The moment Li Wei felt the burning stares of the devils around him, he knew he had succeeded halfway.
He also knew that, in Coriel, he had unleashed the shadow of a monster—a capitalist monster fused with a community of shared interests.
In truth, after formally partnering with Waukeen, with Kaka as an AI terminal and Remlu's slime race forming a hive-mind network, he already possessed the material foundation and possibility to make it happen.
Yet Li Wei had long delayed putting it on the agenda. For one thing, the various industries of the Northlands had not yet matured to that extent. More importantly, once this upgraded "monster" was unleashed, he feared that he and Waukeen alone might not necessarily be able to rein it in.
In Li Wei's eyes, if capital were personified, its essence was not all that different from cancer cells. Both demanded ceaseless, limitless expansion and appreciation; once there was no pursuit of profit, capital would lose its vitality.
Capital had neither hands nor feet. To achieve expansion and appreciation, it had to rely on human labor. Thus, since its birth, capital had gradually turned more and more humans into slaves it kept.
The reason it possessed the means to enslave humanity was that people had selfish desires, and those desires knew no end. So capital endlessly stirred up people's desires, then fulfilled them bit by bit, before continuing to stir them up... As people pursued material wealth in an endless effort to satisfy their desires, capital gradually became the ruler of the world.
Mistema had once compared capital to a "devil"—from the day it was born, every pore from head to toe dripped with blood and filth.
In every human culture, "devils" were the embodiment of evil. Their sole purpose was to control and enslave