Chapter 111 — One Small Step
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 3
Had he not lived it himself and seen it with his own eyes, Gaoyang—even armed with Gaoyang Cecil's memories—would have found it hard to grasp why this world was sunk so deep in the mire of civilizational regression that it could not pull itself free, why after all these years civilization had shown not the slightest warming but instead the telltale signs of ossification and retreat.
A single research manuscript, passed through four owners in succession, built up and studied and distilled over decades, had produced results enough to shift the very shape of the world—and had nearly been destroyed in the hands of this age's stale and powerful. Jennie and those who came before her might be rare talents, but their fate was anything but rare in this world.
Take a typical example: on a noble's land, a serf suddenly hits upon a good way to manage the fields, or discovers a problem with the tax collector, and decides to bring his discovery to his lord. What, then, would be the outcome?
Many would assume the serf would be punished for meddling in the lord's property, or for slandering the tax collector. But that is usually not what happens—because they never even reach the lord, never even reach the moment of voicing their thoughts.
The punishment they face is invariably something else entirely: "How dare you tread your dung-caked bare feet upon a noble's courtyard!"
And if he were wearing shoes?
Then they would be dragged off by the guards all the same: "You have shoes?! Where did you steal them!"
Clearly, from first to last, no one cares what the serf has discovered, and no one will ever know what he truly meant to say. As a serf, he is not convicted for his words—he is convicted for breathing.
A serf does not even qualify to be convicted for his words.
This is a social ecology that people from modern civilized societies find hard to comprehend—absurd, stupid, bizarre, pitiable, and yet real.
Did Jennie's and Ravenkess's research yield real results? Of course. Though those crude, primitive theories had yet to be organized, though there remained cases where they could not explain real phenomena, though they might even produce significant errors in practice—at least most of the time, those formulas held. Otherwise Jennie could never have become a fourth-tier rune master: as a rune master with only apprentice-level casting ability, all she could rely on were the formulas and logic three generations of predecessors had distilled.
Was Jennie's mentor truly stupid? Of course not—at least in intellect, an archmage cannot possibly be stupid. A stupid man cannot master complex spell models and rune calculations, so that archmage must have been a man of considerable intelligence.
What led to the final tragedy was neither a flaw in the notebook, nor any genuine stupidity in Jennie's "mentor" that left him unable to see the notebook's value—but rather that the man had never paid the notebook any attention at all. He had never paid Jennie any attention either. His attention was fixed solely on his slave overstepping her bounds—just like the noble in the story who had a serf whipped for treading barefoot into his courtyard.
Gaoyang walked on, his thoughts churning without pause, and he found that matters were indeed as he had expected: this world had reached the moment when change could occur. Breakthroughs both technical and ideological had accumulated to a great degree, and among a minority of the lower classes such change was already happening—had, in fact, already happened before. They arose in silence and ended in silence; the powerlessness of those who changed things meant that what should have been epoch-making could never spread upward or outward, and so the so-called remaking of an age never came to pass. This was precisely the crux of this world's ailment.
But finding matters as he had expected did not make him happy.