My Sheowon captors led me past the statue towards the largest building in the village, which was just beyond it, and I finally gave it the attention it deserved.
The reason it was so much bigger than the others was because it was, for lack of a better word, a pyramid—though it was round, which, upon closer inspection, the stone buildings were as well. Its base occupied far more land than the simpler structures around it, but each subsequent layer was smaller, until it reached the same general base size as most of the village buildings, at which point a similar structure to the rest was built upon it.
Since the base was solid stone, and the building had little extra storage space or capacity, it was very much performative, and likely tied to religion, leadership, or both. Since I was being brought to the “elders” of the village as a result of my blessing, and the goddess’s statue was right in front of it, I was leaning towards it being both.
I was guided up the stairs of the pyramid base until we reached the entrance to the actual building, at which point I was told to wait while Ushem entered to inform the elders what had happened. That gave me a chance to study the building a bit closer.
In addition to being on top of a pyramid base, it was a lot higher quality than some of the other buildings I had passed by. I didn’t have to wonder for long why they hadn’t made the actual building larger, rather than just building it on a huge base; it was the same limitation the Uli faced with building. There was no lumber, so they had no supports or roofing beams.
Coming up out of the center of the building was a round chimney, and as I glanced back at the village, I noticed the other buildings had similar central chimneys. So the structure of the roof under the thatch was possibly domed stone, and if they went any larger, the weight would become a problem—either collapsing the interior chimney or just too difficult to move into place for Sheowon builders. The thatch was somehow secured on top, adding waterproofing and insulation.
Or maybe they used megafauna bones, like the Uli used in tent making, which would also limit the overall size. The creche tents were pretty large, but it was just holding up hide, not the weight of a full roof. I had no idea if megafauna still existed on this landmass, though, or if these Sheowon had already hunted them to local extinction in the process of building this level of civilization.
Ushem stepped back out, derailing my internal debate about roofing and drawing my attention back to the immediate issue. “The elders will see you now,” he said, motioning for me to enter.
I did so, and when my eyes adjusted to the low indoor light, I quickly took in my surroundings. A glance up revealed that the ceiling was domed stone, after all, and it looked shockingly well done given the level of civilization otherwise. Blood techniques weren’t as flashy as Argadian magic, but even still, its use allowed for things which humanity had needed more advanced tools to accomplish, and so the order of development wasn’t the same. That, and necessity was the mother of invention; the lack of wood forced these people to build with stone, and with the Blood to do so, it was no surprise they worked it well.
The hearth drew my eye because, unlike the smooth and carved stone of the rest of the structure, the opening of the fireplace was comprised of a rougher, darker, porous stone that was largely unworked. Inside the hearth was a low, smoldering fire using the unidentifiable squared-off chunks of fuel. Near the fire was a clay pot with something delicious-smelling simmering inside.
Pottery wasn’t too surprising to see, as they had mortared stone buildings, and clay was likely an ingredient in that. More importantly, they had fuel to fire it. There was clay where I grew up, but it couldn’t be fired, so pottery hadn’t developed.
I only gave all that a moment of consideration though, as I focused on the most immediately important thing: the elders with whom I was meeting.
Like Ushem’s group, the elders numbered four, with two males and two females. Sheowon, like the Uli, had four digits on each of their arms and legs, so they likely also counted in fours and sixteens primarily. Also, their goddess’s statue had sixteen arms, but I wasn’t sure if that was correlated, and in which direction; the admin’s arms, in her goddess form, hadn’t really been countable, and the statue, as a representation of her, might have settled on sixteen arms if groups of four was common in their culture and a group of four had sixteen arms.
The old females reminded me of the grandmothers of my tribe, at first, though the facial and bone structure was different. Unlike the aged Uli females, these women radiated confidence and power, so any familiarity or comfort was quickly subdued. Even more discomforting were the old males.
Male Uli didn’t live to see old age, so aside from glimpses in the village along the way, this was the first time I got to see a senior male in this world.
All four of them were well-dressed, displaying their status, though it wasn’t overly ostentatious. I couldn’t entirely tell if that was just because they didn’t have access to the kind of wealth that would allow for that, from my human perspective, and I was missing a more subtle display of wealth. After all, they were sitting on top of a relatively large pyramid structure.
Given that the Sheowon had a way to cultivate Blood without killing each other, it was fair to assume the elders were among the strongest in the village, since they had the most time to develop. That was mostly confirmed when Ushem and the others were told to leave, and they did so without complaint, leaving me alone with their leaders.
“Sit,” one of the females commanded, and I did, as they were also sitting—on some kind of woven cushion—and I was already taller than them, so standing was pretty awkward.
“Ushem gave us the rundown,” one of the males said. “Maleekrume, was it?”
“Mali-iq Rumi,” I corrected. “But you can just call me Mali.”
“Mali, then,” the other female said. “You can call me Yishola, and this is Owawu, Brumesh, and Nupeol.”
The names were quite different from both Uli names and the human names of my previous lives, but I had a plenty sufficient Brain stat to remember them. Hopefully. “Nice to meet you.”
“I’m not sure we can say the same thing,” the first female, Brumesh, said in response. “You bear strange tidings.”
“How did you get here? Ushem said you rode something across the ocean?” Owawu asked, leaning forward.
“The how is less important than the why,” Nupeol said, shaking his head at his fellow elder male. “And your connection to the All-Bonded.”
“First I think we need to address the Blood retaliation,” Brumesh argued.
Yishola clapped her upper two hands. “Perhaps we should let Mali here tell us the whole story himself.”
The other three elders leaned back slightly on their cushions, muttering acceptances.
“The whole story?” I asked. “Starting from when?”
“In my experience, it’s best to start from the beginning,” Yishola said with a soft smile.
I looked over the four elders, and while Brumesh and Nupeol were clearly still skeptical of me, they all seemed willing to listen. These were leaders with experience and, I hoped, wisdom, rather than people who led purely with strength. I let out a slow breath, thinking of what to say.
“Well,” I began, “I was born in an Uli tribe, and spent my childhood with my mothers and siblings in our creche…”
*
“…and that brings us to the here and now,” I finished.
The elders had interrupted with questions several times through my life story, but for the most part were quite good listeners. With my story finished, the room fell silent as the four elders contemplated what they had heard.
“Well,” Owawu said slowly. “I don’t think you’re being entirely truthful.”
“Yes, he’s obviously hiding something,” Brumesh agreed.
“But I also don’t think he’s lying,” Owawu added. Brumesh hummed, while Nupeol simply sat in thought. Yishola stood, and walked over to the fireplace.
I tried not to let anything show on my face. Obviously, I had glossed over the details of my [Metasurvival] and reincarnation, and while I knew parts of my story would be hard to explain without that key aspect, I had hoped it wouldn’t be too obvious.
“Coming up with a way to effortlessly float on the ocean and then developing it enough to cross who knows how much distance to reach our shores, all in a handful of years?” Brumesh pointed at me with one of her hands, while looking at Owawu. “That’s absurd.”
I didn’t think it was that absurd. Technological development did sometimes happen in rapid leaps and bounds, like the development of heavier-than-air flight on Earth in the early twentieth century. Admittedly, that was built off of a much larger foundation of experimentation and theory that went back hundreds of years, so maybe it wasn’t a very good comparison. Also, comparing my boat development to something that happened in another world was no way to convince these Sheowon that it was plausible.
“Ah, but if the All-Bonded guided him, it would explain his insights,” Nupeol said. “And clearly She did, since he received Her blessing upon reaching us.”
Brumesh scoffed. “We haven’t verified that yet. Besides, why would the All-Bonded guide him here to bring Her word back to his people, instead of giving one of our people the task?”
Yishola stepped away from the fireplace and over to me, and I turned to find her passing me a small clay bowl of the simmering soup. “Oh, thank you,” I said, taking it. I was eager to taste it, but waited for it to cool down so I didn’t burn my mouth on it and look like an idiot. “Brumesh, I can probably answer that much. Quite frankly, if any Sheowon approached an Uli tribe, there would be no reception. You’d likely be killed immediately. My people are incredibly hostile to outsiders, even their own kind. The only way you’d be listened to at all was if you fought and killed the tribe chief.”
The elder Sheowon frowned. “Barbaric,” she muttered.
I took a sip of the soup, and held back a groan of pleasure. “This is very good,” I said, nodding to Yishola, who gave me a small, pitying smile, putting me on my back foot again. She hadn’t said a word through my story, nor after, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call any of them the singular leader, she did seem to be listened to by her contemporaries.
“Well, I, for one, think that this is a good thing,” Nupeol said. “If what Mali said is true, then his people are harvesting Blood retaliation, which is… unimaginably sickening. It goes against the natural order, and it must be stopped. They need to be enlightened with the word of the All-Bonded to cease this horrific practice.”
“I think we can all agree with that,” Brumesh grunted.
“About that,” I said. “How is it that you use Blood techniques without gaining Blood through killing?”
The elders stared back at me in surprise, before Brumesh let out a harsh laugh. “This is who the All-Bonded chooses to spread her word? When he doesn’t even know it?”
“No one knows anything without being taught, Brumesh,” Owawu sighed. “Even Her missionary.”
“One of the most important truths about life is that your Blood is your own,” Nupeol began to explain. “And sustains one’s life, which is sacred. So when a life is taken by another, the Blood retaliates. It delivers retribution, invading and branding the killer with its name in life and delivering punishment. Oftentimes this is fatal, but when it isn’t, the killer is weakened enough to be captured and contained.”
“The Blood Fever,” I murmured, mostly to myself. “But wait, then… what do you do with the killer?”
They couldn’t kill the killer, because if they did, the cycle would continue. But if they didn’t, even if murder wasn’t common among the Sheowon thanks to this religion and belief, then the killer would eventually kill again, especially as, like an Uli, they would come through the Blood Fever with more Blood and thus more power.
Owawu made a face. “A few days of captivity without food and sleep and the Blood is weakened. Eventually, when the Blood has fully faded, the body passes on.”
I blinked a few times as I processed Owawu’s declaration. Sure, it was punishment for murder, but starving someone to death while torturing them by way of sleep-deprivation was… pretty bad. So was ritualized pedicide, but no one was starved or tortured. Not that they were comparable.
My gut churned lightly when I realized that that would likely have been my fate, had the admin not given me a blessing, and could still be my fate if these elders weren’t convinced. I glanced down at the bowl of soup in my hands, and back up to Yishola, who was watching me carefully. The fact that she fed me seemed to suggest that I was in the clear. At least, for now.
What I wondered, but didn’t ask, was what happened when a murderer captured, confined, and starved their victim to death themselves. That wouldn’t trigger the Blood retaliation, as the Sheowon called it. In Uli terms, they wouldn’t be Bloodied by it, so no one would be the wiser. The Uli avoided death like this at all costs because it weakened the tribe, but the Sheowon’s interpretation of it meant that only crimes of passion were punished. Someone who was coldly calculating enough could probably get away with it. Which, since people were people, meant that someone somewhere almost certainly had.
Sheowon seemed to always be in groups, so a disappearance would probably be noticed immediately. Perhaps that was enough to stop that from ever happening. But there was more to their groups than just safety in numbers.
“Your Blood is your own, and must never be taken,” Nupeol continued after scowling at Owawu, “but it can be given. This was the first, and most important, lesson from the All-Bonded. The Blood Bond is a sacred ritual which connects two people and allows them to share each other’s Blood as one.”
That got my attention.
Sharing the Blood was a bit like taking the Blood, in that while Bonded, someone would have more than before, without being Bloodied. They wouldn’t get to keep it, but during the Bond, they would be working with more, quantitatively, than their stat normally allowed. That was exactly the kind of thing that promoted growth of my Will in the past, by taking in more mana than I had with my breathing exercises or osmosis in high-mana environments.
By contrast, the Uli could never use more than they had, because it was all internally generated, and going all out with Blood was so laborious and required so much recovery time after that one could rarely push themselves like that, instead getting stronger by taking more and more from their victims.
Nupeol reached a hand out to either side, and the other elders took them, until all four of them were connected. He began to channel into [Blood Augmentation], or something like it, and started to glow with energy, the amount increasing and increasing until it was plain that his power, in that moment, exceeded anything I had seen before in this world.
“This is the Blood Bond,” he said, thrumming with power, until he slowly released it. “And this is Her word.”