* You've Been Cheating A Bit On Technology Advances... *

There are just a few bits of data to go over before we get back to the main story.

Those "daily life" tasks that have occupied your time while you waited for the second unit of Jaguar Warriors to be trained and winnowed down from the starting 20 hopefuls to the hardened core of 10 victors included sitting in judgment on a number of legal disputes and even **** cases. Because of your eidetic memory, you have been able to give very consistent judgments and rulings, which you have had the researchers in the Caves of Wisdom use as test beds for their "Writing" research. Because of this, you have been able to 'cheat' a bit on researching another advance that you want to finish ASAP: "Code Of Laws". You estimate you have actually made five times as much progress on "Code of Laws" as "Writing" itself, because while you can use your memories from what you now think of as "The Old World" to advance "Code of Laws" faster than is natural, you have no idea how Aztec Writing worked in the world you came from.

However, you have been 'cheating' like a fucking BEAST on the advance "Ceremonial Burial". You are not certain how close you are to a breakthrough on that advance, but you know it's come a very long way! You started by just ordering a sanitation measure for dead bodies, saying they had to be buried in a 6'×4'×6' pit to discourage disease and scavenging, but then you began attending every funeral, and laying flowers and a bowl of seeds on the grave. You tested your progress last year, excusing yourself from one funeral by carefully building up a huge court docket, but when you snuck out to the graveyard that night you found the flowers and bowl of seeds just as if you'd done it yourself...

More than that though is "Pottery". This advance you didn't just progress a bit faster than 'should' have been possible, you outright did the research yourself! Your Workers have been under instructions to bring back samples from each clay deposit they found while doing road work, and in among the other daily tasks you've been researching which ones worked for Pottery making and how they could be IMPROVED for that task. It's been a long hard slog, but you have recently finished teaching the first potters in the empire what you have learned and when that happened the "Granaries" building order unlocked. (Who knew that grade school art class would have practical applications later in life?)

In a related note, you have also knocked out "The Wheel". Your "Chariots" are more like Fred Flintstone's car as you have no domestic animals large enough to pull them, but Wheelbarrows, Hand Carts, and Rickshaws have brought great benefit to your city, not to mention Potters Wheels for making Pottery.

You haven't made any progress on any other advancements, but now that "Pottery" is squared away your next target is "Bronze Working". You remember that bronze is made from copper and tin, you just have to figure out what tin looks like, find ore of those two metals, learn how to smelt them, and then figure out the ideal mix†...
†(No one ever said it would be EASY!)

Now that those details are out of the way, it's time to figure out where your troops are going...