The sun had not yet broken the horizon when Ubirajara reached the outskirts of the village, where the dense forest opened into a natural clearing of beaten earth, interlaced by exposed roots.
The air was heavy with the scent of the night-soaked earth, and dew dripped slowly from the broad leaves of the native banana trees, falling in silence. In that bluish twilight, he sought neither meditation nor any kind of spiritual communion.
What he looked for there was to overcome the limits of his own body.
Ubirajara positioned himself between two thick-trunked trees, separated by just over forty long paces. He breathed in deeply, letting the cold air invade his lungs, and then exploded into movement.
The first burst was violent. His feet struck the ground with brute force, demanding maximum power from his body.
For brief moments, there was no thought, only action. He ran, crouched, jumped, and threw his body weight to the ground in rapid push-ups, feeling the blood pound in his temples and his chest burn.
When the effort reached its limit, he allowed himself only a few moments of recovery. He walked slowly, breathing in a controlled manner, before throwing himself back into the chaos of the effort.
His purpose was the sudden explosion: to run, to fight, to kill, and to recover fast enough to do it all over again.
His body needed to obey even under exhaustion.
Ubirajara breathed deeply, letting the fatigue settle into his body, and thought of the civilization that once dominated the Mediterranean Sea.
The Romans of the Republican period were not the fastest, nor the strongest. They did not win by fury or individual talent.
They won because they did not break. They marched for thousands of kilometers under sun, rain, and mud, and when they finally reached their destination, without rest or relief, they still had the strength to raise walls, dig trenches, and organize camps that looked like cities sprouted from the earth.
They operated at the edge of the body's limits, and yet they maintained the readiness to fight.
That was the key aspect. Not speed. Not courage. But the most underestimated characteristic: resilience.
Cesar understood this better than anyone else. After marching from Gaul to the Rubicon with troops exhausted from the campaign, he did not stop and did not retreat. He dared to cross the river and put Rome in a state of panic.
Not because his men were rested, but because they were ready. Fatigue did not prevent them from acting. This was the resolution Ubirajara sought for himself and for the professional army he intended to create.
An army capable of walking to the ends of hell and, upon arriving there, still having the breath to fight.
Sweat flowed freely, and the heat radiating from his skin created a thin mist in the cold morning air. More than muscles and breath, that training molded the mind. Discipline. Control. Will.
When war ceased to be an improvisation and became an institution, others would follow the same rhythm.
With his heart still hammering against his ribs, Ubirajara left the clearing and walked towards the flooded plains.
The village was beginning to wake up. Low voices, smoke rising timidly between the houses, the first movement of the day.
The sun, at length, touched the ears of the Oryza glumaepatula. The native rice with reddish grains that they had begun to cultivate systematically. The stalks swayed gently, reflecting the golden light in the calm waters of the floodplain.
Ubirajara watched in silence. That discreet grain, rooted in the mud, had the potential to change everything. He observed the women approaching to maintain the plots and reflected on the structure of the Tupi peoples.
The Tupis were not an isolated nation, but an immense and complex set of interconnected peoples and villages.
The connection between these villages allowed for cultural and technological exchange that flowed through forest trails and river paths.
What was most impressive to Ubirajara was that all of this functioned without the need for a centralized state or a heavy bureaucracy.
It was an organic network of cooperation and kinship.
He reflected on how this tendency to migrate and integrate was inherent to human nature, a constant search for new horizons and better conditions.
This vision was the direct opposite of the expectations of a certain fascist he had known in his past life. That man actively sought to make people's lives difficult, using violence, threats, and walls to contain the human flow.
It was a perverse cycle: first, the powers destabilized peripheral countries, leaving people with no choice but to abandon their ruined lands, only to be received with hatred and repression in the metropolis.
There, among the Tupis, migration was the blood that kept the culture alive, a truth that fascism would never be able to understand or accept.
This migratory dynamic brought, in those days, about sixty refugees to the village. They were people who had escaped the violent advances of the Tapuia groups, who lived in constant conflict on the borders of the territory.
These new residents were not just mouths to feed, but carriers of new stories and arms ready for work.
With the increase in external conflicts, exchange between the villages of the Tupi complex became even more frequent, helping to transform the village into a strategic point of convergence and defense.
The morning silence was broken by an uproar coming from the main entrance of the village. Guaraci appeared leading a group of warriors who exhaled a mixture of fatigue and triumph.
They brought with them several specimens of Mutum, birds of deep black plumage and elegant crests, struggling inside baskets of woven straw.
Under Ubirajara's prior instructions, the warriors led the birds to an enclosure made of wood and vines, built with stakes driven deep into the clay soil.
"Perfect, Guaraci. Now we will have eggs for breakfast every day," Ubirajara said, approaching and examining the health of the captured birds.
He continued, explaining to the warrior leader that the Mutum would provide not only eggs and meat, but also feathers for ornaments and arrows, in addition to helping control insects in the nearby plantations.
Guaraci, surprised by the number of uses for what he saw only as common prey, widened his eyes.
"So many things? Why didn't you say that in the meeting? I would have worked harder to capture many more if I knew about these benefits," Guaraci replied, crossing his arms with an expression of slight indignation.
A nerve pulsed in Ubirajara's forehead and he took a deep breath before answering with a firm voice.
"I mentioned exactly all of this in the meeting, Guaraci. However, you weren't paying the slightest bit of attention because you were too busy scribbling strange drawings on the paper I gave you."
Guaraci felt his face flush and, embarrassed, looked away to the right, pretending to observe one of the birds.
He noticed that the other warriors who had participated in the capture operation began to laugh quietly, exchanging complicit glances.
"What are you laughing at? Get back to work, we still have to reinforce the base of the enclosure!" the leader shouted, rebuking them to hide his own mistake, while Ubirajara walked away with a slight ironic smile on his face.
Ubirajara then went to meet the shaman. They met near a clay bank where the artisans were testing new mixtures.
The conversation revolved around the transition from utilitarian ceramics to construction materials. Ubirajara introduced the technique of adobe bricks, blocks of clay earth mixed with straw and sun-dried, which would allow for the construction of structures much more durable than those made of straw and wood.
"With these bricks, we will build a community center," Ubirajara explained to the shaman. "A place to gather the children and teach them mathematics, the Tupi characters we are systematizing, and also a space to manage the village and train our military in advanced tactics."
He laid out his social strategy for the refugees. Instead of allowing the Tapuias to build their large traditional malocas, where the old collective organization would remain intact and difficult to influence, the village would build individual adobe houses for them.
"If we keep them in smaller family units under our architecture, we will facilitate assimilation. We will introduce our characters and our culture gradually, transforming them into part of our people without them noticing the transition."
Ubirajara had stylized the numerals in a new way, escaping the Indo-Arabic patterns known in Europe.
"If one day the foreigners from across the great sea arrive here and see numbers that resemble those of the Arabs, they will think their old enemies have already been here. This could motivate a bloody holy war, a Tupiniquim version of the Iberian Reconquista, motivated by their religious fanaticism. Our symbols must be unique, protecting our origin."
Tupi mathematics was based on the standard arithmetic taught in schools, the only difference being the stylization. The shaman proved why he was the shaman; his memory and logical reasoning were very good, quickly mastering the four basic operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
He would be the central pillar in spreading this knowledge, ensuring that every child in the village knew how to calculate harvests and construction proportions.
While they talked, the first bricks were being molded. Ubirajara showed an architectural drawing on a tanned skin, highlighting the thermal properties of adobe.
The houses would be much cooler during the day and would conserve heat at night, providing a comfort that the straw houses could not offer.
His plans included a paper factory made of macerated embira fibers and, in the future, a mill near the river to harness hydraulic power.
The conversation then turned to the local fauna. "The domestication of the tapirs is our next great challenge," Ubirajara commented. "They are magnificent animals, but extremely stubborn and require a considerable amount of food. If we can train them for carrying cargo and even as mounts in swampy terrain, our logistics will be unbeatable. The benefit of the meat and the thick leather is also incalculable, but we will need vast enclosures and a lot of patience."
He also mentioned the start of research into metallurgy, looking for the right kinds of stones that indicated the presence of metals.
Ubirajara knew that if progress continued at that rate, the village would stop being just a cluster of hunters and gatherers to become the largest Tupi settlement in the region, potentially evolving into a true city-state.
To consolidate this expansion, he began to plan an ambitious expedition. They needed to create a detailed map of the region, identifying all the villages of the Tupi-Guarani complex and seeking a safe route that would lead them to the ocean.
The ocean was the final goal, the frontier they needed to know before any invader did.
At the end of the afternoon, Ubirajara found Tainá by the river. They played in the shallow waters, laughing and forgetting for a moment the responsibilities of leadership.
While resting on the sand, they watched a group of tapirs playing in the water, diving and stirring up the bottom of the river.
Ubirajara noticed how the fish followed the animals to eat what was stirred up from the bed.
"Look, Tainá, nature shows us the way. If we create fenced areas in the river itself, we can control the feeding of the fish and always have them at hand. We can do aquaculture right here," he said, his eyes shining at yet another possibility for innovation.
The day ended with the sight of the first batches of adobe bricks completely dry and stacked. The foundations of the community center were already marked on the ground, and the construction plans were officially beginning.
The seed of the Tupi city-state had been planted.