After a full day of cooking, Du Yi had at last prepared his welcome gift.
The most tempting of all was mammoth neck and shoulder meat. The flesh of those two cuts carried fat laid through it like veins of marble, and under Du Yi's roasting craft—honed for who knew how long—it gave off a mouthwatering aroma.
But the sabertooth's tenderloin was no worse. The cloying sweet jam of crowberries played the part of honey in the cooking, stripping away the gaminess of the meat itself, while the faint sweetness that seeped into the fibers made the tenderloin all the more delectable.
And of course, Du Yi's own favorite was the grand dish he called Earth-Vein Marrow: the great bones of the mammoth roasted at high heat until the marrow within turned to a paste that filled the whole mouth with fragrance. The natural flavor of the ingredient alone was enough to leave a man lost in it, unable to pull himself free.
"And there's the heart-tips of the sabertooth and the mammoth...... a pity they don't slice up well."
Du Yi felt a touch of regret.
Still, these dishes remained the pinnacle of his craft; even he himself didn't always get to eat this well—cuts like tenderloin, or marrow, were simply too much trouble to cook on an ordinary day.
But for the sake of the best possible first impression, Du Yi had made these grand dishes anyway. Reckoning that the savages might not care for fully cooked meat, he'd deliberately taken these only to medium-rare.
"This is for the sake of communication, too. After all, I don't speak their language...... so the dishes have to land hard, have to seize their sense of taste in the first instant, make them forget their fear of me for a moment—just enough to lay the most basic ground for talking."
Du Yi reasoned it through coolly.
Indeed, he had folded even the language barrier into his calculations. To make this exchange go smoothly enough, he had made every possible preparation.
And after that, Du Yi set off with this spread of dishes, following the trail the savages had left, winding away after them.
Everywhere he passed, the wild beasts shrank away from the colossal thing. Under the terrible pressure radiating off an apex predator, even sabertooths—even mammoths—scattered and fled, racing for places farther off.
Racing for the places that looked, to them, like safety.
***
The village at the foot of the mountain was the sole domain of the Ignivas family.
Once, this place had belonged to no one—in that ancient age there hadn't even been a concept of "people." But in that age of raw flesh and drunk blood, the forebears of the Ignivas family had discovered the power of fire, and had even founded the magic of fire.
And so the Age of Fire arrived.
Relying on the power of fire magic, the newborn human race swiftly found its footing in that savage age. The ferocious sabertooths, once dread hunters that preyed on men, all fell beneath the battering of fireballs; even the giant mammoths were turned, in the burning flames, into food for the people.
This let the Ignivas family grow stronger and stronger still, until they carved out a dynasty all their own.
Ignis, in the ancient tongue, means flame.
And Ignivas means the sovereign of flame.
This was one destined to become King of Kings.
But just now, this Eighteenth King of Kings, on the very brink of mastering all beneath him like the rising sun, had met with an unprecedented challenge—because every wild beast in the mountains was fleeing outward as though it had gone mad.
"The pastures are already destroyed?"
"The berry fields are already destroyed too?"
"What? Those beasts are charging straight at the village?"
The Eighteenth Ignivas, the chieftain named Sunblazer, reeled with dizziness.
The upheaval had come far too suddenly—so suddenly it left them no time to prepare. Faced with the oncoming beast tide, all the Ignivas family could do was fight!
"This is our place! The place where our line has lived for generations!"
Shouting this rallying cry, the members of the Ignivas family began to organize a defense.
Every man took up an axe and a spear, but these weapons could serve only for self-protection; what could truly stand against those crazed beasts were the Ignivas family's mages.
Only the fireballs hurled by those mages could truly hold back a beast tide.
The searing burst of flame was itself enough to make those beasts afraid; when a fireball rose blazing into the air, even the fiercest mammoth would balk and shy away.
But this time, those beasts did not stop at all.
Forget the mammoths—even the mountain goats, far smaller than mammoths, didn't stop. Faced with the fireballs rising before it, the goat at the very front charged on as though it had gone mad, neither dodging nor flinching, ramming straight ahead!
"BOOM—"
The searing flame burned the goat into a living torch, but more hooves and claws had already trampled over its body—great-jawed tigers, cave bears, woolly rhinos, dire wolves, giant tapirs, terror birds...... and the mammoths plowing through everything like war-chariots, all of them fleeing, fleeing for their lives with everything they had.
As if, at their backs, there were some still more terrible thing.
"Go! Go now—we go too!"
The Eighteenth Ignivas, the chieftain named Sunblazer, chose to withdraw at once.
The young and able-bodied took charge of the old and the children, bringing along whatever water and food was needed; the mages spread along both wings of the column, tasked with cutting open a space to live in through this deadly beast tide—while Sunblazer, as chieftain, stayed at the very rear, holding off the frenzied beasts that might smash through the column at any moment.
But it was precisely because he hung at the very back that he saw it: the vast figure trailing far behind the herd of beasts.
"What...... what is that?"
Gazing at the colossal thing winding toward him in the distance like a mountain range, the Eighteenth Ignivas was struck dumb.
By the family's word-of-mouth tradition, the Ignivas forebears had grasped the power of God, and only thus had they handed down the magic of flame. Yet the maxims left by those forebears had never once said what God actually looked like.
And now, the true face of the divine had appeared before his eyes.
It was a giant snake vast as a mountain, its huge head large enough to swallow two mammoths in a single gulp. A great mass of unnameable flesh and blood hung along that vast snake-body, along with row upon row of white bones.
The unnameable flesh had already been steamed through, giving off a terrible white vapor; some of it was even smeared with strange syrups, enough to make a man's scalp crawl at a single glance—and even those stark white bones had been roasted through by the searing heat. Across all that distance, one could still smell the rich, fatty fragrance of marrow cooked to perfection.
At any other time, Sunblazer's mouth might well have watered.
But just now......
"Am I going to end up...... a part of all that cooked meat too?"
Faced with a terror beyond anything he had known, even Sunblazer's mind was trembling.
"Run! Run, now!"
The cries of his people came from up ahead, and Sunblazer broke without hesitation into a frantic run.
But that vast figure had already been carved, deep, into the bottom of his heart.