The coming of age ceremony.
I felt the blessing of the gods enter my body.
Book 1-2.1 The Crimson Desert
The Crimson Desert that divides the large continent in half. The people of the continent were divided to the Eastern and Western continent by this Crimson Desert. They weren’t very different, but this desert was large enough to make a decent border.
There are many unique characteristics to this Crimson Desert.
First of all, the name Crimson Desert comes from the fact that the sands are red in color but also because there is blood always being shed here.
There are a total of twelve different tribes in the Crimson Desert.
The land where during the day there is a blistering heat, and at night, the icy coldness could even freeze your soul. Half of the desert is made of quicksand, so it was difficult for people who did not know the way to even move freely (TL: it says Drift of Sand in the raws, but it’s quicksand. So it’ll be quicksand. What the heck is drift of sand?). With a single miscalculation, the sand would be where their souls will be buried in a moment’s notice.
And of course, water was important. In the desert, there are approximately two hundred oasis that have not dried up for a long time, and will not dry up. There are also approximately two hundred oasis which dry up and then refill itself in a cycle. Finally, there are approximately one hundred oasis which appear and then disappear.
Just hearing those numbers, you might be thinking that there are a lot of oasis. But for a desert this large, that amount of oasis would be considered on the lower end.
The level of strength for each desert tribe is based around how many never-drying oasis they had control over. That is why all of the desert tribes are always fighting. They are trying to increase the number of Oasis that their tribe controls.
Truthfully, even though the number of oasis are low, there was plenty of water. In fact, there was enough water that even if the population of the desert increased by three hundred percent, there would still be enough.
Sadly, people don't know what satisfaction means and they are animals who live in fear. Since water meant survival, they could only relax when they had more water. The tribes always fought, worried that if they lost their Oasis, they could die or end up as slaves for an enemy tribe. Living in this type of environment was the reason the majority of the men in the desert were growing up to become rough and violent Warriors.
Although all of the desert tribes originated from the same ancestor, this actually led some tribe to become bitter enemies.
The tribes who have the most violent wars and have been fighting the longest are Yulian's
Pareia tribe and the Shuarei tribe.
As the saying goes, the two tribes would get fussy about not being able to eat the other tribe (TL: Not literally cannibalism, just a figure of speech). Because each of the tribes had these types of issues, it became known as the Crimson Desert for the continuous bloodshed.
In addition, regardless of all the other things, the reason the strong nations in the East and the West could not just leave the desert alone was because of a resource that existed in the desert.
This resource was known as the ‘Black Water,’ or ‘Burning Water.’
This was the reason Yulian’s pride was hurt significantly.
The interference of the great powers.
Not only the Pareia tribe, even the Rivolde tribe, the largest tribe who owned seventeen Oasis, could not avoid it.
If all of the desert tribes united together, it could become the scariest country on the continent, but the tribes were currently split in so many ways.
The desert is a scary place, but if you put your mind to it, it was still a place that could be invaded. That was why all of the desert tribes paid tributes to the strong nations; in the East, these were the Inama Kingdom and the Puria Kingdom, and in the West it was the Silence Empire and the Rojini Kingdom.
The Rojini kingdom does not have a border against the desert, but because they were a strong kingdom located right next to the Silence Empire, it could be said to be a strategic alliance.
Of those, Pareia has been paying tribute to the Silence Empire. On the surface, it looked like they had a favorable trading partnership, but compared to the amount of work that went into harvesting and storing the burning water, they were getting the short end of the stick, receiving pennies in comparison. This made it obvious it was a tribute and not a trade.
When you consider the violent nature of these tribes, the fact that they would sit still for this type of plot was weird, but putting the danger of invasion second, they could not say no because the payment they were receiving for the burning water was iron.
If their tribe was the only one to reject the trade, it was guaranteed to create a difference in the number of weapons they possessed compared to the other tribes.
In war, the warriors were important, but the right weapons for the warriors were just as important.
Weapons are used up each and every battle. If two warriors have the same level of skill, a warrior holding a wooden shield will be pushed around by a warrior with a steel shield. With the current situation in the desert where each tribe is itching to eat up the other, iron was more important than gold.
This was why the desert tribes ended up in the situation where they were being forced to listen to the outrageous demands of the strong nations of the continent.