[Note up front: The differences between the elves of the Zheer Continent and the humans of Douluo Planet are as follows. First, lifespan: elves generally live for 300 years. After reaching level 90, their lifespan increases to 1,200 years, then grows by another 100 years with each level thereafter—after all, they're elves. Second, Martial Souls: elves don't have Martial Soul Awakening, but every elf can gain Soul Power after turning twelve. (They're currently in the late Neolithic Age and still struggling to solve their food shortage, so they haven't had the time for it.) Third, Soul Ring level restrictions: elves don't get stuck at a level for lack of a Soul Ring, so aside from obtaining food, they have no need to hunt Soul Beasts at all. (This is very important.) Fourth, pregnancy: elves carry a child for twenty-four months, while humans do so for ten. Fifth, social stability: the exceptionally long lifespans of elves make their society far more stable than human society. Sixth, genetics: elves and humans can't naturally produce offspring together.]
The Zheer Continent lay in the southern hemisphere of Douluo Planet, and its climate distribution resembled that of South America. But the shape of the continent could be described as a Nepalese flag made of two triangles bent inward, with a large northern triangle and a smaller southern one.
The Nanshan Rainforest lay along the equator of the Zheer Continent. Because it happened to be in the widest part of the continent, the rainforest covered thirty-nine percent of its land—far more than the Star Dou Forest.
The Central Plateau disrupted the zonal distribution of pressure belts, making it difficult for large deserts to form in the middle of the Zheer Continent. Instead, the region became tropical savanna. Moist winds from the vast oceans surrounding it, combined with the mountain range stretching along the entire western coast and blocking cold currents, meant that deserts were limited to small areas along the central-western coast.
Farther south, the Zheer Continent's shape—a large triangle overlapping a smaller one—began to cause trouble. It brought the continent an enormous gulf, while the mountains rising high along the narrow connection between the two sections created a high-altitude climate. Farther south, apart from the Mediterranean climate along the western coast formed by the mountain barrier, nearly the entire area east of the mountains had a humid subtropical climate due to differences in how land and sea heated up. Only deep in the continent did the expected temperate continental climate emerge.
Along the bottom edge of the smaller triangle, the climate shifted in an orderly pattern to boreal forest, tundra, and ice-cap climates.
The most densely populated and developed region of the Indigenous People was the southern Zheer Continent, where the climate was humid subtropical. There, the elves had almost completely transitioned from nomadic foraging to slash-and-burn farming. They were in the late Neolithic Age, and their tribes were gradually becoming early kingdoms.
Rus Wang had been there before, but his territory lay within the Nanshan Rainforest and the Central Plateau. If he extended his patrols south, they would take at least half a year. So he had no plans to interfere with the region's independent development. He focused his attention on the Indigenous People in the northern Zheer Continent.
The elves there had developed slowly from the start because of various climatic and environmental factors. And because they lived next to the Nanshan Rainforest, they were among the worst victims of the Soul Beasts that had fled there. Many elves still living as hunter-gatherers had been slaughtered for no reason.
For the first three of those five years, Rus Wang had mainly killed Soul Beasts, taken in elves, and given them seeds for high-yield crops from his past life in the twenty-first century. He had also taught them to speak Mandarin with twenty-first-century pronunciation, to write Oracle Bone Script, to practice slash-and-burn farming, and to forge copper tools.
In the fourth year, after he married the Female Water Dragon who had fled to his territory, he began checking on the elf tribes under his protection during his patrols.
Now it was the fifth year, and his own young had already turned one. It was time to take the Female Water Dragon and the young with him to visit the elf tribes he protected, so the little ones could get to know the elves.
Come to think of it, the elves he had taken in had built over a hundred villages across his territory. If Rus Wang remembered correctly, on a whim he had named the area the Levant Region?
Hmm... The Levant, a land of sun, milk, and honey. But ironically, it didn't have a Mediterranean climate; instead, it was tropical savanna.
Rus Wang had to make an initial inspection. After all, his one-year-old young could now recognize danger, but their soft little bodies couldn't even withstand a Copper Spear.
Once he had sorted out his thoughts, Rus Wang decided to set out for the Levant the day after tomorrow.
While Rus Wang enjoyed a leisurely time with his wife and children at a lowland lake in the Nanshan Rainforest, the villages of the Levant Region under his protection were in the midst of a busy and festive season.
Since the Levant Region lay in the southern hemisphere, its villages usually planted corn and harvested winter wheat in October and November. After the growing season, they harvested the corn and sowed winter wheat between April and June.
The golden corn had ripened. Thanks to Rus Wang's tireless efforts to improve things over the previous three years, the elves could now communicate with one another. They began gathering the corn and stalks with copper tools that had turned black from oxidation.
The former was the villages' second-most important staple after wheat, while the latter was an important building material for their houses.
From harvesting the corn to clearing the leftover roots from the fields, the interval before sowing winter wheat couldn't exceed ten days. This was a rule the elderly village elders had worked out over five years.
"Elder Osuan, Elder Liana, we've finished harvesting the corn and stalks in the fields, and we've cleared the roots."
The young elven child spoke cheerfully to the elves whom Rus Wang had taken in during the first year.
Rus Wang had taught them farming techniques in the very first year. But when they put them into practice, things still went wrong in many ways, and for the first two years he had to hunt from time to time to feed them.
Once the elves had mastered slash-and-burn farming and the craft of making copper tools, Rus Wang began appearing far less often. His protection of the elves and the knowledge he had given them during those first three years became a matter of spiritual faith among the elves of the Levant.
With a stable food supply, the villages of the Levant gradually developed family units and social classes from what had once been a chaotic system of communal labor and equal distribution. The elders, the highest-ranking elves, governed the villages. Blacksmiths, priests, tailors, and others formed the second tier, while farmers made up the lowest. (Much of the land on the Central Plateau remained undeveloped. Although they used slash-and-burn farming, the high-yield crop seeds from the twenty-first century greatly reduced the cost of clearing land. The elders supported land-clearing and distributed copper farming tools, lowering the likelihood of landless farmers emerging.)
As the villages began communicating with one another, the elves, who had previously relied on barter, gradually started using copper as a basis for pricing. Early merchants and envoys began to take shape.
Change was also quietly underway. Osuan, an elder of one of the larger villages in the Levant Region, hoped to marry Liana, the elder of a neighboring smaller village, so their villages could merge without conflict.
He chose to approach Liana during the corn harvest.
On the harvest day, the villagers of the two villages still gathered crops from their own families' fields and paid a portion to their respective villages. But during the harvest festival, Liana didn't celebrate with the villagers of her own village as she had in previous years.
She accepted Osuen's request and brought the elves of her village to join the harvest festival in Osuan's village.
As the priests sang incantations in an unfamiliar tongue and used wooden tablets inscribed with Oracle Bone Script to ask their guardian deity, Rus Wang, to bless their winter wheat with a good harvest when winter gave way to spring, Liana noticed Osuen standing beside her. He silently reached his left hand toward her right. Having accepted him in her heart, she took his hand first.
The first village merger took place in the fifth year.
When Rus Wang arrived before the elves with the Female Water Dragon and their young to announce that a year had passed since his offspring's birth, he didn't punish Osuen and Liana for merging their villages. Two months after he announced his offspring's existence, other villages began merging or forming alliances as well, and such cases quickly multiplied.
Several villages joined together into larger regions, either through marriages between male and female elders or through alliances. Larger regions naturally brought both internal and external conflicts. As those disputes multiplied, elves had to be appointed specifically to handle them, and the first dedicated mediators appeared.
Rus Wang knew this was an inevitable part of a city's formation, so he didn't interfere.
He drew a line in his mind: he would only ensure that the elves shared a common language and that Oracle Bone Script gradually became Bronze Script. He would bring down "divine punishment" only on elf villages that changed their language.
Rus Wang was quite satisfied with the results of his two-month patrol.
But just as he returned with his wife and children to the lowland lake in the rainforest, the Female Water Dragon acted strangely. She handed all five young to him, then went into the forest alone.
[Female Water Dragon, age: 99,990 years]
This was bad! Why had her age increased so much this month? Something terrible was going to happen to his wife! Rus Wang panicked. After shielding the lake where his offspring were with multiple layers of energy protection, he hurried after her.
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