The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,159

then you will lose your mind forever. If you succeed, you’ll still never have your mind to yourself again. You’ll live on the precipice of insanity. You’ll be constantly afraid. Drinking laudanum might become the only way you can get a good night’s sleep. You might kill innocent people around you because you don’t know what you’re doing. You might kill yourself.”

Her words were met with blank stares. Rin waited, fully prepared for all of them to stand up and leave.

“General?” Again Dulin raised his hand. “With all due respect, could we stop fucking around and get started?”

So Rin set about the task of creating shamans.

They spent the first evening sitting in a circle on the floor of the hut, resembling village schoolchildren about to learn to write their first characters. First Rin asked for their names. Lianhua was a willowy, wide-eyed girl from Dog Province who bore a series of terrible scars on both arms, her collarbones, and down her back as far as Rin could see. She did not explain them, and nobody was bold enough to ask.

Rin wasn’t sure about her. She seemed so terribly frail—she even spoke in a tremulous, barely audible whisper. But Rin knew very well by now that delicate veneers could conceal steel. Either Lianhua would prove her worth, or she’d break down in two days and stop wasting her time.

Merchi, a tall and rangy man a few years older than Rin, was the only experienced soldier among their ranks. He’d been serving in the Fourth Division of the Imperial Militia when the Mugenese invaded; he’d been part of the liberation force on the eastern coast after the longbow island fell, and he’d witnessed the aftermath of Golyn Niis. He’d first seen combat at the Battle of Sinegard.

“I was in the city when you burned half of it down,” he told Rin. “They were whispering about a Speerly then. Never thought I’d be here now.”

The one thing that bound them all was unspeakable horror. They had all seen the worst the world had to offer, and they had all come out of the experience alive.

That was important. If you didn’t have an anchor, you needed something to help you return from the world of spirit—something thoroughly mortal and human. Altan had his hatred. Rin had her vengeance. And these four recruits had the ferocious, undaunted will to survive under impossible odds.

“What happens now?” Pipaji asked once introductions were finished.

“Now I’m going to give you religion,” Rin said.

She and Kitay had struggled all day to come up with a way to introduce the Pantheon to novices. At Sinegard, it had taken Rin nearly an entire year to prepare her mind to process the gods. Under Jiang’s instruction she’d solved riddles, meditated for hours, and read dozens of texts on theology and philosophy, all so that she could accept that her presumptions about the natural world were founded on illusions.

Her recruits didn’t have that luxury. They’d have to claw their way into heaven.

The necessary, fundamental change lay in their paradigms of the natural world. The Hesperians and the majority of the Nikara both saw the universe as cleanly divided between body and mind. They saw the material world as something separate, immutable, and permanent. But calling the gods required the basic understanding that the world was fluid—that existence itself was fluid—and that the waking world was nothing more than a script that could be written if they could find the right brush, a pattern they could weave in completely different colors if they just knew how to work the loom.

The hardest part of Rin’s training had been belief. But it was so easy to believe when the evidence of supernatural power was right in front of you.

“We trust that the sun will rise every morning even if we don’t know what moves it,” Kitay had said. “So just show them the sun.”

Rin opened her palm toward the recruits. A little string of fire danced between her fingers, weaving in and out like a carp among reeds.

“What am I doing right now?” she asked.

She didn’t expect any of them to know the answer, but she needed to be clear on their preconceptions.

“Magic,” Dulin said.

“Not helpful. ‘Magic’ is a word for effects with causes we can’t explain. How am I causing this?”

They exchanged hesitant glances.

“You called the gods for help?” Pipaji ventured.

Rin closed her fist. “And what are the gods?”

More hesitation. Rin sensed a budding annoyance among the recruits. She decided to skip over the next line