[Lightscreen]
[In truth, much like the impact of the Black Death on Europe, the great epidemic at the end of the Han dynasty functioned in exactly the same way.
Heroes died young. Grand ambitions went unrealized. Feuds remained unresolved. Yet all of these were nothing more than the aftershocks of the epidemic itself.
The Holocene climatic optimum ended three thousand years ago. What followed was the first cold period in nearly five thousand years, which the Western Zhou encountered head on.
This cold period ended during the Spring and Autumn era, after which the land of Huaxia entered a warm phase lasting nearly four hundred years.
During this warm phase, ancient China completed the unification of the pre Qin era and achieved the flourishing age of the Two Han dynasties.
But as that warm phase came to an end, the harsh turn in climate directly raised the cost of living and reduced grain yields. Cold weather, along with the countless civilians who collapsed and died due to forces beyond their control, became the most fertile breeding ground for epidemics.
Ancient feudal dynasties, constrained by limited productivity, were extraordinarily fragile in the face of natural disasters. A simple drop in temperature alone was enough to send an entire dynasty toward its end.
Yet the rising tide of epidemics did not prompt ancient people to value medical care or hygiene.
When common folk faced the terror of disease and starvation, the first force to break through the chaos was the Way of Great Peace.
The earth shaking declaration of the Great Virtuous Teacher, that Heaven was dead and the Yellow Heaven would rise, was merely the final result. The true beginning lay in the Scripture of Great Peace.
Today, when speaking of the Dao, people often say that Daoist philosophy and Daoist religion are two different things.
So how did Daoist thought become religion?
The answer lies in the Scripture of Great Peace.
During the reign of Emperor Cheng of Han, a man named Gan Zhongke proclaimed that the Han dynasty's mandate had reached its end, and that if the Han were to continue, it must receive a new command from Heaven.
Faced with such a figure who openly defied the heavens and misled the people, Emperor Cheng wasted no words. Gan Zhongke was thrown into prison and ultimately died there of illness.
However, the work he authored, the Baoyuan Scripture of Great Peace, survived.
This text was the first to construct a structured heavenly court system, assigning duties to deities, and it pioneered the model of immortals descending to personally transmit sacred scriptures. Countless later imitators followed in his footsteps.
Modern people are hardly unfamiliar with this approach. It is essentially concept hype, gathering followers, borrowing a shell to go public. It simply happened to be much harder to execute in a feudal age.
But by Emperor Cheng's time, the Western Han was already nearing its end. The lives of the common people could not quite be called living in fire and water. It was more accurate to say they survived one day at a time.
The Han court was already overwhelmed by its own troubles and had no capacity to manage the quietly rising religious currents among the populace.
By the time of Emperor Shun of Eastern Han, a man from Langye named Gong Chong traveled to the capital and presented a divine book obtained by his teacher Yu Ji, the Scripture of Great Peace. Only then did the Way of Great Peace truly complete its revival.
Over more than a hundred years, the Scripture of Great Peace had diverged greatly from Gan Zhongke's original version. After generations of additions and refinements, for the people of the late Eastern Han, the Scripture of Great Peace had become indistinguishable from a divine revelation.
Beyond the heavenly court and immortals fabricated by Gan Zhongke, later generations fused concepts such as the belief that all things possess spirits, karmic reward and retribution, reverence for Heaven and Earth, and obedience to the Five Phases into a single system. They proposed the grand vision of a world of Great Peace, which also included longevity, ascension to immortality, rituals of supplication, talismanic water, and many other elements.
Such content perfectly suited the times, and it quickly gained a massive popular foundation among the people of the Han. By the end of the Han, the individual who mastered the Scripture of Great Peace most thoroughly was named Zhang Jiao.
Building upon the foundations laid by those before him, Zhang Jiao formally established the Way of Great Peace. He divided the organization into thirty six regions and appointed canal commanders. From that point onward, the followers of Great Peace transformed from scattered individuals into a nationwide religious organization.
As the climate of the late Han grew colder still, the ruling class descended further into excess, and the feudal era's woefully inadequate medical systems suffered repeated defeats against epidemics, the man who best understood this scripture, Zhang Jiao, was ultimately pushed to raise the banner calling for the death of the Han.
The Yellow Turban Uprising lasted only nine months before collapsing, yet it officially tore open the curtain on the fall of the Eastern Han.
What Zhang Jiao could never have imagined was that the struggle between religion and epidemics had only just begun with him.]
Within Ganlu Hall, the first thought to leap into Li Shimin's mind was this.
Did their act of watching the light screen of later generations count as immortals transmitting scriptures?
He lifted his head, and the first thing he saw was the ceiling of Ganlu Hall.
Yet his gaze seemed to pierce straight through it and into the firmament beyond.
In the Great Tang of today, above were the heavenly court and ranks of gods, below were the officials of the underworld. This had already become a tacitly accepted consensus.
But now Li Shimin knew that there was no heavenly court above. There was only endless abyssal void, stars vast beyond comprehension, and the Heaven Palace constructed by later generations of Huaxia themselves.
And yes, among the stars, there also seemed to be enemies watching this world.
Even so, as Li Shimin watched the evolution of the Scripture of Great Peace, he could not help feeling puzzled. Did the Eastern Han really not investigate the source at all when receiving such a text?
Back in the Western Han, Gan Zhongke had clearly been branded a deluder who deceived the people and defied authority, someone rightly executed.
Yet a hundred years later, his successors were welcomed as honored guests of the imperial court. If Gan Zhongke were aware of this in the underworld, who knew what he would think.
Because of this, a certain idea within Li Shimin's mind slowly began to take shape. But for the moment, he could not quite put it into words. Instead, he drifted into a daze, silently turning over thoughts about religion again and again.
…
Among the people of late Han Chang'an, emotions were far more complex.
At this moment, they truly wished they could pull the descendant on the other side of the light screen over and speak face to face.
The chaos of their age was a tangled mess of warfare, natural disasters, and heretical doctrines misleading the people. Liu Bei and Zhang Fei in particular had risen to prominence by resisting the Yellow Turbans.
Now, hearing later generations methodically unravel the past of the Way of Great Peace and analyze the age from a perspective unique to the future, everyone felt as though enlightenment had struck like a sudden awakening.
"Zhang Jiao is dead. Praise or blame no longer reaches him."
Kongming spoke softly. Then, almost immediately, a trace of interest appeared in his eyes.
"But because of the Way of Great Peace, we can understand the reason behind the people's suffering."
After the Yellow Turban Uprising, so called remnants of the Yellow Turbans had long been targets of strict suppression by regional governors.
In especially harsh regions, collective punishment was even used to eradicate them entirely.
When Kongming and Pang Tong had earlier discussed the livelihoods of the people in Yi Province and Jing Province, Pang Tong had once remarked that under Duke Xuande's rule, Yellow Turbans had completely vanished.
Kongming had responded with only a quiet sigh.
"In Jing and Yi, the people are fed. The strong have fields to plow. Merchants have trade to conduct. Women have cloth to weave. Why would anyone seek ghosts and gods?"
He could not articulate those later expressions refined over a thousand years, but Kongming felt the same clarity he had experienced earlier when listening to the discourse on great clans.
In the exercise of power, when the state retreats, local strongmen advance.
And so it is with livelihood. When granaries are full, Yellow Turbans retreat. When granaries are empty, chaos arrives on its own.
For the people of Jing and Yi today, rather than praying to ghosts and gods, it was better to honestly farm the land, learn a couple of practical skills, and if one had spare money, even try sitting down with merchants to drink tea and learn the ways of trade.
Was that not far more useful than the Way of Great Peace?