Two or three days after the ritual, the entire Green Sparrow Tribe was immersed in a mysterious atmosphere tinged with an inexplicable aura.
The drum received great attention from the people of the Green Sparrow Tribe. It was carefully placed in front of the totem pole and enjoyed the same treatment as the feathered crown and bone staff.
After the ritual, people became more enthusiastic about making bows, arrows, and slings.
Every day, as requested by the Divine Child, they would spend some time practicing with slings or arrows outside.
However, the arrows' target was no longer a makeshift wooden stake but a roughly woven rope about half a meter in diameter, tightly coiled in circles.
Han Cheng had painted a black circle using black charcoal at the center of this coiled grass rope target.
Initially, hitting the target would elicit cheers from the crowd, but as people became more adept with the bow and arrow, hitting the target became more commonplace and lost its novelty.
Only someone like Third Senior Brother, who could shoot an arrow into the black center of the target from sixty meters away, could still impress the crowd.
After pulling out the arrow, the person was astonished to find that this arrow was different from the ones they were familiar with.
Instead of a wooden tip sharpened by fire, this arrow had a sharp bone tip polished to a fine point.
It could penetrate the grass target and embed itself into the wood behind it!
As they marveled at this, a realization dawned on them: they could attach bone tips to their arrows, too!
This discovery prompted many to inquire about making bone arrowheads from Third Senior Brother.
Naturally, Third Senior Brother was happy to share, and he took out the remaining arrows to show everyone and explain the process of making bone arrowheads.
The idea of adding bone arrowheads to the arrows had been conceived several days earlier.
When someone is deeply passionate about something, they tend to think about it and seek ways to improve it involuntarily.
As the great writer Pu Songling once said: "Obsessed with sex, their will becomes focused." Those obsessed with books excel in literature, and those obsessed with skills become proficient in their craft… Those who fail in life are those who are not obsessed.
For the Third Senior Brother, it was the same with bows and arrows.
After his initial excitement about bows and arrows had subsided, he began to consider their practical use.
Bows and arrows could be used for hunting and defense against enemies.
After carefully considering these two purposes, he was no longer satisfied with shooting at wooden stakes daily.
Because wooden stakes were not prey or enemies.
Since there were no enemies to test the power of the arrows, he turned his attention to prey.
After sharing his idea with the Divine Child, the shaman, and the chief, he set out with his bow, arrows, and spears to hunt for prey outside the tribe, turning his experimental idea into the reality of fetching two rabbits from the rabbit warren…
The results of the experiment were not very satisfactory. At close range, the arrows could pierce the rabbits' bodies, but as the distance increased, the damage caused by the arrows decreased.
Eventually, they couldn't even penetrate the rabbits' skins.
This discovery left Third Senior Brother deeply troubled. If they couldn't penetrate the thin skin of rabbits, how could they fare against sheep, deer, leopards, saber-toothed tigers, and other such creatures?
In the following days, he continued to ponder this issue.
Initially, his solution was to manufacture a longer and thicker bow. He did so, and while it had some effect, it wasn't as significant as he had hoped. This discovery led him to abandon the idea of making a more powerful bow because the new one he made was already quite difficult for him to draw.
This line of thought continued until one distracted evening during dinner when a fishbone pricked him. The sharp fishbone could pierce his flesh, so he thought, if he tied fishbones to the arrowheads, wouldn't they be able to penetrate the flesh of prey?
He excitedly entertained this idea for a moment before shaking his head; fishbones were too fragile…
With this idea in mind, it wasn't long before bone arrowheads appeared.
Han Cheng quietly observed all of the Third Senior Brother's actions without interference.
For the Green Sparrow Tribe to thrive and grow, it couldn't rely solely on him. Cultivating talent, among other things, was also essential.
Otherwise, they might end up like the Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period, with talents dwindling and Zhuge Liang's departure leading to their downfall, a truly disheartening outcome.
Seeing Third Senior Brother spin around the bones and then start to select them, Han Cheng couldn't help but smile.
Under Han Cheng's instructions, a sling practice area was set up at a distance from the archery practice area.
This area was off-limits to outsiders because of the whirling slings and flying stones, making it highly dangerous.
In light of Han Cheng's glorious feat of smashing a patch of tiles with a single shot, the sling practice area was far from houses and readily accessible areas.
Second Senior Brother, who had been quite battered from using the sling to smash a rabbit a few days ago, noticed an unusual reaction in the archery area.
After watching for a while, he didn't pay much attention and skillfully loaded a stone into the sling, swung it around his arm a couple of times in the air, and then quickly let go. The stone flew out of the net and smashed into the straw target, knocking it down…
Every day, the Green Sparrow Tribe allowed men and women to practice with bows and slings. The traditional gender roles of men working outside and women inside the tribe did not apply here.
Relying solely on men couldn't guarantee the tribe's safety in the face of major threats.
In today's Green Sparrow Tribe, there were many more women than men, and they indeed carried half of the tribe's burden.
On sunnier and slightly warmer days, the Divine Child would have everyone practice using these two new weapons by aiming at the straw figures and odd-shaped straw animals outside the perimeter, which were almost invisible under the snow cover.
When setting up these straw figures and objects made of straw, the people would be highly cautious, constantly checking a small sign standing a short distance away from the wall.
These inconspicuous signs bore an abstract skull drawn in charcoal with two crossed bones beneath it.
This was the Divine Child's creation, meant to remind the people of the Green Sparrow Tribe that on the side of the wooden sign facing the wall lay the dangerously obscured "stick array," covered almost entirely by snow…