Merin exerts his power to kill the ordinary hyenas.
Another force from a distance stops him.
He pushes harder, and the force slowly gives ground.
The hyenas retreat.
The force feels similar to his divine power, yet empty at its core.
Where his power carries faith, the other reeks of bloodlust, killing, and plunder.
It must come from the hyena tribe's totem.
That totem is stronger than him.
They did not fight fully today because, for now, the hyena tribe's only enemy is Merin.
But every tribe in this region is their enemy.
The hyena tribe raids all nearby tribes, destroying many.
When their powers collided, Merin sensed distant eyes watching.
The clash with the hyena tribe's totem leaves him uneasy.
Today's attack was not their full force.
They could come with everything at any moment.
The tribe must grow stronger.
For ordinary deer-orcs, close combat is not the answer.
Three of them are needed to safely deal with one ordinary hyena-orc.
The divine warriors face a similar problem against the hyena tribe's divine warriors.
To increase the tribe's strength, defence must come first.
There is no wall around the tribe.
They never built one because beasts stayed away, fearing him.
This is the first time another orc tribe has attacked.
Merin orders the shaman to build a wall around the tribe.
Wide enough for tribe members to stand on and shoot arrows.
But the shaman cannot understand what a wall is.
Merin wonders how to show him.
He thinks and thinks, but his plan requires waiting until the tribe sleeps.
When the sun sets and the moon rises, hours pass, and everyone falls asleep.
With no entertainment in this world, the night holds nothing but rest.
Merin releases his spiritual power.
He invades the shaman's body.
With his understanding of the Law of Dream, he enters.
The Law of Dream is not from this world.
But the basics are the same in every world.
No matter how much a law changes, its roots remain.
Merin enters the shaman's dream and takes control.
The shaman is unaware he is dreaming.
Within the dream, Merin shows him what a wall is and how to build it.
Two wooden fences with a two-metre gap between them.
Fill the gap with stones and soil.
Standing atop the packed earth and stone, they can shoot outside.
The tribe does not even know what bows and arrows are.
So he shows the shaman these as well.
And later, in the dreams of other tribe members.
The next day, remembering both their dreams and Merin's advice, the tribe begins building the wall and crafting bows.
While they work, Merin turns his thoughts to the second way of increasing their strength.
A cultivation technique to raise physical power.
It takes him time to create a basic physical training method.
A path where life essence and strength can reach 0.4 rank.
At life level 0.4, the same faith power can turn three tribe members into Divine Warriors instead of two.
That night, he enters their dreams to teach the technique.
While teaching, he senses the 'Law of Dream' of this world.
He comprehends it slightly.
And feels his divine power begin to change.
He realises the second way to increase his strength is to comprehend laws.
He does not rush to comprehend every law he can sense.
Instead, he focuses on the Law of Dream.
Before coming to this world, he had already chosen the five laws he would combine to advance to rank 11.
In this world, he will comprehend those same five laws and attempt to merge them.
That way, when he returns—whether with less merit or none—he can still advance to rank 11.
The wall takes twelve days to build.
Every night, he guides the tribe's dreams.
Their strength rises quickly.
Many reach 0.1 rank, and a few even reach 0.2 rank.
Their devotion to him deepens.
He gathers enough faith to turn two more ordinary tribe members into Divine Warriors.
But instead, he uses the power of faith on one Divine Warrior—Ronald.
He pours it into Ronald's body.
Ronald's life essence climbs from 1.00… 1.01… 1.09… 1.15… 1.21… 1.29… 1.35… 1.41.
It stops there.
With the tribe's defence and strength improved, he allows hunting to resume.
For twelve days, they have eaten only fruit, vegetables, and fish.
Nutritious, but meat is needed for the physical training technique—especially meat from magic beasts.
The few hunters who go out return soon after, injured, carrying only small beasts.
They had clashed with the Hyena Tribe.
The hyenas have formed a perimeter around the tribe.
Their goal is to starve the deer-orcs to death, knowing that attacking head-on would bring heavy losses with Merin present.
They cut off the tribe's food supply—unaware that the deer-orcs can still fish.
When the plants nearby are gone, they can still survive.
But Merin does not want the tribe to merely survive.
He wants them to thrive.
He turns his attention to the shaman, wondering how to increase his strength.
The shaman does not know—his strength has barely grown since birth.
Merin avoids teaching cultivation techniques from other worlds, fearing they may cause problems, and he cannot risk losing the only spiritual-side cultivator he has.
Shamans cannot be trained—they must be born.
So, at night, in the dream space he creates where all tribe members dream together, he teaches the shaman about the Law of Dream.
A month later, Merin senses the shaman's spirit essence has grown.
The tribe's strength doubles.
Ronald advances to a second-mark Divine Warrior.
Jacques reaches the 1.3 rank through the physical technique.
Merin improves the physical technique for ordinary deer-orcs, raising their limit to 0.7 rank.
He stops there—the last step from 0.7 to 1 rank will be done by him using the power of faith.
With the tribe's strength rising so sharply, the hyena encirclement suffers heavy losses.
Their totem descends to the battlefield in a storm of bloodlust.
Merin answers in kind, his divine form taking shape above the battlefield, dream power flowing around him like shifting mist.
The Hyena Totem's eyes blaze with savage hunger, its growl deep enough to shake the air.
Merin meets its gaze without a word, his will pressing down like an immovable mountain.
For a moment, the battlefield stills—the clash of their auras weighing on every creature present.
The Hyena Totem snarls again, but this time, it steps back.
One step becomes two, then three, before it turns, retreating into the wilderness with its tribe.
With the siege broken, the deer-orcs who fought do not return immediately.
They go hunting.
A couple of days later, a sheep-orc from the Rock Horn Tribe visits.
The Rock Horn Tribe is an intermediate tribe, and from him, Merin learns that the Hyena Tribe is a top tribe.
The Rock Horn Tribe, along with other intermediate tribes and the top-ranked Golden Eye Ox Tribe, is fighting the Hyena Tribe's main force.
Because of this, Merin realises the Hyena Totem he faced was slightly stronger than him, only because most of the Hyena Tribe's totem is busy battling the totems of the sheep-orcs and their allies.
The sheep-orc comes to request that Merin's tribe support the nearby inferior tribes against the hyenas.
Merin orders the shaman to agree—it is a chance to increase their fame and draw more deer-orcs to join them.
Now, he is no longer worried about newcomers without faith in him.
With the Law of Dream, he can peer into their dreams and uncover any spies.
Six months after becoming a totem, the tribe's population rises to 115 members.
They now have four second-mark Divine Warriors, fifteen first-mark Divine Warriors, and the shaman has advanced to first rank.
The shaman gains a new spell—Dream Travel.
It is not created by him but forms naturally, a gift from the world when his understanding of the Law of Dream deepens.
The shaman's advancement to rank one becomes a key for Merin, an opening of a gate to understanding how to increase a shaman's strength.
Shamans cultivate the spirituality of their spirit, and through comprehension, the old man refines his spirituality further.
Understanding this, Merin creates a meditation technique for refining spirituality and absorbing it from the outside world.
A week later, the sheep-orc returns to ask him to send troops for the final battle against the Hyena Tribe.
Merin must agree—if the hyena-orcs win, it will be disastrous for him, forcing him and the tribe to leave the region, but if the coalition wins, they will take revenge for disobeying orders.
Merin sends all his Divine Warriors, but not a single ordinary tribe member, fearing the other totems may notice how much their strength has grown without the power of faith and react unpredictably.
He loses five Divine Warriors—one second-mark and four first-mark—but they return victorious.
The next day, a tribe member gives birth to a girl who is a shaman.
Merin had fallen into a dilemma, for the old shaman's lifespan is short, and a deer-orc's life does not extend even after advancing through the ranks of evolution.
It is the law of the world—totems like him may live forever, so the world denies such longevity to the orcs.
With this girl, his problem is solved, and her birth marks the tribe's transition into a new era.