Dark Sand: My Players Are All Actors

The tragedy within Chang'an city had not ended.

Huang Xianzhi's army cast aside their hypocritical masks and began to rampantly slaughter, pillage, and plunder throughout the city.

Naturally, such actions would incite the discontent of countless citizens.

But no matter how disgruntled they were, there was nothing they could do, for in the face of Huang Xianzhi's six hundred thousand strong army, any resistance would only be met with even more cruel treatment, making it even harder to contain this bloodshed, as if fueling a fire with oil.

Moreover, the ordinary residents of Chang'an, when facing the powerful soldiers, truly had no power to resist; numbers meant nothing.

Yet resentment continued to accumulate.

Someone wrote a poem on the gates of the Ministry of Personnel, mocking the army of Huang Xianzhi that was committing indiscriminate killings after entering the city.

And there were these lines within the poem.

"Blood runs from every home as if springs boiling, cries of injustice shake the very ground. All the dancers and singers are secretly sacrificed, infant boys and girls are all abandoned alive. … One man leaps up to the golden steps, with half his robe slipped in an attempt to bring shame. Pulling at his cloth, he refuses to exit the vermilion gates, a beauty falls beneath the knife, her fragrant rouge turned to ash. … All that was prosperous, now buried and gone, one looks around to see nothing but desolation. The imperial treasury burnt to ashes, the born nobility's bones trampled in the streets!"

Although Huang Xianzhi was a private salt trader, he was also a scholar who had repeatedly failed the imperial examinations; he of course understood the meaning of these verses.

Furious, Huang Xianzhi blinded all the officials and guarding soldiers who were in the Ministry of Personnel at that time.

Afterwards, he viciously hunted down anyone in Chang'an capable of writing poetry, and killed more than three thousand people.

Even those who could not write poetry but were literate, he did not wish to spare; every one of them was sent to the battlefield to toil as laborers.

…

Chu Ge silently observed all this, his heart brimming with mixed emotions.

In truth, from what he saw, the historical records' depiction of these events was mostly exaggerated.

After all, with so many people in Chang'an, there must have been more than three thousand who could write poetry; not to mention the many literate people, sending all of them to toil on the battlefield was somewhat unrealistic.

But Huang Xianzhi did indeed rage because of the poem, resulting in many arrests and killings; that had really happened.

It was like the historical records' claim that Huang Xianzhi used large stone rollers to crush bones for use in army rations; this was surely a vilification of Huang Xianzhi by later literati. Because anyone who has ever cooked would know that crushing a person would only yield a mixture of excrement, viscera, and bits of bone, which is simply inedible.

Cannibalism wasn't practiced in that way.

The tales of using large stone rollers to crush bones for army rations were false, but cannibalism itself was probably true.

Perhaps the historical accounts of Huang Xianzhi had a lot of exaggeration and fiction by later scholars, with the real Huang Xianzhi not being as monstrous and fearsome as the records suggest, but his deeds of evil were surely no less.

The reason was simple; if he really could enforce discipline and did not wrong even a single hair on the heads of the citizens, then it wasn't possible for him to have an army of six hundred thousand men yet suffer a complete defeat.

Sometimes, the will of the people is just that simple.

Emperor Taizu of Sheng, though also emerging from the Rebel Army, was able to enforce discipline during an era when that was very difficult, treasured the labor of the people, did not loot or persecute citizens, knew how to employ the right people, attracting heroes from all over to come and pledge their allegiance.

If Huang Xianzhi could have done the same, then even if vilified by later generations, at worst he would have been stigmatized in the manner of Emperor Taizu of Sheng, rather than becoming a demon associated with nothing but chaos and brutality.

Chu Ge's heart was complex when he saw all this from a deity-perspective.

As a modern person, Chu Ge naturally sympathized with the peasant rebellions.

Because they were the oppressed, poor people under the rule of a foolish ruler and treacherous court, unable to survive after being struck by natural disasters, they had no choice but to rise up.

It was not until the world failed to treat them as humans that they were forced to become evil spirits.

Yet, after seeing their actions, Chu Ge found it hard to continue sympathizing with them.

When the strong rage, they draw swords against those stronger; when the weak rage, they draw swords against those weaker.

If the truly trend-conforming uprisings were meant to be like sparks in a prairie fire, then Huang Xianzhi's army was more like a pitiless, aimless wildfire.

A wildfire rages with the wind, burning everything; whether good or bad, bright or decayed, all are reduced to ash by the flames.

And once the wind stops, the wildfire will extinguish, leaving just a ground of burnt, once-elegant ashes behind.

From a positive perspective, the wildfire burned down the old system, dealing a heavy blow to a crumbling decadent dynasty; but from a negative perspective, the wildfire severely damaged the current production, and in its brutality failed to establish a new order, only inciting greater chaos.

From seeing this scene inside Chang'an, it was clear, Huang Xianzhi was ultimately incapable of winning the world.

A wildfire, in the end, is just a wildfire.

…

Chu Ge's gaze left Chang'an city and traveled westward.

Suddenly, crossing over thousands of mountains and rivers, his view caught up with Emperor Xizong of Liang's fleeing carriage.

Emperor Xizong of Liang prepared to escape from Chang'an, heading straight for Shu, following the same route as during the An and Shi Rebellion.

Only this time, passing Ma Wei Slope, he couldn't blame a woman.

Suddenly, a troop appeared ahead, blocking Emperor Xizong of Liang's carriage.

Emperor Xizong of Liang was scared out of his wits, but upon seeing an old minister dismount from a warhorse in front, he finally let go of his fear.

"Your Majesty! Your officials deserve to die!

"The state has come to this, all due to ministers and generals misleading the country, please execute me to appease the people of the world!"