I am the sacred tree, evergreen for eternity.

Hong's tears welled up. He held the leaf in his hands, trembling as he raised it high above his head. His lips trembled for a long time before he finally let out a hoarse cry.

"Xia—the Xia clan! We are the Xia clan!"

The tribespeople behind him looked up in astonishment, not understanding why their leader was suddenly so agitated.

But when Hong turned around, held up the leaf with the inscription, and showed them the symbol with tears streaming down his face, an indescribable shock swept over everyone.

They didn't know what writing was, nor did they know what "summer" was.

But they read something in the leader's eyes—

From this moment on, they were no longer wild men living in the mountains, living in constant fear, nor were they nameless, faceless wandering souls.

They have names now, names given by God, names etched on leaves, names that will never be forgotten.

That night, no one in the entire tribe slept.

They sat around the campfire, passing the leaf around and reciting the syllable over and over again.

summer.

summer.

summer.

Yu Su watched all this quietly as the branches and leaves swayed gently in the night breeze.

From that night on, he began to teach Xia to write.

Those characters were painstakingly unearthed from the depths of his memory.

Memories of past lives have been eroded into fragments over the long years, but the words etched into one's bones are like indelible marks, becoming clearer the more one digs into them.

Horizontal strokes, vertical strokes, left-falling strokes, right-falling strokes, dots, turns, hooks, and lifts—those strokes seem alive, emerging one after another from the depths of his chaotic consciousness, arranging themselves into complete characters, each bearing immense weight.

The characters inherited from the ancient Hua clan were etched into the soil for the first time in this era's wild and untamed landscape.

It started with just the most basic elements—sun, moon, mountain, river, water, fire, wind, and rain.

Yu Su used his roots to draw lines on the soft soil, and used fallen leaves to carry his thoughts and convey meaning, so that Hong could gather his clansmen under the tree and teach them one by one.

Those savages weren't stupid; they just had never encountered abstract concepts before.

Before this, their "records" were nothing more than a knot in a rope, a graffiti on a rock wall, or a fragment that was easily blurred in oral tradition.

Hong was the first person to grasp the power of words.

That evening, he squatted by the tree roots and used a charred stick to draw a few characters crookedly on the animal hide.

That was their hunting record for the day—crossing a stream, bypassing a hollow overgrown with poisonous thorns, and behind a giant rock, a herd of giant deer...

When words are given meaning, knowledge is born.

From then on, a fervor for writing spread throughout the entire Xia clan.

Young people learn the fastest; they repeatedly trace on the ground with sticks and write on the sand with their fingers.

Although the elderly learn slowly, they are the most devout. They string together leaves with inscriptions on them with animal sinew and hang them around their necks as their most precious amulets.

Based on the reverence for 'writing', the Xia clan held a grand sacrificial ceremony.

The entire tribe knelt under the tree, their foreheads touching the ground, chanting the newly learned characters over and over again.

Words are power.

Moreover, it was far larger than Yu Su had anticipated.

With the advent of writing, information transmission between tribes no longer relied on oral tradition.

Hong drew hunting routes on animal hides and distributed them to the various hunting teams, so that the hunters no longer got lost or accidentally entered the territory of ferocious beasts.

With the advent of writing, the tribe began to cooperate in specific ways—some people specialized in recording the habits of their prey, some in studying the effects of herbs, and some in observing changes in the weather.

The success rate of hunting increased visibly, and the tribe's granaries were full for the first time before the first snow. Not a single tribesman perished in the cold winter because of food and animal hides.

With relatively abundant resources, the Xia family entered a period of vigorous development.

In just ten years, the population has increased by 30%.

Even more valuable is that the number of young and middle-aged men who can serve as the main force in hunting has finally exceeded one hundred.

Yu Su watched all of this with a strange feeling welling up inside her.

One Hundred Years of Solitude.

He took root, grew, and withstood the flames and storms alone in this valley for a full century.

He grew from a fragile seedling into a towering tree deeply rooted in the earth, witnessing the scorching sun, the fiery tiger, and countless cycles of birth and death.

He had thought his heart was as hard as a rock, unmoved by any living being.

But when he saw those once weak savages gradually become stronger because of writing, and gradually coalesce into a real "tribe" because of writing, he still felt a sense of relief that he couldn't quite explain.

Xia Shi, he used the character "Xia".

He himself couldn't explain what that word carried.

Perhaps it was a projection of some fragments from his broken memories, or perhaps he simply thought the syllable sounded nice.

But in any case, from now on, this word will be imprinted in the blood of these people.

The days passed by peacefully and fulfillingly.

A peaceful morning.

A hunting party of twelve set off as usual, heading north along a safe route marked by the tribe in advance, and entering the depths of the jungle.

According to Yu Su's perception, the hunting team skillfully avoided the areas inhabited by ferocious beasts and quickly found a herd of migrating deer.

Everything is going smooth.

Suddenly, at the edge of his perception range, deep within that area he had not yet explored, an extremely faint yet extremely eerie aura appeared, like an invisible giant maw that swallowed the entire hunting team.

Before Yu Su could react, the twelve life auras belonging to the Xia clan members vanished without a trace.

Three days.

Three whole days.

Yu Su's roots could only reach a range of a hundred feet, so he could only extend his senses multiple times to explore that unknown area.

But that eerie aura seemed to have vanished into thin air, leaving no trace.

The hunting party did not return, there was no news, and there was no sign of any survivors.

For the first time, Yu Su felt anxious.

His branches and leaves moved without wind, making a rustling sound, which startled the tribesmen under the tree, who all looked up.

Hong knelt beside the tree roots, gazing at the totem in his heart, yet dared not overstep his bounds in the slightest.

Yu Su did not respond. He did not know what changes had occurred in that unknown area, but he still stopped the Xia family from sending out more explorers.

Wild mountains and seas, the unknown is danger.

At dawn on the fourth day, Yu Su finally sensed two faint auras.

Two blood-soaked figures staggered out of the dense forest and ran wildly toward the tribe.

Their animal hides were tattered and their bodies were covered with horrifying wounds. One of them had his left arm severed at the elbow, the cut hastily bandaged with charred strips of cloth, and blood had stained half of his arm black and red.

The moment they stormed into the tribe, the entire Xia clan was in an uproar.

Hong rushed forward to help the hunter with the missing arm.

The hunter raised his head, his eyes bloodshot, his lips cracked and bleeding, and with his last bit of strength, he hoarsely uttered a sentence.

"Chief... there's a monster... to the north..."

Before he could finish speaking, he fainted.