@daywithoutgames I thought so too while reading, the old men ignore the scream but try to stop Usum from going in the hole. They are either terrified of the being or are trying to tame it for the future using sacrifices, while keeping it a secret to "notGuts".
@Mnuchinboo We actually don’t know when gunpowder was formally invented but it has been around far before the Middle Ages. A Chinese alchemist called Wei Boyang was the first person to give the chemical composition of gunpowder and he wrote it in 142 AD, most archaeologists agree it was discovered some time in China in the first millennium BC, the reason you think it was invented then is because that’s when it moved from just fireworks to weapons and this isn’t the early Bronze Age, the reason I know this is that there was an actual king kirta of the hurrian people who is dated to the late Bronze Age around 1200 BC from his epic and the fact that they are even using bronze scale armour and referenced the Phoenicians is actually a give away. The gunpowder is an anachronism but not an unbelievable one since the way she discovered it and the material were actually freely available.