Feasibility Analysis

After listening to Li Wei's analysis, the students felt as though the clouds had parted and the sky had cleared. Everything ahead of them suddenly seemed bright and open!

At last, they knew which path to take.

Had the Zaunites resisted before? Of course. They had risen up more than once throughout history.

But ten years ago, under the leadership of Vander, the leader of Black Alley, the Zaunites had launched an organized armed uprising against Piltover, with fighters from several major Zaun gangs as its backbone.

Yet that resistance had been no different from any of the others over the previous two centuries. They had not even managed to cross Sun Gate Canal Bridge, much less set foot on Piltover soil, before the Enforcers slaughtered them until blood ran like rivers and sent them fleeing in defeat.

Why had they always failed?

The students had not understood before, but now they did.

It was because the Zaunites of the past had always acted blindly on emotion. Their vision had been too narrow and too shallow.

They had only thought of toppling the Piltovans pressing down on their heads. They had never considered what they wanted to change or achieve after pushing down that mountain, nor had they seriously analyzed the balance between themselves and the enemy or the feasibility of their actions.

With no goals and no plans, they had caused a noisy disturbance every decade or so, only to receive a hard slap from the Piltovans and immediately "gather like a blazing fire, scatter like stars across the sky."

Resistance like that could not frighten Piltover's industrialists.

They might even have hoped the Zaunites would do this every so often, making it convenient for them to periodically purge the troublesome Zaunites who dared resist.

But now, Li Wei had arrived.

The moment he arrived, he gave everyone a clear ultimate goal: to achieve global unity and equality in the future.

Then he established a short-term goal: to secure victory in Zaun in the near future.

And now, he had explained the feasibility of their actions: Janna, a goddess whose power was theoretically inexhaustible, would be their greatest guarantee of military strength in the future.

Having analyzed things to this point, what they needed to do next became perfectly clear:

"We must spread Janna's Ideology to more people, draw more believers to our cause, and help Goddess Janna regain her strength!"

Sitting among the students, Lina once again became the Class Representative.

Her gaze was utterly focused, her little face flushed red with excitement. So absorbed was she that she had nearly forgotten that the person standing on the stage was her formerly clumsy and rough-mannered brother.

"That's right." Li Wei gave his sister an approving glance. "What we need to do next is—"

"Mobilize the masses to the greatest extent possible!"

"Mobilize... the masses?" The phrase seemed to carry a natural spirit of struggle. The students flushed with excitement as their blood surged.

"Yes, but everyone must take note!" Seeing the overly fervent atmosphere, Li Wei immediately lowered his tone and emphasized:

"At this stage, when I speak of 'mobilizing the masses,' I mean spreading our ideas among them, drawing them closer to us and closer to Janna—"

"Not blindly mobilizing them for struggle and confrontation."

"That would be impractical, even meaningless."

Li Wei had always adhered to the principle of seeking truth from facts.

He knew that some methods worked well on Earth but would not work on Runeterra.

Calling upon the common people to rise up and struggle sounded passionate and stirring. It was as though everyone only needed to wrap yellow turbans around their heads, rise with their poles in hand, and the world would immediately be at peace.

But what if they truly did that on Runeterra?

Runeterra's social environment remained trapped in an extremely primitive and brutal era.

In Demacia, the power over life and death still lay in the hands of nobles, while Ionians were constrained by various clans and sects.

Zaun, Shurima, Bilgewater, and Freljord were simply in states of lawless disorder, where the strong devoured the weak, natural selection ruled, and the weak deserved to die.

As for the Noxus Empire, the world's largest slave plantation and war profiteer, there was no need to say more.

In this world, human lives were cheap.

Humanitarianism did not exist at all.

If you dared resist, they dared kill.

They would kill however many came. Even slaughtering them all would not matter.

After all, Piltover was the City of Progress. They did not even need to make an effort; cheap laborers, chasing the "Piltover dream," would stream in from all over the world on their own.

Forget harvesting the chives—they could not even pull them all out.

As for the strength of the common people, in this world, the power of ten thousand ordinary people might not equal that of one powerful warrior or skilled mage.

If there were more ordinary people, the enemy would not only feel no fear—they might even become excited—

Just like Sivir clearing a hundred waves of minions in one go: exhilarating and stress-relieving. The more there were, the more satisfying it was to kill them.

"The power of the common people is indeed inexhaustible, but we cannot dogmatically treat that statement as the bible guiding every battle. We must instead find a reasonable way to mobilize and use that power according to actual circumstances!"

So what was that method?

Naturally, it was still Janna.

In this extraordinary world, where great power belonged to individuals, only magic could defeat magic.

"We must mobilize the masses and gather their Faith Power into Janna, creating an extraordinary powerhouse that belongs to us common people!"

"And because Janna is a god shaped by faith, her very existence determines that she can never stray from her own beliefs or abandon the humans who follow her."

Yes, that was Janna's fundamental setting. It would never change.

Just as dogs were born dogs and humans were born human, Janna had been born from the faith of "protecting humanity." So long as she drew breath, she would forever protect the humans who followed her.

Li Wei could use the "evil contract" he possessed as a Summoner to command Janna to do things she did not wish to do.

But that would be meaningless.

Because if Janna strayed from her own beliefs, even under coercion, the Faith Power she gained from those beliefs would no longer serve her.

The result would only be this: humanity's Faith Power would abandon her, the traitor, in turn, then naturally shape an entirely new "Goddess Janna" who would forever protect humanity.

And Li Wei would lose his power completely along with Janna.

"So Janna's power is the power of us common people."

"She will always stand with those who suffer. That will never change!"

Li Wei's explanation, which laid bare the very foundation of Janna's existence, filled Viktor and the students with even greater passion:

A goddess of limitless power would stand by their side forever!

What they were doing absolutely had hope!

"Then... then how do we begin spreading the word?" a student asked excitedly. "Where do we start? Who do we spread it to? How do we spread it?"

After the ultimate goal, the short-term goal, and the feasibility analysis, it was finally time to discuss the concrete steps.

To these Zaunite students, Li Wei was like one of the laboratory instructors they had seen at Hextech Academy.

He did not seem to be lecturing on politics or discussing grand affairs. Rather, he was guiding them through a scientific experiment with careful planning, rigorous design, and clear, complete steps.

Sure enough, Li Wei did not disappoint them this time either:

"Where should we begin our outreach, and with whom? That is a good question."

"And to understand that question, we must first understand the most important question—"

"In Piltover and Zaun, who will sympathize with us, and who will oppose us?"

"This..." The students all fell into thought.

Someone quickly answered, "The Piltover Council, along with the wealthy industrialist families controlling it, are our enemies!"

"And... those Zaun Chem-Barons who look like Zaunites but are actually in cahoots with Piltover's industrialists are our enemies too!"

"Well said!" Li Wei added approvingly. "I analyzed the crimes of Piltover's merchant class in my previous article."

"And the Zaunite comprador class, represented by some Chem-Barons, may appear independent, but in reality, they are entirely economic dependents of Piltover's merchant class."

"These people embody Zaun's most backward relations of production. They only want to forever rely on Zaun's cheap labor to supply Piltover with low-value minerals, chemical raw materials, and mechanical parts, earning only scraps from the table."

"They have no desire to develop science and technology or achieve industrial upgrading, because doing so would offend the Piltover lords firmly occupying the high-end market and threaten their stable position in this system of dividing the spoils—"

"So in a sense, these Zaunite compradors are even more evil than Piltover's major merchants."

"Piltover's major merchants at least promote technological progress, while these Zaunite compradors merely cling to their little patch of land and obstruct the development of productive forces!"

Li Wei's explanation exposed the enemy's ugly faces one by one.

Everyone now clearly understood who their enemies truly were.

But another student asked:

"Then, Teacher Li Wei, what about Piltover's ordinary citizens?"

"Are they our enemies?"

The moment that question was raised, opinions began to diverge.

Because Li Wei had already learned from the original owner's memories and Baku's account that the oppression Zaunites most directly felt in Piltover did not come from those lofty industrialists, but from the ordinary Piltovans who appeared before them every day with discriminatory gazes.

Call those Piltovans friends?

The Zaunites would be the first to start cursing.

But call these ordinary citizens enemies, and that did not feel quite right either.

"Piltover's ordinary people are certainly not our enemies."

"But neither can we naively regard them as friends."

"If you see the Twin Cities as one whole, you may understand that these so-called lower-class Piltovans are not truly at the bottom. They actually stand a level above Zaun's poor, occupying the middle tier of the pyramid."

Once Li Wei put it that way, everyone understood.

The Twin Cities only looked like two separate cities. They had always been one whole.

Those Piltovan civilians who were theoretically of the same lower class were, in reality, naturally superior to Zaunites.

"They are not our enemies, but Piltover's powerful merchant class has already bought them off with the excess profits it extracts from Zaun and all over the world through technological and financial hegemony."

"These middle-class people who live in houses and eat steak are also among those who do not wish to change the status quo. That is why it will be difficult for them to understand the struggle we intend to undertake—"

"We can try to win over some of them, but we absolutely cannot treat them as the focus of our early outreach and struggle."

The enemy was now clear, and Piltover's civilians would be difficult to win over in the short term.

That made it easy to identify who their friends were next:

The impoverished people of Zaun.

Due to Zaun's extreme semi-colonial, semi-primitive social conditions, aside from the tiny minority made up of Chem-Barons and their followers, nearly everyone else belonged to the impoverished class—and they were all progressive industrial poor.

"They are concentrated, economically disadvantaged, nearly devoid of hope of becoming rich, and subjected to the brutal treatment of Chem-Barons and the merchant class. These people are our natural allies."

"But we are currently in Piltover. Our cause has only just begun, our strength is weak, and we cannot yet establish ourselves in Zaun or carry out work there, so..."

Li Wei pointed out their concrete direction for action:

"What we must do now is use every possible means in Piltover to carry out outreach among Zaunite international students, Zaunite Apprentices, and new Zaunite immigrants!"

"On one hand, we must accumulate manpower, financial resources, and material resources. On the other, we must strengthen Janna through spreading the faith, until, at the right moment—"

"Return to Zaun, return to where the contradictions are sharpest!"