The four Sheowon worked like a well-oiled machine, converting what looked like little more than grass and dirt into bricks of fuel. This was the foundation of their current civilization, allowing them to heat their homes and cook their food.One of the four stood on the ridge they were harvesting, using Blood to make long cuts down into the turf. The second stood at the bottom of the ridge, cutting into it to free the long brick, which the third physically tossed up to the fourth, who caught it and stacked it to dry. After a while, the two Blood users and the two Brawn users would switch, keeping the whole team relatively fresh as they worked strip by strip of turf from the ridge.This was one of the clearest examples of the Sheowon using their Blood solo, proving that they could, and that they had actually grown their individual Blood stats from using the Blood Bond. Like the elders and Ushem’s quartet, these Sheowon working in the peat were older. Young Sheowon wouldn’t have the Blood to do this as efficiently.While efficient, the use of Blood really only supplanted the use of hand tools, and was limited both in who could use it and for how long. This was a big limiting factor, but those limits are also what maintained the relative sustainability of the practice.The details were hazy, since I hadn’t ever used peat for fuel myself, but I recalled that peat mining was bad for the ecosystem. I had much clearer memories about the uses of comparable fuels from Earth; how deforestation and coal extraction could snowball, particularly through industrialization.Peat was technically renewable, like firewood, but at an even slower scale. Even with such a small local population, I could see the legacy of generations of digging, a visible scar on the bog. As long as they were limited to working by hand—even with Blood—it was a scar that healed, but it was still visible.I couldn’t hold it against the Sheowon. The fact that this had (...)