I didn’t expect to find the tar pits quickly, but with no maps and practically no helpful Uli who would provide directions, it took even longer than I expected.Not that I was in a rush, and time was weird for me now, having experienced so much of it. I wasn’t bothered by the time my journey took me, and on the whole enjoyed it. I fished with my spear, hunted down mantises—half for sport, because fuck the uqandu, and half for their backstraps when I tired of seafood—and explored slowly, careful not to overshoot my destination. If I accidentally sailed past the tar pits, I might never find them.When I found them, though, there was no chance of missing it. The smell from the pits alone was impossible to miss, especially with my sensitive Uli nose.It wasn’t just the smell of the gasses and the asphalt, but also the smell of death. Mirulu and other animals sometimes stepped into these pits, unaware that it would spell their doom, and once stuck would either starve to death or be an easy meal for predators, who in turn would also often get stuck in the tar pits.No doubt the area was rich in fossils of long-dead species, possibly even ancient Uli or their ancestors, and I was incredibly interested in what lay within, but the Uli weren’t advanced enough to care about that sort of thing. Nor were they social enough that I could recruit for a dig, which we didn’t really have the tools for anyway, but could possibly do with Blood techniques.Perhaps in generations, when the local civilization had advanced enough to care about ancient history, they would uncover the trapped relics of biological history and learn about how things came to be.In any case, that wasn’t my goal. I just wanted some of the contents for waterproofing, to make a bigger and better boat. Not that I had any idea how I was going to do that, especially since I also didn’t have tools.First, I needed to find any pitch that had already formed naturally, (...)