mijobooks Chapter 61 [Blood, Fire, and Prayer]
Chapter 61 [Blood, Fire, and Prayer]
As night enveloped the mountains and forests, the campfire at the dwarves' makeshift camp was the only striking orange light in the darkness.
Two chosen young men, relying on their agility, held their breath and lay in ambush in the shadows of the bushes.
Their hearts were pounding; they were both nervous and excited.
The dwarf's snoring was so loud that it could be heard from a great distance in the quiet night.
They saw it.
The iron axes leaning against the dwarf gleamed dimly in the firelight.
The two young people were itching to take it, but they held back.
The dwarf was sleeping right next to me; the slightest movement would alert me, and I'd be dead.
Their gaze eventually fell on a pile of rubbish in the corner of the camp.
There was a piece of black iron lying there, its edges worn down, clearly a useless piece of scrap metal.
However, that thing looked quite heavy.
One of the men made a gesture, and the other immediately understood, silently slipping over and taking the cold piece of metal into his arms.
Beside the campfire, there were some black, lumpy objects piled up, looking quite heavy.
This thing burns with almost no smoke, but the fire is very strong.
The dwarves call this charcoal.
Another young man was quick and grabbed a piece as well.
The two quickly retreated.
They returned to the village with the stolen goods, and everyone gathered around them.
The heavy piece of iron was passed around among people, and it felt cold to the touch, heavier than any stone.
It represents a power they cannot comprehend.
Mason took the metal sheet, thinking it must be useful.
He found a very hard, sharp stone and tried to sharpen the iron sheet into a blade.
Sparks flew everywhere.
The piercing scraping sound was especially loud in the night.
Mason used all his strength and struggled for a long time.
As a result, the hard rock itself was worn down and broke into several pieces.
But there wasn't even a decent scratch on that piece of metal.
Everyone's hearts sank.
They held the dwarven iron, yet didn't even know how to use it; this feeling left everyone breathless.
Just as everything was quiet and no one spoke, Terra took out the dark charcoal.
He walked to the nearly extinguished campfire in the middle of the village and carefully put charcoal into the fire.
After a while, there was a crackling sound from the fire.
The flames suddenly shot up, and their color changed from orange-red to bright white.
A scorching heat wave swept over us, dispelling the chill of the night.
The entire village was brightly lit by this powerful light.
Now everyone felt a little more confident.
People instinctively moved closer to the campfire. This fire was the first thing they had obtained from the dwarves that they could actually use.
However, the village was crowded with people, and the aroma of food, combined with the bright firelight, quickly attracted things from afar.
The howling grew closer and sounded different from before.
The beast horde attacked.
Dozens of wolves rushed toward the village from all directions.
The villagers screamed in fright, and the men grabbed the wooden spears and stone axes they had with them and rushed behind the wooden wall that Mason had reinforced earlier.
They frantically rammed against the wooden wall, their sharp claws leaving deep marks on the wood.
Human resistance seemed utterly futile; the tips of wooden spears broke easily upon contact with the thick fur of wolves, and stone axes, when struck on their skulls, often only provoked a more ferocious counterattack.
A particularly large wolf leaped over the wooden wall and pounced on a child hiding by a campfire.
The child screamed, and Mason's eyes turned red.
He had no weapon in his hand, only that cold, heavy piece of blunt iron.
Without thinking twice, he roared, raised the metal sheet with both hands, and smashed it down on the wolf's eye socket.
It's just smashing it.
"Pfft—" The piece of metal sank deep into the wolf's eye socket.
The ferocious beast let out a mournful cry, and its massive body crashed heavily to the ground.
This was the first time people had used iron tools to kill wild animals since the fighting started.
Everyone then realized that the sheet of iron didn't need to be sharpened at all; its weight alone was formidable.
The battle is finally over.
Several villagers lay dead in pools of blood, and many more bore deep, bone-revealing wounds.
But the wolves paid a price; they left behind seven or eight carcasses and retreated into the darkness with their tails between their legs.
The battle was a Pyrrhic victory.
The survivors sat around the campfire, which burned brightly with dwarven charcoal, silently watching their companions' cold corpses and the blood-stained, blunt iron piece placed beside the fire.
A true tribe was born amidst the baptism of blood and fire.
They shared a common enemy, a common dead, and a common desire for that black metal.
The shadow of the wolf attack had not yet dissipated when a new despair quietly arrived.
The wounds sustained in the battle began to fester and become infected.
A newborn baby in the village also developed a high fever due to his weak constitution.
The raw herbs were chewed up and applied to the wound, but they had no effect.
Many people in the village were on the verge of death.
The baby's mother was holding her nearly lifeless child, trembling all over.
She tried everything, but could only watch as her child's breathing grew weaker and weaker.
Finally, she carried the child and walked to the edge of the village.
She raised her head, looking at the three distant sacred mountains in the night sky, and let out a heart-wrenching cry from her throat, a cry that belonged to a mother.
This mental fluctuation had no affiliation, and in the monitoring of the [Celestial Main Network], it became a particularly bright abnormal signal.
Thea's deduction was interrupted.
She looked at the unusual signal and a smile appeared on her lips.
"Very primitive, very pure, all about survival, which is just right..."
She saw this prayer as a golden opportunity to instill a system of "knowledge" into this new race.
Thea extended her finger, and a wisp of the purest [source of life] flowed through the invisible network into the mortal realm, entering the body of the dying infant.
The Black Tide Monarch also sensed it.
Blood, despair, the will to survive...
These elements, mixed together, brewed the most delicious struggle.
"Interesting bugs," he remarked, casually adding the tribe's coordinates to his next selection field in the [Eternal Struggle Blackfire].
In the mortal realm, the baby miraculously recovered.
One second he was on the verge of death, the next second his high fever subsided and he let out a loud cry.
The villagers erupted in immense joy and jubilation.
They surrounded the child who had been given a new lease on life, and looked at the mother with tears streaming down her face.
Everyone looked up at the sky in unison, and for the first time felt that there might really be "gods" in the sky.
In the old house in the countryside, Xu leaned back in a rattan chair, taking in everything that was happening in the sand table.
"But...we need to wait a little longer. This world is not perfect yet, so...humans, please wait a little longer."