Chapter 323 — Our Path
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
The news Suojilin brought was of vital importance.
Anyone with even a modicum of sense could recognize what impact this would have on the current tense Typhon-Ansu situation.
For Gao Yang, this was both bad news and good news. The bad news went without saying—he had been worried about this ever since he crawled out of his coffin and saw the vast swarm of aberrants outside (all that grinding in the last patch, wasted). He worried about the Great Wall's growing decay, worried about more and more aberrants breaking free from that wasteland to assault the human world. The attack on Typhon's border meant the last aberrant incident had been far more severe than imagined—the few thousand monsters Cecil Territory faced were merely a portion of the aberrants that had breached the Great Wall. But on the other hand, the emergence of these aberrants, the great enemy of civilization, might also delay the war...
Delay the war between Ansu and Typhon.
Rebecca, ever slow on such matters, only grasped the significance of this after Heidi prompted her. She blinked her eyes and looked at Gao Yang with curious intent: "Ancestor, if the King and the Emperor over in Typhon both realize the aberrant threat, won't they stop fighting?"
But Gao Yang could only shatter the girl's hopes: "Ansu and Typhon will inevitably go to war—it's only a matter of when."
This was the conclusion Gao You had reached after analyzing the current state of the human nations.
Rebecca clearly could not work out how that conclusion had been derived, and even Amber, the craftiest of them all, wore a look of utter bewilderment. Only Heidi, brows slightly furrowed, showed a thoughtful expression. Seeing this, Gao Yang did not hold back—he took the opportunity to give everyone present a lesson:
"Typhon has developed rapidly and is now exceedingly powerful, but in truth it has reached a critical turning point, a bottleneck—the most dangerous moment for it. Through repeated successful domestic reforms, Typhon has achieved tremendous growth in population, economy, and military. Yet rapid development has also sown hidden dangers. On one hand, increased productivity means increased efficiency in resource consumption; this behemoth needs to devour vast resources to complete its society's final transformation. On the other, Typhon's population has grown too fast, while its officials and domestic nobles lack effective new means of management. That enormous population is gradually transforming into a crushing pressure upon the empire.
"Whether to absorb 'nourishment' or to release pressure, Typhon must find an external outlet.
"And there is something even more important: Emperor Luoyan Augustus's reforms have deepened to the point of touching noble interests. Whether it is centralizing legislative power under the crown or the nationwide reassessment of landed nobles, both have profoundly provoked the sensitive nerves of those traditional aristocrats. Though Emperor Luoyan used an iron hand and his personal ability to suppress the backlash and push the reforms through, that pressure has never been released.
"Domestic economic growth has indeed brought considerable benefits to Typhon's landed nobles, but those benefits clearly have not been enough to satisfy the greedy fellows who lost so many privileges in the reforms. Emperor Luoyan still needs to find more dividends—more dividends to prove the correctness of his grand strategy—to feed those still-discontented vassals, or to use the process of seeking dividends to 'naturally and reasonably eliminate those who cannot keep up with the times.'
"A foreign war is the best choice—it can solve nearly every problem Typhon faces after its reforms.