!
"Returning Home..."
"Returning Home..."
Shen Le cradled the Pottery House in both hands and let out a long sigh. Rekindling its spiritual flame and repairing the Pottery House had taken him less than twenty-four hours;
Yet witnessing the Pottery House's memories had immersed him in a family's rise and fall for ten, twenty, even a hundred years. Even after opening his eyes again, his mind could not pull itself free for a while:
For a small family, expanding—or even simply surviving—was far too difficult. Natural disasters, man-made calamities, dynasty after dynasty falling and rising, peasant uprisings, all kinds of wars...
The slightest setback was a devastating blow to a family like that.
Over Huaxia's thousands of years of history, families had risen one after another, and families had fallen one after another. How many could produce a genealogy, demonstrate an unbroken inheritance, and present evidence claiming to be the descendants of some famous figure?
Even among the descendants of the Liu, Li, and Zhao families, how many could produce proof and say that they were the descendants of a certain emperor?
Even though genetic studies showed that tens of millions of Chinese men carried the paternal marker O-F254 of Liu Bang's family, making Liu the de facto most common surname in China.
Most of those descendants had nevertheless taken other surnames, forgotten where they had come from, and faded from the Han Dynasty's "national surname" into the common people of Huaxia...
For ordinary people, the only way to withstand natural disasters and human calamities was to bear children—more children, and more, and more. Farm, marry, reproduce, carry on the family line—
Population. Only with a sufficiently large population could the inheritance of civilization endure, hanging by a thread yet never breaking, as war and disaster swept through time and