I was led back to Ushem’s house in awkward silence. No one really knew what to say to each other, me included. It was an uncomfortable start to a living situation, but that was more or less expected.
It might have just been easier if I spent my nights in some kind of prison, but between a lack of metal and the existence of Blood techniques, prison wasn’t really feasible. Sheowon society was also probably fairly low crime in the first place, since the Blood Bond produced a prosocial culture, and the usual drivers of crime weren’t really present. Uli culture was also fairly low crime, if you ignored all the killing, since the tribe as a whole was taken care of. Any conflict that escalated far enough just turned into a challenge, and that solved most issues quite decisively.
Ushem’s home wasn’t all that different from the elders’, though it was a little messier. I lowered my head to step through the doorway, and watched as the quartet naturally eased into various chores and tasks now that they were home. Ushem, Pliwa, and Keo all started doing things like rebuilding the fire and starting to prepare some food, leaving me with their fourth family member, who was watching me from the corner of his eye.
“I never caught your name,” I finally said.
“…Lowar,” he grunted.
I waited a moment to see if he would ask anything of me, but he just glowered, so I continued uncomfortably watching the others.
“This is probably going to make me sound pretty stupid,” I said to Lowar after a little while. “But what’s that?”
Lowar glanced at what I was pointing to. “The… fire?”
“The stuff burning, I mean. Is it dung?”
“No, that’s turf.”
“Turf?” I repeated, wondering if my translation blessing was acting up. It certainly didn’t look like dried grass. As I thought on it, some word association seemed to click and I realized he was talking about peat.
My recollections of my life on Earth were pretty fractured and hazy, but language and memory were pretty inseparable. Understanding words required, to some degree, remembering definitions, and from that, I dredged up old mental images and concepts. Peat turf was dug from bogland and was semi-renewable, though the regrowth rate was pretty abysmal. But bogs were excellent at carbon capture. Peat turf was a first step towards fossil fuels, turning to coal over a geological timescale.
I hadn’t encountered peat in Argadia, but the country was heavily forested, so wood was always available. Due to mana decomposition, I wasn’t even sure if peat bogs formed in my last world; the humans there stuck to wood and wood charcoal. This world didn’t have trees, but with no mana, there was ancient carbon sources like tar pits and peat bogs.
It must rain here a lot, too, I thought. It rarely rained where the Uli tribes were, which was probably a factor in our lack of grass—or whatever the local analogue was—with only sparse, hardy shrubbery that wasn’t sufficient for fuel. That could further explain why the Uli remained comfortable living in tents, often nomadically, whereas the Sheowon had settled, building water-tight structures.
Something about the existence of bogs tickled my mind, but Lowar interrupted my thoughts.
“Do you only burn dung, where you’re from?”
I covered up any annoyance at my train of thought being interrupted, since I was glad he was showing any interest in me and my past. “We don’t really burn anything. It rarely gets cold.”
“What about for cooking?”
“We only eat food raw,” I answered.
“Huh.” I thought that might be the end of it, but after a moment, he continued. “Well, we’ll probably put a shift in digging turf soon. If you want to fit in here, you can put those muscles to work and help out.”
“Sure,” I said with a shrug. “I’m surprised you’re responsible for that. I thought you specialized in protection of some sort.”
“Everyone protects the village,” Lowar said. “And everyone digs turf. People contribute where they are needed. But yes, we’re more focused on our training than others, which takes the bulk of our time.”
“Is that why you don’t have children?” I asked, looking around. I had been a bit surprised that their home had been empty. Walking back through the village, now that things had calmed down since my arrival, I had seen a number of children around, most of them stopping to stare at me in curiosity. They didn’t seem to be sequestered or exclusively communally raised, and instead seemed to live with their families, but there were none living here, as far as I could tell.
Lowar didn’t respond, so I turned back to him, and found him frowning and looking at the markings on my chest and arms.
I sighed. “Don’t misunderstand. My tribe’s practices… I’ve left it all behind, but also, what happens between the young is between them. Adults don’t harm children.” Not directly, at least. I wasn’t sure what more to say, because I didn’t think the Uli concept of honor would pass Sheowon muster.
It took a while before Lowar finally answered. “We have children, but they’ve already grown and are living with their Bonded families.”
“Oh.” They were older than I thought. Given their stature, it was easy to mistake them for what would have been a younger Uli, at least until they started to show more signs of advanced aging, like the elders. But if Lowar’s Bonded family was among the village’s strongest, they must have been older. “Are you training to become the village elders, one day?”
“We shall see when the time comes,” Lowar replied. “If we can earn the position, we would gratefully accept it.”
I looked at the other three, who were still preparing the meal—dinner, I supposed, given that it was late in the day. Ushem seemed like a capable leader, and Pliwa seemed to have a kind heart. Keo seemed a bit hot-headed to be an elder, but that was largely my fault, and I was an outlier.
Eventually, the aroma of food filled the small home, and I was sat down as we waited for the meal to fully cook. My captors-turned-hosts had questions for me, since they hadn’t heard the whole story from the elders, which turned into a retelling that ran all the way through dinner and into the night, before their curiosity was sated.
As with the elders, I couldn’t honestly explain everything, since my situation was unique and unnatural, but they didn’t seem to have the same level of insight as the elders. There did have some follow up questions about things I glossed over, but I was able to come up with answers well enough to satisfy them, at least on the surface. Sometimes, I leaned on the goddess, and her insight or guidance, to explain something, if necessary.
The boat itself was still a point of interest, and the elder Owawu had been interested in that as well. I knew I would have to explain it in full, sooner or later, but I was fine with that. I had no idea if the knowledge of boats I had given to my Uli tribe would survive my absence, but it was already out there, and it was only fair that the Sheowon had something similar, since it wasn’t exactly naturally obtained. The bigger issue was whether the knowledge was usable here, because I didn’t know what resources they had, particularly when it came to large bones.
After my second round of questioning for the day, I was shown a place were I could sleep. Lowar and Keo didn’t turn in when I did, though Ushem and Pliwa went right to bed as well. I figured they were going to trade of a watch over me, but it wasn’t necessary. I was where I wanted to be, for now, and not planning on hurting anyone or escaping. Having cleared the first hurdle, I had plenty of time to study the Sheowon and learn more about their way of life, so I closed my eyes and let sleep take me.
*
The following day, Owawu and Brumesh showed up quite early to check in on me. Brumesh had been the most concerned of the four elders about the Blood retaliation written on my body, so she had likely just been worried about Ushem and his family’s safety, but Owawu had been the one most interested in the boat. I wasn’t surprised when he asked about it, and shortly thereafter, guided me and Ushem’s quartet back to the beach, where it had been pulled to shore.
After a short lecture on buoyancy and boating, I answered some of their questions as best as I could. Ultimately, without knowing more about what life was like on these shores and thus what they had available to them, I couldn’t really say how they could build boats, nor what I could use to repair mine.
“What’s the animal you keep?” I asked. “I saw a couple different ones, but I have no idea if their bones will work, even if you could find more tar.”
Tar hadn’t translated for them, but my sealed bone bucket of the stuff was one of the few things that hadn’t been cast from the boat in the storm and survived the journey. I showed it to them, and explained its origins, but no one had any knowledge of it, which meant there likely wasn’t any tar pits nearby. That could be a problem for building a boat that could make the journey back to the Uli’s homeland—which, given my blessing, I presumed I needed to do one day—but it wasn’t necessary for hide kayaks and canoes.
Keo and Brumesh raised some concerns, but I fought back with my only ammunition. “The All-Bonded brought me here to learn from you,” I argued. “Keeping me uninformed only delays Her will.”
“Might as well just show you,” Owawu said, clearly keen on extracting as much from me as I was hoping to learn about them.
Detective Gudell had said it was fine even if I spread information and ideas across reincarnations. Information about boats, for example, was either useful to them or not, based on available resources. And if it were possible to make them, resource-wise, then it was only a matter of time before they were made. If it was too impractical, it wouldn’t survive the test of time. At least, that was my theory.
The Sheowon took me on a little tour of their village after that, showing me some of the things I was interested in, like the six-legged herbivore that had at some point been domesticated here, which seemed to fill the niche of a large goat or sheep or smaller version of cattle. It was the source of much of their meat as well as the dung fuel, though that was mostly just the Sheowon making the best out of what they had. They were plenty capable of digging enough peat turf for the village, but the animals produced a lot of dung, and drying it to toss in the fire for heat overnight was better than letting it pile up and stink.
Using it as compost and a soil amendment hadn’t taken off because the Sheowon, like the Uli, mostly ate meat and seafood, so they didn’t do much farming. They had cultivated some herbs and spices, which already put them miles ahead of the Uli, but it wasn’t enough to deplete the local soil, which was very rich already.
Aside from meat and seafood, fungi fruiting bodies similar to mushrooms seemed to be an aspect of their diet, but it was foraged in a particular season, not cropped, and it grew around the bogs, not in the animal manure. Perhaps it was possible to use the dung to cultivate fungi crops, but if it hadn’t happened yet, there was probably a limiting factor I wasn’t aware of. That brought up memories of cultivating mana amanita with my family in the Nialdan dungeon, but I ruthlessly crushed that line of thought, refocusing on the present.
I asked about riding the livestock animals, but that was, apparently, a laughable idea.
The other animal I had seen on my first pass through the village did turn out to occupy a dog-like niche, like I had guessed, though they were less like pets and more livestock guardian animals. They were friendly creatures, and many people did care for them quite a lot beyond their pure usefulness, but they were still working animals. I was sure that if this society developed far enough, there would be lines which wound up cared for purely as pets, but things had a long way to go before that was practical. Still, compared to most of the animals I had seen in this world, they were the closest to something I could call cute.
After the animals, I was shown a few other parts of the village, things that were interesting, but it was all largely quite primitive. They made better clothes than the Uli, but nothing that approached what I knew was possible. They carved stone and had a primitive mortar, enough to build small structures but still too limited to build massive monuments. I tried to stay interested, but there wasn’t anything truly impressive.
What I really wanted to learn about, both for myself and to fulfill the description of my blessing, was the Blood Bond. Bringing that back to the Uli required solving a bunch of huge challenges, but the first one was getting the Sheowon to teach it to me. That would take time, and trust. I hoped I had enough of the former to gain the latter.
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AN: I just want to quickly talk about this line towards the end of the chapter, "That brought up memories of cultivating mana amanita with my family in the Nialdan dungeon, but I ruthlessly crushed that line of thought, refocusing on the present."
I don't think I've done a very good job of showing Mali push past the loss of his life as Tovar, like he did at the beginning as a child, once he got caught up in his current life. I think I might go back and add a bit more of stuff like this to the moments where he remembers the past, to lead up to this level of memory suppression. I'd like that to come up to a head soon, but I just don't think I properly set up the groundwork for it, so it needs a bit of retconning to fix up. Probably not enough to merit a full reread here and now, but it should smooth it out for RR and later publishing.