PS: I want to hear more of your voices and receive more of your suggestions. Search for the WeChat public account "qdread" and follow it to give Castle of Black Iron more support!
At least up to today, what Great Xia feared about the Heaven-Piercing Sect was not the martial force this cult displayed, but its ability to beguile people's hearts and the harm it brought upon Great Xia's ordinary citizens.
Last November, when the Heaven-Piercing Sect's rebellion in Gan Province was put down, the highest-ranked among those who had risen in revolt was merely a Level 13 Battle General. Yet the Heaven-Piercing Sect's upheaval in Gan Province still inflicted immense harm upon its common people and sent massive shockwaves through all of Great Xia.
Looking across Great Xia's past several centuries, there had never been any shortage of people in remote rural corners who shut themselves away in mountain gullies to play at religion. But to put it bluntly, those people's cults were merely there to amuse the Court of Justice—ten or dozens of them would hide in some tiny place, then some fellow whose brain had been fried would start playing gods and ghosts, proclaiming himself "XX Great Emperor," "XX Heavenly Lord," "XX Reincarnation," "XX Patriarch," and the like. They were simply too numerous to count. A casual search through the archives of the Court of Justice in any province would turn up more than a dozen such cases.
Whenever something like this happened, so long as word reached them, there was no need to dispatch judicial constables at all. A local pavilion chief leading a few archers could wipe out those Great Emperors, Heavenly Lords, Patriarchs, and the rest in one fell swoop. Local officials loved dealing with such people, because cleaning them up was easy and