Chương 85: Chapter 2.22: Earthly Education

"Well?" Brutus asked Favius as they were walking outside the estate several days later.

"Why are you so gloomy? You won. You got everything you wanted." Favius sighed before taking a deep breath of the early spring air. He studied the greening gardens, where shy sprouts of leaves and weeds were awakening from their winter slumber, before letting out a bitter chuckle.

"You're right, I won." He scratched his head.

"I got everything I could have wanted at this stage. But there's still—" He gestured broadly.

"—so much to do."

"And you're not happy with all that needs doing?" ventured Brutus. Favius looked away from the brown-beige Cindrathi plains and toward the eastern mountains. His eyes settled on the closest one, the one where he had first told Brutus the truth.

"Let's go to our spot." Brutus nodded. They left through a side door in the outer wall and walked across the fields, where slaves were busy plowing using the primitive wooden stick ard instead of a proper plough. Favius simply shook his head as they entered the olive orchards in the foothills. He turned to Brutus.

"You know, before the negotiations, I told myself I need to get better at politics. Better at the whole plotting, deceiving, and betraying thing. More capable of handling this world." Brutus snorted.

"Well, you certainly handled something." Favius pressed his lips together.

"I did, but..."

"But nothing," Brutus said as they entered the forest of evergreen pine trees.

"You are learning. And at an astonishing rate, if I compare what you did in the beginning. Never mind your first plot against Hesnia." The cultivator snorted, and Favius rolled his eyes.

"Yes, having Caliga throw snakes and frogs at her entourage of noble ladies might not have been the smartest idea." In silence, they scrambled up the more difficult part of the goat path without spooking any goats this time. Finally, they reached the flat hilltop. Favius looked over it. The view was still breathtaking. He studied the chasm where Brutus had nearly dropped him and the dark stains which were all that remained of the fire Brutus had used to make him and Caliga earn an insight of endurance.

They settled onto two boulders, and Brutus unleashed his aura. The smell of blood. The overwhelming promise of slaughter. The comfortable presence of the man who was closest to him in this world. It all hit him at once. Favius studied the vista for a while longer, the distant spines of the Rhexar Mountains above them. He squinted down toward the plains. Is that Cindrath in the distance? Maybe.

"All right, Cousin, tell me why we have come here." Favius gestured at it all, feeling a weight around his heart.

"You said it yourself. Everything went well. I should be happy. But..." He leaned back, studying Messenger and Daughter drifting lazily through the daylit sky.

"I'm unhappy about my reactions. I challenged Marcus. I plotted. Everything worked out, but I was still surprised and overwhelmed. I may not be naive in the classical sense, but I'm emotionally vulnerable." Brutus chuckled.

"Isn't that the experience of every child who grows up and becomes ever more exposed to the realities of the world? After all, at your age, I too was certainly a bundle of idealism, talent, and..." A smile played over the man's lips.

"Maybe some arrogance." Favius sighed, letting his feet swing in the air.

"You are right. But I am..." He looked from side to side.

"No child. You know that. And that's what makes it even worse." Brutus hummed.

"How so? You told me your world was very different." Favius sighed.

"That's just the point. Most of the common people in my world..." He swallowed.

"By the gods, even those I would regard as my peers were often naive and unaware of the realities of history and the present." He smirked. Oh my God, I sound like a fucking edgelord saying this.

"I made it a point to know the darkness that dwells in the heart of man. I knew that the world's potential was a beautiful thing, but that it was broken by idiocy and complacency." Brutus nodded, and Favius gestured at his axe.

"I've always known that dog-eat-dog viciousness, the rules of power and strength, are ultimately still there despite the veneer of politeness and civilization humans like to put on." Brutus hummed and stroked his beard while he too studied the plains of Cindrath.

"All of that is true. But what's the issue?" Favius chuckled bitterly.

"With all your talk of the levels of a cultivator's knowledge, I would have expected you to realize my point by now."

"Ah," was Brutus's only reply. Not an answer, simply an acknowledgment. Favius picked up a small stone.

"You see, propositions are easy. Even processes are. You know that better than me with all your insights. But..." He squeezed his fingers tightly around the rock until its sharp edges bit into his skin.

"I enjoyed being aware of such things. Even if..." He swallowed.

"Learning and reading about them was neither easy nor pleasurable." His thoughts drifted. Reading books like Ordinary Men, The Gulag Archipelago, and The Rape of Nanking. An icy shiver went down his spine. Had to put them down time and time again. Couldn't just devour them like other books I read. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. But then and now, I would read them again.

"I pontificate about such things, but I do not understand them like gravity." He opened his hand and threw the rock off the cliff. It fell in a sharp arc.

"I know what gravity is, how it functions. I can—" He sneered.

"—lecture about it endlessly. Yet when I threw that rock into the chasm..." His words were punctuated by a sharp shattering sound deep below them that echoed against the chasm's wall.

"I was not the least bit surprised. With all my being, I expect the rock to fall."

"But," Brutus interjected after Favius had again been silent for almost a minute, "the viciousness of the world, the darkness in the hearts of men, as you put it. It's as if the rock suddenly fell upward." He nodded, and Brutus leaned forward, resting his chin in a hand. Favius massaged his stomach with a hand, swallowing and waiting.

"That's the crux of the matter, isn't it?" He let out a long breath.

"Well," Brutus said, "I would give you a speech if I believed that to be helpful, but ultimately you know that you improved despite those feelings." He trailed off before chuckling.

"I might not be the best person to talk about this." Favius nodded, feeling his throat tighten.

"But you're the only one." Brutus hummed. They sat there in companionable silence, and Favius leaned back against the rock, holding up a finger to eclipse Messenger. He smiled as the moon slowly but inevitably moved out from behind it. Still strange to see the movements this much. Its changes are... Favius paused. Something unusual. But my experiences... Maybe the answer to my emotional Earth problems is actually Earth knowledge.

"So, Brutus, do you know what..." He stumbled over the word, and the translation didn't come out clean.

"Prejudice?" He frowned. No, that's not quite the right word. It's too negative. Cognitive biases.

"How to translate... the way your mind weighs your experiences and all that you see through what happened to you in the past?" Brutus nodded.

"Isn't that simply what a person's character is?" Favius waved a hand in a weighing motion.

"Kind of. It's a favored way of thinking, one our brain has found convenient and useful. A pattern that has worked in the past and has worn grooves into, as you would say, our souls." No use explaining the neuroscience to him.

"The way you speak of them," said Brutus gently while narrowing his eyes, "it almost sounds as if you disapprove." Favius let his shoulders slump as he exhaled.

"Not really. Some are deep mistakes from our past, but most are useful. But they are our identity. They are shaped through culture and experience, and without them, we couldn't function." Brutus tilted his head to the side.

"It sounds as if you have some expertise on such matters. I would not have taken you for a theologian. I thought you studied the laws of nature." Favius laughed.

"I studied these laws of the mind, as you might call them, to understand how I fail in studying the laws of nature."

"That sounds like cultivation," argued Brutus. Favius sniffed.

"I wish. After they were identified as errors of thought, some people tried to improve themselves through awareness of them, but..." He shrugged.

"Without the magic of this world, the project was only ever marginally successful. And, well..." Favius paused.

"I was always more interested in the ones that hurt me when it comes to working with numbers, not the ones that are now hurting me when it comes to politics and..." He gestured down at the estate.

"... social stuff." Brutus hummed idly, caressing the blade of his axe.

"You're intellectualizing your problem. Give me concrete examples, Favius." Favius leaned back and clicked his tongue.

"There are, of course, more, but I think just-world bias and normalcy bias are hurting me most." Brutus laughed sharply.

"Just-world bias certainly sounds like you." Favius nodded.

"Yeah, it kind of does. It's this assumption that if good things happen to people, they must be good people, and if bad things happen to people, they must be bad people. It's more complicated than that. And my issues might also be related to something adjacent." He paused.

"Believing that everyone acts in good faith. But no." He shook his head, sighing internally. This reminds me of when I was on Earth, always endlessly debating, going off on tangents. But here and now, this needs to have a purpose. He continued, "I think of myself as good, as right. So I'm always surprised when people are vicious. Like... I expect to get what I believe I deserve." Brutus clicked his tongue.

"You believe that justice is inherent in the world instead of it being a virtue that every man must cultivate within themselves, lest they wish to be cast into Oblivion by the Gods." Favius tilted his head to the side.

"That's a good way to phrase it."

"Still," said Brutus, "make it more concrete."

"I think about incentives, about pressures and reasons. When I think about people, I know that self-interest aligned with what is right is best." Brutus snorted.

"That's why you settled our poor Majordomo with the burden of earning a handful of gold senati each year." Favius grinned while studying the mountainside.

"Yes, exactly. Ideas like wickedness, moral failure, evil character..." He raised his hands.

"Those are primitive ways of thinking, but emotionally, they are still in me. I don't automatically jump to asking which incentives made this man send his son after me to cripple me. I think he's a nasty person." Brutus snorted.

"Well, in that case, he definitely is a nasty person." Favius let out a long breath.

"No, he is just the kind of creature that makes sense given his circumstances and upbringing." Brutus paused before snapping his fingers.

"This idea of incentives. It explains the way you phrased the contracts. I do not think you mentioned the word duty a single time. You only laid out required actions and expected rewards." Favius smiled.

"My father." He paused before smiling sadly.

"Well, the first of my three fathers was quite fond of this philosopher who said that, given the chance to work on incentives, a leader should always work on incentives." Brutus hummed.

"Well, working on incentives sounds healthier and more productive than crying about the wicked failings of those around you." He paused, studying the sky as well.

"Yes, I believe I understand. So, Favius, tell me of this normalcy bias." Favius nodded and rallied his thoughts.

"Well, I mentioned that I enjoyed pontificating about how evil people were in my old world."

"You may have done that," granted Brutus.

"I know that the things happening here, the slavery, the political violence, and..." He swallowed.

"... the atrocities I am all but sure happen during war. All of those existed in Earth's past." He pressed his eyes shut.

"Scratch that. They even existed in my time. But I lived in a part of the world where they were nearly absent and distant." Brutus smacked his lips.

"I see. You grew accustomed to a more civilized way of being. To being cushioned from the hard realities of power. But here they are immediate. So your assumptions of normality collide with reality."

"Yes. And that's even considering that I sort of prepared myself. Most other people from my culture probably would have done worse." He sniffed.

"Not to say that there wouldn't have been people better than me at this whole thing, but..." He shook his head, recalling the last meeting.

"When you asked Marcus for permission to purge the estate of spies and Hesnia's loyalists..."

"You still don't like that?" Favius made a gesture.

"Liking is not the point. It is necessary. But Caliga's enthusiasm, the fact that she had a list." Brutus slapped Favius's thigh.

"Young Cousin, your understanding of women must be worse than I had anticipated. I would wager my axe that even in your old world, most women would have that kind of list given the opportunity to direct a purge." Favius let out a long breath.

"Can we just not have that discussion again?" Brutus laughed.

"Oh, but it is my sacred duty to prepare my young Dominus for the dreadful realities of his inevitable marriage." Favius sighed.

"Don't remind me. And we're talking about normalcy bias." Brutus nodded sagely.

"Yes, I believe at some point that was our subject. But nothing you said..." Brutus shrugged.

"Even with your bias for the norms of your old world, you are improving. Remember that you are still a child." Favius shook his head.

"I might be a child, but the timeline... Early decisions have consequences. If I make a critical mistake, even while I am still a child—" Favius spat out the last word.

"—it might cost me decades in the future." Brutus nodded.

"Foundations do matter, even beyond cultivation."

"You know, cultivation is actually an interesting option." Favius narrowed his eyes. Did his shoulders just tense?

"We talked about the differences between knowing, understanding, and internalizing, and the terms for a cultivator's knowledge. Couldn't we use techniques similar to cultivation?" Brutus studied him for a long moment before shaking his head.

"No, Favius. That would be a horrible idea." Favius raised his eyebrows, studying his protector's closed-off, stony expression.

"Why?" he asked with incredulous curiosity.