Vast daylight rolled on. The sun set beyond the Wasteland, then rose again over the highlands. The standoffs and schemes of the northeastern tribes under heaven were hidden within endless marshes. And in the Lake Capital at the center of the world, the New Year's grand sacrifice had just been completed, staining the sixty-to-seventy-meter-tall Great Temple Pyramid completely red with the blood of Mixtec god-descendants.
Amid the cheers of hundreds of thousands of capital subjects, High Priest Uger sat serenely in the Great Temple like a wooden carving or clay idol. The priest elders of the three factions—Main God, God of War, and Sun God—struggled against one another in secret, while under the pale-red waters of Lake Texcoco, undercurrents surged, and none could gain the upper hand.
In the Calmecac University of the Lake Capital, stone steles of the Sutra of Ali and religious law stood everywhere. Under Xolotl's proposal and the Divine King's demand, this Priest University of the Alliance was continuously training Main God priests who had a rough grasp of writing and calculation. And Cihuacoatl Gilim, acting in charge of the Alliance's governmental affairs, incorporated large numbers of commoner priests into the War Priest corps, then sent them out to escort and transport logistical grain supplies to the three-route Alliance Army marching south.
The purpose of the divine war's southern campaign against the People of the Clouds was not to make the Mixtec and Zapotec submit, but to pursue a total conquest of sacrificial annihilation, conversion and forced change of faith, and enfeoffment of royal bloodlines. The punitive expeditions of the three armies all met the People of the Clouds' desperate resistance. The fighting was incomparably brutal, and not even a single city-state of the Cloud God-descendants surrendered.
The winds and clouds of the era had already