Chapter 882 — Fragments of an Ancient Book
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Since His Majesty Gaoyang's coronation, when the whole realm was once again made whole, the Bureau of Affairs had issued its decree:
A comprehensive sorting of every book and archive in the nation, and a protective restoration of all knowledge.
The purpose of this work was to gather up the technical records that had been scattered and dispersed throughout the human world since the Age of Exploration, so as to check the damage done to human civilization by the gaps in its technical lineage; to preserve historical evidence and the various regional records of the old kingdom, so as to put an end to the former chaos in which every locality kept its own muddled accounts and history and legend were confounded and distorted; and to collect and organize the scriptures of all the churches, so as to further absorb and reform the religious forces within the Empire, and weaken and eliminate the knowledge monopoly of the missionary class.
Countless scholars, priests, and clerks threw themselves into this undertaking, which might shape the Empire for the next hundred years; and unlike those spectacular engineering projects that drew every eye, their work was quiet and dull:
an endless wrangle with stale old books, piecing together files from a mass of repetitive, fragmentary, and even self-contradictory text. Among the moldering volumes and dust-caked scrolls, some recorded the mighty technologies of the ancient Gondor era, while others were merely the crude doggerel dashed off by some third-rate noble poet; and all of it lay buried in heaps of old paper across the nation, worn past recognition by round after round of court intrigue, church strife, and lords' wars, until it was all but forgotten.
Centuries of civilizational decline and a chaotic medieval aristocratic order had destroyed far too much; far too many treasures had gathered dust in the process.
And as one of the participants in this undertaking, Sevin Terry's work had in fact begun earlier: not long after Mingyuan City was taken over by the Cecil family, he had already been dealing with these books, whose ages spanned several centuries.
Frostgate City, as the former headquarters of the Southern Yaochen Church, had been the greatest cultural center and "knowledge hub" of the southern lands. The priests who monopolized divine authority and a vast body of knowledge had ceaselessly gathered books from all over the south into the libraries, great and small, of this city of churches—and from the beginning of the Second Dynasty they had done so for a full hundred years. In an age when books were treasure, this was more or less what every noble and every church did.
The tireless "plundering" of the old-era missionaries had left the rest of the southern lands ever more diminished, yet on the other hand, Sevin Terry had to admit: it was precisely this greedy plundering and gathering that had preserved many precious texts amid the general chaos and decline of the south in those years.
Sevin Terry came to a halt before a towering bookshelf. He raised his head, his gaze sweeping across the volumes with their dark bindings, climbing steadily upward until it reached the solemn, massive stone vault of the ceiling.