A Tasting Expedition

After opening his eyes, he moved in the direction of these three different smells and found that two of them were coming from the flowers present the two different plants that were present near the tree with the poisonous red fruits and the other one was coming from the dark green leaves of a two meter tall plant that was situated on the other side of the tree.

After getting close enough, he plucked the two little petals from the two different flowers and one dark green leaf from the two meters tall plant, and then squished the first petal in between his fingers and put it in his mouth, and then he closed his eyes and activated the amplified sense of "TASTE" and the next moment a blue number popped up in his 'TASTE INDICATOR'.

[ -13 ]

Then after spitting it out, he opened his eyes and tried the same thing with the other petal and the dark green leaf, and they came out to be [ -9 ] and [ -3 ].

After taking a look at these blue numbers, he spit them both out and opened his eyes cancelling his sense of "TASTE".

"Well, what did you expect?", June said in his mind while sighing in his heart at the same time.

After roaming around the jungle in search of the suitable plants with unique smell, after more than two hours, his hard work finally paid off.

June had finally found four different plants with uniquely strong smell which had better than normal aftertaste.

The main reason that why he only found just four plants that fulfilled his requirements was because most of the strong smells that was present all around the jungle was mostly covered by the wild flowers, and hence providing very little space for the other hidden ones.

And also, June could not walk blind while his amplified sense of "TASTE" was activated, after all this was a very taxing restriction for him.

He found only four plants, one of them with light yellow leaves and the other three out of them were herbs, and even within those selected few plants, both smell and taste varied according to their different parts.

Like in the case of one of the plants, only roots were edible, whereas leaves were mildly poisonous, and in other one only stem was edible and everything else was toxic. But there was one strange thing that June could not ignore.

Which was that he had actually never seen flora and fauna of this kind before in his life. It was like he was in a totally different place than earth but he was not totally sure about that, after all he had not travelled to every corner of the earth, and so far, it was looking like he was still on earth, and at the same time not exactly. It was a very strange kind of feeling.

Earlier due to his unique circumstances, he had been preoccupied with many different things, but now when he was taking a closer look at all the vegetation in this hilly forest in order to search for those strong scented plants, he found out that he has never seen or read or even heard about any of these types of plants before that he had been noticing so far in this forest.

But due to his time constraints, at the moment he could only take a mental note of it.

Finally, he had collected four different parts from the plants that met his requirement. Inside the June's sense of "TASTE", the 'TASTE INDICATOR' had shown the readings that were at least more than positive sixty five percent consumable.

They were [ 67 ], [ 71 ], [ 65 ], and [ 87 ] respectively, out of which [65] was from the 'yellow leaves', which tasted a bit salty, [67] and [71] were the 'stems' with their own unique strong flavor and [87] was actually from the 'roots' of one of the herbs which had the flavor similar to the red chilies.

After collecting a handful of these plants and keeping them separately in four different leaf pouches, June noticed that the whole process had nearly taken him approximately around three hours, so after keeping all his belongings and collections on his belt, he started walking back in the direction of the first river stream in order to further proceed onto his next task of the day.

When he reached the river stream, he started looking around for a bigger pond of water, down the river stream.

Last time when June was bathing in the waterfall, he had noticed a few river fishes in that pond, but now June was looking for an even bigger pond with a bit of more steady water.