Well, realistically, Varan's been taking insane risks for a long time now. Being eaten by some kind of monster on the road isn't really surprising.
Surviving it is!
[We have, like, wild animals? Not very many and they mostly avoid people. If you walked through the wrong woods you might get a bear or a wild boar.]
[I don't think I'm a match for a bear by myself but I could tag-team one if I had someone to set it on fire while I distract it and someone to patch me up when that inevitably gets me disemboweled.]
[When I say eclipsed make a lot of money that includes the mage healers and the reason they make a lot of money is that they charge a lot of money, do not lead your life like you can be trivially patched up when disemboweled.]
[It's not trivial anywhere but you'd expect someone would help if people were in danger from a bear and there weren't any other monsters anywhere.]
[If a bear needs dead someone will come shoot it with a gun. Mostly we want the bears alive, a lot of people just really like the fact that there are bears out there in the world, and we try not to get them used to humans enough that they'll approach anyone.]
[...Well... on the one hand, in that case, I don’t know that I'm good for anything very interesting, but on the other hand, I guess if I ever have to I can just move someplace it doesn't snow and camp.]
[There's not a lot of terra nullius. I don't know that it's impossible but it might be close to it.]
[Quite! Like, there's wilderness, but it's gonna mostly be national parks and timberland and stuff, and I don't think you can just live on it indefinitely. The spells you can sometimes do, what are they?]
He can describe how prestidigitating laundry works in the sort of detail that distinguishes someone who watched it happen regularly for years from someone who really has no idea how it works and just read a single sentence saying it could be done it in a book somewhere and is too lazy to make something up.
[There'd be applications for that but they're going to be niche, since we have washing machines - it'd be stuff like art restoration, off the top of my head. And the heat spell?]
[It's the same spell, it just also makes things hot. It does whichever one you concentrate on.]
[I'm not immediately thinking of uses for that, electricity's pretty good at making things hot.]
[...And if I ask 'is there a different cantrip I should try really hard to remember in case that somehow works', there is no way you're going to be able to give me a useful answer, is there.]
[I don't know what cantrips there are! I could try to find a diviner who'll tell us but if you can barely remember one existing I don't see how knowing its name would let you cast it.]
[Yeah. I mean, I've seen everything that was in my mother's spellbook - the actual spells, not just names - but I haven't even tried to cast most of them. Just, even if I had, I have no idea if any of them would be worth anything here. Seems like you have more light than you could possibly need already, I suppose if you have no monsters there's not that much point in spells for combat...]
[I mean, many things that might mostly see combat use on your planet could have industrial applications or something here?]
[Acid splash? Ray of frost? Maybe mending would be useful? If, again, I actually had the ability to cast anything.]
[Mending might be useful depending on how good it is at things like electronics?]