Having tasted the deliciousness of vermicelli, Jaxon immediately sent more people to the dense forest and the Magic Beast Forest to gather canna tubers and bring them back. He estimated that before winter arrived, the amount of vermicelli produced would be enough to last until the end of spring next year.
Once the group of five had finished learning, Kaelen proactively withdrew, letting them work while teaching others in the tribe themselves. The fact that the vermicelli-making process was learned from Kaelen was unanimously kept secret, only said to have been bestowed by the Beast God through High Priest Nyx.
Without time to rest, Kaelen rushed to the brick-making area, and for the next few days in a row, his locations of movement were solely his cave and the brick-making area. With Sane there, even if Mossi looked at him with a gloomy gaze, Kaelen no longer felt afraid.
On the contrary, he found Mossi's meticulous carving of the brick kiln and shaping of the pottery blanks quite admirable. While others produced finished products that were either lopsided or shattered, only Mossi carefully polished every small detail. Every batch of pottery blanks Mossi made took proper shape and form, just like an experienced potter.
A few times, Kaelen deliberately carried wet blanks and walked past Mossi, found a spot neither too far nor too near to sit down, and used a small bone knife to carve some unfamiliar patterns on the surface of the blanks. A few times, Mossi couldn't resist wanting to approach and take a closer look, but after taking a few steps, he retracted his feet and stared at Kaelen with eyes full of resentment.
Sane always stayed close by Kaelen's side. At times like these, he would step forward to block Mossi's line of sight, while Kaelen would subconsciously shrink back and hide behind Sane. The two of them, unintentionally and unknowingly, displayed a posture of possessiveness and mutual reliance.
The beastmen here, including Mossi, all noticed that Sane had a strange possessiveness towards Kaelen. However, they were all tight-lipped individuals carefully selected by Jaxon; even if they had doubts, they kept them tightly within their hearts, and no one spoke a word.
The tacit exchange of glances among the beastmen didn't affect Kaelen at all. He picked up a newly shaped pottery blank to examine it, his eyebrows furrowed so tightly they could pinch a fly to death.
Several days had passed. Aside from the bricks, which were made quite neatly, the beastmen shaped items requiring delicacy into incredibly bizarre forms. Not to mention whether they could be successfully fired; even if they were, who knew what they could be used for.
Except for Mossi's pottery blanks, the rest were all rejects.
It seemed that without the deft hands of sub-beasts, this task of shaping pottery blanks could not be done!
Kaelen tugged at Sane's arm, calling him to return to the tribe together to discuss this matter with the Tribe Leader.
Waiting until they were far away, Mossi quietly stepped forward and carefully picked up a pottery blank made by Kaelen to observe. The patterns on it were all very beautiful; there were flowers, leaves, birds, and beasts, as well as rocky mountains and rivers, and many unfamiliar patterns that Mossi had never seen before. However, they all had one thing in common: at the bottom of every pottery blank, a pattern of a bird spreading its wings in flight was carved.
Mossi tried hard to dig through his nearly hundred-year-old rusty memories, but he still couldn't find any bird species with a shape as strange as this bird.
The bird was depicted with extremely simplified, rustic lines, yet exuded a strangely intense vitality. Its beak was long, holding a curved flower branch. He knew this flower; it was pink with many overlapping layers of petals, yellow stamens, and a light but refreshing fragrance. The flower usually bloomed in the sunny season and withered in the windy season, leaving behind a green receptacle with many seed eyes.
On the top of the bird's head was a crest sweeping back, as proud as the feather plumes on the crowns of the greatest Tribe Leaders.
Its slender neck stretched out as far as possible, connecting to a tapered body with decisive, angular cuts. Its wings spread wide as if riding the wind, while its tail swept long, fanning out backwards like swaying reed branches.
There were no meticulous realistic details like individual feathers or leg scales; the entire shape of the bird was created solely from parallel geometric carved lines. Yet, its stretching posture exuded a surging desire for freedom, a posture as if wanting to tear open the sky, trampling over all storms to charge toward the dazzling sun.
Mossi's eyes rested on that drawing for a long time, his mind constantly thinking. The Obsidian tribe was previously considered a large tribe, gathering many races; however, the Beast God had never once bestowed a protective totem upon them. From the previous High Priest until now, over three hundred years had passed, and the beastmen in the tribe all had smooth, bare bodies without a single protective tattoo.
Mossi looked at the unrestrained, free pattern on the pottery blank and suddenly thought that if the tribe's totem were like this, it wouldn't be bad either—looking strong without lacking softness, proud without losing its true nature.
The person thinking this way wasn't only Mossi. Elder Randy of the Avian tribe had also been thinking about this since receiving Kaelen's signed drawing from Walter's hands. He planned to report this thought to the Tribe Leader and the Priest after successfully researching how to weave fabric.
Kaelen didn't know that his habit of drawing the Lac bird shape on his designs as a signature was about to change an entire ideology. He only knew that after discussing finding more people to make pottery blanks with the Tribe Leader, on the way back to the brick-making area, he was pulled into a small stone cave by Sane to fool around.
"Shh! Keep your voice down..."
Kaelen was done to the point of tears welling up. He couldn't help but bite hard into Sane's shoulder, stopping himself from letting out sobs that would attract others' attention. His legs wrapped tightly around Sane's waist, his arms hugging Sane's neck. One of Sane's hands supported Kaelen's buttocks, while the other slid behind Kaelen's back, pressing against the cliff wall to serve as both a fulcrum and a cushion, his lower body constantly making piston movements.
During this time, the small sub-beast had been too busy, tired to the point of being unable to open his eyes. Sometimes he would fall asleep while bathing, and sometimes he would pass out right while eating dinner. Sane couldn't bear to wake him, so he had held back for several days straight. Holding it in so long, he was about to explode too.
Because he had held back for too long, Sane was a bit intense while doing it. Kaelen was forced to use his Wood-element ability to envelop the embryo in his stomach. His mind had long turned into a puddle of mush, so he was completely unaware that his ability, transmitted through their connection into Sane's body, circulated through all the meridians and gathered into a swirling vortex between Sane's eyebrows.
Sane only felt his entire body incredibly relaxed, every pore seemingly opening up, making him unable to hold back a sexy hum. In a daze, Kaelen lightly bit Sane's Adam's apple, successfully hearing the beastman's deep growl, and his body was once again thrust into a passionate wave.
Consuming energy from having sex while also consuming his ability, by the time the outdoor field battle ended, Kaelen had fallen fast asleep, snoring softly. Sane embraced his body, taking advantage of the sun having just set behind the mountain to carry Kaelen back to his cave via a different route.
In order not to wake the sub-beast, Sane only boiled a little warm water to roughly wipe his body, cooked another bowl of meat porridge, and woke Kaelen up to feed him.
Half-asleep, Kaelen finished a bowl of porridge, then rolled into the inner corner of the bed and snored loudly, leaving half the bed for Sane. Sane ate and bathed himself a bit, wrapped his arms around the sub-beast, and happily drifted into a sweet dream.
The green light vortex hidden between Sane's forehead spun a few more times before vanishing without a trace.
On the other side of the continent, a luxuriously dressed sub-beast, kneeling before a large statue of a God, suddenly opened his eyes, his gaze darting to the transparent sphere on the God statue's scepter. Just now he had felt a fluctuation of Divine energy, but as soon as he opened his eyes, that source of fluctuation vanished as if it had never existed, making him think he had just experienced a hallucination.
The sub-beast didn't think much more of it, closed his eyes again, clasped his hands together, and prayed.