Arthur was awakened by Jackal’s voice an undetermined amount of time later. He had evidently fallen asleep in the midst of his thoughts, but that wasn’t much of an issue.

Nadia had told him he had been asleep for almost two cycles after the tribe’s Healer, who he had yet to meet, had tended to his wounds, but Arthur had still felt slightly tired. Not that he was completely rested after only a couple hours of sleep– tacks?–, but it was better.

Arthur followed Jackal outside the tent, after the Oni had explained to him that they wouldn’t eat alone in the tent, but rather with the rest of the tribe. Apparently it’s custom in small communities of Oni to eat both of the main meals together, since all food gathered, hunted, or produced is stored in the same place and belongs to the whole village.

As they walked towards the centre of the village, from where the sound of conversation and the good smell of food was propagating, more and more people got out of their tent and converged towards their destination.

Arthur expected to get a lot of attention or maybe gawking from the other Oni as they walked, as had happened before his meeting with Nadia, but he only got sneak glances and was seemingly being ignored on purpose. They had probably been already informed of his presence by Nadia or someone else.

Since there were more people than before, he got a chance to observe them better than before, gleaming more information about their race.

The most evident feature was the difference in skin colour and size of their horn, which he had also had a chance to ask about when chatting with Nadia.

As she had explained to him, the colour of an Oni’s skin determined the focus of their Skills, while the length of their horn was determined by a mixture of factors such as age, average Level of all their Skills, the Level of the highest levelled Skill they possessed, nutrition through their puberty, and some other minor, random facets of their lives.

Consequently, Jackal and the other dozen or so hunters of the tribe had red skin, as indication of their combat-focused Skills.

Nadia, Miren, and the Healer who had helped speed up Arthur’s healing all had blue skin, since they focused on magical and intellectual Skills.

Finally, all of those who possessed mostly farming, gathering or crafting Skills had light grey skin, with a myriad of other shades of colours evenly mixed in as a result of the wide variety of Skills that that covered.

Since he had got this explanation, Arthur hadn’t been surprised to see just how colourful a crowd of Oni could be; even though the dominant colour was grey, the additional shades made for a wondrous display, and the children running around made the sight even more lively.

The younger a kid was, the lighter their skin became, with some of the infants being carried around by their mothers looking as if they were born with albinism. Also, most of the kids had little bumps in the spot their horns would grow, which made the sight of them even cuter.

In the middle of the emptied out space an incredibly long carpet had been laid out, with each Oni moving about and settling down in a predetermined order unknown to Arthur.

They sat cross-legged or on their knees over thin pillows, laid down on either of the long sides of the carpet, on the surface of which a dozen soup crucibles and six roasts of mystery meat had been deposited, accompanied with drinks and various appetizers.

While Arthur looked around, confused as to where he was supposed to sit down, Jackal confidently strode towards the only end of the carpet currently occupied, which was coincidentally where Nadia was sitting.

Arthur followed him, and noticed that one pillow had been prepared on each side of the Elder, one of which was probably Jackal’s target. Miren and another Oni with blue skin, whom Arthur assumed was the Healer he had yet to meet, sat on the next nearest seats to Nadia, on her left and right respectively.

As they reached her, Nadia looked at Arthur with a smile, and patted the pillow directly on her right, which he guessed to be where he was supposed to sit. This put him between her and the Healer, whose name he still didn’t know.

As soon as he was comfortably sat on his pillow, Nadia introduced the healer to Arthur, and he learned that his actual name was Derin. He politely thanked him for basically saving his life, but Derin told him to pay it no mind, as it was his job.

Derin was a rather quiet man, although while they talked Arthur noticed that he seemed to take much pride in his role, as he had come to notice most of the Oni were of theirs.

When all the hundred or so members of the tribe were finally done finding their place and settling down, Nadia took out a thin metal rod from her sleeve, and lightly tapped it against her silver cup. She was the only one to have any utensils made out of metal, all other cups, plates, forks and knives were carved from bone or chitin.

Silence fell as quick as lightning, the murmurs and conversations from all around the ‘table’ cut off as soon as the ring was heard; even the children stopped what they were doing. If Arthur hadn’t seen the Oni around him physically shutting their mouths, he would have thought Nadia had cast some kind of silencing spell.

When no more sounds were heard from all around, Nadia cleared her throat and spoke up.

“Ahem. As you may have heard, we recently had a most esteemed guest join our community. He will be living together with us for the foreseeable future, residing in the family tent of our Head Hunter. He has agreed to provide his services in exchange for hospitality, in addition to a couple more trades with yours truly as mediator. I expect only utmost respect for a guest such as him, as it is just tradition of our people,” she threw a few glances around surreptitiously, and then continued, “I only say this as a reminder, just in case someone has forgotten their manners after such a long time since our last guest. Now, let us eat.”

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Nadia clapped her hands, which was seemingly a sign for the rest to pick up conversations and finally dig in for food.

Everyone only had three utensils, namely a soup spoon for, well, the soup, a two-pronged fork for the meat roast, and a bone pick to stab the appetizers with.

There wasn’t an order you were supposed to follow on which course to eat first, and everyone simply ate what they liked whenever preferred to.

The meal was almost like a free-for-all, although Arthur noticed there wasn’t really any rush to eat, and the adults restrained themselves to let the youngest eat their fill first.

This apparently included Arthur, if the subtle gestures and looks from Nadia were any clue, probably because he resembled at least in size the Oni equivalent of a very young teen, around sixteen or so of their years. 

He still didn’t know if Oni aged differently from Humans, although if Nadia wasn’t joking when he told him she was two hundred and fifty Rotations old, then they probably did. He still wasn’t sure exactly how long a Rotation was, but it appeared to be the equivalent of a year in this world.

Since he didn’t really want to compete for food with people a head taller than him, Arthur filled a bowl with soup, and then took a stab of meat from the roast, followed by a couple small cubes of some kind of cheese. From what he had seen from others his size, this should be an acceptable portion for him.

The soup was very salty, although far from unsavoury, with a few chunks of some kind of chewy potato floating around, while the roast was seasoned with a wide variety of spices he didn’t recognize, making the flavour literally otherworldly to him.

The cheese just tasted like cheese, nothing much to say there.

As he ate, Arthur had a chance to take in the people around him once more. Honestly, they weren’t much different from humans, from normal people.

The Oni laughed, joked around, and conversed amiably with each other. And even if a few of them threw Arthur a hard stare or two down the line, he felt quite comfortable being among them.

Dinner was over quite fast, and Arthur was quite impressed to see not even a scrap had been left behind, although he imagined it should have been obvious, with how much bigger than him the people around were.

He had been a bit disappointed there weren’t desserts of any kind after the meal, but he had kept it to himself; he was already more than satisfied with such a meal, after days of eating fairy dust and maggots.

Jackal and Arthur departed from Nadia and the others shortly after the meal ended, with the usual pleasantries and ‘sleep well’. He had almost let a ‘good night’ slip, which he didn’t really know what would mean in a world where night didn’t seem to exist.

They reached their tent, and went to sleep without saying much. Although he had seen him quietly converse with Miren and some of the other hunters with red skin, Jackal didn’t strike Arthur as a man of many words, but it wasn’t much of a problem for him.

As he laid on his pile of pelts, Arthur noticed that the tent seemed much darker than when they had left for dinner, as if the material which made up the abode was somehow letting less sunlight through than before.

He wasn’t really sure if that was some kind of natural property, or if it was appositely enchanted, or well, inscribed, but he could probably find out the next d– cycle.

Arthur woke up to the sound of Jackal moving about the tent, packing up his few possessions. The tent was back to being bright, although he had been so tired it hadn’t been enough to wake him up.

“You better freshen up quickly, human. Although the Elder said you could live here in my tent, you’ll still have to help me dismantle it, if you don’t want to be kicked out.” Jackal said when he noticed Arthur waking up.

“Sure thing, boss,” Arthur quipped, hopping out of his beddings. Jackal narrowed his eyes at him, but didn’t say anything further.

The tent was evidently built to be as easy as possible to dismantle and assemble, since it was made by just a few parts, namely two rolls of leather making up the ‘roof’ and ‘walls’ and a dozen thin poles planted in a circle around a larger pole in the centre of it all.

They quickly disassembled it and rolled everything up in the same bundle, the village around them doing the same, readying themselves up to depart.

Arthur was soon made aware that the carriages he had seen the cycle before were only used to transport the dismantled tents, the elderly, and the children or pregnant women, although he hadn’t seen any of the latter.

This was apparently done to speed everything up, since the Gobblers, the big lizards used to pull the vehicles, didn’t like to carry heavy weights around and would move much slower than the Patch if they tried to carry everyone.

As such the rest of the village would have to walk, or sometimes run, to keep up the pace. Arthur wasn’t quite happy to hear that, but since his arrival in this world he had done a lot of trekking anyway, and he didn’t really have other options, so there was that.

Before departing, Arthur and Jackal loaded the bundled up tent in the cart of another family, since despite possessing a tent all for himself, the Red Oni owned neither a Gobbler nor a carriage.

He also informed Arthur that he wouldn’t travel with him, since he and the other hunters had to scout ahead with the Sandboats. So Arthur was left alone with the random family, which made things quite awkward for both sides, since no one had introduced them.

Since he didn’t want to start up a conversation at the moment, Arthur limited himself to observe them, to pass the time as they walked through, and with, the Patch of grass.

The family was on the smaller side of what Arthur had seen from the rest of the tribe, with only five people making up the group rather than the usual eight or even ten he had seen around the tents.

This was probably because a family group was usually made up by uncles, grandparents and others, while this was just a couple with their three kids. Or so Arthur assumed.

The ‘father’ was an Oni who looked just slightly older than Jackal, but his skin was grey with an undertone of yellow.

Arthur had no idea what the colour meant in his case, although he did know that the green mixed in the grey of the ‘mother’ probably indicated someone focused on gathering and foraging Skills.

Together with the two were their three children; a young man probably in his Oni equivalent of just into teenage years and with the same skin colouration as the father, a pre-teen boy with very light-grey skin, and a baby girl with completely white skin.

The mother was currently sitting in the carriage with their tents, carrying the baby. It didn’t seem to be a problem to anyone, and he had seen most other families with infants doing the same, so he didn’t complain. Although I wouldn’t have anyway.

The other two older kids walked together with their father, although when the grass picked up the pace and they were forced to run, Arthur had seen the older Oni pick up his middle son and just carry him as he jogged.

Unfortunately for Arthur, a light jog for an Oni equalled an almost-running pace for a Human like him, and by the time the grass slowed down enough for the tribe to take a break he was exhausted.

As Arthur watched the caravan form up, and the older son of the family he was walking with almost collapse on the carpet of grass covered sand, he wondered how much longer they would have to travel.

More importantly, he wondered how often they would have to do this, and Arthur already knew he wouldn’t like the answer.