I waited for Daru outside of his tent. Far outside of it, actually, as I didn’t want to overhear anything. My Brain stat being so high meant my perception was quite good, including my hearing, at least when my focus wasn’t entirely internal like it had to be when I was using [Blood Restoration], which had allowed the mantises to sneak up on me.

  Though I had already mostly healed up while washing—there was a visible scar on my arm, pink and fresh, but I was no longer bleeding—I debated using the skill again now, or going into deep meditation just to tune out the sounds and smells of the camp. But then I would miss my moment when Daru and Loma were finished. Reluctantly, I kept my awareness up, though the bulk of my focus was thinking back on the mantises’ biology, my battle, and what I had learned.

  When Daru finally emerged from his tent, I got up from my rumination and headed over.

  “Mali,” Daru said when he saw me. “Why’d you run away earlier? I wanted to—”

  “I just saw some uqandu close to camp,” I said, interrupting him. I gestured in the direction of the battle. “That way.”

  Daru’s brows furrowed and his eyes swept over me, landing on the scar on my arm, then darted back to my face. “You saw?”

  I shrugged. “At the least.”

  It was practically impossible to hide my strength, or at least my potential, from Daru, as he was actively teaching me my Blood techniques. Daru had his own circumstances in the tribe, so it wasn’t like he was going around bragging about me either, as he didn’t want me to be targeted by other youths with something to prove. While I wouldn’t call him a true confidant, as I hadn’t told him about [Metasurvival] and the reasons I was able to learn so quickly, I wasn’t exactly hiding my progress from him either.

  Daru moved past that quickly enough, asking a few more questions about the finer details, which I was mostly honest about. “That’s close,” he murmured, crossing two pairs of arms in contemplation. “And bad timing. We should report that to the chief.”

  I nodded, as that was what I had thought as well.

  After telling Loma he would return a little later, we departed from his tent and headed toward a part of camp I barely ever lingered: the personal area of the chief, Ardu-un Iqul Roba.

  Roba was a name modifier in the Uli tongue which meant chief, or boss, or leader. Most people gave his living area space out of respect. It wasn’t forbidden to approach, but doing so without reason invited complications, so I avoided it.

  The chief’s personal tent was far and away the biggest and nicest, insofar as anything in the tribe could be called nice. Certainly, it was the most ostentatious in how it was decorated. From what little I had seen of the Uli, he clearly liked his position of power over the tribe, which was one reason why I wanted to keep my head down and avoid notice when possible.

  Ardu-un Iqul Roba was undoubtedly strong, to stand as chief, and I wasn’t sure what he would do if he felt threatened by an upstart, particularly a son of Daru, who hadn’t exactly thrived within the tribe. I had the stats and skills from a previous life, but that was only one System adulthood beneath my belt, and much of it was crippled by the lack of mana in this life. Though my Blood techniques were powerful for my age, they were limited in quantity; once depleted, my Brawn alone wouldn’t hold out against the strongest Blood techniques in the tribe.

  “Roba!” my father called out from in front of the tent. It was normally considered rude to enter another Uli’s personal tent, but even more so during the mating season.

  As we waited, a few Uli noticed us, and started milling around, curious what the commotion was about. Eventually, the chief stepped out of his tent, a sheen of sweat on his body.

  “Daru-an Bauq?” the chief said, frowning. He glanced at me, then over to the small audience that had gathered. “What is this about? Surely not a challenge?”

  “No challenge, Roba,” my father said, causing a few of the spectators to grunt and walk away. “Rather, a concern. My son says he saw uqandu just outside of camp.”

  The chief grunted, baring his tusks slightly in displeasure. “Which direction?”

  The two grown Uli looked to me, and I tried not to wither under the attention. “That way,” I said, pointing to where I had gone off to train and was ambushed.

  After recounting the details I had shared with my father, the chief nodded. “There will be some complaints, but we will have to set up a watch and confirm.”

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  With that, we were dismissed. All in all, reporting it went rather smoothly, and for a while, I was able to put it out of my mind. Mating season came to an end, and right after, a hunt was organized, with some of the tribesmen setting out to pacify the nearby mantises, with some left behind on guard duty in case the camp was attacked in the interim.

  They returned, injured but largely intact. All but one.

  Uli killed each other with startling regularity, but this was the first time I had seen one fall to an external, non-Uli force. Surprisingly, his death was treated with quite a lot of respect.

  I had assumed that dying from something like a mammoth or mantis would be derided for weakness, but instead, the dead Uli was given something like a hero’s memorial for his sacrifice for the tribe. It was extra peculiar to me since the loss of a strong warrior to a mantis was a complete loss for the tribe, as far as I could tell; another Uli didn’t grow their Blood in exchange for the diminished numbers.

  My initial concern was that the Uli would do something horrific like purge his entire bloodline, but instead, the mothers and the creche were shown quite a lot of favor. The tribe took care of itself, and they would continue to be fed and allowed to grow, with the chief himself stepping in to guide the boys on to becoming tribesmen, if they survived their First Blood.

  When the mothers no longer had children left in the creche, they could be claimed anew by the other tribesmen. A strong fallen tribesman tended to have a good harem of females, so there was usually still quite a lot of interest, or the close friends of the fallen Uli would take them in. In the worst case, when there was very low interest, it was a way for the lowest ranked males of the tribe to acquire more females.

  If there was no interest at all, which did sometimes happen, there was one final place in the tribe for them. Mostly, it was comprised of elderly females who could no longer breed. Colloquially, these were the “grandmothers”, and they tended the tribe in general: overseeing tide pools, sewing tents and clothing, and stepping in during mating season to help watch children as needed.

  There weren’t really “grandfathers”, as male Uli tended to not live to old age.

  Finally, with mating season and mantis hunting finished, things would return to normal for the tribe. There was just one last event which occupied the minds of the males, particularly the youngest new tribesmen of the past year.

  Claiming the females who had come of age.

  * * *

  I was not a tribesman, so I had no right to lay claim, but that didn’t stop me from viewing the event alongside many other teenage males who were still adolescents.

  In theory, this was something to aspire to, and the teens around me were excited about it. For me personally, it was incredibly uncomfortable, and not just because Nadi was one of the females presented for claiming.

  Like Argadian nobility’s arranged marriages, the idea of a relationship where both participants didn’t have the freedom of choice didn’t sit right with me. Presumably this was because of the culture I was raised in on Earth. Admittedly, marriage arrangement had worked out quite well for me in Argadia, and free choice romantic relationships hadn’t worked for me on Earth, but the idea of being in a relationship with someone who didn’t actively want to be in a relationship with me just felt uncomfortable at best, wrong at worst.

  With survival itself on the line, I suppose Uli culture didn’t have the freedom to make those choices, but… couldn’t it? How far off would that be?

  Was that something I wanted to work towards changing, with the power I would gain in this life?

  I honestly wasn’t sure whether or not that was something I wanted to do. In theory, if I survived long enough, I could grow my power to rival the chief’s. I could take over the tribe and institute change. It might require killing a lot of the current tribesmen, which would weaken the tribe in the short term, but if I could feed and protect it for a handful of years, new males would grow up and gain strength.

  Though, I still didn’t know any way to accomplish that without ritual pedicide and murder. Which still resulted in a disproportionate ratio of males to females, which complicated the whole notion of romantic choice, as there would still be harems. Perhaps females would choose males with less females just for the measure of power it would give them within the creche rather than because of romantic feelings.

  What about female warriors? I hadn’t seen any reason why that couldn’t happen aside from culture. That would surely introduce a ton of different complications that I couldn’t yet foresee. And if males were killing females for their Blood, didn’t that open an entire different, dangerous door?

  Did I have the right to make a change like that in the time I lived in this world, when I was just passing through?

  These thoughts allowed me to mostly avoid focusing on the claims being laid and my anxiety about Nadi. I still wasn’t sure if I was worried someone would lay a claim on her, or if they wouldn’t, and what that would mean for her.

  Ultimately, when it was Nadi’s turn, a large male I recognized made a claim. It took me a moment to place him, and when I did, I was surprised; it was Uqar-il Roru’s father, the boy I had killed in my First Blood ritual.

  I couldn’t help but wonder why he had laid a claim. He hadn’t seemed all that broken up about the loss of Uqar, one of many sons in his creche, but perhaps this was retribution? Or was it that he saw some potential in our creche now that I defeated one of his sons, and he hoped to breed stronger sons from Nadi?

  The whole thing made my stomach hurt.

  Most claims went uncontested, including Uqar’s father’s claim. The older males knew there were plenty of females, and killing each other over one hurt the tribe. The only contested claims I witnessed were after the elder males stopped making claims and the younger, newer tribesmen had a chance to build up their own harems and creches.

  I still couldn’t find Uli attractive, but I did have an idea of what traits the other boys seemed to find attractive. The remaining females with these traits led to a few challenges, and, unsurprisingly, these young new tribesmen fought to the death over it.

  The winner gained Blood and a new female for his upstart creche, and, supposedly, the tribe grew stronger.

  If only I could bring myself to believe that.