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The jungle is silent.
To the east, the land plunges down into the green, and to the west the mountains rise high above, but here there is foliage all around, and a game track, and a conspicuous lack of small mammals and birds.
You might even say it's too silent.
She'll offer to make a small rain so they don't have to carry water? Otherwise no, she wants a backlog of burnable information and is writing down every observation that she won't mind forgetting either because it will be obsolete or trivial to re-observe.
They would greatly appreciate the rain, that seems less likely to give them any waterborne diseases as well.
They won't bother her writing until the celebratory meal of grilled jaguar is completed, at which point they'll invite her to have dinner with them.
She will be happy to try the jaguar with everybody else. She's eaten seals and fish and mollusks, and has no idea what to expect a jaguar to taste like.
It's pretty tough, and tastes milder than seal, but still gamier than most fish, but the crossbowman does a pretty good job of slicing it thin in a way that makes chewing it not a whole project.
"I apologise", starts the crossbowman "But I realise that you have not been properly introduced to us, and that you would not be familiar enough with our clans to immediately recognise us as members on sight or to know what that means. I am Du Ye, and while you have already been introduced to Guo Rong, these other two are Jian Bojing" (the swordswoman) ", and this is Jing Yi. The Du clan manage the farms and ecosystems of the empire, the Guo clan pursue virtue and protect the people, the Jian clan study the blade, and the Jing clan are ... scouts, I guess you could say. They go where others cannot, and do what others will not."
She's got carnivore teeth but the thin slices don't make it any harder for her. It's decent eating. "I'm Tireh," she says, "and my people don't do clans, though I could give you the name of the beach I grew up on if you want it."
"Commoners don't really do clans either, they just keep track of who their father was and maybe their grandfather if he was important. If you join the world of cultivators rather than the world of mortals, whichever clans teaches you will probably adopt you."
"What's a beach? I've never heard that word before."
(It does seem to be a real word in the language Du Ye is speaking.)
"I don't think the earth has an edge? It just goes on as far as anyone has ever been since the days of the ancients."
"Wow, no ocean? Well, I don't know what it's shaped like here. I'm from a beach though."
"There might be an ocean somewhere, I've heard the term before, but only as a metaphor in an old book that I had to get explained to me. Thousands of years ago, humanity lived in more places than it does now."
"Records are patchy. There was a war between the immortals, they say, and then monsters moved in over the ruins in most places, which wiped out nearly everyone who survived."
"They can be all sorts of ways. There are demons and devils, but most monsters are just - animals who cultivate by instinct. Like the Jaguar we just killed - it was walking the same way as the Jing clan."
Jing Yi bursts into laughter in the background.
"Not a mundane way - a Way. One of the thirteen paths to immortality. Each is a way to live, a path which we will spend our entire lives walking down and never reaching the end."
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