In human mythology, which has always been known for exaggerating facts, there seems to be an endless supply of characters with the power to destroy heaven and earth.
With a little fighting, the scale is earth-shattering. Any giant can hold the sky with one hand.
Although those extraordinary creatures do exist in this world, they are still just creatures. No matter how big, beautiful, majestic and extraordinary they are, they are just creatures living in this world.
Even the giant dragon, which has become the most powerful creature in mythology everywhere, is just a relatively conspicuous footnote when its huge body with a wingspan of up to 100 meters is placed on the towering mountains.
The world is really too big.
An army of hundreds of thousands spread all over the mountains and plains can be regarded as the strength of a powerful country. The collision of armor and weapons in the valleys and fields is an epic battle worth celebrating for thousands of years.
But within three to five years, people will forget all the evocative stories and the horrifying mountains of blood and corpses during the war.
In ten years, people will even forget its tragedy. The new generation will listen to those who only retain honor and hatred and hope that one day they can become famous.
In another twenty or thirty years, it will be replaced by something else.
After a hundred years, it has become nothing more than a passing deed in a long chronicle. It is difficult to know the specific details unless you go to verify it.
But what about the valleys and fields?
They are still there.
The entire human civilization, even counting the entire human race, is still ignorantly and step by step following behind those races that have risen earlier, and that golden age when beings called gods are still walking in the mortal world.
It's just a few centimeters thick in the dirt. If you press it with your palm, it won't even cover the thin layer of dust on the back of your hand.
Even a giant dragon, even a great empire that flourished for a while, is still small compared to the mountains, rivers and seas.
Small, yet arrogant.
On June 13, 1532, 4165 of the Great Lunar Calendar, and 1532 of the Padro Silaman New Calendar, the volcano in Xinjing erupted for the second time, followed by violent shaking.
The volcanic ash that blocked the sky directly caused the entire New Beijing area to be dark. After all the residents in the outer city had fled, the residents in the inner city who were reluctant to leave their property and houses suffered a devastating disaster.
The first reaction of the core nobles located in the innermost imperial palace area was to throw this issue to the Grand Miko they appointed as the commander-in-chief of external defense.
They formed a mighty "Great Chinese Special Regiment" with luxurious clothes and proud faces. Surrounded by sergeants wearing colorful armors and children holding lanterns and paper umbrellas, they stood in the sky amid the volcanic ash. When I arrived at the frontline command post, I found that it was already deserted.
After finding no one, these nobles who seemed to be unified immediately started to shirk each other, and took the opportunity to slander each other, thinking that in the future, they would use the negligence of their political opponents in this matter as a reason to remove themselves from power and seek more power for themselves. So all the energy is spent on shirking responsibility.
Outside the imperial palace, there were wailings everywhere, and inside the imperial palace there were quarrels.
A few knowledgeable and caring people spontaneously went to organize rescue and escape, but in such a large capital without the order of the highest authority, the efforts of some individuals would only be a drop in the bucket.
"Where is the emperor?"
"Where is the minister?"
The citizens of Xinjing, who used to think they were superior and looked down upon the people of any other province, frequently asked this question.
None of this should have happened.
Crescent Continent has always been an unstable continent, with frequent geological disasters such as volcanoes and earthquakes. It is precisely because of this that local housing buildings are mostly made of lightweight paper-wood structures rather than earth and stone, so as not to cause more casualties due to excessive weight of the houses during an earthquake, and to facilitate the clearing of rubble during subsequent search and rescue operations.
There are many fire and disaster prevention departments, and they have so much experience in how to operate when a disaster strikes that the Department of Land and Resources Ph.D. under Tange University has a subordinate "Disaster Prevention Bureau" to specifically manage it.
But no matter how well thought out the wisdom is, no matter whether there has been successful experience in dealing with such situations thousands of times.
All can be destroyed in the hands of short-sighted people.
The root cause of Xinyuezhou's illness lies in the failure of civil and military officials to separate.
This beautiful expectation that those who can do more work and the idea of avoiding civil strife and division caused by different concepts of civil servants and military attachés once brought glory to this country, but division and internal strife still appeared in another form. The method of promotion of nobles in Crescent Continent, which has lacked large-scale battles for many years, has naturally evolved into the form of "those who are good at engaging in political struggles and forming cliques will win"——
Warriors do not judge their merits by martial arts. The honor of the martial arts family cannot be exchanged for the achievements in the official career, and they can only be famous as "excellent swordsmen and bodyguards".
The upper-class Chinese are all insiders of an intricate group of forces. They are not good at swords but good at speaking.
Although all Chinese are nominally warriors, in reality warriors have long been vassals of the civil servants who are de facto in power.
They have lost the decisive action and decision-making ability and sensitivity to crises that military attaches should have. They are obsessed with the internal squabbles of the Chinese group and are deaf to what is going on outside the window.
People who are dissatisfied with this situation retreat to the mountains and forests and run to small border towns. People who try to do practical things and tell the truth will always be excluded and persecuted, because in the process of solving problems, someone's interests will inevitably be touched. Only those who are good at intrigues and maneuvering can stay in high positions. If a huge country cannot keep pace, it will be difficult to bring into play the development advantages brought by its vast land and large population. Instead, it will become a source of civil strife that constrains itself.
And today's Big Moon Empire has actually fallen apart due to this reason - this series of crises has only accelerated the process.
The vassal kings and the Lamanites on the other side of the ocean who were eyeing this kind of thing could notice it, and there were naturally many knowledgeable people in Crescent Continent who understood it.
Can--
Scholars are bound by layers of shackles and are not allowed to use their knowledge for their own purposes. They cannot reach the center of power.
And even if they were informed of such obvious facts, the heads of the Chinese groups who had actually noticed this sign had already noticed it.
Nothing will be done to save the country.
The reason is the same as that of the northern lords——
Because this will consume their own strength.
After Otsukiruo's death, he gained real power and a large number of people loyal to his faction.
You can become king immediately.
They will not try to save this four-thousand-year-old empire, because in their opinion their own interests are not related to her survival.
Loyalty is so worthless. What does it have to do with the suffering of all the people in the world?
I need to conserve my strength and wait for the opportunity to come, and then compete with my old enemy.
The people waiting for rescue did not know that those high-ranking nobles who only cared about protecting their own interests did not care about their life or death. This was the case in the past and would be like this in the future. They will wait until the country is subjugated and the people have worked hard to rebuild the achievements, and then bring the army in to demand that they surrender and pay tribute.
The high-ranking Chinese who were nominally loyal to Xinjing had already become de facto rebels against the vassal king, and even caused greater damage than the vassal king.
This is such an ironic scene.
Amid the dust from the second eruption of the volcano, those who tried their best to save the country, apart from the old gods who had long been betrayed and expelled, were the only people who had been excluded from the inner circle and irrelevant strangers. .
It is precisely because there is nothing to lose that we can be so desperate.
If there is no skin left, how will the hair be attached?
The big nobles who are still addicted to the power struggle can only think about how they should use the turmoil to seek more power after the fall of the Moon Kingdom. They will not consider a person who has passed through the mouth of a sage or even through the existence of these obviously non-ordinary people. With their confirmation, the possibility was still unbelievable to the great miko and the Qingtian family.
Volcanic eruptions have been so frequent in the history of the Moon Country, coupled with the chronology and loss of knowledge, that no one has tried to connect them with the temples and shrines.
This continent is unstable.
And this instability is not just purely geological.
Those numerous foreign ruins, those large and small shrines and shrines that worshiped eight million gods.
They are the earliest stable nodes, the source that makes reality and illusion distinct, and the anchor points that fix the land that was torn apart in the ancient war from being torn apart by the other half that eternally attracts it.
The occurrence of these geological disasters is like when a picture scroll nailed to the wall is torn off with brute force.
As the nails were pulled out one by one, it was dragged into the curtain little by little, causing vibrations.
For four thousand years, it has been forgotten, damaged, and has not been replenished. It is just a little bit of various anchor points that are being lost, and gradually only a small part is left that can barely maintain balance.
Without knowing it, the feudal kings hired people from Placia.
This balance is broken.
The mountains are roaring, and the hard-scale warriors and dwarf magisters who are more closely connected to the earth than humans sound like the continent is mourning.
The frightened birds and beasts fled in all directions under the gray sky, but they didn't know where to go.
"Crescent Continent will sink."
"The land will be torn apart, countless creatures will disappear, and she will never be able to regain the territory she once had."
"Four thousand years of glory will pass away in just one night."
"And in the remaining fragmented soil, evil will breed, and creatures from other worlds will appear one after another and cannot be completely eradicated."
Such a sensational argument would make even the great miko and the Qingtian family, who were familiar with the sage and his party, find it unbelievable if they were to tell the Chinese people who only wanted to preserve their strength and continue fighting among themselves.
I'm just afraid that I'll be treated as a laughing stock and kicked out of the hall.
In the evening of June 13, although it was difficult to confirm the time due to the volcanic ash that blocked the sky, it was probably nightfall. Another volcano located south of Xinjing also erupted, and then the southern wall of Xinjing City collapsed one after another amidst the earth-shaking impact.
Two eruptions in one day directly darkened the entire Xinjing Province, and the air filled with exhaust made it difficult to breathe. The successive large and small earthquakes caused countless panic and casualties.
The truth of that statement that you don’t want to believe and that seems to be too much nonsense seems to be getting higher and higher.
And with the arrival of these geological disasters, the maddening whispers also spread to groups other than the ghost tribe.
The phenomenon of going berserk and starting to attack their companions without explanation has also begun to appear among mortals, and these crazy people seem to have extremely ridiculous vitality. It is difficult for four or five strong men to suppress them, and several arrows missed the torso. It also failed to stop its actions.
The Chinese people imprisoned the ghosts and replaced them with mortal soldiers, but now they can no longer fully trust even their closest relatives. With everyone in danger, they became more withdrawn and conservative - after all, if they died at this moment, how could they build a great cause for the ages after the fall of the Moon Kingdom.
Small white flowers that cannot be contaminated even by volcanic ash suddenly bloomed in a corner of the city street filled with screams, pain, curses and shouts, but no one knew when they bloomed.
And following the arrival of the flowers, there were also those beings with twisted figures, whose movements in the darkness did not slow down at all.
They keenly followed the guidance of the fluctuations in the magic pool and approached the group of people heading towards Otsuki Shrine from all directions.
