Chapter 120 — The Outsider...
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The conversation with Pi Yun had not achieved what Gao Cen had set out to accomplish, yet it had yielded an unexpected harvest.
He had not gleaned anything about the essence of magic from the druid's ritual spells. He had assumed that with a transmigrator's imagination and Gao Yang Cecil's breadth of experience, witnessing this "wondrous flower of magic" that was druidic spellcraft would grant him some sudden insight—but reality had proven that expectation rather too generous. On the other hand, he had heard from Pi Yun's own lips a "small modest insight" regarding divine arts and magic.
It was not that humanity had stolen the authority of the gods, but that the gods had cut off the power that had always belonged to humanity.
To be honest, though Gao Yang Cecil was reputed to be a half-polymath, that reputation owed no small part to boastfulness. He did know a great many things, but only because his pioneering expeditions had broadened his horizons and his wide circle of friends had widened them further; much of his knowledge fell, in his memory, into the category of broad but shallow. Take druidic history, for instance: from memory Gao Yang knew that the druids had been a unified religion three thousand years ago, that only after the "Fall of the White Star" three thousand years past had that religious order disintegrated and transformed into a number of scholarly factions, and that in the course of this process natural divine arts had likewise evolved into the druidic magic of the present day. But as for the details of that history, the memories he had inherited were plainly no match for Pi Yun, a druid who had received orthodox transmission—even if he always seemed hopelessly irreverent.
Since every druidic faction placed enormous importance on the transmission of knowledge, "the history of the school" was a foundational subject every druid was required to master. Furthermore, druidic transmission relied heavily upon the elven race, and so their tradition had escaped the influence of the magical tide seven hundred years ago. That three-thousand-year gap left Gao Yang, a "man of ancient times," with no particular advantage over Pi Yun when it came to historical questions; what Pi Yun knew, Gao Yang did not necessarily know.
It was precisely because Pi Yun clearly understood how the druidic priests of three thousand years ago had wielded divine arts, and knew the process by which divine arts had evolved into magic, that he could arrive at such a startling conclusion: "It is not that humanity stole the authority of the gods, but that the gods cut off the power that had always belonged to humanity."
Of course, Gao Yu knew this conclusion was but Pi Yun's one-sided claim and could hardly be taken as truth outright—yet as a line of thinking for considering the gods... it seemed not entirely unworthy of consideration.
……
Several days after dispatching Sir Byron, the plan to increase the domain's population finally began to show a little progress.
Just as Gao Cen had anticipated at the outset, compared with recruiting vagrants, enlisting craftsmen, or publicizing and attracting settlers, the only truly reliable means of bringing in population steadily was the purchase of serfs and slave laborers.
People were not fools. If they had any way at all to survive, who would come to the foot of the Dark Mountains to break new ground and farm?
Far from the borders of civilization, hard against the wastes of Gondor, the entire new Cecil domain was built skirting the very doorstep of hell. A century of steady decline in the southern realm, together with the dark tales endlessly circulating among the common folk, had dyed this land in a deep hue of terror. Everyone firmly believed this place was a deadly wasteland, and that the head of the Cecil family's mystic line, leading people here to break ground, had most likely lain too long in his coffin and suffered some change in his brain—what man in his right mind would come here?