After leaving the wandering wizards' camp, Gerald and Lupin headed west.
They gathered spirit herbs along the way while honing their combat skills.
On a rocky slope, they ran into a small group of red caps.
The short, hideous creatures crawled out of the cracks between the rocks and tried to surround them. Gerald froze them in place with a Stagnation Jinx, then hit them one by one with Stupefy.
His haul of spirit herbs over the past few days had been considerable: three tier two moonlight ferns, five tier two tricolor ginseng plants, two tier three red sun herbs, and one tier three earth marrow that had nearly slipped past him unnoticed.
He carefully wrapped these spirit herbs and spirit plants in damp moss, sorted them by type, and stored them in the Potion Ingredient Compartment of his Object-Storing Talisman.
He had not encountered any more tier four spirit plants, though. Precious natural treasures on the level of clear source fruit clearly were not cabbages he could pick up anywhere.
Gerald was also searching for traces of Nagini, but five days had passed without a single lead.
Still, he was not discouraged.
He had already obtained the Thunderbird Egg and Paracelsus's Research Notes on Parseltongue. Together, those two items were worth far more than he had expected to gain before setting out.
Albania was so vast that whether he encountered Nagini had always been a matter of luck.
If he really could not find her this time, he could wait until he learned Parseltongue, then go to the Chamber of Secrets and claim that thousand-year-old basilisk. That would still make the trip worthwhile.
As he was thinking this, an Erumpent charged out from behind a pile of rocks on the hillside.
It was slightly smaller than a rhinoceros, with