Yeeeeeaaaahhh, don't wanna touch any of that. Let's do this with traps and bombs and arrows. Sounds good.

And then after that she can investigate the ancient hall!

That gets her a hologram of a massive triangular building! And more audio, plus another written letter: 

"Apocashitstorm Tour, day 2. My father guest-lectured here, a 300-level military history course on the Age of Human Airpower. Might as well have been teaching medieval siege tactics. I was eight when he died."

So this used to be a school? The old world must have been something to see. Though evidently it wasn't all sunshine and roses, people still fought and died. Dunno if that's comforting or not.

Aloy pokes around the building a little more before setting out again.

She finds a couple of old relics - nothing useful like her Focus, though they might be of interest to collectors - and after that it's either back into the Embrace for the flower or back north on her mission. 

She wants to see what kind of flower is important enough for a machine to put it on a map!

It's one on top of a mountain, apparently - surrounded by a vibrant bloom of other flowers arranged in a large triangle. It's metalic, and it shivers as she approaches. 

Ooh, that is pretty.

And come to think, she remembers seeing something kind of like this before, a long time ago, in an underground ruin where she found her Focus. Maybe she should go back there and double check?

Maybe!

When scanning this flower with her focus, she gets a very weird data file: 

Code fragment downloaded:

 

///

  [function: true]

    {{Evening wind:}}

    {{water laps}}

    {{the heron's legs.}}

  [function: true]

///

Poetry? ...Machine poetry? Now she's definitely got to check out the ruins again.

The ruins are still there, much the way she left them. She hadn't been able to reach the flower last time, but she should be strong enough now to break through the barrier between it and the main halls. (It's in a rare patch of sunlight in the underground ruin, surrounded by a similar profuse triangle of flowers.)

Also, she has a weapon to help break things now.

Hello machine flower, Aloy is here to take pretty pictures of you and maybe read your poetry???

She can reach it fairly easily - and she gets another poem from it: 

Code fragment downloaded:

 

///

  [function: true]

    {{Light of the moon}}

    {{Moves west, flowers' shadows}}

    {{Creep eastward.}}

  [function: true]

///

Evocative.

Okay, but for real this time she's got to go where she started off intending to go. Fortunately, her ability to override Striders makes travel times much quicker than they used to be.

Her contact - Marea, the captain of Mother's Watch - is pretty easy to find... And she reveals that the Carja have closed the border, shutting the gates on their forts, in response to the Corrupted machines in the Sacred Lands. 

Soooo... if the corrupted machines were taken care of, they'd reopen their gates?

Marea's not sure, but... Maybe. 

Well, it's worth a try. Aloy will see what she can do.

Alright. She'll give Aloy the locations of where her scouts have spotted Corrupted machines. "You'll be doing us a favor, too," she points out. 

(There's four clusters - corresponding to the ones Aloy got off the Tallneck's map, and including the one she already took out.)

Cool, she knows where to go. Now to plot a route that also hits as many of the other Points of Interest too.

There's a group of Corrupted machines right outside the gate! From there - to the west is the Carja gate, along with two Flowers, a vantage point, and another Corrupted machine zone. She's also heard rumors of a hunting grounds directly to the north of that. If she wanted to go to the northeast instead, she could hit the place marked by that weird triangle symbol on the Tallneck's map (possibly via the hunting grounds), then hit another Corrupted machine zone and vantage point. If she wants to take a somewhat circuitous route back from or to that northeastern Corrupted zone, she could hit another two Flowers. 

The most efficient route might be going northeast first (either through the hunting grounds or cutting past it), hitting the triangle spot either on her way to or back from the northeastern Corrupted zone, then taking the slightly long way back to hit all four Flowers, the western vantage point, and the western Corrupted zone.

Hunting ground sounds interesting, so she'll do that last route, with the hunting ground to triangle first leg. Since that triangle is taunting her. With mystery.

The Hunting Grounds seems to be a series of challenges and competitions - the person running it tells her that she can take any medals she earns to the Hunter's Lodge in Meridian. (Sounds like this is possibly some kind of cross-cultural outreach thing?) This one's challenges focus on using elemental ammunition against machines. 

Aloy's pretty good at that. Her Focus can tag weak points and her aim's on point.

She'll be able to blow through the trials, then! The highest medal she can earn is a Blazing Sun.

That's how you can tell it's a Carja operation. Still, winning feels good.