Mashouah watched with clenched jaws as Mlezi chewed the last of his dinner which he had brought with him onto the porch.

“Well?” He asked after swallowing.

“Mmm… some scouts of mine recently went north to the Forest Afor, our homeland and they discovered a horrifying truth. Those of our people who remained are now scattered and struggling for survival. Please, could you send some of your men to help them?” Mashouah asked with a lowered head.

“Pangolins?” Mlezi asked.

“Yes. Those things drove my people to the brink and I fear, if nothing is done, those who remained in the Forest will be no more very soon.”

Mlezi nodded before placing his right hand on the table and this made Mashouah sigh.

“What do you want?” The Chofumah Chief asked with a defeated expression.

“Your people.” Mlezi sighed.

Mashouah’s face twisted violently for a moment but he let out a sigh before nodding.

“Will you assume the title of Chief?”

Mlezi shook his head.

“No. You will keep your title and continue to lead your people. The only difference will be that you will answer to me. I also want you to move your people to the southern part of Central Hatua. If we are to survive, we will have to be together. Are my terms acceptable?”

Mashouah nodded before joining Mlezi in standing up.

“Good,” Mlezi said while accompanying Mashouah out.

I let out an internal drone.

Mlezi and Ua were playing a very interesting game.

So much had changed under their leadership and I couldn’t help but feel intrigued at the outcome.

I was also a little envious of how much they had built and so I flew to my island.

The Temple of Tablets and the Mega Crystal were the stand-out features but I wondered just how funny it would be if Mlezi and Ua one day sent people out into the ocean only to discover a vacant city built by something beyond their comprehension. I wondered how they would react.

A more serious issue was that I needed to protect the Chamber of Tablets.

At this rate, humanoids would one day inhabit most of the land on my surface and I couldn’t have them running around in my sanctuary.

I tapped my chin and wondered if there was a way for me to conceal it.

I could seal it with a diamond door but that would eventually be broken.

I also needed something that could be opened and closed as to not be tedious so I turned to the Pāttiram vehicle.

It was a complex machine and although I couldn’t recreate it since its creators lost the blueprints, I could recreate the metallic material that made its skin using Glass Conversion and so dropped down to the broken vehicle and grabbed a loose chunk of its skin.

I then walked into the Temple and made my way to the Chamber of Tablets which I had tidied up.

I raised my right hand and using Glass from the meteors, I created a vault-like door, sealing the chamber.

This would be more than enough for now and so I returned to the surface and flew into the sky.

I wanted to make a city which didn’t resemble anything the humanoids had ever seen or would ever see and so I took inspiration from the Pāttiram.

I would construct roads and houses that stood sideways and upside down above the ones that stood normally.

I also didn’t wanna completely deforest my island so I planned to build along four roads that connected to an outer road that resembled the Closed String the Pāttiram used in a lot of the architecture.

I gave myself a nod before entering the functional vehicle and digging out the four roads.

I had learnt that all Pāttiram vehicles had Glass Cores or hearts that resembled the one in my doll and those in the Pāttiram themselves.

It ran on Glass Energy but that much was obvious.

What wasn’t so clear was how I was able to telepathically control it.

There weren’t any controls inside and whenever I entered it, it felt as though I was in a much bigger doll.

I temporarily stopped excavating and looked the vehicle over.

I then tried seeing if some kind of Life Energy was flowing within it but I found none.

My eyes then widened as I thought of an even crazier possibility.

I tried looking for a soul within the machine but what I found instead was one of my strings only it reached out from all the way beneath my surface and was running through the vehicle like a rubber belt in a system of gears.

I was literally tethered to the vehicle.

I wondered if this was also the case for my doll and so I hopped out of the vehicle and watched as my string followed my doll.

I then watched as it slowly turned within.

Oh!

This was why I could never leave my surface.

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Any attempt would pull my string further than it could go.

I let out a frustrated but understanding sigh before returning to the vehicle and continuing to build my roads.

I chose to pave them with stone and then started my work on the first set of buildings, the ones that stood upright.

I made them using the Temple of Tablets as a template.

They were made of bulbous cores which had two to four rooms each, although a few were larger or smaller.

They all had tall open-top towers which I assumed the Pāttiram used for easy access to the sky.

I then built the sideways and upside-down roads and houses before wiping my hands with a proud expression.

I then frowned upon realizing that I had no one to put in these houses and had just wasted several hundreds of tons of Glass.

Well… at least the island looked a little cooler.

I looked up and saw that the sun was rising.

Not even an entire night had passed and I had already finished building a city.

Time really felt different to me.

A thousand years could pass by in a flash and I wouldn’t notice it.

That’s partly why I was watching over Mlezi and his family so closely.

I didn’t want to rush to the end.

So, I chose to instead take my time.

Whether or not I would eventually find the answers I sought would be revealed in time.

So, I returned to Central Hatua just as a sleepy Ua made her way to a large hut a few meters south of hers where several Umande women, her fellow Blessed Sisters, sat in waiting for her. They all also curiously wore black silk head wraps that covered their heads, although Ua wore a white one. The wraps covered the cranial part of the head along with the hairline, leaving their faces and ears uncovered. This was all because of a silly belief that the wraps would protect the divine knowledge in their heads.

Ua began her lesson on basic mathematics and its appliances.

Many of the Blessed Sisters she had taught went on to become teachers and those they taught, passed down those lessons to their children making the general populous more knowledgeable.

Mlezi was overseeing the movement of the Chofumah and Jua was studying under Heziyn’s supervision.

I then remembered that Mlezi said he would send some of his men to the north and so I looked for them.

I found a group of ten making their way north.

These were the strongest of his men.

Each of them was tall, muscular and, unlike everyone else who had pale grey skin, theirs was dark grey and covered with scars.

The group was also a mixture of Umande and Chofumah individuals, although the Umande were the majority.

I followed them as they crossed the Kifo Valley and anything that tried to kill or eat them was promptly stabbed to death.

They operated as a single, cohesive unit, striking hard and fast.

They were also adaptable and changed tactics whenever necessary, like when they faced Pangolins.

They would break up and flank the beast before going for its neck and head.

A few days passed and they eventually reached the home of the Chofumah, Forest Afor.

A lush place filled with massive trees, vibrant assortments of flowers and, of course, Pangolins.

One thing the men noticed was that the bottom quarters of most trees were either burnt or covered in ash or soot.

The men noticed that smoke was steadily filling the air and so they bravely ran towards its source.

They eventually found two Pangolins burning the foot of a tree but what was curious was that, built almost fifty meters high, onto the tree’s trunk, was a hut.

Actually, this was the case for several trees and cowering within the huts were people who could be heard loudly coughing as the smoke rose.

Mlezi’s men wasted no time in attacking the nearest Pangolin which they brutally killed by ripping apart the only soft part of its body, its head.

They then rushed to the second as it turned to face them and before it could even open its mouth to breathe fire, they shoved all of their spears into its mouth and its eyes, skewering it in an instant.

The Pangolins fell and the men used some of their water to douse the flames.

The people above called out to them and asked who they were.

Mlezi’s men explained everything and asked if there were any other tree-top villages in the forest.

The people above said there were two others but before sending Mlezi’s men off, they offered them thanks in the form of baskets which were filled with fruits.

The baskets were lowered via ropes and Mlezi’s men thanked the tree people before heading north towards the next village.

They eventually reached it and were relieved to see that it wasn’t on fire.

They greeted the people above who told them that there was a Pangolin nest a few kilometres east.

They warned Mlezi’s men to stay away from it but that is exactly where they went.

They eventually reached it to find that it was a deep hole in the ground covered with dry grass that the twelve visible Pangolins greedily ate.

That was the thing that always confused me about them.

They didn’t eat meat and thus didn’t need to kill humanoids.

This meant that they were probably just assholes.

Mlezi’s men needed to find a way to kill them all while avoiding getting cooked alive and so they devised a plan. One which cost them a lot of the Glass they had in their leather bags.

Their Healers, the only two among them who were trained for that specific role, raised their hands and began siphoning Life Energy from the Pangolins but they did so strategically, choosing to steal the Life Energy that flowed to the eyes.

If temporarily deprived of Life Energy, living tissue would weaken but if it rapidly lost Life Energy for any stretch of time, the tissue would suffer irreparable damage.

What Mlezi’s men were trying to do was blind the Pangolins and their plan worked but this made the Pangolins panic and so they began breathing fire in random directions.

The grass they sat on caught fire and although they were fire resistant to an extent, they weren’t fireproof and so the more they panicked, the more fire they breathed and this added to the inferno around them cooking them from the inside out.

Mlezi’s men had also done this to kill any infant or adolescent Pangolins that were in the nest and they watched as all of them burnt to a crisp.

They then continued north where they found that the last of the tree-top villages had already been burnt and all of its members had been reduced to ash.

At this point, they were supposed to turn around and report everything to Mlezi but their eyes burnt with hatred for the Pangolins and so they continued their sweep of the forest for days, killing any Pangolin that dared walk in the Forest Afor.

They spent so much time killing the pangolins that their bodies were blacked with ash and soot.

Their blood lust was eventually quenched as they killed the last of the Pangolins but in their effort to chase it, they had ended up fifty kilometres north of the forest where they were met by the ocean.

They had never seen it before and so they wrongly called it a giant lake.

They cautiously stepped into it and, after seeing that there weren’t any predators nearby, they washed their bodies.

They then had a bit of fun swimming in the salty waters before finally succumbing to fatigue and camping by the beach where they spent the night.

The next day came and they made their way back home, passing the two tree-top villages and telling them of the fate of the third in the process.

Upon their return, they gained an audience with Mlezi who stood next to the tree that Musa often stood by when he was on patrol with Imani, Maini and Thabiti by his side.

The men stood about five meters away as Mlezi looked out into the distance.

His eyes were locked onto Mount.

He eventually turned to his men and they promptly reported everything.

“A great lake?” Mlezi asked with a raised brow.

“Yes, sir. It went on for what looked like tens of kilometres and had waters which tasted… salty.”

Mlezi turned to Maini.

“The Chofumah speak of something they call the Ocean. A great body of water that goes on forever. It also goes by another name... Makor. Perhaps this is what they saw.”

“Mmm… the lands near this Ocean aren’t occupied, right?” Mlezi asked.

“No, sir.”

“What do you plan on doing with them, sir?” Maini asked as Mlezi closed his eyes.

“Our huts are small, fragile. With trees as big as you described, we could erect great houses and never have to fear getting attacked by predators in the middle of the night again. We could also erect mighty walls to drive back the predators further. A desirable vision, no?”

Everyone let out agreeing hums.

“Alright. Prepare a force of fifty men. They will go to the Forest Afor and establish a logging camp. We’ll then have to establish a set route for any wood we harvest will take. That is all for now unless someone has something to say.”

No one spoke making Mlezi nod as he led them all back to Central Hatua.