The Primeval Era-Chapter 85: The Second Doctrine IV

After achieving such a profound success, Damian did not want to stand still.

With the effects of the latest utterance of the letter of the Primordial Tongue, any sense of exhaustion to his consciousness or body rapidly faded away. Even though he had taken an arduous task that should have made him tired and want to pass out, he felt brand new.

Not only brand new, but it felt like his power had grown significantly compared to a few minutes ago.

Because he felt an extension of himself freely in the walls that surrounded the tribe right now.

He looked at them.

The walls had transformed into something that no longer resembled the simple logs that Tribesmen had labored to raise. They now held a glossy crimson sheen littered with blue specks that sparkled and pulsed with inner light. It looked like the radiant night sky filled with stars had descended and wrapped itself around the Purple Stone Tribe in the form of a wall.

A barrier of blood and starlight.

The height was larger than two men standing atop each other’s shoulders, the logs having grown and fused until the original seams between them were barely visible. The thickness was wide enough to make the walls feel like a bastion, a fortification that belonged around a great city rather than an Unbound Tribe.

And Damian could feel them.

Not just see them. Not just know they were there.

He could feel the walls as if they were extensions of his own limbs.

The hardness of his flesh and his bones had been transferred over to this transformed barrier. When he focused on a section of the wall, he could sense its density, its strength, the way Mana flowed through the blood that saturated its grain. It was like having skin that stretched across an entire perimeter.

When he drew in Mana now, he would no longer just be drawing it into his body.

It would also continue to be drawn into this wall!

It would continue to elevate and strengthen.

As for what he could name this doctrine of his cultivation...

He thought about it for a moment as he looked at the crimson-blue barrier that now surrounded the tribe.

The First Doctrine was Primordial Convergence. The simultaneous cultivation of all internal systems, breaking the rules that said one must proceed Circle by Circle through established paths.

And the Second Doctrine...

It was the extension of self beyond the boundaries of flesh. The spreading of his blood, his essence, his very existence into the external world. Making the environment itself a part of his power rather than something separate from it.

"Primordial Sovereignty."

He spoke the name aloud, and it felt right.

The Second Doctrine of Vakochev’s Doctrines of Stone.

Primordial Sovereignty.

The dominion of self over that which was external. The claiming of territory not through conquest, but through connection. The transformation of mere objects into extensions of his own cultivation!

If the First Doctrine made his body into a vessel that could hold power beyond what others could imagine...

Then the Second Doctrine would make the Land itself into an extension of that vessel.

Behind him came the figures of Uncle Adam and Grandmother Essun.

The old warrior had no words.

He simply stood there with an expression that mixed shock and pride, his weathered face struggling to process what he had just witnessed. His hands hung at his sides, his spear forgotten, his eyes moving between Damian and the transformed walls as if he couldn’t decide which impossibility deserved more attention.

But the old shrewd Wisewoman...

Grandmother Essun looked at the raised and elevated wall, then back to Damian, and her ancient eyes were shining with a fervor that bordered on religious ecstasy.

"Eibiri."

She breathed the name.

"The Legends of Stone speak of this great man! The Undying Stone! He who descended upon a Tribe filled with a deadly Plague when their people were dying by the thousands, their flesh rotting from a sickness that no shaman could cure."

Her gnarled hands gripped her staff with intensity.

"Eibiri walked among them and healed them all. Not with salves or herbs or the techniques of ordinary Wisewomen. He simply touched them, and the plague fled from his fingertips like shadows from light."

She took a shuffling step toward Damian.

"And by simply staying within that tribe, by making it his home, he transformed it into something greater. The first empire in the Lands of Stone. The Seat of the Undying! Its history stretches out to this very era, and multiple empires of this current age claim descent from that first and greatest dominion."

Her yellow teeth showed in a smile that held too much hope.

"Are you him, Tokoloshe? Are you Eibiri returned? Have the Ancestors sent you to us in our hour of need?"

In the Lands of Stone, there were many stories and legends that the weakest and the strongest would tell their children generation after generation. 𝙛𝒓𝓮𝒆𝔀𝒆𝙗𝓷𝒐𝙫𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝓶

Stories of legendary figures performing tremendous tasks that others could not even imagine.

Eibiri the Undying was one of the greatest of these legends. A being who appeared from nowhere, who healed the sick and raised the fallen, who transformed a dying tribe into an empire that conquered half the known world in its prime. Some said he was a man who had transcended normal cultivation.

Others said he was an Ancestor who had grown tired of watching from beyond and descended to walk among mortals once more.

The truth of his existence was lost to time.

But the stories remained.

And Grandmother Essun clearly believed that one of those stories was standing before her right now.

Damian did not believe much in legends like this.

He had been raised on different stories, tales of the Vakochev Empire and its founding, histories that were recorded rather than simply told. He knew how easily truth could become myth, how quickly extraordinary events could be exaggerated into impossible ones.

He simply shook his head without refuting the wise woman who was looking at the wall and then to him with eyes shining with fervor.

Let her believe what she wanted to believe.

It would do no harm!