Chapter 687 — Euphemism
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 5
The fall of the man-made god directly reduced the crystal-cluster legions to weak, scattered beasts, greatly easing the subsequent purification work on the Holy Spirit Plain. Otherwise, with nearly a million monsters still lingering across the entire plain, and the Empire's severely depleted forces after the war, it truly would not have been easy to clear them out completely.
"When a rotten old tree falls, it scatters withered branches and dead leaves everywhere... cleaning it all up will still take some effort," Gao Yun sighed, then raised his head and said to the three Grand Consuls, "The Church of the End of All Things has an enormous structure and has operated in this country for a long time. Quite a few minor nobles, merchants, and church priests were seduced by it and became corrupt. Now the trunk of this church has fallen, but its branches and remnants will surely leave a great deal behind. What needs cleaning up is not just the monsters on the Holy Spirit Plain."
Victoria bowed her head deeply, her voice cold: "Yes, we understand."
"No, you only understand part of it," Gao Yang shook his head. "The remnants of the cultists must certainly be uprooted entirely, but we must be vigilant that this process does not degenerate into the kind of extreme violence seen when the Yaochen Church burned heretics at the stake—the Empire has only just been founded, and we are promoting a new order of justice and rule of law. At a time like this, there must be no old-school methods, no slapping our own faces, and certainly no stirring up panic and creating chaos."
"Afterward I will have Pi Yun compile a booklet on the methods for identifying the activity patterns and magical signatures of dark druids, to be distributed to priests and official druids everywhere. If cultists at the priest level are discovered, they are to be executed according to law. But if they are merely ordinary people who were seduced, or low-level believers of shallow faith, handle them as much as possible through labor service and ideological reformation—the practice of burning heretics en masse must be abolished."
Victoria blinked: "And if such mild measures fail to effectively deter those believers? Minds seduced by cults tend to be deeply entrenched and very difficult to correct in a short time..."
The Duchess, who had once hunted cultists in the Northern Region and dealt with many heretics, clearly understood those who had gone astray rather well.
"First, you should have confidence in the Cecil-style labor-plus-ideological-reformation program. We have already reformed many people with the same method, and I have prepared special spiritual nourishment for the believers of the Church of the End of All Things," Gao Rong smiled and spoke with great patience. "I plan to play them footage of the hunt for the man-made god on repeat—from the Brave One's entrapment to the Sea Demon's feeding, broadcast in full without any cuts, with dedicated personnel on hand to explain knowledge about the man-made god. Three screenings a day, morning, noon, and evening, and on rest days we can also show the documentary on cutting up the false god's remains and processing the Skull Throne."
"Second, if there really are stubborn ones of the kind you describe—and I believe such people will certainly exist—then that is no problem either. The Empire now has plenty of mines short of manpower. If those people cannot be reformed in one year, then two years; if not in ten years, then twenty; if they cannot be reformed in a lifetime, then after they die we will award them medals in thanks for their outstanding contributions to the Empire's industrial construction."