After all the excitement of our trip down the cave tunnel, our first sight of the natives was almost a disappointment. It wasn't some grand battle or even an ambush. The tunnel simply opened up into a titanic cavern, affording us a perfect view of a local settlement.
The settlement was… quaint. No, I'll be frank: it was a filthy mess, in line with what you could expect of the most primitive civilizations.
Most of their 'homes' consisted of burrows carved into the ice. The entrances were covered by raw-looking hides of some animal that had bristly fur with short, sky-blue spikes. Bones, bits of flesh, and bloodstains of several different colors covered the icy floor of the settlement, and the creatures within it paid the chaos no mind. Some were literally lounging in the filth.
At least that explained the pungent aroma of our prey. My lips curled at the thought of devouring the soul of something so… unpleasant. I knew the soul could not be tainted by whatever happened to the flesh, but still…
All around the edges of their camp, one could spot perhaps the most obvious sign that they were advancing as a culture. Banners wrought of mistreated skin and marked by symbols I had no context for were proudly displayed on poles of bone driven into the ice. I could feel mana radiating off the squiggles, but none of them registered in my mind as runes or a proper magical language.
This frustrated me to no end. As far as I could tell, they had painted random shit on desecrated pieces of an animal, and it worked.
The center of the settlement held its most interesting feature: a massive bonfire placed directly on the ice itself, with no fuel for it to feed on. Yet it crackled on merrily. The flame was a nearly transparent blue, so pale that it would have been difficult for mortal eyes to spot it from a distance.
A few moments of careful observation explained the lack of fuel. Every so often, a member of the tribe walked up and flicked a glob of mana at the flame. The bonfire would consume the mana eagerly, flaring a little higher before settling back down.
The ease with which the local wielded mana didn't escape me. It looked effortless and instinctual. None of the tribe's members reacted, either, which made me think that they could all use mana or that casters were not particularly respected. The level of mana I sensed radiating off every single local suggested the former.
Finally, having avoided the subject for as long as I could, I turned my attention to the locals themselves.
They were… well, they were. Their fur, which I assumed was meant to be stark white if the younger members of the tribe were any indication, generally tended towards a sickly yellow. Bits of their food and other contaminants were visible in it to my keen eyes. The scraps of cloth they wore weren't in much better condition.
I could tell they were starting to figure out tanning and similar arts, but they were clearly still at the 'cut it off, dry it a bit, and wear it' stage. Some had more elaborate clothing that appeared to be singed on the inside, but these garments were still just bundles of fur, strung together using what looked like tendons.
Never let it be said that cultural development isn't a grisly business. Judging by the stains, they were just a step away from the wonderful historical development of using piss for tanning! I did a fully body shudder at the thought.
Even with all this, I could admit the locals looked imposing.
Their build was large and muscular. They walked on two legs and had corded arms ending in long, gnarled claws. Their entire bodies were covered in thick wiry fur that looked like armor as much as a means of warmth. When they spoke to one another, I spotted flashes of deadly fangs in their mouths. Their faces were fairly ape-like, with oddly squished-looking noses.
The funny thing about the universe is that it seems to really like repetition. If a species pops up once, then there is every chance it will pop up again, on a wholly different world, with barely any biological differences between the two.
Take humans, for example. Far too many worlds out there have one variation or another of this basic species. I belonged to it myself, in two separate lives!
So, it wasn't too hard to identify a yeti when I saw one.
They were one of the more common sapient life variants on icy worlds, and that's what I was looking at. Very unkempt, very uncivilized yeti, but yeti all the same.
From my limited education, I knew yeti had amazing ice magic potential and frightening physical might. I also knew that ogre variants could pop up, if their civilization developed to the point where it could support these titans of pure physical might backed by natural magic.
That still didn't explain all the magical anomalies I was seeing.
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Sure, yeti were supposed to be gifted with ice elemental magic, but that didn't mean they could casually break all known laws of mana-wielding. And these yeti were most definitely doing that.
As I watched from our hiding place behind an outcropping of ice, one of these yeti casually twisted his mana into a knot to hold his ratty clothing together. The garment looked like it should have fallen apart months ago, but it held. No runes. No formalized spell-structure. The yeti didn't even break a sweat.
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If a mage from Berlis saw that, they would have a stroke severe enough to kill them on the spot. I was a demon, and by all accounts immune to such embarrassing deaths, but I still felt a headache coming on as my blood pressure spiked.
"What am I even looking at?" I wondered quietly.
The smartass cat didn't miss her cue. "Yeti. Obviously," she quipped, offering me a smug smile when I fixed her with a glare.
"And they're playing with mana like putty how?" I hissed back, unwilling to let her get away with it so easily. Honestly, I was also hoping she had an explanation for the madness we were seeing.
But Mia just shrugged. "We'll find out when we get their souls."
"Glaustro didn't say we can slaughter the locals," I shot back. "He might want to leave them alone for a while so their numbers grow and we can gauge their usefulness to the legion."
"How are they going to be useful? They don't even shower."
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While Mia's signature look of cat superiority was as annoying as it was endearing, she did have a point. The legion had a thing for assimilating advanced civilizations, but the yeti definitely could not lay claim to such a title.
Still, the numbers thing was also true. From what I could tell, there were about a thousand yeti down there. Most of them were relatively young and healthy adults. I spotted exactly twenty-three members of the tribe I could refer to as elderly, and a grand total of sixty odd children. Clearly, they had little use for the infirm, and the young were not as common as they might have liked.
If we went down there and slaughtered half of them for souls, we'd get less than a monthly legion pay's worth, and probably tank the tribe's long-term survival chances significantly.
Sure, they probably weren't the only tribe in the area, and definitely not the only tribe on Breskwor's surface, but that didn't mean we were justified in treating them callously.
This was a moment when I felt a strong disconnect between myself before and after ascension. Pre-ascension me would have been horrified to consider sentient lives from a point of view that likened them to livestock. Post-ascension me was horrified, too, but the emotion had to be dredged up from the furthest recesses of my mind. Even then, it was kind of mild.
My first impulse was to see and treat the mortals as a resource, something to conserve or spend. Terms like 'breeding plans' and worse floated around in my mind. It wasn't hard to tell that all this knowledge about the proper use of mortal populations had been a generous gift from the Abyss, though I hadn't processed the full 'ascension info packet' yet. I kept getting random flashes of insight when my mind strayed to certain topics.
"I think we need one or two souls," Mia insisted, interrupting my thoughts. "We need to know more."
I couldn't argue with that. Glaustro would be dying to find out more about our discovery, and Bronwynn wouldn't be far behind. I, myself, would not have minded a soul for my own use, if only to answer some of these burning questions.
If there was even the slightest chance that I could learn how to manipulate mana and spells the way the local yeti were doing, I wanted to take it.
"Fine. Still, we shouldn't just barge into their…" I tried to think of a charitable term, "village, and start killing. They might try to run, or they might swarm us and commit suicide by demon. Either way, we'd lose a local population center, and Glaustro would be on our asses. You know how much he wants things to go right."
"We wait and stalk, then. A party went to our camp. Probably scouts. They'll send more, to us or elsewhere."
"That makes sense." I nodded. "We wait, then. It's not like Glaustro's going to get too worried if we're not back immediately."
I nodded again, just to bolster my own certainty about the latter claim. Truth be told, there was a chance Glaustro would send people to find us. He definitely had a tendency to overthink things when it came to the two of us, and this was the first time he had chosen to send us out alone.
Still, the fact that he was starting to trust us with more authority and responsibility brought a smile to my face. For all my grumbling about our new jobs, but I couldn't deny the warmth in my chest at the thought of Glaustro's confidence.
He trusted us. We were not going to let him down.
What I wasn't counting on was my companion's sense of urgency and tension. We'd been spying on the yeti camp for only twenty minutes when I suddenly had a cat sprawled over my back.
"Mia, what are you doing?"
"I'm bored."
"I see. You realize I'm bored too, and that we're on the job, right?"
"I'm bored."
"And what should I do about that?"
"Give me a book. And a massage."
"Mia… no. Books aren't meant to be enjoyed in the middle of a cavern. You also have my feathers stuck in something, and I don't like the way it's tugging on them."
"Massage, then."
"We're keeping an eye on the yeti. No massage for annoying cats."
She popped my head lightly. "They're mortals, and they don't even have proper spells. I've got a spell shielding us from view and muffling our voices. Massage."
I blinked, then paid attention to the ambient mana. It was extremely faint, to the point that I could barely detect it, but she was telling the truth.
"When did you get so good at stealth spells?" I demanded. Then another thought struck me, and I twisted my head around to look at her. "Wait. You've been letting me hiss and whisper at you this entire time, when we could have been talking normally? And why was I lying down on the ice to hide? This spell fully shields us from detection!"
"Because it was funny, and I got to lie down on your wings?"
"That's it!"
The ensuing scuffle was more subdued than usual, so as not to risk the spell's perception-dampening effects. By the end of it, I was on the ice once more, and I had a cat lounging on my back with one of my mother's grimoires in her hand.
I would say I resented it, but I was honestly more amused than anything. It wasn't like the position or the cold ice were uncomfortable for a demon, and I needed to keep an eye on the yeti anyway.
After several hours of lounging and even a bit of snacking, something finally happened. I had noticed an absolutely massive den in one corner of the camp on my first viewing. Its entrance was completely covered by the finest furs, which in this context meant they were the least stained of the lot.
Now the makeshift curtain was shoved aside, and a party of nine yeti emerged from within. The last to exit was by far the largest local I'd had the pleasure of seeing thus far. He looked more like a bulked-up body builder than a regular member of his species. The ball of mana shining in his chest was also the brightest I'd noticed among the yeti, which probably explained his 'improved' stature.
None of that mattered, though. All that mattered was that something interesting was going on. But when I prodded the lazy cat on my back so she could get her ass in gear, my actions earned me a second pop on the head.
The indignities I put up with for friendship's — and Glaustro's — sake!