(It's the last two days of the month—please vote! This isn't too late, right? If you've got votes, throw them my way!)
The ancestors had been carefully locked in cages by their children, who had become gods, displayed as spiritual idols for others to admire. They could neither interfere in the Empire's affairs nor were they allowed to interact with "lower civilizations." Was this resurrection... truly a good thing for them?
I suddenly felt that bringing the ancestors out today had been a mistake—a huge mistake. Their position, that utterly unique position, meant that they could never view everything in Shadow City with the same calm perspective as ordinary races.
The Empire's Kindred had deeply affected Anses. Perhaps he had not felt it so clearly back at the base, since there he could only come into contact with Shilin Apostles. But outside, he saw people called "kindred," "vassals," and "servants"—mortals like himself, living in Shadow City and serving the "gods" as servants of the Empire.
The Shilin Apostles did not bully "lower civilizations," and the Empire certainly had no regulations discriminating against "inferior life forms." Yet at the same time, it was unquestionably a society of distinct ranks. The Apostles treated all mortal species equally, not because of moral "fairness" or any other "virtue." There were only two reasons for that equality: rationalized Apostles had no time to entertain pointless notions like "racial discrimination," nor did they have the leisure to rank a group of equally weak mortals.
Would you make a combat power ranking for every ant in your yard?
Of course, the Shilin Apostles did not subjectively regard other races as ants. They were willing to coexist peacefully with all intelligent beings capable of becoming allies. But the final reality remained that, on a macroscopic level, there were