The evening self-study session that the tribesmen of the Crimson tribe had been anticipating the most had finally arrived.

Today, the teacher would narrate the final two Chapters of the travelogue ’Rokley’s Adventures’. Everyone quickly finished their chores early; after freshening up and eating, they all carried their own tables and chairs over, lining them up in neat rows. The group from the prairie was allowed to audit the class but wasn’t provided with furniture. They had to pool their salt and scavenged supplies to hire Crimson’s carpenters to build two tables, where young and old alike squeezed together to sit.

Talon took a leisurely sip of floral tea, looking at the orderly crowd below, nodding in inward approval. Sure enough, when learning was tied to benefits, even the most stubborn individuals became perfectly obedient.

"Ahem! Everyone sit up straight. Today we will have a spelling and multiplication test; you can only listen to the final two Chapters of the ’Rokley’s Adventures’ travelogue if your test meets the requirements."

The students below grimaced, but no one dared to utter a single word of complaint, because just one sigh would get them thrown out of the classroom, condemning them to remain illiterate forever.

"Hey you, who let you look at your friend’s paper? Do you want to get kicked out?"

"You two, daring to talk during the test, itching for a beating, aren’t you?"

"You there, are your teeth itchy? If you chew and break that pen, can you afford to replace it!"

The square echoed with the teachers’ full-throated shouts. Sitting in his tent adjusting a crochet hook, Kaelen found it amusing to listen to.

The classes had been divided previously, but ever since the after-school entertainment was introduced, everyone wanted to hear the story as soon as possible, so they all showed up to study even if they didn’t have a scheduled class. The teachers told them off a few times to no avail, so they had to teach everyone all at once. He thought they should select some individuals with an aptitude for learning from among the students and put them through a short-term training program. That way, the tribe would gain more teachers, and the pressure on Priest Collins’ group would be somewhat alleviated.

After adjusting the sharpness of the hook’s tip, Kaelen tested it on a yarn of fabric. The wooden crochet hook felt a bit stiff compared to modern metal ones, but with the arm strength of the Sub-Beasts here, he believed they would conquer it.

As a male Omega, while other male Omegas were proficient in handicrafts, Kaelen only knew a little bit of everything. For example, between knitting and crocheting, he only knew how to crochet, able to use various stitches to make scarves, shirts, bags, or hats... But as for knitting, forget it, he couldn’t even memorize the basic stitches.

Or regarding embroidery, he could embroider patterns printed on fabric and knew how to coordinate colors, but with the exact same flower pattern, others would embroider flat, glossy, and smooth petals that looked like real flowers; he embroidered petals that bulged out like ticks. If he had to say what he was best at, it would probably be cooking, baking, drawing, and pottery.

Oh, and farming too, since that was his profession in his previous life.

By the time Kaelen had tested all the needle sizes from 1mm to 15mm, the call to collect the test papers rang out outside. He hurriedly put the crochet hooks into the box, tidied up a bit, then carried a chair outside and sat in a discreet corner of the square. He wanted to hear everyone’s reaction to these final two Chapters.

Speaking of the character Rokley. Rokley’s setting was a mutated beastman of the Snow Wolf clan; he was the firstborn son of the Wolf King and the Wolf Queen. Both of his fathers were purebred Snow Wolves, but when he was born, he had a mix of black and white fur.

Because of this, he had been loathed by the Wolf King since childhood. The Wolf Queen, having suffered the Wolf King’s coldness due to his birth, took out his anger on him and tossed him to a wet nurse to raise.

Enduring the alienation of his two fathers and subjected to long-term abuse by the wet nurse, Rokley’s personality was rather timid. The tragedy reached its climax when the second child of the Wolf King and the Wolf Queen was born. Rokley’s younger brother had a pure white coat and, right from birth, possessed powerful Beast Energy identical to the Wolf King’s. The Wolf King publicly announced that the younger brother was his and the Wolf Queen’s only child, and that their firstborn had unfortunately died prematurely at birth.

No longer recognized by the royal family, the wet nurse caring for him cut off even the meager rations distributed to Rokley, leaving him so starved that he had no choice but to steal food himself.

Rokley was caught by the kitchen staff, beaten half to death, and thrown into the dirty ditch behind the castle on the day of his younger brother’s one-month milestone celebration...

Kaelen sketched the stark contrast between the younger brother’s luxurious meal inside the castle and the scene of Rokley scavenging for rancid food in the garbage bins; the flashy extravagance of the full-month banquet and the foul-smelling ditch with floating trash successfully roused the deep empathy of the locals.

Not stopping there, Kaelen had Rokley saved by a wandering beastman, and together with this person, they fled everywhere just to scavenge a bite to eat. He let the tribesmen witness the precarious lives outside through Rokley’s perspective; the filthy evils in society, the bitter divide between the rich and the poor.

The simple-minded locals had suffered from starvation during the freezing winters and had faced imminent death, but they had never been beaten by others while working themselves to the bone for food, had never been forced to kneel on the ground and lick a slave owner’s spit just to get a sip of water, and had never been scammed out of every last piece of clothing...

In today’s final two Chapters, Kaelen did not let Rokley escape from the human slave traders; he turned Rokley into a slave subjected to abuse, dragged into the arena to fight ferocious beasts, and sent to a place called the ’Night of Revelry’. He made Rokley witness a Sub-Beast being taken into a room to ’serve’ those called ’nobles’, only to come out with barely a breath of life left. Or like a human female who, upon accidentally getting pregnant, was forced to drink an abortion potion, resulting in two lost lives in one body...

The square was dead silent, the stillness broken only by occasional sniffles. Lucian quietly crawled into the arms of a middle-aged Feline clan Sub-Beast, burying his face in the older Sub-Beast’s chest without saying a word. The little boy had seen scenes like that many times; hadn’t he, before running away, witnessed a similar death of Nashi?

Kaelen knew this was cruel, but he had to write it down. This was the harsh reality of the outside world; if the tribesmen of the tribe remained forever naive, this would be their eventual fate.

Chapter six ended with Rokley biting off a pot-bellied human’s neck to protect his chastity, after which he was hung up on a torture rack. As he lay dying on the crucifix, a voice drifting from near and far reached his ears.

[Do you want to live?]

In a daze, Rokley’s lips moved: I do!

---

When Chapter seven, which was also the final Chapter with a length of over twenty thousand words, ended, it was already very late. The wind was bitter cold, but not as cold as everyone’s hearts at this moment. Rokley had died...

He was helped to escape the ’Night of Revelry’ by a human female. During the process of hiding, he met many types of people and went through countless hardships, eventually learning the ways of deceit, acquiring ruthless methods, and learning how to smile while driving a blade through another’s heart.

Rokley acquired an immense amount of money and had numerous subordinates under his command; he became powerful and returned to take revenge on those who had tormented him and abandoned him. He saved those in the beast arena, rescued people in the ’Night of Revelry’... but in the end, he could not save himself.

Abused from a young age, beaten to near death, and soaked in putrid water for too long, his body was no longer healthy. Later on, he wandered aimlessly everywhere without enough food to eat or clothes to wear; when captured as a slave, he was tortured and forced to drink potions to fight wild beasts; and at the night of revelry, to keep his body perpetually in an adolescent state, the slave owners even forced him to drink an anti-aging potion.

The anti-aging potion was actually a drug that destroyed the growth structure of bones, hair, and skin; although the body would forever maintain an adolescent state, the internal organs would correspondingly deteriorate.

The day Rokley died, he looked up at the sky radiating bright golden sunlight, lying in the arms of Lisa—the human female who had saved him years ago—humming the lullaby he had accidentally heard when his Papa sang his younger brother to sleep.

The young beastman departed peacefully, but he left behind a lingering, restless torment in the hearts of the living.

Amidst the wind blowing through the square, choked sobs echoed one after another. Adults hugged children, Sub-Beasts hugged Sub-Beasts, mates hugged mates; everyone mourned together for the young beastman’s fate.

Sane had been standing behind Kaelen at some point.

He draped a blanket over Kaelen’s shoulders and bent down to pull Kaelen into his embrace. He knew Kaelen based this story on the experiences of the slaves at Obsidian, but within it, there seemed to be Kaelen’s own life as well, a life that he had never known about.

If Kaelen knew Sane’s thoughts, he would certainly explain to Sane that it was someone else’s life. In the human world, there were many people like Rokley. At least Rokley had someone to save him, and before his gloomy life ended, he managed to save many other gloomy lives.

There were people who weren’t as lucky as Rokley, having to drag themselves through the mud until their lives ended.

That night, many people lost sleep.

The next morning, everyone worked as usual, but the atmosphere in the tribe was unusually somber, to the point that Kaelen suspected whether he had laid it on a bit too thick.

Fortunately, by noon, everyone’s emotions had stabilized. The beastmen and Sub-Beasts even teased each other about their swollen eyes that looked like they had been punched. Everyone was also able to softly discuss the characters in the travelogue, deliberating on how to avoid the hidden schemes within it; they also exchanged ideas on what they should do to protect themselves and find a way out if they unfortunately fell into Rokley’s situation.

Kaelen breathed a sigh of relief and turned to say to Sane:

[I see they are too free so they think a bit too much. You should start their training from this afternoon.]

Sane: "..."

You are even more wicked than those slave owners in the travelogue!