“So what do you think of our village?” Yishola asked me as we walked.
“It’s nice,” I answered. Two Sheowon stared at us as we passed them by. “Though I’m looking forward to a time where I draw less attention.”
“That may take a while,” Yishola chuckled.
I was a bit surprised when the elder asked me to join her on a walk that morning when she picked me up from Ushem’s home. I had figured we would talk in private, but she said she wanted to show me something. Keo and Lowar trailed behind us, within sight but out of earshot, and Ushem and Pliwa were a similar distance ahead of us, turning back often to check that we were following.
“I was hoping to get a shirt,” I mused, gesturing at my chest. “Maybe hide some of… all this.”
Yishola craned her neck to look up at me. “That’s not the only way you stand out.”
I shrugged. “Can’t change my height. Weird to be so tall. I’m actually short, among my people.”
“Is that so? Hard to imagine so many giants.”
“You should see the size of the animals we hunt.”
“Was being surrounded by so many larger people difficult for you? From what you told me, with the… competition between you and your peers, it must have made you a target.”
“It did, at first,” I said. “Until I was strong enough to prove that making me a target was a mistake.”
“Hmm. Strength. That’s important to you.”
“Of course. Without it, I’d be dead.”
“Is that the only reason? Seems like there is more to it,” Yishola said.
I glanced down at the insightful Sheowon elder, before looking away to think about my answer. I wasn’t prepared to talk about [Metasurvival] or my reincarnation, but that was a major factor when it came to all my decisions and pursuits.
The strength I had gained as Tovar had been a huge part of helping me succeed as Mali, even if the pursuit of strength had stopped being my primary focus as I grew older. I took a breath, refocusing on the present.
“It’s all right if you aren’t ready to talk about it,” Yishola said. “But it’s something you will need to come to terms with before you can Blood Bond.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, happy for the change of topic.
“The Blood Bond grants strength, of course, but it isn’t personal strength. You have to be able to give up your own strength as well, to your Bonded partners. The All-Bonded may have set you to this task, but that doesn’t mean you’re yet capable of it.”
“It’s not a permanent loss, though, right?” I asked, thinking it over. “It’s just… sharing.”
“Just sharing, is it?” Yishola asked. “Do you have much experience with that, Mali? Even for our youths, steeped in our ways, it can be difficult to give up what is theirs for something greater.”
I almost scoffed, because of course I knew how to share, but I stopped myself. “We share,” I said, thinking back on my life. “The hunters bring back meat and other resources and distribute it to the tribe.”
Yishola nodded. “That’s good,” she said. “But what would the alternative look like?”
Uli tribesmen cared about the tribe, but to Yishola’s point, it wasn’t exactly selfless. Feeding all the females and children ensured all the tribesmen were vested in the hunt, and kept our overall strength up. The children needed to survive and grow in order to replace lost tribesmen. If every tribesman hunted for themselves and their creche alone, most creches would starve to death, and the tribe would lack for Blood, and ultimately perish.
“I see your point,” I grumbled. “It wasn’t sharing so much as survival.”
“You mentioned conflict between tribes, and even tribe schisms, but you never spoke of tribes combining. Why is that? Would two tribes joining not be more safe and secure, more able to succeed in hunts?”
“That’s more of a practical limit,” I said. It was something I had thought about as well, but it ran up against the available resources. “A tribe can’t be so large that a single mirulu can no longer feed it.”
Smaller tribes tended to grow to meet the resources that a mirulu hunt would bring in, but larger tribes would suffer. Hunting a single mirulu was a significant enough ordeal, and hunting them daily or multiple in the same day wasn’t reasonable. There were likely other limits, like the cognitive limit on the number of individuals an Uli was capable of maintaining stable social relationships with; if a Roba didn’t know all the tribesmen, it would be hard to lead without a division of labor, which didn’t exactly mesh with their ethos of strength.
“Sounds like a hard life,” Yishola said.
“Is it so different here?” I asked. “You have more resources, because you raise your own meat animals and have the bog, but you still have limits. How much larger could your village grow before it couldn’t support itself? And what would happen then?”
We walked in silence for a while after that, both thinking.
“I see,” Yishola finally said. “The All-Bonded tells us that our children are a blessing—a blessing that should be appreciated in measure. We cherish them. But if we all birthed children every year that we were able, the village would be forced to expand generation after generation.”
“Eventually, you would strip the bog bare, faster than it could regrow. You would eat the animals faster than they could multiply. And then you would be in conflict with one another, like the Uli.”
“People would move and settle new villages,” Yishola said.
“At first,” I acknowledged. “And there’s a lot of land, so that would work for a while. But the land isn’t endless. It’s hard to imagine, but eventually, there would be more people than the land could support.”
That population limit would increase with more agriculture and industrialization, but one thing I would never forget from my original life on Earth was that everything had a limit.
“Eventually, there isn’t enough to share. My people simply reach that point a lot quicker.”
Yishola hummed. “It’s a rather bleak outcome.”
“It being unpleasant doesn’t change the reality of the limits.”
“I can accept that as an explanation. But is it a justification?”
I frowned. “No. I don’t think you need to justify survival, but when there are better alternatives, I don’t think it’s justified to continue doing the same things.”
Uli didn’t limit their breeding because they were essentially farming their boys for Blood. To a certain degree, that had been necessary for survival, but that could change with the Blood Bond, or other technological advances. Like the Sheowon, being monestrous meant that it was actually relatively easy for the Uli to avoid excess childbirth, even without contraception. If there were no losses, they could develop a stable population that didn’t require killing each other.
It wouldn’t be enough to stop all killing. That wasn’t how things worked, be it on Earth or in a System world. It would likely only defer conflict between groups to when they were larger. Maybe the Sheowon were entirely without greed and a need for power, but I doubted it. Even if the Uli unified and followed the All-Bonded, it didn’t guarantee that they wouldn’t come into conflict with the Sheowon, or another group. Religions could schism and come into internal conflict as well, though in a System world that would be in the hands of the admin, to some degree.
The existence of Blood complicated warfare in this world, but I didn’t know if that would remain true as technology progressed. Blood grew exponentially more difficult to use at a distance, so it wasn’t common to kill someone from afar. Would guns trigger Blood retaliation?
Just because there would almost certainly be further issues down the line didn’t mean that something shouldn’t be done, though. I couldn’t justify leaving the Uli as they were, either.
“Well, that’s why I want to bring the Blood Bond back to my people, personally, with or without the All-Bonded’s blessing.”
“I think all of our interests align, there,” Yishola said. “Come, sit. We’re here.”
I looked around, realizing I’d gone internal and stopped paying attention to where we were going. We were at a small field, marked off, were a group of children were playing a ball game.
Sitting down at Yishola’s request, we watched the game unfold. The ball was stitched hide, probably stuffed with moss or hay, and it was being tossed around the court, with the aim of being thrown at a vertical stone hoop on a goal post, on either side.
There was no dribbling, but at a glance, the players seemed to need to have all four hands on the ball while in their possession to run. There was no contact, but there was some kind of offside rule; the court was split into quarters, and they couldn’t run outside of the area they caught the ball in, which forced passes. Given their four arms, it was a bit hard to predict passing, which added a level of intrigue to the game. It was also hard to get a pass through a defender, since four arms also meant a strong defense. Lobs worked, but they were slow. The two teams seemed to exchange the ball a lot, and it was a pretty low scoring game.
I couldn’t help but ruminate on the game, after my conversation with Yishola. A two-sided, competitive game strongly suggested that the Sheowon weren’t always so peaceful, but that much was obvious. They weren’t that different from the Uli, they just had the Blood Bond and a better ecosystem that allowed for a more idyllic life. There was nothing wrong with that, and I was happy for them, but still, something in my gut churned.
“What do you see?” Yishola asked me, and I glanced away from the game to find her studying my face.
“A… game. Two teams, trying to score by throwing the ball through the hole up on the post,” I started, but Yishola shook her head. I didn’t think she was looking for my thoughts on sport as a stand-in for war, so I sighed. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“Tell me about the players.”
I glanced back at the court. The kids, calling out for passes, laughing as they played. A toss on the goal, and cheers turning to groans as it bounced off.
My hands shook slightly, so I clenched them into fists.
“Kids having fun,” I said through gritted teeth, before I took a breath. “Look, I already get it. You think I don’t already understand that what I did was wrong? That’s the whole reason I’m doing this!”
Yishola looked past me, and shook her head slightly. I turned to see Ushem and Pliwa had taken a few steps towards us. The kids had stopped playing, looking over at us, and I realized how much I had raised my voice. I took another breath.
“I did what I had to in order to survive,” I said quietly. “Should I have just died?”
The elder took on of my hands in two of hers, patting it softly. “No, Mali. Sometimes, there are no good choices. I’m not judging you.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“It’s not about what I want. It’s about what you need in order to move forward. You’ve acknowledged the past and accepted it as necessary, explaining it and justifying it, and then locked it away. I don’t blame you. What you went through was horrible. But when we talk about it, you get... cold. Detached. You’ve closed off a part of your heart. Anyone can see that.”
Yishola paused, and I felt my chest constrict.
“Sometimes, it’s best to leave the past in the past. But you will need to open your heart in order to Blood Bond, and to do that, you first need to face this fully. You need to feel the regret, so you can repent, and so you can forgive yourself.”
The cage I had built began to collapse.
Growing up as Tovar had its challenges, but it wasn’t fundamentally different from growing up for the first time. I started that life with virtually no bonuses, making my way like any other. The same could not be said for my childhood as Mali.
It took time for my body to adapt to my last life’s stats, but there were some things that were very different because of them, especially my Brain. My memory, for one thing, was far better than a child’s should be. My Earth memories were always hazy, since I had no stats, and my earliest years as Tovar weren’t particularly memorable either until my Mind stat grew. With a high Mind stat, memories became clearer and clearer.
My memory wasn’t the only thing improved by this stat. Perception, clarity, and processing were all improved as well. But the bulk of my mental training, which had been the driver of growth for my stat, was in my focus. Mindfulness.
As I began my life as Mali, I had been stuck in the past, missing what I had gained when I was Tovar. Those memories were still so clear that it had been hard to move on.
Then I was forced to deal with the reality of Mali’s life. To live, I had to do things I wouldn’t be able to forget, things which betrayed my memories of Tovar’s life. I had to become Uli, and whether it was my biology or just the choice to live like a slave to it, I started to use that focus and mindfulness to suppress my past and my memories in order to survive the present.
Before I knew it, I stopped thinking about it at all. I distracted myself with projects and stories of progress, all in the hopes of finding new meaning in this life, at the cost of shutting down the most important parts of my last life.
Then I found the Sheowon, and learned that all along, there was an alternative. I could no longer insist that there was no other choice. It didn’t matter that there was no possible way an Uli child could have learned that on their own. Worse yet, ever since getting here, I had been forced to face my past over and over and over, with the mental blocks I had erected to protect my past life’s memories getting increasingly battered.
For the first time in years, faces and feelings I had locked away thanks to my mental stats flooded to the surface. I saw Felris, my children, my family. People I loved, people who made life worth living.
People who I couldn’t bear if they saw what I had become.
Now, the memories of my children and grandchildren spilled over into my memories of the First Blood ritual. I couldn’t help but imagine them being forced to kill each other just to survive, and it nauseated me. Memories of Felris and Torra, so capable and confident, spilled over into memories of people like Nadi and Loma being sent away to live under the thumb of the males who had claimed them.
I told myself I had no choice but to accept the way of life here, but right in front of me were children who were laughing and playing, people who chose their lovers and partners. There was always a choice.
Tears welled up in my eyes as I faced my regrets in full for the first time.
“They were only kids,” I whispered, a sob wrenching from my chest.