Chapter 524: The Hidden Library
Kian had caught one key point in what the old monk said.
"Burned the books? Why would the Son of Heaven burn the books?"
The old monk explained:
"Rulers are political animals, and political animals have political instincts.
"The whole planet had just gone through the Great Forgetting, but that didn't stop those in power from making the decisions that best served their interests.
"The Planetary Governor at the time rode the tide of forgetting. He began burning books, destroying every record of the Imperium, and tearing down every holy statue, and he founded what is now the Eastrise Dynasty.
"He succeeded in sweeping away most of the traces the Imperium had left and built the dynasty we have today, and his descendants have ruled ever since!
"To fill the people's need for faith once the Creed was gone, the Son of Heaven dug an ancient religion out of the surviving texts: Buddhism.
"The Son of Heaven of that time revised it and handed it down as the only lawful religion on the planet.
"And our ancestors, the surviving members of the Ecclesiarchy, went with the tide so the Son of Heaven wouldn't kill them. They all shaved their heads and became monks, and they preached that he was the Golden Sun!
"The Son of Heaven was delighted to be called the Golden Sun. What he didn't know was that the Golden Sun we spoke of wasn't him, but the true Master of Mankind!
"And so, for nearly four hundred years, we've hidden on this lost world as monks, secretly gathering everything we could about the Creed and preserving it, praying only that someday the Imperium will return, reclaim the planet, and truly shine the light of the Golden Sun on the people!!"
The old monk was deeply moved and deeply devout, but Kian's expression was complicated.
If the Imperium of Man really did come back, it might not shine any golden light on anyone.
To be honest, the people of this planet were ravaged by monsters, ruled by famine, and exploited by cruel daimyō.
But all the people that killed still didn't add up to the number of workers who dropped dead on the Imperium's factory lines.
The Giant Yōkai ate a hundred people a day? Please. A Leman Russ production line ate that many in half a day!
Kian said:
"You've saved a lot of texts over the years, right? Show me."
The old monk agreed and led Kian into the back courtyard of the temple, where he opened a tunnel and led him underground.
The tunnel was long and deep, and both sides were lined with stone statues. When Kian saw them, he nearly lost it. Every single one was a Primarch reworked as an East Asian Buddhist statue.
Some of the Primarchs were wrathful guardian kings, and others were merciful living Buddhas. Some were reworked so heavily that Kian couldn't tell who they were supposed to be, but others he recognized at a glance.
Vulkan, for instance, had been turned into a kindly laughing Buddha, with a big round belly and enormous earlobes.
Leman Russ had become a big, hearty fellow holding a wine gourd and drinking from it.
Lion El'Jonson had become a wrathful guardian king with a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, eyes glaring as if they could kill you on the spot.
Guilliman's statue was the most damn accurate of all. Kian recognized him instantly.
Because the bastard had been carved with an eagle's stare and a wolf's backward glance, the skull of a traitor, and a hint of something petty and scheming in his eyes. You could say it perfectly matched the popular misconception of him.
The old monk carried an oil lamp to the very end of the tunnel and pushed open a door.
"Please look, my lord. Everything we've collected over three hundred years is here.
"Besides the texts from before the Great Forgetting, we've also recorded and organized everything that has happened under the Eastrise Dynasty. Whatever you'd like to know, feel free to read."
Kian looked around. It was an eight-sided, roughly circular chamber, very large, and surrounded by tens of thousands of books.
In the centre stood a golden statue: a statue of the Emperor, a full four metres tall!
Kian's eyes landed on the statue. The old monk stepped forward and said very proudly:
"Over more than three hundred years, our Ecclesiarchy scrimped and saved and cast this holy image from the gold we accumulated, to show that we've never forgotten our first devotion and have always served the Emperor!"
Kian rolled his eyes. Why the hell is this Emperor statue holding a fan and a scroll? It made him look like some pale little scholar.
Kian said, at a loss for words, "The Old Man doesn't look like this. And you're telling me this thing is solid gold? A chunk of solid gold this big? How much did you have to squeeze out of the common people to save that up?"
The old monk said very proudly, "Not that much. The Son of Heaven gave us monks a lot of temple land, tax-free. We just made the peasants on the temple land tighten their belts a little, and in a few hundred years we had it saved up."
Kian clapped the old monk on the shoulder and gave him a thumbs-up.
"Wow. Just wow. I now believe you really are the Ecclesiarchy's true heirs. Pure-bred. As in, pure-bred bastards."
Then, ignoring the old monk's alarmed face, he started reading through the books on his own.
First he went through the books from before the Great Forgetting, to see if he could find the planet's coordinates.
But after searching for a long time, he found nothing. He called the old monk back over and asked if any of the books recorded the planet's coordinates. The old monk said none did.
After the Great Forgetting, the Planetary Governor of the time had immediately reorganized himself into the Son of Heaven and then gathered and destroyed books of every kind across the land as fast as he could.
Most of what the monks had managed to save were Ecclesiarchy scriptures and whatever ordinary books they could find. There was nothing as important as a record of the planet's coordinates.
With no luck finding anything important, Kian moved on to where the texts from after the Great Forgetting were stored and read the histories.
He wanted to see what major events had happened in the three-hundred-odd years of the so-called Eastrise Dynasty.
After going through them, the gist was a parade of man-made famines, man-made uprisings, and page after page of policies designed to keep the people ignorant.
The Eastrise Dynasty was a slave state. The slave trade was legal.
The planet the Eastrise Dynasty ruled had a pleasant climate and fertile soil, very well suited to human life, so the population was large.
But to make money, the Son of Heaven and the daimyō had started manufacturing slaves.
The method was to bind people to the land and forbid them from moving around on their own.
If a farmer went from one county to another without a permit, he was no longer a person. He was a slave!
Once they'd confined people's bodies, the next step was to confine their minds.
It was the same old bushidō, absolute loyalty to one's lord and all that.
You could see it in Hei. Hei gave Kian the impression of a man who longed for the system with an almost fanatical devotion. If the Son of Heaven told him to commit seppuku, he'd probably do it without question.
Once people's movement was restricted and their minds imprisoned, the rulers could play with them however they liked.
The Man-Made Rice Famine.
The government forced farmers to sell their rice at rock-bottom prices, then resold it at dozens of times the price. The artificial rice shortage created more than five million refugees.
Those refugees were later divided up among the daimyō and turned into slaves.
The Maggot Rice Incident.
The common people had no rice to eat, and many starved to death. When maggots grew on the bodies, the refugees gathered around the corpses to catch the maggots and eat them, joking that rice looked like maggots anyway, so this was maggot rice.
The Human Fertilizer Incident.
Once, a famine starved nearly ten million people to death, and corpses covered the land.
The Son of Heaven at the time didn't offer any relief. Instead he joked in court that soil grew far more fertile after people died, so they might as well bury the dead in the earth and turn it into paddy fields, and next year's harvest would surely be bountiful.
The most incredible part was that the policy was actually carried out. The Son of Heaven sent people to collect the bodies of the starved and plant them in the fields, and the next year the yields really did soar!
That wasn't long ago. Dig in certain fields even now and you'll still find fragments of human bone.
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