all trying so hard to live. Look, they've grown from tiny little things to this tall now." Little Jiang Yunlan looked up at the green trees, her eyes sparkling with pure love.
A leaf fell from a tall tree, lightly touching Jiang Yunlan's hair.
"Lan, the leaves are falling." Gray Honey said, reaching out to remove a green leaf from her head.
She twitched her furry ears, turned her head to look at Grey Honey, and just then saw Grey Honey open her hand, revealing the leaf in her palm.
"Is there anything else?" Jiang Yunlan stopped and blinked at Hui Mi.
Upon hearing this, Grey Honey looked down at her head, then smiled and said, "No, that's all."
Having received a satisfactory answer, Jiang Yunlan withdrew her gaze and strode forward.
Grey Honey lifted her foot to catch up with her, and asked with a puzzled look as she peered around, "Lan, are we here to find a new kind of food?"
"We're just looking for food, it doesn't matter if it's not a new breed. We traded goods with the Hatti clan for a lot of meat, so we don't need to worry about meat reserves for a while, but we won't have enough vegetarian food," Jiang Yunlan said without turning her head.
Grey Honey wanted to say that the orcs in the gathering team would bring back enough berries and wild vegetables, but then she suddenly remembered the sheep-beastmen who came to work in the tribe.
She silently suppressed the words that almost escaped her throat and said firmly, "Lan, we will find enough food."
Lan and 022 identified a wide variety of edible foods, several times more than before, making it easy for them to gather enough food for the entire tribe. However, Lan was certainly worried about the weak sheep-beastmen, so she decided to find food that could even feed the sheep-beastman clan.
"I believe in you all. You've always been amazing," Jiang Yunlan said with a smile, her words full of trust.
Her gaze once again fell upon birds perched on the treetops. She belatedly realized that she had encountered far too many birds along the way, as if she had stumbled upon a flock's roost. Realizing this, she looked up and scanned the treetops, and sure enough, found many birds hiding among the branches.
It's not an illusion; this is indeed a place where birds gather.
If it weren't autumn, there would surely be many bird eggs on the ground. Jiang Yunlan thought to herself, and told her people to stop collecting wild vegetables near the tree roots. She also squatted down and picked up a wild vegetable.
"...There really are bird eggs." Holding a few wild vegetables in her hand, she stared at the broken eggshell with surprise, a feeling of unexpected astonishment welling up inside her.
It seems the birds in the tree are birds that lay eggs in the summer.
Hearing Lan's voice, Heitu turned to look at her and immediately saw the empty eggshell. She stood up and walked closer to Lan, uttering serious words with a blank expression, "Lan wants to eat? I'll find some."
"No..." Jiang Yunlan swallowed the half-spoken denial, gently exhaled the breath she had just forced down, and said with a smile, "Hmm, I want to eat it."
There are birds in the forest that lay eggs in the summer. If you look around, you can probably find intact eggs to give the beastmen an extra meal.
One of the orcs overheard Lan and Heitu's conversation and immediately nudged one of their kind, reminding them to keep an eye out for bird eggs. Within seconds, all the orcs knew Lan wanted to eat eggs, and their earnest search for food turned into an extremely serious one.
While searching for fruits and wild vegetables, they set their sights on a new goal: finding eggs.
Grey Honey, adept at climbing trees, spotted a bird's nest in a branch, instinctively transforming into a beast-like form before reverting to beast form in the next instant. Stealing eggs directly from adult birds wasn't cautious enough; if it angered a vengeful bird, Lan would be chased and pounced on. It would be better to steal eggs from birds without adult birds guarding them.
"Lan. Egg, look." Heitu found the egg first, carried half a basket of wild vegetables on his back, walked a few steps to Lan's right side, and held up the items in his hand.
Jiang Yunlan turned around and praised her. After she finished speaking, she turned her head and turned aside a clump of low plants, her gaze meeting that of two eggs that were very close together. They sat on the weeds, not obscured by any plants.
“These two are intact,” Jiang Yunlan said, picking up one of the eggs and standing up to hand it to the half-adult lemming beastman next to her. “Black Soil, take it to the car.”
The two eggs were several times larger than the large bird's eggs, so it was safer to put them in the vine basket in the car, which was full of wild vegetables.
Kurotsuchi understood what Lan meant, took the patterned bird egg, and turned to walk towards the wooden cart not far away.
After settling one egg, Jiang Yunlan picked up the other egg from the ground and cradled it in her arms. She lowered her head and listened carefully to the sounds inside with her furry ears, her movements just as cautious as when she listened to the first egg. Her human form didn't have human ears, only animal ears, which allowed her to detect more sounds than when she was still human.
She heard a faint sound.
"rustle."
Jiang Yunlan looked up and followed the direction of the sound, her gaze sweeping across a slightly sunken patch of ground where she saw a clump of low trees. It seemed to be the sound of the wind blowing.
She turned her head closer to the eggshell again, but didn't hear the faint sound. She clearly heard it just now.
A golden leopard, carrying a large egg in its mouth, approached Jiang Yunlan's face and exhaled a strong breath from its nose, bringing her back to her senses.
Jiang Yunlan finally came to her senses and blinked her sore eyes.
"What's wrong?" she asked Yan Dahe, puzzled.
Yan Dahe walked around to her and turned his head to gesture for her to look at the wooden cart.
"Lan! We've finished picking all the wild vegetables and ripe fruits here. We should head to the next place," Grey Honey called out from beside the car.
Jiang Yunlan responded and slowly walked over, carrying the plain-colored egg. The egg in her hand had very weak vitality; the heartbeat inside was intermittent, and she didn't know if it could survive.
The golden leopard stood behind Lan, protecting little Lan as she walked to the side of her tribesmen. They didn't notice that after they had walked a distance, the sunken ground in front of the dwarf tree had transformed into a raised path.
Jiang Yunlan carefully placed the plain-colored egg down, then caught the large egg from Yan Dahe's mouth with both hands and put it into a vine basket.
"Where did you find such a big egg?" Jiang Yunlan asked curiously.
“Inside a cave,” Yan Dahe said.
A bad feeling welled up inside Jiang Yunlan. She took a deep breath, decisively climbed onto the wooden cart, and shouted for the beastmen to leave. Yan Dahe seemed to have stolen a large animal's cub; if they didn't run away quickly, the animal would be drawn by the scent and rush over.
She wasn't afraid to fight the animal, but with so many eggs on the truck, what if one of the surviving eggs got smashed in the bumps and knocks?
Three adult orcs pulled the wooden cart steadily, while the orcs who didn't need to pull the cart followed closely on either side of the three carts, running at a steady pace.
Yan Dahe ran alongside Jiang Yunlan, looking helpless, and asked, "Lan, should I not have taken this egg?"
Jiang Yunlan sat in the car tending to the eggs of various sizes. Hearing her uneasy voice, she immediately laughed and loudly affirmed, "No, you're absolutely right. If this egg is a wild beast's cub, then we'll tame the beast inside!"
The fighting power of wild beasts should not be underestimated. If a clan can tame a wild beast, it will gain another powerful force.
Hearing Lan's happy and unrestrained laughter, Yan Dahe breathed a sigh of relief. Taming wild beasts? If they were wild beasts tamed by the tribe, they shouldn't be afraid, right?
Jiang Yunlan and her group ran far away, and the underground creatures that had been chasing them disappeared without a trace.
"Lan! A bird is chasing us!"
"Oh no! Run! Be careful not to drop the eggs we just pulled from the bird's nest!"
One orc, unable to resist attacking the nest, attracted a flock of birds that attacked him. He hastily fled with the eggs, having no chance to put them down. The vengeful birds summoned other birds, who then pecked at the Xia clan orc who had taken the chicks.
Seeing that the Xia clan's wagon was filled with many eggs in the vine baskets, they mistakenly believed that the Xia clan orcs had also stolen the eggs from their nest, and their attacks became even more ferocious.
"Ouch! Bird droppings! Watch out, bird droppings are falling from the sky!" A squirrel-like beastman screamed after being hit on the head by bird droppings.
"Ah! My butt! I didn't steal any eggs, why am I being attacked too!" a sprinting leopard beastman cried out in despair.
"Lan—let's go back to the clan. A patch of my fur has been bitten off. Waaah, I look awful now."
Sitting in the car, Jiang Yunlan waved away several birds that flew towards her, and said in a protective voice while holding the egg in her hand, "We'll be out of the woods soon, just hang in there a little longer."
Grey Honey, also sitting in the car, remained silent, one hand protecting the vine basket, the other blocking the birds that were attacking Lan.
"Waaaaah, why are they still chasing us even after we've left the forest?" The leopard-man, whose body had been bitten bald, couldn't hold back anymore and cried out loudly.
After being chased for several kilometers by the flock of birds, Jiang Yunlan and the other orcs finally shook off the vengeful birds. Thankfully, they escaped, otherwise they would have had to return to their clan with this group of exceptionally powerful birds.
"Lan, are you hurt?" Hui Mi subconsciously breathed a sigh of relief and looked at Lan nervously.
"I'm fine," Jiang Yunlan said, and then looked her over carefully. Seeing that she wasn't injured, only that she had lost a small tuft of hair, Jiang Yunlan turned to check the eggs on the car.
After checking the items in the car, Jiang Yunlan found only three broken eggs, and they were all dead. She was relieved.
The food loss wasn't significant, but the beastmen suffered a great loss, especially their fur. Watching the beastmen return to their tribe and weep over their lost fur, Jiang Yunlan was at a loss for words to offer comfort.
Many orcs are concerned about their fur when they transform into their beast form. If they go bald in their beast form, there's a chance they'll become withdrawn, staying in their tribe and refusing to go out until their fur grows back. Just like Lup, who has yet to appear.
It took Jiang Yunlan and the clan members some time to coax the bald orc back to health.
The heartbroken leopard-beastman decided that he would never transform into his beast form again until his fur grew back. He... he wouldn't go out anymore, and even if he did, he wouldn't go out in his beast form. The leopard-beastman, who still wanted to hunt, weakly lowered his standards.
“Lan,” 022 came over with the wolf-beastman who was working, and floated back onto Jiang Yunlan’s shoulder, “Welcome back.”
Jiang Yunlan raised her hand and gave it a high five, smiling brightly: "I'm back."
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Author's Note: The little angel "Nan Shige" has injected 67 hair growth serums, and the orcs who lost their hair and fur are about to grow lush hair and fur.
The little angel "^^" dropped 1 nutrient solution, replenishing the fragile solid-colored egg and increasing its health by 1.
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