The Primeval Era-Chapter 82: The Second Doctrine! I

The feast continued and eventually ended.

Tribesmen returned to their homes and huts with full stomachs and lighter hearts, their faces holding something that had been absent for too long.

Hope!

They looked forward to a better tomorrow.

Damian slept through the night without any strange dreams or nightmares, his body sinking into the rough furs of his sleeping platform with the exhaustion of someone who had done too much in too short a time.

When morning came, he was one of the first to be up.

He had an odd sense of restlessness that wouldn’t let him stay still.

He attributed it to the young woman who had been looking at him again and again throughout last night, her wing-shaped pupils tracking his every movement as if she was trying to figure him out. Every time he had glanced in her direction, she had been watching. Assessing. Cataloging details that she would later piece together into conclusions he might not want her to reach.

As much as he had left behind the habits of Anointed Ones, he knew that someone like her would very soon catch on to the fact that he wasn’t truly Dross.

But it didn’t really matter too much right now.

What he wanted to focus on most was his own power.

---

Damian stood at the edges of the tribe where the defensive walls were being raised.

The construction had been ongoing since the day after the Butcher’s attack, and now it was nearing completion. The walls were simple in their design but massive in their ambition, a barrier meant to encircle the entire Purple Stone Tribe and provide at least the illusion of safety.

The logs themselves had been cut down from the trees at the base of the Roaring Stone Mountain, their trunks thick with absorbed Mana from years of growing in the mountain’s shadow. Tribesmen worked in teams to drag them into position, rolling them across the hard-packed earth using smaller logs as wheels beneath their weight.

Once a log reached its designated spot, the real work began.

Teams of workers used stone-headed tools to dig deep trenches into the hard earth, their arms straining as they carved through soil and rock alike. The trenches had to be deep enough to anchor the logs securely, to prevent them from being pushed over by charging beasts or attacking Warriors.

When a trench was ready, ropes of braided sinew were looped around the top of a log, and a dozen Tribesmen would heave together to raise it upright and drop its base into the waiting hole. They packed the earth back around it with stamping feet and pounding stones, then moved to the next log and repeated the process.

Between the logs, they wove branches and packed mud to fill the gaps. Sinew cords lashed the tops of adjacent logs together, creating connections that distributed force across multiple points rather than allowing a single log to be knocked free.

It was hard work.

It was slow work!

And Damian watched it all with eyes that saw more than just the physical construction.

Even in these early hours of the morning, Grandmother Essun had a few Tribesmen working. She stood nearby with her gnarled staff, occasionally cracking it against the back of anyone who moved too slowly.

"Death could be around the corner!"

Her voice carried across the construction site.

"You want to be sleeping when it arrives? Build! Build!"

---

As he watched them, Damian sensed the tumultuous and immense concentrated waves of power that he had been recklessly drawing in since he caught the Holy Daughter from the skies.

He had found out a few things since then.

One of them was the fact that when he utilized the letter of the Primordial Tongue, it could now affect external objects or things that he was touching. In the case of the Holy Daughter, it had healed her grievous wounds as if they were nothing more than scratches.

He had not told her this, but...

He felt a faint line of connection between himself and the Holy Daughter ever since he utilized the letter of the Primordial Tongue to heal her. If that made sense.

As of right now, he could sense where she was even without spreading out his senses of perceiving Mana. He simply knew. She was in her hut, still sleeping, her presence a warm pulse at the edge of his awareness that he couldn’t quite ignore.

Whatever the letter of Persevere had done when the flames of the Primordial Tongue healed her, they had drawn something about her into him as well.

For now, it was best not to think about this.

But since then, he had drawn in obscene amounts of Mana into himself, drenching his Flesh, Bones, Blood, Marrow, and Organs with concentrations that were more than ten times what he had absorbed yesterday. His body had adapted to hold power that should have torn it apart, his systems growing resilient through repetition of damage and healing.

And yet when he was looking at his power, even though it felt grander and more terrifying than before, he asked himself a question that had been gnawing at him since the battle.

Could he use this power to stand against dozens of Organ Sanctification Warriors?

Because since he was bathing his organ systems with Mana, he could be considered to have achieved the level of a Fifth Circle Warrior even though he hadn’t reached such heights through normal means.

And since he had boldly claimed that he would crack the skulls of entire armies by himself...

He needed to have the power of many Warriors all by himself.

So he had been wondering since last night how he could expand his own cultivation.

His own Doctrine.

He only had the First Doctrine, which allowed him to cultivate everything all at once. But since last night, he had been pondering on exactly which direction to take it next.

For this, he would need a clearer understanding of exactly how the more powerful Warriors above Organ Sanctification cultivated. But when he thought about this, he asked himself a question that felt almost heretical.

Why did he even need that knowledge if this was the path that others followed?

Why could he not just forge ahead without knowing what had been previously established?

...!