Why must you pester me so, lordling. I am here on but obligation. I have no interest in whatever games it is you wish to play with the court.Leave this old man be!
You imagine that you are the first to ask me just what it is that we think we are preserving you smirking rascal, you arrogant, unfilial thug? Do you think I will grasp for answers, or ramble aimlessly like a man whose mind is already half rotten? I am Meng, a son of the waterways and my blood runs just as deep and old as yours, son of the Peaks. Your kin love to forget that, pretending that they are something more than men, that those they rule are idiot beasts to be herded and bred for profit and amusement.
Hmph, your words are as gnats and I have swatted them all before. You lovers of imperium are all the same, you dismiss and deride our traditions. Primitive you call us. Not all tribes of men had the fortune to grow up in a cradle, built by god beasts and dragons, surrounded by an order which merely needed to be found, not built. When my ancestors were setting the seasons, yours were still playing the courts of dead gods. We speak to our land, sing with our spirits, craft our homes hand in hand with the gods of the land, and you call us weak for failing to dominate as you do. Where are your scales, dragon? Your horns, your whiskers, your claws. You seem to have misplaced all your lordly might.
We are not weak, we are not soft. We accomplish more together with our land than we ever could in trampling it, moulding it to whatever momentary whims may not even last a century. Our schools of geomancy know this and need not your harsh lord of angles. The Nameless Mother is the world and the contours of her flesh persist for eons, changing only on a scale which only the longest lived may glimpse. It is not foolish to tap into that rather than try to impose some artificial order, invented by a man living in an artificial land.
It will support more people, you say, but why need we expand like locusts on their breeding flight? There are enough of us to rule our lands, enough of us to see the safety of our settlements, enough of us to do our duties to the gods. What good precisely will come from doubling or tripling the numbers in our cities. Ah yes, more taxes and levies for the throne, yes how could I forget the most important factor.
Your order is not wanted here, your help is not wanted here, least of all because we know it false. It has always been false, a trick to replace us, to change us. You made kings of the Xi and to what end, to subjugate our neighbors, who had been all but brothers for millenia. You couldn't even be content with tribute, nay your dogs demanded blood and control, and both they received.
And then came your puppeteers, the Hui, who have made of our faith a laughingstock. The words of the Pure One have disappeared from the minds of men, and only memories of hedonism and the self aggrandizement of the Hui remain. It makes this old man's fists shake with rage to know that such arrogant fools call themselves Teachers, call themselves Pure. As if all it takes to rise above this cruel world is to never lift a finger in labor or hardship, to never know want or connection! As if the overcoming is not how one comes to know themselves and the delineation of their path.
Then there are our beasts, and O does the hypocrisy burn. The great clans are exempt from your distaste naturally, as you dare not face their strength. But for consorting with our kin, whose chains Tsu himself shattered the skulls of their gods, we are savage. You tell us it is a foul thing for children to see our companions as kin, that it degrades their humanity, degrades their loyalty to their own kind. In this the extent of your ignorance is revealed. The beasts which live beside us, which have helped us build,which have defended our homes against nomad, enraged spirit and conqueror alike, and have died beside us when we failed are far more our kin than men such as you in your far away mountains and keeps, ever and always taking from us.
But that is the trouble with imperials. You covet the aesthetic, the appearance of order and unity. Our ways offend for the simple fact that they are not your ways, not due to any true objection. You look upon us and are offended to not see a mirror. You will take the world and erase everything which does not match your soulless peaks if you could.
But yes, come tell me more how you are improving our lands, bringing your roads and buildings which clash with the spirits and crush agreements older than the sage. Tell us how we are better packed into hovels where disease spirits and misery breed, in buildings which have no spirits, no bond to kith and kin who live within their walls. Tell us more about how barbarous our ways are in letting our children grow with companions four legged as well as two. Tell us that we are savages, little better than the wretched tribes of the Wall. How we will be much improved by answering to your lords and ministers rather than our councils and elders.
..We pay our tithes. We grant our tribute. But it is never enough, for you conquerors of Qin. All must be alike, all must submit, all must obey. Deviation punished.
We have no intentions of rebellion, we just wish you to leave us alone.
Last records of the Priest Meng Dizi, during the reign of Emperor Si, later executed for sedition against the Duke of Hui.
, meanwhile the Ling Qi over there probably got incinerated in the earliest updates trying to approach Meizhen as a result of a background roll.
