My mood was sour.

  The beastkin people were not on good terms with the hominids.

  Ten years ago, nearly the entirety of the Great Pins was the domain of the beastkin tribes. Our flocks grazed on both sides of the River, and we migrated as far south as Sindria, an ancient hominid city-state that was close to the ocean.

  However, everything changed when the Great Conquerer of Uruk marched his armies across the Fertile Crescent. I was too young to remember anything from that time, but our vilge elders told me that they left a long trail of ash, blood, and destruction. That hominid king was especially brutal and he had a reputation for cruelty.

  When the hominid armies reached the doorstep of another nation, there was only two options:

  A. Surrender, and be spared.

  B. Resist, and be sughtered.

  The Urukai armies did not show any mercy to the women or the children or the elderly. The soldiers never left a single stone untouched. If there was any sign of resistance, the outcome was always a 100% genocide, and the entire point was to be as cruel and vicious as possible. Entire bloodlines disappeared without a trace, and today it is exceedingly difficult to find any beastkin of birdkin or snakekin descent.

  My family ultimately chose to surrender to the hominids.

  We gave up vast swaths of nd, agreed to pay a crippling annual tribute, and accepted the fact that we would always be second-css citizens of the empire.

  It was a deeply humiliating outcome, but my father swallowed his pride and groveled on the floor like a tamed dog. At the end of the day, not a single one of us had died, and our people were able to continue with our pastoral way of life. Meanwhile, neighboring tribes of beastkin were utterly crushed one by one. Their cns are now extinct, and the remnants of their people currently live as sves trapped within the walls of the great hominid cities.

  Was it the right choice to submit without a fight?

  …I don’t know.

  It’s difficult for me describe how I feel.

  Among the beastkin tribes, ‘wolves’ are seen as spineless traitors who betrayed their own kind.

  + + +

  I set up on the ridge overlooking the hominid encampment while I waited for nightfall. Obviously, if I was going to sneak into their camp in order to spy on them, the cover of darkness was preferred, especially since hominids had notoriously bad vision at night.

  I tore a bite out of some strips of dried meat while I reflected on the current situation.

  It looked like there were maybe 15 to 20 hominids in the river encampment. The regalia was imperial, which meant that resorting to brute force was probably a very bad idea. The Varg (wolf) cn was a vassal of the Urukai Empire, so openly attacking these hominids was equivalent to decring a rebellion against our sovereign liege.

  However… I doubted that they would just leave if we asked nicely.

  I chewed slowly at my jerky.

  While I knew that I was regarded as something of a useless princess who cked any decision-making authority in my tribe (…my only political purpose was to get married), I certainly wasn’t an oblivious fool.

  The meat was unsalted — a byproduct of the fact that salt could be as valuable as gold in the ancient era. The process of harvesting salt wasn’t exactly difficult, but long-distance trade was so expensive that it completely distorted all sense of value depending on the pce where you lived. For example, there was very little rainfall on the arid steppes, so something as mundane as timber could be as expensive as silver.

  Regional trade networks were the fundamental determinant of power during the Bronze Age, and it simply wasn’t possible to build a powerful nation by pying a video game like an isoted turtle. Tin ore was an especially scarce resource, and entire empires rose and fell depending on their access to tin trading routes in the ancient world.

  Fight or trade?

  These two paths were mutually exclusive.

  As much as we beastkin harbored deep resentment for our hominid conquerers, the rational part of my brain knew that they possessed all the critical resources that we cked. As tempting as it was to go on a bloodthirsty rampage seeking revenge for the humiliation that we suffered, I could see in my mind’s eye that it would only cause the prices of particur goods to skyrocket.

  We did not have a source of salt in the steppes.

  Salt was essential for life.

  We would suffocate our own economy if we fought for the sake of our pride, and realistically, there was no way for a bunch of stone-wielding nomads to compete against a flourishing empire that had a dedicated supply chain for every critical natural resource. In my tribe's current state, it was a completely impossible endeavor.

  And this dilemma made me feel somber.

  + + +

  As the sun traveled across the afternoon sky, I ultimately changed my mind about hiding until nightfall. I got to my feet and coaxed Lakka into descending down the hills to the river bank where the hominid barge was moored. By walking pinly in broad daylight, I knew they could definitely spot me in a distance. However, I gambled on the idea that they wouldn’t see a lone traveler with a pack mule as a threat. I wasn’t doing anything suspicious, and my intentions were clearly telegraphed.

  I simply intended to walk through the front door.

  I didn’t see any benefit to being sneaky about it.

  The main reason for my change of heart was because the clouds looked ominous. A storm was brewing on the horizon, and I judged that there would be heavy rainfall by the time that the sun set. The bad weather was something of a ticking time bomb, and I could confidently predict that Mother Nature would have her own temper tantrum.

  Specifically, this hominid encampment would be flooded by morning.

  They clearly were not familiar with this area, and their newly erected houses were built too close to the river. All of the infrastructure would be swept away.

  + + +

  “Yo,” I spoke casually (note: as much as my native nguage allowed) as a guard approached me at the entrance of the hominid river encampment.

  The man had a glimmering bronze breastpte that was no doubt the handiwork of a skilled Urukai metalsmith. He looked to be a professional soldier, but this makeshift settlement did not appear to be a military operation. There weren’t any war chariots, and the men working in the fields looked frail, ragged, and somewhat malnourished like a stereotypical lower css peasant.

  It seemed to me that they were trying to dig irrigation canals for a farm.

  “State your purpose, ska (female dog).“

  Unsurprisingly, the guard was hostile.

  The offensive slur right off of the bat was pretty standard, too. Urukai soldiers wasn’t exactly known for being nice, after all, and it really would have been exceedingly strange if I had received any kind of warm welcome. I was well aware of the fact that beastkin were commonly kept as sves within the walled cities, and I was actually fairly cautious about my safety even if I pretended to have my guard down.

  I smiled warmly, not even flinching from the guard’s foul nguage.

  My tail swished back and forth — my posture fully rexed — even though I was ready to draw a knife at a moments notice if the conversation ever went sour.

  “Oh, I just wanted to ask if you wanted to trade anything, that’s all.” I spoke innocently.

  The man looked at me suspiciously.

  My pack mule was clearly not carrying any goods.

  “What are you selling?” He asked.

  I tilted my head quizzically.

  “Oh… you’re clearly new to this area, aren’t you?” I remarked harmlessly. “There’s not many people who live out here, so it doesn’t really make sense to peddle an entire store around on our backs. The way that it ordinarily works is that you make a request for things you think you’d buy, and in a few months we come back with the goods that you asked for.”

  The guard furrowed his brow in confusion, clearly unfamiliar with the lifestyle out on the steppes.

  He was obviously a city-dweller who was far away from home.

  “…So you don’t have anything right now.”

  “Nope.”

  The guardsman frowned.

  “Do you have a leader?” I asked him. “Living in this pce can be pretty harsh. The mountain gods are quick to anger, and they are quite brutal and unforgiving. If you’re unfamiliar with the area, it may be a good idea to make sure that you have plenty of emergency supplies. You never know what sort of natural disaster might strike.”

  The man looked at me for a long while, trying to judge if I was a trustworthy individual.

  Eventually, he relented, but he did not seem very enthusiastic.

  “…Just, give me a moment. I’ll be right back after a few minutes.”

  The warrior turned around and abandoned his post at the vilge entrance.

  + + +

  I was expecting him to return with some type of spoiled noble or aristocrat, but the supervisor that the guard ultimately returned with was drenched in sweat, carrying a hoe on his shoulder as if he were an ordinary low-css borer.

  The armored guard looked particurly unhappy, and I could tell that he had been rebuked. The supervisor, on the other hand, seemed spirited and enthusiastic.

  I honestly didn’t know what to make of the hominid supervisor. The man was quite tall — in fact, he was half a head taller than the guard in bronze armor — and he looked just as sturdy. However, his ragged linen clothing was so filthy and riddled with holes that there was no way that he could have been of noble birth.

  Mentally, I took him to be some kind of military general.

  However, I couldn’t expin why he was here. He was too young to be retired, and as far as I understood, the Empire had active military campaigns in the Far East, which was thousands of leagues away from here.

  “Yeah, we’ll buy everything,” the supervisor said casually, as if he were a spoiled king who owned so much wealth that he could afford to buy out an entire department store.

  …Which rendered me slightly speechless.

  In the first pce, I was mainly here to gather information. By asking them about the goods they hoped to buy and sell, I could learn a lot about these foreign settlers. Depending on their responses, I could estimate the amount of food that they had in storage, and I could even develop a decent guess at what their ultimate goals were.

  ‘Everything’ — on the other hand — was a completely useless piece of information to me.

  “You can’t buy everything,” I immediately objected with in exasperation.

  “Why not?”

  “We can’t even carry ‘everything’ on our animals,” I protested. “Besides, you only have like… twenty people here. Bringing enough food to feed three hundred people is a complete waste when you can only eat so much. You have to be specific with exactly what you want, or else we can’t prepare a suitable caravan.”

  The supervisor appeared slightly contemptive.

  “If that’s the case, we’d be willing to purchase all the goods you can possibly fit in a caravan. I’d buy all of it. I’ll buy every single item that you can gather for us.”

  “You can’t afford to buy everything,” I accused him. “If you pn to pay in gold, you should know that gold has very little value on the steppes. We wouldn’t trade you all of our supplies for a shiny rock we can’t even eat.”

  He definitely wasn’t being serious, and I didn’t appreciate his frivolous attitude.

  “Okay then,” he said. “If that’s the case… how much would it cost for me to buy — you?”

  My eyes suddenly went bnk.

  What?

  Was he actually just making fun of me?

  My tail bristled. I was honestly offended. I thought I had a pretty good tolerance for derogatory nguage, but I never imagined in my entire life that anyone would casually suggest that I could be bought and sold like an item. Frankly, it was totally messed up.

  “What I mean is, how much could I pay your tribe to live here as inhabitants?” He quickly crified after he realized that his words could be misinterpreted.

  “…”

  “You’re from the Varg (wolf) cn, right? I’ve been tasked with building a new settlement in this pce, but I’ve struggled to get enough people willing to migrate here. We don’t have enough manpower, and I think I can offer you a good deal.”

  ?