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Isekai Terry TOD: Chapter 52 – History
🕑 Added 2024-07-31 04:24:36 +0000 UTCWith his deepest secret in the open, Terry got a much more thorough, if wildly haphazard, education about the place where he’d landed. He also recognized that most of the information would have slipped from his grasp if he hadn’t gotten some kind of brain upgrade since arriving. Not that Haresh, Ekori, and Jaban were trying to be confusing. They were always good about answering his questions, but they were also people. They tended to wander off of their points, get lost in the details of things they knew well, or assume that he knew things he had no possible way of knowing. Facts that they considered common knowledge were wholly mysterious to him. For example, the north was considered cultivator territory almost exclusively. The nations and cultures there weren’t quite xenophobic, but they did not encourage visitors.
Of course, that information in isolation didn’t mean much to Terry. It was like saying French people ate French cuisine. While it had the patina of truthfulness to it, there was a lot to unpack there that didn’t come across with a blanket statement they didn’t like people from other places. Why didn’t they like people from other places? Was it because they weren’t cultivators? Was there a war in the past? Was it the reliable old standard of supremacist thinking? Were all they just dicks? Although, it did shed some light on why more people from the south weren’t racing north to join the war. The kingdoms in the south had been informed with excruciating politeness that their assistance was not required. Translation: Keep the fuck out and mind your own business.
It also helped to explain why the stupidly pretty people hadn’t made more of an effort to find him after his rabbit act. The city where he’d been summoned was basically the southernmost city that the cultivators controlled. When he’d fled the city, he’d effectively fled the country. He wouldn’t have put it past them to send people to look for him. But they couldn’t have done it in force without drawing a lot of unwanted attention on him and themselves. Not that he’d done much to keep out of the spotlight, however unintentional some of it had been. The downside was that he’d fled from the one place where the Church had exactly zero authority and no presence.
It turned out that there had been a war, a holy war, thousands of years ago between the Church and the cultivators. That was how the Church described it anyway. The cultivators hadn’t gone in for anything as gauche as a mass invasion. They weren’t going to war with the south, after all, no matter what the Church had been hoping. The cultivators had, with more of that excruciating politeness, informed the southern kingdoms that they were going to be engaging in hostile activities against the Church. They would take every precaution to avoid engaging civilians and the southern armies unless they were interfered with. Translation: We’re going to kill some folks. Stay the fuck out of our way and mind your own business.
The southern kingdoms weren’t stupid. There might be a war going on, but it wasn’t their war. They had uniformly ignored it when small bands of cultivators crossed their border. Ekori was particularly knowledgeable about that particular period in her world’s history.
“There are legends about how the cultivators treated civilians during that conflict,” said Ekori, enthusiasm glinting in her eyes.
“What kind of legends?” asked Terry.
“Oh, that they would always ask any civilians to leave the area, very politely and gently. Supposedly, They were especially considerate toward the elderly. They would often personally escort them to safety. The cultivators took it very seriously and retaliated with towering fury if those efforts were thwarted in any way.”
“Towering fury? What does that mean?”
“Well, mind you, this was all a long time ago. But there were report of Church knights who did things that endangered those who were being escorted away. The cultivators,” she went a little pale and swallowed hard, “made examples of them.”
Terry was half-tempted to ask for details, but if the descriptions the young woman had read were enough to provoke that kind of response, he’d just look for a library somewhere. The big takeaway was that with zero support from the local governments and such good PR with the public, the Church had not come out on the winning side of that conflict. They had been all but wiped out in a handful of kingdoms and driven back to the very gates of their holy city by a comparative handful of people. The cultivators hadn’t beaten the Church. They had crushed it almost effortlessly. It did make Terry wonder what kind of god was backing the religious organization if some magical ninjas had routed it so effectively.
Since then, every single effort by the Church to get a foothold in the North had failed utterly. Some people were turned back at the borders. Some people just disappeared. Some people had been converted. Those apostates earned a special hatred from the Church leadership, who put out absurd bounties on their heads. The warriors and adventurers who went north looking to collect on those bounties never returned. Or rather, most of them didn’t return. Their heads were sent back. That was hardcore message sending if Terry had ever heard it. He could even appreciate just how cocksure people had to be to do something like that.
In the intervening centuries, the cultivators and the Church had achieved something between a cold war and a détente, but Terry got the impression that it could flare back up without much prompting. The difference was that the Church leadership seemed to think they had a better chance this time.
“Why do they think that?” asked Terry.
Haresh shrugged and said, “There are all kinds of rumors. Everything from their god making a personal appearance to some kind of new weapon.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not,” said Haresh. “I think that it’s mostly talk. If they really did have that kind of advantage, they’d have tried to use it by now. I think time has made them think that their predecessors were weak or stupid or just unlucky.”
“But you don’t think that?”
“I think that governments are often stupid. And the Church leaders are, for all intents and purposes, a government. It’s easy to look at something that happened that long ago and make wrong assumptions about the people involved or to think that it would have been different if you were there. It’s also easy to think that you’re stronger or more skilled than you are.”
Nobody looked directly at Jaban, but Terry saw the color rise in the young man’s cheeks.
“So, you don’t think the outcome would be different if they started a war now?”
“I think that we’ve never seen the cultivators go to war,” said Haresh. “But I’ve seen you fight. If they sent even a hundred people like you, and a handful who were stronger, it wouldn’t be a fight. It would be an execution. It might take a little while, but I suspect that there’d be nothing left of the Church if the cultivators ever decided to get serious about it.”
“What if the kingdoms decided to get involved? Or the Adventurer’s Guild?”
“Who can say about the kingdoms? As for the Adventurer’s Guild, why would they? There’s no profit in picking a fight with people like you.”
“Profit,” said Terry thoughtfully. “So, it’s a strictly business venture?”
“It’s not quite that bad, but adventurers become adventurers primarily to fight monsters not people. Every once in a while, you’ll see a contract that targets a person, but they have to be pretty damned evil for the guild to post a contract like that. For every one of those that you see, you’ll see hundred or even thousand of monster hunting contracts. Let me ask you something. If you had the choice between hunting some monster or hunting a person, which would you pick?”
“The monster,” said Terry without any hesitation.
He’d made is accommodations with killing the beasts that prowled the forests. He avoided killing people if he could. It wasn’t always possible, but he hated how it made him feel. If I have a choice, why choose to feel like a deep fried shitburger when I can go slap a man-goat thing to death?
“That’s how most adventurers feel about it,” said Haresh. “When it comes to politics, the guild usually keeps out of it.”
Terry raised an eyebrow at that. He’d never been one to track political happenings, but he remembered plenty of scandals around big businesses paying off politicians in one way or another back on his world. He had a hard time imagining something as big and widespread as the Adventurer’s Guild not looking to at least rent a noble every now if they weren’t going to buy them outright. Haresh nodded in acknowledgement of Terry’s skepticism.
“I’m not going to say that they never get involved. There are factions in the guild. Some want to take a more active hand, while others want to keep clear of it. That’s going to be a headache for you now.”
“What? Why” asked an alarmed Terry.
“Because you’re rank two,” said Jaban like he was stating something really obvious to someone really stupid. “Like it or not, you’re an important player in the guild now.”
Terry gave the young man a flat look and said, “You can add that bullshit to the list of reasons I wanted to stay rank three.”
Comments
Jason Hardman
Ironic if they summoned him to fight the church, he runs away from it, but ends up defeating the church because they're eternal asshats. Also, would be ironic if the church's god is just some ancient ascended cultivator, who doesn't want company in the clouds, so launches a holy war against other cultivators. 😂
Angela Roberts
I was going to say war against the church coming but I think a bounty on Terry is coming first.....
Marian Ch
"were going to engaged in hostile activities against the Church" - engage.
