Aztec Civilization: Destiny to Conquer America!-Chapter 1687 - 1202: The Fall of Stele City, the Arrival of the Cuban Ship!

The pattering rain fell from the gray sky onto Dzibilchaltun, the stone-carved city of the Maya Tail Feather Clan. This was a truly ancient Maya city-state, with numerous temples of all sizes. And at the highest point in the center of the city-state stood the original Maya Seven Gods Temple.

Inside this ancient Seven Gods Temple, there were many offerings of fish bones, shells, obsidian, and turquoise dedicated to seven Maya ancient gods! Among these seven ancient gods, there was neither Kukulkan brought from the highlands nor Chaac, the Rain Divine, from the seaside lowlands, but only the seven original Great Divine Spirits of the Maya.

In front of the ancient temple, there stood an even older Divine Stele, a Maya long calendar stone stele. Carved onto the stone stele were ancient serpent, bird, sun, and moon patterns, along with indecipherable long calendar symbols. According to the captive Tail Feather nobility warriors, this stele can be traced back to the beginning of the Second Epoch, the onset of the Maya Golden Age, exactly two thousand rainy seasons ago!

"The Chief Divine bore witness, two thousand rainy seasons ago! Phew! These Maya tribes, though not great fighters, have indeed passed down a remarkably long history!"

Black Wolf Torc tilted his head, standing in the rain before the long calendar stele, carefully examining the mysterious patterns and symbols on the stele like a highland priest scholar. Yet, this "scholar's" burly physique, fierce demeanor, bloodstained copper armor, copper axe, and his somewhat confused expression akin to a Siberian Husky, inadvertently gave away his true nature.

"Hmm... The dots and circles are time-related counting symbols of the Maya. The serpent and bird patterns are divine records of significant events in ancient times, typically marking the succession of a new city-state leader or disasters like eclipses and floods."

"Hmm... As for the specifics... these lines and dots that appear most frequently should be floods! In this absent-river Maya lowland, floods are the most common disaster! And this round one, is there a problem with the sun? Why is there a bird head flying next to the sun? How does a star fall down and become a serpent?"

"Damn it! What kind of bewildering stuff is this! Wuta! Wuta! Where is the temple Maya priest? Bring them to me!"

"Uh, chief, are you talking about those long-headed, narrow-eyed priests?... They're all dead! During the previous Chief Divine Grand Festival, didn't you say to sacrifice them all, leaving none?... They're all for the new Maya warriors to present their allegiances!"

Red-haired trusted aide Wuta rubbed his eyes, glanced at the mysterious, peculiar, elongated stone stele, then looked at the pretending scholar, the chief gazing upward in the rain, unable to resist whispering a complaint.

"Chief, you're as brave as a bear, as fierce as a wolf. If the bird demon, snake monster on the stele jumped out, they'd be chopped into seven-eight sections by your two swords and three axes! But now that they're hidden within the stele, transformed into bizarre patterns, there's nothing that can be done about it!"

"Bore witness, Chief Divine! You're top-notch in combat, archery, and chopping people! But when it comes to reading and interpreting these mindless patterns, you're like a black bear in the dark trying to spot black ants—blind as a bat! In my opinion, it'd be better to push it over in one go and see if anything changes, if some weird underground demon pops out!"

"Damn it! You uncultured fool! Get out!!"

Upon hearing this, Black Wolf Torc glared and angrily kicked his trusted aide Wuta, sending him tumbling away. Wuta nimbly rolled on the ground for over ten circles, then quickly stood up, grinning.

"Chief! It was you who told me to roll! While the brothers are reveling and looting, I should also enjoy myself, find some valuable gold and silver jewels..."

"Come back!"

Upon hearing this, Black Wolf Torc furrowed his brow, observing the situation in the stone-carved city. Ten days ago, he seized the opportunity during the Maya sacrificial New Year festival, leading his army in a surprise attack, breaking through the stone-carved city where the Tail Feather Divine Descendants had gathered! Thousands of Black Wolf Army rushed in, slaughtering two thousand Tail Feather warriors and militia, capturing over two thousand Divine Descendants and warriors, virtually rounding up the entire Tail Feather Clan's Divine Descendants and warriors!

Subsequently, Black Wolf hesitated no longer, immediately summoning the War Priest, holding a grand blood festival! This grand blood festival lasted seven consecutive days, sacrificing all the ruling Tail Feather Clan's Divine Descendant priests and nobility warriors, forcibly converting a thousand surrendered Maya warriors, along with tens of thousands of Maya tribes surrounding the stone-carved city, until it officially ended three days ago!

After this grand war and festival, the nearly ten thousand-member Tail Feather Clan was effectively erased, leaving not a single surviving Divine Descendant bloodline! As word of this dreadful annihilation of an entire clan's Divine Descendants spread far and wide, the entire Lowland Maya nobility were inevitably terrified, fearing Black Wolf as the chief of the end-times demon!

The rain grew heavier, washing away traces of the sacrificial bloodstains from the past few days, forming dark red streams. These streams flowed through fallen corpses, passed by the ax-chopped temples, ran through palaces burned by great fires, trickled past a large stretch of dilapidated shacks, finally gathering at the breach in the low city wall and rushing out toward the low terrain beyond the north gate of the city. Further away was the kingdom camp established along the reservoirs and small lakes north of the city.

"Damn it! This sudden downpour, these clueless dumb wolves! Didn't you see the blood flowing into the reservoirs? The weather is so hot, according to what His Highness said, there will be many invisible evil insects that will trigger a plague in the army!"

Black Wolf furrowed his brows, scanning the surrounding terrain, selected a small hill in the west, and instructed Wuta.

"Wuta, don't just think about looting; stay by my side. Rewards are surely coming your way. Those camp captains and flag team leaders, which of them doesn't scramble to offer you benefits?... After a sacrificial festival, the Canine Descendants have plundered for three days, it's about time they stopped."

"Go! Take twenty trusted aides, raise my flag! Order all camps to return to camp from the city! Also, arrange for a thousand newly surrendered and converted Maya warriors to drive the thousands of tribesmen in the city to conduct a thorough cleanup, bury all the corpses on the western hill!"

"Ah, and! You personally lead five hundred elite troops and supervise that thousand Maya warrior camp! These Maya wolf cubs were just forcefully converted; hundreds went mad, two hundred committed suicide, and the remaining thousand are dead in spirit, needing strong soldiers to keep them in check!"

"By the chief divine's witness! After a couple more battles, some backbone being promoted, a few raids, and the war priest spreading some teachings, only then will this camp be roughly usable! These Maya warriors, blinded by the old gods, lack any real spirit. Training them to be obedient little wolf cubs is such a slow process! Just like another camp of a thousand Maya warriors we had, it took half a year of training before they were roughly usable... Once we advance eastward again, we'll leave that camp stationed here, and supplement it with five hundred of our core troops!"

"Yes, chief!"

Upon hearing about the unseen plague of evil insects, Wuta, the trusted aide, shivered. In marching and warfare, one always encounters such bloodless fatalities, necessitating strict adherence to the divine laws personally established by the Great Chief of the God of Death: boiling water before drinking, centralized waste disposal, timely burial of bodies, and the like. As for the newly converted Maya warriors, Wuta was somewhat unimpressed.

"Ha! These strange-looking jungle warriors utterly incompetent and so bothersome... Dying at every turn, isn't it just coercion... Ha! Reluctant in battle, equally unenthusiastic about meals, and still worship the Goddess of Suicide. It's bizarre that such tribes managed to endure for two thousand years!... Ha! Toss them into the wilderness, and they wouldn't survive a generation before being wiped out by the allied tribes..."

"Shut up, get back to work!"

"Yes, chief!"

Wuta promptly rolled on the spot and dashed away. After such a disruption, Black Wolf Torc lost interest in continuing to look at the "Divine Stele." He shook his head regretfully and let out a long sigh.

"Ah! Just a little more, and I might have understood it... Alas, the army duties are pressing! I must return to arrange the camps..."

With a long sigh, Black Wolf Torc turned and left, heading back to the large camp north of the city. Spring had arrived in the Lowland Maya, and after this sequence of battles, sacrifices, and rain, the water in the reservoirs was evidently not very clean. Without flowing rivers in the Maya lands, clean drinking water was the principal problem, making reservoirs the most fundamental infrastructure in a city-state!

Black Wolf even had some insight that the reason those Maya tribe warriors and tribespeople were so obedient to the Divine Descendants, without any thought of rebellion, was likely because the Maya Divine Descendants monopolized knowledge transmission, understood numerical calculations, knew how to build long-lasting and reliable reservoirs, could preliminarily predict rainfall, and designed irrigation channels for agriculture! In this environment prone to floods and lacking surface water sources, without the knowledgeable Divine Descendants, without architectural and mathematical legacies, Maya city-states would gradually become wild and barbaric, much like the Putun tribes of Central Maya...

"By the chief divine's witness! In the jungles of the Lowland Maya, water sources are indeed severely scarce! Your Highness repeatedly emphasized that in the Maya lands, epidemic prevention and sanitation must be regarded as the most critical tasks, sometimes even more important than warfare!"

"I must strictly enforce discipline in each camp, maintaining sanitation across all camps, especially chopping firewood to dry, boiling water before drinking... Yet managing these fighting wolf cubs to pay attention to sanitation is much more troublesome than leading them into siege warfare! Forget it, these wolf cubs probably can't manage at all. It's better to relocate the army's large camp and return to the northern coastal tail village to station!"

"And when we conquer the Maya coast, taking the warriors to Cuba to confront the white-skinned demons with plagues, it would be even more necessary!... Hmm? I wonder if the evil demon predicted by His Highness has actually appeared?"

Black Wolf Torc was pondering when another red-haired trusted aide came running urgently. Focusing his gaze, he realized it was one of his trusted aides stationed sixty miles north at the tail village, a warrior of Totonac origin, Leopard Head Kepili.

"Leopard Head! I stationed you at the tail village, why are you here running in such a rush? Is it the Luchong clan from the eastern coast that attacked? Or has the Canul lineage from the west rebelled?"

"Huff! Huff! Chief, it's neither..."

Leopard Head Kepili was panting heavily, and his jaguar helmet, the emblem of a warrior, dangled messily behind him. He had run sixty miles from morning till night just to deliver that astonishing news to the chief at Stone Engraving City as soon as possible...

"By the chief divine's protection! What on earth has happened?"

"Huff! Chief... it's the returning Maya fleet from Cuba... the merchant fleet of the Yan Island Maya nobility!"

"What, the merchant fleet from Cuba? Ah! Could it be?!..."

"Yes! Exactly! They brought back news of the appearance of white-skinned demons, and also brought over a dozen furry, big-bearded heads of the demons!"

"Ah! Demon heads!!"

Upon hearing this, Black Wolf Torc instantly turned around, looking fiercely and sharply towards the northern coast like a head wolf. After a moment, he decisively gave the order.

"Someone! Notify the two thousand-man camps!... Tomorrow at dawn, march north with me to the tail village!"