The girl cheered as she got a whole System Point for her contribution, though there was no Mystery Box for the food collection. However, the system also didn’t require Kalli to keep the food.

Mark took out handfuls of food until Kalli stopped him, and they made their way down the line, emptying the bag until only a small portion of the odd root vegetables, perhaps two kilos, were left.

"Can I keep these? They’re extra, right? We didn’t have a scale, so we had to guess."

The Rogue nodded. "They’re all yours, call it a tip."

Kalli pointed to the first pile. "You can keep those as well. The quest doesn’t require me to charge you to give the items back after the quest completion. So, you can keep the food you got today, if anyone is brave enough to eat them without testing them.

The system says they’re edible because they completed the mission. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need to do something to them first."

They really did look like potatoes, or perhaps sweet potatoes? They were a vibrant orange colour on the inside, with a thick black skin that wasn’t dirt. The real question was what they tasted like. If they were "edible" only in the "not toxic" sense, it wouldn’t do them much good to go and collect more.

The goods were quickly brought to Gerry so that the others would know how to prepare them, based on the skills of an expert.

"You know, the only one here who actually took xenobiology as a course elective is Esmeralda. Why not ask her if there is a right way to cook these?" Gerry demanded as his kitchen was stormed in the middle of preparing dinner.

"She’s forty kilos soaking wet. No offence, but we trust your kitchen skills more."

The assistants in the kitchen laughed quietly as Gerry tried to decide whether that was an insult or not, then gave up and had them hand over some of the tubers.

"You said that the system confirmed these are safe to eat?"

"It let us complete the mission to gather edible food with them."

"Good enough for me, as long as the healer has a cleanse spell, and you’re doing the taste testing."

The warrior shrugged. "Deal. If they taste like they smell, I’m all in."

Gerry laughed at the thought. The tubers actually smelled like pumpkin pie, sweet and spicy at the same time. If they were about six shades less bright, they might even look like it. As it was, they made the insides of an orange look dull.

The first thing Gerry did was cut a slim strip and handed it to Mark.

"Taste that raw. You might be able to eat it like an apple."

Mark bit down into it, chewed a few times cautiously, then pursed his lips and spit a small bit into the garbage.

"The skin doesn’t seem to be edible. It tastes awful. The inside isn’t bad."

Gerry tried a bit of the interior, then nodded. "It actually does taste like spiced sweet potato pie. Alright, that’s how I’ll prepare this first one, give me fifteen minutes to boil it soft, and I’ll have you taste test it again."

Once the tuber was boiled, Gerry got to work preparing it.

The entire tuber was nearly a kilo on its own, which gave him more than enough to mash some, pan fry some with a honey glaze, make a few small potato fritters, and a small bowl of soup with some of the supplies brought out from the Rat King Dungeon.

"Alright, I will cut these up, everyone take a bite and let me know what you think of each recipe. I don’t know how much of this we will get, but I don’t want to waste it."

The girl from the apartments laughed. "Oh, you’ll be seeing it again. Those evil plants are all along the tree lines. There are acres of them within a half hour walk of here."

"What is the danger level of the plants? Are the others from the apartments in danger from them? Should we have a team with a healer go check on them?"

Mark considered it, then shook his head. "If they’re in a team and don’t go right into the middle of a patch, they should be fine. If they grab one from near the edge, they’ll be able to fight off the vines and chop it off near the base so it stops fighting.

Then they can dig the tubers.

But if they stumble right into them, not realizing that the plants are dangerous, they could be in real trouble. Even a team of heroes might be in trouble if they get the whole group at once.

Not because they’re particularly deadly, but because the first response when they grab you is to panic, and that gives the vines time to wrap you up."

"Ah, that makes sense. You panic, you get fully wrapped, and then it doesn’t matter how strong you are, unless you’re strong enough to simply tear free of the entanglement."

"Exactly. They don’t even have thorns, but it will try to tear your arms off."

The samples were carefully devoured, and Kalli felt the energy from even such a small meal flow into her body. The plants were clearly more powerful than her Common Grade food products, on par with the beast meat that they had collected from the crabs and boars.

That was also valuable information. Not just beasts and monsters, but also the magical plants had more energy stored in their body, and you wouldn’t need a large portion to make a meal.

So, collecting food from magical plants would do them much better than constantly relying on the store. There were some things in the store that you simply couldn’t get from this region, even before the world changed, but they would have to adapt their cooking to use as many of the new products as possible to increase the physique of the Heroes and keep them healthy.

The same would likely go for the others, though the common ranked sorts didn’t need as much of it to keep them going as the heroes did.