Fifty years before now, there were more than twice as many pastoral peoples as there are today.
I was one of them, born into what you'd call a militant tribe. "Militant" might sound impressive, but to put it bluntly, we were bandits. We usually raised livestock, but when we wanted wives, we'd often seize them from other tribes or settled villages. And as a side gig, we also dabbled in raiding and human trafficking.
Hey now, don't glare at me like that. I know it was wrong. Back then, I didn't question a single thing—I figured that was just how the world worked.
So anyway, let me keep going.
I was still just a kid in my teens, but even then, the chieftain acknowledged my skill with the bow. I threw myself eagerly into the raids. The arrogance of someone who'd always been on the winning side—it's always the other guy's fault for losing.
That arrogance had spread through the entire tribe.
One day, the chieftain's son made a declaration. "I want a woman from the Wind-Reading tribe."
The Wind-Reading tribe, you see—they were like priests entrusted with the sacred rites of the whole grassland. They raised birds, read the winds, and moved across the plains accordingly. They were a wise people who could predict the year's weather with perfect accuracy.
Even among us rough pastoral folk, there was an unspoken rule: don't lay a hand on the Wind-Reading tribe.
Our tribe broke that rule.
We attacked the Wind-Reading tribe to secure a bride for the next chieftain. It just so happened they were in the middle of a ritual and had no weapons—no bows, no swords. You're wondering what they did have? Here's the strange part: all they needed for their ritual were the tamed birds and...
...a hoe.
The women commanded the birds while the men turned the earth.
Doesn't make much sense, does it? But that's what they called a ritual. "Practically farmers," the chieftain's son sneered. "Kill them," he ordered.
I drew my bowstring back until it groaned. The arrow flew with a twang, traced an arc through the air, and struck the Wind-Reading tribe's chieftain in the head.
That was the signal that started the slaughter.
These people had no real weapons—they were just turning soil. Killing them required no skill whatsoever. It was like chasing down wounded deer.
It wasn't until everything was over that I realized that raid had been the most abominable thing I'd ever done in my entire life.
There was no hesitation in killing people who had been revered as holy men. If anything, we were even more brutal than usual. I think, deep down, we were terrified of what it meant to kill priests. Maybe we believed that if we let them live, they'd report us to the gods.
We killed every adult male. We kept only the young women. The children were sold off as slaves, and the birds they'd raised became our dinner.
Disgusting story, right? But that's exactly what I did. There was even a rush—a terrible kind of exhilaration.
That's why I didn't notice at the time.
One dull-witted bird had been pecking at the ground during the raid. I didn't think twice and drove my blade into it with a single thrust.
It wasn't until later that I learned it had been eating seeds of catastrophe.
After that, our tribe ran even wilder than before. The chief's son had his way with a girl from the wind-reading clan, and she got pregnant. Around the time she was carrying her second child, it came.
A black shadow that blanketed the entire plain. The smudged darkness, like charcoal smeared across the sky, looked at first like an out-of-season raincloud.
My ears were ringing. The livestock grew restless. Children pressed close together in fear, and the women pulled them tight.
The man who'd said he'd ride out to check on things came back looking half dead. Not just his clothes — his skin and hair were in tatters. The horse was in a frenzy and it took ages to calm it down. There were bite marks where something had torn chunks out of it, so I asked what had attacked.
You lot already look like you've got it figured out. But let me tell it properly, will you? The folks back in the village wouldn't believe a word of this.
I didn't even need to ask the scout.
It caught up to our camp almost immediately.
Bugs. More bugs than you could ever count. Locusts.
A deafening roar of wings and a grating chewing sound. They swarmed the tents.
The sheep that had been grazing scattered in a panic, and the dogs could only whimper like beaten mutts.
The men swung their swords around like fools, even though there was no way they could swat them down. But waving torches around was the real blunder. The locusts that caught fire flew straight into the other men, bringing even greater catastrophe.
I didn't know what was happening. All I could do was crush the locusts on the ground beneath my feet. Each one was only about two inches long — a little winged thing — yet we were being devoured inside the belly of some enormous insect.
We hid the women inside the tents, but the locusts kept squeezing through every gap. Inside, the children screamed and wailed. The mothers couldn't even comfort them — they started screaming too. They cursed the men for failing to protect their families from the locusts. Women who'd been abducted and forced into marriage had been pushed to their breaking point, and they let it all spill out.
The bugs weren't satisfied with just grass — they devoured every last bit of our food.
Wheat, beans, whatever vegetables we had — they even gnawed through the dried meat. The tents were riddled with holes, and when the locusts finally passed, all that remained were people who'd screamed themselves hoarse and countless dead insects.
Everything was gone. The livestock had fled too.
We managed to catch some horses and headed for the village to get food. Since we made our living as bandits, we picked men whose faces weren't known. We picked them, but—
The moment we got close, arrows flew. I never expected them to shoot without even checking who was coming. We left behind the comrades who'd been too slow to run. We turned our backs on them as they reached out, grasping at us, and there was nothing we could do.
When I looked back later, the villagers were collecting our horses — along with the men who'd been riding them.
Think about it and it's obvious. We weren't the only ones being starved by the locusts.
I prayed that the comrades we'd abandoned had at least died without suffering. We'd killed the clan of priests, so it seemed like more than we had any right to — but I prayed anyway.
With nothing left to eat, we slaughtered what few livestock remained. To stretch our meals—
Broth—
—we'd add grass to it, which sometimes made us sick. The hungry children ate locusts that had fallen on the ground, and before long one of them died. Whether the locusts were poisonous or he'd eaten them without tearing off the legs, I couldn't tell. He'd been wasting away from lack of nutrition. When food runs short, the weakest die first.
And a pregnant woman — who needed more nutrition than anyone — was naturally the weakest of them all.
She was gaunt, her belly grotesquely swollen despite it all. She was to be the next chieftain's wife, but after that massacre, she could barely get a proper meal. The eldest clung to her, sucking on his fingers to stave off hunger.
The stillbirth was a foregone conclusion.
The chieftain's son despaired over the loss of his second child. And to make matters worse, his wife, having just given birth, was on the verge of death.
"You people disrupted the ritual. There is no one left to perform the Wind-reading rites. The people of the grasslands will be threatened by the insects for all eternity."
Those were words she had bottled up for years—ever since her tribe was slaughtered and she was taken. The woman let out a wild laugh, clutched the dead infant and the emaciated child to her breast, and drew her last breath.
Just as the woman said, it came to be accepted that the cause of this calamity was our tribe, for disrupting the ritual.
Our tribe was hunted as a common enemy of the grasslands.
You could call it our own damn fault. But even so, we were desperate to live.
We ate grass, we ate insects, sometimes we killed, sometimes we were killed, and we kept running.
A starving man ate the flesh of a dead companion. Not satisfied with that, he even tried to kill the living. That's how I lost my left eye—an arrow from a man who wanted to eat me. I pulled the arrow out on the spot and killed him in return.
I couldn't stand the thought of eating others or being eaten, so I fled. But fleeing got me nowhere—I just withered from hunger and thirst. And so I wandered into the city, lured by the smell of wheat porridge.
The lord's charity kitchen. The porridge—so bland it could be mistaken for saltless livestock feed—tasted better than anything I'd ever had.
Covered in filth, my face sticky with tears and snot, I was promptly seized by the guards. Apparently some resident of the city had recognized me as a bandit. I had no will to resist or do anything at all—I figured if I could at least eat in prison, that'd be fine. I was looking forward to nothing more than counting how many meals I'd get before the hanging.
But they never put a rope around my neck.
Instead, they cut off the fingers I used to draw a bow, and I was made a serf. Given what I'd done, I still think that was a remarkably lenient punishment.
The lord knew about the Wind-reading tribe's rituals too. The reason we'd been allowed to keep performing those seemingly nonsensical rites and still get fed was that the lord had been protecting the Wind-reading tribe all along. Those rituals everyone dismissed as meaningless—they actually had a purpose.
The lord, you ask? The late
Xu
clan—would that ring a bell?
Gyokuen
was some upstart who came along later. This was before his time.
The Xu clan knew about the Wind-reading tribe's rituals. So they placed serfs in various regions to serve in the Wind-reading tribe's stead.
Unfortunately, all we could do was till the soil. The Xu clan didn't seem to understand much about bird control either, from the looks of it. All I have on hand are chickens.
Like you said. I'm kept alive for the sole purpose of performing the ritual. A sacrifice with the name "serf" attached.
This village was built by those very sacrifices. The shrine next to my house exists to enshrine the Wind-reading people we killed. As the price for slaying the priests, as the price for inviting the calamity, I paid with my small, insignificant life. From anyone else's perspective, it hardly seems worth it.
Well, that was all seventeen years ago.
When the Dog clan was gone, the serfs scattered as they pleased. There were even some fools who went back to banditry, since they were originally roughnecks anyway. Huh, judging by the looks, you must have run into bandits then.
Eh, why am I still here?
Well, it’s because I never want to be eaten by those flying locusts again.
Never again...
Anyway, that’s the end of that long-ago tale.
Got any questions?