The Knight's Hill

There was a famous assassin in Chinese history named Jing Ke. His story was recorded in Sima Qian's Biographies of Assassins.

At the time, Yan State could no longer defeat Qin State on the battlefield. The Crown Prince of Yan used the delivery of the traitor Fan Yuqi's head and the offering of territory as an opportunity to have Jing Ke assassinate the King of Qin, Ying Zheng.

He might have been the assassin who came closest to succeeding. Ying Zheng was forced to flee through the palace, while none of the soldiers around him dared step forward to stop Jing Ke. In the end, a physician saved Ying Zheng's life by striking Jing Ke with a medicine chest. Otherwise, divided China might have taken many more years—or perhaps never managed—to unite.

World War I also began because of an assassination. Being an assassin required extraordinary courage, intelligence, and luck. Qin Wuyang had accompanied Jing Ke on the mission to assassinate the King of Qin, but he lost his nerve at the crucial moment and nearly exposed them. Assassinating a terrifying person was difficult; it was nowhere near as simple as outsiders imagined.

The Slavs had their own mythology too, but while Norse mythology had begun rising again today, theirs was still treated as heresy and no one passed it on. Unlike the Germanic peoples, they had migrated eastward. Many modern Russians still called themselves Slavs. Like the Germanic peoples, they were barbarians in the eyes of the "Romans." Modern European civilization had developed upon the foundation of the Renaissance.

Goethe outlined the spirit of modern European civilization like this in Faust: driven by desire, people strove tirelessly toward an endless world.

This spirit differed from the dull dreariness of the Middle Ages, and it was also unlike the lively