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Well, fuck the heavenly order of things. If getting married to a gross old man was her preordained role on this earth, then Rin was determined to rewrite it.
“Do you want to die?” she asked.
Please do not commit spousal homicide.”
She knew their names, of course—the White Tiger, the Black Tortoise, the Azure Dragon, and the Vermilion Bird. And she knew that they represented the four cardinal directions, but they formed only a small subset of the vast pantheon of deities that were worshipped in Nikan. This temple also bore shrines to smaller guardian gods, whose likenesses hung on scrolls draped over the walls.
The Keju keeps the lower classes sedated. It keeps us dreaming. It’s not a ladder for mobility; it’s a way to keep people like me exactly where they were born. The Keju is a drug.”
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
She realized, too, that she felt about praise the way that addicts felt about opium.
Achievement was a high. Failure was worse than withdrawal.
Jiang stretched out his right arm and shoved his sleeve up to the elbow. At first Rin thought that he might punch Jun, but Jiang simply raised his elbow to his mouth and made a loud farting noise. “That’s not written approval.”
“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.
She couldn’t accept that, though. She wanted power, and she wanted it now—especially if they were on the verge of a war with the Mugenese.
“What does it matter? They’re coming, and we’re staying, and 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.”
Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.
Next time she wouldn’t be deadweight.
