Dany had misunderstood Hoson; he really had gifted her a supreme manual.
After returning, unable to suppress her curiosity about the twelve Arts of the Spring Cry, she secretly opened the book to take a look.
She had intended to study the peak techniques of this other world, but upon opening it, she found dense data and maps.
True, Hoson’s diary contained the twelve Arts of the Spring Cry, but the twelve highly difficult gymnastic poses only took up twelve pages.
When the book had fallen to the ground earlier, it had simply happened to fall open to the page on the Arts of the Spring Cry.
In reality, the vast majority of the content consisted of numbers and sketched maps.
It wasn’t just the Dothraki Sea; the topography of almost the entire continent of Essos was described in detail.
It even included data on the population, industrial distribution, military deployment, city walls, and watchtowers of various city-states.
It seemed specifically designed for his Khal son to use for conquering territories.
Furthermore, acting as an observer, Hoson had recorded the growth of pasture grass in the horse lords’ nomadic grazing lands, rainfall, temperature, humidity, whether certain areas were prone to disease, herbal knowledge learned from maegis, the length of summers, and the winter temperatures and agricultural production of various regions.
It seemed chaotic, but it actually contained the most brilliant survival experiences of the nomadic horse people.
In short, Hoson’s diary was almost useless to a single person, but it was a supreme treasure trove for a Khal.
Of course, the prerequisite was that the Khal had to recognize its value.
It detailed the customs, agricultural production, geographical environment, and seasonal changes of the Essos continent.
If Blue-Eyed Haggo had lived, he might have become the greatest Khal with his father’s assistance, perhaps even uniting the Dothraki before Dany could.
This diary would be incredibly useful for Dany’s future conquest of the Dothraki Sea.
She decided to give Hoson a grand burial.
Yes, she would personally preside over Hoson’s cremation ceremony.
“The tail of the Bleeding Star really has grown longer!
Hoson has already joined the Khal’s khalasar!” Aggo shouted in awe, pointing at the bloody streak in the sky.
When ordinary horse people were cremated, there was actually no need to look for signs in the night sky.
However, Dany was a woman of her word.
After placing the old man’s body on the small funeral pyre, she really did raise her voice and shout at the sky in front of everyone.
Then, the horse people were shocked to discover that the comet’s tail had grown a tiny bit.
The comet was constantly approaching the planet.
Theoretically, it would get brighter and its tail clearer, but it was absolutely impossible for such an obvious change to occur in the time it took to say a few words.
It was an illusion.
Everything was an illusion.
However, Dany did not correct them.
Instead, with a solemn and mysterious expression, she ordered, “Kill the horse!” A stubborn nag was led over.
Well, it was certainly sturdier than Hoson’s previous mount.
Two warriors held the horse’s head down.
A third horseman’s arakh flashed, a white line reflecting the red glow of the torches as it sliced through the dim dawn sky.
The horse neighed and struggled, but that only made the blood spray from its neck even more fiercely.
With a splash, the dark red horse blood fell like a waterfall into the copper basin below.
“Bring the docile straw horse over,” Dany said next.
An elderly Dothraki warrior stepped forward upon hearing this, carrying a straw horse made of wooden sticks and devil’s grass on his shoulder.
“Soul extraction!” she shouted, pointing her right hand at the dying nag, repeating the phrase continuously in Mandarin, English, her hometown Sichuan dialect, and Dothraki.
To the people of her khalasar, the Khaleesi seemed to be chanting a string of mysterious incantations.
“Om mani padme hum!” After muttering a few more spells that even Dany herself didn’t know the meaning of, she suddenly swung her arm and pointed her left hand like a sword directly at the straw horse.
“Soul return!” Under the awe-struck gaze of the horse people and Jorah’s bewildered stare, Dany panted for a moment before scanning the crowd.
“It is done.
The steed’s spirit has entered the straw horse.
This will be a rare treasure of a horse, possessing the docility of straw and the divine strength of a fierce stallion.
Old Hoson will never have to worry about failing to catch up to the Khal, nor will he need to fear falling off horseback ever again!” “Place the straw horse upon the pyre.
Dawn is breaking; prepare to light the fire,” she ordered with a wave of her hand.
“Then what do we do with this?” the warrior who had held the horse for bloodletting asked nervously, pointing at the horse corpse with teardrops still hanging from its eyes.
The Khaleesi was not only the Unburnt and the Mother of Dragons, but she also knew sacrificial magic.
It was truly awe-inspiring!
“Are you stupid?
We roast it over the fire and eat it, of course,” Dany rolled her eyes and said in exasperation.
The whole reason she had gone through all this trouble was to preserve as much food as possible while still fulfilling the traditions of the horse people.
While Hoson’s body roasted in the fire, a group of horse people busied themselves around the pyre.
Some roasted horse meat, while others used iron pots to boil soup—horse blood, horse bones, barley, dried apples, turnip chunks, and peppercorns.
There was no need to add salt; it was incredibly fragrant.
Hmm, was it the aroma of the food, the charred smell of Hoson’s burning flesh, or a mixture of both?
The strange scent greatly increased everyone’s appetite, and both the horse people and Jorah slurped their food down eagerly.
Dany herself couldn’t stomach it.
Carrying a bamboo basket on her back and a basket of roast meat on her arm, she ran off under the excuse of training her dragons.
On the fourth day, the khalasar set out at dusk, just as they had on previous days.
Along the way, they continuously spotted water pits marked with rocks and wooden stakes.
The situation was slightly better than Dany’s worst-case scenario.
Even though the second batch of riders had already drawn water from most of the pits, when the khalasar arrived and moved the stones pressing down on them, shallow traces of water could still be seen.
Dany didn’t let a single one go to waste.
As the khalasar traveled, their water reserves were constantly depleted.
She used the emptied waterskins to collect all the muddy seepage water, waiting until they made camp to pour it out and filter it.
Even though the water shortage was temporarily alleviated, after marching for about three hours, someone in the procession still died—a six-month-old baby girl.
Her mother cried with heart-wrenching grief.
The entire procession could hear the mother’s pain and despair.
Dany felt terrible, but she was powerless to help.
She didn’t even know the cause of the baby girl’s death.
It wasn’t heatstroke, and she hadn’t lacked food or drink.
She had simply suffered from diarrhea in her mother’s arms for half a day before passing away.
According to Dothraki tradition, this poor child was too young to ride a horse.
She could not enter the endless black plains of the Night Lands; she had to be reincarnated.
The child was buried in the sand right there.
The procession barely paused.
Just like yesterday when they dealt with old Hoson falling from his horse, only Dany and the ten-man squad the mother belonged to stayed behind to handle the aftermath.
Perhaps out of the depths of misfortune comes a blessing.
In the morning light of the next day, Dany laughed and clapped her hands at the sky, cheering for her baby dragons’ first flight.
But when the black dragon spiraled high into the sky and disappeared as a tiny dot, Dany felt a surge of anxiety and unexpectedly entered a dragon dream state.
It was also the first time she had experienced a long-distance dragon dream without touching the black dragon.
In truth, using dragon dream to describe this state was no longer quite appropriate.
If compared to the warging of the Stark siblings, Dany could be called a lesser dragon warg.
Wargs, also known as skinchangers—or rather, a specific type of skinchanger—were humans capable of invading the consciousness of animals or other people and controlling their behavior.
For a skinchanger, this was easier to achieve if an emotional bond existed between the human and the animal.
Therefore, wolves—close relatives of dogs with a relatively loyal genetic makeup—were the most common companions for skinchangers.
A person who controlled a wolf was called a warg, but this did not mean they could only communicate with wolves.
Bran, Rickon, and Arya of House Stark, as well as the nominal true protagonist of A Song of Ice and Fire—Jon Snow—were all wargs.
They possessed skinchanging talents so powerful they were enviable.
However, without systematic training, and constantly denying and rejecting their talents in their subconscious, their abilities had never been fully revealed.
Bran’s strength needed no elaboration.
Once he ascended from a skinchanger to a greenseer, he would be able to wander the timeline of the Westeros continent, altering the past and observing the future.
Well, the Old Gods observed the world through weirwood trees, and since weirwoods only existed on the continent of Westeros, the power of the Old Gods likely could not reach Essos.
Jon’s talent made the strongest wildling skinchanger—Varamyr Sixskins—feel apprehensive.
So, just how strong was Varamyr?
Strong enough that even after being beaten to a bloody pulp by the red priestess, he still had the strength to attempt to seize the body of another healthy human.
Even when fate proved unkind and his body-snatching failed, Varamyr did not die; instead, he possessed his pet wolf.
Uh, but in a stroke of terrible luck, he ended up encountering Westeros’s number one skinchanger, Bran.
The heavens simply didn’t want him to live.
Then there was Arya.
Her Nymeria had been released into the wild long ago, and she herself had gone to Braavos to become an apprentice of the Faceless Men.
Despite the wolf and Arya being separated by the Narrow Sea and thousands of miles, they could still frequently communicate through wolf dreams.
Finally, Rickon, who was only three years old, could actually predict the future to a limited extent through his wolf dreams.
Sansa’s Lady had died too early, and her experiences and life values were very un-Northern, making it impossible to guess whether she possessed the warging talent.
However, Robb Stark likely also had an incredibly powerful talent.
His direwolf could foresee its master’s crises and had warned him several times that there is danger or this person cannot be trusted, acting as supernatural as a divine beast.
It was just that Robb forgot his wolf after getting a wife, constantly rejecting the premonitions of danger he subconsciously received from the wolf.
Wargs were universally recognized as evil creatures on the same level as the Others and grumkins.
Whenever a warg was discovered, everyone sought to kill them.
The reason for such public sentiment was closely tied to the history of the Westeros continent.
As mentioned before, aside from fantasy species like the Children of the Forest and giants, all humans in Westeros were past invaders and refugees from the continent of Essos.
The Children of the Forest were a dark and beautiful race, short in stature, with adults being about the same height as ordinary human children.
They had deep chestnut skin, large ears, and large golden eyes.
However, some Children of the Forest who possessed the talent of a greenseer had green or red eyes.
If such a Child of the Forest merged with a heart tree, they would become a greenseer and gain the greensight.
Here lay the crux of the matter: skinchangers almost entirely originated from the Children of the Forest, representing a lost civilization.
Twelve thousand years ago, the first generation of invaders brought bronze weapons and fought the natives for living space.
One side was small and physically weak, with a small population, but possessed strange magic; the other side was tall and sturdy, equipped with advanced bronze weapons, and had greater numbers, but lacked supernatural abilities.
The two sides battered each other to a standstill.
On the Isle of Faces—a small island in the center of the Gods Eye—they signed the Pact to divide their spheres of influence.
This process lasted for four thousand years.
Because the first generation of invaders, the First Men, had witnessed the magic of the Children of the Forest, and their own beliefs were very loose, the First Men gradually began to worship the mysterious gods of the Children of the Forest, becoming believers of the Old Gods.
Perhaps due to faith, or perhaps due to interbreeding (do not doubt it; let alone the child-sized Children of the Forest, Westerosi would even sleep with giants—their appetites were terrifyingly broad), skinchangers also began to appear among the First Men.
One man in a thousand is born a skinchanger, and one skinchanger in a thousand is born a greenseer.
This ratio seemed a bit low, but thinking about it, if almost every generation had one or two greenseers, then…
One or two Brans.
Having one or two figures like Bran in every generation…
It was truly a bit terrifying!