There in fact appear to be no other acorns in evidence.

Right then.

She drops to the ground, rolls forward on the landing and bounces back to her feet, then turns back to the tree and punches it just like she did with the first one. Coins?

Nothing falls out of the branches.

Curiouser and curiouser...

Next tree, maximum stealth mode, these branches aren't going to so much as quiver if she has any say in the matter. She inspects them carefully. Acorns? Coins? Neither?

The tree has nothing but leaves on its branches.

Drop-roll-turn-punch, with barely a pause this time as she starts to get used to the maneuver.

Several cardinals burst from the branches of the tree and fly off.

Right, okay. It's time to do statistics to this.

Take the nearest, oh, twenty trees. (That she hasn't already mauled.) Carefully climb and inspect ten, then punch them; punch the rest without inspection. Tally the results. Observe trends.

Of the twenty trees eleven just drop leaves. Three drop branches. There's another flock of cardinals, two squirrels with different colors of fur from different trees, one cluster of butterflies and one tree drops an apricot.

...she returns to the guides to ask, "Does either of you have something to write with? I'm doing tree statistics."

"Certainly." The man produces a small leather bound notebook and a pen and hands them over.

"Cool, thanks."

She writes down her results as best she remembers them, noting which of the trees were inspected before punching and which were not. Then she does twenty more, ten with inspection and ten without. In theory she should not be prioritizing this over building a house but if the trees react to being inspected by not having stuff in them she's gotta figure that out.

Of those she inspected she gets four that drop leaves, one that drops a lemon, one that drops acorns, one that drops a branch, one that produces butterflies, one that produces cardinals and one that produces a single golden bird (literally it appears to be a solid gold bird that nevertheless flies away).

Of those she hits without inspection two drop leaves, three drop acorns, two drop strange cracked eggs that smell awful, one drops a branch, one produces butterflies and finally one drops a small carefully carved wand with what seem to be living leaves on the end.

"Please be careful with those eggs, I don't think they'll hurt you if you break them but they aren't pleasant to be hit with."

"Okay," she says. "That's a lot of stuff. Some of which definitely manifested out of the trees without being there beforehand."

That's all she wanted to confirm with the initial round, so she goes back to her very first tree and gives it a solid kick in the same place she was punching it before. Another few blows like that and she should have it down and be able to start in on stripping the bark and branches. After which, she guesses, she'll use the bark to make buckets to put all the weird tree crap in...

The tree obligingly falls.

"Would you like an axe? I'd generally give one to people after they touch the pillar but I can give it to you before if you'd like.... It is infused with this world's magic though so it won't behave like you might expect."

"Why, what's it do?"

She starts methodically snapping branches off the trunk.

"It itemizes the tree into wood. Standardizing it into discrete uniform chunks. You can also reshape those chucks to a degree and place them into the world. It also allows more advanced crafting options using some other things I'll be giving you after you begin the challenge."

"...huh. Useful."

But she keeps working on her tree trunk just the same. Branches go in this pile, bark goes in that pile—somehow she can dig in her fingernails and just pull it off the wood in sheets. Eventually the trunk is properly denuded and she rolls it over to a relatively clear flat space and sits down by the bark to start shaping it into buckets, a process which involves folding and sealing the edges of the material together by pinching them with her fingers like a chef constructing pastries. Somehow this works.

"What does 'place them into the world' mean, exactly? Do they stick in place by magic somehow or if you put a chunk at the top of a hill and kick it down will it fall like any other thing?"

"You have some intriguing magic there. I wonder what you'll be able to do with magical materials when you get them. Placing things in the world in the way I mean magically anchors them in place. They'll stay there even if you dig out their foundations and leave them floating in the air."

"...okay, more anchored than I was expecting. Gonna do science to that as soon as I get my shit together."

Bucket! She sweeps all the coins into the bucket. Another bucket for leaves, another for fruit, another for acorns. That's about as much bucket as she can get out of the biggest pieces of bark; she leaves the eggs and wand where they are— "what is that, anyway?" she asks, gesturing at the wand.

"It's always fun to see people exploring this world  That is a living wood wand. It will let you reshape trees while keeping them alive or convert itemized wood into living wood structures."

"...neat. Huh. Is it dangerous to play with? Is it possible to play with before I touch the pillar?"

"It doesn't take any mana to use so it should work. The only danger would be if you reshaped a tree in a way that intersected with your body."