I jump off the left eye tower of Skull Lake and fall an impressive distance before arresting my fall with the glider, swim over the other eye island, build a fire, and wait for night. At night, I turn from the fire to see an odd contraption, a bit like a hot air balloon, with a creepy looking grey skinned person working on the machinery inside. He doesn’t notice me at first, so I walk up right behind him and startle the crap out of him by introducing myself.
I’ve met Kilton. He tells me of his business startup, Fang & Bone, and shows me his business card. We have a brief conversation before he takes off, and I’m left all by myself again.
I guess I’ll see him again sometime…?
I explore the region around Skull Lake, but it’s a lot of difficult climbing and point A to point B is usually anything but direct. There’s a concentric shell inside shell of rock formation to climb on, and then there’s another wetland region, with some rock formations that I want to check out. I eventually get there, after much climbing, and waiting around for rainstorms to end, which gets annoying.
I find a Goron camp where the Gorons are all dudebro weight lifters who are all about getting ripped and shredded and challenging each other to do manly feats of strength, such as climbing. They are an amusing parody of gym rats. They have a rock climbing course called Gut Check Rock, which they challenge me to climb. I check it out. There’s an updraft right next to the rock, which makes it easy to get to the top, and I talk to another Goron, who tells me about the challenge and dares me to try it. As I talk to them, I imagine Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage doing the voices, which makes it very entertaining.
I do, and it’s not too hard. Starting at the bottom, I climb up and quickly get all the rupees they’ve left along the course, picking up 121 or 141, I forget which. I only needed to get 100, and I complete the course with 30 seconds to spare. I’m pretty sure I could glider cheat it in under a minute; fly up, glide down and pick up the rupees as I fall, then glide back to the top again, and blow their dudebroron minds.
I find four or five korok seeds in this area as well, but I don’t really see a lot of reason to spend much time here, so I skip the bokoblin camp I see behind Gut Check Rock, and teleport back to Akkala Stables, and run back up to the Akkala Technolgy Lab, where I go to do the furnace lighting quest. This takes a lot of time, as the trip is more difficult, I have to clear the route of many moblins and octorocks, it rains every other hour, and I don’t have a torch to keep lit. I improvise by burning moblin clubs that I loot from defeated moblins, and it takes forever, but I eventually get every lamp lit and the furnace as well.
This activates Cherry, who can now manufacture expensive Ancient Weapons for me, which are awesome, as well as Ancient Armor, which is even more expensive and even more awesome. Awesome.
Having done that, I do not have the 6000 Rs that I’d need for the Ancient Armor suit, or the 1000 Rs that I’d need for any one of the ancient weapons. So, looks like I have a couple hundred more hours of play left in this game if I want to afford the good stuff.
I take Radish, one of my horses, out from the Akkala stable, and we ride down the road looking for adventure. Heading south along the east coast road, I ride a long way, pausing frequently to check out interesting sites, and find some korok seeds and a few forage areas, but I’m interrupted pretty frequently by monsters. It seems like monster frequency is higher in Akkala than in a lot of other places. I don’t feel particularly harried or harrassed in other parts of Hyrule, the next most full of enemies probably being Gerudo desert believe it or not, or maybe Faran jungle. But here it is probably even double that, and it’s often multiple groups of enemies at once, like keese and moblin skeletons, or bokoblin riders and moblins. Or moblins and lizals. I avoid fighting when I can, to conserve weapons, and if I can kill some with bombs, I’ll do that in order to harvest their loot drops so I can sell the body parts later to fund my ancient tech armory.
Coming to a fork in the road, I see a road sign, which says one way is Fang and Bone, so I head that way. Or I think I do, but I must have read the directions wrong, and took a wrong turn. I end up getting to the spiral peninsula, which I go check out. There’s some ancient ruins near the base of it, which I explore and find two koroks, and then I find an orb. I have to carry this damn orb all the way to the center of the spiral, and then I’ll reveal a shrine. This takes a damn long time, because of how slow you walk when you’re carrying a heavy object like these balls. I also have to stop roughly every 20 feet to pick up a rock to chekc to see if it has a gem or rupees under it, or a korok seed, or to pick up crabs or other forage, or to fight moblins and lizals, or to shoot an offshore artillery octorock with an arrow. It takes what feels like at least an hour, and might have been even more than that, but eventually I reach the center of the spiral, put the ball in the socket, and the shrine appears.
The shrine just gives me its reward, there’s no challenge. No complaints here this time. I’m worn out from carrying the ball around the spiral.
Emerging from the shrine, I decide to cut straight across the water to get back to shore, and find that the water on the inner orbit of the spiral is shallow enough to wade, so I probably could have made this trip with the orb a lot faster if I hadn’t wanted to make sure I missed absolutely nothing of the wonderful spiral adventure loot. I swim the rest of the way to shore, and climb up the hill back to the ruines where I left Radish.
I get there, killing three more moblin skeletons, as it is night time, and then fire keese appear, and more wolves, and I fight them, too. Then a swordsman from Yiga clan appears and I kick his ass as well. It’s seriously like one encounter after another like that, sometimes, around these parts.
I decide to get out of the area, and follow the road further south. I get to a point about at the latitude where the fairy shrine is, so I’ve come pretty far back south, although still well north of Lanayru Mountains, when I come to an area I haven’t explored at all, which looks geographically similar to the features around Zora’s domain, but a bit more like a quarry. There are loose boulders all over the place, and someone has left iron sledge hammers laying about all over. I guess I’m expected to slam balls into the valley below. Presumably for some purpose. Also, my shrine detector is pinging a lot, but I can’t see any shrine nearby, and I’m having a difficult time triangulating where it could be. It seems like I must be passing right over it, and not see it, so it’s probably underground somewhere.
At this point it’s grown pretty late and I’ve gotten rather tired, and I was hoping that I could find Kilton’s monster shop, Fang & Bone, but I must have gotten way lost, and now it’s probably like a couple dozen miles away back where I took the wrong turn.
There’s a chain of islands off the shore of the east coast here, and I haven’t explored those yet, other than the southern most of them, where I had my first Lynel encounter so long ago. It’s just possible that Kilton is somewhere around there, but if not I have no idea where he could be.
I can’t find the shrine, and from being bounced around from a few points, I have a feeling that there’s either more than one, or that there’s a deep underground shrine similar to the one in Hebra. I move on, climbing further up the cliffs, and eventually make it back to the area near Zora’s domain where I fought my first Lynel, who has reincarnated due to the Blood Moon. He spots me, we fight, I win again, and pretty easily. This gives me some confidence.
I also have a near encounter with Naydra, the dragon of Lanayru, and try to hit him with an arrow, but by the time I get close enough to get a shot off, he has changed course and my shot falls just short, and I am unable to get him to drop a scale.
I take off again from the peak of the mountain near the Lynel’s field, and glide further to the south, to an area I haven’t been to before, and explore, finding korok seeds, and a shrine. It’s another Kass song shrine, although I find Kass after I find the shrine. This one involves riding air currents on the paraglider to land on a pad which triggers the shrine to emerge from the ground. To clear a path, you have to use bombs or bomb arrows.
I learn from this that bomb arrows do not work in the rain, as the fuse can’t light. Good to know.
I continue to explore further south, running into moblins, bokoblins, and lizals around the mid-point of Talus Plateau, and a Hinox, who, out of boredom, I decide must die. I defeat him and he drops some nice royal-level weapons, including a bow.
Further south, I have a run-in with the very first Lynel I encountered in the game, when I took the raft from Lurelin village all the way north to Wintre Island and Tarm Point. I don’t want to fight him, but before I am ready he spots me, and the fight is on. I haven’t saved in a while, and decide to just roll with it. We tangle. He kicks my ass very, very badly — I use most of my good prepared meals, all of my fairies, and Mipha’s Grace, all of my normal arrows, but I eventually drop him. He seems to grow in strength as I knock his health bar down, unleashing lightning, fire, and wind attacks in addition to absolutely brutal melee attacks. He drops some very powerful weapons and a shield, but the rupee chests that I had looted via stealth before when I first encountered him are gone. I guess they don’t respawn with blood moons? Well, they’re not monsters…
I return to the North and buy the Ancient armor from Akkala Technology Lab, but I only have enough to buy the cuirass for now. The helmet and greaves will come later. I visit the fairy in Akkala and get a few more upgrades on my clothing.