Just as humans knew of the Blood-Derived only through their upper echelons,
the Blood-Derived knew of humans only through the Gods.
But this state of affairs, which had persisted for thousands of years, began to change with the rise of the Silver Lamp Masters and the "open your eyes and see the world" movement that followed.
Information about human scholars was no longer a secret passed around by only a few Blood-Derived.
The Silver Lamp Masters brought up scholars time and again. Their presence gradually began to rival that of the Holy See, making them one of the subjects most closely watched by the Blood-Derived who had been enlightened by the Silver Lamp Masters.
Scholars used truth to uncover the mysteries of natural laws, then opposed the Holy See through violent means.
By contrast, the Silver Lamp Masters' opposition to the Blood-Derived's faith stemmed from morality.
To understand all this, one had to begin with the Blood-Derived's way of life as a Mother Nest civilization and analyze its history and culture step by step.
Almost all Blood-Derived were born through painters.
Using facilities inside Fat Blood Nests, painters fashioned the fur, fat, and flesh hunted by other Blood-Derived into bodily shells for new Blood-Derived. They then implanted seeds of spiritual will into them, completing the gestation process.
It was much like the hatching of a fertilized egg.
But this was not a matriarchal society. It was more like a primitive tribal society.
At this stage, the Blood-Derived tribes acted according to the characteristics of a Mother Nest civilization. They gathered resources through hunting, continually expanded, and reproduced to increase their numbers.
The Blood-Derived were merely one of countless kinds of Mother Nest organisms.
Yet within the Blood-Derived Mother Nest civilization, almost all Blood-Derived were utterly selfless and held themselves to