The four Sheowon worked like a well-oiled machine, converting what looked like little more than grass and dirt into bricks of fuel. This was the foundation of their current civilization, allowing them to heat their homes and cook their food.
One of the four stood on the ridge they were harvesting, using Blood to make long cuts down into the turf. The second stood at the bottom of the ridge, cutting into it to free the long brick, which the third physically tossed up to the fourth, who caught it and stacked it to dry. After a while, the two Blood users and the two Brawn users would switch, keeping the whole team relatively fresh as they worked strip by strip of turf from the ridge.
This was one of the clearest examples of the Sheowon using their Blood solo, proving that they could, and that they had actually grown their individual Blood stats from using the Blood Bond. Like the elders and Ushem’s quartet, these Sheowon working in the peat were older. Young Sheowon wouldn’t have the Blood to do this as efficiently.
While efficient, the use of Blood really only supplanted the use of hand tools, and was limited both in who could use it and for how long. This was a big limiting factor, but those limits are also what maintained the relative sustainability of the practice.
The details were hazy, since I hadn’t ever used peat for fuel myself, but I recalled that peat mining was bad for the ecosystem. I had much clearer memories about the uses of comparable fuels from Earth; how deforestation and coal extraction could snowball, particularly through industrialization.
Peat was technically renewable, like firewood, but at an even slower scale. Even with such a small local population, I could see the legacy of generations of digging, a visible scar on the bog. As long as they were limited to working by hand—even with Blood—it was a scar that healed, but it was still visible.
I couldn’t hold it against the Sheowon. The fact that this had developed at all, without wood, was pretty impressive in its own right. Like the early humans who had witnessed forest fires, the primitive Sheowon must have learned to burn peat from bog fires caused by lightning strikes. Perhaps they foraged coals and embers to bring back to caves, where they would learn what burned, like dried dung, and what didn’t, like clay, which in turn would lead to pottery. Over time, they learned how to cut and dry the turf to use as fuel, and started building structures similar to their caves. That allowed them to live wherever they wanted, like the prime real estate between the coast and the bog.
There had surely been a population boom after that, but it was still limited to the scale of what Sheowon could produce by hand. I had wondered why there weren’t far more Sheowon youths running around the village, since unlike the Uli, their numbers wouldn’t regularly halve through ritual combat. Owawu had explained that this was largely intentional, like in the case of my hosts. Once a Bonded family had all the children they wanted, they could distance themselves during the breeding season—like I had done back at the Uli camp—and intentionally dodge their biological drive to breed. Oftentimes, this was practiced once they reached replacement numbers, as too many families having too many children would strain the village.
The fact that they didn’t have strict gender roles helped with that, too. When their biology pushed them to breed, the males of a Bonded family could find temporary relief in each other, as could the females. That helped them stay together as a family unit during the breeding season while they were raising children and work together as needed. For the rest of the year, the Sheowon, like the Uli, were largely not sexually active.
It was interesting that the Sheowon naturally kept themselves to sustainable levels, but there was something else to consider, which fundamentally changed how I viewed everything about Sheowon culture: the administrator.
I knew the administrator had her fingers in the development of this culture, because she had given them the knowledge of the Blood Bond. Presumably, she had also guided them to maintain their numbers, but at any time, she could appear to someone during prayer and produce a revelation which could change everything. It would only take one command of “be fruitful and multiply” to push the Sheowon to breed beyond replacement numbers and create a need to expand.
While I had no idea what her goals were, I couldn’t help but remember the previous administrator’s words. Conflict produced stronger souls. That alone was enough for the admin to keep Tovar’s world in an endless cycle of war.
What did that mean for the Sheowon and the Uli? Once I proved myself by being fully accepted by the Sheowon, and earned myself some answers from the admin, I hoped to find out.
Problem was, I had no idea how to go about that.
Of course I had to be a good guest and, obviously, not kill anyone. But there was still a huge gulf between us, and the prospect of getting accepted enough to learn the Blood Bond seemed very unlikely.
I sighed, looking out at the bog. I could help them dig peat, but they had it well in hand. Digging more than they needed wouldn’t help, since they didn’t seem pressed to expand. Hunting wasn’t all that necessary, because while there were wild animals they could eat, they had their herds, and while there were predators that picked off some of their livestock, they also had their “dogs”. And, frankly, the Sheowon were more than capable of dealing with their problems themselves.
Just like when I was living with the Uli, there wasn’t much I could contribute. There was so much I could do if only I had wood, but if wood existed here, they would probably also have figured that stuff out on their own before now. Finding alternatives to wood was a huge challenge, and I had only just managed to create boats with the oversized bones of the mammoths back in my homeland.
There were no animals that large here. If there ever had been, they were hunted to extinction long ago. The livestock bones could maybe work if secured together with tar, but the resulting kayaks wouldn’t be nearly as strong, and there was no chance they were sufficient for a proper sailboat. Plus, I only had one bucket of tar, and no ability to acquire more.
The bog stretched out before me, pockmarked with wet spots. As a cloud shifted overhead, the red sun reflected off one of the puddles, and I saw a brief, iridescent shimmer, like a coating of oil on top of the water. I had seen similar iridescence at the tar pits.
My brows furrowed slightly. Oil in the water? Except, if there was, surely the Sheowon would know about it and exploit it. Also, the plant life around it would probably be dead, but it looked healthy.
“Hey, can we take a walk over there?” I asked, turning to my guides and pointing. Brumesh glanced out at the bog and grumbled, clearly not wanting to, but Owawu seemed curious about what caught my attention.
“Lead the way,” he said.
By the time we reached the large puddle, my legs were thoroughly coated in muck, and I understood Brumesh’s grumbling, but I was willing to get a little dirty to get a closer look at the oil slick. Even right next to it, I couldn’t smell anything, and when I tapped it, it broke apart rather than flow around my finger.
“What is this?”
“That usually appears where bloodstone forms,” Brumesh said with a shrug.
“Bloodstone?”
“Try digging around in the mud underneath,” Owawu said, studying me.
I was already pretty filthy, so with nothing to lose but my pride, I got down onto my hands and knees and reached into the water, shifting around the muck in search of this mysterious bloodstone.
My fingers grazed against something hard, so I dug them deeper in around it and wiggled it until it was loose, pulling it out and rubbing the mud off it in the water before examining it.
It was a porous, dark reddish stone, which after a moment I thought I recognized; the elders’ hearth had been decorated with a dark porous stone.
“Why is it called bloodstone?” I asked, turning it over in my hands.
“Because it’s too hard to carve, even with Blood,” Owawu said, shrugging. “And it’s a similar color to dried blood.”
Since I had heard about the bogs, there had been a faint tickle in the back of my head, but at Owawu’s words, the light tickle turned into the smash of a hammer. I knew why blood was red, and I knew why this rock was so hard to earn a special name in the Sheowon language.
It’s bog iron, I realized.
These people were in a Blood-modified Neolithic age, a little more advanced than the Uli’s stone age. It was the use of their Blood which allowed them to bypass a number of restrictions that would otherwise require metalworking to achieve a more advanced civilization, but, like the Uli, they had no concept of metal at all.
Even though they had already found iron, it had taken humans multiple eras of working softer metals, starting with copper, before they learned to work it. If there was little native copper here, that would be a stumbling block to learning to work with the harder metal.
The biggest problem with discovering metallurgy would be the same limitation on cooking: fire. The Uli didn’t use fire at all, and also barely worked stone, instead relying on bone, ivory, and their own Blood. Even if they found native metals, I wasn’t sure they would catch on to the importance of it. Either they wouldn’t be able to carve it with Blood techniques, or they would, but would largely dismiss it as a different colored stone.
While the Sheowon did use fire, all their fuel was terrible. Dung and peat were both wet fuels, even when dried out, and had a lot of other stuff in it that slowed the burn. That wasn’t a problem for cooking and heating—in a way, it was actually a good thing—but wouldn’t get hot enough to work iron.
But this world had peat bogs and tar, so it also would have coal. Argadia used charcoal, but that required wood, which wasn’t an option here. The Argadian ecosystem was also balanced by mana, which completely changed things. This world, while significantly more different from Earth, was actually more common when it came to fossil fuels.
Despite my reservations about fossil fuel use, burning hand-dug coal wasn’t that different from burning peat. It would just burn more efficiently, which would help work iron. The issue was what happened when it was burned at scale, particularly industrially. The former might lead to the latter, though.
Except, fire and metal already existed, and the locals weren’t stupid. They were different, as a result of both biology and culture that came about due to Blood, but they were just as capable of humans, and unless they went extinct for some other reason, it was only a matter of time before they discovered these things on their own, not unlike the methods of ocean travel I had already shared.
If the admin takes issue with it, she’ll stop me, I figured. Besides, I might not even be able to make this work.
The Sheowon wouldn’t have a forge, so I would have to start with the next closest thing.
“Any chance you could introduce me to your best potter?”
---
AN: Not sure I noticed anyone in the comments catch the hints leading up to this. (Sadly Patreon is absolutely terrible for comment management, there's no way for me to view/search all comments on all posts, and I'm too lazy to go back through each chapter's comments to check.) Wonder where this will go?
This weekend I went looking for something good to read (to distract myself from world news) and stumbled onto the manhwa/Webtoon The Greatest Estate Developer, which I somehow missed until now. I ended up binging it in full, yesterday, and really enjoyed it. I don't usually make recommendations, but if you like isekai stories, you might like this! The core isekai is a bit goofy at times, and there were one or two moments that were a bit rough and slowed down (usually transitions between arcs) but those issues all quickly resolved in an episode or two. I laughed, I cried, I had a grand ol' time.
Also! My friend Allora Lee just launched the Kickstarter for her absolutely stunning, limited edition, omnibus hardcover of her isekai, Otherworldly! If you'd like to add a beautiful book to your bookshelf, go check it out!