Mission name: Explore the Land of Fire.
Mission rank: D-rank.
Objective: Explore the country, anywhere you want, and make maps of the places you go.
Location: Hi no Kuni.
Reward: 100 Ryo.
Mission description: The administration building is extending their records of the country's geography and they need people to work as cartographers and make the maps for them.
Mission Details: Explore anywhere you want in the whole country, you just have to make a map of wherever you go.

The Land of Fire was a vast, vast place.

It was arguably one of the largest countries in the entire Elemental Continents, and while geographists and topologists may argue that the Land of Earth or the Land of Wind could challenge the size of the Land of Fire, no one could argue that the Land of Fire housed the most villages among the three, followed by the Land of Earth and finally with the Land of Wind only boasting a miniscule number due to its arid environment, as compared to the Land of Fire’s rich, nurturing environment.

It was for this reason that Konoha often needed it mapped, not just to find out new, unexplored areas, but also to update their existing database on the various villages that dotted Konoha. Cultures were always changing, trade routes were always being redirected, and it was imperative that Konoha was made aware of all these changes if they were going to properly and safely defend not only their borders, but the people within.

However, Kidou was now in the northwestern area of the Land of Fire, trying to map out the dense - extremely dense - forest that he had found himself in. Many people had expressed problems traversing through these forests. Now, while normally, complaints like these coming from civilians and merchants would have been responded with a ninja missions being drawn up to escort such people through the dense greenery, but these complaints had come from other Genin, and the administration had deemed it unfathomable that such a dense forest was what had been keeping Konoha’s economy from blooming as smoothly as it should have. As a result, they had sent Kidou, a Genin himself, to map out the treacherous and dense forests northwest of the village, obstructing the clear path to Iwagakure.

“Okay, so a tree here…” Kidou noted down on his map. It was a stupid thing to note down, given he was in a freaking forest, but that was the complexity of the task given to him. “And… there and there and there and there.”

Kidou looked at the map he held in his hand. It was ninety-percent complete now. As strenuous a task as it may have sounded, marking down trees wasn’t as hard as he had thought, especially when the map itself came with the location of most of the trees. The only things that he had to do were to cross-reference the trees on the map and the trees in the forest, making sure that every tree was taken note of, and to add those that had recently grown, while mark those that had been fallen due to whatever activity. It wasn’t unusual for the occasional farmer to think of a quick profit by cutting down some trees, and as illegal as that may have been, it was just a small, negligible problem, and not one that Kidou was bothered to do.

The map looked pretty plain. It was just a white, slightly yellowing, piece of paper with several circles on it, with their sizes slightly differing to indicate the respective sizes of the trees in the forest. It was a fairly detailed map of his location, and his location alone, though anyone without any idea what they were looking at wouldn’t know exactly where it pointed, since the only other things on this small square parchment was the four cardinal directions: North, South, West, and East, along with a small winding path that snaked around the forest on the bottom left, or southwest, corner of the map.

He double-checked the area once more, looking high and low and travelling through some of the branches, as well as disabling several traps that he had found. These traps seemed to have been meant for ninja who had been looking to pass this forest at high speeds, since it had taken him hours of looking to find all of them and disable them. Even so, he didn’t plan to report this to the authorities, at least not on an urgent basis. They were likely placed by the local hunter who had decided to catch some wildlife, or other Konoha ninja as a result of some long-drawn out battle that had long since ended.

‘Seems clear enough,’ he thought, before turning back to Konoha to submit the updated version of this small, small speck of the Land of Fire’s expansive area.

Konoha's administration would be happy with the work that he had done, and he just hoped that this would be helpful to future ninjas who tended to get lost.

[Exit]

772

D-rank: 600
Reaction Time: E-1 to E-2: 150