The battle was won, but I was in pretty rough shape. I had burned through practically all of my Blood energy, and the retaliation was still coursing through me wildly. It had been a long time since I had experienced this, but I focused inward, taming the foreign energy so I could convert it into restoration.
Movement nearby forced me to open my eyes and look up. I was vulnerable right now; that was the true function of retaliation. Anyone could slaughter me right now, though they would experience even worse retaliation as a result. But the movement towards me wasn’t aggressive. Uli culture was built around this. No one in this tribe would attack me, and I would be safe from challenges until I recovered.
The nearby movement was from one of the younger tribesmen, someone in the pro-fishing camp. “Are you all right, Roba? Should we carry you to your tent?”
Roba. Yeah, I suppose that’s me now.
“I’m fine,” I said, waving him off and sitting upright. I wasn’t fine, actually, but I probably wouldn’t die. “There’s some fish in my boat, if you could get it for me.”
The younger Uli ran off to get me some of my food. The calories would help me recover my Blood energy and expedite my healing. I couldn’t afford to sleep right now, which I would eventually need to recover fully; first I needed to salvage this encounter by establishing my new position.
I looked over the Uli who had backed up the now-dead Roba. “I hold no ill will against you for supporting your Roba. That is how a tribe must function. But he is dead, and I am the new Roba,” I said. “If you cannot accept this, I will accept challenges when I am healed. If you do not wish to fight, you may take your mates and creche and leave. But before you decide to do either—hear me out.”
Despite being in pain and exhausted, I lifted my daggers, still wet with their former chief’s blood, up above my head so everyone could see.
“These are just one of the things I bring back from my journey. It’s called iron,” I said, loudly and clearly. I was speaking the Uli language, not relying on the translation abilities of my blessing, and I needed to come up with some new words to describe things, as was the case when developing boats.
Borrowing from the Sheowon, despite the fact that there were no bogs here, the etymology I used for the Uli word was similar. It literally translated to stone’s blood, because if it existed in these lands, it would likely be in ore form that we needed to mine and extract.
Looking at the reddish nature of the Uli lands with new eyes, I didn’t think we would struggle that much finding iron. I was veritably certain it was all around us. The bigger issue was how we could refine it.
“It is harder than rock, made from certain stones and sands, but to do that, first we must find another special rock called coal, which can be found by digging underground.”
Coal, in the Uli tongue, was more literally translated to black rock. I still had some tar, so I would be able to explain coal better later with that. For now, I just needed to get the basics across, in order to convince my tribe not to schism and splinter. I needed everyone’s strength to ensure I could build something lasting. Hunting down a source of coal and then digging it up would be a ton of work, though once we had it, switching the Uli diet to cooked food would unlock a huge amount of additional nutritional energy.
“It will take many years and many Uli to acquire this for our tribe,” I said, adjusting expectations. “Perhaps it will not come to pass until our children, or even our children’s children, become tribesmen. But this is not the only gift I bring back to you. As I said before, I found a way to get stronger without killing.”
This time, those words had more impact. I saw the tribesmen who had doubted me now looking at each other, reevaluating me and my words.
“You all saw the battle. You saw my skin, before and after. I was unchanged from when I left you.” I looked down at the dead Uli next to me. “This was my only kill since I became a tribesman. And yet I could stand against Roba, despite all those he killed to grow his own power.” I looked back up to the Uli around me, locking eyes with each as I spoke. “I can teach you how to get stronger.”
Was I stretching the truth a bit? No, I was basically outright lying. My strength in this battle came entirely from my previous life’s Will and the stat boost from my blessing. That was fundamentally unteachable, and it was very possible that I would never be able to adapt the existing Uli tribesmen to Blood Bonding. I would cross that bridge when I got there, though, and by then, I would be able to show how the next generation of Uli were growing, without suffering any losses. The population boom would be a problem for food, but we could make that up with fishing, and the extra bodies would allow us to start surveying for future mines.
Since a big part of this entire operation depended on creating a religious culture out of nothing, I could offload the blame from those that failed to Blood Bond onto the goddess. Their failure would be a lack of piety, not my inability to teach. I would need to manage any issues that grew out of that, but if the admin could hand out some more blessings once the tribe was praying to her, I could maybe avoid any serious problems, and also leverage those she blessed to spread the word to other tribes.
The Uli who had run back to my boat returned to my side, and I accepted the food he offered. I took a bite, chewing slowly and looking over the males of the tribe.
“Return to your tents. Give it some thought. We will meet again tomorrow morning in front of my tent,” I said. Now that I was the Roba, his tent was mine. I turned to the younger males who had declared for me before the fight, and pointed to four of them. “You four stay here.”
The crowd dispersed slowly. Some Uli stayed back out of curiosity, but I just silently ate my fish while shooting glares at those that refused to leave, until it was just the five of us.
I held back a grunt as I got to my feet, leaving the site of the battle and headed back to the water. Stepping into the ocean, I rinsed the blood off myself, wincing slightly at the sting from the wounds which hadn’t closed up fully yet. I would need to meditate and focus in order to heal properly, but that could wait a little while longer. Once I was clean, I reached into my boat and grabbed another fish, taking a bite and turning back to the four Uli I held back.
Now that I had a moment to spare, I dug through my memories and tried to put names to the faces. They were older, but I recognized them as some of the youngest of the Bloodied boys who had learned to fish, before I left the tribe.
“Aqir. Duno. Ubo. Orma. It’s good to see you again.” The young tribesmen looked nervous, and it took me a second to remember that I was the chief now. I dialed down the seriousness, forcing my face into a kinder, casual grin. “I’m still just Mali. The weird fishing guy.”
That eased the tension, and soon they were all talking over each other, asking questions about the boat behind me, where I had been, and what I had learned in my travels. I raised a hand, cutting them off.
“I’ll tell you all about it soon,” I said. “First, I need to know what things have been like here, and what I’ve got myself into.”
The story wasn’t anything special, and fell well in line with my expectations. After my exile, the former Roba had put a kibosh on fishing, trying to stamp out my influence. That, naturally, created some push-back, though even the older boys weren’t strong enough to actually do anything about it. Of course, by that same difference in strength, the chief couldn’t exactly beat them into submission to enforce his demands.
“He tried to have the boats destroyed,” Ubo told me. “But we brought them to the grandmothers, who yelled at whoever he sent to mess with them.”
The Roba held the highest position in the tribe, and his orders were absolute, but in terms of who held the most actual respect in the tribe, that was the grandmothers. Piss off the grandmothers, and you were doomed to a life of slow repairs, leaky tents, or even outright denied requests. They couldn’t be forced, and they couldn’t even really be coerced. Hurting them would directly hurt the tribe, and thanks to Uli culture, there was no real value in threatening their children and grandchildren’s lives over their heads, either. Those sons and grandsons were either already dead or under constant threat of death anyway, and those daughters and granddaughters were the source of new sons.
“So the boats still exist?” I asked. I had definitely written those off.
“Most of them, yeah.”
That would make ramping fishing back up go much, much quicker. I would have to go visit the grandmothers soon and thank them for that.
In order to get his way, the former chief had instead convinced equal-powered traditionalist Bloodied boys to challenge the fishing camp boys. Since the traditionalist boys had spent a lot more time training their Blood techniques, the fishermen didn’t stand much of a chance, even with their spears.
The youngest and weakest Bloodied boys who had learned to fish could only be challenged by equally young boys, though, and those boys still had a poor grasp of their skills, and so some fishermen survived. With no choice but to keep learning to fight in the traditional way, boys like Aqir, Duno, Ubo, and Orma survived the purge. Once they weren’t fishing, and instead fighting and winning, they fell off Roba’s radar.
“Once we got strong enough, we even got revenge for some of our brothers,” Aqir said, eyes hard. Sure enough, when I looked at their chests and arms, I could see other familiar names, trailing past the names of their killers. “We never forgot.”
That was a mistake on Roba’s part. He saw people falling in line, and assumed it was over. Really, he just cultivated resentment, putting the tribe into a weaker position. Despite the fact that Uli killed Uli to get stronger, it should never have come from a place of resentment and revenge. It should have been in service to the tribe, not an attack on it.
It wasn’t just the fishing. The fact that Roba had challenged me, downward in strength, had set the tone of his subsequent leadership. There were some, entirely unrelated to fishing, who were put off by that, resulting in a lot more challenges against the chief than a healthy tribe would see.
As the Roba’s singular strength rose from defending his position, the power imbalance grew. In a healthy tribe, the chief was the strongest, but only to a small degree. With good leadership, there would actually be a large number of strong Uli supporting the Roba, males who could step in to replace him in the case of his death on a hunt or in a battle against another tribe. That was the case for this tribe under Ardu-un Iqul Roba, before our migration.
When the new Roba was repeatedly challenged, this changed his rule from one of mutual respect to one of strength and fear. The consequence of that was the strong tribesmen, who normally worked together, were forced to seek more power so they could feel secure in their positions, and that pitted them against one another.
Looking at a healthy tribe, the spread of Blood looked a lot like a pyramid. There were many tribesmen sitting relatively comfortably, just over 48 Blood, supporting the structure of power, with fewer at each level above that, up to the 64 Blood mark where the chief and his supporters generally peaked. Having a wider group of happy tribesmen across multiple power levels also resulted in more sons born, providing a strong foundation to the entire pyramid.
As a singular entity grew in strength far above that 64 Blood mark, it reduced the numbers of supporters, and also forced each tier below that to try and grow their power to close the gap and avoid an imbalance. At each level, they clashed, and some died, leaving fewer tribesmen to support those above. The pyramid became a tower, significantly more hierarchical, and also less able to produce the necessary boys to support the structure of power in totality.
In short, the tribe was on its way out. These were exactly the kinds of conditions that would kill a tribe, even without external factors that could acutely topple the tower. It was the sort of thing that would ultimately lead the Uli as a whole to extinction, given time, like the admin had mentioned. Power through sacrifice was inherently unsustainable.
“Sorry, Mali,” Duno said. “I wish we had better news.”
“You’re inheriting… quite the mess,” Orma said with a wince.
“No, thank you for telling me,” I said. “Now let me tell you about the people I met, across the ocean, and how without killing at all, they have grown even stronger than me…”