"Feeling awful and powerless, aren't you?"
"Ooka family... If I moved out of the Fujiwara family, you'd probably drop to your knees on the spot."
Seeing Ayanokoji Fumimaro's reaction, Fujino naturally knew exactly what he was thinking and silently mocked him.
Fujino had heard of Ayanokoji Fumimaro. He was from the court nobility. Put simply, court nobles were probably equivalent to aristocratic families that had served as government officials for generations.
But in Fujino's eyes, titles like court nobility were a joke. Their descendants were nothing special; their ancestors had merely been rich. Yet they strutted around just because they carried the title of court nobility.
The Americans had already smashed them to death with one swing of the club, yet they still wanted to play at ancient traditions—family lines, clans, inheritance, bloodlines, the idea that heroic fathers produced heroic sons. Just like that old Confucius, whose family had submitted generation after generation while he still wore the title of sage.
Utterly useless.
At the end of the day, things like this would never change without a massive reshuffling.
If someone surnamed Huang had not once slaughtered them according to the clan registries with the words, "When autumn came on the eighth day of the ninth month, when my flowers bloomed, all other flowers would perish. Their fragrance would soar into Chang'an, and the whole city would be clad in golden armor," how could those old rulers possibly settle down obediently?
Even if the nobles had disappeared on the surface, the things rooted deep in people's bones still clung to society. The moment people heard a surname, they thought of court nobility, and whenever they introduced someone, they always added the words "court noble."
The Ayanokoji were court nobles, even if their former glory was gone.
Court nobles had their