Chapter 23
Our Age of Decline
More than two hundred years had passed since the Great Flood. Several generations that had come into existence during that time had now passed into extinction.
The Babylonian people wore animal skins and clothes thus no longer needed their natural luxuriant body hair to keep them warm. And as their body hair began to diminish, their thin outer carapaces also disappeared. Their bodies began to straighten, gradually revealing snow-white skin.
They began to evolve from apes with lush hair all over their bodies to early humans with sparse hair. In terms of their physique, they were increasingly resembling the rugged, strong, and muscular build characteristic to Westerners.
There had once been glorious, civilized tribes, and there had been a period where they established city-states. These had yet to recover. They were still stuck in their primitive farming tribes, incapable of even rebuilding their city-states.
The glory they had was all thanks to the great Hero King, Gilgamesh, who established the foundation that made it possible for them.
The great Hero King possessed the strongest power in the world. With his strength alone, he single-handedly suppressed countless giant beasts and made the Sumerian race rise to the top of the food chain!
But without the Hero King, they had nothing.
They could not progress into developing a Bronze or Iron Age of their own, and with mere crude stone spears and clubs, how could they fight against the towering, huge beasts?
The only metal weapon they had was the civilization’s holy sword, otherwise known as the Sword of Damocles. Yet, this had followed the Hero King, Gilgamesh, into his grave and was forever buried beneath the world that was destroyed by the Great Flood. It had sunk into the endless depths of the ocean.
They could not even rebuild the city walls.
The Uruk Kingdom was a city that had been single-handedly built by Gilgamesh. He had personally moved giant boulders of sizes that were comparable to mountains and used these to surround the city. And it only took him a month.
For ordinary people, the amount of work required to build a great city was comparable to the difficulty of the people of Ancient Egypt in building the pyramids. It would take them dozens of years. Besides, how could there possibly be so much manpower and resources in such a cold and starving environment?
At this moment, the daughter of the Babylonian tribal leader, Medea, was sighing.
“Sumer was truly glorious. That was an epic era that solely belonged to one man, the great Hero King, Gilgamesh. No wonder the people of that age sang his praises and wrote grand epics to record his glory.”
A great, grand epic; a glorious, magnificent civilization.
Merchants, shops, colosseums, slavery.
In the exquisite and magnificent Palace of King Uruk, the great Hero King was seated on his throne. His eyes were deep and unfathomable, and with the Sword of Damocles in hand, he looked down at all his subjects.
“The time of our era has fallen. We are on our way to decline, and we are facing extinction. If the sword of civilization that God bestowed upon us had not been lost, we might not have had such a hard time even if we did not have the mighty strength of the blood of power.”
“God, is this impending doom for our Babylonian tribe?”
“Civilization. It is the power to protect intelligent species like us… I, Medea, want to know the way forward for our civilization! How exactly are we supposed to survive!!”
Medea wore a calm expression on her face. She was the bravest and wisest person of her tribe. She was not as strong as the men, but when it came to killing techniques, she triumphed over most of the warriors in the tribe.
She looked at the few men of the hunting party who donned animal skins and was pulled back to reality. “What about this area? How’s the exploring coming along?”
Surrounded by a pool of mud, the area reeked densely of fetid decay. A warrior replied, “This is a vast muddy swamp; it must be the case that this muddy terrain was formed through the accumulation of water puddles after the Great Flood. Species are flourishing within it and there are also many delicious fruits.”
This was the fertile swamp that Xu Zhi had created by treating it with animal manure such as chicken poop and cow dung. Now, natural plants would flourish here even more.
“The Great Flood?”
Medea took a deep breath and looked at the vast swamp, a black mire, that was right before her.
It was hard to imagine the overwhelming Great Flood that drowned the entire world, the catastrophe of more than two hundred years ago,.
God had such mighty power that it was unimaginable to mortals. With just the lift of a finger, God could destroy the world.
“Then there must be plenty of food here; it’ll be the next gathering point for our tribe…” She looked around for a moment and suddenly noticed something amiss. “Wait a minute, Garkai, Bolognagas, where are they?”
Everyone looked at one another and came to realize that two people had disappeared.
This was something that had never happened before.
The savage species in this land were not very intelligent and would not bother to sneak up on the weak humans, for the people who held crude stone spears and axes in their hands were simply unable to break the scaly armor of the huge beasts. They could only face the fate of being slaughtered by the huge beasts to become their next meal.
“Something’s wrong. This seemingly quiet and peaceful muddy swampland contains something ominous. There are terrifying creatures here that we do not know about,” Medea said with a change of expression. “Because of their huge size, giant beasts can’t set foot into the swamp. They will only sink here. There are no signs of giant beasts entering either, so it is most probably an ambush on us by some small swampland creatures.”
“Let’s go!”
Medea acted decisively and left with the group of more than twenty men under her command.
But at that moment, a disgusting and bloodied monster with grayish-black tentacles suddenly appeared in the swamp. Its body was covered with tentacles that looked like gray seaweed and the tentacles surrounded a huge bloodshot eyeball that was scarlet due to all the blood vessels.
The body of this monster was extremely disproportionate.
The single, huge eyeball that was covered with blood vessels actually took up two-thirds of its body.
“So beautiful.”
“How could there be such a beautiful girl in this world!”
Several of the strong men wearing animal skins suddenly locked eyes with the huge, bloodshot eyeball of the evil-eyed creature and could not help but walk over to it in a frenzy. It was as if they had just seen a stunning beauty and were so excited that no one could pull them back.
“What are you all doing!?”
“Don’t go over there!”
The surrounding Babylonian warriors could not help feeling terrified.
The bizarre and inconceivable scene had overturned all kinds of existing perceptions they had.
Medea, as the most intelligent person in the Babylonian tribe, instantly sensed something was amiss and said, “What kind of terrifying creatures live in this muddy land? Those strange and evil-looking huge eyeballs can actually charm their prey into voluntarily going over to them. I’m afraid that the missing Garkai and Bolognagus must have walked to their death out of their own accord!”
“Run!”
She made a prompt decision to immediately abandon the few men who had been charmed and were slowly walking over to the creature. She led her group of men, and they fled as quickly as they could.
But then, she suddenly stopped in her tracks and her eyes began to turn fiery.
“These are such wondrous creatures… They are weaker than us humans, with soft and powerless tentacles, and foolish huge eyeballs, yet they had such terribly astonishing power that allows them to destroy creatures that are much more powerful and stronger than themselves.”
“Aren’t we just as weak? Why is that only they can have such a unique power…” Medea’s eyes were blazing as if there was some unknown flame burning away in her eyes. There was a terrible thought taking root in her mind.
I will claim its power and revive the tribe!!
“We will kill it and then escape!” Medea suddenly shouted.
“What?”
The warriors of the tribe were all taken aback.
Medea turned around and raised her white stone spear high.
From the sky above, a ray of light fell upon her stunningly cold and beautiful face, making her look like the Goddess of War from Norse mythology. “Follow me!” she ordered. “I will kill it. I will bring its corpse back with me and return to the tribe!”