Looking at the unconscious Qianxi lying on the ground, Como XIV's aged face took on a sickly cast.
"Don't blame King Father. We have waited too long—far too long. It has been nearly two hundred years, yet they are always like ghosts that cannot be killed clean, always appearing again."
"No one wanted two hundred years of chaos. No one did. So, Qianxi, my dear Qianxi, you should take pride in what you have done."
No one would have imagined that the King of the Kingdom of Como, one of the Five Great Kingdoms, had become so morbid. Yet only these five kingdoms capable of reaching the summit themselves understood just how terrifying the ghost known as His Imperial Majesty Hops was.
How immense the physical and psychological pressure he had placed upon them was.
It was just like Holy Rome. No one would speak ill of a Holy Rome that had completely died; even the kingdoms that had split away from it would sing of its epics.
But when Holy Rome truly lived, it was no longer that great Holy Rome. It was an invisible shackle pressing down upon the heads of every kingdom.
And the Thornflower Empire Emperor represented by Chen Cheng was precisely such a shackle. Because of his existence, the Five Great Kingdoms that had developed could only check and balance one another, trapped in a dilemma where they could neither advance nor retreat, watching bit by bit as rising stars caught up to them.
No ambitious kingdom could accept this. To curb it all, they had no choice but to turn civilization into a beast and thoroughly deform their rule.
They even allowed religious forces to rise, bit by bit gnawing away at the Royal Authority of the secular world.
Thus, in the eyes of