Chapter 8-249: Island Hopping (1/2)

Perth was a mining center and shipping port, and its relations with the native tribes wasn’t actually all that much better than the other colonial cities of Australia, especially with how mining tailings polluted the Land, and how the miners were tearing it up with wanton disregard for the ecology.

However, the arrival of the Buddhist Mantra had at least been enough to warrant a cease-fire, as the brainwashing and mind control of the Mantra was a horrifically effective threat that could potentially work on anyone... and the natives certainly weren’t immune to it, as quite a few had been caught up in the Mantra’s power.

Again, I had to stay for two days total, both to clean up this nasty mess, light some vivic fires to eat the Qi hotspots in the city, and wait for the important people to gather so I could talk to them about vivus, the Helix Method, their need to Level, and very importantly the Sydney Shroudzone and the implications if the Mother Land woke up before it was fixed.

There was also some major fallout with the current administration, which had been dominated by merchants and crafters of Trose and Forj. They actually hadn’t minded the rise of the Mantra folk, right up until the Priests of their Faiths, and all the other ones too, were converted or ganked. Having people who labored happily and mindlessly had gotten a lot of work done without them having to spend more money, and they’d been very happy with the Mantra up until then.

They didn’t have much profit once they were dead and their workforce had taken over, which had curtailed a lot of production. The Druids probably wouldn’t have minded that all that much... if the Buddhists hadn’t been forcibly indoctrinating their people, too, and even the Druids eventually realized the Mantra simply wasn’t going to stop.

Common cause makes for strange bedfellows.

The Druids by now had heard of what I had done in the east and the north, and some of them were actually eager to meet with me. They Treejumped and Wildshaped into birds to wing their way to Perth to meet me urgently, not wanting to miss out on what I was bringing.

I basically mass recruited all of them when I shared a Commune with Nature with them, and they finally got to feel the sleeping awareness of the continent directly, and how very, very small they were.

It also very clearly showcased that I knew Druidic magic, and I was much, much better at it than they were. Funny how that browbeats people who respect strength into line, and inspires others to want to get stronger, once they know what it entails. The simple idea of being able to Commune with the spirit of an entire continent had their eyes lighting up.

What next? The oceans? The very world itself?!

There was still bad blood, there were still conflicts, but the whole idea of owning property was turned on its head when you realized that property owned YOU... and it was probably going to get rid of you as anti-productive if you didn’t prove your worth. Oh, did that make a lot of people grimace when the tables were turned...

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They were happy, sad, and angry to see me go, but that was par for the course. There were going to be some big changes coming, and some of the Priests of Heaven were coming to help mediate and figure out a new way of doing things. Taking responsibility for their actions instead of just making money and leaving someone else to clean up the mess was really a tough pill for a bunch of capitalists to follow, but all they had to do was remember that vast, sleeping entity who they were giving a deep rash to, and they swallowed their pride.

We roared out of the harbor, heading around counter-clockwise to complete the circumnavigation of the continent. I inquired if Master Fred and Sleipner wanted to Waterjump back to the north, and proceed across the sea from there, or make an overland run across Australia instead.

There was no intact road across the continent, chopped up by the Druids some time ago, so going overland while retaining a Lived-Line was going to take us at least a couple of days if the trail was still pretty clear, twice that or more if it was not. Australia was not a small place, and without a road, Sleipner’s land speed was as limited as any vehicle.

Warlock and unicorn debated the point, and expanded it out to some of the Allegiance members interested in such things. As I had alternate methods of travel available to me by also Treejumping, and could simply contact a local Druid or person to find a plant to exit from nearby, there was no immediate need for a Lived-Line lock, unless I wanted to bring large numbers of people with me.

It was something I could take care of in the future, so I demurred, and when we finally swung around the eastern corner of the continent and closed the Lived-Line, I Waterjumped us all the way back to north of Darwin. We fell into the sea, swirled along the edge of All Waters, and emerged in an erupting spray back in the Arafura Sea. We headed up to circle around Papua, the island which would be New Guinea back home.

The primary purpose here was to deliver copies of The Human Tongue to all the settlements, which would quickly help communication between them. Yes, it would inevitably destroy the hundreds or thousands of regional languages here, which was a sad thing I didn’t really much care about, in the end. The tales and culture would live on, but now they’d actually be able to talk to their neighbors.

There were problems with this, of course. One of them was the actions of the Japanese, stealing away some of the islander women for wives for their men. The second was the barbaric cultures from the inner areas of the island and the Native Spirits who responded to them, which didn’t help the tribal peace situation at all. Headhunting and tribal warfare were still a thing here, and with the Priests there to encourage it, raiding was still a common event in the interior, occasionally spilling out into the coasts.

Shamans and barbaric Priests defending their ways of life (and their own positions) also held back a lot of technology and advancements.

The last factor was that there were Chinese Cultivators in several places, and they had to be purged violently. The natives didn’t like it at first, as the Cultivators did defend them against raiders from inland... at least until they realized it wasn’t the raiders killing their Powered, it was the Cultivators themselves...

The coastal communities had strong followings of Aru, if their Priests were still around, and both Amana and Flora, along with Niord. Western influence fell off rapidly as you went inland, however, and Shamans and Warlocks of native Place Spirits started becoming a lot more common.

But the Human language was literally infectious. Just coming into contact with someone speaking it would plant the seed. Even limited contact would start the process, and it would grow slowly over time, edging out other languages naturally, until people had to actually think and concentrate to speak any other language, Human becoming their ‘natural’ language despite what they had been born and raised with.

Importantly, I had the Lived-Line and Great Seal locations of these settlements. If they needed help against the shit from the sea or from inland, I could potentially get there to help from halfway across the world.