"Now where are you?" My eyes followed the line of magic present underneath the earth, tracing the leyline is a lot harder than I expected.

  For one, it's not actually just one giant line, it fills the entire area with magic. The earth is just one part of it, the trees, the air, and of course the animals get dragged into its influence, turning an otherwise normal ecosystem into something close to Chernobyl, radiation and all.

  Well I guess magic is less harmful than radiation, and also that people can recover from it much more easily but the comparison is still pretty close.

  Anyway, tracing the leyline isn't a walk in the park, it is brighter compared to the rest of the forest but not by much. The fractal-like pattern I saw beneath the floor of the mender's cottage must have been her doing, but the fact that she's able to build cottages is proof that tracing the leyline and finding concentrated areas is possible.

  I just need to figure it out first.

  Besides the leyline, I'm also looking for a beehive since I need to collect a lot of it for my quest. Upgrading my learner's badge isn't the priority right now though so I'm only just casually searching for bees, I'm sure I can find one by looking around fruit trees.

  Even when they're not flowering right now, bees should still be near them. In a forest like this one, nectars from fruit trees are their main food source.

  But again, bees aren't my priority right now.

  It does suck that I can't come up with anything when it comes to tracing the leyline though.

  After walking around some more, I decided to stop running around like a headless chicken and actually figure out what's going on with this whole thing. The leyline is there for me to study so tracing it shouldn't be impossible.

  My knees touched the ground and I ran my index finger across the bare dirt, leaving a long line from one end of my shadow to the next, without magical awakening the gash I made would look just like any other trail when it is anything but, in my eyes I tracked the size of the river of mana flowing beneath me.

  With this line as a guide, I mapped out the differences in the river, from the tiniest flicker of color present within it to the flow of currents that I can spot. My mind didn't come to any proper conclusion and I was stumped, and then it came to me: isn't it because I'm thinking about this thing like it's actually water?

  Mana is energy, and it's even said in lore that it wants to go to... Certain places. Mana has specific spots it wants to stay in, making the hotspots exist before the leyline...

  Ah.

  So that's how the mender traced this thing huh?

  "Okay, what are mana hot spots?" I muttered out loud to get my thoughts in order, an old habit from my past life whenever I get stumped at work. Pacing back and forth helped too, it got my heart pumping and that lets my brain get more oxygen, that's how I see things at least.

  Leyline's hot spots, I am currently in a rain forest aren't I? I can probably start this whole thing by searching for the biggest tree around here since its long age means that it's been soaked in enough mana for the energy to be naturally attracted to it. Right? Right.

  Biggest tree... Where can I find something like that? If it does exist then doesn't it mean that there's going to be a few "occupants" in it? Monsters are fairly common here and I think that if I want to find hot spots then encountering them is outright inevitable.

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  Eh, it's fine, I want to get more cores anyway, this whole thing only makes it easier for me.

  I thought that but I did go back home to grab a bunch of stuff, the only thing worse than going into monster territory is doing it unprepared. Naturally, my family saw me do this so the question my mother threw at me is kind of expected? Seeing her child rummaging through the storage shed at dusk must be pretty horrific for her.

  "What are you going to do with that Rontress?"

  My answer only came when I'm almost done organizing my stuff. "Making traps, I'm gonna go and find a place full of monsters and then kill them all."

  "Be sure to go back before night."

  "Will do!" The bag wasn't all that heavy, but I think that the lack of weight might have something to do with my stats. "See you later!"

  All of them gave me a dismissive wave as I got out.

  Back at the forest, I started deliberately searching for areas in the swamp that might be a hotspot. Learning about the leylines in places like that will allow me to determine what it looks like when it's actually in an area where mana is concentrated, and once I get the gist of that, mapping the leyline will be within my abilities.

  Walking with my backpack should give me a decent passive though right? That's how I feel at least, but I didn't even feel tired when I found what I was looking for so I guess the chances of me getting a passive through this is pretty low.

  Ahead of me is the tree that I have been looking for, it's some kind of oak? Maybe? It's definitely not pine though, that I can confidently say.

  It stood around 40 feet in total, a height that's supposed to be unnatural for this particular species. Or maybe it is, I'm not a tree expert. Point is, with its giant branches that fanned out so wide it covered the sky, leaves so vast that it looks like a cloud of green floating in the air, and bark so wrinkled you can tell its age. I know that this is the tree I have been looking for.

  Given its age and the fact that it's standing directly on top of a magically concentrated location, it naturally became a hotspot for monsters. There are plenty of them just hanging around, such as the oversized birds perching on the trees, their colors as varied as the dress of a noble trying to look fancy, or the insects crawling around the bark.

  Out of all of them though, the most dominant species is this group of lizards that stubbornly clung to the bark. They had dark brown scales, arrow shaped heads, and I also spotted a purple tongue coming out of their mouths every now and then. Strangely enough, they don't seem to be moving.

  You'd think that lizards would want to constantly eat but guess that isn't the case here? Or maybe I'm mistaking their behavior to that of frogs or something, I wouldn't put that past me.

  Since all the monsters are too busy doing whatever it is they're doing, I went ahead and placed my traps around the surrounding area while studying the differences in the leyline, effectively killing two birds with one stone.

  Doing this so close to night is probably not a good idea but to hell with it, if the monsters in that tree start roaming towards me then I'll just kill them with my magic and if they do it as a swarm then I'll run away while placing walls of ice every so often.

  Lizards hate the cold right? They totally do, the ice walls will slow them down and stuff.

  When night does come and the monsters start truly roaming, then my traps will come and kill them. I'll check this place first thing in the morning and harvest monster cores tomorrow.

  Makes me wonder how much I'll get from a place like this, there's also the fact that so many monsters live here.

  Too bad aberrants give me more exp than these guys, otherwise they'd be the perfect group to farm if I wanted to level up.

  Maybe once the cull finishes? Yeah, definitely once the cull finishes, I'll come here and start killing monsters, if I leave their corpses behind and just take the cores it should attract more animals, and those guys will mutate into the next generation of monsters!

  An infinite exp farm doesn't sound so bad now does it? But I should probably stop counting chickens before the eggs hatch, it's still too early for me to have this much expectation about this place.

  Also, I came here to study the leyline and I think I understand enough of it that I can confidently search for the mender's cottage now.

  Well, I guess I still need to trace the leyline from the tree to the swamp but that kind of work is much easier than differentiating the color patterns of the mana.

  Packing up after the last of my traps got placed, I looked at the ground and then proceeded to follow the river of mana underneath the earth. I realized that if I truly did figure this thing out, I would be able to easily navigate this forest.