The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

“If you exist, if you’re up there, help me. Give me a way out of this shithole. Or if you can’t do that, give the import inspector a heart attack.”

This is how I pray lol

“Hello,” she said. “I’m praying.” “Please leave,” he said.

Rin to a monk.

Over the next fifteen minutes, the physician’s assistant explained in detail the changes going on in Rin’s body, pointing to various places on the diagram and making some very vivid gestures with her hands. “So you’re not dying, sweetheart, your body is just shedding your uterine lining.” Rin’s jaw had been hanging open for a solid minute. “What the fuck?”

But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.

100% agreed

“How does the doctrine of separation of church and state affect Hesperian politics? Why is this doctrine ironic?”

Hello America

The Militia is composed almost entirely of people like Jun, who think that things matter only if they are getting results immediately, results that can be duplicated and reused.

When Hesperians wrote of “God,” they wrote of the supernatural. When Jiang talked of “gods,” he talked of the eminently natural.

On the eighth day, a battalion of Federation soldiers landed at the port of Muriden and decimated the city. When resisted by province Militia, they ordered that all the males in Muriden, children and babies included, be rounded up and shot.

“Don’t you want to see the face of the enemy?” Kitay asked. “No, I don’t,” she said. “Because then I might think they’re human. And they’re not human. We’re talking about the people who gave opium to toddlers the last time they invaded. The people who massacred Speer.” “Maybe they’re more human than we realize,” said Kitay.

at the end of the day whoever is alive is the side that wins. War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”

She wondered if Hesperians were really pale-skinned and covered with fur, if their hair was really carrot red.

Their government sent a ship for them. Nearly tipped over, they were trying to cram so many people in.

Rin remembered what Kitay had said about calling on Hesperia for aid, and snorted. “They think that’s helping?” “They’re Hesperians,” said Qara. “They always think they’re helping.”

“I’ll deal with the Warlords,” Altan said. “You just keep making those shit bombs.”

All she could register was how young he looked. He was not a hardened, trained soldier. This might have been his first combat engagement. He hadn’t even thought to draw his weapon.

Rin saw them boil to death before her very eyes, skin scalded bubbling red like crab shells, and then bursting; cooked inside and out, eyes bulging in their death throes.

“I am nothing to the glory that is the Emperor. By his favor I am made clean. By his grace I am given purpose. It is an honor to serve. It is an honor to live. It is an honor to die. For Ryohai. For Ryohai. For—” Altan stepped lightly across the charred helm. Flames licked around his legs, engulfed him, but they could not hurt him. The captain lifted his sword to his neck.

Japanese Seppuku

It was the first time Rin had gotten a good look at the Mugenese outside the chaos of a melee, and she was disappointed by how very similar they looked to the Nikara. The slant of their eyes and the shape of their mouths were nowhere near as pronounced as the textbooks reported. Their hair was the same pitch-black as Nezha’s, their skin as pale as any northerner’s. In fact, they looked more like Sinegardians than Rin and Altan did.

Aside from their language, which was more clipped and rapid than Sinegardian Nikara, they were virtually indistinguishable from the Nikara themselves. It disturbed her that the Federation soldiers so closely resembled her own people. She would have preferred a faceless, monstrous enemy, or one that was entirely foreign, like the pale-haired Hesperians across the sea.

The delegate raised an eyebrow. “Alas, the Emperor Ryohai has no intentions of abandoning his designs on the Nikara continent. Expansion onto the continent is the divine right of the glorious Federation of Mugen.

Kill me if you like. On the longbow island, we are taught that our lives are meaningless. I am only one in a horde of millions. I will die, and I will be reincarnated again in the Emperor Ryohai’s service. But for you, heretics who do not bow to the divine throne, death will be final.”

“The third line, divided. The end of the day has come. The net has been cast on the setting sun. This spells misfortune.” Rin felt a sudden chill. The end of an era, the setting sun on a country . . . she hardly needed Chaghan to interpret that for her. “We’re not going to win this war, are we?” she asked the Talwu.

Golyn Niis was a city of corpses. The bodies had been arranged deliberately, as if the Federation had wanted to leave a greeting message for the next people to walk into the city. The destruction possessed a strange artfulness, a sadistic symmetry. Corpses were piled in neat, even rows, forming pyramids of ten, then nine, then eight. Corpses were stacked against the wall. Corpses were placed across the street in tidy lines. Corpses were arranged as far as the eye could see.

The Federation handiwork became more elaborate the deeper they traveled into the city. Close to the city square, the Federation had arrayed the corpses in states of incredible desecration, grotesque positions that defied human imagination. Corpses nailed to boards. Corpses hung by their tongues from hooks. Corpses dismembered in every possible way; headless, limbless, displaying mutilations that must have been performed while the victim was still alive. Fingers removed, then stacked in a small pile beside stubby hands. An entire line of castrated men, severed penises placed delicately on their slack-jawed mouths.

Nanjing

There were so many beheadings. Heads stacked up in neat little piles,

“They were buried,” he said, disgusted. “They were buried up to the waist and set upon by dogs.”

A family, arms still around each other, impaled upon the same spear. Babies lying at the bottoms of vats, their skin a horrible shade of crimson, floating in the water in which they’d boiled to death.

he convulsed, sank to his knees, and could not keep walking. This was not Altan’s first genocide. This is Speer again, Rin thought. Altan must have been imagining the massacre of Speer in his mind, imagining the way his people were slaughtered overnight like cattle.

“Have you seen Nezha?” Kitay finally asked. “I heard he was being shipped to Khurdalain.” Rin opened her mouth to respond, but a horrible prickling feeling spread from the bridge of her nose to under her eyes, and then she was choking under wild, heaving sobs, and she couldn’t form any words at all. Kitay said nothing, just held his arms out in wordless sympathy. She collapsed into them. It was absurd that he should be comforting her, that she should be the one crying, after all that Kitay had survived. But Kitay was numb; for Kitay the suffering had been normalized, and he couldn’t grieve any more than he already had. He was still holding her when Qara ducked into the tent.

I don't know, I think Rin is stronger than that.

But they came at night, and they . . . they captured Irjah. They flayed him alive over the city wall so that everyone could see.

“Pathetic,” he spat, and Rin agreed with him. The idea that the Empress had fled from a city while her people were burned, killed, murdered, raped went against everything Rin had been taught about warfare. A general did not abandon his soldiers. An Empress did not abandon her people.

The Federation had fun. They made it a sport. They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground. They had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour. They raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.”

“Did you know they called us public toilets?” Venka asked suddenly. Rin stopped two paces from the door. Comprehension dawned on her, and her blood turned to ice. “What?” “They thought I couldn’t understand Mugini,” Venka said with a horrifying attempt at a chuckle. “That’s what they called me, when they were in me.”

“Do you know how badly it hurt? They were in me, they were in me for hours and they wouldn’t stop. I blacked out over and over but every time I awoke they were still going, a different man would be on top of me, or maybe the same man . . . they were all the same after a while. It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.” Rin’s mouth filled with the taste of bile. “I’m so sorry—” she tried, but Venka didn’t seem to hear her. “I’m not the worst,” Venka said. “I fought back. I was trouble. So they saved me for last. They wanted to break me first. They made me watch. I saw women disemboweled. I saw the soldiers slice off their breasts. I saw them nail women alive to walls. I saw them mutilate young girls, when they had tired of their mothers. If their vaginas were too small, they cut them open to make it easier to rape them.” Venka’s voice rose in pitch. “There was a pregnant woman in the house with us. She was seven months to term. Eight. At first the soldiers let her live so she’d take care of us. Wash us. Feed us. She was the only kind face in that house. They didn’t touch her because she was pregnant, not at first. Then one day the general decided he’d had enough of the other girls. He came for her. You’d think she’d have learned by then, after watching what the soldiers did to us. You’d think she would know there wasn’t any point in resisting.” Rin didn’t want to hear any more. She wanted to bury her head under her arms and block everything out. But Venka continued, as if...

It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant.

And if your opponent was not human, if your opponent was a cockroach, what did it matter how many of them you killed? What was the difference between crushing an ant and setting an anthill on fire? Why shouldn’t you pull wings off insects for your own enjoyment? The bug might feel pain, but what did that matter to you?

Her legs were stiff; the one she lay on was numb from lack of blood flow, and when she shifted so that it would regain feeling, it hurt like a thousand needles were being slowly inserted into her foot.

“I am Eyimchi Shiro, chief medical officer of this camp. You may call me Dr. Shiro.”

Surgeon General Shirō Ishii was a Japanese microbiologist and army medical officer who served as the director of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Shiro sighed. “Is it not obvious?” He patted her cheek. “I want knowledge. Our work here will advance medical technology by decades. When else do you get such a good chance to do research? An endless supply of cadavers! Boundless opportunities for experimentation! I can answer every question I’ve ever had about the human body! I can devise ways to prevent death!”

The death of one soldier was a tragedy, because she could imagine the pain he felt at the very end: the hopes he had, the finest details like the way he put on his uniform, whether he had a family, whether he had kids whom he told he would see right after he came back from the war. His life was an entire world constructed around him, and the passing of that was a tragedy. But she could not possibly multiply that by thousands. That kind of thinking did not compute. The scale was unimaginable. So she didn’t bother to try. The part of her that was capable of considering that no longer worked. Those weren’t lives. They were numbers. They were a necessary subtraction.