A Pawn's Passage

Chapter 1381: Twilight of the Gods

If the Western Daoist Order truly resolved to abolish blood sacrifice, it could be done, but the cost would be too high.

In short, it was not worth it.

Qi Xuansu could not help but recall the past. He had killed Wan Xiuwu and imprisoned Yue Liuli back then, when he was young and naive, still wrestling with the difference between procedural justice and substantive justice.

As his status rose and his experience broadened, his perspective gradually changed as well.

Law was related to justice, but it could not fully represent it.

If a law aligned with the common consensus, then to some extent, it was just and even carried a sense of sanctity that extended to those who uphold it. But if a law contradicted that consensus, then it was not considered just, let alone sacred.

At its core, law was a tool to safeguard the interests of the ruling class. One could say its function was to define what justice was, but whose justice? If it aligned with the interests of the majority, then it was the justice of the majority.

Qi Xuansu came to realize that the Daoist Order did not truly care about procedural or substantive justice. It only cared about cost—maintaining order at the lowest possible expense.

Justice was not the priority; stability was. Under the overarching goal of stability, costs must be minimized.

The Western Daoist Order had clearly inherited this line of thinking. Abolishing blood sacrifice would create massive instability, which would go against their priority. The ancient gods and the priestly class would certainly resist, leading to rebellion and internal conflict. The cost would be too great for them to bear, so they chose not to abolish it.

This was not flawed reasoning. Once the order collapsed, the number of deaths could easily reach into the millions. Even a partial breakdown of order would be unbearable.

If the ancient gods and the priestly class were to rebel, how many would die? If the Holy Court took advantage of the chaos, how many more would perish?

At that point, most people would only care about survival. Who would still care about blood sacrifice, let alone such a trivial notion of justice?

It might seem cold, but that was reality. Governing a region or a nation required careful calculation, only spending where necessary and allocating costs where they mattered most.

Most often, it would be individuals, especially the insignificant, who paid the price, as there would always be someone in power who exploited the system, using authority for private gain.

For this reason, Qi Xuansu did not react with righteous fury over the blood sacrifice, nor did he declare war on the ancient gods.

If blood sacrifice were to be abolished, the most practical approach would be to offer the ancient gods an alternative. They did not perform such rituals for pleasure. They simply wished to survive. After all, no one desired to be consumed by karmic fire or to drink poison to quench thirst.

The weakness of these gods was likely a lingering effect of the last divine war. Though the pantheon led by Kukulkan had survived and escaped destruction by the Holy Court’s apostles, the cost had been immense, and they had yet to fully recover.

It could be said that without the emergence of the Western Daoist Order, they would have perished in the Holy Court’s subsequent offensives.

This brought a term to Qi Xuansu’s mind—the twilight of the gods.

This phrase had appeared many times. Many ancient gods of the Western Continent, as well as those of Misir, had already entered their twilight or even vanished. For example, the hammer in Alex’s possession once belonged to a Western god who had been slain by the Supreme Will. His divine weapon had become a trophy of the Holy Court and was bestowed upon its followers.

In truth, the Ancient Wuist Sect could also be considered a pantheon that had perished.

From a certain perspective, it was inevitable that ancient gods, Ancient Immortals, and Ancient Witches would exit the stage of history. They simply refused to accept it.

Qi Xuansu visited several more pyramids and found that the priests’ abilities remained at a level predating the First Emperor, which was essentially that of the Ancient Wuist era. Even if the Holy Court refrained from direct force and competed fairly through preaching and influence, these ancient gods would still suffer a crushing defeat.

If the Western Daoist Order did not require these high-level forces to resist the Steam Evangelical Sect, and if it held absolute dominance over the New Continent, these ancient gods would have long been swept aside. The fate of the Ancient Immortals of the Central Plains stood as a clear precedent.

With these thoughts in mind, Qi Xuansu found an inn in the commercial district styled after the Central Plains. Such establishments were naturally expensive, catering to highly sinicized clientele or visitors from the East. After all, in the Tawantin Empire, sinicization symbolized advancement, and those who embraced it often held a higher status.

After registering, Qi Xuansu began reading about the native civilizations of the New Continent. The book was written by a missionary of the Goddess Society, a renowned figure named Andres, who discovered Paititi and submitted a written report of it to the Holy Seat.

In this travelogue, Andres put forward a theory concerning the limits of land capacity and population.

In his youth, he had traveled to the East during the final years of the Wei Dynasty, where he witnessed desolate lands stretching as far as the eye could see and villages nearly emptied of inhabitants. He believed that whenever the East reached its population limit, large-scale peasant uprisings would erupt, overthrowing dynasties and eliminating surplus population.

Due to land constraints and agricultural limitations, this cycle typically occurred every two to three centuries.

This idea was not unique. Many scholars of the Confucian School and Daoist Order at the time proposed similar theories. Among them, Elder Xu stood out because he suggested expanding the pie to break this cyclical pattern.

What was crucial was that Andres used his Eastern experience to extrapolate a similar cycle for the indigenous peoples of the Southern Continent.

In Andres’s view, the Southern Continent was covered in rainforests, with rapid organic decomposition and nutrient cycling, which made the land far less fertile than Eastern farmland. Combined with primitive agricultural techniques, this meant the Southern Continent could not sustain itself for even two centuries, often collapsing in less than a hundred years.

Within a century, social tensions had not yet reached the point of irreversible crisis, making large-scale uprisings unlikely. Thus, the Southern Continent followed a different path of depopulation—sacrifice. Through continuous small-scale blood rituals, the excess population was eliminated.

The East accumulated its problems and resolved them all at once, though at great cost. The Southern Continent, on the other hand, dealt with issues daily, keeping each burden relatively small.

The ancient gods also played a role. Since they benefited from blood sacrifices, they naturally supported and encouraged such practices.

In Qi Xuansu’s view, these ancient gods were unworthy, treating their followers as consumables, sacrificing them at will, and demanding constant appeasement. In the Central Plains, such behavior would brand them as evil gods. Here, they were revered as righteous deities.

In a sense, while the Holy Court’s acts of extermination and enslavement deserved condemnation, one must also admit that blood sacrifice and ritual killing were backward practices, out of step with the broader currents of the world.

Though the Tawantin Empire excelled in many areas like astronomy, calendar-making, sculpture, ceramics, and murals, its inability to achieve breakthroughs in critical technologies would ultimately stagnate its civilization and lead to its downfall when faced with external threats.

The East had faced similar challenges, but its sheer scale allowed it to endure and eventually complete a difficult, painful, and monumental transformation.

The Tawantin Empire was now still in the midst of its transformation, standing at the crossroads of old and new. The process was bound to be painful, with sharp internal contradictions. However, all of these were overshadowed by a greater conflict—the Steam Evangelical Sect in the north.

The Holy Court sought to exterminate the indigenous people, while the Daoist Order aimed to heal and reform them. Yet one thing was the same. Neither side truly recognized this civilization.

There was a simple truth in this. Dignity must be earned. With their practice of cannibalism and blood sacrifice, clinging to ways long abandoned by the world, it was inevitable that the more modern civilizations would look down on them.

Qi Xuansu closed the book in his hands and fell into brief contemplation.

The future of the Southern Continent was a problem far too vast for the current Qi Xuansu.

Qi Xuansu opened another text, a scholarly study written by a deceased elder of the Western Daoist Order.

This deceased elder proposed a theory. Both Misir and the New Continent were civilizations centered around sun gods, and both had constructed numerous pyramids, so was there a connection between them?

He made a bold conjecture, that these two ancient gods were akin to senior and junior disciples. They could be like the Buddhist Sect of the Central Plains and the Western Region, originating from the same source but diverging along different paths due to differing environments.

Kukulkan’s usurpation of Misir’s sun god’s divine authority served as supporting evidence.

At that moment, Qi Xuansu suddenly heard a faint call, like a whisper echoing beside his ear.

Qi Xuansu froze. He was certain no one was nearby, so this whisper must be coming from a higher existence.

This was no coincidence. When Qi Xuansu had been weak, such occurrences might have been explained as chance or fortune. But now, he was no minor figure. As the Daoist Order’s envoy, he was not to be underestimated, even though he was not yet a true Immortal.