Sui Xiong had never had much fondness for orcs.
This was not racial discrimination or anything of the sort—being a jellyfish, Sui Xiong did not even discriminate against universally acknowledged lowly creatures like goblins, so how could he discriminate against orcs, who possessed a brilliant civilization? There were mainly two reasons why he disliked them.
The first was that orcs were obsessed with slaughtering victims as sacrifices.
Slaughter sacrifice was a very common method of offering sacrifice, but orcs were especially fond of it. In their culture, invading others for the sake of sacrifice and capturing prisoners to use as offerings was only natural, an everyday sight. Such slaughter occurred not only between orcs and other races, but also among the various orc tribes. Even within a single tribe, such cruel acts often took place.
By comparison, whether humans, elves, gnomes, or dwarves, though they too often used killing as a means of sacrifice, never deliberately launched a war for the purpose of sacrifice, much less slaughtered their own kind as offerings.
Sui Xiong felt that a race capable of launching wars for sacrifice and slaughtering its own kind was fundamentally different from the races he knew and recognized. Though it sounded strange, he truly felt that orcs were "not of my kind," and had always kept them at arm's length.
The second reason lay in the orcs' beliefs.
When it came to faith, Sui Xiong was an unwavering believer in "freedom of religion." He believed that every person—indeed, every intelligent being—had the right to freely decide their own beliefs. To believe or not believe in a certain god, to believe in this god or that god, or to believe in some ideal, even to believe in nothing at all... all of it was sacred and inviolable personal freedom, something