Chapter 43: History
Fortunately, there had been no heavy rain recently, so the Cao River had not swollen.
After rowing the bark boat to the middle of the river, Chen Jian stripped off his animal skins. Taking a rope with him, he swam to the log, tied it securely, and the people on the boat pulled it back.
Four of the seven people they had pulled from the river were already dead. Their physical energy had been exhausted from fleeing, and the severe hypothermia from their time in the water made them impossible to save. Water conducts heat far more effectively than air, so even water that doesn't feel freezing can rapidly drain a person's body temperature.
As they carried the dead and dying back to the village, Chen Jian noted that one of the seven was a stranger he hadn't seen with Hua during his last visit.
*What the hell happened?*
He felt a surge of apprehension. A wild beast attack was almost impossible. Once humans learned to cooperate, they were at the top of the food chain; even a ferocious beast might kill a few, but it couldn't wipe out a group. Sickness? Unlikely. Even the most devastating plagues rarely have a mortality rate so high that only a handful from an entire group would survive.
A feeling of uneasiness grew in his heart. He was anxious for Hua and the other survivors to wake up so he could find out what had happened.
The development of every group was different. The people he had joined after his rebirth were organized by blood kinship rather than a larger tribal structure, which made them more peaceful. But he knew that might not be the normal state for all tribes.
The information he had gathered from the surrounding hundred *li* had lulled him into a false sense of security. The reason for Chen Jian's unease was a chilling thought: *Was this the work of another tribe?*
Tribal warfare emerged for one reason: profit. And the basis for that profit was a surplus of resources. Otherwise, if a group was living hand-to-mouth, war was a losing proposition; with no significant difference in weaponry, both sides would suffer losses they couldn't afford.
This meant the aggressor tribe must have had a surplus of its own. It was a classic case of projection—because they had extra resources, they assumed others did too, making them viable targets.
Chen Jian understood perfectly what the appearance of a surplus meant: there was a tribe nearby that could be considered a genuine enemy.
The people from both groups gathered around the fire, their eyes turning to Chen Jian. In their panic, he was the first person they thought of—even the old grandmother and Shitou.
Chen Jian waited with them. After a long time, Hua regained consciousness, looking around feebly as if searching for something.
"We pulled you from the river. You're safe," Chen Jian said quickly, careful not to mention the four who had died.
Hua stopped straining to turn his head. He rested for a moment, then stretched out his arms.
Some of the clanswomen, thinking he wanted water, hurried over with clay pots, but Hua waved them away. Instead, he reached up with a weak hand and touched his hair, feeling for the topknot that was still there, albeit messy.
After tidying it slightly with trembling fingers, he stroked his hair and asked, "Are we of the same ancestors?"
Chen Jian nodded. Hua let his hands fall. "My family… my kin… they are gone! They were killed, and the others were taken. Help us."
A shocked murmur swept through the crowd.
The people from both groups erupted into a flurry of panicked questions. The old grandmother and Shitou had to yell at their own people, "Quiet! Let Jian ask."
Once the crowd settled, Chen Jian frowned. "Which tribe was it?"
Hua shook his head, then pointed to one of the other unconscious survivors. "My younger brother… he knows. He was outside relieving himself and escaped into the forest. He saw what happened."
Hua tried to say more, his mind filled with the image of corpses in their cave. The fever was burning through him, but he couldn't forget the tragic sight of his sister crawling toward him before she died. He had come here because he remembered Chen Jian's promise, and because they shared the same ancestors.
But the more he tried to speak, the more the words failed him. His body lacked the strength, and forming a single thought took far too long.
Chen Jian signaled him to stop talking. He asked his clansmen to clear a hut to move the survivors inside and to place the bodies outside for now.
His people gathered around him, their faces etched with unease, full of questions.
Chen Jian waved his hand dismissively. "Go to sleep. Post a few extra people on watch tonight. We'll talk about this tomorrow."
No one slept well that night. The clanspeople lay awake, whispering about what had happened. Song, in particular, was reminded of her own tribe's past suffering.
Clearly, another tribe had attacked Hua's people.
*But who?* Chen Jian wondered. *Was it a tribe from within two hundred li? Or a group that had migrated from somewhere else?*
He had first encountered Song's tribe on the lower reaches of the Cao River; they had migrated from the east, the direction of the rising sun. The Meteorite Tribe was to the northeast.
But Hua's people were from the upper reaches of the Cao River, to the west—Chen Jian had learned that when he asked them about malachite.
According to the old grandmother, the dozen or so tribes in this region had all migrated from the southeast decades ago. In all his time here, he hadn't encountered any new groups arriving from that direction.
This area should have been the westernmost edge of that migration. He had assumed the lands to the west were empty, but now it seemed that was not the case.
Chen Jian turned these thoughts over in his mind for a long time. Just before dawn, someone ran to tell him that Hua's younger brother was awake.
He hurried over to the hut, where a group of his people had already gathered. Hua's brother stared at them in terror until his eyes focused on their familiar hairstyle—the topknot—and his panic began to subside.
Once he had calmed down, he told them what had happened.
That day, Hua and the others had gone to Chen Jian's village to trade. After the hunters in his own clan returned, everything was normal. Later, he went outside because of a stomachache. That's when he saw them: a group of people with unbound hair, holding stone axes and shouting in a language he couldn't understand as they rushed into the cave. He was so frightened that he hid in the grass without making a sound, watching as they captured many of his clansmen and dragged them away.
As the young man finished his story, Hua, who had also woken up, tried to speak. Chen Jian held up a hand. "I'll ask the questions. You two just answer."
He knew that when questioning people who were confused and panicked, it was best not to let them talk freely.
"Their hair was unbound?"
"Yes."
"They used stone axes? Were the heads hafted through a hole, or tied on?"
"Tied on."
"Did they have bows and arrows?"
"Yes, but the arrows had no feathers."
"Were they wearing animal skins?" Chen Jian asked, pointing to his own chest. Hua's younger brother shook his head.
Chen Jian's thoughts turned back to the arrows. He took an arrow from one of his own men and pointed to the nock carved into its tail. "Did their arrows have this?"
Hua shook his head. "I don't remember. I just remember there were no feathers."
The lack of feathers wasn't necessarily a deficiency. At close range, an unfletched arrow could be effective and might even fly faster. At longer distances, however, it would tumble in flight.
He was asking these questions to determine the tribe's origin. Were they a local group influenced by his own people, or had they migrated from somewhere else entirely?
Thinking of this, he picked up a bow and went to Hua's younger brother. "Were you close to them when this happened?"
"Very close. I was hiding in the grass. I watched them take my mother and my sister."
Chen Jian nocked an arrow and demonstrated a three-finger draw—using his index, middle, and ring fingers. "Did they draw the bow like this?"
"No."
He switched to a thumb draw, hooking the string with his thumb. "Like this?"
"No, not like that either."
Finally, he pinched the tail of the arrow between his thumb and forefinger. Hua's younger brother immediately nodded. "Yes, that's how they drew it! You taught us to draw the bow round like a full moon, but they draw it thin, like the crescent moon."
Chen Jian put down the bow. This confirmed it: a new tribe, one outside his sphere of influence, existed to the west.
Whenever he taught archery to other tribes, he always instructed them to carve nocks on their arrows. The nearby groups used either the three-finger or thumb draw, but he would never have taught them the inefficient pinch-grip.
The range of such a draw was very short, which was why the bowstring formed a shallow crescent instead of a full circle.
Anyone could invent a bow and arrow, and they would naturally start with a primitive pinch release. If this tribe had been influenced by him, they would have adopted his more advanced techniques instead of sticking to this basic method.
Therefore, this tribe must have developed archery on its own.
The key point was that they took captives instead of killing everyone. That, too, was significant.
Taking prisoners didn't automatically mean a slave-based society, but it pointed toward a specific economic condition. As long as one person's labor for a day could produce enough to sustain them for more than a day—even just a day and a half—exploiting captives became theoretically profitable.
Primitive societies might kill prisoners of war as human sacrifices, or they might force them to do dangerous tasks their own people refused. Their lifespans were not a consideration; they were used when food was abundant and killed when it was not. It was a cruel but logical system for the time.
Civilizations develop in diverse, non-linear ways. He was not the Haotian God; he couldn't see the developmental path of every group on the planet from an omniscient perspective.
In the eyes of his own people, the banks of the Cao River were the entire world. He, too, had been judging others by the standards of his own tribe, assuming the region was harmonious. In truth, it was not.
So, were those who were taken away meant to be temporary slaves? What work would they be forced to do now, when food was abundant in the summer and autumn? Or were they intended for sacrifice, part of some primitive worship?
The power of early beliefs could have a huge impact on a tribe. He imagined a group that worshipped a goddess. After they settled, the weather was favorable for years. But then, a multi-year drought could cause them to smash the goddess's idol in anger. Before reaching that point, they might have tried human sacrifice or any other ritual the shamans could devise. When nothing worked, their faith would collapse completely. And the people who were sacrificed would never know why they had been captured and killed.
These were all just Chen Jian's guesses. There was no way to know what had truly happened to the captured people. The geography and distribution of species in this world were completely different from his old one, filled with too many unknowns and variables.
But if they were truly taking slaves, it meant this new tribe was a huge threat, regardless of how long those slaves survived. What had happened to Song's people was tragic, but Chen Jian had never taken the Meteorite Tribe seriously as a strategic opponent.
The Meteorite Tribe merely used force to extort tribute from their neighbors. They didn't take slaves, not out of kindness, but because their own productivity was too low to support them. A tribe like that could stumble upon a crashed flying saucer and it wouldn't change their fundamental weakness; a single decisive battle would be enough to break them.
But a tribe that could afford to take slaves had already reached a crucial economic threshold: the point where one person's labor produced a surplus. If a worker only produced enough to feed themselves, keeping a slave was a net loss once the costs of management and suppression were factored in.
Judging from their bound stone tools and primitive arrows, they were likely either nomads or practitioners of slash-and-burn agriculture supplemented by hunting and fishing. And they must have migrated from a great distance.
As for what kind of people they were, he would have to see them for himself. The changes in geography and biology made all his knowledge of Earth's history useless here. In the narrow sense, this world had no history yet.
*This world has no history.*
He, his people, and everyone else on this planet were creating that story right now with their own hands and minds. It would be a story of struggle against the heavens and the earth, a story of alliances and betrayals, of love and war, all driven by the pursuit of survival and benefit. *That* story would become this world's history.
The days when their only enemy was the wilderness were finally coming to an end.
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