The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1)

by R.F. Kuang

“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”

The national quest to modernize and mobilize entails a faith in one’s ability to control world order, and when that happens, you lose your connection with the gods. 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 had been skimping on meditating. She was supposed to keep a meditation log, to document each time she made it to the end of an hour successfully. But as coursework from her other classes piled up, Rin had neglected her daily requisite period of doing nothing. “I don’t see the point,” she said. “If it’s focus that you want, I can give you focus. I can concentrate on anything. But to empty my mind? To be devoid of all thought? All sense of self? What good does that serve?” “It serves to sever you from the material world,” Jiang answered.

But this—viciousness on this scale, wanton slaughter of this magnitude, against innocents who hadn’t even lifted a finger in self-defense, this she could not imagine doing. They surrendered, she wanted to scream at her disappeared enemy. They dropped their weapons. They posed no threat to you. Why did you have to do this? A rational explanation eluded her. Because the answer could not be rational. It was not founded in military strategy. It was not because of a shortage of food rations, or because of the risk of insurgency or backlash. It was, simply, what happened when one race decided that the other was insignificant.